George Rudé (8 February 1910 – 8 January 1993) was a British Marxist historian, specializing in the French Revolution and "history from below", especially the importance of crowds in history.
Early life
Born in Oslo, the son of Jens Essendrop Rude, a Norwegian engineer, and Amy Geraldine Elliot, an English woman educated in Germany, Rudé spent his early years in Norway. After World War I, his family moved to England, where he was educated at Shrewsbury School and Trinity College, Cambridge. A specialist in modern languages, he taught at Stowe and St. Paul's schools. After completing university, Rudé took a trip to the Soviet Union with friends. When he returned he was a "committed Communist and anti-Fascist", despite his family's fairly conservative political views.
Career
In 1935 Rudé joined the British Communist Party. Communism awoke in Rudé an interest in history in which he pursued during the 1930s and 1940s attending London University part-time. During this time he taught at the preparatory schools of Stowe and St Paul's. When the war broke out he joined the London Fire Service where he extinguished fires caused by German bombs.
He received his doctorate at the University of London in 1950 for a thesis on crowd action during the French Revolution. He taught modern languages in English secondary schools while publishing. His first book, The Crowd in the French Revolution, soon became a classic.
Rudé was actively involved with the Communist party, an affiliation which caused him many hardships during his life. In 1949, he was relieved of his duties at St Paul's for his communist leanings. He accepted teaching positions at Sir Walter St John's Grammar School for Boys and later at Holloway Comprehensive School. Rudé, making his new academic focus history, and with very little to back his research in Paris of revolutionary France, became a leading British historian of the French Revolution. Rudé contributed to the "history from below" view of history, which is history from the view of the oppressed. He focused especially on those who participated in the riots and rebellions.
He is credited by Eric Hobsbawm as having been the only member of the Historians' Group of the English Communist Party to write 18th century history, exploring the chronological "no-man's land between the Group's two most flourishing sections". After writing an article about rioters during the French Revolution, Rudé was awarded the Alexander Prize by the Royal Historical Society in 1956. Rudé wrote and was featured in a number of journals and created a scholarly name for himself under the wing of his mentor, Georges Lefebvre.
Hobsbawm alleged that Rudé's thesis advisor, (Alfred Cobban, a political conservative), blocked any chances Rudé may have had at getting an appointment at a university, but Friguglietti says there is no evidence for that. Shunned in Britain, Rudé looked for opportunities abroad.
In 1959, he was appointed senior lecturer at the University of Adelaide, in the home town of his wife Doreen. He took the opportunity of his time in Australia to research 19th century British and Irish political prisoners transported to Australia as convicts. This later resulted in his book Protest and Punishment: The Story of Social and Political Protesters Transported to Australia, 1788–1868.
Rudé, like most prominent communists in Australia, was put under surveillance by the government's domestic security agency, ASIO. They found little of interest to record. One agent noted: "history books of which he is the author and reports of his class work at schools in England all show that he is objective in his approach to his teaching subject and has not let his own personal politics intrude in any way".
Rudé accepted an offer of a foundation chair of history, at the new University of Stirling, in Scotland, during 1967. However, he fell out with the university administration and returned to Adelaide in 1969, this time as professor of history at Flinders University. In 1970, Rudé moved to Montreal, where he taught at Sir George Williams University, later Concordia University, until he retired in 1987. While at Concordia, he founded the Inter-University Center for European Studies and also taught in the Graduate Programme of Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto. Rudé was also a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, Columbia University in New York, and the college of William and Mary in Virginia.