F.-A. Aulard

François Victor Alphonse Aulard (19 July 1849 – 23 October 1928) was the first professional French historian of the French Revolution and of Napoleon. His major achievement was to institutionalise and professionalise the practice of history in France.

Career

Aulard was born at Montbron in Charente. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1867 and obtained the degree of doctor of letters in 1877 with a thesis in Latin on Gaius Asinius Pollio and a French one on Giacomo Leopardi (whose works he subsequently translated into French). Moving from literature to history, he made a study of parliamentary oratory during the French Revolution and published two volumes on Les orateurs de la Constituante (1882) and on Les orateurs de la Legislative et de la Convention (1885). With these works, he established a reputation as a careful scholar well versed in the primary sources of the French Revolution.

Appointed professor of the history of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne in 1885, he formed the minds of students who in their turn did valuable work. Nonetheless his views were seen as controversial and "advanced" in a society still under the long influence of the French Revolution. During his course on the Revolution at the Sorbonne in May 1893 violent fist fights broke out. At the exit rival gangs yelled at each other "Down with Aulard" and, in opposition to a Roman Catholic clergy identified with the Ancien Régime, "Down with the skullcap".

Peter Kropotkin, the Russian Anarchist, wrote in 1909 that Aulard and the Société de la Revolution française "have shed a flood of light upon the acts of the Revolution, on its political aspects, and on the struggles for supremacy that took place between the various parties. But the study of the economic side of the Revolution is still before us..."