Without Lifting A Finger

Richard Charles Cobb   CBE   (20 May 1917 – 15 January 1996) was a British historian and essayist, and professor at the   University of Oxford . He was the author of numerous influential works about the   history of France , particularly the   French Revolution . Cobb meticulously researched the Revolutionary era from a ground-level view sometimes described as " history from below ". Cobb is best known for his multi-volume work   The People's Armies   (1961), a massive study of the composition and mentality of the Revolution's civilian armed forces. He was a prolific writer of essays from which he fashioned numerous book-length collections about France and its people. Cobb also found much inspiration from his own life, and he composed a multitude of autobiographical writings and personal reflections. Much of his writing went unpublished in his lifetime, and several anthologies were assembled from it by other scholars after his death. (Wik...

It all got worse (it always does); indeed, it reached a poignant climax in 1989, when Cobb was so disgusted by the Bicentennial celebrations that the Revolution’s great historian resolved never to write about France again. This was a sad, love-lost, and possibly naïve decision. Renan said that “getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,” and a nation rarely gets its history as wrong as when congratulating itself on a famous yet intensely contradictory event. Cobb might have known this. But it is a measure of the largeness and precision of his love for the country that it could in the end so disappoint him.