'It may seem incredible that nobody tried before to discover what sort of people actually stormed the Bastille, but Rude was the first to have done so....Like all his work, this book is concentrated, simple and clear, and admirably suited to the non-specialist reader.' --Eric Hobsbawm, New York Review of Books
George Rudé was a prolific researcher and writer. Although he began his academic career at the age of fifty, he wrote some 15 books and edited several others. He was one of the leading practitioners of ‘history from below’ and his work influenced an entire generation of historians of the French Revolution.
