Keywords

• The paper tries to collocate the work of Albert Soboul in the historical context of the Sixties and Seventies of the 20th Century. It concentrates on the later part of the historiographical writings of the historian of the French revolution. Those writings are less esteemed than the study on the sans-culottes and frequently considered to be strongly influenced by Soboul's Marxist orientation.
• During the Sixties and Seventies Soboul focuses his work on the study of the manifold dynamics of the capitalistic transformation in France in the course of the 18th and 19th Century. Soboul's decision to dedicate a large part of his scientific activity to this thematic was partly caused by the polemic with François Furet
• who had incriminated the classic historiography of the revolution to be strongly influenced by communist ideology. In this polemic
• which quickly turned into a cultural battle
• Soboul tries to recover the heritage of Georges Lefebvre. Lefebvre states that the understanding of the transition from feudalism to capitalism should have been based on the analysis of specific historical contexts instead of being based on abstract theoretical models &ndash
• either Marxist or Liberal.
• Analyzing Soboul's later historiographic writings and the studies that he coordinated
• this paper tries to recover their scientific and innovative value
• overcoming their alleged ideological partiality. The studies on the development of capitalism in rural France combine a profound knowledge of the sources and the theoretical instruments of Marxism
• allowing thus a synthesis of economic
• political
• social and cultural elements. It's in this sense that it can be said that there are rudiments of an anthropological history in the work of Soboul