The French historian Albert Mathiez (1874-1932) was one of the major 20th-century historians of the French Revolution.

Albert Mathiez was born to an innkeeper's family at La Bruyère in eastern France on Jan. 10, 1874. He graduated from the École Normale in 1897. After teaching for a short time in the provinces, he returned to Paris to prepare a doctoral thesis under the direction of Alphonse Aulard. The thesis, on Revolutionary religious cults (1904), marked him as a historian of independent mind. Mathiez argued that these cults were profoundly related to the Revolutionaries' views of the role of religion in society. Though the thesis derived much of its argument from the work of the sociologist Émile Durkheim, Mathiez later became dubious about the use of sociology in historical writing.

Three years after presenting his thesis Mathiez broke with Aulard, beginning a feud that continued for the rest of...