The French historian Georges Lefebvre (1874-1959) was one of the major 20th-century historians of the French Revolution.

Georges Lefebvre was born at Lille on Aug. 6, 1874. His father had little money to spend on his son's education. Young Lefebvre attended the local public school, followed the "special curriculum" in the local lycée--which emphasized modern languages, mathematics, and economics instead of the classical languages--and graduated from the University of Lille. This education, he later wrote, "opened my mind to economic and social realities, and gave me the air of an independent, self-taught individual among my colleagues later on." He began research on his doctoral thesis in 1904, but as a provincial school-teacher, preoccupied by supporting a family and his aged parents, he did not complete it until 1924, when he was 50 years old.

Lefebvre's doctoral thesis, "The Peasants of the Nord Department and the French Revolution," was a detailed statistical...