ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: 1975
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

U dobrom stanju, signatura biblioteke

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; First Edition (1975)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 279 pages
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds

Richard Cobb, Paris and its Provinces, 1792-1802, London, Oxford University Press, 1975. 279pp


On Christmas Eve, 1800, Bonaparte narrowly escaped assassination when the Machine Infemale, planted on a horse-drawn cart in the Rue St Nijaise, exploded and killed twelve people. Fouche enterprisingly ordered a taxidermist to reconstitute the shattered remains of the horse, and the stuffed animal, shown to blacksmiths for identification, became an important clue in the search for the would-be assassins. Professor Cobb has filled Paris and its Provinces with such startling and grotesque anecdotes, but he works, as usual, in an anarchic way, and he will disappoint any reader who expects a logical structure, or who is searching for answers to general historical problems. Yet this book is rewarding for its wealth of documentation, its telling social observation, and the imaginative power of its author. Cobb the taxidermist has re-assembled lecture material, seminar papers, evidence from the files of the Ministry of Justice (series BB18), and, he engagingly tells us, twenty-year old notes unearthed in the process of moving house. The result is uneven, the stitching is loose in places, and lumps and bulges appear beneath the surface. But the finished work, enriched by personal reminiscences, and inspired by observers of the Paris underworld like Restif de la Bretonne and Georges Simenon, is instantly recognizable as a reflection of Cobb’s very personal preoccupations as an historian.



Cobb evokes the landscape and the urban topography of the capital and its immediate environment. He describes the woods and forests as refuges for prostitutes and robbers, and in the cold years of 1794-6, the scenes of large-scale wood stealing — a crime which might involve entire rural communities. He describes the world of the river, with its wood-floaters, drownings, its floods and its smells. Its bridges, we are told, where traffic converged, were convenient pitches for pedlars and police informers.


It is an imagination unique in contemporary historical writing. Like the nineteenth-century novelists, with their prolific output and recurring characters, Cobb has created his own personal universe. Familiar characters reappear: the bandits and their mistresses, the police informer, the horse-thief, the young girls fresh up from the country. They move in a familiar universe of gamis, prisons, suburban waste lands, and hidden comers of the forest. It is a world in which your companion in the stagecoach is a spy or a confidence trickster, and where anyone in uniform may be in disguise.

This time Cobb has written a grim book, even a black book, dominated by Black Peter, the mythical bandit of bandits, in the Black Forest, his legendary lair.

Martyn Lyons
-University of Durham

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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.