Augustin Cochin (historian)

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Augustin Cochin (1876 – July 8, 1916) was a French historian of the French Revolution. Much of his work was posthumously published in an incomplete state after he was killed in action in World War I.

Cochin was the son of Denys Cochin, a Parisian deputy in the National Assembly with ties to the Vatican, and the grandson of Augustin Cochin, a French politician and writer. His Catholic upbringing helped him to remain detached from the French Revolution and study it historically in a new light.^[1]

Cochin studied the Revolution from a sociological perspective, cultivated from his interest in the work of Émile Durkheim, and he sought to look at the revolution from a social perspective.^[2] François Furet believed that Cochin’s work worked towards an analysis of two objectives: “a sociology of the production and role of democratic ideology, and a sociology of political manipulation and machines.”^[3] Cochin’s work deals with the revolution itself from a conceptual basis.

Cochin was drafted into service in World War I in 1914, and he was wounded four times in service before being killed on July 8, 1916.^[4]

His sometime collaborator, Charles Charpentier, worked with Cochin’s family towards posthumous publication of his works.

[edit] Major works

• La Crise de l’histoire révolutionnaire: Taine et M. Aulard (1909)
• Actes du government révolutionnaire (23 août 1793 – 27 jullet 1794) (1920)
• Les Sociétés de Pensée et la Démocratie: Études d’historie révolutionnaire (1921)
• Les Sociétés de Pensée et la Révolution en Bretagne (1788-1789) (1925)

[edit] References