He and his older sister Gisèle grew up first in a rural community in Ardèche in southern France before moving with their mother back to Algeria.
He published his first work of history, an examination of the ideas of the revolutionary leader Saint-Just,[2] originally attributed to a pseudonym, Pierre Derocles.
[3] Soboul spent the rest of the war years doing historical research under the direction of Georges Henri Rivière for the Musée national des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris.
[3][7] He served also as editor of the Annales historiques de la Rèvolution française and lectured frequently throughout the world, acquiring a reputation as "the leading French authority on the Revolution".
[3] He carried forward many of the central viewpoints of earlier historians like François Victor Alphonse Aulard and Albert Mathiez[1] and his extensive body of work is characterized by a clear, unfettered writing style and deeply detailed research.
[2] He always rejected labels of his work as Marxist or communist, describing himself as "part of the 'classical' and 'scientific' school of historiography represented by Tocqueville, Jaurès and Lefebvre".
[10] Instead, the extreme violence was an inherent part of the intense ideological commitment of the revolutionaries—it was inevitable and necessary for them to achieve their utopian goals to kill off their opponents.
[14] Toward the end of his life, Soboul's interpretations faced increasing opposition by new historians of the revisionist school, but his work is still regarded as a major contribution to the study of history from below.