[1] Appointed professor of the history of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne in 1885, he formed the minds of students who in their turn did valuable work.

At the exit rival gangs yelled at each other "Down with Aulard" and, in opposition to a Roman Catholic clergy identified with the Ancien Régime, "Down with the skullcap".

[4] He was known to have argued: "From the social point of view, the Revolution consisted in the suppression of what was called the feudal system, in the emancipation of the individual, in greater division of landed property, the abolition of the privileges of noble birth, the establishment of equality, the simplification of life.

In a volume entitled Taine, historien de la Révolution française (1908), Aulard attacked the method of the eminent philosopher in criticism that was severe, perhaps unjust, but certainly well-informed.

This was, as it were, the manifesto of the new school of criticism applied to the political and social history of the Revolution (see Les Annales révolutionnaires, June 1908).

Aulard's famous four volume history of the Revolution focused on parliamentary debates, not action in the street; and in institutions, not insurrections.

He recognized the complications that prevented the Revolution from fulfilling all its ideal promises as when the legislators of 1793 made a suffrage universal for all men, but also established the dictatorship of the Reign of Terror.

His history was a series of narrow studies of constitutional, institutional and political developments in stark contrast with the wide-ranging imagination of his leading student Albert Mathiez.