[1] Born in Oslo, the son of Jens Essendrop Rude, a Norwegian engineer, and Amy Geraldine Elliot, an English woman educated in Germany, Rudé spent his early years in Norway.
Rudé, making his new academic focus history, and with very little to back his research in Paris of revolutionary France, became a leading British historian of the French Revolution.
[3] After writing an article about rioters during the French Revolution, Rudé was awarded the Alexander Prize by the Royal Historical Society in 1956.
One agent noted: "history books of which he is the author and reports of his class work at schools in England all show that he is objective in his approach to his teaching subject and has not let his own personal politics intrude in any way".
While at Concordia, he founded the Inter-University Center for European Studies and also taught in the Graduate Programme of Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto.
Following the new Annales school of thought, Rudé strove to cast off the idea that history was only about nation-states and the men who ruled them.
Accompanying Rudé in this shift was the 'new left', which according to Mark Gilderhus these liberal historians, "showed the feasibility of doing history while incorporating attitudes and viewpoints other than those associated with white male elites".
The historian James Friguglietti comments that Rudé's work, "displayed sympathy for the lower classes, whether laborers or convicted criminals".
He sought to dismantle the myth that the crowd in the revolution is seen as a great evil mass of people bent on destruction of order.
Rudé did this by showing the common people in the revolutions and protests as key players who actively sought to change history.
By focusing on such groups, historians have, "inspired new debates over the roles of class, gender, and race in accounting for human divisions and inequalities.
From the start, his Marxist view of history made teaching in Great Britain very difficult at the height of Cold War fervour and brought him severe criticism.
[10] Some of Rudé's work became less highly regarded after the collapse of the USSR, but, overall, his contributions to social history and the understanding of protests greatly enhanced how historians look at the past and its actors.
George Rudé's historical work focused primarily on the French Revolution and crowd behaviour in France and Great Britain, during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Rudé's most notable works include The Crowd in the French Revolution; The Crowd in History; Revolutionary Europe: 1783–1815; Ideology and Popular Protest; Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century; Debate on Europe: 1815–1850; and Captain Swing: A Social History of the great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 (co-authored with Eric Hobsbawm).
One of Rudé's most influential works is The Crowd in History, focusing on 18th and 19th century dissidents and revolutionaries in France and Great Britain.
[1]: 15 In his introduction Rudé expresses a hope that other historians will be inspired by his new bottoms-up approach to write crowd-centric histories of other eras.
He made no secret of his sympathy for the underdog, and this history offers a robust defence of popular uprisings in this period.
While this work is not predominately a history from the "bottom up", Rudé does incorporate the impact of each class in Paris and London during the 18th century events.