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WORLD RENOWNED SCHOEAR of European history, and past president of the American Historical Association, Robert R. Palmer died at the age of ninety-three on 11 June 2002.
There is little question that Palmer was the preeminent authority of his generation on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French and European history. The case might also be made that his corpus of scholarship constitutes a singular contribution to the postwar liberal tradition in American historiography associated with such figures as Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward.
R. R. Palmer was born in Chicago on 11 January 1909. He attended the city's public schools, and in a city-wide Latin competition won a full scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he studied the revolutionary era with Louis Gottschalk and graduated with distinction in 1931. His Midwestern roots and the sense of being a self-made man no doubt formed key parts of his intellectual armature. He received his Ph.D. at Cornell under Carl Becker in 1934, though without imbibing Backer's somewhat cynical view of the French philosophes. Palmer referred to his doctoral dissertation on American influences on French revolutionaries as "a youthful indiscretion," and never published it. Instead, he turned to a completely different subject and wrote the first of his impeccably balanced, finely crafted, and remarkably insightful books, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (1939). Without abandoning his commitment to Enlightenment values, Palmer sympathetically portrayed the efforts of believing Catholics to accommodate certain currents of modern thought, but demonstrated where they were compelled to draw the lines on such issues as sin and salvation.
In the shadows of a malignant fascist tide, Palmer next turned to the French Revolution in its most aggressive, tumultuous, and problematic phase, the Reign of Terror. Based entirely on the voluminous printed sources available in this country as the war interrupted scholarly contact with the continent, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution appeared in 1941, has been in print ever since, and is arguably the best book on the French Revolution ever written by an American. Palmer's study was virtually the first in any language to focus on the Committee of Public Safety. Appointed by the French National Convention, the committee functioned as a kind of war...