Robert Tombs

Robert Tombs (born 1949) is a British historian of France, and professor of French history at St John's College, Cambridge. His specialism is nineteenth-century France, particularly the Paris Commune. His work, focused on the political culture of the working classes, led him to revise a number of myths associated with the history of the Commune—in this he is similar to the French historian Jacques Rougerie.
His first book, The War Against Paris, 1871, analyzed the role of the French army in the suppression of the Paris Commune.
In 2006, with his wife, Isabelle Tombs, he wrote a history of the relationship between Britain and France, "That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present". A review in The Independent described it as "stronger on war than on peace... despite the twin authorship, it is a very English perspective, resolutely empirical, deeply anti-theory." His wife, Isabelle Tombs (née Bussy), was born in France and is in charge of French training at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
In 2014, Tombs published The English and their History, which was widely reviewed.
His retirement was announced in August 2016.

• The War Against Paris, 1871, Cambridge, CUP, 1981, 256 p.
• Thiers 1797-1877: A Political Life, with J.P.T. Bury, London, Allen & Unwin, 1986, 307 p.
• Nationhood and Nationalism in France: From Boulangism to the Great War 1889-1918 (editor), London, Harper Collins, 1991, 286 p.
• France 1814-1914, London, Longman, 1996, 590 p.
• The Paris Commune, 1871, London, Longman, 1999, 244 p.
• Cross-Channel Currents: 100 Years of the Entente Cordiale, London, Routledge, 2004.
• That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present, with Isabelle Tombs, London, W. Heinemann, 2006, 780 p.
• Britain and France in Two World Wars: Truth, Myth and Memory, with Emile Chabal, London, Bloomsbury, 2013.
• (French) Paris, bivouac des révolutions. La Commune de 1871 (Paris, bivouac of revolutions. The Commune of 1871), Paris, Libertalia, 2014.
• The English and Their History: The First Thirteen Centuries, London, Penguin, 2014.