Eugen Weber

Charting the story of modern France
Eugen Weber, who has died aged 82, was one of the most distinguished historians of modern France. He wrote on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from French sport to Romanian fascism, and was the author of a seminal study of the transformation of the French countryside in the last three decades of the 19th century.

Born to a Romanian family in Bucharest, Weber spent his entire academic career in the west. His origins were important, however, to his later development. As he wrote: "Few 20th-century historians of 19th-century Europe had the good fortune to be born in the 19th century: that was where Romania still lived between the wars." Sent by his parents to be educated in Britain, he was here when war broke out.

He served in the British army from 1943 to 1947, and after demob read history at Cambridge, with a year at the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris. He then began his doctorate in Cambridge on the nationalist right in France in the decades before 1914.

Weber's career suffered a slight hiccup when his thesis was failed, but he had the last laugh since the book that resulted from it has rarely been out of print since its publication as The Nationalist Revival in France (1959). In 1956 he was appointed to the history faculty at UCLA, California, where he spent his entire career, culminating in a professorial chair now named after him. He was a lively teacher and excellent communicator, hosting a 52-part, historical television documentary series, The Western Tradition.

But most of Weber's energy went into writing and researching French history. His second book, published in 1962, was a study of the influential nationalist and anti-semitic movement Action Française. A richly textured study, it argued that Action Française's brand of nationalism was not identical to fascism, but rather another (hardly less noxious) variant of rightwing authoritarianism. It remains the best book on the subject. He also wrote extensively on fascism, where he explored how extremes of right and left converged - an idea others developed in more detail after him. Another subject he pioneered was the history of sport. This was a logical transition in his research, since sport was considered an instrument of national regeneration by many French nationalists in the late 19th century.

In the 1970s Weber turned his attention to the French countryside and produced the classic book, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernisation of Rural France 1870-1914 (1976). It begins with a vivid picture of a French countryside, where, as late as 1870, many did not even understand the language, use the metric system or know they were "French". Weber goes on to show how this rural world was integrated over three decades into the modern world of the nation state. This is a book about the arrival of national politics in the countryside and the creation of a sense of national identity.

One of Weber's strengths was his eye for an illuminating anecdote; he was a historical impressionist, more interested in colour than line. When the anecdotes were integrated into an overarching thesis, as in Peasants into Frenchmen, the result was powerfully illuminating. In some of his later books, however, the anecdotes could become undisciplined, as in France: Fin de Siècle (1986). "Too many loose ends" was his own verdict on that book.

But even when not writing at the top of his game, Weber was always hugely entertaining. What other historian, for example, would tell us, when discussing the importance of duelling in late 19th-century France, that when Debussy refused to allow Maeterlinck's mistress to sing the lead role part in his opera Pelleas and Melisande, he was challenged to a duel; and that Maeterlinck practised in advance on his cat, shooting her dead by mistake. Luckily, the matter was resolved before he could do the same to Debussy.

It is, however, for Peasants into Frenchmen that Weber will be remembered. It is the fate of all great history books to stimulate debates that often end up overturning their central theses. Some historians have contested Weber's chronology - they suggest that to make his case more effective he concentrated on "backward" regions and underestimated the extent to which elsewhere in France the modernisation process began much earlier than the 1870s. But even if the central thesis is no longer accepted uncritically, the book survives as a dazzling, rich, erudite and kaleidoscopic account of France which anyone interested in the country should read. Weber is survived by his French-born wife Jacqueline, whom he married in 1950.

· Eugen Joseph Weber, historian and academic, born April 24 1925; died May 17 2007