Village Bells

by Alain Corbin

In the French canton of Brienne in November 1799, local authorities were scandalized when a crowd of girls broke through the doors of the church and rang the bells in order to mark the festival of St. Catherine. Religious use of the bells was forbidden by law, but the villagers boldly insisted on their right to celebrate with peals the feast of a beloved saint. So begins Village Bells, Alain Corbin's exploration of the "auditory landscape" of nineteenth-century France, a story of lost sensory experiences and forgotten passions. In the nineteenth century, these instruments were symbols of their towns and objects of both ecclesiastic and civic pride. Bell-ringing served practical purposes of communication, marking both religious and secular time, as well as calling citizens to pray, assemble, take arms, or beware of danger. As Corbin shows, the bells also reflected the social, political, and religious struggles of the time. To control the bells was to control the symbolic order, rhythm, and loyalties of French village and country life.

Using church archives and local documents, Corbin forges a unique history of the role of bells from the aftermath of the Revolution to the dawn of the twentieth century. He charts how the First Republic (1792–1804) moved toward a more secular society, turning many bells into coins and cannonballs and seizing others as property of the state. A gradual return to the religious use of bells occurred in the nineteenth century, even as their new secular roles were maintained. Corbin describes the battles over the marking of religious versus secular time, as calls to prayer, the celebration of religious feasts, and the marking of rites of passage―baptism, marriage, and death―competed with tolls indicating the passing hours or marking assemblies, elections, or republican holidays.

Thoroughly documented and recounted with intriguing narratives, Village Bells provides an original approach to nineteenth-century French cultural, social, and political history. As Corbin notes, the bells are no longer essential to our lives―their qualitative, sacred time and space replaced by the quantitative, secular measures of the clock―but by understanding their lost symbolic and practical importance we open a window onto the age in which they rang.

Genres: History, France, Nonfiction, Music

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Alain Corbin is a French historian, specialist of the 19th century in France.

Trained in the Annales School, Corbin's work has moved away from the large-scale collective structures studied by Fernand Braudel towards a history of sensibilities which is closer to Lucien Febvre's history of mentalités. His books have explored the histories of such subjects as male desire and prostitution, sensory experience of smell and sound, and the 1870 burning of a young nobleman in a Dordogne village.

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary book which deserves an extraordinary review but I don't think I can provide one. This wonderfully fascinating book opens up a whole world that is so alien for most of us that it is like reading about a foreign rather than reading one. The details of its riches and complexities, idiosyncrasies and delights can be told, but not really grasped. To read how important the bells of the village church were, that they had god parents, were engraved with talismantic symbols, is all very good but what all that meant and felt like is impossible for most of us to know. Indeed we would probably have more sympathy or time for the rituals and beliefs of indigenous people in the remote areas of the world where they remain uncontaminated by contact with us. Yet it isn't all that long ago that the French countryside was as remote and mysterious with people speaking languages or dialects that no Parisian would understand (in connection with which I can't help referring everyone to 'The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War' by Graham Robb).

It is that vanished world that Alain Corbin brings as much to life as it ever can be. That it fascinated me says a great deal for the power of his imaginative evocation based on an immersion in the shadowy remnants in archives of this world. Because, urban child that I am, educated in a boarding school set in Ireland's equivalent France profonde, I know I would have loathed and fled from these provincial scenes as quickly as Balzac or Rimbaud. The world of 'Village Bells' is gone, and in part I can weep for its loss, but I can't pretend want to live in it.

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now I have "The Bells of Notre Dame" stuck in my head

[Bri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting work of campanarian detail - some useful notes for Sayers, but v. fascinating on the subject of what bells meant in the rural communities of France pre/post-Revolution, and the battle to re-establish the bells. I did laugh at the traditon of having each bell have a godfather and godmother, and one outraged town failing to find sponsors for their bell declaring 'we have a bastard bell!' Also interesting: the hidden bells buried to protect them from being claimed for the Revolution and melted into cannon, dug back up thirty years later; the varios subterfuges and antics that allowed certain villages to hide their bells, the tradition of 'bell abduction' where competing villages bell-napped from each other in order to add to the glory of their peals.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed account of the regulation of the soundscape and practices of resistance.

[Marty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will they ring again?

[Charles Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Historical analysis rings true.