Village bells: sound and meaning in the nineteenth-century French countryside

by Alain Corbin, Martin Thom (Translator)

Since the Renaissance, France has been known as the country of ringing towns. By the 19th century, according to Alain Corbin, a renowned professor of contemporary history at the Sorbonne, a French village community could not live without its bells. Village peals were symbols and objects of both ecclesiastic and civic pride, and played such an integral role in town life that, according to Corbin, community leaders frequently allocated more money to their acquisition and maintenance than to relieving poverty or promoting education. Bell-ringing not only served practical purposes of communication, it 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. Furthermore, Corbin argues, possessing a peal of bells was a prerequisite of modernity in a society increasingly subject to haste but as yet without any other means of transmitting information instantaneously. Examinations of the social imagination have traditionally neglected materials pertaining to auditory perception, making Corbin's exploration of his thesis all the more original. --Bertina Loeffler

Genres: France, History, Nonfiction, Music

416 pages, Paperback

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.

[Roxanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dingdong blablabla

[y · Rating 4 out of 5]

intended to just skim the beginning and ended up reading the whole thing

[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?

[Mathieu · Rating 3 out of 5]

extensif, trop ?

[Charles Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Historical analysis rings true.