The Life of an Unknown

by Alain Corbin

"My task is piecing together a puzzle... I hope to reconstitute the existence of a person whose memory has been abolished.... I want to re-create him, to give him a second chance... to become part of the memory of his century."

With these words, Alain Corbin embarks on a journey that is part history and part recreating the life and world of a man about whom nothing is known except for his entries in the civil registries and historical knowledge about the times in which he lived. Risen from death and utter obscurity is Louis-François Pinagot, a forester and clog maker who lived during the heart of the nineteenth century―the age of Romanticism, of Hugo and Berlioz―from the Napoleonic Wars to the Third Republic.

The result is a fascinating picture of the way people lived along the forest's edge during this tumultuous and eventful time in the history of France―and of the world. How did the residents of this unique community live and work together? How did life in the village differ from life in the forest? How did the church and various governments of France affect the everyday lives of these people, and of Pinagot in particular? With The Life of an Unknown, Alain Corbin presents a full record of a life, comprised of supposition, with room for each reader to insert his/her own imaginings onto the scene.

Ambitious in its aims and exquisite in its execution, The Life of an Unknown is nothing short of a bold and successful attempt by a master to correct historians' all-too-common neglect of those relegated to oblivion with the passage of time.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, France

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

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

[Elsa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enfin terminé, c'était si long T-T
En soi, ce n'était pas horrible à lire, mais c'était diablement ennuyant. Pour autant, j'aime l'idée de faire un livre entier sur un inconnu tout à fait banal ayant vécu il y a deux siècles de cela, c'est assez amusant.

[Elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Démarche géniale que de prendre un individu presque au hasard et de reconstruire tout un monde autour de lui. Trois cents pages de quasi rien sur Pinagot lui‑même, mais un "presque rien" qui éclaire tout un univers social et réussit à être captivant, ce qui est en soi un petit exploit.

[David Montgomery · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating work of microhistory, though extremely specific and not likely to be interesting to anyone without a passion for 19th Century France. The author sets himself an unusual challenge: to write a biography not of a famous notable but of an obscure, illiterate peasant, who appears in history only through a handful of public records. These are exhaustively mined for every hint of detail, but much of the book is supposition about what Louis-François Pinagot might have thought or what people like him did. The real star of the book isn't Pinagot, who largely remains a cipher, but his tiny village of Origny-le-Butin, a very poor community on the edge of a forest. Corbin describes the town during Pinagot's 77-year life in fascinating detail:

- the town's 114 cultivable acres divided up into tiny plots by 63 farmers, none farming more than 3.4 acres, but all of whom were better off than the masses of laborers who frequently had to resort to begging to survive.
- the decades-long rivalry with a neighboring town and the fight over which one would get an official church, neither being large enough to support an entire parish themselves
- the ceaseless lawsuits between neighbors over who let whose cow graze on whose land.
- the massive quantity of cider consumed in the local taverns.
- their suffering under Prussian occupation in 1815 and again in 1871.
- the powerful but frequently hapless local administrators, called upon by the central government to maintain order but often struggling just to keep people fed

As a companion to other, more general historical works, this is a wealth of specific details about an area and a type of people who don't get a lot of attention from historians. But it's probably far too niche for a casual reader.

[Mimonni · Rating 2 out of 5]

Un libro che mi sono portata dietro per settimane e che solo ora ho concluso. lo spunto è affascinantissimo: ricostruire la storia di una persona qualunque che ha vissuto la sua esistenza senza lasciare tracce. L’autore ha trovato a caso il suo nome negli archivi e ha iniziato a ricostruirne la vita, i legami, la geografia in cui ha vissuto ( un paese della Normandia ) e naturalmente, la storia. A tratti difficile da leggere perchè abbastanza tecnico e a volte basato su supposizioni per quel che riguarda il quotidiano vissuto da Louis-François. Chi scaverà nelle nostre vite qualunque, un giorno?

[Gilles Russeil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Étrange projet d'un historien : retracer la vie d'un sabotier normand du XIXe, choisi au hasard sur des registres d'état civil. En exploitant des archives, en décrivant l'époque, il y parvient néanmoins parfaitement.

[icaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

un grande professionista sa cavare sangue anche dalle rape. un modello

[Tom Bellenguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

C’est un livre de micro-histoire absolument fascinant. Tout dans le sujet, dans la méthode, dans l’analyse et la contextualisation des sources est intéressant. Corbin mène son enquête à merveille et on est captivés par cet inconnu issu de l’Orne…

[L · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of those "China Town" film moments, where the character could have been both at once, depending on the moment.
Where he had no documentation of the person, he filled it in with a thematic sketch of a village custom.
It worked well, rather like The Distant Mirror meets The Cheese and the Worms meets the Return of Martin Guerre. Taking the life of a person and using it as a device to explain a larger picture of a region and using that picture to fill in the blanks of this mysterious figure.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a tour de force of archival research. What can we learn about a man who lived through much of the nineteenth century without making a mark on the historical record? Corbin uses this question to learn a great deal about the ordinary lives of poor rural people in France. It is an effort at a different way of doing social history and implicitly a critique of other approaches. I found it fascinating to read, though I also like 'plotless movies." For me it was like listening to a virtuoso performance on the violin, knowing that it was something that I could not do.

[John Beeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you research someone that barely exists (in the historical record)? Should you? Corbin has an idea or two.

[Rasa · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a person into genealogy, I found this book totally fascinating. Being able to piece together a person's life from various outside sources is just really cool.