Les cloches de la terre : paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siècle

by Alain Corbin

Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siècle

Reconnu comme le grand historien des sens et de l'évolution des sinsibilités, Alain Corbin, auteur notamment du "Miasme et la Jonquille", consacre "Les cloches de la terre" a l'étude du "paysage sonore".
En exploitant pour la première fois les quelques dix mille affaires de cloches que le XIXe siècle nous a laissées, il découvre à quel point ces sources insolites sont au centre de tout un ordere symbolique. La cloche préside au rythme de la vie rurale,oriente son espace; elle définit une identité et cristallise un attachement à la terre. La sonnerie constitue un langage, fonde un système de communication et accompagne des modes oubliés de relations entre les individus, entre les vivants et les morts. Enfin, qu'il s'agisse de traduire la liesse, la menace du feu ou du sang, la terreur des épidémies, il n'est pas de profonde émotion collective qui n'implique un recours à la cloche. Du même coup, maîtriser l'usage de la sonnerie constitue un enjeu majeur dans le déroulement des luttes de pouvoir qui agitent les microcosmes campagnards.
L'hisotrien, dans cet ouvrage brillant, se tient à l'écoute des hommes du passé, en vue de détecter et non de décréter les paasions qui les animaient et de comprendre un monde récemment disparu.

Genres: History, France, Nonfiction, Music

359 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.

[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.