Making sense of social history - New Topics And Historians

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2003 by Mark M. Smith

Some of the same investigative strategies Corbin used in his study of smell resonate in his 1998 study on sound, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside. "In order to write the history of the bell," he argued, "one has constantly to shift levels of analysis. The emphasis is on locality, but bells also serve to announce events of significance in the national sphere, be it military mobilization, the declaration of war," and the like. In short, maintains Corbin, "A history of representations of space and of the social imagination can no longer afford to neglect materials pertaining to auditory perception" not least because such perceptions give us access to "a deeper mode of existence" of past lives. (23)

Corbin examines shifts in thresholds of hearing that were in some part class based, the "country people" clashing with the "people of the bourg" not only over the meaning of peals and bells but on their timing and use. In this class conflict resided a dispute over religion and nationalism: "The leaders of the First Republic had sought to descacrilize these instruments, to limit their strictly religious uses, to curb their sensory ascendancy, and to monopolize their solemnity. They also attempted to secularize and municipalize the peals, to subordinate them to the nation, and to insert them into a framework of citizenship" and, in effect, "to alter the prevailing pattern" of the culture of the senses and the social hierarchies shaping that culture. Even though Corbin's study is in part an inquiry into "emotional power" and the control and manipulation of "modes of behavior," he eschews a heavily linguistic emphasis in favor of elucidating representations "based on material facts that shed light on the physical attributes of sensory messages at the end of the Old Regime." As he remarks: "Without a detailed study of peals, we would not be able to grasp with any precision the rhythms of village life, the experienced shape of territories, the acquiescence in and resistance to the expression of hierarchies." (24)

Although Corbin refers to his highly empirical study as a "cultural history"-presumably because it "consists of an endless series of exchanges"--the work reads very much like a Thompsonian social history. Viz.: "Complaining of the discomfort caused by the din of bells was a venerable urban tradition, and one that fit with the familiar theme of the drawbacks of town life. It formed part of a struggle of the elites, who were intent on imposing their fastidious tastes and reducing noise to some sort of harmonious order, against 'rough music,' charivaris, and rackets, which all served to define the people." And, as with his work on olfaction, Corbin rooted his discussion of shifting mentalities (although he'd hate the word) and social representations in concrete evidence ranging from a detailed discussion of the process and mechanics of bell casting and an examination of the function of bells in timekeeping, to a fairly quantitative analysis of the numbers and types of bells used in France in the late nineteenth century. Corbin is as aware of the need for a good, positivist narrative as he is of the analysis of his data: "My aim here has been to write a history of this auditory landscape, to describe it in all its magnificence, and then to retrace the process by which it disintegrated." (25)