Bøker av Alain Corbin

Silence is not simply the absence of noise. It characterises our most intimate spaces and inspires writers who have long sought solitude in mountains and forests. Today, when noise is everywhere, historian Alain Corbin goes back to a time when speech was rare and precious, showing how silence can still offer a richer experience of life.

Alain Corbin depicts prostitution in nineteenth-century France not as a vice, crime, or disease, but as a well-organized business. Corbin reveals how the brothel served the sex industry in the same way that the factory served manufacturing: it provided an institution for the efficient and profitable sale of services.

A story of lost sensory experiences and forgotten passions, the latest work from renowned historian Alain Corbin recounts the history of nineteenth-century French rural life through the countryside's numerous bells.

Corbin recreates 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: Louis-Francois 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.