| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Alain Corbin, The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in 19^th-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press 2001).

THIS WORK, which originally appeared in French in 1998, is a product of a renowned historian's quest to study ordinary people instead of elites, members of the great majority whose obscure condition and illiteracy meant they conveyed nothing to future history, except inadvertently in administrative archives. Arguing that the current social history of ordinary people is based on the traces left by very unusual people who are wrongly taken to be spokesmen for the rest, Corbin seeks to rectify this by studying someone so obscure, unimportant, and anonymous as to be totally unremembered. He chose his native department, the Orne, picked out in it at random a tiny and obscure commune, Origny-le-Butin, and from its municipal archives chose, again at random, two late 18th-century names, from which he selected the one with a longer life. Thus the focus of the book is one Louis-François Pinagot (1798–1876), the son of a carter, who lived on the edge of the forest of Bellême, and worked mostly at making wooden shoes (sabots, a trade translated in this book as clog-maker), but sometimes as a labourer, married the daughter of a farmer at the age of twenty and she bore him eight children before her death in 1846.

Illiterate, leaving no written traces beyond scrawled crosses on voting registers, and often officially indigent, he vanished totally without trace when he died. Corbin, however, sets out to collect and collate all traces of him, so as to organise them into a picture of the outlines of his life, to reconstruct his times, family environment (Pinagot's relatives are all also investigated), circle of friends, community, probable values and beliefs, and to imagine the feelings, emotional relationships, and forms of sociability that might have affected him. In this way Corbin hopes to understand this period in a wretched part of one of the poorest departments in France. The book provides fully researched accounts of the area, countryside, agriculture, places, housing, transport, sounds, forms of exchange (with an apparent assumption that dealings for money actually meant money changing hands), produce, diet, animals, population, occupations, family structures, education, literacy, conversations, the social division between farmers and woodsmen, the particular trades in which Pinagot and his relatives worked (sabot-making, spinning, and glove-making), local quarrels (with a long catalogue of disputes over such matters as land boundaries and rights of way), standard of living, periods of famine, memory, celebrations, National Guard, and elections.

Corbin wishes to make Pinagot part of the memory of the 19th century, which can sound like a folie de grandeur. No doubt Pinagot will henceforth be referred to in historical works, so that, in the terminology of E.H. Carr, he has become a historical fact. In truth, not surprisingly, little is discovered about Pinagot beyond the bare outlines of his life, and the probable greater comfort of his later years. After the last bad time of 1853–4, as sabot-making became more remunerative, spinning was replaced by the better-paid glove-making in the employment of female members of the family, agriculture was modernized, the forest better exploited, the economy more national and fluid, and all his children of working age. In 1856 he bought a little cottage with a small plot attached to it and thus became a landowner, and in the 1870s his eldest son became a municipal councillor. As Corbin recognizes, a biography of Pinagot is impossible, and we can only hope to create an evocation of his life. Because of the lack of information, Corbin proceeds to speculate on such matters as networks of solidarity, what Pinagot could have seen and felt, and his views of the past. This leads him to pick out events Pinagot was likely to have heard or known about, including the cahiers for the Estates-General, chouannerie, periods of dearth and popular protest (of which an account is given), conflicts over the local church, the impingement of the outside world in the invasions of 1815 and 1870–1, but not Napoleon. Corbin's defence of this "re-creation" through speculation is that all historians speculate anyway, which will make some readers uneasy.

The main lesson of this book would seem to be the impossibility of knowing the thoughts of most of the people of the past. While it is of some interest to know about Pinagot and his relatives, and this little impoverished area and the overriding concerns of its inhabitants, it is not clear that a new perspective on history has been gained. The aim seems to be to get at ordinary people usually missed out in historical research, by going behind the misleading partial pictures of them that arise from the usual sources and such exceptional testimonies as those of Menetra and Menocchio. This is to be done by looking at someone so obscure that we are freed from any intermediary opinions, preconceptions, or interpretations of him. No such distorting and obscuring pictures get in the way, even from the man himself through such exceptional actions as giving us a written statement on anything. But because so little can, consequently, be discovered about him, the reconstruction has to be filled out with information on people like him in this small area, culled from the usual (suspect) documents created by outsiders. Because these have no direction connection with Pinagot himself, they are used to speculate about him. Perhaps, instead, we should be content to recognize the subjectivity of our sources instead of trying to circumvent them, and agree, with Collingwood and Bloch, that we seek to extract from the sources things they were not intended to tell us. What is really gained by the focus on this one man remains unclear, as it does not even lead, as biography does, to any understanding or recognition of individuality. Pinagot figures not as an individual but as a sort of vessel for some very generalized statements and assertions that often obscure the multiplicity of the past.


Iorwerth Prothero University of Manchester

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