Nobody Was Here, Clogs And All
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday September 22, 2001
THE LIFE OF AN UNKNOWN
The rediscovered world of a clog maker in 19th-century France
By Alain Corbin
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Columbia University Press, 269pp, $68
`By chance," writes Alain Corbin, disingenuously, halfway through this book, ``I chose to study a poor clog maker who spent his entire life in the most wretched part of one of the poorest departements in France."
Though chance and choice would seem to be mutually exclusive, he has already explained in his introduction (archly called the ``Prelude") how he hit upon Louis-Francois Pinagot, the ``unknown" of the title, as the subject of a historical exercise resulting in his book-length study.
In the spring of 1995 Alain Corbin went into the archives of the Orne region in north-west France and, as the result of an elaborate game of blindman's buff with the municipal registers and census tables, ``chose" Pinagot's name at random.
Yet while Corbin is forthcoming about the ``how", even reproducing entries from the journal he kept in the early days of his research, the ``why" is not so clear. He declares his purpose is ``to stand the methods of 19th-century social history on their head", but that, arguably, is not the same thing.
Author of a provocative study of the ``soundscape" of 19th-century rural France, as well as a ``history of the senses" and a separate study of changing historical responses to smell in The Foul and the Fragrant, Corbin, clearly, is not a historian who sees history as made by exceptional individuals or notable events.
We can infer he has in mind the French Annales school of history of the 1930s prioritising long-term historical process over ``event" and emphasising the minutiae of everyday life in the writing of history of which Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms is the well-known example.
``It was essential," says Corbin, ``to choose a person about whom the only documentary record would consist of materials not brought to light by a specific interest in that individual."
Born in Year VI of the Revolution, or 1798, son of a carter, Corbin's ``nobody" lived through the restoration of the monarchy and of the Empire, and died early in 1876. Pinagot was an illiterate woodsman who made his meagre living chiefly in the cottage industry of clog making.
In the absence of all but a few bureaucratic details on the public record, Corbin embarks on an ``evocation" of Pinagot's life by drawing upon the social, economic and political history of his time. Eschewing the ``dry, statistical study", this historian is equally chary of empathetic speculation on his subject's feelings or intentions.
But there was no good reason for him to be so sparing of information about clogs, or sabots, if you prefer: how they were made, or their role in the sabotage of the mechanisation threatening craft-based cottage industries like Pinagot's own.
Corbin's book has two readerships in mind. With its assertions about method and focus, it is part of an ongoing argument with fellow historians. At the same time, it clearly wants to engage the ``general reader". But the reasonably curious general reader learns very little from it about who wore clogs. It may be that before the era of cheap mass production, the distinction between those who wore clogs and those who wore shoes was as marked as the famous cultural distinction between the ``raw and the cooked" drawn in an earlier generation by Corbin's compatriot, the structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald
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