Alain Corbin

A fascinating work of microhistory, though extremely specific and not likely to be interesting to anyone without a passion for 19th Century France. The author sets himself an unusual challenge: to write a biography not of a famous notable but of an obscure, illiterate peasant, who appears in history only through a handful of public records. These are exhaustively mined for every hint of detail, but much of the book is supposition about what Louis-François Pinagot might have thought or what people like him did. The real star of the book isn't Pinagot, who largely remains a cipher, but his tiny village of Origny-le-Butin, a very poor community on the edge of a forest. Corbin describes the town during Pinagot's 77-year life in fascinating detail:

- the town's 114 cultivable acres divided up into tiny plots by 63 farmers, none farming more than 3.4 acres, but all of whom were better off than the masses of laborers who frequently had to resort to begging to survive.
- the decades-long rivalry with a neighboring town and the fight over which one would get an official church, neither being large enough to support an entire parish themselves
- the ceaseless lawsuits between neighbors over who let whose cow graze on whose land.
- the massive quantity of cider consumed in the local taverns.
- their suffering under Prussian occupation in 1815 and again in 1871.
- the powerful but frequently hapless local administrators, called upon by the central government to maintain order but often struggling just to keep people fed

As a companion to other, more general historical works, this is a wealth of specific details about an area and a type of people who don't get a lot of attention from historians. But it's probably far too niche for a casual reader.… (more)