Books by Alain Corbin

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.