Village Bells

Since the Renaissance, France has been known as the country of ringing towns. By the 19th century, according to Alain Corbin, a renowned professor of contemporary history at the Sorbonne, a French village community could not live without its bells. Village peals were symbols and objects of both ecclesiastic and civic pride, and played such an integral role in town life that, according to Corbin, community leaders frequently allocated more money to their acquisition and maintenance than to relieving poverty or promoting education. Bell-ringing not only served practical purposes of communication, it also reflected the social, political, and religious struggles of the time. To control the bells was to control the symbolic order, rhythm, and loyalties of French village and country life. Furthermore, Corbin argues, possessing a peal of bells was a prerequisite of modernity in a society increasingly subject to haste but as yet without any other means of transmitting information instantaneously. Examinations of the social imagination have traditionally neglected materials pertaining to auditory perception, making Corbin's exploration of his thesis all the more original. --Bertina Loeffler