Alain Corbin

About the author

Born in Courtomer in 1936, Alain Corbin is a French historian and specialist in 19th-century France and microhistory. Trained in the Annales School, he has moved away from the large-scale structural history associated with Fernand Braudel toward a finely grained history of sensibilities closer to Lucien Febvre's history of mentalités. His books range across strikingly varied terrain — male desire and prostitution, the sensory histories of smell and sound, and the story of a young nobleman burned in a Dordogne village in 1870 — making him one of France's most original cultural historians.