Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-century French Countryside by Alain Corbin (review)

640BOOK REVIEWS studies of the lower clergy available for the modern period suggest that although there were undoubtedly cases of abuse, the vast majority of priests more or less lived up to their calling. The author correctly identifies the anticlerical indictment of clerical sexual abuse with the broader conflict in twentieth-century Spain between powerful secularizing forces and a Church determined to impose its view of morality on an entire society. Whether the issue of sexual morality was as central to that conflict, as he maintains, is less clear. This is particularly true of the assertion that the assassination of more than 7,000 priests and religious during the Civil War of the 1930's can be attributed in large measure to a powerful popular reaction , especially among anarchists, against "authoritarian sexual repression" identified with the clergy. That such a reaction took place in some cases is beyond doubt. But the causes of the Civil War and the attack on the Church and its clergy were complex. Political,social,and economic motives combined in explosive combination in the summer of 1936 to produce a sustained assault on the Church. No single cause can explain its unprecedented scale and ferocity. The connection between religion and sexuality that lies at the heart of this study is a legitimate object of enquiry. The author's sense of moral indignation at cases of sexual abuse and cover-ups by some ecclesiastical authorities, especially during the recent past, is justified. But from an historian's perspective, the brush is too broad. The thesis of "authoritarian sexual morality" as an overarching explanation applying to vastly different historical periods is too straightforward . Until historians turn their attention to study of the clergy in both early modern and modern Spain, a definitive answer to the questions raised in this study will remain elusive. William J. Callahan University ofToronto Late Modern European Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-century French Countryside. By Alain Corbin. Translated by Martin Thorn. [European Perspectives.] (NewYork: Columbia University Press. 1998. Pp. xx,4l6. $35.00.) The villages of nineteenth-century France were unfamiliar with the pervasive sounds of our contemporary world, the hum of the computer, the engines of the cars in the street and planes overhead, music and news amplified by the ubiquitous radios, tape decks, and compact-disk players. The silence of rural France was broken instead by the pealing bells of the parish church, which carried both an enormous amount of information, and an affective charge based on their ability to evoke feelings of belonging, danger, sadness, and joy. For Alain Corbin, the Village Bells which are the subject of his new book "bear witness to a different relation to the world and to the sacred as well as to a different way BOOK REVIEWS641 of being inscribed in time and space, and of experiencing time and space" (p. xix). Corbin opens with the revolutionary attempt to limit the ringing and, at the height of the Terror, to suppress the bells, understood as allies of religious fanaticism . But citizens were passionate in defending their bells against officials who sought to turn them into copper coinage and cannons. The religious peace established by Napoleon allowed the bells to ring, but called on clergy and public officials to co-operate in regulating this powerful instrument. As with so many other issues that required the co-operation of church and state under the Concordat, ringing the church bells became a source of constant tension, and sometimes open conflict, as priests and mayors fought to control the sounds that divided the time and structured the space of the French countryside. In chapters that define "l'esprit du clocher" Corbin describes the rituals that surrounded the casting and raising of parish bells, as well as their central role in marking the hours at which people began and ended their day. Bells were also the principal means used "to make announcements, exhort people to assemble, sound the alarm, and express general rejoicing" (p. 159). For students of religious history Corbin paints a fascinating picture of how the secular and the sacred were intermingled, for bells called people both to prayer and to work. As Corbin...