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“... In this very short book about a very long murder Alain Corbin returns, as he puts it, ‘to the peasants of my youth (or at any rate to their traces in the archives)’. And he returns with new sensibilities shaped by new methodological tools. Listening to his rural actors with ‘a fresh ear’, he identifies the ‘alchemy’ of a violent event which, in the history of modern France, represents the ‘last outburst of peasant rage to result in murder ...”

“... Alain Corbin is a prolific new-style French historian, and these books are notable contributions to an interesting genre he describes as ‘the history of sensibilities’. The Foul and the Fragrant created something of a stir some years ago when the translation appeared in hardback, partly, I suppose, because no respected historian had ever before written so much, and so explicitly, about shit, which, as more sanitised historians had omitted to specify, occupied in former times the worry-space now claimed by nuclear waste ...”

“... The encounter between Alain Corbin and François-Louis Pinagot was at one level fortuitous. The historian picked the dead peasant’s name from the register of births in a provincial archive. He set out to bring him back from oblivion by following the meagre traces left in the bureaucratic records of the French state when the most subordinate of its agents – mayors, foresters, tax collectors – made fleeting contact with, or more often narrowly missed, one of their humblest and least troublesome administrés ...”

“... stigmatise any strong smell as a bad smell. In one of the few investigations of the subject before Corbin’s, Adrian Stokes noted that unlike the other four senses, that of scent had not inspired any art, or aesthetic cultivation. (I think Stokes may have overlooked the use of the nose in wine-bibbing.) There is no educational encouragement to improve one’s ...”

“... failings, of a great deal of current French history. Alan Sheridan’s excellent translation of Alain Corbin’s Filles de Noce makes widely available what is probably still the best, the most formidably-researched and the most wide-ranging study of 19th-century prostitution. The fourth volume of A History of Private Life, originally published in 1987 ...”

“... the one hand, 1832 saw the beginning of building inspections in which officials investigated what Alain Corbin has described as ‘the stench of the pauper and of his lair’. On the other, Parisians, despite their susceptibility to everything fashionable and new, were slow to relinquish their traditional obstinacy when it came to conforming to the new ...”

“... an essential part of daily life.The 18th century’s ‘new calculus of olfactory pleasure’, as Alain Corbin called it in his classic study from 1982, Le Miasme et la jonquille (published in English as The Foul and the Fragrant), created an opportunity both for Laugier and for his home town of Grasse in Provence, which had long been renowned for the ...”

“... historians to write about, although we have a whole book on the subject by the French historian Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant (1982), which shows how the upper classes achieved olfactory separation from the smelly lower classes in the course of modernisation. The problem is that odour is ephemeral and can’t be archived, and conventional ...”

“... sufferings dwarfed his own experiences in Algeria. As a young lycée teacher, another historian, Alain Corbin, tried to solicit the indulgence of a disapproving school inspector by pointing out that he had just been called up for service in Algeria. He received the devastating reply: ‘Moi, monsieur, j’étais à Verdun.’ As Françoise Giroud once ...”