A compelling study, The Village of Cannibals re-creates a world of pent-up rage and collective violence which, from the perspective of our own fin de siècle, seems distant in time alone.
   --Michael Burns, London Review of Books

Alain Corbin has taken this atrocity and made it into a metaphor for the fragility of civilization. The book is a small masterpiece.
   --Virginia Quarterly Review

Corbin traces this apparently unmotivated horror every which way, examines its details, seeks to explain its precedents, its unfolding, and its 'reasons' by reference to local conditions, crowd psychology, and historical circumstances. He does it with his usual acumen, cleverness, and style. It is a tour de force.
   --Eugen Weber, author of My France,

It's an excellent book that unites the best in the sensibility of the Annales to the traditions of histoire historisante, of history as it has classically been defined. This is disciplined and imaginative history. Corbin thinks innovatively, profoundly even, about the nature of the mob, its political and sociological situation, and about the political history of the region, its geography and its economy. He ranges back and forth through French history to explain a precise event, it is the interplay of scholarly presentation and imagination that makes this book so particularly taking. It is also very well composed and written. This is popularized scholarly history at its best.
   --Patrice Higonnet, author of Sister Republics: The Origin of French and American Republicanism,

Alain Corbin is Professor of History at the Sorbonne.

Arthur Goldhammer received the French-American Translation Prize in 1990 for his translation of A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution.

Read More by Alain Corbin:

• The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination
• Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850

Read More by Arthur Goldhammer:

• France in the Enlightenment
• A History of Private Life, Volume III, Passions of the Renaissance
• A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution
• A Small City in France
• A History of Women in the West, Volume II, Silences of the Middle Ages
• The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century
• A History of Private Life, Volume IV, From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War
• A History of Private Life, Volume V, Riddles of Identity in Modern Times
• The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944
• A History of Women in the West, Volume I, From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints
• Blessings in Disguise: or, the Morality of Evil
• A History of Private Life, Volume I, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
• Dionysos at Large
• The Living Eye
• Tocqueville and the Two Democracies
• A History of Private Life, Volume II, Revelations of the Medieval World
• A History of Women in the West, Volume V, Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century
• A History of Women in the West, Volume IV, Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War
• A History of Women in the West, Volume III, Renaissance and the Enlightenment Paradoxes
• Greek Virginity
• Paris: Capital of the World
• The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution