The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination

In a book whose insight and originality have already had a dazzling impact in France, Alain Corbin has put the sense of smell on the historical map. He conjures up the dominion that the combined forces of smells–from the seductress’s civet to the ubiquitous excremental odors of city cesspools–exercised over the lives (and deaths) of the French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.