By giving a voice to the forgotten of history and an intelligibility to feelings and the senses, Michelle Perrot and Alain Corbin wrote, each in his own way, a story of the impossible. Debate between two major historians around Michelle Perrot’s book, Room story.
September 28, 2009, The life of ideas welcomed Alain Corbin and Michelle Perrot at the Collège de France for a debate around the book by Michelle Perrot, Room story (Threshold, coll. “ Bookstore XXIe century », 2009, price femina test). Classically, one could say that the work of these historians is devoted respectively to the transformation of the senses and sensitivities since the XVIIIe century and forgotten in history (workers, prisoners, women). But these interests are intertwined: they both paid attention to the strangers, to the silencer, to those who remain in the shadows-the children locked up in Petite-Roquette or Louis-François Pinagot, this modest sabotier of the Orne. They also gave intelligibility to the feelings and the phenomena which we thought could not be able to say anything: noises, smells, body, pleasure, intimacy, loneliness, hope, exclusion.
This is the reason why their works constitute a reflection on the conditions of possibility of history ; They are all archival, intellectual and literary challenges. This swinging between possible and impossible, it is Michelle Perrot herself who indicates it in two works: The impossible prison And Is a story of women possible ? Everyone in his own way, Alain Corbin and Michelle Perrot wrote a story of the impossible. By the originality of their questions, their taste for experimentation, their writing, they have considerably widened the spectrum of historical investigation and renewed the way of doing history, so that the history of the XIXe century is no longer conceived without them. They invented a century, which became theirs: there is a XIXe corbinesque century as there is a XIXe Perrotian century.