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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The distant past is commonly characterized in terms of dominant materials of the time – the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, etc. Since the dawn of writing, however, characterizing eras in terms of materials has fallen by the wayside, and yet materials have continued to exert a powerful influence on our collective imagination.
Viewed from this perspective, France in the period from 1815 to 1855 could be seen as the half-century of plaster. After the French Revolution, plaster was used for a great variety of things: building, moulding, sculpting, decorating. Cheap and easy to use, plaster was everywhere, from Napoleon’s death mask to household ornaments, from walls to elaborate mouldings. Plaster was king – but a fragile king that easily crumbled and fell apart. The age of plaster was also the reign of the ephemeral and the transient, the vulgar and the eclectic, and the men and women of the time struggled to maintain stability and continuity with the past. In the space of a few decades, no fewer than seven political regimes succeeded one another. Plaster – symbol of the ephemeral, the flaking and the vulgar – is the material which defines the first half of the nineteenth century.
Written with his characteristic brilliance and eye for unconventional topics, Alain Corbin’s highly original exploration of the role of plaster in history will be of interest to a wide readership.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Quote
Acknowledgements
History: from stone to plastic
Notes
1. The half-century of plaster
Notes
2. Plaster houses and poverty
Notes
3. Restoring ancient monuments
Notes
4. Plaster: allegory of a phantom century
Notes
5. Plaster casts and the art of the hollow
Notes
6. Immortalizing the dead in plaster
Notes
7. Ornaments and figurines: plaster within the home
Notes
8. The strange case of life-casting
Notes
9. Crumbling political regimes
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Quote
Acknowledgements
History: from stone to plastic
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
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Fragility
A History of Plaster
Alain Corbin
Translated by Helen Morrison
polity
Originally published as Fragilitas. Le plâtre et l’histoire de France © 2023 by Éditions Plon, un Département de Place des Editeurs, Paris
This English translation © Polity Press, 2025
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6596-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024948714
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Our fathers had a Paris of stone
– our children will have a Paris of plaster.
Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, 1833
Acknowledgements
Without the active participation of my friend Professor Jacques Hentraye, this book would not have been possible.
My deepest thanks go to Sylvie Le Dantec, who was the first person to see and read this text.
History: from stone to plastic
In the past, the very first chapter of primary school ‘history’ textbooks – and, by the same token, the very first lesson – was dedicated to prehistoric times. Teachers introduced their pupils to two key concepts. The first of these was the sheer length of this period during which man concentrated his attention on survival and on overcoming the many challenges of existence. The second concerned the key elements of this timeline, with the emphasis placed much more on materials and techniques, rather than on what would, at a later stage, be referred to as ‘lifestyle’. The past was presented in terms of chrononyms which referred to the dominant material of that time: the Stone Age (initially with crudely cut stone tools and later more refined ones made of polished stone), the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, etc., right until the Neolithic Age, also referred to as the New Stone Age.
The second lesson focused on the birth of history, linked to the invention and practice of many different writing systems and the splendour of the Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations, amongst others. In order to mark this abrupt change, this starting point of history, chrononyms referring to materials were no longer used. They have subsequently never reappeared, except perhaps in our imaginations, as demonstrated by the fascination exerted by the standing stones of Carnac or Stonehenge.
Yet materials have continued to exert a subtle influence on our perception of time. The solidity of Carrara marble, sculpted notably by Michelangelo, as well as its dazzling brightness, were closely associated with the period referred to by Michelet as the Renaissance, while the blackness of coal left its mark on the collective imagination of the English in the first decades of the nineteenth century.
But the situation was to become even clearer in subsequent years when the metal girder succeeded in imposing itself on the public mind to such an extent that it could indeed be regarded as a material chrononym in its own right, symbolizing, between 1860 and 1945, solidity, strength and even a kind of brute force in the construction of buildings, market halls and metal bridges, as well as in the manufacture of arms. Its appeal to the collective imagination reached a peak with the huge crowds of tourists flocking to see the Eiffel Tower during the Paris Exposition of 1889.
From 1945 onwards, a new material – in the form of plastic – took centre stage, and this too could be regarded as a chrononym. On the eve of the Second World War, when my brother and I played together, most of our games revolved around Meccano, an activity which represented the advent of the metal girder in the realm of children’s toys. Subsequently, everything changed with the advent of nylon stockings, neon lighting and then, between 1950 and 1970, the invasion of an omnipresent plastic, all of which marked a revolution in the presence and use of materials in our lives.
Focusing their attention on the village of Plozévet in Brittany, Edgar Morin and his skilful team of researchers drew attention to a phenomenon which was soon to be observed across all rural areas.1 Farmers, many craftsmen, and even the middle classes threw away, burnt or confined to outhouses any kitchen items made of wood, with the result that tables, sideboards and dressers found themselves relegated to the scrap heap along with traditional bedroom wardrobes, all of them destined to be replaced by equivalent items very often made of formica. In a great many interiors, plastic now reigned supreme.
In a relatively short space of time, ‘Tupperware parties’, initially intended to promote plastic containers of all shapes and sizes, resulted in a hitherto unknown form of social activity which was essentially the preserve of women. Too little attention has been paid to this innovation, which ended up modifying working practices, creating free time and reconfiguring conversations between women, and which was undoubtedly a factor in their emancipation.
But if we delve a little deeper into the details, there is yet more to be discovered. Bags – large and small; packaging materials, previously in the form of paper, cardboard or natural textile; bottles; glass carafes; the metal cutlery which was our grandmothers’ pride and joy – all soon began to be manufactured exclusively in plastic. At the end of the meal, all the cutlery, glasses, plates and dishes could be thrown away – everything was now disposable. The glory of plastic was demonstrated with considerable fanfare during the opening ceremonies of the vast factories destined to produce it by the thousands of tons.
At a much later stage, it became apparent that these same objects were invading rivers, forests, coastlines and oceans and that their indestructible nature in fact represented a serious threat – that even fish had been affected. Worse still, people had been ingesting and inhaling minuscule elements of plastic. From that time onwards, our bodies all contained plastic in some form or another. War on plastic was therefore declared and it would be by no means absurd to refer to the period extending from 1945 to 2022 as the age of plastic, pending the advent of a new material chrononym … and, with the omnipresence of fibre, there is certainly no shortage of candidates in our present time.
From the same perspective, we have come to regard the period extending from 1815 to 1855 in France as the reign of plaster, with this material acting as a chrononym in its own right and thereby transforming the decades in question into a half-century of plaster.
It remains now to justify this hypothesis and to demonstrate the significance of this material, which during that period was becoming ever more invasive. It was a material with rich potential in agriculture and construction, in the amalgamation of all manner of debris, in art, in private and sentimental life, in medicine and even as a reflection of the different political regimes, which resemble a series of moulds like those used for plaster casts. In addition, we should not forget that plaster in a sense also suggests the direction taken by history, the appeal of eclecticism, the fascination with the discontinuity of time and, in brief, the sense of a flawed existence. Plaster – symbol of the hollow, the crumbling, the ephemeral, the transient and the vulgar – is therefore the material that best defines the first half of the nineteenth century.
Notes
1.
Edgar Morin,
Commune en France: la métamorphose de Plozévet
, Paris: Fayard, 1967.
1The half-century of plaster
What effect, whether physical or psychological, did the omnipresence of plaster have on people in France in the first part of the nineteenth century? In one of his Propos, the philosopher Alain1 briefly turned his attention to this subject: ‘Plaster is ugly because it can take on any form whatsoever. The most beautiful form, as everyone knows, loses much from this over-lenient material.’2 It is a material, therefore, with connotations of pretence and sham.
Plaster is a friable material which produces a white dust. Mixed with water, it becomes malleable. It is not easy to handle and must be mixed with care. Plastering requires a certain level of technical skills if the smoothly polished surface and the dazzling white finish characteristic of this elusive material are to be successfully achieved.
Plaster is also used to stick items together, for distempering and coating surfaces and even for colouring. Covering a facade with plaster is a way of protecting it. Replastering strengthens the walls of a dwelling or a monument, filling in any cracks which have appeared. Plaster is useful when it comes to reassembling and sticking together scattered fragments. It allows remnants of debris to be stuck back together.
Most importantly, it readily lends itself to being moulded on a variety of different supports and dries rapidly. Consequently, as we shall see, the use of plaster for making casts has become a fundamental and widely used technique, whether for making casts of ancient works of art or for casting from nature, either to create a death mask or in the process of life-casting the human body or a fragment of it. Not surprisingly, medicine lost no time in adopting this technique.
