Materials, notes Alain Corbin, emeritus professor of history at the Sorbonne, are integral to the way we think about time. We conceive of the deep past in terms of the ages of stone, bronze and iron, and more modern times have characteristic materials too. The Industrial Revolution is associated with coal, the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the iron girder, the late 20th century with plastic, and our own era with silicon and graphene. It was plaster, he says, that defined France in the period 1815–55, between the fall of Napoleon and the early years of the Second Empire.

It is a neat conceit but one that doesn’t always live up to its promise. In the course of this short book, which has the feel of a series of conjoined lectures, Corbin loads plaster with an unfeasible number of meanings, some of them contradictory. Plaster, he says, was a symbol of the ‘hollow, the crumbling, the ephemeral, the transient and the vulgar’, but also the gimcrack, the liminal state of France, a bric-a-brac culture, changing trends in art, political instability (the century’s churn of governments, he says, ‘stemmed from the fact that they were merely moulded on past regimes’) and poverty (drying plaster was thought to be unhygienic, so prostitutes and the poor were routinely sent to live in newly built homes while the plaster cured). 

Corbin takes his cue from some of the writers of the age. In Le Père Goriot (1835), Balzac railed against the fact that he was surrounded by ‘short-lived ornaments, everything is makeshift and pitiful’; plaster was the culprit. Alfred de Musset in The Confession of a Child of the