Selling Beauty: Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750-1830
As slim and elegant as a tube of lipstick, this volume traces the history of the French cosmetics trade from the thick fard of the mid-eighteenth century to the wan visages of the Romantic era. Fittingly for a book about truth in advertising, Martin has titled hers Selling Beauty. She is concerned with the marketing of cosmetics, not their history, use, and fabrication. (For that, readers should consult Catherine Lanoë’s comprehensive 2008 book La poudre et le fard: Une histoire des cosmétiques de la Renaissance aux Lumières, or Rosemarie Gerken’s more focused 2007 study La Toilette: die Inszenierung eines Raumes im 18. Jahrhundert in Frankreich). Within those parameters, she has succeeded in crafting a thoughtful and thought-provoking text that will resonate across disciplines.
Between 1750 and 1830, a bewildering variety of store-bought beauty concoctions replaced traditional home remedies. There was a corresponding increase in cosmetics advertisements, which Martin’s research combines with information gleaned from beauty manuals, medical treatises, patents, legal documents, trade cards, and inventories. Bankruptcy records proved particularly fruitful; even successful merchants struggled financially due to changing fashions and cutthroat competition. These at times dry archival records are enlivened by famous names: Casanova, the actress Mademoiselle Clairon, chemist Antoine Lavoisier (who, as patent inspector, tried to settle the tedious–as he considered it–question of whether or not rouge was medically safe), and Antoine Claude Maille, a vinegar and rouge merchant whose name survives in the modern-day mustard empire.
Cosmetics fell through the cracks in France’s strictly regulated guild system. This was both a boon and a hindrance; “in the traditional guild workshop, the corporation set standards for artisans to follow, encouraging perfection but not innovation” (64). Public fears of charlatanism—and merchants’ fears of counterfeiters—encouraged new marketing strategies, including touting guarantees of satisfaction and patents. “Guarantees from a commerce renowned for its falsity were worth more than a multitude of royal titles” (66). Though patents were shockingly easy to obtain—and rarely offered real protection against counterfeiting—they lent unregulated products an appearance of legitimacy, innovation, and safety.
Another, even more surprising strategy was the introduction of fixed prices, “meant to reassure the client” (66). These “fixed” sums actually varied a good deal, but it was according to the type of container purchased rather than the seller’s whims. Decorative containers—including rouge pots made of Sèvres porcelain—allowed cosmetics to be “both an expensive luxury and a fairly affordable high-quality necessity” (67). Continuing Cissie Fairchilds’ argument, Martin calls cosmetics the ideal “populuxe” product, as “they were easy to make and to transport,” and “their perishable nature meant constant demand” (3, 33). A thriving trade developed thanks to “the growing demand for affordable luxuries, the decline of guild monopolies, and the ease with which cosmetics could be manufactured” (33).
In this increasingly crowded market, merchants further differentiated their products by giving them distinctive names, often evoking the Orient. “Harem women, chosen by the sultan for his pleasure, represented true beauty” (134). But their allure was sanitized in cosmetics advertisements, stripped of any racial or sexual subtext. “Unlike the secretive and titillating descriptions of the harem in earlier literary works, the cosmetics advertised were commodities whose mystery had been completely revealed for the good of French women” (146). This was not entirely a commercial fabrication; many of the key ingredients in cosmetics were imported from the East.
Detractors attacked cosmetics as being not just unhelpful, but damaging to the skin—and morals. During the French Revolution, “honest self-presentation became essential to join the fraternity of citizens” (1). In order to survive commercially, sellers “repositioned what had been ostentatious elite products as purchases consistent with Enlightenment values” (2). However, as Martin points out, “criticizing artifice was a fairly easy task with few detractors. Replacing it with a new aesthetic of beauty was altogether more complicated” (75).
One group that made a credible effort was the medical profession. Doctors–“distancing themselves from the severe criticisms of philosophes, playwrights, and poets”–made medical arguments against cosmetics while also proposing healthy alternatives (108). Half of the beauty advice manuals published between 1750 and 1818 were written by doctors. “In the midst of public disapproval, this specialist knowledge gave women a means to reclaim beauty practices for themselves” (108). This “legacy of medical beauty” survives today in “pseudoscientific” brand names like Clinique and Laboratoire Garnier (116).
Though men gave up fard in the later eighteenth century, they continued to consume hair products. When hair powder and wigs went out of fashion around the time of the Revolution, other products rose up to take their place: dyes, potions to stop hair loss, and new, undetectable wigs. “That women might also need these was simply an additional benefit for the sellers” (156). Martin charts the rise of hair potions marketed to men, like Macassar oil, “an exotic solution to a prosaic problem” (167). Bear and beaver grease were similarly masculine remedies for a uniquely male predicament.
As it had with female cosmetics, “the medical profession . . . tried both to discredit and compete with this market” (170). For the first time, medicine paid serious attention to hair loss, forcing men “to enter into the commercial world of cosmetic practices in a period when most forms of male vanity were suspect” (155). The Napoleonic wars glorified young, fit men and launched a fashion for short hair and tight clothing, putting added focus on the ideal masculine physique–and added pressure on those who sought to achieve it without apparent effort.
If Selling Beauty ultimately reads more like a medical treatise on makeup than an alluring advertisement, it is partially due to the limitations of the source material; descriptions found in inventories are more quantative than qualitative, and visual sources cannot be trusted. As Martin points out, “there are inherent problems with using painting to reflect the use of cosmetics” (27). Nevertheless, one cannot help but wish for more images of painted beauties, expensive containers, and innovative hairpieces to supplement Martin’s vague and rather clinical descriptions of them. (It will come as no surprise to readers that the book was adapted from Martin’s dissertation.) Martin references exotic ingredients but gives no sense of why or in what quantities they were used, or how dangerous or counterproductive they really were (15). Of course, this information may be deemed incidental to the history of marketing, but one has to wonder if Martin has ever seen an eighteenth-century wig, or attempted to re-create any of the recipes she quotes, which might have supplied the sensual element that is conspicuously missing from the book.
When in doubt, Martin blames fickle fashion for trends that actually had multiple causes and lasted longer than the vagaries of fashion alone can explain. Much of the story of cosmetics in eighteenth-century France hinges on the persistent taste for white hair and skin, which Martin does not satisfactorily explain. With such a long and diverse period to cover, generalizations are inevitable, and it is sometimes unclear whether Martin is discussing the pre- or post-revolutionary period, or both. But she also demonstrates the efficacy of a beauty-based approach; in particular, she convincingly challenges longstanding assumptions about Nicolas René Jollain’s painting La toilette, which was altered to reflect post-Revolutionary concepts of femininity (96).
There is a good argument for not tarting up a subject that is already prone to sensationalism. Nevertheless, Selling Beauty could use a coat of lipstick.
Discourses of Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Enlightenment
As Peter Hanns Reill puts it in his introduction, tolerance, in its modern, positive sense is very much “a child of the Enlightenment.”(3) It is not difficult to locate instances of limited religious coexistence or grudging toleration in the medieval and early modern periods but these aberrations invariably derived from pragmatism: temporarily, there was more social and political sense in putting up with diversity than in following the usual pattern of imposing uniformity of belief and expunging heresy and dissent. A principled philosophical belief in the virtues of pluralism would not arrive on the European intellectual scene before the late seventeenth-century at the very earliest. Since we, too, are all children of the Enlightenment, we tend to see toleration in a positive light. We might even be minded to identify it as a sign of progress.
As Reill explains, however, such optimism (which can easily morph into Whiggish triumphalism) has been questioned in recent decades. Some philosophers and historians have identified the darker side of toleration. They have pointed to “the omnipresent gaze of a centralized domination” (4) which the enforcement of toleration requires. To create a tolerant society, there is often a need for an attentive, interventionist state. New norms of behaviour have to be created and policed (which, in itself, breeds suspicion of otherness) and, with no small amount of irony, the very survival of tolerance requires a new brand of intolerance — intolerance of intolerance itself. To enjoy freedom is to submit to previously unheard of levels of surveillance and moral scrutiny and this, by some accounts, is a hefty price to pay.
To venture down this theoretical avenue is a perilous undertaking and, while it provides a necessary corrective, it can also lead to exaggerated, perhaps even paranoid conclusions. It does remind us of one cardinal fact, however. The history of the rise of Western toleration is not nearly as straightforward as we used to imagine. It is important to jettison the rose-tinted historical spectacles and pay more attention to the many tensions and ambiguities that stemmed from the Enlightenment’s cautious embrace of tolerationism. This edited volume, a model of its type, does precisely that, and the contributors are to be heartily commended for their efforts.
After Reill’s impressive introduction, Hans Erich Bödeker offers a prologue in which he asks some very important questions about how we should study tolerance. There are two standard methodologies: seeing toleration’s rise as the consequence of social, economic and political shifts, or locating it firmly in the realm of the history of ideas. Both approaches have their virtues and have produced a great deal of important work but both have their drawbacks. There are competing risks, for instance, of either lapsing into vague abstraction or poring over legislative measures at the expense of studying the lived, day-to-day reality of toleration (or its absence). Bödeker, eager to cleanse both the theoretical and empirical stables, suggests that we ought to study the subject in the round and a good first step would be to examine the “structures of thought, patterns of argumentation, and the conceptual categories” (21) that underpinned attitudes towards toleration. He is also insistent that we should move beyond the religious dimensions of the issue (though these remain vitally important) and he offers several pointers towards future areas of research. Happily, many of them are represented in the book’s subsequent chapters.
The interaction between tolerance and religious belief will always be of pivotal importance and it is well studied in the first two-thirds of the volume. Geoffrey Symcox takes us to Savoy, a proudly Catholic state that was always obsessed with the dangers of dissent: a result, perhaps, of the memory of Calvin and Geneva shrugging of its authority during the Reformation era. For all the tides of Enlightenment, such fixations did not evaporate during the eighteenth century. Two groups felt the pinch. The Savoyard chapter of the Waldensians’ history had been truly awful: a tale of massacre and persecution. Matters began to improve during the eighteenth century, but as Symcox is eager to point out, the arrival of attenuated toleration had precious little to do with a principled belief in religious pluralism. Rather, it was the result of Savoy’s rulers succumbing to external political pressure. Those rulers’ policies tended to “veer opportunistically with each shift in the political situation” (40). The region’s Jews, by contrast, had enjoyed a relatively untroubled past. They had endured social exclusion, they had not been entitled to worship in public, and they had been made to wear symbols on their clothes. They had been spared the trials of ghettoization, however, but this all began to change in the late seventeenth-century. As Symcox concludes, this is a signal reminder that the emergence of centralized governments driven by reason of state did not always lead to increased toleration: in some instances, it had precisely the opposite effect.
A comparable warning is provided by Hartmut Lehmann’s chapter on dissenting Protestants in Württemberg. Tolerance here was much more expansive; echoing one of the themes of the introduction, Lehman explains, however, that this came at a cost: namely, ever-tightening political control and oversight. Sometimes, he opines,” the progress of Enlightenment cannot and should not be equated with a steady progress of religious tolerance.” (126) Similar hermeneutic spanners are thrown into the works by Frances Malino’s and David Sorkin’s chapters on the Jews of France and Germany. The most important is the reminder that, while the period witnessed increased toleration of Judaism, this was sometimes a double-edged sword. When it came to extending civil rights to Jews, there was a widespread notion that a quid pro quo was required. Jews would have to go through a process of ‘improvement’ and ‘regeneration’ and rid themselves of their ‘alien’ and ‘barbarous’ qualities in order to take their place as fully-fledged citizens. If this was toleration, it was of a decidedly repugnant variety.
The remaining chapters in the first part of the book offer some surprises. The late and much-missed Richard Ashcraft set himself the task of rehabilitating and revitalising John Locke’s reputation. He had two bugbears. The first was scholars who dismiss Locke because his philosophising was wrong-headed; the second, those who claim that his theories are no longer relevant. Ashcraft challenged any assumption that “arguments are, as it were, frozen in historical time and cannot be resuscitated for use by later thinkers.” (54) Richard Popkin also has assumptions to slay: in this case the belief that millenarian thought was always associated with intolerance. Popkin seeks to trace a tradition of “benign egalitarian millenarianism” (100) encapsulated by Ezra Stiles, the Chilean Jesuit Immanuel Lacunza, and Abbé Henri Gregoire.
Finally, Terence Ball tackles the often neglected subject of the emergence of political parties. This, he argues, was “a moral and intellectual achievement of no small importance” (73) and one of the crucial planks of modern toleration. Open, principled and heated debate was a sine qua non. For centuries the concept of factionalism had haunted the Western political imagination but, starting with Hobbes and progressing through the thought of Locke, Toland and Hume, a new paradigm began to emerge. The notion that principled opposition and political squabbling did not always have a deleterious impact began to take hold: a process, by Ball’s account, which culminated in the political activities of Jefferson and Madison.
The book’s second, shorter section moves into the social arena. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink analyses how talk of tolerance and rights influenced debate about race and slavery. Madelyn Gutwirth homes in on the fascinating subject of how eighteenth-century writers approached the “issue of exotic alterity through female personae” (170). She provides some insightful readings of Voltaire’s Zaïre, Marivaux’s La Colonie, and Staël’s Mirza and ends with the cheering thought that, while the period (including the French Revolution) did not secure many concrete victories for the cause of female equality, it at least unleashed a rhetoric that would be put to good use by women in the future. The book ends with two treatments of marginality — often a difficult concept to contemplate or locate in tolerationist discourses. Ann Goldberg looks at mental illness and the methods by which male masturbation was pathologised and demonised. By establishing a negative image of the male masturbator (defined by weakness, laziness and effeminacy) a dominant ideal of masculinity (defined by strength and discipline) was brought into sharper focus. Finally, Peter Becker introduces us to the German criminal subset of the Gauner: an expert in property crimes who was roundly condemned during the nineteenth century. Becker compares the attack on the Gauners with the relatively indulgent treatment of female prostitutes: a class perceived as a necessary evil and an outlet for male sexual passion. It is an appropriate way to end the volume because it reminds us that toleration only ever stretched so far and, even when it was advocated, the motives had at least as much to do with good, old-fashioned pragmatism as with enlightened theorising.
This is a first-rate contribution to the literature. Unlike so many edited volumes, it is much more than a random assemblage of essays. It asks fundamental questions about toleration: how was it defined, what was the difference between theory and practice, what was the precise trajectory of its arrival in various, different locations and social milieus? All of the contributions orbit this interpretative core and, as a result, the book possesses a winning coherency. It is essential reading for any student of the subject.
Journal inédit 1765-1766: Suivi du Mémoire remis par le duc de Choiseul au roi Louis
From 13 March 1765 until 21 April 1766 – a period of just over one year – Pierre –Étienne Bourgeois de Boynes (1718-1783) kept a diary almost daily. By the time Bourgeois began this journal, he was already rich, powerful, and a close advisor of King Louis XV. The son of an important government financier, he became Intendant of Franche-Comté in 1754, and soon thereafter, the king asked him to combine this role with that of the President of the Parlement of Besançon. When the parlement’s magistrates eventually revolted against his extraordinary authority, Bourgeois was forced to retire to his estate. Meanwhile, the King gave him a seat on the Royal Council. His experience made him a unique and powerful advisor as the parlements grew more restless and the crown grew more desperate for funds.
While the diary is relatively short and the time period brief, its publication is nonetheless a very significant development in the study of the eighteenth-century France because of the author’s importance and the events described by him. These were heady times for the reign of Louis XV. Following the disastrous results of the Seven Years War, France found itself short of cash but needing to rebuild its expensive navy. Unfortunately for the King, many powerful French nobles had different ideas. Feeling already pinched by special wartime taxes, disgusted by France’s military losses, infected by Montesquieu and others with Enlightenment worries about a despotic monarchy, nobles coalesced around the nine parlements and specialized tax courts (e.g., the Cours des Aides) to challenge the king’s authority over raising taxes during peacetime. In November 1763, the Parlement of Brittany, led by its procureur général, Louis René Caradeuc de La Chalotais, refused to register new taxes. The king responded by ordering the arrest of La Chalotais, instantly turning him into a national celebrity and transforming “the Brittany Affair” into a perceived bulwark against monarchical despotism. Over the next three years, as the case went through various legal proceedings, the Parlement of Paris and other French courts acted in solidarity with the Parlement of Brittany; increasingly it was clear to everyone that French political institutions were at a critical turning point.
None of this story is news to historians. At least since the 1970s, when Jean Egret and William Doyle published remarkable studies, the struggle between the parlements and the crown has been seen as the front-page story of Old Regime politics. Nor has Bourgeois de Boynes’s contribution been ignored. In the most recent history of this period, Julian Swann (Politics and the Parlement of Paris Under Louis XV, 1754-1774 [Cambridge, 1995]), makes use of the journal. Nonetheless, Swann, like all scholars before him, had to acquire permission from a family relative to access the privately-held papers. The diary’s publication brings Bourgeois’s perspective to center stage and will allow historians to better evaluate his own special role.
The journal is obsessively preoccupied with politics, and politics narrowly conceived as the struggle between the parlements and the crown for sovereign authority of the kingdom, or in the words of Bourgeois, to make certain that “nothing compromises or disadvantages royal authority (353).” Unlike Saint-Simon’s journals, or the diaries of closer contemporaries such as the Duc de Cröy, there is nothing about sexual intrigues, royal or otherwise; nor is there any discussion of philosophy, church affairs, literature or the arts. Even more curiously, there is hardly anything on foreign affairs. When we learn that the Duc de Choiseul (Minister of War and the Navy, and virtual prime minister) is ill with a kidney ailment, it is only because his absence creates problems for resolving the intricate discussions surrounding political affairs. In short, the diary is virtually silent on anything unrelated to the impending threat to the King’s perceived absolutism.
Bourgeois himself seems to have been the go-to person between the Royal Council and the ministers of state. In this regard, much of his business was done with Choiseul and others over supper, and he would apparently jot down what he learned when he got home. The diary therefore reads like a kind of log, so that Bourgeois could recall for himself where and when (and most importantly, from whom) he learned developments surrounding the parlementary remonstrances and the royal responses. Historians are familiar with the most famous of those responses, the 3 March 1766 “Séance de la flagellation,” in which Louis XV reasserted royal sovereignty over the resistance of the Paris Parlement. Bourgeois worried about the effectiveness of the king’s speech, and his rendering of the details leading up to the historic meeting are exceptionally rich and informative.
Ultimately Bourgeois’s journal vindicates Keith Baker’s notion that the struggle between crown and parlement was not so much between the forces of feudalism against modernization, but rather a clash between two competing world views of French political life, a discourse of justice versus a discourse of reason (see Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution [Cambridge, 1990], 109-127). Bourgeois believed that he was a servant for a modern administration seeking to improve government financing, in order to compete with new powers, such as Britain, Holland, and Prussia. Here we find Enlightened Absolutism in practice.
And yet, in what may be the most interesting dimension to the journal, Bourgeois reveals that while the ministers surrounding the king certainly viewed the crisis in stark terms, and did not hesitate to arrest and exile the leaders of the parlementary magistrates, the two camps never lost touch with one another. Avenues of communication were everywhere. For example, Bourgeois himself regularly dined with Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, President of the Cours des Aides and author of its most scandalous remonstrance. Despite Malesherbes’s liberalism, Bourgeois and Malesherbes remained close friends, and Bourgeois never hesitated to ask him for his sincere advice.
This edition is well edited, with an informative introduction by Marion F Godfroy, and appropriate editorial material, such as a chart of the Royal Council and two short essays on the state of France penned by Choiseul.