sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 4

Rezension: Hygiene and modern perfumery in France

Napoleon Bonaparte was a heavy user. He is said not only to have washed and perfumed himself with Eau de Cologne but to have drunk it, consuming one bottle per day during his 1796 Italy campaign. Almost one hundred years later, the préfet of the Seine, Eugène Poubelle, ordered the installment of public waste bins that bear his name to this day. Historical leaders, one could argue based on these examples, cared substantially more about hygiene and perfume than current historians do - at least in their writings.

The two books in question attempt to address this imbalance. As Steven Zdatny claims in the introduction to his History of Hygiene in Modern France, his topic "has attracted comparatively little interest among researchers". (2) However, this is only partially true. There are already some footsteps to follow, as demonstrated by the impressive number of works by historians such as - most prominently - Georges Vigarello and Alain Corbin as well as more recently by Fabienne Chevalier and Jean-Pierre Goubert on hygiene in France. [1] Some of those scholars also touch on the history of perfume, but as a monographic topic, Cheryl Krueger has only a few predecessors, since perfume history has only recently sparked the interest of scholars such as historian Érika Wicky or curator Isabelle Chazot.

It is not purely incidental that both books draw on France, where the achievements of medical reformers such as Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) and perfumers such as Pierre-François-Pascal Guerlain (1798-1864) contributed to the image of France as the cradle of both hygiene and modern perfumery. Steven Zdatny sets the scene on the eve of the French Revolution, when philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau called Paris "the city of mud", filled with "small, dirty and stinking streets, ugly black houses [and] an air of filth." (10f.) Both industrialization and urbanization were at the root of such unpleasant conditions. Especially Paris, whose population increased from 630,000 around 1789 to more than a million inhabitants by the mid-nineteenth century, was "the monster of urban growth," but smaller cities such as Lyon or Bordeaux underwent a similar development. (53) One of the strong suits of the University of Vermont historian's book is his coverage of small cities and gendered sensibilities in the countryside, beyond the well-studied centralist French metropolis.

Already during the July Monarchy (1830-1848), hygienists such as doctors Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon and Auguste-Pierre de Polinière published comprehensive studies of hygiene. They covered the topics of dirt, water, and air within housing, schools, and the greater environment - areas to which Steven Zdatny devotes his chapters. The problems that arose were not only of aesthetic relevance but also closely linked to diseases and even death, leading to a high rate of infant mortality throughout the nineteenth century. However, urban conditions proved difficult to change because of the die-hard habits of Frenchmen in post-revolutionary France, who had little faith in the revolutionary results of modern hygiene. According to Zdatny's findings, sensory attitudes developed differently in rural societies than in Paris. With an "almost constant and promiscuous contact with animals" in the countryside, a "piquant personal bouquet" of strong body odors functioned as a "sign of vigor and virility in men and sexiness in women." (33)

But his history of hygiene is not a mere cultural or social history. He links hygienist's efforts closely to the politics of the different French monarchies and republics. Armed conflicts such as the First Coalition War (1792-97) or the Franco-Prussian War about eighty years later were intertwined with public and personal hygiene. In both wars, poor hygiene was even blamed as a major factor for military loss: When the Prussian Army lost the Battle of Valmy in 1792 and the army of Napoleon III. was beaten in the Battle of Sedan in 1870, the bodily and medical states of young soldiers were identified as decisive factors in victory or defeat. For those reasons, the city commander of Marseille introduced his men to the shower as early as 1857, when most of his compatriots were still afraid of the weakening effects of too much water on their bodies. Nearly four decades later, however, Jules Rochard, a navy doctor, still found barrack latrines "the most disgusting and worst maintained element" during a survey. (97)

While Zdatny's book adds numerous little-known details to the generally well-studied hygienic revolution of the nineteenth century with its battles against foul-smelling miasmas in housing and canalization, cholera, and tuberculosis, its main achievement is to broaden this field into the era of Contemporary History. Unfortunately, the time after 1945 fills only thirty pages, yet they are groundbreaking. After the end of l'occupation, Zdatny argues, based on social statistics and comparative studies of different European countries, that the French leadership fell behind the standards of the New World in modern hygiene. In fact, French standards were so poor that the US army warned their soldiers in a brochure that "French cities are filthy", "The French don't bathe", and that they "pile their manure right in front of the houses". (277f.) According to a nationwide survey of France, as late as 1975, only 38 percent of French women and 22 of the men washed "à fond (from head to toe) every day". (285) However, perfumes were used more frequently than in neighboring countries.

This is where Cheryl Krueger's study ties in. The literature scholar at the University of Virginia devotes several chapters to the role of perfume in French novels and poems from Baudelaire to Flaubert, but also contributes substantially to the significance of perfumery in broader history. Not only can her title, Perfume on the Page, be taken literally - she illuminates the role of perfumed love letters and scented ink in private writing culture - but she also draws on the collections and archives of perfume companies such as Lubin. The products of this Paris-based company were excessively consumed by Jean Des Esseinte - like Bonaparte, a heavy user of perfumes. Des Esseinte, the main character of Joris-Karl Huysmans' iconic 1884 decadence novel À rebours (Against the Grain), displays an obsessive "focus on perfume (contemplating, studying, identifying, sorting, categorizing, blending)". (139) Author Huysmans was himself a customer of Lubin and partly shared his character's obsession with perfume - a subject which has only recently become the focus of serious academic research and inspired archival and museum projects such as the EU's Odeuropa-project or the state-financed, scientific Osmothèque at Versailles. [2]

But perfumery was not always perceived as cultural heritage. The most fascinating chapters in Krueger's book are devoted to forgotten crazes and, especially, scares surrounding certain scents. Advice books warned girls and women about the scents of musk and amber, which could provoke animal instincts that supposedly threatened the desirable education in modestie raisonnée. In her Manuel des dames, Madame Celnart recommended soft scents such as iris, heliotrope, mignonette, and violet as appropriate for female perfumery. But other authors warned of the damaging effects of certain floral scents. In his Dictionnaire de la beauté ou la toilette sans danger, César Gardeton cautioned that "even the most suave odours are not innocent; roses, jasmine, and violets emit mephitic air and can trigger anxiety, headaches, convulsions, and fainting". (42) Especially violets became suspicious. Following the death of a young girl while sleeping amid the scent of violets, French anatomist Hippolyte Cloquet warned against keeping those flowers inside the bedroom. And even after the idea of sickening miasmas and deadly 'bad air' had given way to microbiology with its concepts of bacteria and viruses, violets were still regarded with suspicion.

At the fin de siècle, French poet Renée Vivien, famous for her literary talent and infamous for her "turbulent life and eccentricities", including a wasteful use of violets both in her poems and in her boudoir, became the target of moral criticism. While focusing on her use of flowers, her critics actually took aim at the non-heteronormative lifestyle of the "Muse of the Violets." (47) Other authors condemned the so-called Oriental taste for Indian scents such as patchouli. The sweet scent had originally been used as an insect repellent to protect expensive silk shawls from moths, but became notorious as "the smell of disenchanted prostitutes and their clothing," as Huysmans claimed in another scented novel. (167)

In sum, the "evolving dialogue between literary invention, nonfiction writing about olfaction and perfume marketing in the nineteenth century" led to the image of "modern perfume as distinctly French", or so Krueger concludes at the end of her tour d'horizon through novels, letters, paintings, and catalogues. (256) Steven Zdatny might have come to a similar conclusion with regard to hygiene (had he included a summary in his impressive study). While both books are not explicitly positioned within the recent turn towards sensory history, they contribute to this field of research in various ways. Hygiene and modern perfumery, although by no means purely French inventions and entangled with medical, technical, and economic developments from other countries, European as well as Asian, were branded as typically French achievements - at least in France. Both books also blur the lines between cultural and social history by demonstrating that fiction and social regimes were deeply intertwined. Covering two sides of the same coin, they are best read alongside each other.

Notes:

[1] Georges Vigarello: Concepts of cleanliness: Changing attitudes in France since the Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell, Cambridge / Paris 1988; Alain Corbin: The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, Cambridge, MA 1988; Fabienne Chevalier: Le Paris moderne. Histoire des politiques d'hygiène (1855-1898), Rennes 2010; Jean-Pierre Goubert: Une histoire de l'hygiène. Eau et salubrité dans la France contemporaine, Paris 2008.

[2] See Odeuropa: Smell Heritage - Sensory Mining, URL: https://odeuropa.eu; Osmothèque de Versailles, URL: https://www.osmotheque.fr (viewed 16.3.2026).