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Introduction

In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias put forward an overarching vision of the progress of Western civilization based on the slow domestication of affectivity, increasingly leading the subject to develop self-control.¹ He explained how coarse emotionality gradually came to be driven out of its central position in the public sphere, giving way to highly codified attitudes of politeness that defined decency. His deeply optimistic, Eurocentric theory has given rise to much debate, at times heated, and has remained highly influential. It drew on a long-standing and diverse school of humanist thought, whose proponents believed in the capacity of their fellow humans to improve over time, following Erasmus – much quoted by Elias – who dreamed of a golden age in the near future, and Condorcet, who held that ‘the human race [is] advancing with a firm and sure step along the path of truth, virtue and happiness’.²

When it was first published in 1939, Elias’s work offered a valuable intellectual antidote to the looming threat of Nazism; however, its approach to sensory phenomena does not reflect the latest in scientific research. It takes as its main example the court of Louis XIV, seeing the restriction of bodily functions in public and the increasing disapproval of excessive or indecent reactions in the presence of others as part of a broad civilizing process. Elias argued that these new models of behaviour became ingrained in childhood among the upper classes, leading to increasing suppression of aggressive tendencies at an individual level that were then slowly adopted by other social groups.

This valuable basic framework can be used to underpin new directions in research. Smells, the focus of this book, were a key point in innovative conduct manuals such as Erasmus’s De civilitate morum puerilium [On civility in boys], published in 1530 for a select readership. Recent scientific research has shown that smells are vital gateways for emotions and their recall. As the first chapter will demonstrate, smell is arguably the only one of our senses to be acquired from experience, rather than being innate. As it is binary in nature, it can easily be inflected by affective messages towards pleasure or, alternatively, fear and disgust. This opens the door to a sort of experimental history, drawing on the vast body of information left by people long since dead. This means trying to understand how their world worked, how they saw it and thought about it, rather than projecting our own presuppositions onto them. This is the path historical method must take to achieve a degree of objectivity, whatever claims may be made for other methodologies. Disgust at smells is a fundamental sensation in humans, but not one that is biologically programmed. It takes four or five years at least for European children, for instance, to construct disgust at their own excrement. Few people nowadays are willing to acknowledge this, preferring to believe that such disgust is as natural as it is universal; in fact, it is the result of several centuries of cultural pressure. Stubbornly maintained from generation to generation, this pressure has given rise to individual reactions of shame and disgust at anal excreta. The slightest suggestion of a whiff of excrement makes us literally nauseous. We can also feel the same uncontrollable repugnance at the mere sight or mention of it, even in a scatological joke; once the smell has become categorized as negative, all our senses seek to keep it at arm’s length and communicate this to our consciousness. This was by no means the case in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the exception of a tiny minority who stood apart not only from the masses, materially mired in stench, but also from the majority of intellectuals, including storytellers, who took pleasure in spreading a lively scatological culture.³

While Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times draws admiringly on Norbert Elias’s pioneering work, it adopts a far less linear perspective. The significant shifts in our sense of smell from the Renaissance to the Napoleonic Empire cannot be framed in terms of inevitable human progress. Rather, they are approached here as first and foremost a reflection of the daily concerns of our ancestors. The aim is by no means to conjure up an image of the ‘good old days’. The stench in centuries past was dreadful and omnipresent, the air saturated with nauseating emissions and dangerous pollution, particularly in urban areas hemmed in by city walls. The air in towns and cities became even harder to breathe in the eighteenth century as the population swelled, reaching noxious new heights with the advent of industrialization, until mains drainage systems were installed from the late nineteenth century on (see chapter 2). The constancy of the situation makes it impossible to believe that developments in the sense of smell under the Ancien Régime were essentially driven by material progress, symptomatic of the broader struggle against the stench of widespread putrefaction. People simply lived with it as best they could. Having no choice but to see and smell what Rabelais called ‘joyous matter’ on a daily basis, they showed little disgust at faeces and urine, whether human or animal; indeed, both were widely used in medicine and beauty treatments. Until the 1620s, literature and poetry both delighted in excreta which now disgust us. The smells of excrement and body odours were both formative aspects of eroticism and sexuality, for the social elite and the popular classes alike (see chapter 3). The minority opposed to such practices grew following the devastating wars of religion. After 1620, the bands of Catholics and Calvinists preaching intolerance grew and fought hard against man’s animality. Making unwitting use of the simplifying binarity of smell, they taught increasing numbers of students and followers that the Devil lay nestled in the lower body, couched in excrement and urine, laying the distant foundations for the anal repression that underpins much modern psychoanalysis. Their most virulent discourse was aimed at women. Doctors relayed their opinions, believing women to be disgusting by their very nature, particularly when on their period. Older women were even a target for extraordinary hatred from men, as shown by numerous works of literature. They were accused of being close to the putrid Devil, and some were even burned as witches in the most misogynistic periods of our past (see chapter 4).

At the same period, medicine explained terrifying recurrent outbreaks of plague by Satan’s poisonous breath corrupting the air. Ambergris, musk and civet came to be seen as vital bulwarks against the Devil’s breath, a metaphor for sin, which was held to cause dreadful epidemics. Scents were worn like armour against the plague, and doctors explained that harmful forms of pestilence were dispelled by even worse fetid stenches. Plague was thereby correlated with terrible stenches of all sorts in countless scholarly treatises, while pleasant scents such as those emanating from the bodies of saints were thought to open the gates of paradise (see chapter 5). The finest scents were therefore initially used as repellents and prophylactics as well as to increase the wearer’s desirability. This ambiguous role embodied negative and positive aspects: the scents were in many cases obtained from the sex glands of ruthlessly hunted exotic animals, transmitting a message on what death meant to people in the past, yet they were also closely bound up with the vital human impulses of eroticism and love. Their detractors may have promised eternal hellfire for those who used perfumes for pleasure, but all classes of society came to use them as a matter of course as their sole protection against the plague, and the only way of masking body odours that proved particularly rank in two centuries that took against water and bathing. Their popularity earned a fortune for the closely allied professions of glove-making and perfumery, as clothing and leather, whatever its intended use, had to be steeped in perfume to protect the wearer against contagion. Fashion did the rest to trigger the first revolution in smells and smelling of the modern age, from the Renaissance to the age of Louis XIV (see chapter 6). The second such revolution, over the course of the eighteenth century, saw a thoroughgoing rejection of musk-based fragrances in favour of fruity, floral and spice-based scents. In the absence of any decisive advances in the control of fetid stenches, this shift was essentially driven by social and cultural factors: it may be seen as a way of escaping the worsening stench of faeces which spared neither the rich nor the powerful. It was also rooted in increasing disgust at the somewhat ghoulish nature of perfumes and leather, both derived from animal carcases. Collective sensitivities were undergoing a deep-rooted shift. The disappearance of the plague after 1720 and sharp decline in fear of the Devil meant there was no longer any point in using perfumes to fight the forces of evil. A less misogynistic society also meant that it was no longer fashionable for men to wear virile, powerful perfumes to conquer women. Softer, sweeter perfumes came into fashion, heralding the triumphant return of femininity, rooted in a gentler vision of nature. This was particularly true of aristocratic culture and Enlightenment salons. Between 1789 and 1815, years of war and conquest, musk-based perfumes became relatively fashionable once more, though floral and fruity perfumes still reigned supreme (see chapter 7).

The women’s perfume sector is still dominated by fruity and floral scents. Contrary to some claims, the present day is by no means devoid of smells. Such claims merely reflect a striking shift in our attitudes to pain and mortality, now kept out of sight and out of smell. Western society has certainly not lost the use of a sense as vital as smell. Though science long paid our noses little attention, recent research has shown that they are in fact home to the sharpest of all our senses, capable of distinguishing between huge numbers of smells. This book sets out to explore this sudden return to favour, starting with an overview of the current state of scholarly research on this fascinating topic (see chapter 1).

Notes

1 1. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969, 1982 (1st German edn 1939).

2 2. Translator’s note: Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Condorcet: Political Writings, ed. Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 147; emphasis added.

3 3. Robert Muchembled, L’Invention de l’homme moderne: culture et sensibilités en France du XVe au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Hachette, 1994, pp. 55–61; and see below, chapter 3.