PROJECT STATEMENT: “A HISTORY OF HYGIENE IN FRANCE, 1850-1975”
Steve Zdatny
University of Vermont
July 2013
Few histories of modern society reflect on the smell of the past, but any of us
dropped into the daily life of nineteenth-century France would be struck before
anything else by the odors—of streets littered with horse manure, reeking pissotières,
crowded apartments without ventilation or water, outhouses unconnected to sewers
and shared by dozens of families; of clothes never changed, feet never washed, and
teeth that had never met a toothbrush. Even surveys of the post-1945 economic
miracle paint a picture of dingy surroundings and dismal personal habits lasting well into
the 1960s and 1970s. This is no mere offense to twenty-first century delicacy. Even
before germ theory, people understood perfectly well how the itch of lice, the stench of
leaking cesspits, or wells contaminated with typhoid deformed their lives. Escape was
another matter.
Moreover, filth and the evils that accompanied it were no historical novelty.
Industrial- and urbanization left their mark on these age-old miseries, but pollution and
overcrowding predated the factory system, and conditions were almost always worse in
the countryside. The novelty lies rather in the remarkable upheaval between 1850 and
1975 in the structures and practices of hygiene in France—a revolution in the way
people thought about and treated their bodies and their environment that amounted to
what sociologist Norbert Elias, in his celebrated study of the history of manners, called
“the civilizing process.”
Despite the unprecedented nature of this revolution and the fundamental
importance of hygiene to people lives, to say nothing of their deaths, the matter has
attracted little interest and left a gap in our understanding of what happens as
traditional societies become modern ones. Apart from a specialty literature on the
history of toilets, bathtubs, and bidets, information on the history of cleanliness tends to
be scattered among studies aimed at other targets. Crusaders against insalubrité like
Octave du Mesnil collected immense amounts of material about slum housing.
Historians Georges Vigarello, Alain Corbin, Julia Csergo, and Jean-Pierre Goubert
examine the history of water and its place in popular culture and practice.
Anthropologists Laurence Wylie and Jakez Hélias, among others, describe habits of
propreté in rural France, while scholars of consumerism from Dominique Veillon to
Rebecca Pulju trace the particular role of women in extending commodity culture and
directing family economies. Business histories, such as Geoffrey Jones’s studies of
Unilever and beauty culture, document the developing French market for toiletries,
cosmetics, and household cleaning products. Surveys of successive French Republics by
Jean Fourestié and Jean-Pierre Rioux, treat the matter in passing, as an aspect of the
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housing crisis or the general progress of the postwar era. Yet no book-length study
exists of the passage from the noisome world of nineteenth-century hygiene to today’s
more fastidious routines.
My project will construct this story from the ground up, looking at specific practices
of keeping clean and setting those practices in the concrete circumstances of home,
work, and street. It will examine the state’s attempts, largely through the army and the
schools, to teach the masses to wash more thoroughly and to change their clothes more
often. It will keep an eye on the influence of the media, in particular women’s
magazines, in changing public notions of what constitutes a proper level of cleanliness.
While paying close attention to the empirical structures of propriety, however, it will not
ignore symbolic aspects of hygiene and the decisive role of culture in determining
people’s behavior. As Lynn Payer has demonstrated for medical culture, societies with
comparable levels of technology can have significantly different ideas about what is
“appropriate.” The mere presence of a bathtub will not tell you how often people are
likely to use it.
Whether considering infrastructure or sensibility, any study of the hygiene
revolution needs to begin with water, the sine qua non of cleaner bodies and homes. In
part, this was a conceptual matter. Traditional thinking worried, for instance, that water
could import disease into the body as well as scrubbing away dangerous substances.
More critical, though, was the sheer lack of clean water in most people’s lives. Well into
the twentieth century, hot running water remained an unimaginable luxury for the
majority of French citizens. Standards therefore owed less to the fear of water than to
the practical difficulties of washing. Indeed, the plummeting price of clean water—
Fourastié estimated that the cubic meter of water that had cost a manual laborer
twenty wage-hours in 1840, by 1973 required only 0.3 wage hours—remains one of the
neglected revolutions of modern history.
Yet culture and sensibility also played a part in defining habits; for example, the
deep discomfort with nakedness that ran through French society, from rich to poor and
religious to secular, and seriously constrained the way people washed themselves. In
1900 even the fashionable classes, who could certainly afford to do so, virtually never
bathed or washed their hair. Meanwhile, among the masses, few people had access to
anything more commodious than an outhouse, or some other collective facility. And no
one had a shower.
A half-century later, as France launched its postwar economic ascent, personal
and public hygiene advanced in step, especially in the towns, where most apartments
soon acquired running water and hot-water heaters. Evidence suggests that people
gradually began to wash more often and more comprehensively; a majority (of women,
at least) took to shampooing their hair with some regularity. At the same time, both
census statistics and ethnological studies point to the survival of old facilities and
traditional habits in many places. Even in the cities, Paris included, only a minority of
dwellings could boast of having private toilets before the 1960s, and an even smaller
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number had bathtubs or showers. Sensibilities, for obvious reasons, always remained
tethered to practices, and people who continued to live in lodgings without amenities
could hardly expect to live up to modern expectations of cleanliness.
Even so, as France’s economic recovery accelerated, standards of sanitation
changed dramatically. A wave of new building beginning in the late 1950s gradually
brought hot water, indoor toilets, bathtubs, electricity, and heat to the great majority of
the population. Conditions in rural areas trailed those in the towns but improved
inexorably. The schools renewed their drive to inculcate students with up-to-date ideas
about cleanliness. The many new magazines for women, alongside other expanding
media and an increasingly energetic advertising sector, joined the schools in preaching
“modern” sanitary habits and pitched electrical appliances, alongside the new health
and beauty products introduced by manufacturers like Lever Brothers, Proctor &
Gamble, and L’Oréal.
By the 1970s, pissotières had disappeared from the streets; bathtubs and
showers had found their way into most people’s toilettes; sales of soap, shampoo,
toothpaste, and deodorant had increased exponentially; automatic washing machines
and wash-and-wear fabrics had altered the frequency with which the French changed
their clothes; and only the most disadvantaged elements of the population still had
recourse to collective toilets in the towns and outhouses in the countryside. France was
experiencing the famous “rising threshold of disgust” described by Elias—even if, almost
to the end of the twentieth century, France remained behind its northern European
neighbors in most measures of cleanliness.
The implications of this project are substantial, for the transformation of hygiene
addresses key themes that run through the historiography of modern France: the
problems of urban-industrial growth and political disorder, the economics of social
progress, the advance of science and technology, the process of state-building,
especially in the barracks and schoolhouses, the decline of rural France, and the shape
of the postwar “miracle.” The book will begin with a survey of hygiene in the midnineteenth century, using the Second Republic’s law against logements insalubres [filthy
housing] as its starting point. Evoking the smell of the past, it will range across popular
habits of propriety, looking at conditions in rural hovels, urban slums, and bourgeois
apartments, as well as at popular wisdom about the virtues of dirt and the ambiguous
effects of water on the body.
Subsequent chapters will focus on attempts to reform traditional thinking and
habits, rooted in the emerging medical consensus that dirtiness was a source of
epidemics, social pathology, and political instability. The Third Republic (1873-1940)
gave hygiene a central role in its program of national revival and used conscription and
primary education to advance its domestic “civilizing mission,” which historians have
also construed as serving a broader strategy of social control. Beside attempts to
change culture, the state also worked, with mixed success, to improve the material
conditions of hygiene, with plans to build affordable housing, pave and wash streets,
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extend sewers, connect houses to water lines. The impressive successes of the period
up to 1914 turned to frustration and stagnation, due to the costs of war, depression,
and occupation. Putting this history in international context, this study will weigh the
French experience against that of other countries, especially Great Britain and Germany.
A final section will survey the “hygiene revolution” that accompanied post-1945
economic growth. This encompassed a building campaign that finally provided the
majority of French citizens with modern plumbing, along with the spread of household
appliances and personal health products in France’s new consumer society. It will look
at clothing, especially the sort that could be washed (and therefore changed) frequently
and consider the simplification of women’s clothing that made being clean so much
easier. The book will conclude by pointing out that this postwar “revolution” was only
the climax of a difficult, expensive, contested, and uneven process that marked the
distance between an old regime of dirt, discomfort, and early death and contemporary
standards of cleanliness and health.
A Fulbright grant would make two critical contributions to this project. First, the
year off from teaching and administrative responsibilities at UVM would allow me to
complete the research and a major part of the writing. I have already laid a broad
foundation of research. At the National Library (BNF) and other venues I have worked
through inquiries on substandard housing, the work of hygiene commissions,
ethnographic studies of rural homes, traditions of sanitation, children’s pedagogical
texts, teachers’ memoirs, and advice manuals. At the Musée des arts décoratifs and the
Musée Galliera I read women’s magazines and histories of histories of architecture; at
the Paris Préfecture de Police reports by a small army of hygienists; at the military
archives at the Chateau de Vincennes, documents on the army’s efforts to clean up its
recruits; at the Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (INSEE), old
census data and studies of consumer behavior. I still have material to consult in these
places, especially at the BNF and the Bibliothèque Forney, and several important new
sources remain to be exploited—most importantly the reports of social workers
(assistantes sociales) on the housing conditions of their clients, held in departmental
archives in and around Paris; the records of the police sanitaire and the local
commissions d’hygiène, available in departmental and national archives; and the
Unilever archives, split between London and Rotterdam.
Second, the Fulbright scholarship would allow me to take advantage of the invitation
I have received to return to the Centre de Recherches Historiques and, in particular, to
work with Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel and her colleagues at the group Études Sociales et
Politiques des Populations (ESOPP). I would also expect to reconnect with my former
colleagues at the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (IHTP), although probably not
through any formal relationship. My previous projects have benefited enormously from
this sort of collaboration with like-minded French scholars, both in seminars and in more
casual settings: sharpening my analytical perspective and making my work more
accessible to a French audience. It was my old chef at the CNRS Claudine Marenco,
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during a research year in 1991-1992 funded by an earlier Fulbright grant, who
undertook to translate my first book into French and find a publisher for it. At the same
time I worked through the mass of material in France that became the basis of my
second and third books. The semester I spent at the IHTP in the fall of 2001 greatly
helped me in writing the third book.
My research has already led to one major article: “The French Hygiene Offensive of
the 1950s: A Critical Moment in the History of Manners,” published in a special issue of
The Journal of Modern History in December 2013. Several editors have expressed an
interest in the larger project, particularly Susan Ferber at Oxford University Press, who
has asked for asked for a précis, which I have sent her, and Alisa Plant at LSU Press. I
have begun to work on the first chapter of the book and hope to continue writing
through this academic year, as far as teaching and administrative obligations will permit.
In other words, I have great confidence that the resources made possible by a Fulbright
grant would help bring this project to a successful conclusion.
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