5. Paris: Savage Neoclassicism

Rauser, Amelia

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5. Paris: Savage Neoclassicism

Amelia Rauser

The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s

~In 1796, Jean-Louis Laneuville exhibited a prison portrait of Thérésa Tallien (fig. 145). It appeared in the second post-Thermidor Salon, reminding viewers of the...

Author

Amelia Rauser

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.165-185

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00338.11

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23228

Chapter subject tags:Dress, NeoclassicalTallien, Thérésia Cabarrus, 1773-1835France--History--Revolution, 1789-1799AllegoriesExoticism in fashionRace identity

5. Paris: Savage Neoclassicism

In 1796, Jean-Louis Laneuville exhibited a prison portrait of Thérésa Tallien (fig. 145). It appeared in the second post-Thermidor Salon, reminding viewers of the bad old days of the Terror, then two years past.1Freund 2014, chapter four, analyzes this painting and the ways it argues for Tallien’s public and political presence. Although the setting is an unconventional choice in the context of fashionable female portraiture, Madame Tallien’s time in prison was not only key to her own identity, but also to the identity of the new France, post-Terror. She had been first imprisoned in Bordeaux in such desperate conditions that she retained all her life the scars on her toes and ankles from the biting rats. Accused of using her influence with Jean-Lambert Tallien to obtain passports for friends and acquaintances, Madame Tallien was directly targeted by Robespierre when she followed Tallien to Paris in early 1794; Robespierre personally signed her arrest warrant and endorsed her solitary confinement in La Force, one of the most notorious prisons in Paris. Determined to advocate for her own life, she bartered for writing materials by drawing portraits of the guards; until she procured ink, she wrote letters in her own blood. By July 1794, she saw that her trip to the guillotine must be imminent. She smuggled a letter out to Tallien, who replied that he would either obtain her release or go to his death with her. The next day, the ninth of Thermidor, Tallien led the protest that brought down Robespierre and the Jacobins.2For Jean-Lambert Tallien’s life and role in the Revolution, see Bourquin 1987, Kermina 2006, and Freund 2014.

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Description: Citizen Tallien in a Cell in La Force Prison, Holding Her Cut Hair by Laneuville,...

Fig. 145. Jean-Louis Laneuville, Citizen Tallien in a Cell in La Force Prison, Holding Her Cut Hair, 1796. Oil on canvas, 128.9 × 112.3 cm. Private collection

It was partly Madame Tallien’s steely will and resolve, then, that ended the Terror—indeed, according to legend, she even provided Tallien with the knife he brandished in the National Convention on that fateful day. Contemporaries acclaimed her as “Notre-Dame de Thermidor.” Thus, Madame Tallien was credited with political leadership in crushing the Jacobins even as her actions were assimilated into conventionally acceptable female roles of faithful lover or tender saint. For her supporters, Madame Tallien’s beautiful body and sensitive heart explained and justified her political actions. As a journalist said a few years later, “She seemed to us at that time humanity incarnate in the most ravishing of forms.”3Quoted in Moore 2007, p. 305.

Her incarnation—her embodiment—was thus crucial to her public identity, and in this portrait her body is oppressed, subjugated, and endangered. Enclosed by cold masonry walls, she sits on a dirty, straw-covered bench next to chipped crockery. The moment represented is the crucial turning point in her own, and France’s, Terror narrative: Madame Tallien is preparing for the guillotine. She holds in her left hand her chopped hair; prisoners preferred to cut their hair before execution in order to preserve the locks as keepsakes for their survivors and allow a clean slice for the blade.4The Princess of Monaco lied about being pregnant to gain time to cut her hair and send it to her children as a legacy. She chopped off her own hair with a piece of glass before going to the guillotine. Blanc 1987, p. 69. She has presumably just written her final, galvanizing letter to Tallien, who is represented by the silhouette portrait on the wall just behind her, recalling to viewers the artistic example of the Corinthian Maid and casting Thérésa as a passionate creator drawing neoclassical outlines.

But what is Thérésa wearing? At first glance, this might appear to be standard prison clothing: the chemise, or underdress, such as the simple shift worn by Marie Antoinette during her imprisonment (fig. 146). While aristocrats held in the Luxembourg Palace during the early years of the Revolution staged amateur theatricals and dressed for dinner daily, most of the revolutionary prisons were filthy and the inhabitants seldom washed or changed clothes, mainly wearing their linen and cotton chemises without any formal gowns over the top. But in fact, as readers will have already observed, Madame Tallien is fashionably dressed for 1796. Her attire is almost identical to that worn by Jean-Antoine Laurent’s woman with a straw hat (fig. 117, detail), examined in Chapter Four: a short-sleeved, white muslin round gown with a drawstring neckline, shoulder-length curls, and a knotted madras handkerchief at her waist. In 1796, it appears, one could wear the same ensemble to a garden party or to the guillotine.

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Description: Chemise worn by Marie Antoinette during her detention by Unknown

Fig. 146. Chemise worn by Marie Antoinette during her detention, late 18th century. Musée Carnavalet, Paris

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Description: Portrait of a Young Woman by Laurent, Jean-Antoine

Detail of fig. 117. Attributed to Jean-Antoine Laurent, Portrait of a Young Woman, ca. 1795. Watercolor on ivory, 6.3 × 7.3 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

After the end of the Terror, neoclassical dress in Paris persisted in referencing the abjection of prison and execution. As this book has argued, the ideal of the living statue and its appropriation and recasting of objectification and embodiment into agency, sensibility, and authenticity was transnational and grounded in a shared elite visual culture. Yet France’s traumatic revolutionary history inflected the shape, meaning, and reception of neoclassical dress in distinct ways. As we shall see in this chapter, both the bacchante and the statue acquired darker meanings in revolutionary France, as worries about women’s morality, self-expression, and sensitivity became more acute in a culture beset by political violence and chaos. After Thermidor, women both reveled in new liberties and grappled with loss and upheaval. In response, prison fashion and guillotine-ready hairstyles aestheticized abject fears and memories of death and imprisonment, reinscribing those experiences and leaching some of their trauma. Drawing on cultural anxieties about their own leaky, reproductive, uncultured bodies, women created and embodied a savage neoclassicism that, by aestheticizing and sexualizing the disgust and abjection with which they were regarded, forced themselves into the public eye and compelled its attention.

ANIMATING THE FESTIVAL OF REASON IN 1793

To understand neoclassical fashion after Thermidor, we must first look briefly to the role of clothing, women’s bodies, and the living statue in revolutionary public pageantry during the Terror. While Terror was the order of the day, both bodies and statues were smashed and endangered. Sculptures were trophies—elevated or toppled, paraded or shattered—as well as talismans of power and control. Fashion was dangerous in this period: periodicals dedicated to the subject ceased publication, shops closed, and nearly all suggestions of personal luxury were suppressed. Tricolor cockades became mandated public accessories for women in 1793, as revolutionary ideology promoted the unity of exterior presentation and internal political virtue—a fantasy of transparency and naturalism in which clothing was crucial for building a new egalitarian citizenry.5Wrigley 2002, pp. 104–16. Amid all this, the public role of women grew ever more fraught and contested.

As in Naples and London, observers in Paris drew on imagery of the bacchante to describe contemporary women in the public sphere. But rather than the transcendent neoclassical bacchante, whose charm and power depended on the merest hint of the threatening classical maenad, these observers saw the ancient, murderous, and crazed qualities of the bacchante right on the surface. “These drunken bacchanalians . . . what do they want?” Girondin Antoine-Joseph Gorsas asked about the radical women of the Societé des Républicaines Révolutionnaires in 1793. “They want to purge the Convention, to make heads roll, and to get themselves drunk with blood.”6A.-J. Gorsas, Précis rapide des événements qui ont eu lieu à Paris dans les journées des 30 et 31 mai, premier et 2 juin 1793 (n.p., n.d.); quoted in and translated by Levy and Applewhite 1992, p. 93.

As an alternative to women’s bacchantish political participation, officials promoted motherhood and child-rearing. Jacques-Louis David’s design for the Festival of the Federation of August 10, 1793—later depicted in a print by Isidore Stanislas Helman after Charles Monnet (fig. 147)—attempted to substitute mother’s milk for tyrant’s blood as the bodily fluid associated with revolutionary women; it featured a giant lactating sculpture who directly nourished citizens by squirting milk into their cups. This was a sort of living statue, but one that instructed women to breed heroes, not to be them: “O Women! Liberty attacked by tyrants has need of heroes to defend it. It is for you to breed them. Let all the martial and the generous virtues flow together in your maternal milk and in the heart of the nursing women of France.”7Quoted in Moore 2007, p. 204; on milk and breastfeeding in revolutionary pageantry, see Jacobus 1992.

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Description: La Fontaine de la Regeneration - sur les débris de la Bastille, le 10 août...

Fig. 147. Isidore Stanislas Heiman after Charles Monnet, La Fontaine de la Régénération sur les débris de la Bastille, le 10 août 1793, from Les Principales Journées de la Révolution (Paris), 1796–7, pl. 9. Etching, 35.2 × 46.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

But a less official, more improvised and decentralized festival that fall responded by placing women at the center, not as mothers nor as leaders, but as living statues that were human embodiments of important virtues. The Paris city government transformed a previously planned Festival of Liberty into a “Triumph of Reason” on November 10, 1793, as part of a drive to replace Christian liturgy and doctrine with a sacralization of the people.8Hunt 1992, p. 63; Kennedy 1989, p. 343. Notre-Dame Cathedral was declared a Temple of Reason, and featured a mountain in the center of the nave, atop which sat a temple “à la philosophie” and sculptural busts of philosophers (fig. 148). Women in white dresses carrying torches climbed and descended the mountain, while Liberty, a real woman dressed in white, emerged from the temple to sit on a throne and receive homage.

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Description: Fête de la Raison, le décadi 20 brumaire de l'an 2.e de la République...

Fig. 148. Unknown, Fête de la Raison, le décadi 20 brumaire de l’an 2e. de la République française, 1793. Etching with aquatint, 9.5 × 15 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Over the ensuing weeks, churches across France followed suit, becoming sites for nationalist pageantry focused on liberty, reason, victory, and the sovereignty of the people. Chartres Cathedral housed a spectacle called “Reason Victorious Over Fanaticism,” in which a woman dressed as the Republic set fire to Fanaticism and then rose on a cloud to rendezvous with a statue of Reason. Unmasking or unveiling was the common theme across different locales: a fire burned away a cardboard throne to reveal the true altar of the fatherland; a textile decorated with royal symbols was whisked away to reveal Liberty.9Ozouf 1988, p. 100. Darkness was replaced by light, and false idols by sincere truths, using theatrical stratagems that aimed for authentic, transparent representation—precisely the values embodied in the neoclassical dresses worn by women in the pageants.

Casting women not just as spectators but as central players occupying the roles of Liberty, Reason, or Victory was a deliberate choice by the festival’s radical organizers, as one of them, Antoine-François Momoro, explained:

We avoided putting in the place of a holy sacrament an inanimate image of liberty because vulgar minds might have misunderstood and substituted in place of the god of bread a god of stone . . . and this living woman, despite all the charms that embellished her, could not be deified by the ignorant, as would a statue of stone.

Something which we must never tire of saying to the people is that liberty, reason, truth are only abstract beings. They are not gods, for properly speaking, they are part of ourselves.10“On se garda bien de metre à la place d’un saint-sacrement un simulacre inanimé de la liberté, parce que des esprits grossiers auroient pu s’y méprendre, et à la place du dieu pain, substituer un dieu pierre; . . . et cette femme vivante, malgré tous les charmes qui l’embellissoient, ne pouvoient pas être déifiée par les ignorans, comme l’eût été une statue de pierre./ C’est une chose qu’il ne faut pas se lasser de dire au people: la liberté, la raison, la vérité, ne sont que des êtres abstraits. Ce ne sont point là des dieux, car à proprement par er, ce sont des parties de nousmêmes.” Révolutions de Paris, dédiées à la Nation, no. 215 (23–30 Brumaire An II; November 13–20, 1793), p. 215; quoted by Hunt 1992, p. 65. Momoro is generally credited as the author of this passage; see Kennedy 1989, p. 343.

A living woman as statue encouraged the identification of her fellow citizens with the virtue she represented. Her animation forestalled deification, yet provided a focus for mass affirmation of shared values.

Women appear to have been largely enthusiastic participants in this pageantry. David recalled, years later: “Reason and Liberty were enthroned on antique chariots; superb women, Monsieur; the Greek line in all its purity, beautiful young girls in chlamys throwing flowers . . .”11Quoted in Ozouf 1988, p. 101. Some towns treated the festival as a republican version of the village beauty pageant, crowning their local Carnival queen as the goddess of Liberty or Reason.12Hunt 1992, p. 65. In Bordeaux, the future Madame Tallien embodied the goddess Liberty in a white dress, with her lover Jean-Lambert Tallien at her side. But the centrality of women was precisely what repelled both contemporary and later chroniclers. As Mona Ozouf notes, they simply could not get over what a terrible idea it was to have women at the center of a Festival of Reason.13Ozouf 1988, p. 102. For them, such women were not patriots nor citizens nor even actresses, but whores.

This view is explicit in a British satire published just a month after the festival, which portrayed the event as a horrific sacrilege. The French Feast of Reason, or The Cloven-foot Triumphant (fig. 149) alludes to revolutionary pageantry with the “volcano of truth” in the background and the living goddess of Liberty in the center of Notre-Dame, but the conventional meanings of all symbols are inverted: crosses are broken, “reason” is a madman, and “nature” is a murderous mother. The living statue at the center features a guillotine on her liberty cap and snakes at her feet, and the fearful power of what has been unleashed is signaled by the “Pandora’s Box” on which she sits. Snakes writhe on her head: this living statue is a Medusa. She does not gently warm into life, animated by masculine desire or aesthetic contemplation; rather, terrifyingly and conversely, she has the power to turn men to stone.

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Description: The French Feast of Reason, or the Cloven-foot triumphant by Dent, William

Fig. 149. William Dent, The French Feast of Reason, or The Cloven-foot Triumphant, 1793. Etching, 27 × 37.1 cm. British Museum, London

Louis-Sébastien Mercier, in an account published in 1799 after his imprisonment during the Terror, portrayed the Festival of Reason as a degenerate bacchanal:

Those who have been witnesses of those fêtes will never forget them. Reason was . . . a girl chosen among the class of the sans-culottes; the tabernacle of the master-altar served as a footstep for her throne . . . The cries of a thousand confused voices, the noise of drums, the hoarse sound of trumpets, the thunder of the organ, led the spectators to think that they were transported amongst the Bacchantes, on the mountains of Thrace.14Mercier 1800, vol. 2, p. 83.

Mercier’s deepest objections are to the presence of lower-class and uncontrolled women at the center of the festival, which in turn contributed to its decadence and immorality. “The wife of the bookseller Momoro, a villainous orator at the Cordeliers, the singer Maillard, the actress Candeille, such were the goddesses of reason, borne about in triumph, almost worshipped,” he scoffed.15Mercier 1800, vol. 2, p. 84. Mercier reports drunkenness, sex in the side chapels, corrupted children, and women everywhere: “troops of girls unblushingly followed in files, running after the men,” while at the church of Saint-Gervais, “the women of St. John’s market entered with their baskets; the church smelt of herrings.” Many historians have followed Mercier, presenting this as the least defensible revolutionary festival: licentious, anarchic, and counter-productive.16For example, see Kennedy 1989, p. 344. They note that Robespierre opposed it as heedlessly anticlerical and staged his Festival of the Supreme Being, held the following summer, in direct response to it. They also decry it as theatrical and phony, especially in Paris, where dancers and musicians from the Opera played important roles.

Reading against the grain of these accounts, we can observe the Festival of Reason as a pageant that centered women by embracing the imagery of the living statue. As animated statues, women could leverage their longtime association with allegory, sensibility, and naturalism into a role for themselves in public discourse and revolutionary ideology, concretizing abstractions like liberty, reason, and truth into the bodies of the people.

FLESH AND STONE: PRISON FASHION

While some women were embodying Liberty or Reason in 1793, others sat in prisons—yet their costumes were startlingly similar. Ironically, a white chemise clothed both the unfree prison victim and the living allegory of Liberty. David’s famous drawing of Marie Antoinette on the way to the guillotine (fig. 150) gives us a sense of the standard for prison fashion during the Terror: a plain, loose dress and cropped hair. “The detail of the Murder of the Queen of France is of the most afflictive nature,” recounted a London newspaper after her death; “The Queen was dressed in a white loose undress. Her hands were tied behind her. She surveyed the deluded multitude with a firm and undaunted eye.”17Public Advertiser (London), October 25, 1793, n.p. As in this case, the white undress could shock by its contrast with the elaborate ensembles formerly worn by aristocratic ladies, emphasizing how they have been brought low before their deaths, but it could also elevate them as innocent martyrs. One priest recalled after a woman was guillotined: “How I grieved to see that young lady, looking in her white dress even younger than she really was, sweet and gentle as a little lamb, led to the slaughter. I felt as though I were present at the martyrdom of one of those holy young virgins represented in the pictures of the great masters. . . . How the red blood flowed down from her head and her throat!”18M. Carrichon, Priest, “Narrative of an Eye-Witness of the Affair of July 22, 1794,” in Duras 1892, p. 224. Prison fashion is here recalled, after the fact, as a badge of martyrdom, the innocent white of the lamb stained with the vivid contrast of the red blood, its abjection transmuted into heroic sacrifice.

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Description: Portrait of Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, led to execution by David,...

Fig. 150. Jacques-Louis David, Marie Antoinette on her Way to the Guillotine, 1793. Pen and brown ink on paper, 15 × 10 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris

William Hamilton’s Marie Antoinette Led to her Execution (fig. 151), painted in England just a few months after the queen’s beheading, claims the high-waisted neoclassical white dress as a mark of the queen’s virtuous martyrdom. Marie Antoinette is bathed in light and casts her eyes toward heaven as she is surrounded by shadowed, uniformed men and a crowd bristling with weapons. A white cap conceals her chopped hair. The queen’s columnar composure is contrasted with the reveling woman in the crowd to the left, dressed in typical working-class attire based on the fashionable silhouette of the 1780s: a natural waist with stays, an apron, and a kerchief tucked in to a low neckline. Rearing back with both arms in the air, the female revolutionary recalls a baying bacchante, drunk with the blood she is about to witness. In this royalist portrayal it is the saintly queen, not the revolutionary bacchante, who is aligned with virtuous classicism.

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Description: Marie Antoinette Led to her Execution, 16 October 1793 by Hamilton, William

Fig. 151. William Hamilton, Marie Antoinette Led to her Execution, 1793, 1794. Oil on canvas, 152 × 197 cm. Musée de la Révolution française, Vizille, France

Once the Terror was over and the business of fashion re-emerged in France, neoclassical dress surged with a hybrid and layered set of significations, responding to this fraught history. In fact, the experience of the Terror was widely aestheticized through fashion. A pair of gold earrings from the period (fig. 152) depict Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette separated from their heads: cockaded liberty caps on top counterbalance the dangling heads at the bottom, with the instrument of their separation, the guillotine, between them. With similar ghoulishness, around 1798 a few fashion plates appeared with women wearing so-called “croisures à la victime.” These ensembles contrasted a white muslin dress with interlaced red ribbons twined around the wearer’s torso, down her arms, and even over the crown of her head (figs 153 and 154). Such dresses summoned memories of scenes like the one the priest recounted above, with the blood coursing down the white frocks of the victims on the scaffold.

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Description: Earrings in the shape of a guillotine with dangling decapitated crowned heads by...

Fig. 152. Earrings in the shape of a guillotine with dangling decapitated crowned heads, ca. 1793–4. Gold. Musée Carnavalet, Paris

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Description: Coiffure négligée en fichu. Robe échancrée sur le dos. Croisures...

Fig. 153. Unknown, Coiffure négligée en fichu (. . .), from Journal des dames et des modes, Costume Parisien, An 6, 19 mai 1798. Hand-colored engraving, 18.2 × 11.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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Description: Turban au Ballon. Ceinture croisée. Ridicule à chiffre./Théâtre...

Fig. 154. Unknown, Turban au Ballon. Ceinture croisée. Ridicule à Chiffre. / Théâtre Feydeau, from Journal des dames et des modes, Costume Parisien, An 7, 18 novembre 1798, fig. 74. Hand-colored engraving, 17.7 × 11.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

In addition, many women and men wore the cropped hair à la Titus, meant to imitate the hairstyles of the Romans but also, of course, recalling the shorn heads of those about to mount the scaffold. Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Portrait of a Young Girl of 1794 (fig. 155) is radically shorn, not only of hair but also of any sort of overtly fashionable veneer. She employs the peekaboo gesture of a Venus pudica, but doubled, with pink nipples emerging between the fingers of both hands and contrasting with the polished whiteness of her shoulders. The eroticism of the painting is reinforced by the figure’s stark vulnerability, and the startling clarity with which we can imagine her as a victime. Madame Tallien herself wore diamond rings on her toes with open sandals to draw attention to her rat-bite scars from prison. These eroticized and fashionable invocations of prison and execution appropriated and contained the abjection of the Terror, attempting to remake the endangered and dismembered body into a coherent, whole, desirable, and beautified one.19For a parallel expression, we can consider the example of the possibly apocryphal bals des victimes; see Schechter 1998.

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Description: Portrait of a Young Girl by Guérin, Pierre

Fig. 155. Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, Portrait of a Young Girl, n.d. [1794]. Oil on canvas, 60 × 50 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris

PRIMITIVISM AND THE DRESS À LA SAUVAGE

We have seen in Chapter Four that white women, much as they had done when embracing bacchantism and sensibility, adopted fashionable symbols associated with people of color to assert the superiority of the “natural” and unschooled as authentic, truthful, virtuous, and uncorrupted by culture. Daniel Chodowiecki’s illustrations for Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s influential racial taxonomy (figs 156–160) particularly aimed to represent this view of the savage and the civilized. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1755 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality had famously valorized the family unit in the primitive hut as the ideal state of humankind, before the corruption of private property warped society but after men and women had decided to cluster together in their “natural,” gendered roles: “Each family became a little society all the better united because mutual attachment and liberty were its only bonds; and it was then that the first difference was established in the lifestyle of the two sexes, which until then had been only one.”20Rousseau 1992, p. 48. In Chodowiecki’s illustrations, it is the darker races that are closer to the Rousseauian ideal (figs 156–158): sovereigns of their own family unit, they exist in a stable and prosperous nature. By contrast, the “Asian” and “Caucasian” races are represented as both highly cultured and subject to social inequality, as evidenced by the presence of servants in both scenes (figs 159–160). In these more advanced societies, as Rousseau said: “Being something and appearing to be something became two completely different things; and from this distinction arose grand ostentation, deceptive cunning, and all the vices that follow in their wake.”21Rousseau 1992, p. 54. Luxuries such as porcelain, tea, and upholstered sofas are counterbalanced by a diminishment of liberty and freedom—particularly for women, who are the servants in both cases. In this, Chodowiecki provides another gloss on the Natur/Afectation contrast we examined earlier (fig. 9); cultural refinement degrades into false affectation, while both nature and classicism exalt authentic subjectivity, the unfettered body, and its freedoms.

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Description: Tawny by Chodowiecki, Daniel Nikolaus

Fig. 156. Daniel Chodowiecki, Tawny, from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte (Göttingen), vol. 1, 1790. Etching with stipple, 5.7 × 7.4 cm. Wellcome Library, London

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Description: American by Chodowiecki, Daniel Nikolaus

Fig. 157. Daniel Chodowiecki, American, from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte (Göttingen), vol. 1, 1790. Etching with stipple, 5.7 × 7.4 cm. Wellcome Library, London

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Description: Ethiopian by Chodowiecki, Daniel Nikolaus

Fig. 158. Daniel Chodowiecki, Ethiopian, from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte (Göttingen), vol. 1, 1790. Etching with stipple, 5.7 × 7.4 cm. Wellcome Library, London

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Description: Asian by Chodowiecki, Daniel Nikolaus

Fig. 159. Daniel Chodowiecki, Asian, from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte (Göttingen), vol. 1, 1790. Etching with stipple, 5.7 × 7.4 cm. Wellcome Library, London

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Description: Caucasian by Chodowiecki, Daniel Nikolaus

Fig. 160. Daniel Chodowiecki, Caucasian, from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte (Göttingen), vol. 1, 1790. Etching with stipple, 5.7 × 7.4 cm. Bavarian State Library, Munich

But, of course, such an appeal to the virtues of the primitive also carried within it a suppression of the fearful and abject side of primitivism, especially in France, which had just experienced a social and political crisis and eruptions of brutal human behavior. By 1797, the statue of Liberty that occupied the spot where the guillotine and, before that, the dethroned statue of Louis XV, had stood, was no longer white, according to one visiting Englishwoman:

The Statue of Lewis the Fifteenth which originally stood in the centre [of the Place de la Révolution; present-day Place de la Concorde], has been removed, and is now replaced by a gigantic statue of Liberty, which time, or rather the crimes by which this spot has been polluted, have already blackened; for it is a fact, that this divinity is so tinged, and its original colour so altered, that, *par son teint boueux et apparence noirâtre, elle ressemble plus à la Liberté d’Afrique qu’à celle de l’Europe.

*By its dirty and black complexion it resembles more the Liberty of Africa than that of Europe.22Moody 1798, pp. 199–200.

The pollution and criminality of the spot had darkened the sculpture so that it no longer represented the Liberty of Europe, but, she claimed, that of Africa. As the actions of the French became more barbaric, the sculptural avatar of their ideals darkened, blackened by crime; a darkness that was racialized into a fearsome savage.

It was not coincidental, then, that in 1797 a remarkable fad swept fashionable Paris: a few women dressed in an extreme of nudity termed à la sauvage. Although this style was derived from neoclassical dress, it was defined by reference not to classical sculpture, but to primitive nature. The specific details of this fashion varied from one account to the next. Most made it out to be a skimpier version of neoclassical dress, with transparent muslin gowns worn with only flesh-colored body stockings underneath and the skirts looped or held up by the wearer to cling to the haunches and expose the legs, perhaps as the woman in this fashion plate (fig. 161) is doing. Mercier, for example, wrote that while women attended balls attired as nymphs, sultans, or savages, “All the women are in white, and white suits all the women. Their throats are nude, their arms are nude.”23“Là les femmes sont nymphs, sultanes, sauvages; tantot Minerve ou Junon, tantot Diane ou bien Eucharis. Toutes les femmes sont en blanc, et le blanc sied à toutes les femmes. Leur gorge est nue, leurs bras sont nus.” Mercier 1900, pp. 220–21. A genre scene by Louis-Léopold Boilly (fig. 162) illustrates this phase of extreme dress: the woman’s legs are clearly visible and her toes and arms are bare. Yet the most precise and detailed description of the style, observed by British novelist Helen Maria Williams, notes a significant departure from neoclassical dress: the drapery was not white muslin, but knitted silk in a “flesh colour”:

For a short time during the winter, in defiance of frost and snow, the costume of a few reigning belles was not à la Grec, but à la Sauvage. To be dressed à la Sauvage was to have all that part of the frame which was not left uncovered clad in a light drapery of flesh colour. The boddice [sic], under which no linen was worn, (shifts being an article of dress long since rejected at Paris, both by the Greeks and the Savages) was made of knitted silk, clinging exactly to the shape, which it perfectly displayed; the petticoat was on one side twisted up by a light festoon: and the feet, which were either bare, or covered with a silk stocking of flesh colour, so woven as to draw upon the toes like a glove upon the fingers, were decorated with diamonds. These gentle savages, however, found themselves so rudely treated whenever they appeared, by the sovereign multitude, that at length the fashions of Otaheite [Tahiti] were thrown aside, and Greece remains the standing order of the day.24Helen Maria Williams, as published in the Morning Chronicle (London), April 11, 1798, n.p. Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s account of this fashion in his Nouveau Paris, originally published in 1798 (see Mercier 1900, p. 233), is substantially similar to Williams’s and seemingly derived from it, since hers appeared in print first.

A contemporary fashion plate depicting a neoclassical dress with sleeves of knitted silk (fig. 163) gives a suggestion of how the textile may have looked on the body. The effect of such an ensemble would have been simulated nakedness, since all the body that was not nude was covered with flesh-colored knitted silk that clung to its contours. Williams notes that women in this costume were treated “rudely” when out in public and that the “fashion of Otaheite” was quickly abandoned.

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Description: Chevelure en porc-épic. Schall à Mouches. Rubans en Cothurnes. / Dess....

Fig. 161. Unknown, Chevelure à la Titus. Schall à Mouches. Rubans en Cothurnes. Dess. d’ap. Nat. sur le Boulevard des Capucines, from Journal des dames et des modes, Costume Parisien, An 7, 4 mars 1798. Hand-colored engraving, 17.6 × 11.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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Description: La Folie du Jour, detail by Tresca, Salvator

Fig. 162. Salvator Tresca after Louis-Léopold Boilly, La Folie du Jour (detail), 1797. Stipple engraving, 35.2 × 39.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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Description: Fichu de gaze sur un fond de Velours Cerise. Chemise à la Prêtresse....

Fig. 163. Unknown, Fichu de gaze . . . Manches en Tricot de Soie (detail), from Journal des dames et des modes, Costume Parisien, An 7, 28 janvier 1798. Hand-colored engraving, 18.1 × 11.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Otaheite was the British word for Tahiti in this era, and it was a symbol of primitivism and free love based on the sailors’ accounts of Captain James Cook’s Pacific voyage, which began to be published in 1773, recounting incidents of human sacrifice and child sex, as well as the natives’ natural nobility: “their walk is graceful, their deportment liberal, and their behaviour to strangers and each other affable and courteous.”25Hawkesworth 1773, vol. 2, p. 191. For an analysis of the fantasy of Tahitian eroticism in British literature of the 1770s, see Mulholland 2016. The non-monogamous sexuality of the Tahitians provided raw material for numerous orientalist fantasies; indeed, a literary parody published early in 1798 professed that marriage was unnatural and that to be happy, Britons should do as the Tahitians did, and embrace free love.26“The Progress of Man, canto 23,” in the Anti-Jacobin, or, Weekly Examiner (London), February 16, 1798; anonymous, but authored by George Canning and John Hookham Frere. This was written to parody Richard Payne Knight’s Progress of Civil Society, a Didactic Poem, in Six Books (London, 1796). The dress of the Tahitians was famously minimal: “In the heat of the day they appear almost naked, the women having only a scanty petticoat, and the men nothing but the sash that is passed between their legs and fastened round the waist. . . . The women of rank always uncover themselves as low as the waist in the evening, throwing off all that they wear on the upper part of the body, with the same negligence and ease as our ladies would lay by a . . . double handkerchief.”27Hawkesworth 1773, vol. 2, p. 194.

Perhaps inevitably, then, commentators drew on comparisons with Tahiti to emphasize the primitivism and licentiousness of neoclassical dress. “Queen Oberea is preparing an embassy to our fair countrywomen, to acknowledge the compliment paid her Majesty by the adoption of her native dress,” reported the Morning Chronicle in 1798; “. . . Sir Joseph Banks’s conversazziones [sic] were never so much frequented since his return from Otaheite as on the two last Sundays. The ladies were dressed en costume. . . . The decent part of the World are inclined to tell these Belle [sic] Sauvages the naked truth.”28Morning Chronicle (London), April 30, 1798, n.p. It’s not clear exactly what it meant to be in the “native dress,” “en costume” of a Tahitian in 1798, but we can look to contemporary visual culture for clues. A 1782 illustration (fig. 164) for George Henry Millar’s New and Universal System of Geography depicted Captain Wallis’s first contact with the Tahitians as an encounter with a troupe of dancing women, barefoot, lightly draped, and naked from the waist up. Habit of a Young Woman of Otaheite Bringing a Present (fig. 165) depicts a kind of Polynesian version of a courtly panniered gown, with a stiffly formed skirt decorated with swags of beads and feathers. The present she brings is this skirt itself, a ceremonial textile which she would presumably soon remove and give to the observer. Tahitian women also wore cropped hair, evidenced here by the woman’s short curls.29Hawkesworth 1773, vol. 2, p. 191: “It is a custom in most countries where the inhabitants have long hair, for the men to cut it short and the women to pride themselves in its length. Here, however, the contrary custom prevails; the women always cut it short round their ears . . .” It is possible, then, that the knitted bodice of the dress à la sauvage, “under which no linen was worn,” and “clinging exactly to the shape, which it perfectly displayed,” was intended to simulate the toplessness of the Polynesian primitive, remaking the fashionable body of a daring woman in London or Paris into a noble savage with both natural manners and bodily liberty.

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Description: Captn. Wallis on his arrival at O'Taheite, in conversation with Oberea the Queen,...

Fig. 164. Thomas Morris after Hamilton, Captn. Wallis on his arrival at O’Taheite, in conversation with Oberea the Queen, while her attendants are performing a favorite Dance called the Timrodee, 1782. Engraving and stipple, 18.9 × 27.6 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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Description: Habit of a Young Woman of Otaheite bringing a Present by Warren, Charles Turner

Fig. 165. Charles Warren, Habit of a Young Woman of Otaheite Bringing a Present, 1793. Engraving, 21.5 × 15.3 cm. British Museum, London

This primitivism was political. Dressing à la sauvage, whether in Britain or France, aligned the wearer with Enlightenment philosophies and radical ideas about “natural” (and superior) social and political organization. The backlash to this fashion channeled fears of these ideas, as well as of their embodiment by unruly women. In Britain, where fears of a French invasion and domestic radicalism stoked conservative views in the 1790s, some understood the French Revolution as the result of idealism betrayed by barbarism, and civilization undermined by violence. Thus, sneering at fashion’s pretentions to savagery masked a fear of cultural dissolution in the face of an unleashed tide of human barbarity. Beneath the bemused tone and lascivious eyebrow-wiggling, these British writers are casting the belles sauvages dressed in the “fashions of Otaheite” as either deluded or malevolent, foolishly embracing a fantasy that would result in a terrifying state of nature and sweep all fashion and culture away before it.

Indeed, some saw this fashion à la sauvage in France as part of a radical plot to undermine Western civilization itself. John Robison, a Scottish scientist, published in 1797 a conspiracy theory that linked the Freemasons, the Illuminati (a fraternity founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776), and the French Revolution in a master plot to overthrow all monarchies and religions and install a secular, transnational New World Order. This influential text was the founding document of an industry of conspiracy that continues vigorously into the twenty-first century, variously scapegoating Jews, financiers, and women. In one passage, Robison connects the naked fashion à la sauvage to the central role of women in the 1793 Festival of Reason and the de-Christianization of France:

Are not the accursed fruits of Illumination to be seen in the present humiliating condition of woman in France? . . . In their present state of national moderation (as they call it) and security, see Madame Tallien come into the public theatre, accompanied by other beautiful women, (I was about to have misnamed them Ladies,) laying aside all modesty, and presenting themselves to the public view, with bared limbs, à la Sauvage, as the alluring objects of desire. I make no doubt but that this is a serious matter, encouraged, nay, prompted by government. To keep the minds of the Parisians in the present fever of dissolute gaiety, they are at more expence from the national treasury for the support of the sixty theatres, than all the pensions and honorary offices in Britain, three times told, amount to. Was not their abominable farce in the church of Notre Dame a bait of the same kind, in the true spirit of Weishaupt’s Eroterion? “We do not,” said the high priest, “call you to the worship of inanimate idols. Behold a master-piece of nature, (lifting up the veil which concealed the naked charms of the beautiful Madms. Barbier): This sacred image should inflame all hearts.” And it did so; the people shouted out, “No more altars, no more priests, no God but the God of Nature.”30Robison 1798, pp. 189–90.

The naked, literally unveiled, bodies of beautiful women were substituted for religious symbols in Notre-Dame during the Festival of Reason, Robison argues. Elevating women’s animated flesh instead of “inanimate idols,” revolutionaries turned the people away from the true God, and toward the God of Nature. Madame Tallien stands at a vanguard of civilizational decline, and women dressed as living statues—unveiled as “a master-piece of nature”—and à la sauvage, are, like the French Revolution itself, a deceptive farce. Not neoclassical bacchantes but rather dangerous maenads, they profess alignment with high-minded ideals while unleashing chaos and undermining order. They are not white and civilized, but black and primitive. They fail utterly to assuage the anxiety of cultural and personal dissolution.

For such observers, the only thing worse than an unveiled white woman dressed à la sauvage was an unveiled brown woman dressed à la sauvage, for here the primitivism went deeper than the costume of “flesh colour” into the flesh itself. By the late 1790s, some Europeans saw the brown-skinned among them as evidence of a distasteful and frightening colonialist miscegenation that was to blame for the degradation of society. Mixed-race people were the result of unsanctioned and unbridled procreation and incarnated lust and enslavement, troubling Europeans’ self-definition as promoters of liberty and idealism.31See Grigsby 2002, p. 268. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, it was a “mulatto” woman, Fortunée Hamelin, who was most strongly associated with the dress à la sauvage (fig. 166). Hamelin was part of the small circle of fashion leaders in the Directory period that also included Joséphine de Beauharnais Bonaparte, Juliette Récamier, and Thérésa Tallien. Like Joséphine, she was a Creole from the West Indies, but Madame Hamelin also seems to have been of mixed racial descent.

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Description: Portrait of Madame Hamelin, born Fortunée Lormier-Lagrave (1776–1851) by...

Fig. 166. Andrea Appiani, Madame Hamelin, née Jeanne Geneviève Fortunée Lormier-Lagrave, 1798. Oil on canvas, 70 × 55 cm. Musée Carnavalet, Paris

The event that Helen Maria Williams recounts above, in which “gentle savages” found themselves “rudely treated,” probably refers to an incident involving Madame Hamelin that was reported in a June 1797 Paris periodical:

Two young women get down from a pretty cabriolet, one attired decently, the other with bare arms and throat, and only a gauze skirt over flesh-colored stockings. Before they have even taken two steps, they are surrounded and pressed. The crowd insults the half-naked woman, one pulls her skirt, another stares; a third makes a nasty remark. In the end, as we are so prudish, no one could observe without indignation the indecent outfit of this lady of “New France.” An honest man offered her his arm to pull her out of the crowd and take her back to her carriage, but the crowd would not let her go. It was necessary to invoke the force publique, and the cabriolet departed to the sound of the spectators’ boos.32“Deux jeunes femmes descendent d’un joli cabriolet, l’une mise décemment, l’autre les bras et la gorge nus, avec une seule jupe de gaze sur un pantalon couleur de chair. Elles n’ont pas fait deux pas qu’elles sont entourées et pressées. La femme à demi-nue est insultée, l’un tire sa jupe, l’autre la regarde sous le nez; un troisième lui fait un mauvais compliment. Enfin, comme nous sommes très pudibonds, personne ne put voir sans indignation l’indécente tournure de cette dame de la ‘Nouvelle-France.’ Un honnête homme lui offrit son bras pour la tirer de la foule et la reconduire à sa voiture oil l’on ne voulait pas la laisser monter. Il fallut invoquer la force publique; et le cabriolet partit au bruit des huées des spectateurs.” La Petite Poste de Paris, ou le Prompt Avertisseur, 3 Messidor An V (June 21, 1797), n.p.; my translation.

Wearing this “indecent outfit” of gauze and fleshy tricot, Madame Hamelin, a planter’s daughter from the island of Saint-Domingue, startled and repelled spectators on the Champs-Élysées. She was also heavily pregnant at the time of this incident; to recover from the scandal, she and her husband departed for Milan, where she gave birth to a son a month later.33Lescure 1995, p. 45.

Andrea Appiani’s portrait of Hamelin (fig. 166), painted in Milan after the scandalous incident on the Champs-Élysées, seems intended to refute her critics. She is dressed defensively: thoroughly covered in a simple neoclassical gown and cashmere shawl, she wears no jewelry besides a gold wedding band. No transparent tricot, no madras, no headwrap; Hamelin here eschews clear gestures toward primitivism, racial mixing, and Creole licentiousness, and Appiani depicts a fair-skinned woman with curly black hair and dark eyes. Yet written accounts often stressed her “blackness,” as Madame Hamelin’s unusual features and coloring enchanted some, and repelled others. Countess Divoff, the wife of a Russian diplomat, wrote after seeing her at an 1802 ball: “She is fat, black, and ugly, and has a bad reputation.”34“. . . grasse, noire, et laide, et n’a pas bonne reputation.” Divova 1929, p. 119; see Lescure 1995, p. 61. Prince Charles de Clary-et-Aldringen wrote to his sister on April 23, 1810: “I expected to find her pretty; far from it. She is small, black, fat, with a big head, the nose of a Negro, a fat chubby face covered in makeup, and hair fighting between black, gray and pink—this last the effect of heaven knows what kind of dye.”35“. . . je m’attendais à la trouver jolie, il s’en faut. Elle est petite, noire, grasse, avec une grosse tête, un nez de nègre, une grosse face joufflue couverte de fard, des cheveux combattant entre le noir, le gris et le rose, dernier effet de je ne sais quelle eau pour les teindre.” Prince Charles de Clary-et-Aldringen, Trois Mois à Paris lors du mariage de l’empereur Napoléon 1er et de l’archiduchesse Marie-Louise (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1914), p. 170; quoted in Lescure 1995, p. 61. Others lauded her charms. “As for Madame Hamelin,” attested journalist Georges Touchard-Lafosse, “one guessed, just by seeing her, qu’elle en voulait aux cœurs. Her face was a mixture of agreeable features and faulty features, where ugliness perhaps dominated, yet it was clear that a seduction was assured, and she often triumphed over perfect beauties as a result of the clever play of the most beautiful black eyes I have ever encountered in my life.”36“Quant à madame Hamelin. . . . On devinait, rien qu’en la voyant paraître, qu’elle en voulait aux cœurs. Sa figure était un mélange de traits agréables et de traits défectueux, oil le laid dominait peut-être; pourtant il ressortait de tout cela une séduction assurée, et le triomphe qu’elle obtenait souvent sur les beautés parfaites, résultait d’un jeu habile des plus jolis yeux noirs que j’aie jamais rencontrés de ma vie.” Georges Touchard-Lafosse, Souvenirs d’un demisiècle (Brussels: Meline, Cans, 1837), vol. 5, p. 307; quoted in Lescure 1995, p. 58. And a contemporary in the late 1790s said, “In her olive complexion glittered black diamond eyes. Ugly and delicious; of all the women present, the most daring; one would have said she was a girl escaped from the seraglio.”37“Dans son teint d’olive brillaient des yeux de diamant noir. Laide et délicieuse, de toutes les femmes présentes la plus osée, on eût dit une fille échappée du sérail.” Quoted in Lescure 1995, p. 48. When worn by Fortunée Hamelin, displaying herself to the public in a topless, sheer ensemble that barely veiled her brown skin and her large, pregnant belly, the dress à la sauvage exceeded art’s capacity to contain and recontextualize troubling ideas. While the most elite circles may have welcomed her daring stratagems of provocative self-presentation, the Directory public seemed only to find their anxious fears of miscegenation and savagery exacerbated.

The project [of the Revolution] was to form an entire new race of men, and we have been transformed into savages.
—Louis-Sébastien Mercier, New Picture of Paris, as published in London in 180038Mercier 1800, p. 10.

Women, silenced and excluded during much of the Revolution, counseled to embrace their role as mothers of the Republic, were the abject other of the French body politic. Their marginalized role conversely constructed the rational, male, republican subject. Yet by choosing to present themselves as living statues, women both embraced and recontextualized this objectified and essentialized role they had been given. When they were as still and serene as white marble statues, sculptural bodies helped male observers process their disgust at the abject female, transmuting it into precisely bordered aestheticized purity. But when statues lived, breathed, bled, secreted, and reproduced, they threatened to subvert this mechanism of cultural containment. When symbols of savagery and miscegenation were layered on top of the dress’s neoclassicism, the results were too radical for sustained use—not due to some conventional notion of shocking and unrespectable nudity, but because the dress à la sauvage laid too bare the tensions between Enlightenment idealism and modern, colonialist ambition. But white, transparent, naked neoclassical dress threaded the needle. Seizing on the prestige and visibility of classical statuary, women could embody virtues that were unassailable on the surface, even as they pushed against restrictions to their public, aesthetic, and political agency. In deploying complex references through clothing, women found a way, after having been repressed and excluded during the height of the Revolution, to make themselves visible and vital in the public life of post-Thermidor Paris, even as they struggled with how to understand and represent themselves.

1 Freund 2014, chapter four, analyzes this painting and the ways it argues for Tallien’s public and political presence. »

2 For Jean-Lambert Tallien’s life and role in the Revolution, see Bourquin 1987, Kermina 2006, and Freund 2014. »

3 Quoted in Moore 2007, p. 305. »

4 The Princess of Monaco lied about being pregnant to gain time to cut her hair and send it to her children as a legacy. She chopped off her own hair with a piece of glass before going to the guillotine. Blanc 1987, p. 69. »

5 Wrigley 2002, pp. 104–16. »

6 A.-J. Gorsas, Précis rapide des événements qui ont eu lieu à Paris dans les journées des 30 et 31 mai, premier et 2 juin 1793 (n.p., n.d.); quoted in and translated by Levy and Applewhite 1992, p. 93. »

7 Quoted in Moore 2007, p. 204; on milk and breastfeeding in revolutionary pageantry, see Jacobus 1992. »

8 Hunt 1992, p. 63; Kennedy 1989, p. 343. »

9 Ozouf 1988, p. 100. »

10 “On se garda bien de metre à la place d’un saint-sacrement un simulacre inanimé de la liberté, parce que des esprits grossiers auroient pu s’y méprendre, et à la place du dieu pain, substituer un dieu pierre; . . . et cette femme vivante, malgré tous les charmes qui l’embellissoient, ne pouvoient pas être déifiée par les ignorans, comme l’eût été une statue de pierre./ C’est une chose qu’il ne faut pas se lasser de dire au people: la liberté, la raison, la vérité, ne sont que des êtres abstraits. Ce ne sont point là des dieux, car à proprement par er, ce sont des parties de nousmêmes.” Révolutions de Paris, dédiées à la Nation, no. 215 (23–30 Brumaire An II; November 13–20, 1793), p. 215; quoted by Hunt 1992, p. 65. Momoro is generally credited as the author of this passage; see Kennedy 1989, p. 343. »

11 Quoted in Ozouf 1988, p. 101. »

12 Hunt 1992, p. 65. »

13 Ozouf 1988, p. 102. »

14 Mercier 1800, vol. 2, p. 83. »

15 Mercier 1800, vol. 2, p. 84. »

16 For example, see Kennedy 1989, p. 344. »

17 Public Advertiser (London), October 25, 1793, n.p. »

18 M. Carrichon, Priest, “Narrative of an Eye-Witness of the Affair of July 22, 1794,” in Duras 1892, p. 224. »

19 For a parallel expression, we can consider the example of the possibly apocryphal bals des victimes; see Schechter 1998. »

20 Rousseau 1992, p. 48. »

21 Rousseau 1992, p. 54. »

22 Moody 1798, pp. 199–200. »

23 “Là les femmes sont nymphs, sultanes, sauvages; tantot Minerve ou Junon, tantot Diane ou bien Eucharis. Toutes les femmes sont en blanc, et le blanc sied à toutes les femmes. Leur gorge est nue, leurs bras sont nus.” Mercier 1900, pp. 220–21. »

24 Helen Maria Williams, as published in the Morning Chronicle (London), April 11, 1798, n.p. Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s account of this fashion in his Nouveau Paris, originally published in 1798 (see Mercier 1900, p. 233), is substantially similar to Williams’s and seemingly derived from it, since hers appeared in print first. »

25 Hawkesworth 1773, vol. 2, p. 191. For an analysis of the fantasy of Tahitian eroticism in British literature of the 1770s, see Mulholland 2016. »

26 “The Progress of Man, canto 23,” in the Anti-Jacobin, or, Weekly Examiner (London), February 16, 1798; anonymous, but authored by George Canning and John Hookham Frere. This was written to parody Richard Payne Knight’s Progress of Civil Society, a Didactic Poem, in Six Books (London, 1796). »

27 Hawkesworth 1773, vol. 2, p. 194. »

28 Morning Chronicle (London), April 30, 1798, n.p. »

29 Hawkesworth 1773, vol. 2, p. 191: “It is a custom in most countries where the inhabitants have long hair, for the men to cut it short and the women to pride themselves in its length. Here, however, the contrary custom prevails; the women always cut it short round their ears . . .” »

30 Robison 1798, pp. 189–90. »

31 See Grigsby 2002, p. 268. »

32 “Deux jeunes femmes descendent d’un joli cabriolet, l’une mise décemment, l’autre les bras et la gorge nus, avec une seule jupe de gaze sur un pantalon couleur de chair. Elles n’ont pas fait deux pas qu’elles sont entourées et pressées. La femme à demi-nue est insultée, l’un tire sa jupe, l’autre la regarde sous le nez; un troisième lui fait un mauvais compliment. Enfin, comme nous sommes très pudibonds, personne ne put voir sans indignation l’indécente tournure de cette dame de la ‘Nouvelle-France.’ Un honnête homme lui offrit son bras pour la tirer de la foule et la reconduire à sa voiture oil l’on ne voulait pas la laisser monter. Il fallut invoquer la force publique; et le cabriolet partit au bruit des huées des spectateurs.” La Petite Poste de Paris, ou le Prompt Avertisseur, 3 Messidor An V (June 21, 1797), n.p.; my translation. »

33 Lescure 1995, p. 45. »

34 “. . . grasse, noire, et laide, et n’a pas bonne reputation.” Divova 1929, p. 119; see Lescure 1995, p. 61. »

35 “. . . je m’attendais à la trouver jolie, il s’en faut. Elle est petite, noire, grasse, avec une grosse tête, un nez de nègre, une grosse face joufflue couverte de fard, des cheveux combattant entre le noir, le gris et le rose, dernier effet de je ne sais quelle eau pour les teindre.” Prince Charles de Clary-et-Aldringen, Trois Mois à Paris lors du mariage de l’empereur Napoléon 1er et de l’archiduchesse Marie-Louise (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1914), p. 170; quoted in Lescure 1995, p. 61. »

36 “Quant à madame Hamelin. . . . On devinait, rien qu’en la voyant paraître, qu’elle en voulait aux cœurs. Sa figure était un mélange de traits agréables et de traits défectueux, oil le laid dominait peut-être; pourtant il ressortait de tout cela une séduction assurée, et le triomphe qu’elle obtenait souvent sur les beautés parfaites, résultait d’un jeu habile des plus jolis yeux noirs que j’aie jamais rencontrés de ma vie.” Georges Touchard-Lafosse, Souvenirs d’un demisiècle (Brussels: Meline, Cans, 1837), vol. 5, p. 307; quoted in Lescure 1995, p. 58. »

37 “Dans son teint d’olive brillaient des yeux de diamant noir. Laide et délicieuse, de toutes les femmes présentes la plus osée, on eût dit une fille échappée du sérail.” Quoted in Lescure 1995, p. 48. »

38 Mercier 1800, p. 10. »

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