The old regime of hygiene
The state of man in the middle of the nineteenth century, out in the French countryside, remained what it had always been: solitary, nasty, brutish, short … and filthy. What Jacques Léonard, a historian of medicine, calls the ‘old regime of hygiene’ persisted as a world of poisoned wells, verminous clothes, unwashed bodies, polluted public spaces, and ‘pestilential odors’.Footnote 1 Far removed from the great issues of the time – the fall of republics, the rise of empires – it was the gritty struggle against this dirt and disorder that defined people’s lives … and often, their deaths.
This history of hygiene proceeded quite apart from the more familiar narratives that frame the transition from traditional to modern France. The political upheaval that saw off the Old Regime left virtually no mark on the day-to-day life of the countryside. The National Convention could wage war and bring politics to the ‘little people’. The Directory could conquer much of Europe and Bonaparte build an empire. None of these regimes, however, could do much to change the age-old structures and traditions that ruled the world of propreté. They could not put ‘citizens’ in clean clothes or decent housing, deliver ample supplies of unpolluted water, flush the streets, remove the garbage and the sewage, or drive down the infant mortality rate. The priests may have gone underground for a few years; the lice and bedbugs never did. When it came to being dirty and keeping clean, the Revolution bequeathed to the nineteenth century almost exactly what it had inherited from the Old Regime.
A few words of caution: The story that follows about life on the land is a grim one, and because I have not spared the disagreeable details it is easy to imagine that the story is grimmer than it should be – a function, perhaps, of bias in the sources, a surrender to ‘history from above’ or a reflection of the prejudices of a twenty-first-century American. I return to some of these questions in the conclusion, but I want to clarify matters at the start.
It is true that information about peasant hygiene almost never comes from the peasants themselves. Overwhelmingly, the descriptions that follow are filtered through the ‘gaze’ of others – principally government agents and professional reformers, usually urban and obviously literate, who arrived in the villages with aim of ‘improving’ things. Condescension was not a bug but a feature of this process, as it inevitably is when one group of people sets out to bring ‘progress’ to another. Nineteenth-century French peasants would not have seen themselves as ‘primitive and dirty’, as the improvers did. They simply lived as people on the land had more or less always lived.
In their descriptions, the reformers, as missionaries predictably do, no doubt exaggerated for effect or because what they saw in the countryside so offended their sensibilities. The historian’s judgement may require some discounting for the horrified tone of some of their accounts, but the reformers did not invent the danger and discomfort of rural existence. The essential elements of their depictions are so ubiquitous, and the absence of any countervailing evidence so complete, that it seems reasonable to take them for a decently accurate picture of daily life and prevailing standards. Of course, we are not allowed to judge what we see as the missionaries did. Still, in the end, either peasants changed their clothes or did not, lived with their livestock or did not, piled their manure next to their wells or did not.
That said, the behaviour of people in the countryside throughout the nineteenth century suggests that, while they conceived the matter differently, when they found the wherewithal to follow the reformers’ advice, they often did so. More and more households covered their dirt floors with stone, replaced thatch with slate, constructed outbuildings for their animals, and exchanged rough wool shirts for cotton. This is not a story of irredeemable backwardness. The peasants had agency and, as the century wore on, they increasingly used it to improve their own lives.
Dirt begins at birth
Dirtiness imposed itself on life even before a child’s first breath. Medical crusader Dr Louis-August Maréschal believed he had discovered the zero degree of hygiene in early nineteenth-century Brittany. The filth and neglect he found began at birth in a process presided over by untrained midwives hungry for their fees, with reputations established by ‘one or two “cures” that owed nothing to their “knowledge”’ and that could not make up for the greater damage they did. In the Brenne region (Indre), according to anthropologist Jacqueline Tardivon, 50 per cent of babies were stillborn at the turn of the nineteenth century, a figure that had everything to do with the deplorable hygiene of childbirth, with deliveries occurring in all sorts of unfortunate circumstances, supervised by accomplices who were little more than the agents of infant mortality and puerperal fever – closer in their methods to witches than to nurses.Footnote 2 As for postpartum care, in lower Brittany, new mothers received a day of bed rest and a glass of ‘hot wine to repair their strength’. It was not rare to see the midwives sending new mothers back to their arduous chores ‘the day after giving birth’.Footnote 3
Martin Nadaud, the militant worker and future politician, described ‘Old Fouésonne’, the reigning midwife in his native village in the Creuse:
She was the only doctor who had ever practiced in our village. Accustomed to never being contradicted, she would affirm with imperturbable self-assurance that Tom, Dick, or Harry, who had been dead for several years, had come to visit his former neighbors and told them the names of others from the village who had gone either to heaven or to hell. She would also tell us the names of those known to be werewolves as well as those who had exerted themselves to vanquish them.Footnote 4
Such was the state of obstetric practice in 1815.
Because a woman who managed to dodge the many perils of childbirth returned quickly to her labours, it made sense that folk wisdom prescribed swaddling the little creature, even in the face of doctors’ reproof. Maréschal, one of those engaged in a ‘holy crusade’ against the practice, described it:
Seated on a large stone, our Breton mother laid out a jersey of thick cloth destined to imprison the poor child more tightly than before his birth. The height and tightness of the wrap form a draft collar around the neck, keeping the head fixed and straight. In this prison of linen and bandages [the baby] looks rather like a mummy.Footnote 5
The practice was not limited to Brittany. Parents in villages across France wrapped up their infants like sausages. In the Burgundian hamlet of Minot, newborns were tightly bound from head to toe in feather duffles, topped with a bonnet, and placed lying down until they were ready to walk. In the Pyrénées, they were merely strapped into their cradles and placed near enough to the fire that they would keep warm, but not so close that they would burn, and left, in Pierre Goubert’s wonderfully evocative expression, to ‘marinate’ throughout the day.Footnote 6
The tragedies that often resulted from the lack of supervision left Maréschal aghast. ‘The habit of leaving the swine to come and go freely through all parts of the house’, he wrote,
has been the cause of quite a different set of misfortunes. We have seen the pigs devour hands, faces, and even the entire heads of newborns without these horrible accidents leading to closer surveillance or to closing off the entrance of the house against these animals of such a ‘dangerous voracity’.Footnote 7
The care that these Breton infants did receive was frequently more dangerous than the neglect.Footnote 8 Henri Blanc, the twentieth-century hygienist whose own work leaned so heavily on Maréschal’s, pointed particularly to the custom of feeding newborns solid food, sometimes leading to ‘death by indigestion’. Medical authorities complained that Breton parents gave their infants cow’s milk instead of breastfeeding them. Quite apart from the newborns’ inability to digest raw cow’s milk, the milk itself came from filthy udders, and the unwashed hands of those who handled the milk naturally contaminated it further. Moreover, it could not have helped the youngest Bretons that their parents often added a few drops of alcohol to the milk, believing ‘this detestable practice to be a source of good health and vigor’. Or that the parents, certain that the ability to eat grown-up food was a sign of an infant’s strength, fed them such things as lard and salted sardines.Footnote 9 No wonder infant mortality in the province could run to double the national average.
Even older babies in the Basse-Bretagne were left in a virtual state of nature: awakened in the morning, put to bed at night, and fed in between. Past that, young children were largely ignored, neither hugged for being good nor beaten for being bad – at least until they were older. ‘At an age when all the lessons about what is good and what is bad engrave themselves easily on young souls’, the censorious Maréschal concluded, ‘[young Bretons] easily preserve the habits of dirtiness and savage ignorance in which they are steeped’.Footnote 10
To modern eyes this might look like child abuse, but adults hardly treated their children’s bodies with less care than they treated their own. Indeed, the ignorance and ‘extreme dirtiness’ of the Bretons was axiomatic to contemporaries.Footnote 11 ‘Let us add’, wrote Jacques de Cambry in his book Voyage dans le Finistère (1794), ‘[a word about] the almost hereditary scabies among fathers and children, the filthiness of individuals who neither bathe nor wash, climbing out of the pits, the ponds, the cesspits whence their drunkenness had tossed them; observe the long, slimy hair, the thick beard, the faces laced with grimy crevices … and you will have an idea of the Breton peasant.’ ‘Poor Brittany’, added Victor Hugo, ‘land that has kept everything, its monuments and its inhabitants, its poetry and its filth, its old color and its old grubbiness underneath. Wash the buildings, they are superb; but as for the Bretons themselves, I defy you to wash them.’Footnote 12
The effects of crude material conditions and lack of knowledge were compounded, in the words of the great reformer Louis-René Villermé, by ‘the fatalism [and] ignorance … of those who endured them’.Footnote 13 At mid-century, before the era of universal primary education, some 80 per cent of those condemned in the assize courts of Brittany could neither read nor write; the province counted four of the ten departments in the country where this was true.Footnote 14 And the peninsula was continually placed among those areas of the country whose army recruits were rejected for being too short and too sickly – physical stature serving as a good proxy for general health and health for the general level of hygiene.Footnote 15
Both contemporaries and historians have wondered if this insouciance about salubriousness was linked to the deeply Catholic culture of the Breton peasantry and to the conviction that the body was ‘the instrument of sin [and] vessel of evil’. A worldview that understood the concern for cleanliness as a temptation for ‘luxury and voluptuousness’ would explain the derisory place hygiene occupied in Christian education and serve as testimony to an aversion to washing and nudity that survived well into the twentieth century and that helped the Bretons earn their reputation for good morals and bad sanitation.Footnote 16
On the other hand, if peasants in the backwaters of the far northwest stood out for their deficiency of propreté, it was only a matter of degree. ‘Nothing’, remembered Ramonde Anna Rey, ‘was more miserable than the condition of peasants in the Lozère’.Footnote 17 And the same relentless inattention to hygiene, reflected in the misshapen bodies and poor health of so many inhabitants, characterised almost every corner of the French countryside. The imperial prefect of the Eure-et-Loir complained in 1806 about the ‘scrawny bodies, the skinny thighs, the spindly legs, and the feet deformed through the habitual use of big, heavy sabots [simple, wooden shoe]’ that he saw in the poorer parts of his department. No wonder so many conscripts in the Beauce were rejected by the Grande Armée for being too short or for ‘faiblesse de constitution’.Footnote 18
By the middle of the century, draft boards had long remarked on ‘the extraordinary filth in which countrymen wallowed’, which they saw every year when a substantial portion of the nation’s twenty-year-olds presented themselves for induction. Weber called the draft ‘a sad tale of rural ills: deafness and sore eyes, tapeworm and hernia, goiter and scrofula, stuntedness, twisted limbs, weakness of constitution, and “diverse maladies”’. In Rozier, a rural commune not far from Clermont-Ferrand, near the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the army rejected fully 57 per cent of recruits for a ‘lack of height’ or other physical deformities. It remarked in particular the ‘lack of care for their bodies that accounted for the early mortality and revealed the fragile health’ of these young men. ‘These conscripts’, the army explained, ‘are often weak, with delicate constitutions and some grave disability’; that is, completely unsuited to the military profession.Footnote 19
Likewise, it was not only in Brittany that parents killed their infants with inappropriate diets. In the Nivernais, wrote Heulard d’Arcy, one has only to see ‘the horrible, thick concoctions, yellow and fibrous, to be struck dumb’. It is enough, he wrote,
to have tasted them to understand the revolt of young stomachs against the milk, corrupted by these things; and to the disgust inspired by their appearance must be added the fermentation, during the summer and even the winter, of milk left out in a warm and densely occupied room.Footnote 20
Of course, parents could only poison children who survived their first meal, and plenty of them did not. All across the country, infected bottles and indigestible food killed French babies in huge numbers: 100,000 every year, estimated Dr E. Boell. Infant mortality reached 50 per cent among babies raised on biberons, he added, whereas the rate for breastfed infants was only 10 per cent.Footnote 21 We may question the precision of Boell’s numbers, while accepting that tainted milk left a significant mark on infant mortality rates. These rates reached 24 per cent in the Beauce countryside at mid-century, and only a little less for children between one and four years old.Footnote 22
On the other end of childbirth, the death of mothers from puerperal infection remained common, since no one involved in delivering the new baby washed her hands. … or the baby – at least, not very often or very well.Footnote 23 ‘The dirtier the babies, the healthier they are’, it was said in the Limousin. And the same was apparently true in the Nivernais, where it was considered a dangerous error to change infants’ swaddling clothes at night – leaving them, in the words of Heulhard d’Arcy, to steep (macérer) for eight or ten hours in their urine and feces. The mothers and nurses, with ‘a veritable horror of water [and] using neither water nor sponge’, would then wipe the baby off in the morning with a bit of spittle on an unsoiled corner of the swaddling cloth.
Filth, thought Heulhard, was only one form of neglect, and he recalled with horror a scene reminiscent of Breton infants gnawed by pigs: a hysterical mother who arrived at the clinic at Dupuytren in 1828 with her baby who had been left alone for the day with the domestic animals and had the fingers eaten off both hands by the cat.Footnote 24 Add to these the various sins of commission, such as the practice of head-swaddling, condemned by Dr J.-P. Des Vaulx as ‘a true barbarity, [this practice of] squeezing the heads of these poor little children with bands in order to give them a certain shape … [and] one of the main causes of epilepsy and insanity.’Footnote 25
A philosophy of hygiene
Heulhard, like Maréschal and other frustrated crusaders for hygiene, attributed the primitive practices he found in the countryside to a combination of ignorance, custom, and superstition, reinforced by religion – a convergence of factors reflected in folk wisdom and local proverbs. In fact, a brief survey of these casual elements of ‘mentalité’ in the countryside, although it does not establish the precise means of exchange among culture, circumstance, and practice, can elucidate the way that peasants commonly thought about matters that were, after all, questions of life and death.
Peasant culture was rich in homespun aphorisms, providing a pre-digested understanding that casts a fascinating light on the rural thinking about sickness, sanitation, and the prudent disposition of scarce resources. There existed, in effect, a genealogy of dirt. Rules on washing often had some connection to the religious calendar. In the Nivernais, for example, it was deemed bad luck to wash children’s clothes on 15th August (the Assumption of Mary) or at the end of Holy Week, or to change bed sheets in May, a month devoted to the adoration of the Madonna. ‘To cut your nails on Sunday’, warned one Breton saying, ‘is to give blessed bread to the Devil’; likewise, in the Guyenne, where ‘To cut your nails on Friday brings Evil.’ Other superstitions had nothing to do with saints’ days and other religious moments, like the popular belief in the Forez that cutting hair under a new moon makes it longer whereas cutting it under a full moon makes it thicker, or the proscription against clipping the fingernails of children under age seven, ‘to avoid their becoming thieves’.Footnote 26
Other proverbs were more practical and tightly prescriptive.Footnote 27 Insofar as they addressed issues of hygiene, they sometimes celebrated dirt and other times pointed to its dangers. ‘Clean body, clean soul’, went one piece of customary advice. In Gascony it was said that ‘a clean face is always pleasing’, and in the Anjou that ‘to wash your hands makes for good health’. Some proverbs hedged: ‘Wash your hands often, your feet rarely, and your head never.’ Still others warned peasants about the cost of too much cleanliness: ‘Neither cheese nor soap ever make a house’s fortune’, cautioned one. ‘Filthy hair is healthy hair’, observed another. Several maxims extolled the value of parasites: ‘There is neither man nor woman without vermin’, peasants told one another, adding that ‘He who loses lice gets fleas’ and that ‘Lice protect health.’
Clothes, like bodies, were washed according to the guidelines provided by these ancient proverbs – at least insofar as proverbs organised real life. Some washdays were luckier than others, and some were fraught with hazard, the schedule of prohibitions once again following the religious calendar in some cases. In the most pious regions, Good Friday was particularly taboo – a malediction extended in Brittany to every Friday: ‘Whoever boils the laundry on Friday, cooks the blood of our Savior.’ Elsewhere it was said that to do the laundry on those days dedicated to the Holy Virgin would torment souls in Purgatory, or that clothes washed on Saint-Sylvèstre’s Day (New Year’s Eve) would be gnawed by rats. Exchanging religious injunctions for mere magic, peasants in the Vosges believed that washing clothes in the house of a pregnant woman could kill the baby – hence the advice to keep the laundry vat as far as possible from the mother.Footnote 28
All in all, the advice that country folk gave themselves in the form of proverbs and other bits of folk wisdom did not depart very far from everyday practice and the possibilities of life on the land. Where dirt and sweat were the companions of hard work, where water was cold and inconvenient, homes unheated, and linen sparse, standards of personal hygiene naturally remained lax. These hard realities persisted, largely resistant to the advice of reformers. The more optimistic among nineteenth-century disciples of hygiene, like Dr Monin, believed that cleanliness was ‘instinctive’, and that men had always seen it as the ‘keystone of good health’, since dirt was ‘one of the great agents of death’.Footnote 29 Indeed, the Third Republic was to adopt this optimism as social policy, using its schools and its army to stimulate and instruct this ‘instinct’ for hygiene. For the moment, however, across the French countryside at mid-century, prescriptions for cleaner bodies and homes typically went unfilled. Dirt, discomfort, and disease remained the familiar partners of country life.
Dirty bodies
At the age of fourteen in 1830, Martin Nadaud, the aspiring mason who went on to become a leading member of the Chamber of Deputies, walked to Paris with his father from his native Creuse. When the two men arrived in the capital weeks later, having apparently not washed along the entire journey, they immediately headed to the Seine in front of the Hôtel de Ville, a popular spot for cleaning up ‘the vermin that were devouring [us]’ and that he had probably acquired at one of the inns along the way: ‘Not beds’, he wrote of the furnishings, but ‘grain husks and straw that had been broken up by previous use and that was naturally full of vermin … When you opened the sheets, you saw they were black as soot and bore, in addition, various signs of uncleanliness.’ The other ‘guests’ advised father and son not to undress for bed but assured them that, ‘You’ll even find that exhaustion makes your sleep pleasant and deep even though you’re being roused by fleas and bedbugs.’Footnote 30
These travellers were no exception. ‘The negligence of the peasant for his body is well known’, wrote Gustave Drouineau, ‘and everyone who has lived in the country is unanimous on this point.’ These ‘muddy asses’, as Munaret the country doctor called them, washed only when they fell into water. ‘We wash our dogs and our horses from head to toe’, complained nineteenth-century archaeologist Jacques Boucher de Perthes, ‘but [never] our children and ourselves?’ It is true that the prospect of Sunday, or some other holiday, might prompt a quick rinse in the cuvette (a shallow wash basin) and a change of clothes, but this habit looked to appearance, not to cleanliness.Footnote 31 And it did not apply to the rest of the week. The peasants, remarked Jules Renard with his typical condescension, ‘fight dirt only with sweat’.Footnote 32
This was not a simple consequence of poverty or lack of opportunity, wrote Gillian Tindall in Célestine, her study of a nineteenth-century village in the Berry. Even those villagers who had servants to fetch their water ‘did not indulge in much cleanliness beyond cosmetic attention to face, neck, and hands’.Footnote 33 In what Dr Paul Chavigny later described as a national culture of dirt, there was ‘an almost total absence of hygiene’.Footnote 34 Grime built up on peasants’ bodies, and sweat soaked their clothes, ‘agglutinating and attaching itself to hair and beards’, producing such a ‘nauseating, penetrating odor’ that Dr Munaret grumbled about having to ‘air out [his] office after only a fifteen-minute consultation’ with one of them.Footnote 35 Country people, he wrote, spent their lives covered in a ‘patina of filth’.Footnote 36
Munaret’s contemptuous remarks suggest that he saw peasant practices, not simply as ignorance and cultural inertia, but as a moral failing – just as historian Alain Corbin in his study of mob violence and murder in the Dordogne in 1870, remarked on the particular dirtiness of the inhabitants in this part of the so-called Chestnut Belt, whose bodies, he wrote, quoting a contemporary observer, ‘were encrusted with “something like scales”’. The implication was clear: incivility was of a piece, and the primitive peasant was as filthy as he was vicious.Footnote 37
Dirt clung to the bodies of women and children as to their husbands and fathers. Alexandre Layet, Professor of Social Medicine in Bordeaux, referred with palpable disgust to the ‘repugnant spectacle of young brats, spotty children with rheumy eyes, whose nostrils and eyelids are filled with the flies that buzz around them’.Footnote 38 The hard life of the country aged women with a particular vengeance. ‘When you marry’, the proverb told young men, ‘look for a woman who’s thin and clean; she’ll get fat and dirty soon enough’.Footnote 39
Dirtier in some body parts than in others, however, since washing was not only impractical and morally suspect, it was invariably partial, which meant that some areas got washed more often, others less. At the top of peasant heads, stuffed under a cap or a bonnet and ‘ceaselessly accumulating sweaty, sebaceous secretions and dandruff’, hair received less care than most other parts of the body. Any inclination peasants might have had to wash their hair was defeated by the bother of it and a fear of the effect that a chill might have on the brain.Footnote 40
More critically, given widely shared principles of modesty, some parts never got washed. As Dr Lucien Gretelly noted in an 1867 report to the Labour Minister, Victory Duroy, ‘Because of a ridiculously exaggerated sense of “decency”, there are certain regions [of the body] that are considered shameful and with which people are careful to avoid.’Footnote 41 Predictably, these taboos weighed more heavily on women, who were often warned that washing itself was an indolent and dangerously sensual practice.Footnote 42 They weighed most heavily of all on the old women who, in their ‘incomparable foolishness’, were proud of being ‘virgins of any ablution in these places’.Footnote 43 Julia Csergo tells the story of one old woman in the Aveyron, who fought off the doctors in the hospital shouting: ‘I am over sixty-eight, and never have I washed there!’Footnote 44 Yet these inhibitions also applied to younger and married women. As one popular song of the nineteenth century testified, ‘Married women never wash their c_s.’Footnote 45 Dr Layet deplored the inevitable effects of this systematic neglect: ‘irritations of the vulva in women and herpes of the foreskin in men’.Footnote 46
Rural society was accordingly used to strong body odours. It is difficult to say exactly how strong was too strong, and what a doctor of public hygiene found intolerable might not have struck fellow peasants with the same wallop. Men and women used to working on the land, in almost constant and promiscuous contact with animals, often prized a piquant personal bouquet as a sign of vigour and virility in men and sexiness in women. Ethnologist Yvonne Verdier underlines the powerful erotic effect of ‘strong and nauseating’ odours like sweat and excrement. ‘The smellier the billy-goat’, went the old peasant saying, ‘the more the nanny-goat loves him.’Footnote 47
Love it or not, most country people had to get used to filth, since they had very limited options for avoiding it. Material conditions and culture worked together to repress whatever urge peasants had to bathe. A ‘progressive’ like Charles Collas writing in 1850, might consider two baths per month an ‘indispensable’ regime, but in the Limousin, according to one regional guidebook, they ‘hardly even knew the word’.Footnote 48 And across the French countryside, the hovels the majority of people called home had none of the conforts – water, privacy, tubs, heating – that would have made indoor bathing feasible. True, nature provided rural folks with opportunities the cities lacked, in the rivers and streams that ran through the countryside. The evidence suggests, however, that peasants took infrequent advantage of these resources. For one thing, it was possible only in the summer. For another, the discretion that kept peasants from washing their ‘private parts’ militated even more strongly against taking off their clothes and plunging into the water.Footnote 49 Besides, open-air bathing was full of dangers, both real and imagined. Even reformers who touted the virtues of a good summer’s soaking urged caution in doing so, since the majority of peasants, who could not swim very well, risked drowning in a deep and fast-moving river or catching a fatal chill when they came out of the water.
Lingering suspicions about the effect of water on the human body were reflected in the very strict rules experts prescribed for safe bathing. Dr Des Vaulx dispensed the standard advice to his readers to avoid bathing ‘unless their stomachs were perfectly empty’, normally three hours after eating, or when the body was moist; and to stay out of water containing ‘corrupt and putrefied matter’ – a stagnant pond, for instance.Footnote 50 Ernestine Wirth, headmistress at a girls’ collège in the Aisne department, prudently counselled her pupils not to bathe when the sun was too strong or to climb into a strong current during a storm.Footnote 51
A clash of hygiene cultures
When the apostles of hygiene arrived in the countryside, therefore, they discovered not just ignorance but a fundamentally different set of attitudes and practices. Peasants appreciated strong smells, equating sweat and stench with robustness and fertility: ‘the product of a disposition inclined to procreation’, in the words of Dr de Bourdeu.Footnote 52 They believed in the curative power of dung and the prophylactic effect of a layer of dirt. They accepted that lice cleansed the blood of ‘bad humours’, that one should never wash an infant’s head, since grime helped protect the fontanel (the soft, membranous gaps in its young skull).Footnote 53
A serious disagreement about how to understand this native culture runs through the social science literature. Many reformers reacted with disgust and condescension, in the manner of economist Michel Augé-Laribé (1879–1954), who wrote that the nineteenth-century peasant simply had ‘not acquired the desire to be clean and … therefore accustomed himself to being dirty’.Footnote 54 Ethnographers and folklorists have tended to be more sympathetic to the exotic customs of nineteenth-century French rustics they describe. Thus, what Augé-Laribé, trained in law and dedicated to the modernisation of French agriculture, considered mere poverty and ignorance, anthropologist Françoise Loux sees as a different sensibility. In her view, washing is not so much an instrumental practice as it is a ritual. That is to say, peasant dirtiness did not represent the imperfect application of an incontestable principle: personal hygiene. It existed rather as ‘a complex system … where protection of the body and magical power are profoundly mixed together’ – for example, the young girls in the Brenne region who washed themselves in rose water at sunrise on May Day, in order to guarantee fresh and clear skin throughout the year. They were not practising hygiene in a way the twentieth century would recognise; nonetheless, their behavior was valid and coherent on its own terms.Footnote 55 There is no reconciling these two perspectives: the one critical, the other comprehending. They would agree on one thing, however: that people living rough on the land had little incentive to spend precious energy and resources on washing their bodies, since there was little prospect of keeping them very clean for very long.
Dirty clothes
‘It is beneath the rustic clothes of a farmer and not beneath the gilt of a courtier that strength and vigor of body will be found’, wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts.Footnote 56 Whatever the vigorous quality of farmers’ bodies, Rousseau was right about the rustic quality of their clothes. At the most intimate and immediate level, peasants dressed for work – and they worked almost all the time – in simple, durable, rough, and uncomfortable garments, produced at home or handed down from previous generations or the better-off classes. Clothes needed two essential qualities. First, they had to shield the body from the elements and ‘brusque changes in temperature’. Second, they had to hold up forever against the rigours of a hard life. That is why ‘the fabrics and the shapes do not vary’, as Théodore Chalmel explained, and a ‘piece of clothing lasts a lifetime’.Footnote 57
A typical man’s outfit consisted of a jacket, worn over a vest, on top of a shirt, and fashioned of ‘rude’ materials: trousers of hemp or canvas, shirts of wool or, less commonly, linen. ‘Coarse, but sturdy’, was Pierre Lévêque’s description of the typical outfit of agricultural workers in mid-century Burgundy.Footnote 58 Peasants favoured wool, irritating as it must have been against the skin, for its insulating effect and its ability to draw off moisture without getting so wet that it threatened to bring on a chill. The future belonged to cotton, of course, but until the end of the century that gentle fabric was reserved mostly for handkerchiefs, scarfs, and women’s headdresses. Trousers were sometimes held up by suspenders, more often with a belt made of wool and wrapped around the torso several times, in order both ‘to hold the pants and protect the abdomen [and the kidneys] against the cold’.
‘Saturated in sweat’ and covered in the local dirt, these garments were never washed, although they might be brushed off from time to time, and they were changed ‘as rarely as possible’. Many of those who worked on the land had nothing to replace them; besides, what sense did it make to soil a second set of clothes? Only on Sunday, or some other occasion that did not involve labour were working people in the country inclined to put on their ‘better’ clothes. Then again, while ‘Sunday’ suits did not get dirty in the same way as work clothes, they were not much likelier to get washed. Shoes were a small luxury.Footnote 59
Underwear in the modern sense simply did not exist – at least not out in the country and not in the middle of the nineteenth century.Footnote 60 Instead, peasant men wore leggings of fustian or wool. Like the rough blouses that covered the torso, these would absorb a certain amount of ‘the impurities excreted through the skin’, but at the price of ceaseless chafing and itching. Wool socks that ‘made their own contribution to excessive and incommodious’ sweatiness completed the daily ensemble of the average rural labourer.
Women wore skirts instead of trousers, of course, but their clothes were made out of the same materials: shirts and skirts of thick, rough cloth; aprons of even thicker, rougher fabric, wool stockings, and clogs.Footnote 61 Dr Des Vaulx, writing in 1873, noted the ‘revolution’ in clothing that was on its way, based on the expanding use in the countryside of softer fabrics like linen and cotton. In areas with a lot of out-migration habits changed faster, as seasonal workers returned home with clothes they had bought – or been given – in the city for themselves and their wives. However, most paysannes at mid-century would still have dressed like their mothers and grandmothers.
Two separate features of a countrywoman’s wardrobe stand out. First, like their menfolk, peasant women did not wear proper underwear, but rather an ‘accumulation of skirts supporting the waist and forming a heavy and disgraceful bumper [bourrelet] at the base of the thorax’. Without any sort of bloomers or other protection, both cold and heat easily penetrated the ‘lower regions’, leading, doctors warned, to ‘infections … and frequent menstrual problems’.Footnote 62
If the paysanne’s legs were bare, however, her torso was doubly reinforced by a corset. Naturally, this did not resemble the whale-boned, waist-pinching corset of the urban bourgeoisie. It offered suppler support for a working woman’s upper body, keeping her internal organs warm and in place while helping her breathing. The rural corset, like the rest of a countrywoman’s ensemble, had nothing to do with coquetry and everything to do with the practicalities of toil.
Dirty surroundings
Standards of cleanliness applied to skin and clothes were simply the most intimate part of the larger economy of hygiene that characterised life in the countryside, where dirty bodies lived in dirty houses set in dirty villages. Waves of reformers recoiled at hamlets ‘wrapped in suffocating stinks’, with roads full of stagnant water, polluted by runoff from adjacent dung heaps (fumiers) and littered with the excreta of animals and even humans.Footnote 63 In the Breton commune of Saint-Père Marc-en-Poulet (Ille-et-Vilaine), for example, rain turned streets – ‘paved’ with straw, reeds, and ferns – into ‘nauseating cesspools’.Footnote 64 It would be easy to multiply such descriptions.
Of particular concern to those who worried about rural hygiene were the fumiers that dotted village landscapes. Manure is a ubiquitous and essential piece of the agricultural ecology, so there is no surprise in the general tolerance for it or the widespread belief in its benefits, even aside from its fertilising qualities. ‘This filth’, wrote Agricole Perdiguier, ‘this muck, so despised in cities, is … a treasure to which we owe the most precious and beneficial things, and those most pleasant to the senses of smell and taste.’ ‘On the judgment day’, it was said, ‘shit will be worth more than money.’Footnote 65
The safest and most productive fumiers would be found at a distance from people’s homes and, in particular, from their water supply, and there would be some means to control the liquid runoff – the purin – that contained most of the nutrients in the manure and that most easily penetrated through the soil and into the ground water or flowed into the streets and ponds. Yet what hygienists found when they visited the peasantry was a depressing and dangerous casualness: dung heaps piled higgledy-piggledy in courtyards – or, even worse, right outside doors and below windows, where one might expect to see flowerbeds – filling peasants’ houses with ‘disagreeable and harmful odors’.Footnote 66 It is difficult to find a contemporary depiction of a French village that did not condemn the state of the fumiers.
As disagreeable as city-dwelling reformers found the smell of manure, they were more concerned by the pollution of the water supply, since this posed the greater threat to public health. Peasants were remarkably insouciant when it came to mingling their dung and their water. The village of Les Andelys (Eure), for instance, had three ponds where villagers washed their clothes and whose water reputedly made the best cider in the region: each one had a manure pile sitting beside it.Footnote 67 Even near the end of the century, Henri Baudrillart described Angevin villages with ‘stacks of fumiers [without pits to collect the purin] leaking on every side into the ponds where the cattle drank’.Footnote 68
And not only the cattle. Even if peasants did not take their water directly out of fetid, polluted ponds and puddles, as their animals did, they sometimes dug wells next to dung heaps and stables, from which urine and purin seeped into their own drinking water.Footnote 69 The effect of dirty water on morbidity and mortality in the countryside was multiplied by what agronomist Max Le Couppay de la Forest called the peasants’ ‘almost criminal’ indifference to the quality of what they drank.Footnote 70
Remembering his boyhood home in the Touraine, Leopold Mabilleau wrote of one neighbour who had a dung pit in his courtyard that leached into his well, sickening his animals and even his family. Concerned, the neighbour consulted an architect, who announced it would cost three thousand francs to seal off the well from the pit. The peasant recoiled at the enormity of the expense. He resigned himself to losing an animal or two a year to bad water and to spending ‘a serious sum’ to care for the members of his family who might get sick. It was cheaper than fixing the well.Footnote 71
Whole populations consumed nothing but dirty water. Peasants used cisterns and reservoirs to try to collect whatever rainwater fell, without thereby being able to satisfy their own needs or those of their livestock. In the small village of Meriheu in Languedoc, recalled Pierre Manse, there was plenty of rain. But it quickly ran off the clay soil into the rivers and streams, leaving only shallow, stagnant ponds behind, and hot summers left peasants without reliable supplies of water for months. In those hard times, as in a scene out of a Marcel Pagnol novel, the peasants often loaded up their carts and took their barrels to be filled in the public fountain in the nearby town of Bagnères, where on Sunday the curé led a prayer for rain. What water they had was mostly saved for drinking and cooking; there was little left over for washing.Footnote 72
Dirty homes
The houses that surrounded these dry puddles and leaky piles of manure did not provide much respite from the dirt. Sources describe a substantial range of peasant abodes, varying by region, local building materials, and the economic circumstances of the inhabitants. Jeanne Deneboude-Soulet remembered the house in the Aveyron where she was born, built in 1879, as ‘rather bourgeois’. It had a main floor with two storage rooms, a dining area, and a kitchen opening on to a garden and laundry; on the second floor, five rooms, and an attic above.Footnote 73 But this must count as an exception. The quarters where most country people grew up remained cramped, dark, smoky, humid, and foul. ‘Every child I knew’, remembered Eugène Kammerer, who spent his childhood on the Île de Ré, off the West Coast of France, near La Rochelle,
lived in a house with cracked walls covered in soot, with holes so big the sparrows could come and go as they pleased. A cross in the wall covered in oil paper was wide enough to be able to look out on the duck who played in the muck or to smell the stink of the pond where rainwater mixed with the runoff from the dung heaps piled up in the streets.Footnote 74
Travelling the French countryside at the end of the Old Regime, and comparing what he saw there to conditions in his native England, Arthur Young had written disparagingly of the low quality of the dwellings. Things were much the same a half-century later. Some corners of the Auvergne found peasants living in structures that ‘were not even shacks but mere sheds … so steeped in misery that the inhabitants burned straw to warm themselves’.Footnote 75 In the Jura and the Basses-Alpes, the hills were dotted with wood cabanas covered in grass, with only a small hole in the ceiling for the smoke to escape, like ‘eskimo huts’. Poor chimneys – or no chimneys at all – remained a particular hazard in many peasant dwellings, helping to kill the youngest inhabitants and blind the older ones.
Without the means to cart heavy building materials across any great distance, peasants built their homes from local resources. In the Touraine some people lived in carved-out rocks – primitive in one respect, but more solid and drier than much of the rural housing stock. In the high villages of the Auzat, in the Ariège, the houses were all built of slate, from floor to roof.Footnote 76 The worst abodes were virtually prehistoric, like the circular huts of the Auvergne and the Velay. The best ones, as in the Ardennes, had thick stone walls and slate roofs. In the Pyrénées, thatched roofs were most common. Ironically, the most solid structures often proved to be the dirtiest, as they also tended to be the oldest. Before 1870 in the Limousin, one house in three was more than a century old.Footnote 77 Ethnologist Albert Goursaud compares the houses there to sheepfolds – dark and dank, revoltingly dirty – with the children, the dog, the goat, and the fowl ‘lying about pell-mell’.Footnote 78
A simple but reliable rule of thumb emerges from the many descriptions of nineteenth-century peasant housing: the quality of housing deteriorated from east to west and from north to south; from the plains to the mountains, and from peasant proprietors to common labourers.Footnote 79 The real menace to hygiene and health, however, lay within these unprepossessing exteriors. It would be an easy task to multiply by the dozens the shocking tableaus of peasant homes in the mid-nineteenth century. With houses often erected on impermeable soil in low-lying areas, if not beside actual swamps, walls dripped with moisture, bathing the interiors in a ‘pernicious humidity’. Stone walls and slate roofs provided a tighter barrier against the elements and a less welcome habitat for vermin than wood, daub, and thatch. But that only sealed in the humidity more effectively. Damp and cold in the winter, damp and hot in the summer, peasant homes were in desperate need of air and light. The reek of these ‘mausoleums’ must have been suffocating – the air ‘acrid and fetid, combining the smell of smoke, of rancid butter, moldy bread, worm-eaten wood, dirty clothes, and sweat’.Footnote 80
An era that still believed in the miasmic origins of disease had a particular sensitivity to smell, and so virtually all of those who turned their attention to the conditions of peasant life fixed on the toxicity of the atmosphere in these dwellings as the most serious threat to the health of inhabitants.Footnote 81 While it was easy to tell peasants they needed to brighten and aerate their homes, however, a sizeable majority of these structures lacked the ouvertures – the windows and doors – that would make such relief feasible. The scarcity and tiny size of doors and windows was no construction necessity but a response to the tax the state levied on them.Footnote 82 And the effects of this perverse incentive made themselves felt everywhere, from the ‘ridiculously small’ windows in heavy Breton farmhouses to dwellings in the Haute-Marne having only a single window composed of four tiny, dirty panes of glass. One study of the Charente at the turn of the nineteenth century found that 80 per cent of houses had but one window and one door; 3 per cent had no windows at all.Footnote 83 And at night or in the winter even these were tightly shut – which might not have been so bad, remarks Alain Corbin, ‘in view of the fetid odors that surrounded the habitation’.Footnote 84
An inquiry on the state of rural housing (1912) in several regional prefectures produced some grim statistics. In the countryside surrounding Limoges, Nîmes, and Besançon, few houses had more than four ouvertures. Many had only two, and a substantial number had only one opening for light and air to enter. Around Laon, in the Aisne department northeast of Paris, things were only slightly better.Footnote 85 A similar survey published by the Société d’hygiène publique de Bordeaux (1881) calculated the extent of the problem and its cost in mortality. Across France, the average number of doors and windows per capita was 1.49. Fifty-three departments, almost all in agricultural regions, had a lower figure, thirty-two a higher one. The survey collated these figures with health statistics and found unsurprisingly that mortality and morbidity were highest where ouvertures were fewest. The two prominent reformers who cited this study, Henry Napias and Alexandre Layet, drew the obvious conclusions: the government should eliminate the tax; in the meantime, peasants should ignore the law.Footnote 86
Sunlight shining through windows and doors, while it might have had some benign effect on the occupants of these lodgings, would have illuminated a gloomy interior scene. The typical peasant home consistent of one or two rooms: low, messy, crowded, and dirty. Layet offered this picture of a house in the Vosges, where,
the whole family lives, eats, sleeps almost pell-mell, without distinction of age or sex, inside walls smeared by smoke and filled with animal secretions. The furniture, in harmony with everything around it, consists for a big family of one or two sleeping pallets stuck in some dark, airless corner or under the stairs: a buffet or an armoire; a couple of chairs or wooden benches. The rest of the place dominated by a cast-iron stove, red hot and ready for cooking. Dirty house-rags, hanging on cords, occupy the rest of the space between the ceiling and the floor.Footnote 87
Small proprietors lived a bit better, with more space and more furniture. Agricultural labourers made do with less. Ragotte, the eponymous character in the Jules Renard novel, notes that at sixty years old she slept on a mattress for the first time; she had always had to make do with a thin feather quilt (coquette).Footnote 88
Even slightly better homes offered little in the way of comfort or propriety. Inhabitants got by with a minimum of furniture: ‘no armoire for storing linen, no comfortable bed, [only] a table, a couple of benches, and a trunk’ for most people; richer homes might add a sideboard on a dresser, a breadbox, and a stool for grandpa.Footnote 89 Without easy access to water, inhabitants used it ‘parsimoniously’, rinsing off plates and other cooking utensils in a shallow basin, or perhaps a hollow scraped into a stone sink, in whatever passed for a kitchen, then pouring the dirty water out into a ‘marshy and malodorous’ corner of a nearby field while saving the greasiest water for the pigs. The same shallow basin, with a pail of cold water nearby and a handy hole in the exterior wall for pouring out the dirty water, also served for simple ablutions after a day in the fields or at some other sweaty occupation.Footnote 90
In the virtually waterless world of the peasant home, and in spite of the countryside’s obvious familiarity with effluence and tolerance for strong smells, it made sense to keep the fosse d’aisance, the outhouse, at a polite distance from the living quarters. In fact, ‘outhouse’ is something of a misnomer, in so far as it implies a permanent, even if jerry-built, structure. To the end of the century, according to Guy Thuillier, outhouses remained rare in the countryside. The sources suggest that most peasants had something more primitive, if they had anything at all. Ethnologist Albert Goursaud describes peasants who had neither outhouses nor chamber pots, but who had to go outside in the middle of the night, ‘barefoot and in nightshirt, whatever wind might be blowing’, to answer nature’s nocturnal call. In his tour of the pays d’Othe (Aube), Foville wrote of ‘certain kiosks summarily built outside the house, at the end of the garden’, and the Fourastiés of wooden planks erected carelessly over a rudimentary wooden seat, hovering over a shallow hole. Many homes did not have even this. In lower Brittany, according to Gustave Tarlé, ‘fecal matter’ was hardly ever buried and was usually scattered a bit here and there. In the Limousin it ended up in the spaces next to the house served for piles of garbage and animal carcasses. In the Dombes, it was thrown to the swine and the cows. Other folks simply tossed it on the dung heap.Footnote 91
Back inside the house, dirt began with the floor. Some of the better homes had flagstones, or cement, or wooden planks ideally set a few inches above the earth. In the great majority of rural dwellings, however, bare feet trod on bare earth. Families used to these conditions might not have found them vexing. Pierre-Jakez Hélias had rather pleasant memories of the mud floor of his Breton youth: ‘Of course’, he wrote,
it’s cold when you sit on it with a bare behind, but it’s so easy to keep in good shape, it’s so easy to live with! No need to clean your sabots before coming in. The wet mud on your soles doesn’t dirty anything at all. Either it blends in with the rest or, once it’s dry, it is swept out with a branch of broom. You never feel uneasy about throwing bones on the floor or even scraps to the dog … One basin of water is enough to wash the whole thing down, and the mud floor feels all the better for it.Footnote 92
This was not exactly what Tarlé found in the Ille-et-Vilaine, where he described uneven dirt floors, scarred by little ravines filled with dirty water – the disorder made worse by the fact that nineteenth-century farmhouses did not always distinguish between human space and animal space.Footnote 93 In winter especially, propriety was often sacrificed to the need to keep warm. Public-health doctor Louis Dujardin wrote of Hélias’ native province that a wall commonly separated homes from stables. But this is not the testimony from other sources, which describe ‘men, women, children, and quadrupeds’ living in ‘deplorable promiscuity’ under the same roof, with pigs grunting and cows ruminating behind a low partition, livestock tainting the atmosphere and filling the air with flies – not just in Brittany but across the country. In the Roussillon, according to ethnologist Albert Babeau, villagers not only piled manure outside their doors, but lived with their pigs. In the Périgord, they shared their houses with the goats and chickens. In the Auvergne, living space was divided in three: to the right, the stable; to the left, the barn; in the middle, connected directly to both, the peasant lodgings. In the Haute-Marne, remembered Joseph Cressot, pigs were not only allowed in the house but were considered ‘worthy’ of the privilege.Footnote 94
Moreover, as we have seen above in the case of voracious pigs, even where the henhouse, the rabbit warren, and the pigsty did not open immediately onto the peasants’ living quarters, the animals often came and went with casual ease.Footnote 95 Albin Mazon, the journalist-turned-historian who wrote his celebrated ‘Voyages’ series under the pen name Docteur Francus, left us the most lapidary description of relations between the species in the isolated farmhouses of the Haute-Loire: ‘They consist of only one room’, he wrote ‘[where] men and beasts live fraternally; the former eat the latter.’Footnote 96
The proximity of livestock was not the only troubling promiscuity in the typical peasant home. Sleeping conditions in these crowded and undifferentiated spaces excited quite as much concern among reformers as the mixing of peasant and livestock. This centred first of all in the sheer lack of hygiene in the habits and material culture of sleep. Gilbert Garrier writes of young shepherds in the 1870s sleeping on the straw alongside their lambs. Joseph Cressot’s father Philippe had to sleep on a straw pallet, waking up in the morning only to find that the sheep had eaten his ‘bed’. In the Brie Pierre-Edouard Vialhe’s labourers slept on the floor of the damp old stable, each one ‘wallowing in his own muck’.Footnote 97
It is difficult to imagine what counted for comfort and rest in these dank, verminous hovels, where the day’s smoke filled the lungs at night. No wonder public-health authorities considered them the perfect breeding grounds for tuberculosis. The distance between houses meant the disease was unlikely to spread from family to family, as it did in the crowded towns, but within the country foyer it could not have found a more propitious setting.
A typical arrangement would have one big bed for the parents, whose privacy, such as it was, came from the heavy curtains that hung around it. The Bretons were particularly renowned for their ‘lits clos’ – virtually rooms of their own – widely condemned for providing a welcoming home to the tiny creatures that proliferated inside most homes and for preventing the penetration of air and light that might have had some sanitising effect. ‘The individuals who slept there’, wrote Maréschal,
often several together, rarely change their linen and never bathe, even after they climb out of some muddy ditch where they’ve been working – or into which they’ve fallen when drunk. To complete this picture, let us add that the duvet and the pillows are made from rolled up oats, the sheets, always too short, from the coarsest fabric, and the cover from raw wool.Footnote 98
‘Every bed has fleas’, noted the Corsican proverb, and this could not have been far from the literal truth.Footnote 99
Scattered around the main bed on the floor would be three or four – up to ten, according to one study of the Morvan – miserable paillasses; that is, pallets with a thin mattress on top. The parish archives of Le Vigen in the Limousin described one house with four beds for eleven people: ‘And what beds! Above one [sat] a chicken roost, under another a tumble of all sorts of objects, under a third a rabbit cage, and next to the beds in a corner of the room a spot for feeding the dogs and plucking the fowl.’Footnote 100
The mattresses themselves, universally described as appalling and unquestionably uncomfortable, were ordinarily handmade affairs, with some rough sacking stuffed with various materials – feathers, straw, hay, distaff, horsehair – replenished every few months and rotting in the meantime. Babeau reckoned that feather mattresses dominated in the northeast, while Bretons slept on hemp or horsehair sacks stuffed with tillage, for the poorest among them.Footnote 101 The older generation, if any survived, would find themselves exiled to a paillasse in some corner or alcove, which, if it were near the fireplace, would at least be warm.
On top of the beds, the bedding. More prosperous peasant households might contain an armoire filled with extra sheets and blankets. Indeed, extra linen was often the mark and pride of a well-to-do peasant family. Poorer families, the majority in most regions, slept on sheets and under blankets that were rarely changed and seldom washed more than once or twice a year. Consider that bedding was in daily contact with bodies and clothes that themselves were generally caked in dirt and sweat, and it is easy to imagine the deplorable state of hygiene in which country folk took their rest from hard and unceasing labour. Most people slept in the same clothes they had worn during the day. Some of those at the bottom of the social ladder, agricultural labourers, commonly went to bed ‘tout habillés’ – that is, wearing all their clothes – on straw in the barn. But even the majority, who spent their nights in a bed, ‘knew nothing’ about nightshirts and ‘were hardly less dressed at night than during the day’.Footnote 102
Neither was dirt accumulated during the day mitigated by any sort of bedtime toilette. In a domestic world where water was scarce and objets de toilette ‘perfectly unknown’, a splash of cold water on hands and face was the standard end-of-day lavation. Household inventories for the Ile-et-Vilaine in the first part of the century reveal the lack of virtually any material culture of hygiene: ‘Basins and water bowls were completely absent from these one-room dwellings’, remarked Jacques de Cambry. ‘Toothbrushes and nail files seem completely unheard of.’Footnote 103
Public-health reformers had begun to preach the virtues of oral hygiene in the countryside, but these efforts usually knocked up against the peasants’ ‘utter indifference’ to any such routine and the total deficiency of brushes and dentifrice. The consequences of this inattention to clean teeth did not escape the notice of contemporaries. Dr Jean-Baptiste Fonssagrives, for example, deplored the ‘greenish fungal vegetation’ that grew around peasant teeth. Army doctor Théodore Garnier-Léteurrie described the scurvy, gangrene, and cancer he found in the mouths of many recruits. The tooth-pullers who were a fixture of country fairs, and the folk wisdom surrounding bad teeth likewise spoke to the grim state of dental care in the countryside.Footnote 104
Finally, as the agents of rural improvement peered in on sleeping families, they found more to worry about than bedbugs and tuberculosis. The lack of privacy in these crowded dwellings – which necessarily meant that when the parents had sex, everyone knew about it – and the need to share beds, which often led to young brothers and sisters sleeping side by side, posed an ongoing threat to innocence and morality. In the warm weather, some of the family might sleep outdoors. While this might spare the more delicate sensibilities, however, it exposed them to colds and other respiratory ailments that might kill them.Footnote 105
Conclusion
What can we conclude from this snapshot of rural life? The look and the feel and the odour of peasant existence were rooted in old practices and cultural understandings of hygiene. Nineteenth-century French farmers did not, of course, experience the dirt and the stink as some sort of horrible anomaly, as we would, if we were suddenly deprived of clean clothes, indoor toilets, and a good supply of fresh water. Accommodations with the inevitable were built into the culture. Peasants lived with a different economy of the body; they were, in some sense, used to the smell and the itch – to the sheer discomfort of life. It is easy to guess that they did not enjoy having lice in their shirts and fleas in their beds, but also that they must have thought about it as they thought about capriciousness of the weather or the chances of early death or the endless days of hard labour: both unfortunate and unavoidable.
While there is no denying the hard realities of agrarian life, it is worth wondering to what extent the picture of peasant ignorance and dirt drawn by so many reformers cited above was coloured by the condescension, if not the outright contempt, of educated city people observing rough country people. Recall Maréschal’s remarks about ‘the dirtiness and savage ignorance’ of the Bretons or the insulting depictions left by doctors Chavigny and Munaret, among others. The peasants, if they could speak directly for themselves, would surely use different words to describe their circumstances.
At the same time, patronising language aside, the images passed on by nineteenth-century hygienists seem broadly accurate. Even sympathetic observers describe the same dire conditions. Indeed, in those few cases when people who actually grew up on the land left us their memories of the experience – those memories convey the same impressions of the cold, dirt, and discomfort of everyday life on the land.Footnote 106 Indirect evidence, contained in surveys or implicit in the statistics on the broken bodies of army recruits, tells the same story. The archives, where we are most likely to hear the authentic voices of the peasants, contain exactly the same details of everyday rural existence as the reports of the reformers.Footnote 107
Still, we can insist too much on the common misery of rural life, as it came to the nineteenth century from the long and unhappy past, and miss both the variety of country lives and the ways in which that pivotal century mixed the old ways with the new. For one thing, the very presence of crusading doctors and amateur hygienists points to cracks in the timeless wall of fatalism and inertia. Their efforts to ‘improve’ the peasants seldom met with immediate success. Despite their grumbles about the immovability of the peasantry, however, the peasantry was beginning to move.
For another, while living standards were almost always poor in the villages and hamlets across France, they were not equally poor in every case. The sources invariably testify to substantial variations in conditions, according to region and according to social class. If the Bretons lived in particular squalor, if peasants in the Midi or the Alps tended to live in smaller, darker, smokier houses, descriptions of material life and cultural practices in the North and the East were, by and large, less dreadful. The houses were sturdier, the roofs more solid, the floors more frequently laid with wood or stone, the ouvertures bigger and more numerous, the livestock further from the humans. Even within a single region, as Jean-Claude Farcy makes clear in his massive study, circumstances could change dramatically from one end of the Beauce to the other.Footnote 108
Another look at the state of peasant recruits captures the variety of experience across both geography and time. A map of exemptions for insufficient height at mid-century divides the country virtually in half, with the ‘black departments’ of the west and southwest producing much higher numbers of exemptés than those of the north and east. At the same time, the army’s figures also show a significant decline in the overall proportion of rejected conscripts throughout the century.Footnote 109
Moreover, whatever the general state of hygiene in this or that part of France, some people lived cleaner, more comfortable lives than others. Naturally, it was in the homes and on the bodies of the better-off classes that change first appeared. But the amenities and practices of the peasant middle classes quickly became the aspirations of smallholders and agricultural labourers. And while the agricultural proletariat lived especially deprived lives, other elements in the villages had it better. The agrarian middle classes lived in bigger houses, with superior access to the available comforts: warmer clothes, cleaner linen, decent mattresses, and a degree of privacy. Above them, the most prosperous peasants would have more and better everything, along with extra domestic labour. Rural society was steeply hierarchical.Footnote 110
Nobody had toothbrushes or indoor plumbing, of course. That remained three or four generations away.Footnote 111 Nevertheless, the relatively privileged elements in the countryside set the example for their less-fortunate neighbours. Domestic workers in those households brought new ideas and higher expectations back to working-class homes. The same was true of the many young men who went off to the Army, along with young women who left to work in the cities, and then returned to their villages.
The result was a slow but inexorable virtuous circle. Ethnographer Jacqueline Tardivon concludes her rather dismal tour of material culture in the Brenne region with the arrival of ‘the most modern lifestyles’ by 1900. In a similar fashion, economist Henri Baudrillart finishes his discussion of the Poitou (1888) by praising ‘the notable progress in the habits of cleanliness and hygiene among the majority of the population’.Footnote 112 In the Nivernais, according to Guy Thuillier, efforts to teach peasants to keep dung heaps at a distance from homes and wells, along with money spent by the prefects to build public latrines and baths and even to bring spring water to the villages had brought perceptible improvements in public health by the end of the 1800s.Footnote 113 Even by 1866 the Enquête sur le travail agricole et industriel reported rural labourers being ‘better housed, better fed, and better dressed’.Footnote 114 Similar signs of progress were discernible across the country.
What was true of housing was equally true of other indicators of better hygiene in the countryside. The slow advance of rural incomes after 1850 meant that people were able to wear warmer and more comfortable clothes. Garments of hemp and wool marked a substantial improvement from the canvas pants and jackets that had been common in the first half of the century. In backwards Brittany, as well as in more prosperous Normandy, Baudrillart wrote in 1885, ‘consumption of wool is on the rise’ and the greater variety of fabrics ‘is making for the more frequent replacement’ of worn out attire. As lighter fabrics like linen, and especially cotton, became cheaper, the progress they made through agricultural society further eased the plague of itching and chafing and vermin. Household linen likewise began to multiply among the peasants, especially smaller items like handkerchiefs, napkins, and tablecloths.Footnote 115
It was thus in the French countryside that the longue durée of primitive hygiene began to respond to the new pace of history that would change peasant lives so profoundly in the modern era. If nineteenth-century reformers painted an unflattering portrait of rural hygiene, the facts they collected also suggest the ways in which the future of country life would soon be different from its past. They serve to remind us of both the wretched state of material existence on the brink of the industrial age and of the coming progress of the human condition.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the University of Vermont and the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars (Fulbright Association), as well as the excellent work of my research assistant, Samantha Sullivan.
