Abstract
Reviewed by: R. J. Arnold, Birkbeck, University of London
For scholars of the cultural history of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution exerts a powerful, possibly dangerous, allure. Those labouring over an account of ceramics, botany, or chamber music are to be forgiven for seeing the Revolution as a means of demonstrating relevance or adding glamour; but the urge to prove that one’s particular special subject enjoyed its own type of revolution can distract from the sober elaboration of truths. Some may force their material too vigorously into before-and-after structures, arguing that the political revolution heralded also the birth of modernity in their particular area of study, and brushing aside evidence of continuity, conservatism or complexity. Others may do little more than set events in their field alongside key revolutionary journées, hoping that temporal proximity will do the job of suggesting causation or implication. Such efforts have, as a whole, contributed to our understanding both of the ways that the Revolution reached into the fabric of daily life, and of the deep cultural factors that helped undermine the certainties of the old regime; but within each individual study, the meaningful weaving together of the cultural and political requires finesse, and is rarely achieved satisfactorily.
This somewhat disobliging introduction intends to throw into sharp relief the assertion that Colin Jones is one of those rare exceptions. What makes The Smile Revolution so remarkable is that, within the confines of a concise and accessible study, he tells a coherent story without in any sense soft-pedalling on the complications of cultural history; indeed, it is precisely those complications that make his account so compelling. Jones’s point of departure is a self-portrait by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, displayed at the Paris Salon of 1787 and on the cover of this volume. The painting aroused antipathy on account of a centimetre or so of exposed teeth – demure by modern standards, but condemned at the time for its apparent mockery of classical artistic convention. Jones is too deft a historian to chalk up this rupturing of tradition as a sort of storming of the artistic Bastille: in his discussion of the incident later in the book, he makes it clear that the portrait elicited a range of views, and that toothy smiles had figured in French art well before, making the fuss over Vigée Le Brun’s teeth more of a multivalent struggle around genre than a clash between rebellion and reaction.
The overall trajectory of this study shows the same appreciation of nuance, avoiding the temptation to point everything firmly towards 1789. The open-mouthed smile, Jones argues, did not emerge in a blaze of enamel in 1787, or any other date, but rather danced in and out of the shadows; and its final emergence, far from teaching the world how to smile, as the back cover blurb insists, was transient indeed. Jones begins in the gloomy latter decades of the reign of Louis XIV, where smiling found little favour amid the piety, the sombre ritual, the press of business and, not least, the horrifying maxillofacial sufferings of the king himself. The gaiety of the Regency allowed at least an experimental glimpse of the smile – in, notably, the work of Jean-Antoine Watteau – but it proved a false dawn: the court culture of Louis XV, modelled to a large extent on that of his great-grandfather, emphasized decorous control of emotion and individuality behind a mask of elaborate costume and make-up. It was the complex working out of the culture of sensibility during the mid-century, Jones contends, that loosened these strictures, allowing the spread of a ‘smile of the soul’ – something less joyful, but evidently more acceptable, than the naughty, hedonistic grins of the Regency. Under the Revolution, faces of frowning determination or righteous anger made the smile seem at best inappropriately light-hearted, at worst counter-revolutionary – an interpretation underlined by accounts of aristocrats smiling on the steps to the guillotine. As Revolution shaded into Empire, this political seriousness became generalized into a new code of masculine sobriety, eschewing sartorial display and relegating the smile to the female sphere.
Especially in his first two chapters, Jones dances nimbly through a number of topics that will be familiar to anyone who has dabbled in French cultural history of this period – the portraiture of Louis XIV, handbooks of conduct and manners, the comédie larmoyante, the rise of the novel, the genre paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze. It is a testimony to Jones’s powers that he can revisit this varied material while remaining firmly astride his theme, without either boring the experienced reader, or scaring those new to the topic. But what gives The Smile Revolution real bite is that Jones marries this to the untold story of the development of French dentistry. From the carnivalesque culture of the charlatan tooth-pullers of the Pont Neuf, he traces the rapid professionalization and medicalization of the trade: by the second half of the century, French dentistry was the envy of the world – an achievement capped by the creation of porcelain dentures in the same year as Vigée Le Brun’s controversial portrait. After the Revolution, the dismantling of the medical establishment reversed the specialization that had produced such prestigious chirurgien-dentistes in the old regime.
Jones neatly knits these cultural and medical strands together, suggesting both that improvements in dental hygiene encouraged people to open their mouths and be portrayed doing so, and that developments in dental technology were driven by the growing acceptance of open smiles. For a work preoccupied with appearances and representations, and in particular warmth and good humour, it is appropriate that The Smile Revolution is written with congeniality, laced with wit and richly illustrated. The rigours of tone, register and length imposed by the broad readership Jones has in his sights have served only to sharpen the relevance and impact of his text: instead of wallowing in his material, he has been forced to visit it with a beady eye, refining his conclusions down to their most toothsome essence.