Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut by Elizabeth Amann (review)

The title of Elizabeth Amann’s admirable study may mislead. Notwithstanding its use of ‘Revolution’ in the singular without the definite article, the established association of dandyism with Barbey d’Aurevilly and Baudelaire encourages the expectation, at least in a French context, that her discussion will focus on the nineteenth century, an assumption left intact by the vagueness of her subtitle. Yet, although Barbey’s 1845 essay is recalled in her Introduction and ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ is succinctly analysed in her Epilogue, Amann’s principal concern is with successive phases of the Revolution of 1789. As such, her book takes its place with other recent studies that have demonstrated the revelatory potential of the hitherto largely neglected popular literary and cultural production of the 1790s. Fully versed especially in the revisionist historiography of the Revolution, her avowedly counter-intuitive thesis — that dandyism was an attempt to define a middle ground between the competing extremes of Terror and counter-Revolution — is developed principally from the perspective of the social and political historian. The first three of her substantive chapters are devoted in turn to the muscadins, the jeunes gens, and the incroyables (or collets noirs). Dress as such is not her subject, although it is necessary for her purpose to situate the dandy’s attire (and hairstyles) within the context of the shift from ‘determinist’ to ‘expressive’ views of clothing. Instead, the self-fashioning by these figures and the conflicting ways in which they were represented in assorted newspaper articles, pamphlets, stage plays, and visual caricatures are analysed in terms of what Amann calls three different kinds of ‘imagination’: respectively, the ‘paranoid’, the ‘catastrophic’, and the ‘anachronistic’. With impressive dexterity, she succeeds in identifying the ways in which these imaginations frequently overlapped without causing them to lose their pertinence. Her illustrative examples are both diverse and illuminating, encompassing such matters as the accusations of draft-dodging levelled at the muscadins, the furore provoked by the disruption by jeunes gens of Périn and Cammaille’s comedy Le Concert de la rue Feydeau (1795), and the unexpectedly complex controversy surrounding the proliferation of representations of women wearing blond wigs. The self-fashioning by the incroyable is shown to be anything but apolitical, while the attention paid to the contrasting figure of the croyable brings a new dimension to the picture. In short, all these seemingly eccentric figures are repositioned at the heart of contemporary political debate. The equally compelling Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to the Spanish currutacos and the English crops. The Epilogue traces briefly the ‘afterlife of revolutionary dandyism’ (p. 201) with the aid of Balzac’s Traité de la vie élégante and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, in addition to ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, though without noting Balzac’s inclusion of an incroyable in Les Chouans, first published shortly before his Traité. The absence of a bibliography is irksome, but there is abundant bibliographical information in the extensive and invaluable endnotes. The material presentation is excellent, apart from numerous superfluous acute accents on the letter ‘e’.