The Force of Beauty: Transforming French Ideas of Femininity in the Third Republic by Holly Grout (review)

‘Être belle, n’est-ce pas un devoir toujours?’ asks the vicomtesse Nacla in her Boudoir: conseils d’élégance (Paris: Flammarion, 1896, p. vi). Indeed it is, according to the many writers (self-appointed beauty countesses, etiquette specialists, hygienists, and healthcare professionals) whose published advice and commentary shaped standards of feminine beauty in nineteenth-century France. A focus on beauty as devoir (both duty and work) motivates Holly Grout’s three-part study of women and identity construction during the Third Republic. Analysing a wide range of texts and images, Grout observes that the dramatic shift in standards of beauty during this era reveals changing attitudes about how to work on beauty, and how beauty works. Although beauty clearly remains something to be taught, learned, managed, and advertised, its significance is also increasingly questioned by the very women who buy into its construction. In her Introduction, Grout notes that the comtesse de Norville’s Les Coulisses de la beauté: comment la femme séduit (Paris: Ampleman, 1895), like other self-help books of the era, endorses the importance of physical appearance as a reflection of social status, good character, and moral hygiene. In contrast, decades later, Sylvie’s Comment je fais ma beauté (Paris: Éditions de la femme de France, 1937) emphasizes the importance of beauty as self-expression rather than as an effort to please. To trace this shift from performance for others to ‘a personal process of becoming’ (p. 2), Grout mines print advertisements, women’s magazines, and trade manuals, along with selected paintings and novels of the late nineteenth century. The book’s second part zooms in on some of Colette’s best-known fiction (La Vagabonde (Paris: Ollendorf, 1910), Chéri (Paris: Fayard, 1920)) as well as less-studied music-hall short stories, interviews, and articles for Vogue and Femina. In a chapter on Colette’s role as beauty entrepreneur, Grout discusses what is at stake for a writer who launches a cosmetics line, concluding that, as tools for restoration and transformation in Colette’s life and work, ‘the writing pen and the eyebrow pencil were not so very different’ (p. 126). Turning from the New Woman to the ‘girl of today’, Grout devotes the last chapters to depictions of beauty pageants in print and film, reading Augusto Genina’s early sound film Prix de beauté (1930) as a reflection of contradictions inherent in the simultaneous glorification and commodification of beauty contestants. Grout’s analysis of visual media effectively complements her close readings of written texts. A few of the key images are reprinted in the book; the rest can be tracked down with a bit of online sleuthing. The final chapter makes especially clear one of the main strengths of this study: Grout never asserts that the liberating aspects of beauty work override or cancel the limitations that the force of beauty imposes on women. Nor does she impose false connections among the contradictory views revealed in her investigation. By welcoming her subject’s inherent dissonance, Grout convincingly shows that the construction of beauty was, and still is, serious business.