Selling Beauty: Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750–1830

• 2. A Market for Beauty: The Production of Cosmetics
• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 32-51
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CHAPTER TWO

A Market for Beauty

The Production of Cosmetics

Merchants in shops … are entrepreneurs who buy at a set price and who resell in their stores or in public places at an uncertain price. What encourages and maintains these types of entrepreneurs is that consumers … will pay a little more to buy what they need in retail. —Richard Cantillon, Essai sur la nature du commerce

Cantillon’s 1755 essay on commerce posited the development of a consumer public that looked to fulfill their needs in the stores of entrepreneurs selling both necessities and luxuries such as cosmetics. His basic understanding of supply and demand reflects an eighteenth-century shift in market representations. Enlightenment ideals stressed the need for “production, free trade, and a balanced budget … Consumption would no longer be decided by rank, but by the market.”¹ Mercantilism, guild protectionism, monopoly, and product control were slowly being replaced by laissez-faire, independent producers, free enterprise, and consumer choices. In this shift, the essential relationship was between the buyer and the seller, rather than within guilds or privileged bodies. The change in the eighteenth century was not only in market perception, but in its function. At the end of the century, the increase in buyers of cosmetics transformed the retail world and the relationship between sellers and buyers.

Like all merchants of nonessentials, cosmetic entrepreneurs had to learn to sell their goods in a freer market that catered to increasingly savvy and demanding customers. As we have seen, men and women of the upper and middle classes no longer made all their own cosmetic products at home but turned to purchasing them in stores. At the same time, artisans and servants began to purchase luxury and fashion goods, which had been previously limited to the elites. These intertwined developments enlarged the possibilities for commerce. Artisans had to increase the scope of their offerings and lower their prices to cater to both the shopping elite and the working classes. Producers responded to consumer demand and helped create it. The close-knit world of Parisian trades conceived and created the populuxe goods, which altered the lives of those who made them as much as those who bought them. Sellers of cosmetics helped make available products at reasonable prices, sold in accessible locations, and appealed to a diverse consumer base. The development of a responsive and reactive production economy was essential for creating a consumer society. A consumer revolution may have occurred before the Industrial Revolution, but, without the conscious interaction of supply and demand, the desire to consume would have had no outlet or shape.

The “bazaar economy” of the late eighteenth century consisted of a hodgepodge of artisanal goods, not yet industrialized, but no longer strictly based on systems of patronage and guild monopoly. Luxuries aimed at the elite were sold alongside reproductions fabricated with cheaper materials or ingredients. Artisans continued to work within guild regulations by providing the quality and tradition associated with luxury goods. But, as Gail Bossenga shows, guilds were “transformed by merchants into flexible instruments that served mercantile interests in the competitive world of commercial capitalism.”² Manufacturers often ignored or broke from guild strictures to make a diversity of cheap populuxe goods available to the larger public of buyers.³ Cosmetics made ideal populuxe consumer products because they could be manufactured without large expense, and their perishable nature meant constant demand. The techniques for producing cosmetics were widely available in manuals or through oral tradition, and little capital was required to enter the trade. Such conditions made it largely impossible for the guilds to control prices, quality, and output. The possibility of quick and easy financial profit attracted numerous noncorporate sellers, who promoted the purchase of their goods over homemade production. The growing demand for affordable luxuries, the decline of guild monopolies, and the ease with which cosmetics could be manufactured encouraged the development of a thriving market for fards and perfumes. In turn, the creation of new forms of production and selling further promoted consumer demand, encouraging people to shop for their needs and desires. Though still functioning within artisanal modes of production and the structures of guild finance, the commerce of cosmetics at the end of the century expanded its scope and established new selling methods. Those producers who separated themselves from the guild structure and branded their name and image as accessible to all consumers succeeded in the highly competitive world of the beauty trades.

Creating a Free Market: The Perfumers’ Guild and Its Rivals

The transformation of the public from producers to consumers and the entrance of the working classes into the market profoundly affected the professional production of cosmetics. With cosmetics’ newfound popularity came competition among sellers, pitting those with guild privileges against those without, with each hoping to make a profit from artifice. Under guild rules, the manufacture and sale of goods was traditionally controlled by masters. The guilds of perfumers, mercers, wigmakers, vinegar makers, and apothecaries monopolized different facets of the toilette. As products and their fabrication evolved, guilds were unable to control the illicit production and sale of goods, as well as the publication of secrets, by a diverse set of independent entrepreneurs. Yet it was precisely this race—pursued by both guild members and illegal producers—to dominate constantly changing fashions that turned the commerce of cosmetics into a thriving, innovative branch of the larger luxury market.

Under the corporate system of the Old Regime, each guild’s council supervised goods for price and quality. Guild regulations were meant to foster equality of enterprise for the seller and safety for the buyer.⁴ Regulations also limited the number of masters and ensured profits for those who gained this valued title. The guilds’ overall concern was to maintain skills, rights, and morality. Luxury trades, however, held a privileged position within the hierarchy of professions. They supplied the aristocracy with finery, and their members could become quite wealthy. Michael Sonenscher argues that the luxury trades represented both labor diversification and potential commercial innovations outside guild control. Artisans from different professions worked together to make sumptuous chinoiserie and textiles for the French court and nobility. Because of the diversity of tasks and the patronage of the aristocracy, makers of luxury goods were free to negotiate prices, to set levels of quality, and to gain financial wealth.⁵

Cosmetics, however, did not necessitate large outputs of labor or capital and were not sold solely to the aristocracy. Yet cosmetics producers were as much a part of the commercialization of luxury as other manufacturers. Though their profits were never as high as furniture makers, their customer base had greater potential. One reason for their commercial potential was that cosmetics never truly functioned within guild strictures. Cosmetics were easy to define as an overarching concept but hard to enumerate, as new potions were invented regularly. This meant that most cosmetic products were not assigned to any one guild and could be legally produced by any artisan or independent producer. The low cost of cosmetics, compared with other luxury goods, meant that they were sold by street sellers, in specialty stores, or directly to the aristocracy by private hairdressers and seamstresses. Ultimately, the ill-defined nature of cosmetics meant that guild members constantly struggled to enforce their own monopolies and definitions of their goods. These struggles allowed for a diversity of commercial possibilities that increased the production of beauty goods.

The main contender for the production of cosmetics was the perfumers’ guild, first established as the leather glove makers guild in 1190. In the sixteenth century, French chemists developed methods for macerating plants in vegetable oil and animal greases, which shifted the commerce of perfumes away from the southern Mediterranean to the flower-growing centers of Grasse and Montpellier and from there to the shops of Parisian glove makers who started perfuming gloves and other leather goods.⁶ Because of this connection, the glove makers were given a monopoly over perfume in 1614.⁷ Throughout the seventeenth century, gloves remained the guild’s principal trade, but it also produced “smells and scents … for the commodity of their estate and profession.”⁸ By the eighteenth century, wearing gloves had declined but fragrances for scenting clothing and houses remained popular. New technological advances, such as distilling essential oils and extracting essences using fats—a process that allowed the flowers’ scents to be transferred directly to creams and other greases—helped broaden the use of perfumes in cosmetics.⁹ Because of their past association with perfume, glove makers argued for their legitimate right to control this growing market. The glove maker–perfumers fought legal battles against the manufacture and selling of cosmetics by other guilds, provincial perfumers, itinerant hawkers, and independent producers. Court rulings throughout the eighteenth century favored the perfumers as the rightful producers of cosmetics.

The most prominent and dangerous rival the perfumers faced were the mercers, members of the elite Six corps of guilds.¹⁰ In both 1689 and 1754, court rulings reiterated the perfumers’ right to sell perfumes and soaps to the exclusion of the mercers.¹¹ In 1766, the mercers took the glove makers and perfumers to court for seizing cases of creams and essences a mercer brought from Grasse.¹² The mercers pleaded “artisans such as the glove-makers are not meant to be the inspectors of commerce to real trades people.”¹³ Though the perfumers won the case, they did not have the clout to enforce their claims against the more powerful mercers. Throughout the eighteenth century, mercers continued openly to sell creams, makeup, and other cosmetics.

Other guilds also threatened the perfumers. The wigmakers, who constantly battled the hairdressers, encroached on the perfumers’ monopoly over hair powder and pomades. A 1726 edict maintained the

master perfumers in the right to make pastes, scented oils, essences, powders, soaps, and other merchandise and perfumes dependant of their state as glove-makers and perfumers and to sell to the public this merchandise; permits the barber-wigmakers to make at their own locations powder, soaps, opiates, essences, pastes to wash the hands and other perfumes used for ornamentation, cleanliness, and neatness of the human body, for their own use only and to be used and consumed in their stores and houses.¹⁴

This specific enumeration of products to be sold, displayed, and employed by the different guilds was a triumph for the perfumers. It reinforced their right to sell to the public all goods pertaining to their profession and limited the wigmakers to making cosmetics for their business use only. More important, this ruling specified what constituted cosmetics as a consumer item to be sold in the perfumer’s store. This edict clearly defined the perfumers’ control over the cosmetics market, but the wig-makers, like the mercers, most likely ignored it.

Rulings against the production of powder by starch makers also attempted to reinforce the perfumers’ control over private consumption. Starch makers supplied perfumers and wigmakers with the basis for making perfumed hair powder. In 1751, the guild seized the property and fined a master starch maker 120 livres for producing hair powder out of starch and talcum.¹⁵ The court ruled in favor of the perfumers, strengthening their control over the sale of cosmetics and also defining the appropriate sphere for consumption. According to the ruling, the illegal creation and sale of powder by an untrained starch maker was not a legitimate venue for creating specialty goods meant to represent the highest fashions of France. Scented powder should be created publicly and by those who had the know-how to make it well.

Even more indicative of the permeability of the perfumers’ empire was the vinegar makers’ legal right to make cosmetic vinegars. In 1750, the vinegar guild had the scented vinegars of a perfumer seized. The police ruling of 1752 sided with the perfumers, giving them the right to make scented vinegars out of products bought from vinegar makers, limiting the vinegar makers to condiments. But in 1754, the vinegar guild regained their right to make scented vinegars, banning the perfumers from doing so. Finally, in 1756, they reached a compromise. Both could sell scented vinegars, but they had to purchase the necessary guild-controlled ingredients from one another.¹⁶ Though the perfumers lost this battle, allowing vinegar makers to sell cosmetics expanded the market for new and more complex products.

The Parisian perfumers faced other competitors besides rival guilds. Provincial perfumers and itinerant sellers competed for the Parisian market. Most provincial perfumers or wholesalers came from Grasse, the main center for cultivating and distilling flowers. Grasse wholesalers had the right to sell their goods to Parisian perfumers only after registering them at the guild office, located on the rue de la Pelleterie on the Left Bank. There, a clerk from the guild inventoried the goods to assess their quality and price. Frequently, itinerant merchants without registration papers were caught selling goods to perfumers or, worse, directly to the public. The Parisian guild most often won these cases, but their number indicates the extent of the problem and suggests that other hawkers most likely succeeded in cheating the guild.¹⁷ There were other means for outsiders to gain protection. One seller of cosmetic cleansers gained access to other cities through the approval not only of various guilds but also of “the magistrates of the principal cities of France.”¹⁸ The police commissioner issued permissions to hawkers from both Paris and the provinces.¹⁹ This approval was especially important for artisans who were entering into the territory of another guild. For instance, a grocer placed his police protection before his advertisement for perfumes.²⁰ The department of commerce could issue similar endorsement to bypass guild approval.

Local small-time operators were even more troublesome than provincial peddlers because they saw cosmetics as the means of making a living. The many rulings on cosmetics, passed down by the courts to the guild, never specifically included the fabrication of rouge. This lacuna allowed a thriving, unregulated business to emerge within the Parisian working class. This free market was especially tempting to women who could fabricate and sell their own products to either support themselves or supplement their husbands’ incomes. In 1778, the perfumers’ guild threatened Mme Martin, who sold the most expensive rouge in Paris, but she won because its statutes did not specify the sale of that product.²¹ In addition to rouge, other products were also only nominally associated with perfumers. Hair dye, magical whitening potions, and any product labeled “new” could not be controlled by the guilds’ archaic system of classification. After 1776, women were allowed to enter the guilds. Steven Kaplan finds that between 1785 and 1788, twenty women became glove makers, some of whom might have also been perfumers.²² Thus, from street corners, doorways, and stores, new female entrepreneurial retailers sold goods of their own invention in opposition to and in competition with reigning and more visible male perfumers.

Like the marchandes de mode studied by Jennifer Jones, these women used “cracks in the corporate system of production and retailing for their own advantage.”²³ And as with clothing, contemporaries increasingly saw rouge and makeup as the prerogative of women, both in terms of consumption and production. Cosmetic creation was an acceptable feminine trade, especially when it could be depicted as a frivolous pastime. Clare Crowston traces the feminization of the women’s clothing trade based on the argument that sewing was a female pastime.²⁴ Yet female artisans were often labeled immoral, easily seduced by both luxury and debauched upper-class men. Contemporaries depicted shopping for luxury goods and fashion as a courtship between the male buyer and the immoral shopgirls. The lowly artisan could also become corrupted by her own power within the fashion world by wanting to purchase the goods that she produced.²⁵ Female rouge makers may have suffered from this denigration of their commerce, but ultimately they benefited from participating in a trade that was less hierarchical or grueling than the sewing trades.

The profitable market of cosmetics could be entered by anyone with a little know-how. Commercial manuals, which supplanted recipe books, allowed a growing population of literate workers to gain skills previously controlled by the guilds. Artisans willing to divulge trade secrets, seemingly in opposition to guild protectionism, were commonplace in the second half of the eighteenth century as corporate control declined. The publication of Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751–1777) and the Dictionnaire universel de commerce (1759–1765) also helped establish the writing of commercial manuals as a legitimate scientific pursuit. Yet no eighteenth-century perfumer chose to divulge his secrets, and few seemed to have owned or used such manuals.²⁶ Instead, distillers, apothecaries, or doctors published recipes for cosmetics.²⁷ Those who published advice or recipes promoted their works as trustworthy means of gaining skills far surpassing those of the corner charlatan or even the master artisan.

Because perfumers produced goods that depended on the whims of fashion, the definition and control of their products were difficult. Though the guild was able to define the creation and sale of private goods in a public marketplace, they were ultimately unable to prevent others from profiting from the growing market. Guild members were increasingly alienated from their own system of regulations. It was impossible for the perfumers’ guild to get enough past officials (jurés) to serve on their assembly, and it became harder over time to get experienced members to serve or to pay their fees.²⁸ Successful guild members did not feel pressured to participate actively in the corporate system. Because of its financial difficulties, the guild opened up its ranks to larger numbers of outsiders through the system of selling masterships for 500 livres to those outside the apprentice system, which allowed unofficial sellers to legitimize themselves but strengthened the free market rather than guild traditions.²⁹

Never fully in control of their products, the perfumers’ guild was further weakened by Turgot’s abolishment of the guilds from January to August 1776. Turgot argued that the guilds’ control over who could manufacture and sell goods restricted commerce, inflated consumer prices, and retarded progress. Turgot’s reforms did not last, and most guilds were reinstituted until their dissolution during the Revolution.³⁰ Yet after August 1776, women were allowed to participate, and those who opened shops during the brief period of liberty were allowed, for a fee, to remain in business.³¹ In the already fractured world of cosmetics sales, this moment of liberty reinforced the power of outsiders. The constant pressure of competition, though divisive for the guild structure, forced cosmetics producers to turn to new forms of legitimacy and marketing, which became the basis for the commercial development of beauty.

The Making of Artifice: The System of Production and Sales

As the popularity of home production and the power of the guilds declined, space opened up for educating and promoting a new kind of artisan. Successful retailers presented themselves to the public as the antithesis of the decried charlatan whose only aim was to cheat the public with shoddy goods. Instead, the new artisans were literate, professionally trained artists whose goods and services were not so much legitimated by their corporate affiliation as by their own merit. To survive in the highly competitive yet thriving market for artifice, luxury artisans had to position themselves as purveyors of recognizable commodities with a respectable clientele but also deal with changing fashions and innovations. In the small world of cosmetics manufacture and retail, entrepreneurs jockeyed to get ahead in an economy that often led to bankruptcy and instability. Some who succeeded did so because of traditional patronage of the court and aristocracy that bound them to the trade as well as to a regular clientele. Other retailers, however, thrived by using new forms of production and selling beyond the realms of patronage. By the late eighteenth century, a few manufacturers had even established large-scale industries that evolved into the factories of the nineteenth century.

The production and selling of cosmetics was based on a complex system of interrelations between producers and sellers. Some manufacturers fabricated products to be sold wholesale; others simply sold their products directly to the public. Most enterprises mixed retail and wholesale, production, and selling. Perfumers might buy rouge and creams from other perfumers, while selling their own wholesale powder to wigmakers and mercers.³² Wholesalers and retailers in Paris received their perfumes and flower essences from manufacturers in Grasse either directly or through itinerant hawkers. Trade also took place between artisans in other parts of France. The Parisian perfumer Tellier sold goods to glove makers in Dauphiné and Grenoble and bought products from a merchant in Lyon and a starch maker from Lorraine.³³

Sellers who aimed their goods at the public could also cater to a variety of price ranges and audiences. However, three main groups of retailers can be identified in the eighteenth century: (1) those who sold solely to the aristocracy, some even limiting themselves to the court; (2) those who catered to the lower classes in more informal settings; and (3) those who aimed to bridge the gap between the elite and urban bourgeois consumers through the establishment of respectable stores. Of the three, the most likely to succeed were the last. Itinerant sellers did not have job security. And those who sold solely to the aristocracy were dependent on systems of patronage and credit that could be highly profitable but had little room for expansion and presented considerable risks. The third group, who sought public renown with a broad-based clientele, had the best chance of surviving and becoming recognizable brand names by the nineteenth century.³⁴

The most elite perfumers were well-known names to members of the eighteenth-century aristocracy, but their presence in the wider market was minimal. Houbigant, Lubin, and Fargeon were celebrated court perfumers under both the Old Regime and the Napoleonic period, and their trademarks are still in use today. Fargeon was Louis XV’s official perfumer, and Houbigant opened À la corbeille de fleurs on the faubourg Saint-Honoré in 1775 with the patronage of the Duchesse de Charoste.³⁵ The Baronne d’Oberkirch visited Mme Martin’s rouge store in 1776 and reported that “Mme Martin, approved of by the Queen and all the female royalty in Europe, is a real power … she sends her jars of rouge to queens; rarely does a duchess get hold of one by mistake. We made fun of her self-importance.”³⁶ An artisan’s snobbery, even one with an elite client list, seemed ridiculous and uncalled for to the aristocracy. Yet Martin, Lubin, and Fargeon were able to gain financial if not social standing and, like other luxury artisans, may have associated themselves and their families with merchants, professionals, and even the lower nobility.³⁷

Retailers who aimed their wares at the lower echelons of society were more influential in developing a diverse buying public. Fairchild argues that illegal producers of lesser-quality populuxe goods were responsible for the growth of consumerism in the late eighteenth century.³⁸ These retailers enabled artisans, servants, and actresses to afford rouge and powder. They often did not own their own shops, setting up ad hoc sales spaces with friends or relations, selling goods from doorways, or, using networks of servants, taking their goods directly to clients’ homes. All these retailers needed was a home workshop or a simple connection to a wholesaler. Hawkers were threatening to perfumers because they had direct access to the public. The itinerant “comes to the best parts of town, laying out his wares as openly and as tranquilly as the citizen merchant exposes and sells in his store, having an even greater advantage over the merchant, by knocking on the doors of houses liberally and is often led as far as the toilettes of ladies.”³⁹ Though merchants feared the influence of itinerant sellers on respectable ladies, the lower echelons of Parisian retailers mostly sold their goods to the working classes, especially other artisans and servants.

Between these two extremes were sellers who catered to a wide swathe of customers and who relied principally on their storefronts as a visible sign of their commerce. Though some of these sellers focused their energies mostly on catering to the urban middling classes, most attempted to make their products and shops appealing to all ranks. First businesses needed a storefront. Perfumers’ shops varied as much as their clientele. Successful businesses presented luxurious fronts to the public. Mirrors, mahogany, and gilding framed the items for sale in opulent surroundings. Elite perfumers set up display cases, both in their windows and inside to best present their wares, using counters and chairs for the comfort of customers. Mme Cradock, visiting from England, was impressed by a pharmacy in Lyon that occupied five rooms and sold products she had not seen elsewhere.⁴⁰ The outsides of these shops were no less eye catching. Artisans set up boards (tapis) on which to pin their wares for exterior display, hoping to lure customers inside the store. Distinctive signs, which identified stores by name, were also essential to the promotion of a luxury shop. Luxury artisans spent considerable sums to have their own personal emblem painted and hung.⁴¹ By the end of the century, shop owners had added lights at night to illuminate displays.

Stores with especially ornate décors could become tourist landmarks. Lafaye, a perfumer on the rue Plâtrières near the Père Lachaise cemetery, ran a shop that “merits being seen by foreigners.”⁴² The perfumer Tessier was singled out as having “the most beautiful store in Paris. At night, due to its lights, it offers a charming sight. The little pots of rouge, of paint, those of cream, of essences, are all categorized and arranged with much art.”⁴³ Most elite perfumers stuck to the neighborhoods around the rue Saint-Honoré, and, by the eighteenth century, the Palais Royale had also become popular despite its inordinately high rents. The right bank housed 71 percent of Paris’s perfume stores, with the rest across the Seine where the population was smaller and less elite.⁴⁴ Paris was known for its luxury shopping and stores that “metamorphosed themselves into splendidly decorated salons, sparkling with mirrors and gold, illuminated every night like magical palaces.”⁴⁵

Most perfumers rented storefronts and backroom workshops that were much simpler and less visible than those of the elite luxury tradespeople.⁴⁶ Though artisans and commoners might visit these shops, wealthy patrons were served in their private hôtels.⁴⁷ The workspace, thus, could remain functional. A typical perfume shops was small, and retailers used their attics and basements to store their goods, having no access or need for warehouses or laboratories.⁴⁸ One lucrative perfume business advertised as having a store, a storeroom, a large basement, a nice living space, and two wooden cases.⁴⁹ The son of a perfumer left a similar legacy when he died in 1784. His store contained a counter with a locking cash box, numerous shelves for wares, a display window, and a mirror.⁵⁰ His holdings indicate an attempt at display, while not achieving the showy décor of the shops along the rue Saint-Honoré. From the complete list of Mme Geoffroy’s business holdings after her bankruptcy, we can visualize the interior of an even more modest perfume store. Her inventory contained small numbers of different products: from complexion water, to powder, to toothpicks. As for furnishings, she had two stools, two tables, nine planks of wood, and nine drawers in which to store her goods. Geoffroy probably bought most of her products ready made, mixing scents to her clients’ liking, not using her small shop as either a factory or a site for customer browsing. Her inventory indicates a functional sense of commerce that did not include flattering or entertaining clients.⁵¹

A master artisan traditionally ran his store, whether large or small, with the help of his wife, family, and apprentice. Richer perfumers hired servants to help in their business. For instance, a perfumer to the king hired a garçon de boutique, a servant, a maid, and a cook.⁵² Those who sold their own concoctions or made gloves needed more assistance than those who simply sold the products of others. Businesses were traditionally passed down to sons or apprentices, but it was not unusual for widows as well as other female family members to take over.⁵³ Unofficial businesses had little need for apprentices, though they might enlist family members to help. For instance, in the same space, Frénehard sold coffee and powder, his sister, a hairdresser, sold hair dye she had invented.⁵⁴ Women, generally, did not run large stores unless they were widows of perfumers, but many sold products out of their homes, stores run by their husbands (or other family members), or in outlets in a variety of locations.

Many creators of perfumes and cosmetics attempted to expand their businesses beyond their own retail spaces by adopting the potentially unstable system of outlets. Though protectionism constituted the eighteenth-century commercial ethos, entrepreneurs who wanted to succeed realized the need for national expansion. These attempts were not without risk. The rouge maker Joseph Collin set up outlets all over Paris in which clients could acquire his specially patented rouge. Though he had his own manufactory store on the rue de Vaugirard, he left his product with, among others, Mlle Heran at the gate of the Gobelins and with Mlle Sadous, a marchande de mode, who sold it out of the shops of furriers and jewelers “for the commodity of ladies.” Yet Collin’s outlets caused him trouble. In 1779, he took Ringard, a wigmaker, to court for selling his rouge at a higher price than agreed on. Ringard was forbidden to manufacturer or sell rouge for ten years and had to pay Collin 1,200 livres in damages. After this, Collin learned his lesson and limited himself to only one outlet in Paris.⁵⁵

Outlets were more profitable for smaller producers because producers had less to lose if their reputations were tarnished. Often these resellers and manufacturers did not have their own shops and depended on outlets to promote their goods. When a ship’s captain brought back from Canada “authentic pure and natural bear grease” to stop baldness, he told the public to purchase it from the concierge at the Hôtel des Postes, two grocers, a tobacconist, or a store owner in the Tuilleries.⁵⁶ Possibly, the same merchant set up outlets in Versailles, Lyon, Chartres, Dijon, and Rouen.⁵⁷ The most successful distributor was probably Dubost, who sold his lotion in six outlets in Paris and in nineteen provincial cities. His outlets varied from a bookstore to a director of carriages to the office of the local affiches.⁵⁸ Those who chose to set up outlets presaged the development of retail networks, described by Balzac in César Birotteau as the essential means of conquering the backward provinces.

Though one Parisian wag felt that the overabundant wearing of cosmetics meant that “the profession of perfumer is now the most profitable in Paris,” most perfumers and cosmetics retailers were small artisans trying to get by. The average perfumer was worth only 2,500 livres at his or her death, less than the average for tailors.⁵⁹ After 1770, the number of bankruptcies for Parisian perfumers increased from an average of three per decade to thirty-nine in the 1770s and forty-four in the 1780s.⁶⁰ These bankruptcies were not due to lack of demand but were due to unpaid bills by customers who bought more than they could pay for or were loath to pay their debts.⁶¹ The aristocratic client, though he granted prestige, was often the least willing to pay bills and used all types of ruses to delay or cancel payments. Extending credit was essential to a successful perfumer, who feared that a dissatisfied client would buy elsewhere, but it could take years to be repaid.⁶² Delinquent customers were not the only reason perfumers were liable to lose their businesses at the end of the century. Many perfumers made extravagant purchases to elevate their social positions. Perfumers borrowed money from other artisans or family members to expand their businesses and to buy nicer furnishings. Not unlike César Birotteau, the failed entrepreneur in Honoré de Balzac’s novel, perfumers wished to elevate their status among other luxury artisans such as the wealthier jewelers. They were participating in the consumer revolution both as producers and consumers, and many got caught up in the frenzy to own new luxuries. Outrageous spending and overdue bills left some with little choice but bankruptcy.

Another cause of bankruptcy was unhonored debts between artisans. The possibility of obtaining raw materials on credit made it easy for artisans to start a business, but sometimes without real knowledge of the market or the goods they sold. Many who went bankrupt in the 1780s created a domino effect. They owed money to others who were in turn forced into financial insolvency.⁶³ Wigmakers who extended credit to their clients did not pay off their debts to the perfumers who sold them powder, and in turn, these perfumers did not pay off the starch makers who provided the raw materials. Artisans tried to help one another with loans, which often were not repaid. These small artisans benefited from a boom in private borrowing facilitated by the intermediary of notaries, though many seem to have defaulted because of the interconnectedness of the loans.⁶⁴ Jean Louis Fargeon, one of Louis XV’s perfumers, declared bankruptcy in 1778 because of Louis XVI’s unwillingness to pay his predecessor’s debts. When he reopened his business, Fargeon was soon owed huge sums by a number of bankrupt perfumers. Neither the patronage of kings nor links with other artisans could ensure financial security. Though the family name continued to be associated with perfumes into the nineteenth century, two other Fargeon’s went bankrupt as well.⁶⁵

The case of the rouge maker Collin can illustrate the tenuous nature of the trade. Collin had outlets around Paris, his own factory store, and sold high volumes of rouge starting in 1772. Yet he went bankrupt in 1786. Two clues to his bankruptcy survive: (1) a book of his daily spending on food and wine and (2) a list of his creditors. The former shows a widower spending small sums each day (on average four to six livres) on bread, wine, and small amounts of meat, along with candles, soap, and powder. Nothing in this book indicates that Collin was a spendthrift. The second says more about his business dealings. He owed large sums to a number of artisans and professionals, including members of the elite Parlement court. These debts probably represent professional loans held either directly by those involved or bought by others after the fact. The sums, a few over one thousand livres, indicate that Collin hoped to set up a much larger enterprise than a small rouge workshop. He also owed money to a printer (presumably for leaflets or trade cards) and a maker of porcelain (for his rouge pots). His biggest creditors were four different landlords. Not surprisingly, Collin constantly changed addresses (his factory store moved from rue Vaugirard to Franc Bourgeois and after his bankruptcy from rue St. Michel to Mathurin). Yet despite a bankruptcy, he managed to reorganize his debt and start over.⁶⁶

Collin was not a member of a guild, but like perfumers, he was caught up in dependent system of artisanal finance. The declining number of perfumers also points to the fragility of the commerce of cosmetics. Similarly to other trades in the eighteenth century, there was a consolidation of businesses in the 1770s–1780s, with many smaller shops not surviving. According to official guild listings, between 1776 and 1789, there was a 34 percent drop in perfumers practicing in Paris. This drop can be partially explained by holdouts who did not reenlist in the guild after Turgot’s reforms. These members may have still continued to practice without a visible guild presence. They joined the ranks of independent producers, further weakening the guilds’ power. Yet after 1776, anyone willing to pay could become a master, which created a rush of new guild members.⁶⁷ Some of the decline of perfumers, thus, should also be attributed to the declining popularity of gloves and wealth consolidation in a few larger enterprises.⁶⁸

The market for cosmetics and beauty products may have allowed a few perfumers to expand and innovate, but most were in precarious positions. The perfumer’s business was not only constantly under threat by other guilds and sellers but also all retailers of cosmetics were at risk because of their dependence on changing fashions. Fashion meant that the corporate values of trust, quality, and control were less important than newness, fantasy, and publicity. To succeed in the world of Parisian luxury crafts, cosmetics retailers had to be able to market their products to a broader customer base than just the aristocracy, whose buying patterns were as irregular as their payment. By making certain cosmetics cheaper for wider consumption, retailers could hope to create a reliable market, as long as the fashion for artifice and toiletries was maintained. Under such conditions, few succeeded in the long term, but those who did were adept at mastering new markets and products.

Il n’y à que Maille qui m’aille: Creating an Entrepreneur

The most striking example of such an adept and successful entrepreneur was Antoine-Claude Maille, vinegar maker extraordinaire, whose name today still graces bottles of fine French mustard. Maille was a member of the vinegar guild and specialized in high-end vinegar and luxury cosmetic products made of both vinegar and mustard. He invented up to 180 different types of aromatic vinegars with cosmetic, medicinal, and dietary uses.⁶⁹ He began his career in 1747 and on July 27, 1769, was named vinaigrier du roi. He also had the approbation of the King of England, the Emperor of Austria, and Catherine the Great, who gave him her stamp after he donated vinegar to fight the 1771 plague in Moscow.⁷⁰ Besides royal patronage, Maille’s industry received testimonials from such Enlightenment figures as Casanova, Mme de Genlis, and Mercier.

In 1788 Genlis, then governess of the king’s children, took her charges to visit the Maille factory as their first stop in an educational tour of Paris to teach “her students different branches of industry.”⁷¹ Genlis wanted the royal children to learn about the production and commercialization of goods, and her trip to Maille’s workshop was meant to highlight the development of French industry. A journalist from L’année littéraire was also greatly impressed by his visit to Maille’s store. He praised Maille as an example of “the height of perfection that all types of industry in this kingdom have reached.”⁷² Maille and his mustards and vinegars represented the rising productivity and inventiveness of French commerce, one of the enlightened monarchy’s greatest feats.

Yet Maille also represented the antithesis of royal privileges. Mercier adopted Maille as the model for the humble entrepreneur in his play La brouette du vinaigrier.⁷³ The play told the story of a poor vinegar maker whose thrift and labor allowed his son, a learned young clerk, to marry above his rank. The play celebrated classes mixing, the artisan’s hard work, and fathers’ selfless and accepting love. The vinegar maker, in Mercier’s vision, represented the unflinching commercial hero, capable, with truthful entrepreneurial acumen, and unwavering hard work to turn misery into wealth. Even a simple vinegar maker, Mercier felt, could become a self-made success story in the commercial sphere freed from guild rules and caste constraints.

Maille was more than an artisan to Mercier and others. He ranked as an artist and scientist who should not be associated with other more prosaic vinegar makers. In the Tableau de Paris, Mercier reinforced this vision by calling Maille “the leader of vinegar-makers” and “the most inventive genius in the world of mustard.”⁷⁴ For Mercier, Maille also played the important, if humorous, role of uniting husbands and wives by selling a vinegar capable of recreating virginity. Blushing young maidens visited Maille to purchase a product called “virgin vinegar for the ladies.” Maille’s artistry in this case became science because “all is regeneration due to the laws of chemistry; the happiness of the spouses is linked to this sublime science which I idolize.”⁷⁵ Maille, thus, was an artist, scientist, magician, and marriage counselor all in one. He specialized in luxurious versions of food items as well as less respectable and highly dubious concoctions. Though the basis of his products was vinegar and mustard, the outcomes did not fit neatly into the definition of the trade.

He also differed from other elite manufacturers in his attempts to reach out to a larger audience. Maille did not just depend on the good will of the king. He used new methods to sell his wares and saw the potential of appealing to a larger consumer base that would allow him to increase his output and influence. One indication that Maille hoped to secure a larger customer base was his charity work. In the winter months, he offered his mustard plasters free to the poor and to any priest who wished to make his way to Paris.⁷⁶ He would thus supply the parishes of France with free cures while promoting their sale to those who could afford them.

Maille was not aiming his products at the poor, however. His prices were high, though still within the range of the urban middling classes who might want to splurge on his well-known products. Maille’s many scented vinegars sold for three livres a bottle in the 1750s, relatively cheap compared with the sixteen livres charged for a small bottle of eau de toilette by the king’s perfumer.⁷⁷ His rouge vinegars sold for one livre each, which was cheaper than most high-end rouge, but the price of the packaging was extra. Though none of his rouge containers have survived, many of his mustard pots have. The many options for materials, lettering (in gold or plain black), and decoration indicate the variety of prices and clientele that Maille catered to.

To attract a larger and more diverse buying public, Maille also offered a variety of ways to buy his goods. He had a storefront on the rue Saint André des Arts for his elite clientele. He also ran a warehouse in Sèvres, a suburb of Paris, where he produced both his liquors and aromatic creams, products that were not included in the privileges of his guild and thus needed to be made outside the boundaries of the city. In this way, Maille could maintain both a thriving vinegar and mustard enterprise and expand his business to other products without upsetting guild rules. Maille also put the postal system to use for his own expansion. He sent his products to both the provinces and foreign countries.⁷⁸ He had ties with foreign courts that helped spread his goods throughout Europe. He was not the only cosmetic seller to do so. Dubois, inventor of a face cream, sold his product in numerous European cities, including Amsterdam, Constantinople, Hamburg, Leipzig, and London.⁷⁹ Most manufacturers were not as ambitious, but they did send their products to the provinces. The growing postal system, though slow and unpredictable, allowed both buyers and sellers to depend less on local markets.⁸⁰

Maille represented a new type of artisan, one who was both a respected master of a guild dependent on royal privileges and also an independent artist and inventor. He was an entrepreneur above all, attempting, as Mercier saw it, to elevate his trade through hard work and exceptional skills. He broke from a purely elite clientele and sold goods at a fixed price to all who entered his stores. Others, whose names have not lasted as long as Maille’s, also bridged the gap between aristocratic patronage and innovations in production and sales. These entrepreneurs broke from tradition by attempting to widen the scope of their enterprise, breaking down limits to both their customer base and their methods of production. They became part of a growing proto-industrial urban manufacture that had strong ties to rural agriculture (in this case, growing flowers) even while they focused primarily on the demands of city life.⁸¹ In doing so, they also created a different sort of shopping experience. The elite still had their products delivered to their homes, but, by the end of the century, luxury shops increasingly invited browsers as well as serious clients. Shop windows and displays lent added appeal to the neighborhood perfumer’s shop. Mercier may have criticized the “race of little merchants who had neither integrity, honor, nor scruples,” but he praised their shining window displays and had only positive things to say about Maille.⁸² Elite merchants catered to the homes of the rich, street sellers expanded the reach of consumerism to the lower rungs of society, and, significantly, actual shops became the physical representations of this new consumerism available to anyone with extra money or credit.

A Fashionable Revolution: The Perfumer as Hero or Traitor

The developments in production and retail started in the eighteenth century did not continue without interruption during the Revolution. Since cosmetics and perfumes like fashionable dress and wigs were associated with aristocratic luxury goods, their makers were likely to be suspect in the eyes of ardent revolutionaries. Balzac’s César Birotteau was a perfumer whose Royalist ties brought him trouble during the Revolution and prestige after the Restoration. He hated the Revolution because it “forbade powder, and was thus responsible for the fashion of wearing hair à la Titus,” a short hair cut favored by both men and women.⁸³ The loss of income due to changing styles became a political cause for Birotteau and thus for the profession. Perfumers’ oft-precarious position in the Old Regime was further threatened by a Revolution that put little stake in the trappings of artifice and the refinement of bodily odors.

The real story of the counterrevolutionary Antoine Caron inspired the image of the royalist perfumer created by Balzac. From 1778, Caron ran a perfume shop called La reine des fleurs on the Four-Saint-Germain. Virulently royalist, he hid counter-revolutionaries in his attic. Caron’s conservatism may also have been sparked by changes in revolutionary fashions because his business “no longer prospered since the Revolution.”⁸⁴ In 1804 Caron was caught attempting to hide George Cadoual, the infamous Chouan rebel sought by Napoleon. Caron was jailed for this crime, but the Restoration brought him a medal for his services and a position in the Palais Bourbon. A lucrative government post amply compensated the loss of his struggling perfume business. Caron is not the only example of a royalist perfumer. Maille’s student and successor, Aclocque, a commander-general in the national guard, helped protect the king when the monarchy fell on August 10, 1792, an action for which he was arrested during the Terror.⁸⁵

The royalist perfumers and their fictional counterpart Birotteau reinforced the notion that successful artisans, especially luxury tradespeople who depended on the patronage of the nobility, were either expatriates or ardent antirevolutionaries.⁸⁶ Yet of the 2,598 French shopkeepers and tradesmen who emigrated, only six were perfumers. Overall, the artisans from each occupational group who fled represented a cross section of society, rather than an exodus of luxury craftspeople.⁸⁷ Though they did not leave the country, some perfumers either suspended their trade or moved to the provinces for the duration of the Revolution. Fargeon, the king’s perfumer, closed his shop in 1794 and did not reopen it until 1797.⁸⁸ Bourgeois, the first perfumer to call himself citoyen in 1792, sold the contents of his store in August 1794 and returned permanently to his hometown.⁸⁹ The reasons for these absences are not completely clear. Having lived through the Terror, Fargeon chose to abandon his business at a time of financial rather than political hardship. The period between 1794 and 1797 was probably the hardest for luxury artisans because of the growing economic instability and trade blockages brought on by war. For others it may have been safer to spend the worse years of the Terror in the provinces than to be the butt of ridicule and possible attacks in the capital.

An anecdote poking fun at the revolutionary government provides a glimpse into the dangers present in revolutionary Paris for perfumers who stayed. In 1793, a representative from the revolutionary committees spotted a large crate marked Eau de la Reine de Hongrie. The crate was seized and its owner, a perfumer, was labeled a traitor, conspirator, and counterrevolutionary for having corresponded with a foreign court. The uneducated revolutionaries were unaware that this popular perfume with a foreign moniker was actually made in Draguignan, a provincial city. After the perfumer promised to change the name of his product and send the committee samples of his wares, he was allowed to go free.⁹⁰ Perfumers had to tread lightly during the Revolution because in their fervor its representatives looked for and found traitors everywhere. It was not the link between perfume and aristocrats that made this business suspect but the inability of uneducated revolutionary officials to correctly comprehend the culture of elite luxury goods.

Though some perfumers felt threatened by revolutionary enthusiasts, most were more keenly concerned with the financial strains brought by the Revolution. The rapidly changing concept of fashion and the revolutionary wars and embargoes took a toll on many perfumers’ already precarious financial positions. Commercial activity was paralyzed by stagnation: “In general little business is done. Prices on many articles vary little and, despite deliveries, stocks are low.”⁹¹ The importation of foreign ingredients was greatly constrained by the blockade of French ports and revolts in the colonies. The overall spending capacity of consumers decreased because of this economic instability. Mercier described the commerce of the Revolution as full of fancy storefronts meant to mask the emptiness inside, where shopkeepers employed mirrors to enlarge their holdings.⁹² Yet perfumers attempted to reassure their customers and continued to do business as best they could. Labrierre informed “his co-citizens that he never gave up his commerce as a few persons had rumored; he only canceled certain items.” He also assured his clientele that, although ingredients were scarce, the quality and prices of his products were not affected.⁹³ Another retailer proudly announced the arrival of new stock to his store, noting that otherwise “creams are very rare.”⁹⁴

Financial times were unstable for all professions. Perfumers had to make do with the stock they managed to acquire but they did not close down shop. The economic hardships had only a minimal effect on the number of Parisian perfumers who continued to eke out a living from their trade. Though not entirely accurate, lists of artisans found in commercial almanacs indicate only an 8 percent decline in Parisian perfumers between 1789 and 1798.⁹⁵ If we can trust these numbers to represent actual practitioners, this is actually a lower rate of decline than the prerevolutionary years. Only 28 percent of named perfumers practicing in 1789 are represented in the 1798 almanac, but this disappearance is similar to the next decade, indicating not a massive turnover among perfumers but a normal pattern that may have as much to do with the way the almanacs were edited as actual disappearances of specific perfumers.⁹⁶ The Revolution, thus, did not substantially weaken a profession that had already faced retrenchment.

By 1798, the perfumer trade was once again profitable. New luxury shops opened and flourished. The fashionable shop of Laugier père et fils on rue Bourg l’Abbé doubled the number of its staff and opened a factory in Grasse.⁹⁷ Laugier, the company’s owner, petitioned for forty-two trademarks for his products in 1806, insisting that cosmetic names were equivalent to other industrial products.⁹⁸ By 1811, Laugier had 140 workers but had to ask Napoleon for a loan of 100,000 francs to avoid bankruptcy.⁹⁹ Despite this temporary setback, Laugier’s store and factories continued to gain recognition throughout the 1820s. These large entrepreneurs competed with small retailers for visibility. In 1827, the approximate one-year total of sales of soap and perfume produced in Paris was 8,250,000 francs, of which four manufacturers sold 1,875,000, thus dominating the market. One of these four, Auger, employed twenty-five to thirty workers in his soap manufacture, which was said to rival the quality of British soap.¹⁰⁰

Production capacity developments and marketing technique transformations used by cosmetics manufacturers intensified in the 1820s, by which time a few elite perfumers ran pristine luxury stores and complex factories. By 1825, the industry was centralized in Paris, with Grasse as primarily an agricultural center. In the 1830s, the discovery of distillation with steam allowed perfumery to become a veritable industry that could produce large quantities at low unit costs. Thereafter, both the industries of flower extraction in Grasse and the factories for perfume distillation in Paris expanded rapidly, making it more expensive for small retailers to keep up with new developments.¹⁰¹ To run a competitive business, a perfumer needed a store, a workroom to mix the products for sale, two laboratories to make oils and soap, a studio for making labels and engravings, and a storage space.¹⁰² These spaces needed to be fully furnished with the proper (and expensive) equipment.

Though not fully industrialized until the 1850s, the production of cosmetics and perfumes had become a stable and profitable national industry firmly based in the chic shopping quarters of Paris and other provincial cities. After the Revolution, the industry came to represent French pride in ingenuity and quality, especially in competition with British goods. Rouge sellers, perfumers, and soap makers were represented at the Expositions des produits de l’industrie française starting in 1806, winning prizes for their inventions.¹⁰³ Having survived both the strict controls of the Old Regime and the commercial morass of the Revolution, nineteenth-century luxury commerce hoped to rise from the ashes and conquer new markets.

Conclusion

In mostly dimly lit, unglamorous surroundings, perfumers concocted potions and creams to gain customers and patronage. These same perfumers were constantly at odds with the development of different outlets for cosmetics, such as the vinegar makers’ array of aromatic rouges and the mercers’ stock of eau de Cologne. From this bustle of competition and contention emerged a few thriving businesses and many less successful ones. Stores rapidly opened, closed, were taken over, and were renamed. A few institutions remained the same, while most struggled to make their mark on the faces and purses of the Parisian coquette. The increase in potential customers fueled both the rising number of sellers and in turn caused the insecurity present in the profession. Retailers diversified to meet the needs and desires of the working classes as well as the elite, hoping to gain stability. Competition between retailers for customer attention created the necessary push for developing new and innovative means of sales and, by the nineteenth century, production. Trademarks, factories, and diversification of products allowed certain producers to retain a regular and loyal clientele while attracting new customers away from smaller shops. Though it would not be until the twentieth century that large corporations would be created around cosmetics, the move toward national brands had already started.