The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (review)

"Not everything that stinks kills." This slogan of bacteriological crusaders recurs on many pages of David S. Barnes's exemplary study of the medical and cultural impact of germ theory (or, in his view, "multiple germ theories") in late nineteenth-century France (7). The centerpiece of Barnes's history is the "great stink of Paris" of 1880, which is juxtaposed to a similar malodorous event of 1895. Between these two benchmark dates, Barnes argues, both scientific and public conceptions of the causation of disease shifted. Scientific views altered thanks to convincing demonstration by state-of-the-art laboratory methods; public views changed only because germ theory blended with pre-existing cultural developments, especially the centuries-old "civilizing process" that made "disgust" a habitual reaction to the presence of dirt and filth. Bacteriology did not prevail quickly or unambiguously, Barnes argues; rather it blended with old etiologies (foul odors, bad air, nasty miasmas) in a new "sanitary-bacteriological synthesis (SBS)" (4) that credited the role of specific pathogens while still promoting admiration for cleanliness and abhorrence of filth as broad cultural ideals.

Barnes's study takes issue with "conventional" historical accounts that attribute the putative "Bacteriological Revolution" to a "hardy band of inspired researchers" (7). Instead of a revolution worked by the scientifically sophisticated, Barnes perceives the slow establishment of the "SBS" promoted by public health officials, teachers, and government bureaucrats. Barnes argues this thesis in six tightly-organized chapters devoted to the "great stink" of 1880 and reactions to it by the public and officialdom (Chap. 1); the legacy of the hygienists of the 1830s-40s, who doggedly pursued the eradication of filth long before "germs" became germs in the modern sense (Chap. 2); "taxonomies of transmission," or competing models of disease causation ("academic," "individual," "folk," "local"), which were the subject of "subtle negotiations" once bacteriology asserted its claims in the 1880s and 1890s (Chap. 3); the practical measures—isolation and disinfection—that were all the new science had to offer until the appearance of "Roux's serum," the first efficacious therapy based on germ theory (Chap. 4); the role of hygiene in the politics of the early Third Republic, whose "civilizing mission" encompassed not only the "savages" of newly-forged empire but also of France's own backward peasantry and benighted regions (Bretons and Brittany are the prototypes) (Chap. 5); and, lastly, a comparison of SBS-inspired measures with what had gone before in French battles against stench and filth (a quick overview from an edict by Philippe Auguste in 1184 to ca. 1900 ) and with what transpired in other industrialized settings (brief mentions of Britain, the U.S., and Germany). The book closes with an Epilogue that draws a universal lesson from what Barnes acknowledges to be a peculiarly timed and calibrated French history: "Medical truth must resonate with cultural truth" (269). Barnes insists that bacteriological science alone could never have changed the affective responses, habits, and practices involved in the modern war on germs, and that this historically established truth can give much needed guidance in new medical campaigns such as that now being waged, so far with little success, against obesity.

The argument of this book rests on an interesting amalgam of insights from critical theorists and social scientists, most importantly Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, and Mary Douglas. But Barnes wears his theory lightly (his focused theoretical discussions come at the end of the book rather than the beginning), and some readers may be more impressed with the work's impressive empirical foundation than its contribution to theoretical debates. In any event the book does rest on valuable and painstaking archival research. Potential readers should not be misled by the Parisian focus of the book's title: Barnes combed communal, municipal, and departmental archives of selected locales no less assiduously than the records of Paris and its region. The result is a...