Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France by Kari Weil (review)

“Horses,” Weil offers in the preface to this volume, give “one perspective into the massive changes in gender relations, but also class and race relations” in France during the nineteenth century. Weil might have added that, though specific to that time and place, many of her insights apply to a longer sweep of history and a broader geographical range.

I offer the briefest of summaries here. The perspective suggested by horses is especially rich because horses have been powerful symbols in literature, pictorial art, and what is now generally understood as popular culture. Horses have also occupied a central place in material culture, especially horse breeding and hippophagy. Weil maps changes along the timeline of the long nineteenth century, from the French Revolution through an era of rapid mechanization and to World War I.

The author’s strongest arguments are based in art history, beginning with Buffon’s graphic diagram of the open abdomen of a horse—in this case, a representation of Enlightenment science. Although her treatment of the horse in painting is broad, Weil finds the careers of Théodore Gericault and Rosa Bonheur exemplary. Gericault’s horse images (and those of his French contemporaries) evolved from representing virile, human heroism at the end of the Napoleonic era into horse-centered representations, with horses as both subjects and objects of human activity and the human gaze. Many of these same images of humans with horses also reinforce attitudes about class, race, and empire. Bonheur’s career began almost three decades after Gericault’s ended. Her Saint Simonian background alerted her to ethical issues; her images focus on horses’ domestic labors and their treatment at the hands of human handlers. Weil shows that, as the domestic labor of horses diminished amid the wave of mechanization after mid century, the significance of horses became bifurcated: horses remained important as status symbols and overdetermined symbols of both accepted and transgressive gender values. Popular horse-centered entertainments revealed these values. Ironically, at the same time the French practice of eating horse meat, especially for the working class, operated as a supposedly health-based practical solution to a new surplus of horses, as well as an indicator of national identity.

In Thinking Animals (2012), a more loosely organized group of essays about the importance of animal studies in the twenty-first century, Weil argued for the centrality of the human-animal bond in history and against hegemonic anthropocentrism. Weil’s theoretical rigor in this earlier volume has contributed to the strengthening of animal studies since then—and now it has clearly enabled her to create an even stronger focus on representations of the human-horse bond in one particular time and place.

Tantalizing, brief references to Bentham’s ethics, Sewell’s Black Beauty, and Stubbs’s portraits raise questions. How is Sue’s Godolphin Arabian, a fiction that contributed to anti-cruelty legislation in France, related to animal welfare/rights propaganda in other parts of the world? How is the “horse-riding” described in Dickens’s Hard Times different from French horse-centered entertainments? Did the popular American Wild West shows prescribe gender roles in the same ways? How do the horse paintings of the Anglophone world (Remington, Landseer, and others) differ from or compare to those of their French counterparts? Why did other Western nations not eat horses? Are race and gender stereotypes triangulated with horses in other Western societies in the same ways?

The powerful scholarship of this volume can be attributed in part to its narrow but fascinating focus. The next stage for this author might be an expansion of that focus to reinforce the relevance of her insights within other cultural contexts.