CHAPTER EIGHT
Selling Masculinity
The Commercial Competition over Men’s Hair
Women now only wear blanc, leaving rouge to the men. This young Titus who feigns the greatest simplicity, who had banished powder, scents, and silk clothing, has kept precisely from the old costume what had belonged primarily to women; that vermillion tone, which contrasts so admirably with his black wig, is borrowed.
—Auguste Kotzebue, Souvenir de Paris
By 1790, despite a change in aesthetics, women created their pale faces as before with artifice. Men were meant to be even more natural in practice, but, as the playwright and visitor to Paris Kotzebue suggests, some men wore discernable rouge to go along with new hair fashions. Evidence from the revolutionary years and the Napoleonic period indicate that the so-called Great Masculine Renunciation was nowhere near complete. Though male fashions certainly moved away from thick makeup and primping, men continued to take part in exhibitionism. Men were very much part of the consumer market created in the eighteenth century and very much part of the marketing campaigns of sellers of cosmetics. Though Kotzebue implicates men in the wearing of rouge, his comment on black-haired wigs is telling. Hair was the aspect of the toilette that men would continue to participate in most actively, though in completely new ways than in the eighteenth century. Since the wig was associated with the Old Regime, men had to face a new future without cover for their biological weaknesses. Hair loss (and to a lesser extent unfashionable hair color) forced men to enter into the commercial world of cosmetic practices in a period when most forms of male vanity were suspect.
Not surprisingly, by the early nineteenth century, the most prominent and profitable cosmetics were those for hair. Unlike rouge and Oriental creams, however, hair products had to be fully revised and reinvented to fit the new trends. The great cosmetic casualty was hair powder, replaced by new hair products such as dyes and growth potions. Men gave up their protective covers and needed to be reassured of their redefined masculinity. The accessories that came with the new styles were aimed at assuaging masculine egos: hair extensions, small and imperceptible toupees, and miraculous hair creams. That women might also need these was simply an additional benefit for the sellers. Despite being ousted from public practices of the toilette (both as actors and voyeurs), men without wig and powder remained vulnerable to the publicity ploys of inventive entrepreneurs. Men’s heads, natural and uncovered, were the sites for marketing campaigns that helped male consumers to survive the transition from wig to hair.
Masculine and Fashionable in Postrevolutionary France
Following the lead of sociologists, historians of fashion and masculinity until recently assumed that the shift toward a more functional and staid form of male dress occurred in the late eighteenth century. J. C. Flügel uses the term “Great Masculine Renunciation” in The Psychology of Clothes to indicate men’s begrudging rejection of exhibitionism. This Great Masculine Renunciation, which Flügel blames on the Revolution, solidified the roles of men and women, making men into unwilling voyeurs and women into objects.1 Men were to give up all pretensions of fashion and makeup, adopting more subtle lines and colors. The new male’s worth was not based on blood, leisure, and artifice, but on respectability, hard work, and capital accumulation. Revolutionaries promoted the adoption of a male uniform, linking men across class lines.2 Though the uniform did not become popular, the three-piece suit emerged as the ideal, muted wrapping of homogeneity and respectability. A virile, active, often military male became an archetype of revolutionary and Napoleonic France, auguring the triumph of bourgeois respectability over aristocratic sociability.3
Yet, as much as his Old Regime predecessor, this was a figure dependent on fashion and style and, because of it, caught up in the growing consumer market. David Kuchta, writing on English fashion, finds the new simpler masculinity “no less performative, and no more authentic, than luxury and effeminacy.”4 Flügel’s renunciation was neither straightforward nor complete. The cult of youth dominated revolutionary and Napoleonic France. For the classical heroes of the Revolution, the romantics of the Napoleonic era or the dandies of the Restoration, self-presentation and fashion were essential to their social and sexual personas. Outside these iconic masculinities, the ubiquitous soldier and the rapidly rising entrepreneur needed to represent martial or financial success in their physical appearance. The imposition of a draft, the extreme militarism of Napoleon’s court, and the wars themselves focused attention on the courage of youthful male citizens.5 As with the military, new commercial possibilities after the Revolution allowed sons of artisans to join the ranks of the wealthy, creating a new generation of entrepreneurs and merchants. The uniforms and suits of these new elite stressed the inherent physicality of both economic and social success.
Art historians stress the highly charged presence of homosocial desire in early nineteenth-century imagery. Corporeal, virile masculine beauty evoked ancient Greece, endorsed by both male and female voyeurs. The clothing men wore also reinforced the desirability of an ideal masculine physique. Anne Hollander argues that the uniform of the suit sexualized the male body, echoing the popularity of neoclassical nudes rather than erasing masculine exhibitionism.6 The simplicity and tightness of the suit put greater stress on the body underneath as well as the shape of the head and its crowning locks, providing not renunciation but narcissistic and scopic pleasure in being the subject of the gaze. And men did not even need to be looked at by either men or women but could revel in their own narcissism. The male gaze was one of lustful envy when men looked at women, but when they looked at each other or themselves, it was with pure pleasure and vanity.7
As the center of both the male and female gaze, young, fashionable men had to achieve a balance in their self-presentation between indifference and artifice. During the Revolution, it was politically savvy for a man “to show that he has wasted as few moments as it was possible at his toilette, and that his mind is bent on higher cares.”8 Men had to create their look (either disheveled or well groomed, depending on the period and political leanings of the individual) without obvious pretense. The new man of the early nineteenth century was not meant to be fashionable and vain. Commentators admitted, however, that this “renunciation” of the toilette caused great frustration. The single man’s credo was filled with mixed signals: “What one cannot avoid is the toilette. While acting aloof, one also wants to come off as tender; one wants to be well dressed, one wants to follow fashion or more truly anticipate it.”9
Authors were acutely conscious of the stigma attached to male coquettes but argued that men should not completely reject grooming. It was important for men not to “affect … a philosophical disdain for the toilette or grooming of the hair,” since a clean, well-kept exterior indicated internal morality.10 Doctors were especially worried that men, told to give up cosmetics, might also give up the practices of health and hygiene. As early as the 1770s, Goulin addressed this problem in his medical work aimed at men, by saying, “many people think that all these little details belong only to women and that it is futile for a man to care about them.” He stressed that many of these “little details” of the toilette were also indispensable to men. Yet, for men to learn the skills of grooming, they had to turn to his earlier work Médecin des dames.11
The simplified masculine fashions and the toilette of the revolutionary period were meant to highlight men’s natural characteristics and roles, copying English fashions. To be plainspoken, enlightened political orators, men had to be transparent in their feelings and opinions. Transparency implied an end to deceit and the most deceitful aspect of masculine Old Regime dress was the ubiquitous hairpiece. The first step was the simplification of the wig to fit Enlightenment ideals of simple self-presentation. Wigs had stood for respectability, leveling generational differences with powder and creating professional ranks through style. The new simpler, more natural-looking wigs symbolized convenience rather than emulation of the court. Taste masters defined wigs as a means of protecting natural hair and scalp, making them more appropriate than the hair underneath. Men, such as Rousseau, could choose a simpler wig style to convey their rejection of all things aristocratic and artificial.12 In 1788, Mercier commented that “one no longer wears wigs; the doctor, the surgeons at court wear their hair in a bourse (hair bag), or at least use a wig that imitates the natural.”13
But for Mercier, even natural-looking wigs were not radical enough. He found the fashion for wigs ridiculous and hoped that men would realize the practicality and healthiness of short hair.14 It was for these reasons that Old Regime soldiers were said to be the first to cut their hair short and go without wigs entirely.15 When they started wearing their shorn heads without shame, the fashion spread throughout society. Quentin Bell sees this shift as the beginning of the male renunciation of exhibitionism.16 Men gave up their wigs to proclaim their naturalness and their suitability in the new public sphere. The Revolution further politicized hair, with natural hair representing radicals in the early years and powdered hair proving royalist sympathies by the Directory. The royalist Incroyables pulled off the bonnets of Jacobins, while Jacobins tried to tear off their wigs. Despite Robespierre’s headpiece, “the cradle of liberty has become the grave of Old Regime lawns.”17
After the Revolution, obvious wigs were stodgy and old fashioned. They could not be part of the new, youthful, martial society. The younger generation had to destroy the cachet of the wig and powder to assert their social and economic position. In his early nineteenth-century play entitled Le jeune médecin ou l’influence des perruques, L. B. Picard depicted with humor the necessity of debunking both the fashions and influence of the older generation. In it, two young men, a doctor and a lawyer, donned wigs and powder to dupe their respectable old-fashioned clientele into thinking they were middle-aged men and thus to be trusted and hired. Their nemesis was an aging aristocratic fop who believed that by wearing a blond hairpiece he could pass for twenty and gain the confidence of the grandmother along with the hand of her granddaughter. When, at the end of the play, the deceit of both parties became clear, the crafty lawyer and doctor asked their client, “So, madame, what is more wrong, the wig that ages us, or the false hair which makes him younger? … Is it not more ridiculous to act the young man than to be one? … Is not a young man starting his profession worth more than an old man who never knew how to have one?”18 Youth had possibility, energy, and more important, hair, making youth the winner of lucrative contracts with elderly women and the hand in marriage of young girls. The attempted mimicry of youth by old age remained a joke about bad taste and bad hairdressing. Ultimately, Picard banished both the respectability and deception of the wig in favor of talent and naturalness. By the early nineteenth century, the term têtes à perruques implied empty-headed imbeciles who depended on old-fashioned, and no longer meaningful, markers of learning and respectability.19
The emasculation of the old aristocratic fop was not only due to his wig and powder but also due to the lack of hair it implied underneath. Wigs in the early nineteenth century signified loss and deception rather than social emulation or convenience. In stories and images, young women accused old men of wearing unfashionable, revolting wigs to disguise the signs of aging: wrinkles, pockmarks, and loss of hair. Nougaret tells of a seventy-year-old baron who attempted to gain the favors of a much younger woman. When he was mockingly rejected, he turned his attentions to her mother. Still found ridiculous, he “redoubled his cares to hide his age, had an even more elegant wig made than his usual one, that, according to him, made him look forty.”20 The mischievous lady, however, saw through his disguise and purposefully knocked off his wig, exposing to all those assembled his bald pate and wisps of white hair.
The masculine coteries who watched the emasculations of their peers were fully aware that this humiliation could just as well happen to them. In an early nineteenth-century print, Garde à vous: La perruque enlevée, a woman collecting scraps of paper inadvertently lifts off a man’s wig. The man, parodying Corneille, exclaims, “Oh rage, Oh despair! Oh wig, my sweetheart, did you live only for that disgrace!” The wig and the trash are mixed together and the man’s dismay is both highly comical and tragic. He has lost his cover to the “vile hook” of a poor old woman who should not have the ability to emasculate a respectable man.21 In another print from the same period, L’inconvénient des faux toupets, a hapless man bowing to the ladies leaves his toupee in his hat (figure 10). Though the women seem to be politely shocked, his well-hatted and bewigged companion ogles and laughs openly at his friend’s misfortune. The man who kept his hat on may be impolite, but he nonetheless managed to remain respectable. Men were as vulnerable to the gaze of their competitors as to their potential conquests. For men of the early nineteenth century, fashion choices were tricky. If they adopted a wig, it signified stodginess and it might fall off inopportunely, but if they wore their naturally thinning hair, they were also left defenseless in a world of new signs.
Figure 10. L’incovénient des faux toupets, Bibliothèque nationale estampes
The Rise and Fall of Powder
The downward fall of the wig took with it the profession of starch makers. Hair and its accessories were an important part of the luxury trades in eighteenth-century France. Wearing wigs and powder had been central to courtly fashion; yet, it was a practice also adopted by the middle classes and urban artisans. In 1769, there were twelve thousand hairdressers and wigmakers in Paris, making it the largest and most contentious luxury trade.22 The public’s dependency on hairdressing and wigs meant that starch makers and perfumers profited from the consumption of perfumed powders along with scented pomades to nourish the hair and keep it clean. When the wig first started going out of fashion, men continued to wear powder on their hair, but eventually natural color triumphed over the uniformity of white. For traditional and older men, even this fashion did not fade, with many continuing to wear wig and powder well after the Revolution. Robespierre wore his wig powdered throughout the Revolution, which, according to Mercier, caused many to repudiate this fashion out of hatred for the Jacobin leader. Because many Jacobins gave up powder as well, no political distinction was made during the Terror between powdered and not.23
Whether for political or fashion reasons, the market for powder started to shrink in the 1780s. As a fashion accessory, powder was no longer needed in such large quantities because numerous wigmakers went out of business. Like rouge makers, producers of power attempted to salvage their commerce; yet, they failed to resurrect its popularity. Instead of creating new uses (such as face powder and perfumed clothing powder), most sellers stuck too closely to their dying niche. They also failed to adapt to changing times because they did not address growing concerns regarding the edible qualities of the starch that was the basis for hair powder. By the end of the century, the association of powder with bread production put starch makers too far at odds with both public opinion and the government to institute a successful comeback.
The foremost reason for wearing powder in the eighteenth century was fashion, tied to the court practices and the mimicry of white hair. Powder, however, was also seen as capable of transforming all men into respectable actors, erasing lines of age and rank. With or without a wig, powder was the finishing touch of a man’s toilette. To justify this strange fashion, commentators ascribed to powder other functions such as warding off disease. One commentator felt that “the moderate use of perfumed powder in hair is linked as much to health as convenience; and it is regarded as a necessity amongst all polite peoples.”24
The arguments made for wearing powder quickly became reasons to shun it. The practice of wearing powder was found to be unhygienic and destructive of physical beauty. Le Bègue de Presle condemned the application of hair powder and greases since they “inflame the scalp by blocking the pores of the skin; their putty induces itching, causing humors, pimples.” Those who did not comb their hair had the added problem of vermin and other insects inhabiting their scalp.25 Certain powders, specifically those made with lime, led to hair loss that made wearing wigs even more necessary. Others felt that powder was frivolous and excessively used. One of the petit maître’s most ridiculous traits was his powder-covered clothing.26 Time spent powdering seemed wasted when a simple gust of wind could destroy all the wigmaker’s hard work.27 A well-powdered person could also foul the air, furniture, and clothing.28 The adoption of natural hair and color was an aesthetic, as well as a hygienic, reform promoted by critics and doctors as part of the larger shift in fashion and behavior.
Yet, it was the association of powder with foodstuffs that caused the greatest difficulties for the industry. Powder was fabricated from starch made primarily from bran and wheat by-products sold by bakers to starch makers. Both during the Old Regime and the Revolution, critics accused starch users of exacerbating bread shortages. As early as 1731, a priest was shocked to find that “the stores of wigmakers were more sprinkled with flour than mills.”29 Mercier railed against the two hundred thousand fashionable people in Paris who whitened their hair with enough wheat to feed ten thousand peasants, calling for a return to natural hair color.30 The elite’s fashion was literally taking food out of the mouths of hungry citizens. Attacks against frivolous uses of wheat were also common among philosophes: “Voltaire and Rousseau, despite their antagonistic views on the social utility of luxury, joined hands to assail the prodigal waste of precious flour in wig preparation and cosmetics.”31
When wheat became scarce in years of bad harvest, these fears could be embodied in laws. Amid a 1740 food shortage, the Paris Parlement issued a moratorium on selling barley and grain to starch makers, as well as more stringent laws limiting baking white bread.32 Even in the prosperous harvest year of 1760, a tax was proposed to diminish the purchase of hair powder and to increase the amount of coarse wheat (blé grossier) in foodstuffs. The corporation of perfumers fought back, arguing that this law punished the public who employed the leftover parts of grain for their cleanliness and the conservation of their health. They also argued that a tax on the coarser, lesser parts of grain would force perfumers and starch makers to employ finer edible wheat now made more affordable. Finally, perfumers warned that charlatans might react to this ban by producing low-quality and potentially harmful powders from other ingredients.33
The perfumers may have exaggerated the benefits of powder, but they were right to fear unofficial attempts to create powder from other sources. Numerous inventors petitioned the government for approvals for new kinds of powder, while others advertised their findings directly to the public. One man had the idea of using a foreign grain, Nigella (fennel flower), claiming it could produce whiter powder in greater quantity per acre than wheat.34 In 1772, another inventor petitioned the Academy of Sciences to fabricate starch from rotten beans. This proposal was rejected by Lavoisier because starch was already made from “rotten wheat, middling (gruau), and by-products,” not causing the people to suffer from a loss of food. Moreover, the citizens of Paris alone consumed “three million tons of starch” a year, too much to produce from beans alone.35
That starch was fabricated from substances seemingly edible only in times of famine did not stop revolutionary officials from discouraging the production of powder. In 1790, the Société des Amis de la Constitution of Nice (the local clubs of the Parisian Jacobins) proposed that “curling powder is only a luxury need, Republicans should not know this vice, especially when it diminishes the quality of bread and increases its price.” They further proposed a ban on hair powder, starch, and all establishments serving beer made from hops.36 This proposal was not implemented, but in 1792, the department of Calvados banned the production of beer and starch because of a bad wheat harvest.37 In a move of patriotic zeal, the Paris section of St. Eustache renounced wearing hair powder en masse.38 In this state of need, inventors again pressed the government with plans to make powder out of everything from chestnuts to alabaster. This time the government took such proposals seriously and encouraged inventors to replace costly wheat with cheaper vegetable by-products.39 Yet, in so doing, the revolutionary government was more concerned with maintaining grain stocks than with circumscribing fashions. Popular concerns with hoarding wheat and fears of famine made the production of any type of starch unpopular, whatever its uses. Only when these fears abated was the ban on starch lifted.
Though the laws against starch may never have been strictly enforced, powder producers were directly affected by the Revolution. Citizen Garnier was “forced to cease his business for the duration of the revolutionary laws.” When he reopened his shop in 1797, he reassured “merchants and shopkeepers that he was doing all he could to merit their confidence in the accuracy of his operations, the quality of his merchandise, and the moderation of his prices.”40 Though no longer frightened by government reprisals, Garnier realized that powder had lost its popularity and profit. His emphasis on cheapness and quality, and his subsequent pleas to previous customers, indicates just how damaged the hair powder industry had become by the end of the century. Women’s new short Titus haircut caused starch sellers to wish toothaches on these fashion victims.41
Other powder manufacturers continued to advertise during the Revolution, using the dissolution of the guilds to transform themselves from starch makers to creators of powder (fabriquants de poudre), a title previously belonging to perfumers.42 This newfound freedom, however, did not help artisans sell their now unpopular product. Instead of deflecting criticism with direct references to the debates about foodstuffs, these advertisers adopted the same discourses of medical danger found in rouge advertisements. Of the numerous advertisements for powder during the Revolution, only one makes reference to food shortages.43 Instead, they alerted customers of adulteration in desperate times. For instance, Besnard “warned consumers about the perils of powders currently sold mixed with drugs.”44 Powder had become a political issue and these advertisements did little to quell criticisms of its role in bread lines. Though hair powder would have gone out of fashion regardless of food shortages, starch producers’ unwillingness or inability to address public concerns impeded the adaptation of their businesses. Unlike other cosmetics sellers who deflected criticisms and redefined their products to fit new fashions, starch sellers were not able to save their industry.
By 1798, hair powder had all but disappeared in advertisements and on the heads of the fashionable elite. Though the returning émigrés and the new petits maîtres of the early nineteenth century adopted it, hair powder never returned as a widely acceptable fashion.45 The disgrace of powder was tied to a combination of factors. The loss of its popularity due to the decline of wigs, the association of starch with food shortages, and the inability of producers to address this problem or alter their product’s applications led to an almost complete decline of its commercial potential. The claim, made by retailers, that wearing powder was important to the health of the French people was unpersuasive during the revolutionary years of turmoil and strife. Hair powder was the only beauty product to be a direct victim of the Revolution. The starch makers and those who profited from perfuming powder, to say nothing of the wigmakers, were irretrievably weakened by this change in fashion.
Masculine Vanity and the Cosmetics Market
The decline of the wig and powder created a new set of cosmetic problems for men: visible hair loss. Since nature was to be the dominant aesthetic, men were supposed to accept baldness as a masculine trait, a necessary part of a truthful personality. This acceptance, however, was neither simple nor without casualties. Hair was closely linked to masculine sociability as well as sexual and economic power. French men continued to be perceived in terms of physical traits, judged by their outward appearance and their diminishing pates. A new emphasis on hygiene, exercise, and youth further exacerbated the desire for lively follicles. The bald male head may have been present in the occasional portrait of an intellectual, but in the social salons of Parisian bourgeois and elite society it remained an anathema. So, forced to shun the toilette, men had to take more care of their hair in secretive ministrations. It had to shine and curl at will, representing a fundamental aspect of their masculine identity. As such, it was the hardest aspect of the physical body to tame without resorting to obvious artifice. The hope and promise brought by new cosmetic cures and medical discoveries (still going on today) fed on the general instability in the masculine physique. In case these products failed, men also continued to depend on inventive wigs that might pass as real. In the highly competitive market of the postrevolutionary period, a man’s ability to stop the inevitable physical deterioration could symbolize prosperity. Bald by age and nature, the man of nineteenth-century France had to face his public hair on head.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the medical profession closely scrutinized male hair loss for the first time. Doctors and their patients were keen to find solutions to baldness, made prominent by the loss of wigs. Doctors divided hair loss into two categories: calvitie, which was loss due to aging, and alopécie, which could be blamed on illness. Most doctors asserted that little could be done for calvitie; at the most, it could be stemmed but not stopped. Its root causes were understood to be the diminishing output of hair follicles due to a decline in bulb vitality. This lack of “nourishing greases which feed the bulbs of the hair” occurred naturally with old age.46 For men and their physicians the perplexing problem was frustrating bald spots and receding hairlines on men whose aspirations for social integration and seduction were still active, thus neither short-term alopécie nor the traditional old-age calvitie. What was especially frightening to commentators, as to many people today, was that men started losing their hair by natural causes in the bloom of youth. The medical student Grellier in his 1806 thesis did not think that there were more bald men than previously and cited common Roman jokes aimed at bald men. Nonetheless, he was concerned that in his Europe “it is almost a deformity” for younger men to lose their hair.47 As a later commentator quipped, bald men “no longer have the brilliant prerogative of covering this malformation with a laurel wreath” like Cesar or a well-made wig like their own ancestors.48
Nineteenth-century doctors associated hair loss with male sexuality but without knowledge of hormones or genetics. In 1809, the doctor Marie de St. Ursin connected sperm with hair strength, arguing that hair fell out during old age because of a decline in “erotic fluid.”49 For him, hair (especially beards) was a sign of masculine potency and strength. If the presence of hair implied masculine potency, then “seminal loses, venereal excesses, or masturbation,” as well as syphilis were the main causes for hair loss.50 Men who wasted their fluid were punished by an early loss of their masculine traits and could only hope to regain them by reforming their ways. Petits maîtres were the perfect example of an extreme lifestyle, mixing luxury, sexual debauchery, and feminine traits and thus the most likely to lose their hair.51 Yet by 1815, a medical student pointed out that this link between sperm and hair was not borne out in observation because women, children, and eunuchs did not lose their hair. It was not until 1847 that a scientist surmised that the vigorous heads of hair on eunuchs might be linked to their lack of sperm, thus reversing the previous assumption that diminishing potency caused hair loss.52
Nineteenth-century scientists may not have had any knowledge of endocrinology but they tried to explain why men were more likely to lose their hair than women. Doctors pointed out that though men lost their hair with old age women were more likely to do so during long spells of illness, specifically during pregnancy.53 This theory went well with the scientific assumption that the female organism was weaker, easily put upon by strong emotions and sensations. Yet it was specifically feminine sobriety and lack of bad habits that may have made them less likely to face a full calvitie.54 The most often cited reason for the differences in the sexes was that women took better care of their hair than men and tended, by nature, to have thicker hair. This explanation considered both cultural habits (female vanity) and biology, implying ultimately that men could improve their chances by taking the feminine example of grooming to heart.55
Though there was no consensus on the main cause of hair loss, most doctors stressed the need for better hygiene and healthier habits. Goulin, an early advocate of natural styles, argued that the solution for beautiful hair was to reject all Old Regime fashions.56 Doctors suggested that simpler food, purer air, and moderate pleasures would equal longer, healthier lives and thus stronger capillaries as well.57 They blamed extremes: too much heat, sadness, emotion, intellectual thought, or sleep.58 These external sources, when combined with internal causes (such as illnesses and old age), helped doctors explain what they saw as a growing epidemic. Because most of these causes were behavioral, doctors encouraged balding men to change their habits and reform their behavior before it was too late. Men were not to blame for these habits, even when they were sexual, because they were expected of fashionable men. Baldness could be cured by proper hygiene, self-control, and better fashion sense.
Though doctors did not fault men for their hair loss, they did not encourage public baldness because of its popular association with sexual weakness and aging faculties. But the doctors’ behavioral cures were neither quick nor decisive, and desperate men wanted promises of results. Their saviors were entrepreneurial inventors all to willing to promote their products as capable of redefining the social makeup of the respectable elite. The bane of the professional physician, these hawkers of potions latched onto the possibility of self-deception among a population of fashion-conscious men. In a world of visible pates, the beauty aid of the early nineteenth was hair lotion. The precursors to shampoos (not used in Europe until the late nineteenth century and brought from India), these products had a multitude of usages. They promised to make hair shiny, to thicken it, and to stop hair loss and were aimed at both men and women. Such products as the Pommade régénératrice and Poudre transmutative gained popularity with those who wanted their own hair to triumph over wigs.59 Despite their purported rejection of all toiletries, men gained prominence as consumers of cosmetics since their failures were now on display. Those who made and sold hair products were not so much redefining their goods to fight off criticism, as profiting from the shift toward natural fashions that had doomed other parts of the industry.
Before the development of advertising and the professionalization of medicine in the late eighteenth century, home cures for hair loss were the main solution. In the late seventeenth century, when wigs dominated, advice books provided recipes for ridding oneself of hair as well as regaining it.60 Those worried about hair loss could try scrubbing their heads with eau de vie, honey, eggs, fly cinders, and serpent or bear grease. The marketing and packaging of these cures expanded in the 1770s. Journal advertisements for the sale of greases or oriental creams to cure all aspects of hair loss became common. Such miracles sold for as cheap as two francs a bottle in the 1820s.61 To distinguish themselves from more feminine cosmetics, hair potions adopted a series of pseudoscientific names. In the pages of advertisements can be found the Régénérateur, Philocome au quinquina, Huile phénomène, and Cosmogène Isnard. Though advertisements rarely disclosed ingredients, most were likely to be based on vegetable or animal oils with various added perfumes to please the senses.
The most famous brand of hair-loss product was undoubtedly Alex Rowland’s Macassar oil. In the early nineteenth century, Macassar represented hope for renewed vitality among European men. First sold in London, it gained approval by the British crown (1809), the Emperor of Russia (1814), the King and Queen of France (1830), and the Emperor of Persia, who “testify their approbation of the discovery … with a large order.” Rowland had outlets in all major European cities, as well as in Boston, New York, Charleston, Montreal, Quebec, and Philadelphia.62 Two perfumers, Naquet and Mayer, were the official purveyors of this discovery in Paris. The original ingredients in this marvel were oil of been or ben (which comes from the moringa tree), “esprit de vin,” and flower essences, though Naquet and Mayer added hazelnut oil, an ingredient mimicked by Balzac.63 Macassar oil represented an exotic solution to a prosaic problem. Named after the city of Macassar on the island of Celebes, it evoked strange foreign lands stamped of respectable British commerce. As with other cosmetics, the appropriation of exotic goods as an essential part of growing European empires was a common motif in hair products. Macassar advertisements promised a wild abundance of hair to civilized men and women.
As a common cure used since the fifteenth century, bear grease evoked the wilderness most directly, commonly that of the backwoods of French Canada.64 Numerous sellers proclaimed that they were the sole carriers of veritable pure and white “bear grease made without heat by American Indians” at a price of three livres a pot.65 An early nineteenth-century label depicts two native Canadians tentatively prodding a friendly-looking bear. These savages will collect the precious grease (in a scene of carnage purposefully left out), but it was European traders who had the know-how to market it for hair loss. Another advertisement for beaver oil, also known for its positive properties for hair, depicts two natives in full gear with the fruits of their hunt. The primitive, however, was closely linked to the civilizing forces of European commerce. Ancient Greek caryatides and the announcement of a patent integrate the exotic beaver with European standards of science and reliability. Natives may have hunted the animal, but a French inventor and perfumer discovered its use and processed it for sale, making it available widely throughout France and Europe (figure 11). The men (and women) who used these potions would not turn into hairy backwoodsmen or grow hair like a wild animal but rather would gain potency as defined by European standards of beauty and fashion.
Figure 11. Pommade et huile de castor, Bibliothèque nationale estampes
To take simple grease and turn it into a sophisticated, fashionable cure, inventors used more than advertisements and evocative images. Inventors wrote brochures and manuals to convince the public of their worth. Hairdressers, perfumers, and wig-makers claimed knowledge about the hygiene and maintenance of the scalp and often used the findings of doctors to support their assertions. Duflos’ Essai sur les cheveux outlined the reasons for hair loss and then concluded with a discussion of his own cream’s nutritive qualities. The wigmaker Villaret claimed his knowledge came from the research of chemists and doctors. He gave advice to men and women on how to care for their hair and even described the inner-workings of the scalp. He advertised his Crème d’Alibour amid his lengthy discussions of follicles, asserting that it had the full approval of the Medical Faculty. By the 1830s, this form of promotion had evolved into client testimonies to convince the public. The doctor Oldendorff recounted the tales of real people to illustrate the efficacy of his treatments. He even said that no person should have recourse to wigs since he could prove his Huile préparatoire and Huile définitive infallible. The hairdresser Obert printed letters from satisfied clients in his treatise, while also advertising his ingenious wigs just in case. He also provided a before and after image of a thirty-five-year-old man’s rapid recovery.66 These sellers hoped that the consumer would prefer their mix of science and guaranteed success to the medical tracts that presented only pessimistic truths about hair loss.
The extravagant promises of hair potions were the target of much criticism and popular satire. In one boulevard theater sketch, Arlequin bought a bottle of Macassar to try on himself, but having accidentally dropped it in a kettle of boiling water, out came twelve wigs! Villaret also recounted the story of a lord who, after using this prodigious oil, lost all his hair and had to adopt a wig for life. He bemoaned, however, that the French did not learn their lesson from this story but instead laughed at the poor lord while still spending good money on this useless cure. He predicted that this continued blind vanity would lead to more wigs and toupees covering bald heads, as well as more “pompous advertisements covering the walls.”67 Theater sketches and adverse publicity mocking the credulity of the public further reinforced the visibility of hair potions.
The popularity and profitability of such cures also worried the medical profession that tried both to discredit and compete with this market. Doctors warned that such seemingly magic potions sold by charlatans were often made of “acid bases or corrosives, inciting itchiness … [and] that can have very serious consequences.” Goulin recommended that bald men go to a competent wigmaker rather than risk harming their scalps with such malevolent products.68 Some specialists realized that despite stating that calvitie was not reversible, most men would still buy cures. L’Artois accused his colleagues of ignoring the possibility of cures for too long, leaving it open to charlatans.69 Though their capillary studies were supposedly rational and scientifically motivated, doctors started promoting the distribution of medically viable potions. Most physicians copied one another’s findings to provide clients with reliable pharmaceuticals. The Pommade de Dupuytren (a hair specialist) was a widely distributed remedy depending on cantharides (Spanish fly) mixed in animal fat. Another doctor added quinine and opium to this mixture, to neutralize the exciting effect of cantharides on the nervous system.70 The chemical concoctions touted by doctors may have been more effective than bear grease, but they were undoubtedly more dangerous to the health of the user. Doctors who attacked advertisers of hair potions for endangering the public also participated in the frenzied attempt (whether based on myth or medical research) to control the market for hair loss products and with it the recuperation of masculine dignity.
In tandem with this growing market for hair products, the market for wigs remained an important, albeit reduced, part of fashion production. Since most potions were not known to provide miracles, many men had to turn once again to the promises of false hairpieces. Yet, these hairpieces were not the same as their Old Regime ancestors. A revolution in wigs had occurred. Though late eighteenth-century men had been sold wigs meant to look natural, postrevolutionary men wanted wigs that could actually pass as real hair. A multitude of new inventions— curls inserted inside riding hats, toupees, and false ponytails—emerged to satiate the new fashions and alleviate the ultimate and unforgiving march of aging. Wigs were a private masculine purchase, an essential aspect of the secret toilette the new man publicly denied. Men’s wigs and toupees, like cosmetics for women, were highly visible in advertisements of the period but mainly invisible as consumer goods. The best-selling wig stayed put on the gentleman’s head while he was bowing to the ladies, transacting important business, or even more risky, engaging in sexual adventures.
False hair was especially important for constructing new and ever-changing hairstyles. In the revolutionary period and Empire, tastes spanned from long curly locks to the short Titus hairstyle, both difficult to manage without the aid of false hair. By the 1820s, men’s hairstyles continued to demand wigs. For instance, the hairstyle popular in 1823 was so curled and creped that “one thought that these men had wigs.”71 Men wanted to have “nothing false, at least on the exterior,” but everyone knew that the rage was for luxurious curled hairpieces that could be attached to the inside of hats.72 Each specific lock and where it fell had a name (“the victorious ringlet” or “the seductive hook”).73 Men who lacked the proper virile and sexually enticing curl would understandably resort to art. Artificial hairpieces to create a style justified false hair tresses as objects of fashion.
Other men justified wearing false hair for health reasons. Most nineteenth-century doctors still believed that wigs could protect the head from bad weather and thus illness. “Wigs should not be considered solely objects of the toilette …” since “a great number of people are forced by the loss of hair and especially by the vicissitudes of the atmospheric temperature …” to adopt them out of necessity.74 Men who had lost their hair from “late night work or honorable wounds” could thus don a wig respectably.75 This reasoning assumed that certain men, especially the elderly, would be better served wearing a false hairpiece than having an uncovered head. As justified by health, the wig could also function as an object of social integration, hiding the weaknesses inherent with hair loss.
Despite continued support for wig wearing, the successful wigmaker promoted wigs as a mimicry of the natural, rather than as a social integration tool. Early nineteenth-century wigmakers expanded on earlier inventions to help their products be more realistic. They invented new frames and measured their client’s heads for a better fit.76 Achieving perfection in verisimilitude gained recognition from both consumers and the state.77 One of the most famous inventors in this domain was Allix who was honored with prizes, patents, and public recognition of his art. At the 1819 Exposition des produits de l’industrie in the Louvre, his stand was surrounded by “petits maîtres observing the false toupees and the mechanical tufts,” all ready to spend large sums on these promising covers. Allix proposed wigs for all seasons and styles, which became synonymous with men’s fashion.78 Allix and his competitors represented the utmost ingenuity in an art that had long been associated with French craftsmen. “Mechanical” hairpieces were sold alongside mechanical clocks and toys, proof of the continued ability of French artisans to amaze and seduce consumers. Though wigmakers would never regain the renown and financial wealth of the Old Regime, in the early nineteenth century, hairpieces remained lucrative for businesspeople who could mask the processes of aging with fashion and scientific invention.
Wigmakers, inventors of potions, and doctors vied with one another for influence over men’s heads. As a group, they reinforced the need for a solution to the problem of baldness. Doctors asserted the reasons for the loss, and though less confident about its solutions, took sides on the debate between cosmetic manufacturers and wigmakers. In turn, the scientific language of the medical profession helped those who sold solutions to legitimate their products. Their advertisements made clear that there was something to be done, a purchasable commodity awaiting men who despaired about their lack of hair and thus their lack of masculinity in society. The aggressive presence of hair products in the consumer market of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did not create the stigma of baldness, but it did guarantee that all elite men (and probably quite a few of the lower classes) knew of the potential solutions that the market could provide them.
Conclusion
In Cesar Birotteau, Balzac’s perfumer hero was at once a naïve investor and a visionary businessman. His ingenious plan to conquer the French market for cosmetics was to bet on the vanity, not of the fair sex but of men. Thus, Birotteau invented (with the help of a famous chemist) a hair regenerating oil. Birotteau’s reasoning behind his cure was that “at a certain age men will do anything to grow hair on their heads when they have none … Since the peace, men live more among women, and women do not like bald heads … So the demand for that class of article can be explained by the political situation.”79 Peace and vanity in the 1820s was the instigation for increased masculine anxiety, and Birotteau hoped to find financial wealth in a solution. Balzac’s perfumer echoed the multitude of advertisements and tracts that proposed to help men with their bald spots. Balzac chose to copy Macassar oil precisely because this product was both so lucrative and so ludicrous. The novel used contemporary personages and products to create a credible criticism of the dangers of rampant capitalism as well as the inherent profitability of masculine vanity in the budding consumer market. Birotteau was at once a bumbling fool whose attempts at social elevation left him open to manipulation and a shrewd reader of inherent masculine weakness and its commercial possibilities.
Birotteau’s invention was a simple concoction made with hazelnut oil that he believed must work because medical students used it to make their mustaches thicker.80 To bolster his specious claim, he turned to the famous chemist Vauquelin. Balzac copied Vauquelin’s own scientific study on the composition of hair as the basis for this conversation. Vauquelin at first denied that hazelnut oil would have any special effect. He enlightened Birotteau with the fact that hair was dead and that even the popular Macassar would not bring it back. Nevertheless, the fictional chemist was willing to judge hazelnuts as more suitable than other oils because of their stimulating nature (according to the well-known doctor and researcher on hair, Dupuytren) and gave his name to the marketing of the newly baptized Huile céphalitique.81 Balzac portrayed a world in which specialists and scientists were aware of the false promises made to men by charlatans and perfumers but were also too blasé or too financially implicated to try to stop them. The fictional Vauquelin saw no harm in perpetuating myths and giving hope to consumers.
Melding science and commerce had to be matched by a new means of marketing and advertising. But it was not the elderly perfumer who would revolutionize French consumerism and masculine beauty, but a younger and more creative generation. Balzac made the marketing of Huile céphalitique the first national publicity campaign. Birotteau’s young assistant, Popinot, and his friends concocted visually dramatic and discursively persuasive billboards to be plastered permanently in the perfume and hairdressing stores of France. They also manipulated the possibilities of a new nationalized press. The inventive young promoter bribed, cajoled, and fêted editors, journalists, and printers to get the product talked about, not just through advertisements, but, more important, through informative and supposedly objective articles. These new entrepreneurs “had the wit to comprehend the influence of journalism and the effect produced upon the public mind by the piston stroke of the reiterated paragraph.”82
New means of publicity, thus, went hand in hand with the development of a new market, one that was principally aimed at male rather than female consumers. Birotteau’s enthusiasm and Popinot’s profits matched the success of actual perfumers and physicians. Scientific approval, manipulation of consumer vanity, and commercial acumen came together to make an unbeatable consumer product, a necessity for those with thinning pates, and a highly desirable commodity for the rest. Balzac’s view of history, though off by twenty years chronologically, reemphasized a vision of early nineteenth-century France that firmly linked the development of consumerism, not solely with feminine pastimes but also with the weaknesses of men. Balzac’s Birotteau realized that “the most certain speculations are those that are based on vanity, self-love, or a regard for appearance. Those sentiments will never be extinct.”83 And those most likely to part with their money because of their vanity were men. A man without hair was a figure of degeneration and impotence. Hair concretely symbolized a man’s sexual and financial suitability. Thus, the promise of hair would remain a profitable sector well into our own time.
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