CHAPTER FOUR
Maligning Beauty
The Critics Take on Artifice
It is a quarrel about women (querelle de femmes). Men have entered the fray; it has become almost a civil war. The philosophers of the land make arguments for and against luxury.… The wits create catch-phrases, jokes, epigrams, songs; others say simply that reasonable women are the most amiable. Elegant women are not without worries … every day a few of them leave art to return to nature, and soon they will not be numerous or strong enough to fight against the Insurgents. We do not know when and how this large and small affair will finish.
—Affiches de Toulouse
This “large and small affair” was the debate over the uses and abuses of artifice at the end of the eighteenth century. Elegant women needed to worry because their makeup and extravagant frills were being replaced by more modest and simpler styles. Though the writer of this ridicule, a journalist for the Affiches de Toulouse, claimed not to know how this battle would end, he clearly favored the odds of the “insurgents” against artifice, and rightly so. By the 1780s, fashions had shifted radically for the elite and respectable citizens of France and their counterparts throughout Europe. Satirists and philosophers waged a war of words against women and men who masked their faces. At first playful and light, these criticisms grew more vehement as the century wore on, until few were willing to defend wearing makeup. Not only were the criticisms essentially unchallenged, but they came from all sections of intellectual society. As Daniel Roche points out, by the end of the century, “moral apologists for fashion were few.”1 The wig was toppled, the voluminous skirts shrank, and the painted face was scrubbed clean. Fashion is dead, long live fashion.
These attacks against fashion had as their enemies not just extravagant spending on frills but the aristocratic definition of selfhood. Criticisms of cosmetics were intrinsically tied to creating a public sphere for political discussion and dissent. Transparency of meaning in texts, behavior, and self-presentation was an essential aspect of the Enlightenment project and the physiognomist’s science. The goal was to illuminate what had previously been hidden and to simplify what had previously been overdone. The word plays, innuendoes, and masked balls of the Old Regime elites were to be replaced by frank discussions, honest emotions, and polite soirées. Late eighteenth-century moralists were well aware that the luxurious clothing and artifice of the court was at the center of this redefinition of merit over birth and wealth. Because of the decline in sumptuary legislation and the consumer revolution, fear of emulation grew. Yet attacks against luxury were not principally to keep the lower orders in check but rather to distinguish a new elite from aristocratic excess and those who copied it. The aristocratic elite and their artifice no longer represented the ideals of honor and virtue, so a new, more acceptable system of fashion and luxury had to be created. A new group of elite, made up of both commoners and nobility, rallied around the concepts of virtuous luxury and natural beauty.2
Women and their roles in society were placed at the center of attempts at redefining fashion to fit notions of transparent and natural beauty. Femininity became a means of physically representing virtue. Women were to be treated with respect and reverence as long as they embodied the virtues of gentleness and sensibility that could be read on their faces.3 Thus, to create an idealized world of republican fraternity, the spendthrift, sexually voracious, politically aware, and painted courtesan had to be replaced by the prudent, virtuous, domesticated, and natural mother.4 Cosmetics were at the center of this redefinition not only because they created dissimulation but because “they expose the constructed qualities of masculinity and femininity.” Women who wore cosmetics painted on their femininity, implying choice and control over their roles in society. Patricia Phillippy argues that the painted woman was threatening because she claimed “a creative and self-creative authority ordinarily reserved for men.”5 Though this was already a common concern of the Renaissance, it was essential to those critics who hoped to create a clear demarcation between the sexes in the eighteenth century.
In England, the turn against artifice began earlier and was in opposition to French fashions and practices. To wear French makeup was to be sexually and morally corrupt. Increasingly, French commentators adopted English values for both women’s behavior and cosmetic use.6 To save the women of France from corruption, many male critics felt they had to berate the practices of artifice while extolling the virtues of natural beauty. Adopting the language of physiognomists, commentators argued that if a woman was beautiful in her exterior traits, then she must embody purity within as well. This mix of interior and exterior beauty would allow her to function at the height of taste in the new social hierarchy. The new meaning of beauty by the end of the eighteenth century excluded masculine traits, emphasizing instead the physical and moral nature of femininity. Women represented beauty and thus embodied virtue, a quality that was to be prescribed to their faces by the rational male thinkers of the new elite.
Criticizing artifice was a fairly easy task with few detractors. Replacing it with a new aesthetic of beauty was altogether more complicated. Concretely defining “natural” fashion in either dress or makeup and then influencing the respectable feminine public to adopt these new styles was not an easy task. The newly naturalized and feminized body was an amorphous entity whose signs and meanings were much less easily pinned down than the regulated extravagance of court dress. The debate over cosmetics, essentially a war of words against those who continued to wear them, illustrates clearly the difficulty of presenting a workable alternative model of beauty. Aristocratic makeup, essentially rouge, white face paint, and powder, may have been discredited outside court, but the model of natural beauty that was meant to replace it left women (and men) with a confusing and ultimately highly malleable sphere in which to display and create their own sense of self.
Early Modern Toilette
The war of words against cosmetics in the eighteenth century was not new. The Greeks and Romans were ardent critics of cosmetics. The church fathers, from Tertullian to St. Jerome, also warned women away from the sins of makeup that disfigured their God-given beauty and encouraged vanity.7 In the seventeenth century, most criticisms against finery and artifice were made in the name of God. For instance, in François De Grenaille’s L’honneste fille, women were told that it was more important to be beautiful in the eyes of God than in the eyes of men.8 M. de Fitelieu in La contre-mode of 1642 saw makeup as a tool for deception, invented by the devil, which was especially tempting to women, though no less dangerous for men.9 Phil-lippy argues that early modern criticisms against cosmetics stressed feminine frailty and the need for male control. Her work indicates that cosmetic criticism was common throughout Europe.10
By the late seventeenth century and during the first half of the eighteenth century, wearing makeup was well established in the French court. The tone of criticism softened, and most comments were aimed at the misuses of makeup rather than its uses. Critics admonished women for wearing too much rouge if they were pretty or too little if they were ugly. One wag noted, “a Parisian woman would have less trouble staying two months locked up in her house than to appear one instant in public without being made-up.”11 English visitors, however, were especially shocked at the extent of French artifice, comparing it with the natural restraint of their own ladies in London. The Gentleman’s Magazine commented that French women were “almost equally beautiful,” but that the fashion for rouge meant that even those with naturally fair skin found “themselves obliged to lay on Red.” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was harsher on the overuse of makeup, calling French women “monstrously unnatural in their Paint.”12
Before criticisms of makeup became ubiquitous in France, its application was an occasion for voyeurism as well as mockery. Elite women spent hours at their toilette, first in private to apply paint and rouge, a ritual to which “lovers were never admitted.”13 The second toilette was a public display of primping in the mirror before a table laden with pots and potions. As a reapplication of paint, this toilette became “a spectacle that magnifies the interplay between the hidden and the revealed body.”14 Men visited these provocateurs hoping for favors, intrigues, or glimpses of female flesh. The public toilette was a spectacle of coquetry in the first half of the century, meant to seduce and entertain one’s guests by pretending to unveil one’s hidden charms. At the toilette, women transformed themselves, and it was in this transformation from bedroom beauties to society ladies that the male gaze found its greatest pleasure. For the capable coquette, however, the spectacle of her toilette was carefully orchestrated so that the careless moments of undress were just as planned as the finishing touches on her wig and dress. The rouge women applied “painted lively freshness which love and the effects of the bath knew how to spread on the complexion, as well as tender and timorous modesty.”15 A true coquette could apply love’s blushes at will.
Men who attended the toilette became the spectators of a seemingly private reversal of the strip show, portrayed in numerous pictorial and literary works. Writers and painters took playful jabs at women’s vanity and frivolity while describing these traits as highly sensual. This female weakness was never seriously criticized because enhanced titillation for the male viewer was this vanity’s ultimate outcome. Ensconced in the Rococo aesthetic of pleasure and illusion, the realm of feminine artifice became the realm of masculine desire.16 A voyeur’s fantasy, the coquette preened publicly out of a desire to be desired. Her sensuality was intrinsically wrapped up in “the art of dress” in which the dressing table and room were the entrance to the bedchamber. A woman’s sensuality was detectable in her level of undress and her “lips of roses … burning and half-closed.”17 The morning toilette hinted at past misdeeds and sexual pleasures to come. As the libertine Casanova pointed out, rouge was not meant to look natural but to “please the eyes which see in it the marks of an intoxication heralding the most amorous fury.”18 Most early eighteenth-century descriptions and paintings evoked the feminine toilette not to sermonize but to titillate a masculine audience. Criticisms of women who wore paint in the early part of the century were often no more than flirtatious means of seduction, rather than serious attempts at changing women’s habits.
The Dangers of Artifice: The Mask of Deceit
By the 1760s, the playful toilette was increasingly replaced by a much more moralizing and sinister vision of artifice; deception replaced seduction. Though often couched in humorous stories, such as the works of Louis Antoine de Caraccioli, Louis Mercier, and Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne, commentary on vanity and artifice took on an almost universally proscriptive tone. Critics replaced sensual rouge, popular in the early part of the century, with a mask of unsightly paint. Instead of being socially cohesive and sexually titillating, this mask signified the dissolution of clear, distinct social relationships threatening to the male ego. The goal of critics was to tear off the disguise and reveal the authentic self underneath: a transparent, thus seemingly easily readable persona.
Wearing cosmetics became linked to two different types of corruption: aesthetic deception and moral degradation. Neither of these criticisms was new; they were commonly employed during the Renaissance.19 What changed was the number and pervasiveness of these invectives and their relationship to the social and cultural context of the period. Critics called for an end to artifice because of its transformative powers and its link to the larger decay within society. They saw fard as artifice applied by women to deceive the viewer, most often innocent men. This deceit led to vanity in young women and falsity in older women attempting to conceal the effects of aging. For critics, attempts to turn old women into maidens and to improve beauty through paint were a complete failure (figure 3). Cosmetics did nothing to improve anyone’s beauty, they argued, but instead led to revolting visages. Men who adopted cosmetics, however, turned into effeminate petits maîtres with blurred gender identities. Second, and more damaging, cosmetics use by both genders caused the degeneration and corruption of society. Paint represented moral decline, which led men and women not only to step outside their gender roles but to blur the social distinctions between noble and commoner, master and servant. Those who abused their faces with paint displayed personal decadence, as well as provided signs of a larger decline in the social hierarchy.
From its inception, the artifice of cosmetics was compared with the art of painting. In the late seventeenth century, those critical of the colorist school of painting adopted the term fard to describe these new artistic excesses.20 Falsity in painting was termed fard and a “portrait without fard” came to mean a truthful description of character.21 Though critics associated painting with makeup, the opposite was also true. They described women’s toilettes as “painter’s studios,” and the same pigments were present in paint and makeup.22 Though it may have been acceptable for a portraitist to enhance the sitter’s features and colors using pigment, the reproduction of this false veneer on a real face was seen as a futile attempt to enter the world of art whose properties were incorporeal and static. The face functioned as a reusable canvas, but, unlike a work of art, it would prove to be ephemeral and false.
Figure 3. L. Surugue, La Folie pare la Décrépitude des ajustemens de la Jeunesse (1745), Bibliothèque nationale estampes
The made-up face was also related to the art of theater. Daniel Roche points out that wearing actual masks was common in eighteenth-century high society, linking the social practice of artificial appearance with the physical barriers of playacting. These faces of felt, like the application of makeup, were meant to create a social uniform, a regulation of fashion through artifice.23 They also had the power to establish social distance and mystery, essential to the practices of sexual and political intrigue. Critics in the second half of the eighteenth century saw masks as a symbol of deception, rather than of social conformity or sexual foreplay. The literal face-paint mask was even more insidious than the felt mask or the oil painting. It functioned as a constant reminder that nothing in society was as it seemed, while also signifying society’s conformity and order. It represented flesh and blood reproducing the expected norms of beauty—red cheeks and white skin—in women and for men who themselves were caught in the deception fard helped create.
Though the early practices of makeup created an artificial face prized for its falsity, by the later eighteenth century, makeup mimicked the natural, rather than supplanted it. Fard worn by women and men attempted to reproduce nature by enhancing or completely recreating the bloom of youth and beauty. What was once seen as artificial was now meant to be recognized as artificially natural. No eighteenth-century fashionable aristocrat would have failed to discern the application of paint and rouge, while still asserting that this mask was the recreation of the ideal beauty, a natural beauty that had to be artificial since it did not exist outside the boundaries of fashion. For its critics, the worst aspect of fard was its purported attempt to recreate norms of natural beauty while blatantly supporting the creation of further artifice. If makeup re-created nature, then the destruction of the mask was much more difficult.
Critics hoped to clarify the contradiction between the visually artificial exterior and the assumed natural model, which was at its most obvious in the relationship of the coquette to her physical beauty. The typically vain coquette “congratulates herself on her attractions which she owes to art and not nature … her lovers, duped by the paint and rouge, compliment her on her charms; and she, duped by this praise, which does not belong to her any more than her paint and her rouge, thinks herself truly beautiful.”24 Thus, the wearers of artifice were the first victims of its spell. Women believed themselves to be enhanced by the addition of paint. This false vanity not only obliterated any true beauty they might possess but helped establish a fashion that demanded wearing makeup by all women of the upper classes. If true beauty was defined through the use of artifice, then no scrubbed-clean beauty could compete. This was the first myth that critics wished to challenge. Artifice, they categorically stated, transformed women into unnatural creatures.
Critics accused women of consciously degrading their natural beauty in an attempt to outdo each other, since “the small number of [women] who have not yet fully lost their beauty feel guilty and, in an admirable emulation, they make themselves as unsightly as possible to look fashionable.”25 Society, thus, dictated that beauty and attractiveness be sacrificed to the whim of fashion. Cosmetics functioned as a means of competition between women, causing the wearer to enter a world of feminine rivalry and pettiness. Reasonable women were caught between “the desire to please which custom contradicts and the desire to follow custom.”26 Frivolous women could not stand the presence of prettier women who had no need for rouge, so they constantly tried to coerce and humiliate others into applying as much artifice as themselves.27 It was with peer pressure that the aging coquette corrupted youth. A mother was jealous of her daughter whose presence “destroys everything as soon she is near me, I feel uglier when I see her. And her youth and simple nature do more than all my art, my attentions, and my attire.”28 To diminish the strength of youth over age, older coquettes victimized those who had not yet learned the tricks of flirtation.29 Artifice was invented by “old age and ugliness” to confuse youth with “the age of disgust.”30 Young, fresh-faced women who feared the loss of their beauty were cunningly advised by their knowledgeable elders to apply makeup to fend off the passage of time.
The end to youth came quickly in the eighteenth century. Marie-Antoinette was said to invite only young women to her dinners since she did not conceive of how “past thirty, a woman would dare appear in court.”31 The Comtesse de Genlis felt old age started at thirty-five; Caraccioli identified twenty-five as his yardstick for the loss of beauty.32 Beauty was often compared to a flower that bloomed briefly and spectacularly.33 This loss of social status and attraction at an early age meant that all women were at risk of becoming coquettes. Fearing the loss of their attractiveness, women primped to keep their suitors. One fading beauty “in the past found it obvious that men would love her, now she is almost thankful.”34 Having reached old age “a bitter anxiety broke her heart; in losing her charms, she felt she had lost her being.”35
Older women who wore cosmetics were not only to be pitied but also to be laughed at as silly creatures unaware of their vanity. Pierre Jean Baptiste Nougaret made fun of a fifty-year-old lady who “thought herself still pretty! Her skinny, dry body was in striking contrast with the paint and rouge that covered her yellow and livid complexion.”36 Casanova was disgusted when faced with a sixty-year-old woman who still plastered her face.37 Hardly ever portrayed in a sympathetic light, older mothers and widows were left stranded when their daughters married, with no place in society and no hope of further love affairs. The right behavior for a woman over forty was to renounce coquettishness without regret.38 Kept well away from the sensitive eyes of intelligent men, these women should quietly live out their lives in seclusion and charitable works, rather than dominate the salons of polite society. Women who reached old age were to mourn but accept their losses as “unfortunately everything changes in nature.”39
Since artifice functioned as part of the social rituals of voyeurism and flirting, men too were implicated in its deceit. Though some men may have falsely complimented the wearer of makeup to ingratiate themselves with her, critics felt that the majority of men were unwitting dupes of manipulative women. Governments passed laws against wearing makeup to protect these men.40 Innocent men were told to be on their guard against the false veneer of old or homely women. In one story, a young man learned the hard way of his lover’s wrinkles and imperfections by handing her a bottle of ink in the dark rather than her usual rouge. Upon lighting a candle, he found himself face to face with a horrible hag covered in black spots. His first love affair ended in ridicule, teaching the young man not to trust the tender sex.41 In another often-repeated story, a man followed a prostitute home only to find her attractions taken off one by one, to reveal a hideous shrew underneath.42 The obvious moral was that in the dark streets of Paris or even in seductively lit boudoirs, there was no way of knowing what grotesque traits lay under the voluminous dresses, pounds of paint, and towering wigs. No man was safe from these harridans as long as the fashion of dissimulation held power over society. Men feared the unknown and naked self underneath the frills. Criticizing makeup meant criticizing a woman’s attempt to hide from society her age, weight, skin blemishes, or social standing. Wearing paint implied unspoken faults. Visibility was the aim, but the critics warned that the woman underneath was as grotesque as her made-up counterpart.
It was not only the face underneath the paint that men feared but also the nature of the paint that they found offensive. The deceit of makeup made it unworthy of praise even though it might improve a woman’s looks:
The toilette has rendered their faces charming
Not by natural graces and smiles
But by the false art of applying polish.
Oh, beauties! Who owe to paint alone
The brilliant coloring of a skilful visage
Far from attracting hearts, you make yourselves hated.43
Even if cosmetics managed to improve beauty or re-create it, its status as a form of trickery led to disgust of an otherwise attractive face. If cosmetics were aimed at enhancing natural beauty, then, most critics agreed, it was not succeeding because men certainly preferred the real thing to false hopes.
Though some critics admitted they were tricked by the falsity of fard and found it capable of re-creating beauty, most asserted that makeup did nothing to improve women’s looks. Caraccioli believed that “the more she employs beauty aids, the more she makes herself ugly” and that a woman’s application of rouge resembled bull’s blood.44 As one commentator righteously noted, “if they claim to please men by the help of the rouge and paint that they wear with so much profusion, they deceive themselves.”45 Women’s beautification was the ultimate act of self-deception.
Because men found makeup intriguing, they were threatened by it and associated its use with guilt and deceit. Yet in a paradox, all rational men claimed the ability to see the true and often monstrous self beneath cosmetics. Caraccioli warned that “one thinks by using makeup to trick the masses and to attract a crowd of admirers; yet this makeup in the eyes of the wise is but a solemn and public confession of the annihilation of beauty.”46 The men who were tricked by cosmetics were under the spell of love and thus without their rational senses at the time.47 This momentary loss of reason was as much a threat to the individual Romeo as to the fundamental functioning of society. If men could not judge their sexual surroundings, their ability to rule the state and economy was also in question. Critics uncovered the layers of paint to warn and educate less perceptive men to whom these truths were not so self-evident. Male commentators both feared the power of cosmetics to dissimulate ugliness or age while asserting that any reasonably astute male could see right through the disguises of artifice.
The aesthetic argument against cosmetics, though contradictory, was at its heart both an indictment of female deception and a practical means of redefining beauty as the domain of rational male thinkers. The makeup of the court and aristocratic circles of the early eighteenth century was meant to be a visible marker, openly deceiving the viewer while functioning as an intrinsic part of the game of seduction.48 By the late eighteenth century, critics felt that it was necessary to point out and discredit makeup because its application had become subtler and more widespread. Not only could cosmetics create false veneers, but such masks were offensive themselves, having the opposite of the intended effect. There was little point, in these critics’ eyes, to beauty products meant to hide flaws even if they were aesthetically pleasing. The erotic appeal of the mask was replaced by the vileness of any form of artifice.
The Dangers of Artifice: The Feminized Petits Maîtres
Men had to be taught to discern the falsity and ugliness of artifice, not only on their lovers but on themselves as well. Men’s fashion, up until the eighteenth century, had often been more ornate and showy than women’s. Most elite men wore powdered wigs, and by the early eighteenth century, it was also acceptable for them to wear rouge, face paint, and perfumes and creams. Men “spend much time and effort making themselves clean and well dressed.”49 These practices of beautification took place in male toilettes, where they could also entertain visitors and prepare for their outings.50 As the century progressed, these spaces and practices were defined as feminine. Therefore, men were excluded from the vanity table and instead relegated to voyeur. What J. C. Flügel labels the “Great Masculine Renunciation” banned men from primping and left the male body with no obvious exhibitionary role. Despite evidence that men continued to purchase cosmetics, those who adopted artifice found themselves no longer in favor, and they could only continue to do so surreptitiously. A new version of masculinity privileged simplicity of dress and, more important, a retreat from notions of male beauty. The new man was a man because of his rough features, not despite them.
Fashionable men who wore beauty aids came under harsh scrutiny. The petits maîtres and their companions the abbés poudrés, both known for their frivolous pastimes and fashionable dress, became stock comic characters in plays, novels, and tracts. These men were depicted as even more concerned with their appearance than the women around them. Diderot’s petit maître was highly self-conscious, “blowing on his sleeves, constantly readjusting his wig … and eyeing his rouge in the mirror.”51 This vision of male vanity caused Caraccioli to quip that petits maîtres were members of a secret “order of frivolity” who had to spend at least four hours at their toilettes every day.52 Even the military, site of male power, was corrupted when “each officer procured himself a toilet-table and spent long hours there.”53 This loss of time seemed especially disgraceful for elderly statesmen and men of distinction, not to mention men of the church.54
Loss of productivity was not the greatest hazard of male vanity. Critics feared that men who wore cosmetics would eventually become undistinguishable from women. Men with toilettes were “as effeminate as women.”55 Young men were bewitched by “this seeming uniformity between the two sexes, that rouge … that air of coquettishness.”56 Men who had in the past sported masculine mustaches now wore “an effeminate face.”57 This ridiculous feminization of men, encouraged by social mores, led to their weakening and eventually to their loss of identity to the voracious women of society. The women who ran the popular salons controlled politics and power, since the fashionable men “have brains and almost faces and figures of women.”58 Aristocratic men who acted as women could not rule over society or expect their social inferiors to follow them. They upset the gender hierarchy and, in doing so, the hierarchy of social positions.
Feminized men were feared because they undermined the division between the sexes.59 In one story, Restif de la Bretonne described a lovely boy whose “red mouth, garnished with the most beautiful teeth, resembled a rose bud; on his smooth complexion one can see the brilliance of youth and on his neck the whiteness of a lily.” This description mimicked that of a pretty young women, and indeed, in this case, the feminized boy turned out to be a young woman in disguise. Restif de la Bretonne’s criticism of society, however, was not only that girls dressed as boys but that such a feminine creature was an acceptable man to both the characters in his story and to contemporary readers.60 The shift from a one-sex model, in which masculinity was the norm, to a two-sex model, in which men and women were seen as opposites, heightened concerns over gender identification.61 Restif de La Bretonne stressed the importance of men and women’s dress staying separate so that neither should slide into the realm of the other. He felt that “everything, about women must have a sex, the clothing, the hair, the shoes.”62 The young man who wore makeup may have done so to follow fashions but would unconsciously emulate the weaknesses of the opposite sex if he did not desist.
Cosmetics were not only a means of destroying gender identification but of destroying the link between age and respectability as well. Men, like women, were accused of attempting to dissimulate their age to make conquests. Nougaret told the story of a silly old man who hid his age by wearing an elegant wig and painting his eyebrows black. The older man in rouge and powder was no less “grotesquely ridiculous and ridiculously grotesque” than his female counterpart.63 The moral of the story, as it had been for older coquettes, was that old, often impotent men were not made for love, which should be left to the younger generation. An older man should look on women only as friends from whom he wants conversation. For men, old age brought respectability and distinguished looks to even the ugliest facade.64
To point to the further inappropriateness of rouged men, critics turned to the opinions of women, whose desire for a more distinctly male partner was seen as the strongest argument for the banishment of all finery. The Countess of Getnon-Ville, in L’épouse rare, made this point explicitly. Her hero transformed himself from a selfish, priggish petit maître to an adoring, capable husband. In the story, a count married a good woman but soon returned to his mistress. When he developed smallpox, however, his mistress abandoned him to the disease. Only then did he think of his wife and realized that she too would no longer desire him because “I am no longer the Adonis to whom she gave her tenderness; I am only a monster who inspires horror and who merits only her disdain.” His brother assured him that, on the contrary, pockmarks did not make men unsightly, “they even became advantageous by giving men a more masculine face and that [the count] who [currently] looked more like a woman than a man, would benefit more than any other” from this illness. The count’s vanity, however, made him disregard both his brother’s words and those of his wife, who swore she would love only her husband. Eventually, they were reunited, but not before he had drugged her, ravished her, and inundated her with presents to prove his love.65 The husband, who had lived a lascivious and feminized lifestyle, reformed into a paragon of the new masculinity, complete with economic and physical power. His masculinity was reestablished by his wife’s appropriately feminine humility and purity, rather than the mistress’s coquettish behavior. The new man he became had to learn the value of masculine ruggedness as well as character. Harmony and domesticity were shown to be the rewards of this transformation, even though they were achieved through deception and violence.
Men who wore rouge had always been a minority, principally those at court. Thus, the criticism and eventual demise of makeup for men of the upper classes did not have the same social resonances as the criticism of women’s toilettes. Yet these attacks also had another larger target in mind. They were aimed at discouraging women from adopting makeup. The male version of the coquette provided a mirror in which women could recognize the absurdity of their behavior. Women were to be the opposites of men by playing on their natural femininity without the need for the frivolity advocated in court life. The petit maître, even more than the coquette, pointed to the perils of artifice for both the women who frequented him and the men who admired his looks.
The Dangers of Artifice: The Immoral Coquette
Artifice was blamed for affectation, deception, vanity, and the creation of a race of feminized men. Yet the sin of vanity that led to the adoption of cosmetics by innocent young women and men was just the first step toward greater transgressions. Vanity led to an increasing need for attention, which in turn led to a desire for money and by default led women of the lower orders into prostitution or acting and tempted women of the upper echelons of society toward adultery and gambling. The coquette transformed herself from an innocent young woman to a treacherous courtesan by wearing makeup. Bad skin, which had to be masked with makeup, marked the wearer guilty of the sins of drink, sex, and gambling. Ultimately, in the imagery adopted by critics, artifice helped define and destroy the wearer’s virtue, using makeup as a shorthand for immorality. The painted face was the equivalent of the tainted soul.66 The powers of deception intrinsic in artifice, whether conscious or not on the part of the wearer, were as much a part of this immorality as gambling, loose morals, and drinking. The layers of paint were themselves the causes of corruption and not just its representation.
Though once praised for her seductive attributes, the coquette now under attack was by definition mannered and experienced, vain and self-centered, profligate and frivolous. Polite aristocratic society demanded that all women, at least temporarily, adopt the role of the coquette. For the critics of the court and aristocracy, she represented falsity and double dealings, which clashed with Enlightenment ideals. The Encyclopédie noted that false women and coquettes were “still more dangerous for the court and the spirit than were the courtiers.”67 Lynn Festa argues that the seductive role of coquettes had a political implication “since beauty allows non-aristocratic women like Louis XV’s mistress, Mme de Pompadour, to gain dominion over the king.” Cosmetics created a means of feminine power, a means of social elevation, and a means to “conceal the inner thoughts of the individual, creating a screen upon which other sentiments may be projected.”68 Affected manners not only stood in the way of enlightenment for the state and society but had deleterious effects on the women who adopted this fashion. Genlis believed that fashion “shrinks the spirit, renders it susceptible to the most ridiculous miseries, it extinguishes sensitivity and leads to the most awful mistakes.” A true coquette had neither principals nor virtues; she was a complete moral outcast.69
To those who advocated a moral and simple lifestyle, the threat of the mannered and vain woman came from her ability to put on a persona that hid her true and evil nature. She was
Sister of treachery
She cherishes falsity and seductions.…
Her modest glances offers to those who trust her
Only softness, candor, virtue, severity
But an enlightened eye.…
Tearing off the imposter veil
Soon penetrates the depths of her heart
One sees then only false modesty.…
More fard than virtue.70
The most maligned coquette was the one capable of seeming innocent and good. She could trick men into infamy and corrupt other women into immoral acts. The coquette stood for all that was false in the high society of Old Regime France.
Critics felt that coquettes were made from the inherent feminine failure of vanity rather than from social expectations of elite behavior. Vanity caused women to adopt fashionable clothing and makeup, leading to the sins of gambling, affairs, and worse. Eighteenth-century tales of feminine decadence, which described in pornographic detail the salacious elements of the coquette’s life, ultimately ended badly for the protagonist.71 In Nougaret’s Dangers de la seduction, the heroine, Lucette, gave way to the barrage of attention by her suitors, blushing profusely as she recognized her own charms. Her adoption of rouge to cover her emotions marked the first step from innocent maid to coquette. Lucette soon gave in to the world of theater and gambling. After contracting syphilis, she finally lost her powers over men because “her charms evaporated, her eyes hollowed, her plumpness disappeared.” Her descent into sin necessitated further application of rouge and other cosmetics to mask the marks of her lifestyle. The once naive Lucette ended up hanged after a life filled with sexual conquests, prostitution, and crime, all vividly detailed for the reader.72 The moral of these tales was that young women should avoid the pitfalls of their vanity. The heroines of these novels abused their beauty for immoral ends and had either to learn from their mistakes through marriage to a good man or pay for them with death or, worse, the loss of their beauty. Young coquettes “imagine that they will never cease to be pretty and that the present will last forever; yet most of them die in the utmost misery.”73 Punished thoroughly, the coquette entertained male readers with her seductive figure and antics but had to be crushed and subdued in the end. Beauty was a major theme in eighteenth-century novels: it was necessary for success in society; yet, caused tragedy and loss when it was not protected.74
Thus, beauty was a curse for a young woman for whom modesty and constancy were more important values.75 When these young beauties married, however, the danger remained. It was a well-known adage that a beautiful wife was a hazardous asset to a husband because she could evoke strong passions in other men. By the middle of the century, critics held that a wife who wore cosmetics was even more threatening. Restif de la Bretonne advised men choosing a wife that “a beauty is content to be so; she shows herself fully on the first day unlike those women to whom nature gave only partial charms [and] who use other means to supplement them.”76 The connection of artifice with adultery was simply the next step because these false women were made to seem beautiful and desirable to men. Caraccioli quipped that when a woman wore blanc “her husband never entirely held her in bed.” He also believed that if women stopped spending so much time at their toilette they would stop gossiping, insulting men, and, most important, cheating on their husbands.77 The toilette, thus, was a space of moral dissipation. Its public display of sexuality led to infidelity by allowing women to be admired by other men. Critics, with a nostalgic and fictive vision of the past, hoped that women would return to a simpler state, occupying themselves with feminine hobbies such as sewing, which would result in fidelity to their husbands.
The link between makeup and sexual debauchery was not new. Lichtenstein argues that throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, artifice in art, in language, or in the face, was “immodest like adulterous desire, venal like prostituted pleasure.”78 From adultery, prostitution followed. Women who wore makeup shared this ritual with prostitutes who wore indecent amounts of rouge. The main perpetrators of this disgrace were aristocrats attempting to distinguish themselves from the rabble. Rousseau argued that since bourgeois women could now afford to buy luxuries, noble women had to find new ways of identifying their prominent social position. These aristocratic women “preferred their rank to their sex and imitated harlots.”79 In a failed attempt to remain in control of a world of growing consumerism, aristocrats debased themselves to the level of prostitutes.
Associated with prostitution were the actresses who were also believed to over-indulge in the application of makeup on and offstage. Actresses who lost their lovers and thus their income were likely to fall into prostitution, as does Lucette. She finds herself forced into the hands of whores who provided her with “rouge, paint, fake hips, and breasts” to prepare her for her new line of work.80 The excesses of cosmetics were clearly linked to this descent into sin and had a central role in the unnatural worlds of both the theater and the brothel. The theater, with its bright lights and costumes, necessitated an overuse of rouge and other artifice. Critics, however, bemoaned that respectable women adopted this fashion of wearing rouge in large dabs (en placage) for daily wear. A letter writer in the Journal des Dames was shocked that women might stoop to the level of base actresses to please a crowd of unknown spectators.81 To be compared with an actress was as insulting as being likened to a prostitute. The Duchess de Berry was told that as first lady of the land, she ought to have “a little more gravity than to wear the beauty-marks of an actress in the theater.”82
Cosmetics came to represent sexual deviance among the lower orders and their aristocratic betters and blurred the lines between these groups. Women who wore too much rouge could not be properly categorized. They might just as well be prostitutes as duchesses, and their morality was no different. The association of prostitutes and actresses with the comportment of France’s elite was a clear sign of the growing instability in the system of rank. As early as the seventeenth century, commentators attacked the use of luxury due to its tendency to blur class lines.83 By the eighteenth century, accusations of emulation were common. The poor of Paris “put no less art in masking misery, than in putting on their faces with the aid of a studied toilette.”84 Nothing was ever what it seemed and “each aspired to a rank above that which they should.”85 Philippe Perrot argues that in the “seventeenth century appearance still served to mark ranks, in the eighteenth century it starts to mask them.”86
Though fear of emulation was likely unfounded, it represented the loss of respect for the social hierarchy, at the center of which had been the figure of the king.87 No longer tied to a court system of rank, the adoption of excessive jewels, frills, and powder by individual members of the aristocracy undermined the respect due to the elite. Critics felt as threatened by the elites who debased themselves to the level of prostitutes, than by prostitutes who copied their betters. Mercier’s telling description of prostitutes dressed as bourgeois women indicates how far the standards of the aristocracy had fallen.88 Rather than lead the lower classes toward virtue and honor, elite women were blamed for providing corrupted models of aristocratic femininity. Women of the upper classes disfigured “nature, making themselves hideous with the help of an art more showy than educational.”89 The consequence of vanity and paint was a sinful lifestyle passed on from mother to daughter, from waning coquette to newly arrived beauty, from naive youth to blasé petit maître, from prostitute to aristocrat, and finally from bourgeois to servant. This spread of immorality through paint, which at least symbolically reached all aspects of French society, came to be much more than a personal concern. As Caraccioli so graphically put it, “we live in infection, carrying with us always an unbearable odor. The worms are in our midst and the rot never leaves us.”90
Je ne sais quoi: Natural Beauty Triumphant
“I want women to have the courage to be ugly if they are; that old women have the majesty of their age, the air of goodness and compassion which goes with their white hair; that the young, without any other finery than cloth on which they have drawn the prettiest flowers, without any other hairdo than their beautiful hair, allow themselves all honest pleasures.”91
During the late Enlightenment the aristocratic hold over fashion was replaced by a consumer culture that promoted individualism rather than corporate or elite standing.92 Fashion choices, including what to wear on the face, were part of defining the individual alongside the social actor, “and that individual identity was now perceived to be shaped by nature and gender as much as by class and rank.”93 In the democratization of fashion described by Jennifer Jones and others, individual aristocratic extravagance faded as the autocratic monarchical system of style, best exemplified by Louis XIV, lost its power. Those who wished to overthrow the reign of artifice did so in the name of transparent social relations and a new definition of an ideal natural beauty based in moeurs that valued rural and family life.94
Intrinsically tied to the pseudoscience of physiognomy, the concept of the pure face was at its heart a rendition of the soul and its emotional representations on a physical surface. Artificiality was the bane of a trained physiognomist because it stood in the way of a legible reading. Though not all commentators agreed with the scientific claims of physiognomy, the belief in the legibility of a natural face was popular and highly practical in a society whose own legibility was in crisis.95 Unable to pinpoint social rank through exterior dress and behavior, late eighteenth-century commentators turned to categorizing individuals by their innate characteristics, principally the naked and highly expressive face. This scrubbed-clean visage had to be already pure to truly represent the new taste. The expectation of natural and even moral beauty put women into untenable positions: those who had adopted makeup in the past for reasons of fashion were now associated with its sinful taint; older women who attempted to hide their age were to be relegated to private spaces; and even those perceived to be young and beautiful were burdened with the task of being and acting natural at all times, and thus readable to their male companions. The paradox of this prescription was that to be “natural,” women had consciously to alter their way of dressing and primping to fit fashion expectations.
Once scrubbed free of makeup, women were to display their beauty simply and without help. Yet what were the accepted norms of beauty by the end of the century? The definition of beauty varied from those who believed that all beauty was subjective to those who felt that true beauty was definable through a series of proportions.96 These proportions, however, had to be interpreted by viewers, whose reason and knowledge of science determined their ability to judge.97 Pernety felt he knew exactly what beauty was, listing a small forehead, white teeth and skin, vivacious lips, and a shapely nose among other desirable traits for women, while men were simply to be well proportioned and tall.98 A more subjective view of beauty held that personal taste, cultural, and even racial differences implied multiple forms of perfection. For many, such as Rousseau, taste was personal, based on a certain je ne sais quoi that only the viewer could pinpoint.99 Yet even in this subjective view, the point of je ne sais quoi was not that it was indefinable and illusive, but that most male critics knew exactly what it was when they saw it. More important, physical beauty was not enough to capture the love of men. Though most critics of cosmetics believed in the natural proportions of beauty, this perfect harmony was nothing without grace and character. A young man may have wanted a pretty woman for a mistress, but he would marry one with “that vivacity of spirit which was so natural to her.”100 Though the coquette of the earlier part of the century also had a je ne sais quoi that elevated her exterior beauty through character and wit, her main attraction was in her sensuality. The eyes of the natural woman had to reflect innocence and not provocation, her smile sweetness and not desire. The roses of chastity were much more important than the red cheeks of artifice.
Yet defining innocence and sweetness was as difficult as pinpointing beauty itself. To facilitate identification of purity, those who were covered in flounces and rouge were labeled corrupt, while those who relied on their natural hue and simple accouterments were defined as the new ideal.101 Men wrote poems to immortalize this new ideal of beauty: “Worthy student of nature / Your game, your charm owe nothing to art / You draw your pure expression from your heart / These sentiments without study and without artifice.”102 In the character and traits of this perfect woman, moral and aesthetic arguments against cosmetics were justified. Her goodness was indicated by her lack of artifice; her beauty was made clear and certain to the viewer without obfuscation. The ideal specimen could wake up in the morning “without art, without ornaments, without borrowed charms, she was beautiful by her own beauty.… I saw her dressed without affectation or mystery.”103 Though still attractive, the natural woman’s sensuality was not meant to be threatening or aggressive.
The simple charm of the new natural woman belonged above all in the countryside, in opposition to the urban debaucheries of the salons or prostitutes: “a few ribbons and the crook of a country shepherdess forms the complete dress.”104 The solution to the rampant luxury and artifice of the Old Regime was a return to rural values, which included hard work, healthful living, and Rousseau’s promotion of breastfeeding. L’abbé de Favre, who described in detail the urban toilette, ultimately felt that women should adopt “the dress of a shepherdess … [they] will see that only nature should dress [them].”105 Caraccioli also preferred the rosy natural hue of the peasant maid to that of her urban counterpart.106 Marie-Antoinette’s simple dresses and interaction with real farmers at her hameau at Versailles represents the most extreme example of pastoral seduction.
Yet critics did not tout the ruddy complexion of a milkmaid, but the same creamy skin and red cheeks that had been the desired effect of rouge and paint. In this rural setting, tender beauties were supposed to be “adorned with all the graces which nature can embellish its masterpiece … this tender red which colors the open rose is no more vivid, more splendid than that which is spread on her cheeks.”107 Red cheeks should come from innocent blushing; white skin from naturally pale skin well protected from the elements and nocturnal activities. Thus, the turn to natural beauty was an attempt to free young beauties from the tyranny of artifice, while nonetheless reinforcing the same expectations.
In demanding a strict avoidance of worldly practices of beauty, critics of fashion hoped for an unconscious beauty: “unlike the spirit and the heart, beauty does not need culture.”108 Young women were asked to be unaware of their own beauty, seemingly unconscious of their own innocent seduction; conscious only of having left behind all masks. Rousseau described women as being “more beautiful since they no longer try to be … to please, they only needed not to disguise themselves.”109 Thus true beauty must create for the viewer a perception of natural grace. Yet even Rousseau admitted that this pure beauty and bearing had to be learned. In Emile, Rousseau described Sophie as being the epitome of purity. In her dress she was “simplicity joined with elegance.… There is no other young person who seems dressed with less affectation and whose attire is more studied; not an item of hers is chosen haphazardly, and art appears in none of them.” Rousseau contrasted choices and care to the visible art of the past. He believed in educating young women to be naturally charming and innocent as long as their beauty lasted.110 Genlis also advocated teaching girls to distrust the lure of fashion and frivolity. She advised mothers to tell their daughters they were pretty without laying undue stress on this attribute. She believed young women should be told “that if she saves her figure until the age of twenty-five, which is very uncertain, she will see one hundred women successively preferred to her who do not have her regularity nor her beauty, but who fashion and fantasy have made charming.”111 Thus, young women should be prepared to face a world of vanity and deception, so as not to succumb to the temptations of coquetry. They should repeatedly be reminded of their own faults and defects, with the goal of making them impervious to vanity.
Emphasis on training and lessons in correct and natural fashion implied that a good deal of work went into creating the perfect woman. Yet men such as Rousseau did not want to be able to discern this construction of natural beauty. Women were to aspire to a childlike innocence, hiding from the viewer its artificial constructs. Once achieved, this state of artificial nature became the apotheosis of femininity. The new aesthetic of beauty stressed transparency; yet, it expected these ideals to be expressed through the traditional means of deception. The new woman had to perform the “natural” so that the act would become indistinguishable from “reality.” The young ingénue, Julie, like her coquettish elder, played a game of seduction whose rules were laid out by cultural conceptions of beauty and fashion.
The expectation of having to look natural can be seen at its most contradictory in the work of P. A. F. Choderlos de Laclos. In De l’éducation des femmes, Laclos argued for a return to a natural state in which women would overcome their inferiority to men and bask in their maternal duties. Laclos stressed that natural woman “has neither white nor delicate skin … she has, above all, none of the resources of attire which women of all climates know so well how to utilize.” Though he eulogized natural beauty, Laclos also gave his female readers advice on how best to benefit from their natural traits through the application of cosmetics and perfumes. His list of reprimands to women included not drinking, since it made the skin unhealthy; not screaming, since the face would be contorted; and not being moody, since it made the face ungracious.112 Though Laclos wanted to construct the social world in accord with the natural one, he still felt that women’s concern with appearances had an important role in contemporary society. For Laclos, the philosophes lent their attention to fashion because “it pertains to men’s happiness by contributing to their pleasures.”113
Similarly, Mercier, Rousseau, and others expressed their satisfaction at seeing a beautiful and well-dressed woman. Since it was obvious to these critics that women’s ultimate goal should be to please men, it was not out of line for them to “give them advice and pronounce on the manner by which we wish they would offer themselves.”114 Employing the terms natural, artificial, and coquette became means by which men could control and define women, both as a sex and as individuals. For example, when a woman he was pursuing rejected Rousseau, he called her a coquette, hoping to ruin her reputation in society.115 Beauty in the eye of the beholder created love, but when that love was rebuffed, the object of desire became “every day … uglier.”116 As is evident in the sexual exploits of Rousseau, Restif de la Bretonne, or Nougaret, a real beauty was one who acquiesced to men’s attentions. These critics’ definitions of beauty erased women who did not fit in and objectified those who did.
If the new woman was a natural beauty ready to please those around her, then the new man was the one who could appreciate her charms. The new man did not follow the regulations of fashion, purging from his wardrobe all aspects of femininity and artifice. Men needed to adopt a new version of masculinity that stressed simplicity, subtlety, and quality. He should grow a beard and mustache (unpopular during most of the eighteenth century) to stress the distance between men and women. “A handsome man” had not “the least bit of vanity. The innocence and simplicity of his soul kept his physical qualities from prevailing.”117 The ideal man could have the petits maîtres’ sensitivity and politeness, but he should have “no more red high-heels, no more perfume, no more borrowed complexion” and importantly he no longer cheated on his wife.118 Like his female partner, the main criteria was transparency, which the philosophes believed would show men to be creatures immune to vanity. In 1783, Mercier was happy to note that men wore simpler and more becoming clothing than fifteen years previously, apparel that gave them a dignified appearance.119 Young men could still hope to be charming, but their moral fiber and public endeavors were more important than their pretty faces. Rousseau most clearly laid out the fundamental traits of the natural man in Emile, whose education was meant to distance him from effeminate urban men.120
Conclusion
In the late eighteenth century, the model of aristocratic fashion and artifice was firmly replaced by a moral model that stressed natural beauty and simplicity. All discussions of cosmetics were couched in ethical or aesthetic reprimands. The quantity of criticisms was so overwhelming that it would have been a wonder to see anyone at all walk the streets of Paris wearing rouge and blanc by the late 1780s, though it was still acceptable at court. Alongside the spread of Enlightenment ideals of transparency, the virtuous elite’s fear of confusion with their corrupt superiors and inferiors helped cause this shift in fashion. The criticism of the high aristocracy for their debauchery and the destruction of a visible social hierarchy due to the availability of consumer fashions increased the elite’s support for a society based on merit, virtue, and transparency, a shift that had occurred much earlier in Britain.
The philosophes’ redefinition of the public polity altered fashion’s place within civil society. Simplicity and visibility were powerful concepts because they allowed the new order to justify its ascendancy over the old aristocratic heritage without overthrowing the members of that coterie. Social relationships were meant to become transparent, allowing for merit to shine through just like true beauty would appear beneath layers of rouge. In this new world, critics hoped that aristocrats would no longer rule with excess over social mannerisms and prostitutes could no longer pass themselves off as decent citizens. Fashion would no longer represent the unnatural hierarchy of the aristocracy (including the newly ennobled wealthy) but would become the monopoly of women, albeit with a different model of femininity. The new woman, pure and moral, replaced the coquette.121
Natural beauty was no less complex than previous fashions. The subjective reading of the face made it difficult for both those who chose to judge good taste and those who represented it to know where they stood. The je ne sais quoi of the farm girl was to be the ideal of the newly reformed coquette, but only after it was adapted to the world of fashionable Parisians and to the sexual desires of male voyeurs. A visual representation of the shift in beauty and its complexity can be seen in René Nicolas Jollain’s duo La toilette (figure 4) and Le bain painted in the late 1770s. Both paintings, in the Cognacq-Jay Museum, depict a fully naked woman being ministered to by a maid. The surroundings are typical of late eighteenth-century boudoir scenes. The maid wears a robe à panier along with copious rouge. In La toilette, a portrait of a wigged gentleman looks upon the scene, while luxuries decorate the mantel and toilette table. The nude in both paintings, however, has a small head, which does not seem to correspond either to her body or to the aesthetic of beauty of the 1770s when they were most likely painted. The head has little face color and dark pulled-back hair. When looked at carefully, a rather large halo of lighter paint around her head indicates that at some point it was considerably larger. In his 1781 engravings of both paintings, Louis Marin Bonnet added a large pouf covering a blond towering hairdo as well as giving the nude a sly coquettish gaze and rouged cheeks (figure 5). The museum’s catalogue assumes that Bonnet inserted the hat as his own original touch, calling it “ridiculous.”122
Figure 4. René Nicolas Jollain, La toilette, Musée Cognacq-Jay, Roger-Viollet
I would argue, instead, that rather than being ridiculous, this larger head and pouf may have initially graced the Jollain original and were likely to have been painted over at some point after 1781. Thus, Jollain’s altered paintings literally erased the Old Regime aesthetic of beauty to redefine the figure of the nude, not in her body but in her face and hair while the maid and surroundings were left untouched. The current paintings reflect a mixing of old and new, allowing the elite to evolve into a new aesthetic of beauty while anchoring their inferiors and material luxuries to the old world. The contrast between the mistress’s nudity and the maid’s elaborate (and old-fashioned) clothing further highlights the seductive availability of the flesh to the male viewer. The nude is prepared and presented as an appetizing meal, coyly turning her head away. The originals’ pouf and makeup (as well as coquettish gaze) impeded direct access to the nude. The hat and the artifice of hairpiece and rouge negated the purity of the body, reminding the viewer of the constant playacting, intrigue, and deceit involved in Old Regime seduction. The hat, makeup, and wig’s disappearance erased potentially difficult, and more equal, games of badinage, leaving the new woman and her passive beauty immediately accessible to the men who gazed upon her.
Figure 5. Louis Marin Bonnet, La toilette, d’après Jollain (1781), Bibliothèque nationale estampes
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