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FRENCH CROSSINGS: III. THE SMILE OF THE TIGER

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2012

Abstract

This paper continues the theme of ‘French Crossings’ explored in other Presidential Addresses by focusing on the border zone between the human and the animal. The focus is on the allegedly tiger-like character attributed to Maximilien Robespierre, particularly after his fall from power and his execution in 1794. This theme is explored in terms of Thermidorian propaganda, French Revolutionary historiography and the ancient discipline of physiognomy, which was reactivated by Johann-Caspar Lavater in the late eighteenth century and was still influential through much of the nineteenth. Robespierre's animal rather than human status was also held to emerge in his inability to smile or laugh, a significant point also in that the meaning of the smile was changing in the same period.

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Presidential Address
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2012

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References

1 Le triomphe des Parisiens dans les Journées des 9 et 10 Thermidor (n.p., n.d.) and Portraits exécrables du traitre Robespierre et ses complices (n.p., n.d.). Much of this post-Thermidor literature, cited below, does not signal either a place or date of publication. Unless otherwise indicated, one can assume that the pamphlets were published in Paris in late 1794. I have drawn extensively on the famous Croker collection at the British Library (BL), the largest collection of French Revolution publications outside the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. I have given the BL call-marks in the relevant cases, to assist in location of these ephemeral and not easily locatable pieces.

2 An excellent entrée into the life and ideas of Robespierre, his role within the Committee of Public Safety and the circumstances of his death, is provided by two stimulating recent biographies: Scurr, Ruth, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (New York, 2006)Google Scholar, and McPhee, Peter, Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life (New Haven and London, 2012)Google Scholar. Their bibliographies give a sense of the huge volume and wide range of reactions Robespierre has always evoked. We also now have the first biography of Maximilen's younger brother, Augustin: Luzzatto, Sergio, Bonbon Robespierre: Il Terrore dal volto umano (Turin, 2009)Google Scholar. The literature on the Terror is similarly immense. Helpful perspectives are provided by Andress, David, The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution (New York, 2005)Google Scholar.

3 Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères, 2nd edn (Paris, 1835), 68. Throughout, all translations from the French are my own.

4 Ibid., 38, 159–60. The volume she attacked was Mémoires authentiques de Maximilien Robespierre, ornés de son portrait tiré de ses mémoires (Paris, 1830). The work is thought to be the work of Charles Reybaud.

5 Adelaide Labille-Guiard, Maximilien Robespierre en habit de député du Tiers Etat. There is a good if outdated account of Robespierre's pictorial representations in Buffenoir, Hippolyte, Les portraits de Robespierre (Paris, 1910)Google Scholar.

6 Merlin de Thionville, Portrait de Robespierre, 1 (BL, F852(1)).

7 Jones, Colin, ‘Tales of Two Cities’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 20 (2010), 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Colin Jones, ‘Laughing over Boundaries’, ibid., 21 (2011), 1–38.

9 Key texts include Agamben, Giorgio, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, 1998)Google Scholar; Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaux. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, 1990)Google Scholar; Derrida, Jacques, ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, Critical Enquiry, 28 (2002), 369418 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights’, in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (1990), 151–3. A good anthology of this literature is Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco, eds., Animal Philosophy. Essential Readings in Continental Thought (2004). Joanna Bourke, in What It Means To Be Human. Reflections from 1791 to the Present (2011), seeks to historicise these approaches. See also Kemp, Martin, The Human Animal in Western Art and Science (Chicago, 2007)Google Scholar.

10 Davidson, Arnold, ‘The Horror of Monsters’, in The Boundaries of Humanity. Humans, Animals and Machines, ed. Sheehan, James J. and Sosna, Morton (Berkeley, 1991)Google Scholar. Cf. Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar; Fudge, Erica, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (New York, 1999)Google Scholar; Park, Katherine and Daston, Lorraine, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; and Jean-Jacques Courtine, ‘Le corps inhumain’, in Histoire du corps, i: De la Renaissance aux Lumières, ed. idem, Alain Corbin and Georges Vigarello (Paris, 2005), 373–86.

11 See however Trumble, Angus, A Brief History of the Smile (New York, 2004)Google Scholar.

12 The subject of physiognomy within the west European tradition has come increasingly into focus in recent decades, but still represents a poorly covered field. Much recent work has focused on the later phases of the movement, dating from the work of Lavater in the late eighteenth century (see below, n. 26). For the medieval and early modern period, particularly useful are Porter, Martin, Windows of the Soul. The Art of Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar, and Courtine, Jean-Jacques and Haroche, Claudine, Histoire du visage: exprimer et taire ses émotions, XVIe–début XIXe siècle (Paris, 1988)Google Scholar. See too Getrevi, Paolo, Le scritture des volto. Fisiognomica e modelli culturali dal Medioevo ad oggi (Milan, 1991)Google Scholar; Rodler, Lucia, I silenzi mimici del volto (Pisa, 1991)Google Scholar; Laneyrie-Dagen, Nadeije, L'invention du corps: la représentation de l'homme du Moyen Âge à la fin du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1997)Google Scholar; Maclean, Ian, ‘The Logic of Physiognomy in the Late Reanaissance’, Early Science and Medicine, 16 (2011), 275–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jean-Jacques Courtine, ‘Le miroir de l’âme’, in Histoire du corps, ed. Courtine, Corbin and Vigarello. See too Guédron, Martial, L'art de la grimace: cinq siècles d'excès de visage (Paris, 2011), 303–9Google Scholar.

13 Porter, Windows of the Soul, 48.

14 Porta, Giambattista Della, De humana physiognomonia (Turin, 1586)Google Scholar. The work appeared in French as La physionomie humaine (Rouen, 1655). Cf. Casini, Tommaso, Ritratti parlanti. Collezione e biografie illustrate nei secoli XVI e XVII (Florence, 2004)Google Scholar.

15 Shakespeare, Macbeth, i, iv, 12. Interestingly, Lady Macbeth also evokes the alternative version: ‘Your face, my thane, is as a book where men / May read strange messages’ (ibid., i, v, 53–4).

16 For this almanach-style literature, see Andries, Liese, La bibliothèque bleue au XVIIIe siècle: une tradition éditoriale (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar, and Roche, D., ‘Le rire bleu: comique et transgression dans la littérature de colportage’, in ‘Le Rire’, special issue, XVIIIe siècle, 32 (2000), 1932 Google Scholar.

17 See the general overview, stressing Galenism's attenuated survival, in Lindemann, Mary, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1999)Google Scholar, and Elmer, Peter, The Healing Arts. Health, Disease and Society in Europe, 1500–1800 (Manchester, 2004)Google Scholar.

18 Le Brun, Charles, Conférence sur l'expression générale et particulière (Paris, 1668)Google Scholar. On this work, see esp. Montagu, Jennifer, The Expression of the Passions. The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun's ‘Conférence sur l'expression générale et particulière’ (New Haven and London, 1994)Google Scholar. Cf. too Kirchner, Thomas, L'expression des passions. Ausdruck als Darstellungsproblem in der franzözischen Kunst und Kunsttheorie des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Mainz, 1991)Google Scholar.

19 See the discussion on the distinction in Percival, Melissa, The Appearance of Character. Physiognomy and Facial Expression in Eighteenth-Century France (Leeds, 1999), 30–2, 36–7Google Scholar and passim.

20 Montagu, Expression of the Passions, esp. 17 and Appendix iii, ‘The Sources’, 156–61.

21 Cited in Montagu, Expression of the Passions, 85. Hogarth's regret reflected a general criticism of Le Brun for its overly mechanical view of expression, even while its influence continued to be strong. Cf. ibid., 85, for the decline of Cartesian physiology.

22 Cf. above, Figure 2. The Le Brun illustration drawing is from an eighteenth-century drawing primer.

23 Subsequent commentators did not always appreciate the fact.

24 Exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1797 where they caused a sensation, the images were first published in 1806. Montagu, Expression of the Passions, 193 n. 59. The lecture on physiognomy that Le Brun had given has been lost, though there were accounts of it in circulation.

25 Lavater's works started to appear in German in the early 1770s: see esp. his Physiognomische Fragmente (4 vols., Leipzig, 1775–8). Later editions were added to progressively. The first French edition of his work was Essai sur la physiognomonie destiné à faire connaître l'homme et à le faire aimer (4 vols., The Hague, 1781–1803). What became the standard work was published by Louis-Jacques Moreau de la Sarthe after Lavater's death as L'art de connaître les hommes par la physiognomonie (10 vols., Paris, 1806).

26 Lavater's work in English and French has tended to become better known in recent years through works focused on the impact of his writings on nineteenth-century culture. See esp. in this vein Physiognomy in Profile: Lavater's Impact on European Culture, ed. Melissa Percival and Graeme Tytler (Newark, DE.), 2005; Sibylle Erle, Blake, Lavater, and Physiognomy (2010); Hartley, Lucy, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge, 2001)Google Scholar; and Sharrona Pearl, About Faces. Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2010). See also Guédron, L'art de la grimace.

27 Cf. Kemp, The Human Animal, 69–72.

28 The ‘facial angle’ measuring the facial profile was particularly associated with Pierre Camper, and developed into a proto-racial science: Dissertation sur les variétés naturelles qui ont pour object l'histoire naturelle, la physiologie et l'anatomie comparée (Paris, 1791). Cf. Bindman, David, Ape to Apollo. Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY, 2002)Google Scholar. On other forms of pseudo-scientific measurement, see Stafford, Barbara Maria, Body Criticism. Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA, 1993), esp. 84–129Google Scholar; and Renneville, Marc, Le Langage des crânes: une histoire de la phrénologie (Paris, 2000)Google Scholar.

29 Porter, Theodore M., The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton, 1986)Google Scholar, and the classic Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973).

30 See below, p. 25. This is evident in even early post-Lavaterian texts such Le Plane, J. M., Physiologie ou l'art de connaître les hommes par leur physiognomie (Meudon, 1797)Google Scholar, which draws as much on Le Brun as Lavater. The same is true of the illustrated text, Etrennes physiognomiques, ou le Lavater historique des femmes célèbres (Paris, 1810). For the incorporation of phrenology, see Bourdon, Isidore, La physionomonie et la phrénologie (Paris, 1842)Google Scholar.

31 Pastoureau, Michel, Bestiaires du Moyen Âge (Paris, 2011), 77–9Google Scholar; idem, L'art héraldique au Moyen Âge (Paris 2009); and idem, The Devil's Cloth. A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric (New York, 1991). The status of a ‘bad lion’ assumed by the tiger in the eighteenth century was assumed in the Middle Ages by the spotted leopard; and tigers were sometimes shown with spots.

32 Della Porta, De humana physiognomonia, 96.

33 Pastoureau, The Devil's Cloth.

34 Leclerc, Georges-Louis, comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (15 vols., Paris, 1749–67), ix (1761), 129Google Scholar.

35 Ibid., 130.

36 Letter to Madame du Deffand in 1766: Voltaire, Correspondance, ed. T. Bestermann (107 vols., Geneva, 1953–77), lxiii, 116. This characterisation was to be picked up in 1803 by the English satirist James Gillray, who in his print, ‘The Arms of France’, portrayed the French Revolutionary Republic as ceremonially represented by the two animals, one a monkey under the motto of atheism, the other, under that of desolation, a tiger. British Museum, Prints and Drawings. 1868,0808.7189.

37 I am drawing here on the canonical works of French literature available through Frantext (ARTFL in the USA): www.frantext.fr/.

38 I am quoting from the French version of Clarissa, trans. by the abbé Prévost: Lettres anglaises ou Histoire de Miss Clarisse Harlow (Dresden edn, 1752), iii, 303, 467. Interestingly, Richardson did not use the word tiger, but ‘savage’ and ‘panther’.

39 Kete, Kathleen, The Beast in the Boudoir: Pet-Keeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley, 1994), esp. 117–19Google Scholar.

40 Buffon, Histoire naturelle, vi (1756), 3–4.

41 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Essays in French Cultural History (1984).

42 Lavater, L'art de connaître, ix, 33–4.

43 For Cataline, see e.g. Michel-Julien Mathiey, Réflexions sur les événements du 9 au 10 thermidor (Nemours, Year II (1794); BL, F853(15)). For Nero, cf. (Félix), La dictature renversée, la royauté abolie, et le fanatisme détruit; ou Robespierre et sa clique traités comme ils le méritent. Dédié aux Jacobins (BL, F581(4)); and Nouveaux dialogues des morts (BL, F852 (10)). And for Cromwell, cf. Nouvelles observations sur le caractère la politique et la conduite de Robespierre le dernier tyran . . . Par le Sans-Culotte Lesenscommun, 5 (BL, F852(3)).

44 This literature highighting the allegedly monarchical ambitions of Robespierre is analysed in Baczko, Bronislaw, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar. Cf. the same author's ‘“Comment est fait un tyran”: Thermidor et la légende noire de Thermidor’, in the excellent collection, Images de Robespierre. Actes du colloque international de Naples (1993), ed. Jean Ehrard (Naples, 1996), 25–54.

45 As vampire, cf. (Dejean), Sur la chute de Robespierre et complices (BL, F854(13)), 3. As chameleon, cf. (Franconville), Discours prononcé le 25 Thermidor à l'Assemblée générale de la Section de la Fraternité sur la conjuration de Robespierre et de ses complices, 2 (BL, FR581(4)). More generally on this kind of language, see Jean-Louis Jam, ‘Images de Robespierre dans les chansons et les hymnes de la Révolution’, in Images de Robespierre, ed. Ehrard, 299–321. And for its continuation into the nineteenth century, see, in the same volume, Antoinette Ehrard, ‘Un sphynx moderne? De quelques images de Robespierre au XIXe siècle’, 263–97; and Huet, Marie-Hélène, Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (Philadelphia, 1997), esp. ch. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 de Baecque, Antoine, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France 1770–1800 (Stanford, 1997)Google Scholar; French Caricature and the French Revolution, 1789–99, ed. James Cuno (Los Angeles, 1989); and Monstrous Bodies: Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe, ed. Laura Knoppens and Joan Landes (Ithaca, NY, 2004), esp. 158.

47 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes, Collection Hennin, 11845; ‘Miroir du passé pour sauvegarder l'avenir / Tableau parlant du Gouvernement cadavero-faminocratique de 93, sous la Tigocratie de Robespierre et Compagnie’, British Museum, Prints and Drawings, 1925,0701.60.

48 See the well-known print, ‘Robespierre guillotinant le bourreau après avoir guillotiné tous les Français’. Reproduced in Huet, Mourning Glory, 173.

49 Ehrard, ‘Un sphynx moderne’, 264.

50 Cited in Baczko, ‘“Comment est fait un tyran”’, 46 (Fethemesi), La queue de Robespierre ou les dangers de la liberté de la presse (BL, F356(6)). See below, pp. 34–5.

51 There is an excellent collection of these numerous pamphlets at BL, F354–5 and 356–7. The phrases cited are taken from Les crimes des terroristes (Year III (1795), BL, F355(25)); and [Saintomer], Jugement du peuple souverain, qui condamne à mort la Queue infernale de robespierre (BL, FR375(2)).

52 The ‘black legend’ phrase is Baczko's (‘“Comment est fait un tyran”’).

53 John Adolphus, Biographical Memoirs of the French Revolution (2 vols., 1799), ii, 43.

54 Cited in Huet, Mourning Glory, 152. Many other citations about Robespierre are contained in the anthology by Jacob, Louis, Robespierre vu par ses contemporains (Paris, 1938)Google Scholar. In terms of the argument here, it is noticable that virtually all the ‘contemporary’ verdicts were given after 9 Thermidor.

55 Bourdon, La physionomonie et la phrénologie, 328–9.

56 Michelet, Jules, Histoire de la Révolution française, ed. Walter, Gérard (2 vols., Paris, 1952)Google Scholar, ii, 61, 870. Cf. Jean Ehrard, ‘Entre Marx et Plutarque: le Robespierre de Jaurès’, in Images de Robespierre, ed. Ehrard, 139–61, at 144.

57 Cited in Antoine Court, ‘Lamartine et Robespierre’, in Images de Robespierre, ed. Ehrard, 93.

58 Cited in Huet, Mourning Glory, 154.

59 Ehrard, ‘Entre Marx et Plutarque’, 144.

60 Scurr, Fatal Purity, 11.

61 It would be interesting to see whether the image crops up in Counter-Revolutionary journalism, for example. That field is, however, very little studied. In terms of images, note their paucity, as remarked by Ehrard, ‘Un sphynx moderne’. As noted above, it was almost as though Robespierre was completely physically unremarkable before 9 Thermidor.

62 Carr, John, A Stranger in France, or A Trip from Devonshire to Paris, 2nd edn (Paris, 1807), 316 Google Scholar.

63 Dussault, Jean-Joseph, Fragment pour servir à l'histoire de la Convention nationale depuis le 10 thermidor jusqu’à la dénonciation de Lecointre, inclusivement (Paris, (1794))Google Scholar; Histoire de la conjuration de Maximilien Robespierre ((Lausanne, 1795)), 57.

64 Cf. Pierre Rétat, ‘Note sur la présence de Robespierre dans les journaux de 1789’, in Images de Robespierre, ed. Ehrard.

65 Robespierre's acknowledged pallor seems to have darkened into ‘lividity’ from 1792, which was ascribed to an excess of bile. Cf. Robespierre's former ally Jérôme Pétion, writing in that year (Jacob, Robespierre vu par ses contemporains, 217); and post-Thermidor, see, e.g., Moreau de la Sarthe, Portrait de Robespierre, 2.

66 The ‘red caps’ quote is Saint-Just's: Buchez, B. J. B. and Roux, P. C., Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française (40 vols., Paris, 1833–8)Google Scholar, xxxv, 434.

67 Mémoires de Barras, ed. Georges Duruy (4 vols., Paris, 1895–6), i, 179.

68 Dussault, Fragment, 28–9.

69 (Duperron), Vie secrette politique et curieuse de Maximilien Robespierre (Paris, Year II ( = 1794)), 23.

70 Fréron, cited in Jacob, Robespierre vu par ses contemporains, 41.

71 Etienne Dumont and Barère, both cited in Jacob, Robespierre vu par ses contemporains, 88, 201.

72 Cited in Jeannine Guichardet, ‘L'image de Robespierre dans quelques dictionnaires du XIXe siècle’, in Images de Robespierre, ed. Ehrard, 86.

73 See above, pp. 20–1.

74 Again, Frantext is of great help in tracking usage. Cf. Diderot, Denis, Les bijoux indiscrets, ed. Rustin, Jacques (Paris, 1981), 88 Google Scholar.

75 Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, 1st edn (1694), art. ‘tic’. The veterinary meaning of the term remains primary in the major French dictionaries through to the present.

76 (Duperron), Vie secrète, 29.

77 Soulagne, Guillaume-Antoine, Essai sur le tic en général et en particulier sur le tic douleureux de la pommette (Montpellier, Year XII (1804)Google Scholar).

78 Hérail, Jean-Auguste, Essai sur le tic douleureux de la face (Montpellier, 1818)Google Scholar. This is a useful text for tracing research on the phenomenon across the Enlightenment. See too Marazia, Chantal, ‘“Un piccolo flagello dell'umanità”: note sul termine “tic”’, Medicina nei secoli. Arte et scienza, 21 (2009), 1005–15Google Scholar. My thanks to Chantal Marazia for help on this point.

79 For sardonic laughter over the eighteenth century, cf. Jones, ‘Laughing over boundaries, 9.

80 Adolphus, Biographical Memoirs, ii, 443.

81 Victor Hugo, Quatre-vingt-treize (1874), in his Oeuvres complètes. Romans. III (Paris, 1985), 871–2.

82 Lavater, L'art de connaître, v, 139.

83 Ibid .

84 Cf. Jones, ‘Laughing over boundaries’, 8.

85 Jacob, Robespierre vu par ses contemporains, 41.

86 Perle, About Faces, 47. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), ed. Paul Ekman (1998), 7, 11.

87 Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 120–1.

88 Ibid ., 132–4. The image is on 135.

89 It is also the basis on which ‘post-human’ philosophy operates: see above, n. 9.

90 Rothbart, M. K., ‘Emotional Development: Changes in Reactivity and Self-Regulation’, in The Nature of Emotion. Fundamental Questions, ed. Ekman, P. and Davidson, R. J. (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar.

91 See esp. Ekman, P., Emotion in the Human Face, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1982), 154 Google Scholar.

92 V. Bruce, Recognising Faces (1988), 43.

93 Jones, ‘Laughing over Boundaries’.

94 Lavater, L'art de connaître, vi, 101–2.

95 Ekman and Friesen (1978), cited in Bruce, Recognising Faces, 43.

96 For fuller details on this section see my forthcoming book, The French Smile Revolution: Identity and Dentistry in Eighteenth-Century Paris.

97 These conclusions are based on an analysis of the relevant entries in the Frantext/ARTFL database (see above, n. 37).

98 Cf. Jones, Colin, ‘The King's Two Teeth’, History Workshop Journal, 65 (2008), 7995 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

99 de La Bruyère, Jean, Les caractères de Théophraste, 10th edn (Paris, 1699), 238 Google Scholar.

100 See above, p. 27.

101 Again, these conclusions are based on analysis of Frantext/ARTFL.

102 Pamela (1740) was translated into French in 1745; and the abbé Prévost translated Clarissa (1748) as Lettres anglaises ou Histoire de Miss Clarisse Harlowe in 1751. Prévost was also responsible for the translation of Richardson's sequel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753), which appeared as Nouvelles lettres anglaises ou Histoire du chevalier Grandisson in 1755.

103 For sensibility, two helpful introductory works are Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (1986), and Mullan, John, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar. Also focused on England is Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992)Google Scholar – though cf. G. S. Rousseau, ‘Sensibility Reconsidered’, Medical History, 39 (1995), 375–7. For France, see esp. Vila, Anne C., Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, 1998)Google Scholar, and Riskin, Jessica, Science in the Age of Sensibility. The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On civility and the policing of orifices, see the classic Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process, i: The History of Manners (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

104 Robert Darnton, ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity’, in his The Great Cat Massacre, 215–56.

105 As I seek to show in The French Smile Revolution, this process of the invention of the modern smile was not smoothly unproblematic, and was set back by the Revolutionary decade.

106 Cf. Jones, Colin, ‘Pulling Teeth in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, Past and Present, 166 (2000), 100–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

107 Jones, Colin, ‘English Teeth and French Dentists in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Medicine, Madness and Social History: Essays in Honour of Roy Porter, ed. Bivins, Roberta and Pickstone, John V. (Manchester, 2007), 7389 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. English and American dentistry lagged far behind the French.

108 Wellcome Collection, London.

109 Lavater, L'art de connaître, ii, 244–5.

110 See above, p. 4. Peter McPhee's biography of Robespierre is particularly insistent on this aspect of Robespierre's character.

111 Mémoires de Barras, ed. Duruy, i, 149.

112 The dental entrepreneur Dubois de Chémant marketed his patent porcelain white dentures under the heading of ‘incorruptible teeth of mineral paste’. See Jones, ‘French Dentists and English Teeth’, 76–9. Barras's implication of monarchical tendencies fitted in with the attack on Robespierre's character on and after 9 Thermidor: see Bazcko, Ending the Terror, esp. ch. 1.

113 See the interesting links between the two technologies in La Fabrique du visage. De la physiognomonie antique à la première greffe, ed. François Delaporte, Emmanuel Fournier and Bernard Devauchaell (Turnhout, 2010).

114 See the accounts of the day in Scull's and McPhee's biographies.

115 Jaurès, Jean, Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française, ed. Soboul, Albert (7 vols., Paris, 1968–73)Google Scholar, vi, 515.

116 Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, ii, 989. See Baczko, ‘“Comment est fait un tyran”’, 25–6, for another version of the final events.