Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut 9780226187396

Citation preview

Dandyism Age Revolution in the

of

Dandyism Age Revolution in the

of

{The Art of the Cut}

Elizabeth Amann The University of Chicago Press • Chicago and London

Published with support of the University Foundation of Belgium. Publié avec le concours de la Fondation Universitaire de Belgique. Uitgegeven met steun van de Universitaire Stichting van België.

ELIZABETH AMANN is professor in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University, Belgium. She is the author of Importing Madame Bovary: The Politics of Adultery.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18725-9 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18739-6 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226187396.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Amann, Elizabeth, author. Dandyism in the age of Revolution : the art of the cut / Elizabeth Amann. pages : illustrations ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-18725-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-18739-6 (e-book) 1. Dandyism— France—History—18th century. 2. Dandyism— Political aspects—France. 3. France—History— Revolution, 1789–1799—Social aspects. 4. Dandyism—Europe—History—18th century. 5. Dandyism—Political aspects—Europe. I. Title. GT867.A45 2015 391′.1—dc23 2014023199 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

{ contents }

List of Illustrations Introduction 1

vii

1. Muscadins 19 2. Jeunes gens 56 3. Incroyables 95 4. Currutacos 134 5. Crops 162 Epilogue 199 Acknowledgments 217 List of Abbreviations 219 Notes 221 Index 275

{ illustrations }

1. Ah! Quelle antiquité!!! . . . Oh! Quelle folie que la nouveauté, engraving by Alexis Chataignier 8 2. Carle Vernet, Les incroyables, engraving by Louis Darcis 12 3. Francisco Goya, La tortura del dandy 15 4. Isaac Cruikshank, The Rival Pigs 17 5. Simon Petit, L’anarchiste: Je les trompes tous deux 53 6. L’ami de la justice et de L’humanité 60 7. Henry William Bunbiry, La rencontre des incroyables, engraving by Louis Charles Ruotte 96 8. Ah! Qu’il est donc drôle! 98 9. Carle Vernet, Les merveilleuses, engraving by Louis Darcis 108 10. Les croyables au Péron, engraving by J. P. Levilly 109 11. Collets dit parasabre 125 12. Correction croyable 132 13. Perfecto currutaco 137 14. Francisco Goya, Quién más rendido? 156 15. Francisco Goya, Ni así la distingue 157 16. Philip Dawe, The Macaroni: A Real Character at the Late Masquerade 164 17. Isaac Robert Cruikshank, Dandies Dressing 165 18. Isaac Cruikshank, No Grumbling 171 19. Isaac Cruikshank, A Crop, of 1791 183 20. Isaac Cruikshank, The Knowing Crops 185 21. Isaac Cruikshank, Whims of the Moment or the Bedford Level!! 188 22. Tippy Bob 193 23. Mr. Moss in the Character of Caleb 197

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At the end of the eighteenth century, a series of new words emerged to describe a character type that already had a long history in European literature. The man once called a fop, coxcomb, beau, popinjay, or macaroni in English, a précieux or petit-maître in French, and a lindo or petimetre in Spanish became the swell or the exquisite, the incroyable or merveilleux, the élégant or elegante, and, in all three languages, the dandy. This lexical shift reflected a change in the value of the character. Whereas the old terms evoked the effeminacy (lindo, beau), absurdity (coxcomb, macaroni), apishness (popinjay), and smallness (petit, preciosity) of the figure, the new terms retain to this day positive connotations: to be swell, exquisite, incredible, marvelous, or elegant is ultimately fine and dandy. The character that was once a lampoon of fashion became in the late eighteenth century an ideal of self-fashioning. The emergence of these positive figures also involved a change of aesthetic, a shift from a cult of accumulation and excess—a style that drew attention to itself—to a principle of understatement and nuance: the art of the cut. My study traces this transformation in dandyism by examining five dandy figures that emerged during the 1790s in Europe: the muscadins, jeunes gens, and incroyables in France, the currutacos in Spain, and the crops in Britain.1 I argue that the positive revalorization of the figure and its shift in aesthetic cannot be understood outside the revolutionary politics of this moment. The association between dandyism and revolution may at first seem counterintuitive. We tend to think of the dandy as disengaged and indifferent, too superficial to espouse a political cause and too self-absorbed to

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care about society. If we ascribe to him any ideological position at all, it is usually a reactionary one. In Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle famously opposed the Dandies—the conservative aristocracy—to the Drudges, the working classes of 1830s Britain, which seemed increasingly to threaten the former’s existence.2 But during the French Revolution, the figure did not fall neatly on one side or the other of this dichotomy. Indeed, much of the literature around these types sought to recuperate an ideological center that had vanished during the Terror. As political paranoia escalated in the fall of 1793, the ideological spectrum was reduced to a binary: modéré (moderate) became a taboo word. Many of the texts examined in this study struggle to create a space for a political critique that would not be dismissed as treason, to define a center that was antiterrorist but not counterrevolutionary. The posing of these dandy figures was often a form of opposing, an attempt to make room for dissent in a monolithic political culture. This study has two parts. The first examines the French figures of the muscadin, jeunes gens, and incroyable and the politics of self-fashioning in France during the Revolution. Through consideration of pamphlets, songs, treatises, newspaper articles, parliamentary debates, vaudeville theater, and caricatures, it argues that after the Terror, these types had an important role in coming to terms with the trauma of the recent past— salvaging the ideals of the Revolution from its excesses—and in forging new forms of political expression that would avoid the binary logic of terrorist thought. The second part of the project explores the repercussions of the Revolution outside France by examining counterparts of the muscadins and incroyables in Spain and England. Dandyism has always been a deeply cross-cultural phenomenon. Throughout the eighteenth century, the dandy figures in Spain and England—the petimetre and the beau or macaroni—were Francophiles, condemned for wearing costly and often ridiculous French fashions, while the petits-maîtres across the Channel cultivated English styles, introducing l’anglophilie in France. During the 1790s, however, this cross-cultural exchange took on a new subtext: the politics of revolution. The second part of this study examines how two figures that emerged during this period, the currutaco and the crop, became sites for reenacting and reflecting upon the political turmoil across the Pyrenees and Channel. As with the French types, these figures embodied the struggle to locate a middle ground that preserved the ideals of the Revolution while eschewing the excesses of the Terror. The final

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chapter, on the English figure of the crop, shows how the modern dandy ideal of understatement emerged from these political reflections.

Masculine Singular Most modern studies of dandyism take their cue from what is undoubtedly the dandiest work on the topic: Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1845 essay Du dandysme et de G. Brummell.3 Placing footnotes within footnotes and winking at the reader with witty aperçus, Barbey d’Aurevilly dresses his text as skillfully as Brummell tied his cravat. This playful vision has come to define dandyism as we know it—as a style that is carefree, flamboyant, idiosyncratic, and without transcendence. It also set the terminus a quo to which most discussions of the figure adhere. By choosing George “Beau” Brummell as his hero and Regency England as his starting point, Barbey d’Aurevilly began his narrative long after the terrors of Year II (1793–1794) or the pleasures of the Directory (1795–1799). Later histories of the dandy would almost invariably follow suit: in Ellen Moers’s 1960 The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm, French dandyism is born as the exiles return to Paris; it flourishes in a post-Napoleonic world.4 If Barbey d’Aurevilly’s treatise cast such a long shadow, it may be because it gave voice to the new ethos and function of fashion in the nineteenth century. Historians and sociologists have observed that the meaning and understanding of dress shifted significantly between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One aspect of this change was a movement away from the determinist vision of clothing prevalent in the ancien régime. In the literature around the petit-maître and in the luxury debates of the eighteenth century, moralists had often argued that opulent attire led to moral corruption. Clothing, in their view, had a formative role on character. In the nineteenth century, this view gave way to an expressive conception of dress. Attire now functioned not as the maker but as the mirror of personality, an expression of the wearer’s individuality.5 This shift in function influenced the interpretation of fashion. In the eighteenth century, dress pointed primarily to social status and occasionally to political affiliation. While it continued to have these meanings in the nineteenth century, it increasingly became a way of foregrounding individual particularity—be it by flattering the body of the wearer or by conveying personal idiosyncrasy.6 Barbey d’Aurevilly’s vision of dandyism fit with this emphasis on in-

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dividual expression. Where earlier discussions of elegance—for example, Balzac’s Traité de la vie élégante (1830) or Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)—had dealt with dandies and dandyism, Barbey d’Aurevilly’s subject is a dandy, Beau Brummell, who has no equal: in Du dandysme, the dandy, the singular male, exists only in the masculine singular. Although Brummell also makes an appearance in the Traité de la vie élégante, Balzac introduces him as a teacher of elegance: the goal of the essay is to convert his individual flair into a social and aesthetic code; its assumption is that his style may be reproduced.7 Barbey d’Aurevilly, in contrast, insists on the ineffability and irreproducibility of the Beau’s elegance: “independence makes the Dandy. There would otherwise be a code of dandyism, but there is not.”8 For Barbey d’Aurevilly, Brummell’s self-presentation is an emanation of his peculiar genius. This vision of dandyism as personal idiosyncrasy has come to dominate readings of the dandy, which emphasize the quirks and whims of eccentrics such as Oscar Wilde or Max Beerbohm. The figure itself, however, was born not at the end point of the shift in the role of dress but during the pivotal moment of the transition itself: the French Revolution. As Cissie Fairchild has shown, various views of clothing coexisted and competed during the 1790s.9 While the revolutionaries sometimes embraced freedom of dress, at other times they attempted to instill republican values through enforced sartorial codes: obligatory patriotic accessories or national costumes for male citizens. Dress could function in both expressive and formative ways. It was also subject to diverse interpretive frameworks: it could be read as a sign of moral character or of individual caprice. And, very often, it was viewed as a marker of ideological conviction. This politicization of clothing was probably the most striking aspect of fashion during the Revolution. Throughout this period, dress was a constant source of contention, debated in the legislature and disputed on the streets. The revolutionaries wore their politics on their sleeves (adorned with tricolor cockades), their heads (topped with bonnets rouges), and even their feet (shod in mules révolutionnaires). Tellingly, one of the major icons of the Revolution was identified by a piece of clothing or rather the lack thereof: the sansculotte. Because of this politicization, fashions changed with unprecedented speed during the period. Each shift in ideological tide ushered in a new sartorial fad: the carmagnole might be de rigueur one day, but the scarf à la guillotine would be cutting edge the next. The modern dandy emerged from this moment of flux, from the collision of conflicting

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visions of clothing and from a series of conflicts that took dress as their battlefield.10

T h r e e I m ag i nat i o n s This study traces the intersection between male self-fashioning and the political upheaval of the period. In what follows, we will see that the relation between dandyism and revolution was generally viewed from one of three angles. The first, which I refer to as the paranoid imagination, privileges the opposition between surface and depth, appearance and reality. The second, which I call the catastrophic imagination, focuses on the distinction between self and other, “us” and “them.” And the third, which I have dubbed the anachronistic imagination, emphasizes the divide between past and present, old and new. Almost all texts about dandyism from the revolutionary period tap into one or more of these imaginations. The first approach, the paranoid imagination, is concerned with the legibility of social identity. Revolutionary ideology inherited from Rousseau an ideal of transparency and authenticity and an abhorrence of duplicity in all forms. It associated the court and the ancien régime with hypocrisy and falsehood and sought to usher in an age of honesty, a world in which a citizen’s heart could be read upon his face. Transparency was not only a political notion—an ideal of sincerity and solidarity—but also a scientific one: many of the revolutionaries studied physiognomy and believed that they could find correspondences between character and facial features.11 During the 1790s, however, many revolutionaries felt that this ideal of legibility was under threat. As counterrevolutionaries and enemies of the Republic resorted to subterfuge and camouflage, appearances were increasingly perceived as misleading; few signs, indeed, seemed more unreliable than clothing and accoutrement. During these years, dress became a constant source of anxiety and paranoia, subject to countless ordinances and regulations. Police advisories and newspapers warned against signes de ralliement, which could at times be quite subtle: a fleur-de-lis embroidered on an inner lining, a waistcoat with seventeen buttons (a coded allusion to Louis XVII, the young son of the executed king), or an assignat note folded in half in such a way that its legend—usually “unity, indivisibility of the Republic, liberty, fraternity or death”—read instead “liberty, equality, unity, indivisibility, fraternity or the death of the Republic.”12 In this context, dandyism and self-fashioning introduced a disturb-

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ing ambiguity. The dandy is a figure who makes his own life a work of art; he is at once an author and his own character. Dandyism, indeed, might be regarded as a form of autobiography that takes as its medium not words but fabric. Just as the diarist is both subject and object, so the dandy is at once the fashioner and the fashion plate. In both dandyism and autobiography, moreover, the relation between these two positions is a circular one. The writer creates his image on the page, but his writing also shapes his vision of himself. Similarly, the dandy-artist expresses himself through his dandy-persona but is also transformed by the image he creates. To put it another way, the dandy’s clothing volleys back and forth between the expressive and the formative functions of dress: it is alternately the mirror and the maker of the man. In a world that insisted on transparency and authenticity, this artifice and variability inevitably generated suspicion. The paranoid imagination manifests itself in two forms. The first is a melodramatic obsession with revelation: confronted with an uncertain and possibly misleading sign, the viewer seeks to unmask it, to uncover the reality beneath the ambiguous appearances. A classic example of this appears in the sansculotte newspaper Le Père Duchesne by the radical journalist Jacques-René Hébert. In one issue, the gruff, cigar-smoking sansculotte Père Duchesne tears the wig from the head of a “sansculotte” in the Palais Royal and reveals that he is really a muscadin in disguise.13 This imagination, however, can also manifest itself in more playful ways, taking pleasure in the transformative potential of the role. Dandy texts from the revolutionary period often conflate the subject and object of critique and play with the ambiguity between the two. In earlier eighteenth-century texts, these functions tend to be distinct: an author (the Enlightenment subject) ridicules the fop (an unenlightened other). In the 1790s, in contrast, the satirist often makes his commentary by assuming the persona of the target of his satire: he presents himself as the incroyable or the currutaco and offers himself mock praise. In such texts, it is often difficult to separate the author’s irony from the palpable pleasure that he takes in refashioning himself. At times, indeed, the satirical adoption of the dandy’s voice serves as a celebration and defense of the figure. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the patriotic ditty “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The song originally served to mock the disheveled colonists of the French and Indian War. During the battle for independence, however, it would become the rallying cry of the American revolutionaries, a vehicle of their self-definition and political dissent. While the British soldiers parodied the makeshift fashion of the colonial dandy who stuck a

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feather in his cap and considered himself a stylish macaroni, the revolutionaries took pride in their active self-fashioning, converting provincial arrivisme into a patriotic gesture. In the paranoid imagination, thus, the confusion of subject and object can lead either to compulsive revelation or to playful masquerade. In turning from the first imagination to the second, we move from the masculine singular to the masculine plural, from the dandy as an enigmatic and undecipherable individual to dandies as a class or political group. As revolutionary politics became increasingly polarized and veered toward class struggle, a binary logic began to prevail in public discourse. The catastrophic imagination reflects this us-versus-them opposition; it explores the distinction between self and other. The dandy is now not an undecipherable sign but rather an unassimilable other, be it social (the aristocrat) or political (the counterrevolutionary, the moderate). As this imagination pits one group against another, its titles tend to come in pairs: “les incroyables et les sansculottes”; “los currutacos y los majos.” And its discourse is often anthropological: it probes the strangeness of another culture, offering a glimpse of how the “other” lives. The logic of this approach differs considerably from that of the paranoid imagination. The latter seeks out subtle distinctions that lie beneath the surface: the fleur-de-lis hidden under a sansculotte jacket. In the paranoid imagination, sameness is a superficial illusion; the truth is the dissidence and distinction lurking beneath. What lies on the surface in the catastrophic imagination, in contrast, is not similarity but difference. The two antagonists appear to walk, talk, and dress in opposite ways. Frequently, however, they are not as different as they seem, for they are bound by a deeper tie: their common humanity. This imagination often points to the tragedy of such oppositions, which, though essentially insignificant, can lead to catastrophic situations: persecution, violence, and even war. As with the paranoid lens, the catastrophic imagination has both playful and alarmist variants. In its more ludic incarnations, it takes pleasure not in the confusions and slipperiness of the figure but in its over-thetopness, in its exaggerations and extremes, and in its diametrical opposition to other social groups. In other texts, however, the catastrophic perspective presents a grimmer scenario, imagining cataclysmic and even apocalyptic confrontations. If the threat in the paranoid imagination is confusion, that in the catastrophic is collision, a violent clash between irreconcilable forces that can end only in mutual destruction. Where the catastrophic imagination brims with anticipation, foreshadowing a dire and destructive confrontation in the future, the third

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angle—the anachronistic imagination—looks back to the past and examines its relation to the present. Revolution, in this vision, is viewed not as collision but rather as discontinuity, as a rupture in time. And dandyism now represents neither the indeterminacy of self-fashioning nor the threat of class struggle but rather a problem in chronology. The goal of the anachronistic imagination is to come to terms with this change, to understand the relation between the past and the present. Like the first two imaginations, this angle can take various forms: the dandy may occupy either side of the querelle des anciens et des modernes. In some texts, he is a figure of fashion, embracing all that is modish and modern. Many authors and caricaturists take pleasure in the extreme and almost futuristic aesthetic of the figure: his newfangled accessories and innovative coiffure. In figure 1, which contrasts the fashions of the ancien régime and the Revolution, the incroyable on the left clearly represents the shock of the new: as his acquaintances comment, “Quelle folie que la nouveauté” (What folly novelty is).14 In other texts, however, the figure represents a throwback to the ancien régime. After Thermidor, for example, the reappearance of muscadins at the Théâtre Feydeau would strike one commentator as “a spectacle from monarchic times.”15 Such holdovers can be portrayed either nostalgically as a vestige of a vanished world or

1. Ah! Quelle antiquité!!! . . . Oh! Quelle folie que la nouveauté, engraving by Alexis Chataignier (Paris: Depeuille, ca. 1797). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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negatively as a threatening revival of prerevolutionary mores. Finally, some writers attempted to attenuate the rupture between the past and the present by tracing a genealogy between the prerevolutionary fop and the modern-day dandy. A British ditty from the period, for example, argues that “Dandy and Macaroni are the same/Alike in all respects except the name.”16 Rewriting revolution as evolution, such texts seek to create a continuity between the old and the new. Each of these three imaginations views the dandy with a different focus. The paranoid imagination finds in dandyism an epistemological or hermeneutic problem; the catastrophic, a political problem; and the anachronistic, a historiographical problem. In the pages that follow, all three imaginations will come into play, often intermingled and inseparable from one another. Nevertheless, certain periods or groups of texts show a proclivity toward one approach or the other. As will become clear, the function of the dandy during the Revolution changed considerably from one moment to the next, often within a period of just a few weeks or months. The three imaginations will help us to chart these shifts and to understand the development of the figure.

O v e rv i e w The first chapter examines the figure of the muscadin, a term that first appeared in early 1793 in Lyon, the second city of France, famed for its silk industry and luxury trade. The word, however, quickly spread to Paris, where it took on a new range of meaning in the fall of 1793. Initially, it referred simply to the Lyonnais, who had rebelled against the Republic in the spring and had been under siege since August. But in early September journalists and politicians started to apply the term to Parisians as well. In some uses, the word merged with the preexisting term “jeunes gens” (literally, “young people”), which designated the youths who had protested (and, according to detractors, dodged) the draft in September 1792 and May 1793. More immediately, however, it became associated with duplicity and acting, with deceptive and ambiguous appearances. The muscadin was a compulsive performer who blurred the distinction between fiction and reality. In this sense, the word played a central role in the institution of the Terror in the fall of 1793. One of the first examples of this usage appears in the famous speech of September 5 in which the deputy Bertrand Barère vowed to make Terror “the order of the day.” In the weeks that followed,

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the crafty self-fashioning of the muscadin would be used in the radical press to justify more rigorous forms of surveillance and punishment and to vilify political antagonists. For example, Jacques-René Hébert’s Père Duchesne conflated the muscadin with the modérés or modérantistes, representatives of the political center, in an attempt to exaggerate the threat of the latter. A fence-straddling figure, the moderate or muscadin introduced a vexing ambiguity that triggered the full excesses of the paranoid imagination. Eventually, Hébert would use the term to refer to any form of political difference or dissent. Other writers and politicians, however, would take up the idea of an elusive, invisible enemy lurking in the countryside to deflect attention away from groups and individuals that might otherwise be targeted. In these texts, the muscadin serves as a straw man or decoy, an imaginary figure toward whom popular anger and frustration might be redirected. Chapter 1 traces the different ways in which journalists, playwrights, and legislators manipulated the word “muscadin” and shows how the term became a battlefield of sorts in the crucial debates about the laws and institutions of the Terror. While the word “muscadin” (like its predecessor “petit-maître”) still served as a derogatory label, we begin to see in this chapter how in some instances the discourse around the figure was used for antiterrorist ends, as a way of opposing (or circumventing) the monolithic political culture of Year II. Chapter 2 turns to the Thermidorian Reaction, the fifteen-month period following the downfall and execution of Robespierre and his cohorts on 9–10 thermidor Year II (July 27–28, 1794). During this period, the terms “jeunes gens” and “muscadins” would again become contested locutions. For while opponents on the left continued to define those so labeled as “counterrevolutionaries” and “royalists,” many of the young men targeted by these epithets would begin to give them a more positive inflection, defining themselves as moderates or antiterrorist republicans. In the fall of 1794, the jeunes gens would become the unofficial militia of a group of deputies who sought to dismantle the Terror and to restore the social order that had been disturbed during Year II. These politicians encouraged the fashionable young men, who became known as the jeunesse dorée (gilded youth), to attack former terrorists in the press and on the street. The activism of the jeunes gens would ultimately lead to the closing of the Jacobin Club in late 1794, the depantheonization of Jean-Paul Marat, the destruction of Jacobin symbols and slogans, and the prosecution of a number of the more prominent terrorists. The behavior of the jeunes gens was often thuggish and vengeful, but their campaign was not simply

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a form of reaction. As I argue in this chapter, it was also an attempt to recover a political center. By positively reinflecting the terms “muscadin” and “jeunes gens,” the young men sought to make room for an opposition that was not considered a form of treason. One of the most immediate problems they confronted was that of the recent past: whether to punish the former terrorists and how to do so without reproducing the summary judgments of Year II. Texts by and about the jeunes gens are often curiously torn between the impulse to forget, to repress the traumatic past, and the compulsion to remember, to reenact and avenge it. The second chapter of this study examines a series of plays in which the figure partakes in a collective debate about the value of memory in France after the Terror. Mona Ozouf has characterized the post-Thermidor period as one of a forgetting that is always reminding itself to forget.17 As we will see, the problem of how to deal with the past is central to the literature concerning the Thermidorian trendsetters. Their fashion experiments, indeed, were often wordless vehicles for historical reflection: styles such as the coiffure à la victime (imitating the cropped hair of the executed) or the ubiquitous blond wig (revisiting a vogue of the ancien régime) evocatively pointed to the past, reinserting it in the present. The focus of this chapter is the anachronistic imagination, the problem of understanding a historical rupture. In these texts, the dandy can occupy both sides of the divide: in some he embraces the new in an attempt to break with the past, while in others he is a disturbing throwback, a figure who brings back prerevolutionary mores or who reenacts recent history in troubling ways. Chapter 3 turns to the Directory and the figure of the incroyable, which first appeared in December 1796 in a series of prints by the Parisian artist Carle Vernet (fig. 2). At first, the incroyable seems a more trivial, insignificant, and comic type than the muscadin or jeunes gens. With his bulky cravats and wide lapels, beribboned culottes, long sidelocks known as dog’s ears, and disarming smile, the figure comes across as innocuous and even endearing. Not surprisingly, the prints were an overnight success, and before long, the type had become a staple of newspaper articles, pamphlets, vaudeville plays, and caricatures. To this day, the incroyable and his female counterpart, the merveilleuse, are familiar figures in France, often encountered in schoolbooks. The textbook story about them—a tale largely derived from the Goncourt brothers’ Histoire de la société française pendant le Directoire (1855)—is one of exhilarating release and revelry.18 After the death of Robespierre in 1794, Paris burst into a dancing frenzy—la dansomanie—a return to plea-

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2. Carle Vernet, Les incroyables, engraving by Louis Darcis ([Paris, 1796]). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

sure and decadence after the austerity, paranoia, and deprivations of the Terror. Throughout the city, balls, restaurants, and salons proliferated, as high society resumed its domain. A new sense of liberty was expressed through unchecked libertinage: women’s waistlines moved north while their necklines moved south, imitating classical models of dress—and debauchery. Hedonism was now the order of the day, and its most ardent partisan was the incroyable. But like his predecessors the figure was quickly associated with the political struggles of the day, first during the contested elections of germinal Year V (March 1797) and later in the conflicts preceding the coup d’état of 18 fructidor (September 4, 1797). In the weeks leading up to the latter, tension broke out between the incroyables, also known as collets noirs (black collars), and the Jacobins and soldiers stationed in Paris. For many commentators, the street fighting seemed an unsettling harbinger of things to come. Journalists on both the right and the left anticipated a

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cataclysmic confrontation of opposites, a regression to the barbarism and binary logic of the Terror. The catastrophic imagination dominates the texts of this period. Chapter 3 explores the strategies of self-fashioning adopted in the face of this crisis. As with the jeunes gens, one technique was to reappropriate a negative label and give it a new meaning. Originally, the word “incroyable” was a disparaging term, a parody of the muscadins’ habit of exclaiming “c’est incroyable!” (that’s incredible!), but the young men targeted by the term embraced the adjective, playing on its dual sense of amazement and disbelief. The point of these soi-disant incroyables, however, was somewhat different from that of the jeunes gens. For where the latter’s self-fashioning sought to perform and stake out an ideological center, the incroyables called attention to the meaninglessness of their dress. During the conflicts leading up to Fructidor, their controversial black collar was paradoxically a sign that pointed to its own designification. In contrast to the fiery jeunes gens, the incroyables adopted a dispassionate, ironic stance: their strategy was to sidestep the overheated and polarizing discourse of their antagonists and the overinterpretation of appearance by creating a space of nontranscendence, an ironic remove. Emblematic of this stance was their use of their moniker. Punctuating their commentaries with “c’est incroyable,” the young men drew attention to the hypocrisy and corruption of their day, to a world so incredible as to be uncreditable. The incroyables’ form of disbelief, however, was very different from the paranoid imagination of the Terror. The typical gesture of the latter was to strip away the actor’s mask, to cross the footlights that separate fiction and reality. The incroyable, in contrast, did not cross the footlights but rather pointed to their existence. With his typical riposte, he underscored the fictionality of the fiction that was contemporary society and observed it at a skeptical remove, symbolized by his hallmark quizzing glass. To put it another way, where the terrorists paranoically revealed the reality underlying a fiction, the incroyable pointed to the fictionality of reality itself (and of his own self-construction). In his wit and detachment, we begin to recognize the modern dandy, but his stance was neither apolitical nor apathetic. It expressed a clear dissent as well as a reflection upon appropriate forms of critique in republican society. The final two chapters examine the repercussions of the French Revolution abroad through two case studies. Chapter 4 explores the Spanish figure of the currutaco, which like the incroyable, seems at first cartoonish and frivolous. Born of a lighthearted newspaper exchange in the spring of 1795, the currutacos are pint-size creatures who inhabit a fictional,

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carnivalesque world. As with the French types, however, the specter of revolution hovers over the figure: in a haunting drawing from the period, Francisco Goya depicts a currutaco who looks at himself in a mirror and sees reflected back an image of torture and terror (fig. 3). The world of the currutaco was in many ways such a distorting mirror, an indirect reflection of and upon the events across the Pyrenees. In the wake of 1789, Spain imposed one of the strictest cordons sanitaires in all of Europe. Customs bans on foreign publications and rigorous press censorship discouraged open public debate about the Revolution. But in the summer of 1795, the chief minister of Spain, Manuel Godoy, concluded a peace treaty with France in Basel, which led to a rapprochement between the two countries and, with it, a relaxation of censorship and a new influx of French publications. It was at precisely this moment that the currutacos began to proliferate in the Spanish press and theater. Chapter 4 argues that the playful and relatively innocuous literature of currutaquería offered a safe space for debating the ideas of the new republic and their social implications. As in the French case, many of these texts tried to imagine modes of reform and critique that would avoid the excesses of the Terror and its monolithic political culture. Many of these texts dramatized catastrophic encounters, confrontations between the stylish currutaco and the popular Spanish type of the majo (a colorful and cheeky figure from the lower classes). By reenacting the tensions of muscadins and sansculottes in a local context, Spanish writers explored the causes and consequences of revolution, but from a playful remove. Their currutaco texts address three principal issues, which correspond to the three imaginations that I have defined. The first concerns the ideological causes of the Revolution: was the uprising the result of the ideas of the philosophes? Or was Enlightenment thought a way to avoid such upheaval? This question is a historiographical one, an attempt to understand the relation between the past and the present (the concern of the anachronistic imagination). A second issue taken up in these texts is the economic and political catalyst of revolution: the relation between the uprising and the distribution of wealth and power in society. Many of these works represent class confrontations and violent overturnings of social hierarchy, which echo the fears of the catastrophic imagination. A few of these texts, indeed, openly reflect upon the best social structure for avoiding such tensions. Finally, many of the works explore how the insurrection affected political culture on both sides of the Pyrenees, particularly the anxiety about false appearances and allegiances (the paranoid imagination).

3. Francisco Goya, La tortura del dandy (ca. 1797–1798). © Madrid, Museo nacional del Prado.

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Across the Channel, dandyism would similarly become a space for reflecting upon the ideology and consequences of the Revolution. In 1795, England was still at war with France but increasingly struggling to sustain its efforts. Since the summer of 1794, when France had taken control of Belgium, public support for the war had been waning in Britain. The winter of 1794–1795, moreover, had been one of the harshest in recent history, causing poor crop yields, rising bread prices, and widespread discontent. In an attempt to remedy the situation, Prime Minister William Pitt proposed and pushed through the Hair Powder Act of 1795, a luxury tax intended to generate revenue for the military and (according to some commentators) to increase the supply of flour for stomachs by decreasing its use on heads. Although luxury taxes were not uncommon in eighteenth-century Britain, Pitt’s measure took an unprecedented form. To wear hair powder, citizens would henceforth need a permit, which cost a guinea per year, and the names of those licensed to powder would be publicly posted to enable the identification and prosecution of violators. The measure, that is, applied not to the object—the purchase of hair powder—but to its use: Pitt was taxing the very act of self-fashioning. In the months that followed, a flood of pamphlets, newspapers, and prints explored the ideological implications of the new law and of the decision now facing citizens: to powder or not to powder. In a sense, Pitt’s tax had provoked a national referendum on self-fashioning. Chapter 5 examines the shadow cast by the French Revolution on these discussions of hair powder. The new measure divided English society into two opposed groups, the “guinea pigs” (those able to pay the tax) and the “pigs without a guinea” (fig. 4). Many feared that this polarization would cause resentment and increase the possibility of insurrection in England. In their anxieties about class struggle and their dark forebodings, they exemplify the catastrophic imagination. Others saw the measure not as a catalyst of revolution but as an uncanny mirror of it. The price of the license was so high that many middle-class people who once used hair powder would no longer be able to do so: suddenly, large numbers of people risked losing their heads (of hair) and found themselves forced to adopt an unpowdered style that distastefully resembled the Jacobin fashions across the Channel. Responding to the bill, many prominent members of the Opposition— most notably, the Duke of Bedford—decided to dispense with powder altogether, even shearing off their locks to express their objection to the

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4. Isaac Cruikshank, The Rival Pigs (1795). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

war and to the Pitt government. Their haircut became known as the Bedford Level, an allusion to a draining project by the duke’s forebear, the Earl of Bedford. The label, however, also suggested the antihierarchical politics of the Levellers of the English Civil Wars. Like Bedford, partisans of the style were often sympathetic to the goals and ideas of the French Revolution. One writer attributed the look to Philippe d’Orléans, an avid supporter of the uprising who sported the cropped look until his own head was cropped (despite his republican politics and egalitarian nickname, Philippe Égalité was guillotined in late 1793). The crops, as these short-haired men became known, included some of the most fashionable figures of London society. George “Beau” Brummell, the future king of dandyism who would famously oppose the use of powder, became an intimate of Bedford and his circle at precisely this time. Chapter 5 argues that the crops and the powder politics of 1795 are a key link in the shift from the extravagant aesthetic of the eighteenth-century macaroni to the understated ideal of the modern dandy. The epilogue of this study explores how the three imaginations persisted in theoretical discussions of the dandy in the nineteenth century. Examining three of the most prominent definitions of the figure—Balzac’s

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Traité de la vie élégante (1830), Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), and Baudelaire’s “Le peintre de la vie moderne” (1863)—it shows how the Revolution lurks behind the modern vision of dandyism. As will be clear from this overview, the focus of this study is not dress in and of itself. Indeed, I will spend very little time describing what these figures wore. Nor is the focus the wearer in and of himself. At times, the types that I discuss are associated with actual historical figures (the jeunes gens, collets noirs, and the crops), but in many cases these dandies are more imaginary than real (as in the case of the muscadins, incroyables, and currutacos). My focus is not the dress or the dressed individual so much as the representation of fashion and self-fashioning: the various meanings projected upon dress and the discourses that surround it. What I hope to make clear in these chapters is the profound impact of the French Revolution on the conceptualization of self-fashioning during the period, as well as the importance of these representations in the process of coming to terms with the Revolution.

{ one }

Muscadins In a speech before the National Convention on September 5, 1793, the deputy Bertrand Barère recounted a conversation overheard by a patriot at the Palais de la Révolution. The participants in the exchange were “six young men, I would rather say muscadins, that name which a proud youth has given to itself, and which will bear witness before posterity that there have been in France, in the middle of its revolution, young men without courage and without a fatherland. . . . They were saying: ‘Everything will go well. The women are chosen, and the muscadins are very determined.’” Barère’s speech is a landmark in revolutionary history in at least two ways. First, it marks one of the earliest (and certainly the most prominent) applications of the word “muscadin” to Parisian citizens. Until then, the word had referred to the rebels in Lyon and the Rhône Valley. Second, the speech is often considered to have inaugurated the Terror: in a phrase that would become infamous, Barère proposed to “make Terror the order of the day.”1 Histories of the elegant young men known as the muscadins generally overlook the connection between the term and the beginning of the Terror, because they equate the word with the expression “jeunes gens,” which had become common in Paris somewhat earlier. François Gendron, whose La jeunesse dorée is the classic account of these youths, uses the labels synonymously, beginning his discussion with the jeunes gens who protested (and, in some cases, avoided) the draft in November 1792 and in May and September of 1793.2 Indeed, a number of commentators of the period would define the muscadin as a draft dodger—in Louis Sébastien Mercier’s words, “a species of men occupied with elegant or ridiculous

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finery, whom a drum roll metamorphoses into women.”3 Nevertheless, in this early usage, Barère does not give the word that sense. Nor does Jacques René Hébert in an issue of his best-selling sansculotte newspaper Père Duchesne published at the same time. The muscadins against whom he rails are “agents of Pitt and Cobourg, who in the morning disguised themselves as sansculottes to raid the quartern loaves and throw them in the river, and who in the evening, very powdered and very gussied up, went to insult the public misery with their tight culottes and their square coats at the promenades and spectacles.”4 The young men here are not conscientious objectors, or even mere idlers and cowards, but rather a far more ominous threat: conspirators against the nation who aggravate its economic hardship by destroying precious resources. For both Hébert and Barère, the muscadins are what make the Terror necessary. They are not Mercier’s emasculated fops but a real danger to the Republic. The relation between the label and the Terror is perhaps clearest in the process by which both were repudiated. In the months following the downfall and execution of Robespierre and his followers on 9–10 thermidor Year II (July 27–28, 1794), the most damning accusation was no longer that of being a muscadin (though such allegations continued well into 1795) but rather that of having invented the term. Although Barère considered it (implausibly) to be the young men’s own coinage, the jeunes gens rejected the word as a derogatory label and blamed its creators for the traumas of Year II (1793–1794). As one song put it: Let us swear to make the horror of mankind That beast with a black mane Who forged the name muscadins, To doom an entire youth; Among those hawk-owls, our spring Was sold—alas!—at auction; And we were so many infants Whom their mother devoured.5

For this songwriter, it was the invention of a word that set off the Terror and the annihilation of an entire generation. This connection between language and the Terror has been the focus of a number of historians of the French Revolution in recent decades. In the early twentieth century, the dominant interpretation of the period attributed the Terror to the extreme circumstances that the Republic faced in 1793: foreign invasion, revolts in the provinces, and economic woes on the home front.6 This “circumstantial” theory, however, was problematic

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on a number of grounds. First, the bloodiest phase of the Terror—the socalled “Grande Terreur” of June and July 1794—occurred well after the military crisis had passed.7 Moreover, parliamentary discussions of the laws facilitating the Terror very rarely drew a connection between these measures and the war.8 In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of scholars, most notably the revisionist historian François Furet, began to challenge this theory. Refocusing the discussion on the language and discourses of the Revolution, Furet argued that the seeds of Year II were present in the foundational documents of 1789. While the circumstances of 1793 still played a role, the potential for and ideological predisposition toward the Terror antedated them. For Furet, the Terror was the unfolding of a discursive potential, words taken to their logical extreme. To support this theory, Furet pointed to two interrelated tropes: the notion of a homogeneous “general will” and the idea of the aristocratic plot. The first was the belief that “the people,” viewed as sovereign, indivisible, and unanimous, was the sole source of political legitimacy. Politicians defended their proposals and measures by claiming to be the spokesmen of this mythical consensus. The second trope followed from the first. Once one conceived of the people as unified in its democratic aspirations, then dissent was no longer innocent—a voicing of special interests—but rather the manifestation of a “plot” against the nation. From the earliest moments of the Revolution, the charge of conspiracy was a commonplace of political discourse and could be applied to almost any situation. Furet regarded this type of language as the source and prime mover of the Terror. For him, Robespierre was not a political player so much as the “mouthpiece of [the] purest and most tragic discourse” of the Revolution.9 As Lynn Hunt and others have observed, one of the problems with Furet’s theory is that it tends to obscure the will and agency of the individuals involved and the new forms of political discussion and activism that were emerging in the clubs, sections, cafés, and the press. In Hunt’s words, “language itself is [for Furet] the only active agent.”10 The retooling of the word “muscadin” in the critical moment of September 1793 suggests the importance of language in the emergence and implementation of the Terror. In many instances, the term “muscadin” worked in the same way as earlier discourses around aristocratic and enemy plots. The figure was a dangerous conniver whose crafty selffashioning made him particularly elusive and threatened the transparency of the public sphere. The new word played into the paranoid imagination of the period: it created the impression of yet another slippery player, whose existence justified increased surveillance and summary judgments.

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What is interesting about the coinage, however, is that it did not go uncontested. In both Lyon, where the word “muscadin” first emerged, and in Paris in the early discussion of the Terror, the term was initially a battleground of sorts. Each faction appropriated it in a different way and to a different end. Although some commentators linked the muscadins with the usual plotting enemies and deployed the term aggressively to target an ever wider range of suspects, others used the term to attempt to restrain or resist the Terror. Some texts took up the figure of the muscadin—the idea of an invisible enemy lurking in the countryside—to deflect attention away from other groups that had been targeted. Others openly defended the muscadin, representing him as more innocuous than his opponents made him out to be. And still others portrayed the figure as one that could be reformed, refashioned, to serve the common good. The word eventually fell into the pattern that Furet and others have identified, becoming yet another label for a dangerous form of dissent, but this occurred only after a considerable tug-of-war over its meaning and use. This sparring over the new term suggests that the Terror was not simply an evolution of language that employed politicians and journalists as its mouthpieces. Words were rather a contested site: the same discourses that served to justify the Terror were also used to resist it. It is by returning to individual speakers and writers and their manipulation and recasting of language that we may begin to recover the plurality of voices and viewpoints that simmered beneath the official consensus of the period. In tracing the history of the word “muscadin,” this chapter will focus particularly on attempts at deflection and reinflection, on the ways in which writers sought to skirt or redeploy the paranoid conception of the figure. In the fall of 1793, these strategies of resistance would ultimately fail, but in the months following the downfall of Robespierre, the jeunes gens of the Thermidorian period would return to the linguistic battlefield and attempt to redefine the labels with which they had been targeted. In pamphlets, newspaper articles, plays, and songs such as the one cited above, they began to reshape their image and to participate actively in their selfrepresentation. Rallying around the more neutral term “jeunes gens,” they stressed their youth, energy, and victimhood, their loyalty to the Republic, and their fierce opposition to the Terror. By the end of the Thermidorian period, even the word “muscadin” would take on more positive connotations: “Believe me and disdain the insults,” one pamphlet advised, “always be muscadins, that is to say, properly dressed, powdered.”11 The final section of this chapter examines how some post-Thermidor writers

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sought to shift not only the meaning and connotations of the word “muscadin” but also its function in an attempt to escape the paranoid imagination of the period.

From Musk to Muskets The word “muscadin” originally referred to an edible lozenge that was made with musk and was used as a breath-freshener. Imported from Italy, where it was known as moscardino (from muschio, “musk”), the candy inspired frivolous controversy in the seventeenth-century salon of Madame de Rambouillet, an Italian-born noblewoman whose gatherings attracted the wits and précieuses of the French court. At issue was the proper pronunciation of the word: whether to use the Italianate muscardin or to drop the r, anticipating by several centuries the lisp of the incroyables. In his Histoire de l’Académie françoise, Pellisson cites verses by Voiture parodying the Italianate version: Soit Courtisans, soit Citardins, Femmes de Cour, ou Citardines, Prononçoient toûjours Muscardins, Et Balardins, & Balardines; Be they courtiers or citardins [i.e., citadins, city dwellers], Court ladies or citardines [i.e., citadines, city women], Foolish men and foolish women Pronounced it always muscardins12

In 1638, the French Academy put an end to the dispute by ruling against the foreign affectation. This element of mannerism, however, would reappear a century later, when the word came to life for the first time in the 1745 novel Tanastès, conte allégorique. Written by a Versailles chambermaid, Marie-Madeleine Bonafon, the fantastical story is a thinly veiled account of Louis XV’s affairs with Madame de Châteauroux and Madame de Pompadour.13 Facilitating the latter romance is a character named Muscadin, one of “those people who, covert by profession, become deceitful by habit, who know how to decorate a lie in colors so brilliant that the truth, always simple, is obliged to lower its flag and very often to disappear altogether before them. With such talents, one can believe that Muscadin knew how to compose

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his face according to the time and the place, and that he had no difficulty sustaining the role of chagrin that he had undertaken to play.”14 Muscadin is the incarnation of courtly artifice, a creature who always plays a role.15 Two years later, Muscadin would adopt not only the artifice but also the wardrobe of the dandy. In a comedy titled La faculté vengée from 1747, Julien Offray de La Mettrie critiqued the medical academy and satirized its doctors through a series of ridiculous and hypocritical characters. Among the latter is a physician named Muscadin whose love of finery (wigs, lace, elegant fabrics) marks him as a petit-maître (a foppish eighteenth-century type).16 Keeping a barometer near his bed, he carefully tracks the effect of the weather on his clothing and peppers his speech with recherché diction. Muscadin has picked up these mannerisms during a stint as the inhouse doctor of a great lord: “I’ve played that role so much,” he observes, “that it has become natural for me.”17 Where the Muscadin in Tanastès stood for the artifice of the court as a system—the gap between the mask and the individual—La Mettrie’s character blurs this divide: his pose is such a habit that it has become his true nature. Bonafon’s and La Mettrie’s characters illustrate the two sides of the paranoid imagination discussed in the introduction. The representation of the figure in Tanastès insists on the rift between appearance and reality, the inscrutability of social identity: it exemplifies the melodramatic aspect of the paranoid imagination. In La faculté vengée, in contrast, the emphasis lies not on the distance between person and pose but rather on their mutual contamination: it demonstrates the transformative side of the imagination. Both of these features would become important in representations of the revolutionary muscadin. Fittingly, the latter figure makes his appearance in Lyon, the second city of France, whose silk industry had since the sixteenth century supplied the court (and petits-maîtres like Muscadin) with lavish clothes and accessories. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the control of the textile guild in Lyon had shifted from the weavers and artisans, who once sold their own goods, to the merchants, who came to set prices and wages. In the late 1700s, tensions between the two groups mounted as the industry suffered from crop failure, foreign competition, and changing fashions (notably, the rise of cotton), which caused widespread poverty and unemployment among the workers. The prerevolutionary period was punctuated by unrest and at times even riots. This long-standing friction would shape the Lyonnais’ experience of the Revolution. While the artisans and workers embraced the new political culture that emerged following the storming of the Bastille in 1789

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and participated actively in clubs and popular societies, the merchants took a more cautious outlook, cultivating support in the Legislative Assembly in Paris and in the newly formed National Guard in Lyon to protect their economic interests. To the consternation of the workers, in 1791 the latter established an elite grenadier company drawn largely from the merchant and propertied classes and privileged with a distinctive uniform. Many regarded these grenadiers as “aristocratic” and even counterrevolutionary.18 The divisions in Lyonnais society became more extreme in the fall of 1792. Frustrated by the king’s constant vetoes and fearing foreign invasion, the Parisian populace, led by the Paris Commune, invaded the Tuileries palace on August 10, 1792, and forced the royal family to take shelter with the Legislative Assembly. The result was the suspension of the monarchy, followed six weeks later by its abolition. The official reaction in Lyon to the events of August 10 was hesitant. At the time, the municipality of the city was dominated by a group of moderate politicians, who took their cue from Jean-Marie Roland, the minister of the interior, whose career had begun in Lyon and who was prominent in the centrist Girondin faction in Paris. Steering to the side of caution, the city government postponed four times a vote on the future of the monarchy and ultimately endorsed only a temporary suspension. The tenth of August, however, created greater waves in the clubs of Lyon, where it prompted a rapid radicalization of political opinion. A combination of factors—the hardship of war, the depreciation of the assignat (the republican currency), and mourning in the courts of Russia, Sweden, and Austria, which decreased demand for luxury goods—had taken a toll on the silk industry, causing widespread unemployment and popular discontent.19 The elite grenadiers were an immediate target for this anger. On August 22, 1792, the Journal de Lyon, edited by the radical journalist François-Auguste Laussel, published an angry petition to the Legislative Assembly that attacked the grenadiers musqués (musk-wearing grenadiers) for creating social division in Lyon and firing on the crowds during popular uprisings; it identified them as “proud store sweepers” and “parasitic merchants,” as well as former magistrates, priests, and “Myrmidons of Coblentz” (the German city that had become the gathering place of émigrés and royalists).20 Charles Riffaterre has argued that these grenadiers musqués were the antecedents of the muscadins, who begin to appear in Lyonnais documents around February 1793.21 The path from the adjective to the noun was almost certainly colored by the literary precedents from the prerevolutionary period. But for a Lyonnais, I would add, the

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new label had a special resonance: “muscadin” (also written muscardin) was the name for a diseased condition in silkworms, so called because of the resemblance between the infected creatures and the Italian lozenges.22 Metaphorically, the merchants to whom the term was applied were a plague that hindered the survival of the industry through their selfish practices and indifference to the workers. By the time grenadier musqué gave way to “muscadin,” the Journal de Lyon had changed hands and become more moderate in its views. Since January 1793, its new editor had been warning the Lyonnais against reproducing locally the schism of Parisian politics, the growing divide between the supporters of the moderate Roland and the left-wing Marat.23 On February 21, 1793, the journal published a defense of the muscadin, an innocuous type whose love of fashion could only benefit the luxury-based economy of Lyon. Remarkably, the first extended discussion of the figure in the revolutionary period comes to his rescue.24 Animosity toward the moderate and anti-Jacobin factions had become an increasing source of concern in February 1793. With the execution of Louis XVI in January, left-wing fervor had escalated, and radicals had begun to demand more rigorous measures against the émigrés, refractory priests, and other suspect individuals believed to be hiding in Lyon. Earlier in the month, rumors had circulated that the powerful and Jacobindominated Club Central of Lyon had secretly met to organize a revolutionary tribunal, and talk of guillotines and massacres was rife. By one account, twenty thousand Lyonnais had already been designated for execution.25 The muscadin of the February 21 article is, not surprisingly, a terrified creature: a “scared Adonis” who “sees in his mind’s eye the president of the tribunal.”26 In this earliest of discussions of the muscadins, the idea of the Terror—aggressive tribunals—looms large, as it would again in autumn when the term migrated to Paris. On February 6, the moderate, Rolandin mayor of Lyon, Antoine Nivière-Chol, had denounced the rumored conspiracy to the Commune of Lyon, but his accusation had been greeted with skepticism. Disheartened, he resigned his position. Nevertheless, the ensuing elections on February 18 returned the mayor to his seat with a sound majority. Most of the Lyon electors opposed the radical and Jacobin factions. Celebrating their victory at the polls, the mayor’s supporters invaded and sacked the Club Central.27 Enraged by the turn of events, the fiery radical leader Joseph Chalier sent a letter to the Committee of General Security in Paris in which he denounced the invaders as “all the proper people, women in

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pelisse and large coats, muscadins, counterrevolutionaries, émigrés, etc.”28 The victory of the muscadins and moderates, however, would be shortlived. Nivière-Chol once again refused to serve as mayor, and when another moderate candidate, Jean-Emmanuel Gilibert, won a majority in elections on February 27, he was placed under arrest and after several days in solitary confinement renounced the mayoralty.29 In a new set of elections on May 9, a Jacobin candidate finally prevailed. Published in the wake of the unrest on February 18, the article in the Journal de Lyon is clearly an attempt to defend the muscadins against Chalier’s denunciations. The piece insists on the innocuousness of the type and seeks to undermine the logic by which it had been scapegoated for the problems of France: “What crimes have [the muscadins] committed? Is it just because the Bohemian Francis [i.e., Francis I, emperor of Austria, who had recently declared war on France] has only just gotten out of school and has sworn to have his soldiers spank the human race? But just because the old hussy of the North [i.e., Catherine, empress of Russia] has parceled out Poland like a gâteau de fèves, is it necessary to declare war on all women who no longer have all their teeth and whose pomades can no longer hide their wrinkles?” In attacking the muscadins, the Lyonnais Jacobins had resorted to a strategic metaphor, a comparison of the youthful dandies with the Republic’s enemy abroad (the young Francis I). The danger of this logic was that it equated the political center (the moderate clubs, anti-Jacobin factions, and muscadins) with the far right (outright counterrevolution), flattening out the ideological spectrum and eliminating the middle ground. The rest of the piece seeks to vindicate the muscadin by countering this metaphor with a metonymy, a sartorial part taken for the whole. Until recently, the author points out, the textile industry of the Indies had a monopoly on neckwear, because the fashions favored mousseline cravats over silk. Thanks to the muscadins, however, a new accessory has come into vogue: “a very superfluous kerchief,” which is “[a]rtistically arranged between the waistcoat and the cravat” and “embroidered with a faux revers of silk, as superfluous as the kerchief itself.” The muscadins’ kerchief may seem useless but it has nevertheless an unexpected utility: “How many trades would still be paralyzed without this useful invention!” Judged by his kerchief, the muscadin is not the devil he has been made out to be. Not only do the muscadins generate commerce, but they are also models of thrift. The cloth used for just “the first waistcoat of our sumptuous ancestors” is enough for an entire muscadin outfit. And unlike their forebears,

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the muscadins do not deprive the working class of flour to create powdered hairstyles.30 In this argument, the negative middle of ideological vacillation gives way to the positive ideal of the golden mean, economic moderation. The emphasis is not on the paranoid imagination—the political ambiguity of the muscadin—but rather on his economic function. In this respect, the article is closer to eighteenth-century texts about the petit-maître, which focus on the figure’s role as a consumer and on the value of luxury in society, than to the three imaginations of revolutionary dandyism. It was ultimately this type of financial logic that would cause the downfall of the Jacobins in Lyon. The Parisian radicals’ preference for dressing down and their rejection of finery—their cultivation of a sansculotte image—went against the interests of the Lyonnais, whose economy depended on the luxury market. Moreover, because of the long-standing conflicts between the silk workers and the merchants, Lyon had an active popular movement of its own long before the rise of the Jacobins. By spring 1793 it had become increasingly clear that the program of the Parisian Jacobins, often dictated by the demands of the sansculottes and the populace of the capital, conflicted with the goals and the active sectional and club culture of the Lyonnais radicals.31 This discontent with Jacobin policies, shared by the upper classes and moderate factions, would ultimately lead to the revolt of Lyon, the largest urban insurrection against the revolutionary government. On May 27, 1793, the Lyonnais learned that envoys of the National Convention had sent for troops from Grenoble to reinforce the city government and, by Jacobin accounts, to “bring all the muscadins to reason.”32 Two days later, anti-Jacobin factions, fearing that the troops would give the Jacobins new means of coercion, reacted violently, marching on and overthrowing the municipality of Lyon. They owed their success to the National Guard, most of whose units supported the maneuver. Lyon was now in open defiance of the federal government. Only a few days later, Paris too would rise up—but with a very different outcome. From May 31 to June 2, 1793, the Parisian masses, frustrated by economic hardship, foreign invasion, and the insurrection in the Vendée, began to riot, forcing the National Convention to expel its moderate members, known as the Brissotins (after the deputy Jacques Pierre Brissot) or Girondins (after the region of southwestern France from which many of these deputies hailed). In both Paris and Lyon, protestors had resorted to illegal measures to reshape their government, but where the anti-Jacobins triumphed in Lyon, the Mountain (the left wing of the assembly) won the day in Paris and, by extension, the nation at

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large. In a period of less than a week, the paths of the two cities had diverged irreparably. Almost immediately, the National Convention ordered a siege of Lyon, now considered a counterrevolutionary hotbed, which would last until October 9, 1793, when the city finally capitulated.33 What followed its surrender is one of the bloodiest pages of revolutionary history. In an infamous decree, the Convention ordered that Lyon be effaced from the map of France, renamed Ville Affranchie (liberated city), and purged of all suspect residents.34 The fears of our muscadin Adonis of February 1793 had become a nightmarish reality: 1,800 people would be killed during the reprisals—a number exceeded only in Paris and the Vendée.35 Once the cradle of class struggle, Lyon had become the Sodom of France. Although the two cities parted ways, they would nevertheless converge in the political discourse surrounding the muscadin. Just as it had in Lyon, the word would come to prominence in the capital in the shadow of the Terror and would increasingly be used to target the moderate faction. In Paris, the figure would once again become an internal enemy, a local incarnation of France’s adversaries abroad. Finally, like the editor of the Journal de Lyon, a number of figures would attempt to counter this trend by reinflecting or redeploying the term. In the capital, however, the muscadin would take on a new logic: that of the paranoid imagination.

Muscadin Actors It was at about the time of the siege of Lyon that the word “muscadin” made its way to the capital, where it quickly took on a new range of meanings. At first, the term simply designated the Lyonnais rebels, generally represented as counterrevolutionaries in the Jacobin press. The first uses of the word in Père Duchesne, for example, refer to “the muscadins of Lyon,” who are the “hoarders and merchants” of the besieged city.36 Although Hébert relates the Lyonnais muscadins to the Parisian counterrevolutionaries, they initially appear as two separate groups. Duchesne overhears one of the latter express his desire to achieve in Paris “what our comrades, the muscadins, have done in Lyon.”37 In an issue appearing in early September, however, Hébert’s use of the word begins to change. At the beginning of the article, Duchesne again hears some Parisian counterrevolutionaries praising “the exploits of the muscadins of Lyon,” but as the essay continues, he conflates the

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two groups, applying “muscadin” to inhabitants of the capital (specifically the shady characters who congregate around the Palais Royal): it is not enough to “arrest the muscadins; it is necessary to exterminate them and purge Paris of them once and for all.”38 For Hébert, the Palais Royal is to Paris what Lyon is to France: a mutinous area that must be annihilated. At the end of the essay, he urges François Henriot, the commander of the armed forces in Paris, to “encircle that place of horrors [the Palais Royal] with all the pikes of the faubourgs.”39 In the following issue, the word takes on yet another connotation. Hébert laments that the sansculottes have been duped by the muscadins. Masquerading as coal-men or masons, the muscadins have complained loudly about bread shortages and provoked the sansculottes to “disorder.”40 The muscadin is now not only a local threat but also a slippery one, a figure who takes on disguises and passes unperceived among the Parisian populace. Like the Muscadin of Tanastès, he is a dangerous political actor who triggers the paranoid imagination. Père Duchesne, however, was not as easily deceived as his fellow sansculottes. Not long after this article, Hébert dedicated an issue to the Law of Suspects, a measure ratified on September 17 that made it easier to denounce and arrest citizens of doubtful loyalty: any citizen without a Civic Certificate could now be detained. The criteria for denying Civic Certificates included a number of subtle categories such as speakers using “crafty discourses” in assemblies, people “spread[ing] bad news with an affected grief,” and “those who, having done nothing against liberty, have also done nothing for it.”41 At the beginning of his article, Hébert complains that since the introduction of the Law of Suspects, the muscadins have traded their tight culottes and square jackets for sansculotte trappings: long pants, short vests, black wigs, and fake moustaches. They even sport pipes “just as Père Duchesne does, but only as a pose, damn it, since just one puff of tobacco would suffocate them.” To illustrate their duplicity, Duchesne recounts a recent experience at the Palais Royal. Walking through the arcades with several friends, he has come upon a group of “hussies and con artists.” The latter, believing Duchesne and his companions to be (like themselves) muscadins disguised as sansculottes, let down their guard and freely air their complaints. Because of the police crackdown on suspect citizens, the women have lost their clients, who were mostly bankers and abbots. One of them tells the story of her lover, “a baron of bravado,” who once kept her in utmost luxury by “fleec[ing] some country bumpkins and [ruining] as many merchants.” Upon the outbreak of the Revo-

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lution, he escaped to Coblentz and then fought in the Vendée, but recently he has returned to Paris disguised as a cadet and has been living off her prostitution and the money an Englishman pays him for harassing the sansculottes. The Law of Suspects, however, has again forced him into hiding. Just as she is finishing her story, the muscadin himself enters and is immediately seized by Père Duchesne, who exposes the coiffed blond hair beneath his Jacobin-style wig.42 The simulacrum of the sansculotte is no match for the original. The text is a classic example of the melodramatic side of the paranoid imagination, of the impulse to unveil the true identity of an ambiguous figure. Hébert’s article picks up on a shift in the Parisian use of the term, which had begun only a few weeks before: the association of the muscadins with actors or impostors. On September 4, Alexandre Rousselin, the editor of the radical Feuille du salut public, had published an article titled “Burial of Paméla, and Arrest of the Muscades and Muscadins, Ci-devant Regular Pensioners of the Ci-devant Veto.”43 The headline referred to a controversy that had erupted two days earlier at the Comédie-Française during a performance of the play Paméla, ou La vertu récompensée, written in 1788 by François de Neufchâteau and based on Samuel Richardson’s best-selling novel Pamela (1740). Although the work had already been revised at the behest of the Committee of Public Safety and had been shown eight times in the month of August, the ninth performance, on September 2, 1793, provoked a denunciation by a soldier in the audience, Jullien de Carentan, who interpreted a speech on religious tolerance as a disguised defense of modérantisme.44 The September 3 issue of the Feuille supported the accusations and called for the closure of the theater—“that impure seraglio”—and the arrest of its actors, who with their “pretty airs of aristocracy” and “constantly uncivic behavior” were “very suspect.”45 The Comédie-Française had come under attack a number of times during the revolutionary period. During the ancien régime, the members of the Comédie-Française had been known as the comédiens du roi (the actors of the king), whence Rousselin’s coinage “ci-devant regular pensioners of the ci-devant Veto” (Louis XVI had been nicknamed Monsieur Veto because of his frequent use of his royal prerogative). After the Revolution, the theater, renamed the Théâtre de la Nation, continued to operate. In 1791, however, a protracted controversy over Marie-Joseph Chenier’s Charles IX led to a schism in the troupe. The more fervent revolutionaries—notably the actors François-Joseph Talma and Dugazon (the pseudonym of Jean-Henri Gourgaud)—left to found the Théâtre de la République at the present site of the Comédie-Française, while the

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royalist sympathizers remained at the old theater. With the fall of the monarchy, the Comédie-Française (i.e., the Théâtre de la Nation) would increasingly become a target of attack. At the beginning of 1793, during the king’s trial, its staging of the pro-moderate play L’ami des loix by Jean Louis Laya generated new controversy. By the time of the Paméla scandal, the troupe was widely viewed on the left as conservative, if not counterrevolutionary. Rousselin would not have to wait long to see the situation redressed. On the same day as his attack, Barère denounced the play and the troupe to the National Convention, which immediately moved to close the theater and arrest both the playwright and the actors (they would remain in jail for eleven months, escaping the guillotine by a hair’s breadth).46 Rousselin, however, was not completely satisfied with this outcome. In “The Burial of Paméla,” published the next day, he observed that “HéraultSéchelles alerted the blind republicans to the aristocratic victory of Pamela over equality; but it was not enough to put those men and lost women of the aristocracy under temporary arrest”; the actors should be detained as “suspect” individuals—a considerably more serious charge.47 In this new accusation, Rousselin recalled an earlier controversy over the play. At the beginning of August, a number of critics—most notably, Hérault de Séchelles, a deputy of noble lineage—had objected to its plot. In the original 1788 script, Neufchâteau had followed Carlo Goldoni’s 1750 Pamela nubile in portraying Richardson’s heroine not as a humble country girl but as the daughter of a nobleman. In 1793, however, this detail drew attack, for it seemed to make Pamela’s final marriage a consequence of her station rather than of her virtue.48 Neufchâteau had promptly revised the play and received government approval. What is remarkable about Rousselin’s comment is the way in which it blurs the distinction between the actors and their roles.49 Despite the rewriting, the character’s former nobility seems to have rubbed off on the actors: Pamela’s “aristocratic victory” is performed by “men and lost women of the aristocracy.” In this early Parisian use, “muscadins” and the improvised feminine form “muscades” refer to acting but specifically to a type of acting in which the distinction between the stage and reality is blurred. The members of the Comédie-Française troupe deal in fictions both in the theater and outside it in their false performance of republican loyalty. In their (alleged) confusion of fiction and reality, they resemble the Muscadin of La faculté vengée: their role has changed their identity. Rousselin’s article illustrates the transformative side of the paranoid imagination. Rousselin goes on to identify an even greater danger. It is not just that

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the actors have taken on the aristocratic identities of their roles. What is worse, their audience seems to have followed suit. The Comédie, Rousselin complained, attracted “all those scoundrels disguised as honnêtes gens, . . . that cowardly and impudent bourgeoisie which, under the pretense of a timid indifference, seeks to distract the nation from the republic and to perpetuate the fine airs of the nobility.”50 The spectators have become comédiens in their own right, imitating the actors’ aristocratic performances, disguises, and noble airs in everyday life. Even the closure of the theater did not dampen the thespian enthusiasm of these spectators. A week later, the Feuille observed: “Since the incarceration of the usual actors of the king, one sees the muscadin regulars wandering under the galleries of the auditorium and promenading with demonstrations of a pain that is sometimes laughable but more often tragic; it is known that that genre was a bit of a deficiency in the perfection of the company; these messieurs could be very good acquisitions.”51 Here, the word “muscadins” refers not to the actors but to the audience, but once again the two sides of the footlights are confused. The spectators are now the performers, and their stage is everyday life.52 Hébert’s and Rousselin’s articles illustrate the two facets of what I have called the paranoid imagination. On the one hand, the episode in the Palais Royal demonstrates the obsessive unmasking in revolutionary discourse, the continual revelation of an aristocratic plot to which Furet and others have drawn attention.53 On the other hand, Rousselin’s articles exemplify the tendency to confuse reality and fiction, author and character. Both writers, however, coincide in identifying the muscadin with the series of negative labels (scoundrels, aristocrats, etc.) used to vilify the internal enemies of the Republic. In their texts, the elusiveness and thespianism of the figure serve as a pretext for increased surveillance: the more inconspicuous the enemy, the more vigilance was necessary. In the weeks that followed, Hébert and the radical Left would invest the label with an ever broader range of meaning, folding more and more opponents into the category. The term, however, would also be deployed in other ways, as would become clear the day after “The Burial of Paméla” appeared: the journée of September 5.

D e b at i n g t h e M u s c a d i n On the morning of September 5, thousands of protestors surrounded the National Convention to express their discontent about the current state of

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affairs. Their complaints were numerous. In the months since the journée of June 2, the situation in Paris and the nation at large had worsened. A scarcity of bread and widespread rumors of hoarding were a source of increasing anger among the Parisian populace. The radicals—known as enragés—and sansculottes had pushed for government control of the economy and stricter measures against hoarders, but the Mountain had consistently resisted these demands. Meanwhile, several major cities— most notably Lyon and Marseilles—were in open rebellion against the National Convention and had taken control of strategic areas that stood between the center and the war front. Finally, Paris had received news in early September of the treason of the city of Toulon, which had handed itself over to British forces off the coast on August 27. Led by the radical members of the Paris Commune, the protestors presented a petition to the National Convention in which they demanded that the deputies act upon their earlier promise to create a revolutionary army, a militia that would protect the food supply of the city and scout out hoarders and counterrevolutionaries. Moreover, they insisted that each section of the revolutionary army be followed by a revolutionary tribunal equipped with a guillotine and authorized to do away with traitors on the spot. Surrounded by protestors, the deputies on the floor found themselves in a delicate and dangerous situation. To yield to the popular demands was to sanction disorder, if not butchery. But to dismiss them carried perhaps greater risks: the memory of the bloodshed of the September massacres of 1792, during which the populace took justice into its own hands, was still fresh in the legislators’ minds (Barère, indeed, alludes to this danger in his speech). To defuse the tension, the deputies resorted to a strategy of deferral and partial concession. Some asked the legislators and public to wait for a report from the Committee of Public Safety, which Barère was in the process of drafting. Others praised the enthusiasm of the people and recognized the urgency of the situation while subtly rewording or revising their proposals. For example, when a delegate from the Jacobin Club implored the deputies to “make Terror the order of the day,” the president of the session, Robespierre, agreed but toned down the proposition: “Yes, courage and justice are the order of the day.”54 In a clever maneuver, Danton proposed and pushed through a series of measures that at once nodded toward and reined in the protestors’ demands. While he supported the call for a revolutionary army and urged for improvement in the functioning of the revolutionary tribunal, he avoided linking the two institutions: the new militia would have no ambulatory

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guillotine. At the same time, he proposed that the Parisian sections meet only twice a week and that participants be reimbursed for their time. Ostensibly, this ensured that workers could attend without having to lose earnings: if a greater number of honest sansculottes were able to partake in the meetings, Danton claimed, counterrevolutionary agents would no longer be able to infiltrate and mislead the sections. But his ulterior motive was clearly to curb the sansculottes’ activism by making their meetings more infrequent. Mona Ozouf has divided the September 5 session into two “acts”: first, the reading and discussion of the protestors’ petition, which emphasized the food shortage and rampant hoarding, and, then, the arrival of the Jacobin delegate, who introduced the idea of making Terror the order of the day. The latter’s speech reiterated the demands of the petition but shifted the focus of the discussion: his primary concern was not the scarcity of bread but rather the punishment of “traitors,” broadly defined. For Ozouf, the discussion that followed, including Barère’s speech, gives a first hint of the totalizing logic of the Terror, its tendency to place all criminals—hoarders, spies, counterrevolutionaries, thieves, draft dodgers, and so on—into the same irredeemable category.55 One of the major subtexts of the discussion was indeed the definition of the enemy: who exactly were the “suspect people” who were foiling the Revolution? Although all the politicians were emphatic about the need to punish these wrongdoers, they identified them in very different ways. Some speakers, such as Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, who read the petition from the Paris Commune, denounced hoarders and suppliers, while others blamed aristocrats and English spies or the moderate Brissotin faction. At one point in the discussion, the radical deputy Claude Bazire drew attention to precisely this problem of defining the enemy. Hitherto, he argued, security measures had failed because they targeted aristocrats, most of whom had long since fled. For Bazire, the real threat came from the political opposition and from the world of commerce: “you have had Feuillants [supporters of constitutional monarchy], you have had Brissotins, you still have hypocrites; and I ask whether all those people were noble. No, there weren’t two nobles among them. Who then are the individuals among whom this second class of suspect people is found? They are the shopkeepers, wholesalers, speculators, ci-devant prosecutors, bailiffs, insolent valets, administrators, and businessmen, . . . the large shareholders, charlatans by nature, profession, education.”56 Bazire’s comment echoes a remark made earlier in the day: at a meeting of the Paris Commune, a

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Jacobin delegate had attacked “suspect people, the muscadins, the attorneys’ and notaries’ clerks, the shop assistants.”57 In this usage, the word “muscadin” designates the same group that it did in Lyon: the shopkeepers, merchants’ employees, and the legal profession. Many of the deputies, however, were reluctant to identify the enemy with a specific social group or vocation. The most notable example is the speech of Barère, who arrived toward the end of the session to read the report of the Committee of Public Safety. Like many of the other speakers, Barère adopted the militant language of the Jacobin delegate: the use of the word “muscadin,” Terror as the order of the day, and so on. His speech, however, subtly shifted the terms of the debate. The muscadins to whom Barère referred resembled those of Rousselin’s article: they were clever performers who spread dangerous fictions in everyday life. Barère warned that the muscadins and royalists had taken on the identity and dress of “less fortunate citizens” to “spread calumnies about the National Convention” and rumors of bread shortages so that the farmers would hoard foodstuffs and thus deprive the capital of provisions. The culprits in Barère’s account were not the producers, suppliers, and traders but rather propagandists lurking among both the sansculottes and the peasants. Bazire’s speech had expanded the category of “suspect people,” scapegoating new ranks and professions; it had pandered to the popular frustration with the merchants and hoarders.58 Barère’s approach was in a sense even more “totalizing”: the enemy now could be anywhere. But at the same time Barère made the “suspect people” much more difficult to identify: after all, it was easier to recognize a shopkeeper than a talented chameleon in sansculotte dress. His strategy was to deflect attention from specific social groups by pointing his finger at the straw man of the muscadin, a slippery and protean antagonist.59 Barère, thus, mobilized the paranoid imagination against itself, using the image of a subtle, disguised antagonist to sidestep the popular desire to scapegoat entire classes or professions.60

Draft-Dodging Dandies A similar strategy of deflection governed one of the earliest theatrical representations of the figure of the muscadin La première réquisition (The first draft), a one-act play by Louis-Benoît Picard and Jacques-François Lépitre, which debuted on October 1, 1793.61 In the weeks between the journée of September 5 and the premiere of the play, the word “muscadin”

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had taken on yet another meaning. On September 13, François Chabot, a Capuchin friar turned Jacobin deputy, pointed out the absence of muscadins in a regiment marching by the National Convention and angrily called for the deportation of “those very culotted and very curled messieurs” and the expropriation of their belongings. Since the mass conscription of August 23, 1793, which had called up all single youths between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, many among the wealthy had been attempting to avoid military service, often by taking posts in government offices. Chabot’s comment initiated a discussion about how to deal with these draft dodgers, now labeled muscadins. While some deputies felt that these youths could be put to use, others advocated more severe measures such as those proposed by Chabot.62 This new usage conflated the word “muscadin” with the term “jeunes gens,” which had been used during the draft protests at the beginning of May 1793. The catalyst of the May demonstrations had been the conscription of twelve thousand men to fight in the Vendée. The Paris Commune, dominated by radical and Jacobin factions, had decided to call up the petite bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie—bank tellers, clerks, merchants, and bureaucrats—rather than the workers or sansculottes so as not to dampen popular enthusiasm for the Revolution or risk losing political support. The jeunes gens resented being singled out and loudly expressed their discontent at sectional meetings and in protests on the Champs-Élysées in early May.63 At the September 5 session of the National Convention, three petitioners would make similar complaints, only to be heckled and denounced as jeunes gens.64 In the opening scene of La première réquisition, two soldiers, Francœur (a loyal and good-hearted republican, as his name suggests) and Gafignac (a wigmaker from Gascony) arrive at an inn, where the waitress asks them about the draft-dodging jeunes gens of the capital. Francœur assures her that they are few in number: “Artisans, workers, artists, clerks and assistants, shop boys, all of them have the same single zeal, the same ardor, the same spirit; all of them are going to respond to the insults, to the calumnies of the evildoers” by leaving immediately to fight for their country.65 Francœur defends precisely the professions that Bazire and Hébert, among others, had scapegoated. The only draft dodgers, Gafignac observes, are con artists and gamblers “whose elegant and light style of coiffing constituted three quarters and a half of their merit.”66 Gafignac ridicules the dress and affectation of these posers and is about to parody their hallmark expression when a voice heard offstage saves him the effort: “c’est incroyable, ma parole d’honneur” (that’s incredible, my word

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of honor). The speaker, who enters soon after, is Valcour, a former abbot turned dandy, who has dressed as a woman to escape the draft. The companions of this false lady are two professional swindlers who have disguised themselves as an invalid on crutches and an old man in a Jacobin black wig. All three have trafficked in hoaxes—be it those of the gambling table or of the altar—and now engage in a similar fraud to escape military duty. As in Barère’s speech, Picard and Lépitre deflect blame from the petite bourgeoisie and the professions onto a dandy figure, who assumes a slippery disguise. The true threat is not a particular class so much as a tendency to warp the truth. Valcour’s first words—“c’est incroyable”— are pointed: the three jeunes gens enter under the sign of the incredible, the unbelievable. Not only does the work defend the middle ranks but it also takes its hero from among them. As a former hairdresser and wigmaker, Gafignac belongs to precisely the groups that were most associated with the jeunes gens and draft dodgers. In Paris as in Lyon, the luxury trades had suffered as clients emigrated or conformed to the opulence-averse ethos of the Revolution. Hairdressers and actors and other artists, consequently, were often highly critical of the new regime, and many had participated in the draft protests. Gafignac has himself experienced hard times since 1789: “before the Revolution, I used to shave the world,” but now “the Revolution has shaved my profession.” Unlike the indolent jeunes gens, however, Gafignac has found a new clientele: he is going to “give the Austrians a combing” on the front.67 As this metaphor suggests, Gafignac not only occupies a social middle but also stands between the worlds of Francœur and Valcour, engaging at once in combat and coiffure (tressing the Austrians on the battlefield). In its opening scene, the work sets up a simple opposition between the truth of the frank-hearted Francœur and the falsity and cowardice of Valcour, whose name evokes the values of the court and the ancien régime. Gafignac, however, will straddle these spheres, both resorting to subterfuge and uncovering the truth. A former stylist himself, he is not fooled by the jeunes gens’ self-fashioning. Valcour’s “c’est incroyable” has already raised an eyebrow, and the three travelers’ anxiety about the proximity of the battalion (from which they have escaped) only increases Gafignac’s suspicions. But what finally determines him to act is the lewd way in which the supposed woman (Valcour) ogles the waitress of the inn. Pretending to be a fainthearted maiden who is afraid to spend the night alone, the false lady asks the serving girl to sleep in the same bed. Gafignac, now convinced of the impersonation, decides to intervene.

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In his determination to “out” the impostor, Gafignac resembles Père Duchesne at the Palais Royal. His method, however, is somewhat subtler: rather than unmasking the traitor, he resorts to subterfuge. At first he plans to take the waitress’s place in the bed, but he quickly dismisses the idea. An abbot, accustomed to skirts, may effortlessly transform into a woman—“he only has to change his dress”—but a Gascon military man cannot hide his strength (or his accent) quite so easily: true republicans are ultimately legible creatures. Gafignac, therefore, encourages the waitress to spend the night with the feigned lady while he stands guard at the door. The wigmaker may stop short of the muscadin’s transvestism, but his method still involves a deception and performance of sorts: “I just pretended with those honest people, whom I strongly suspect of pretending with us. Here is an opportunity to wage a little war, and I’ll take advantage of it. I seek to counter-mine to destroy the effect of the enemy’s mine.”68 Both Valcour and Gafignac stoop to deceit, but what distinguishes Gafignac’s fiction is that it serves to reestablish the truth. At the end of the play, he will act as a middleman of sorts, leading the jeunes gens across the divide between fiction and reality. When the serving girl cries out for help, Gafignac enters to discover Valcour deshabillé, his skirt removed and his stylish culottes à rosettes in plain view. “This is embarrassing,” Gafignac observes. “Should one call you monsieur? Should one call you madame? You have an amphibious getup.”69 Awakened by the ruckus, Valcour’s “Jacobin” companion runs to his aid but forgets to cover his blond hair with the black wig of his disguise. In an attempt to escape, the third companion jumps out the window and miraculously walks without his crutches.70 Gafignac’s ruse exposes all three impostors. Aided by the serving girl, the wigmaker ushers the jeunes gens from their fictions through a space of ambiguity—the “amphibious getup”—back to the army and reality from which they have fled. At the end of the piece, the young men, cured of their cowardice, resolve to defend their country. “We’ll make you a hero,” Gafignac tells Valcour.71 The debates about the muscadins in the National Convention had revolved around the convertibility of the jeunes gens, whether they might be made useful to the Republic. The ending of La première réquisition answers with a resounding yes. The assumption of the play seems to be that to reform these weak-hearted souls, one simply needs to re-form them, to re-dress them in republican garb. At first, role-playing and selffashioning introduce a dangerous ambiguity, but at the end of the play they become a tool for remaking citizens. Ultimately, the play steers clear

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of a strict binary—virtuous versus irredeemable characters—and points toward a middle ground, Gafignac’s realm, in which disguises and patriots are refashioned. The hairdresser enters into the paranoid imagination of the period—probing for hidden identities as Hébert does at the Palais Royal—but he avoids the Manichean logic of the Terror. The jeunes gens in the audience, however, would not be as easily converted as those onstage. Curiously, just as Gafignac was breaking the frame of Valcour’s performance, the spectators at the debut did the same with the play itself, angrily catcalling and whistling. Their interruption would provoke a dispute in the theater. One citizen stood up on a bench to observe that “a work became public property from the moment the curtain went up and that no one had the right to stop it from reaching its conclusion.” Another, however, defended the audience’s right to “rise up against pieces attacking customs [mœurs], such as the scene that they had just seen.” The show resumed only after a police commissary intervened to quiet the crowd.72 On the second performance, the disturbances would begin even earlier in the play. The first appearance of the three jeunes gens provoked hooting from what the reviewer for the left-wing Feuille du salut public described as “a muscadin cabal” in the audience, “jeunes gens with big hats and narrow brains, who take revenge for not being able to applaud elsewhere [i.e., at the Comédie-Française, which had just been closed] pieces written expressly for proper people.”73 Although the play sought to deflect attention from the classes and professions traditionally lumped under the muscadin moniker and represented the type as a relatively innocuous and correctible figure, the audience members seem to have identified with the jeunes gens and objected to their vilification. Their reaction is an early example of their resistance to negative labeling.74 Such voices of defense and opposition, however, would become increasingly rare as the general paranoia mounted, and the Terror extended its net.

M o d i s h M o d e r at e s In the weeks that followed, the term “muscadin” would be used to denounce not only sartorial self-fashioning—the cross-dressing draft dodger or the muscadin-sansculottes of the Palais Royal—but also a subtler danger: ideological self-fashioning, the adoption of moderate views or a lukewarm patriotism to mask dissent or disloyalty. One of the clearest representations of this problem was Jean-Henri Dugazon’s Le modéré (The moder-

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ate), another play about a draft-dodging muscadin, which premiered on October 28, 1793.75 At the beginning of the play, Modérantin has decided to unite his orphaned niece, Julie, to his son, Lestanville, a frivolous muscadin. The marriage would allow Lestanville to avoid the draft, which has called up only single men. Julie, however, loves the young Duval, a valorous soldier whose suit her late father favored. The plot revolves around the tension between the staunch republicanism of Julie, Duval, and his father and the more ambiguous stances of Modérantin, Lestanville, and their muscadin friend Fablenville, who is an outright counterrevolutionary. By making the muscadin the son of a modérantiste (moderate), the work clearly equates sartorial and ideological self-fashioning. The genealogy of the work, moreover, collapses the center into the right: the moderate politics of the father begets the lack of patriotism of Lestanville. As in the articles about the Comédie-Française troupe after the Paméla controversy, the play condemns the muscadin as a shifty political operator whose modérantisme is but an act. Fittingly, Le modéré premiered at the Comédie’s rival, the Théâtre de la République, whose left-wing troupe had opposed the moderate views and often lukewarm republicanism of the former comédiens du roi. Dugazon’s assimilation of the muscadin with the moderate was a pointed gesture at the end of October 1793. His work premiered four days after the opening of the trial of the moderate Brissot and his allies, which would end with their execution on October 31. The downfall of the Brissotins marked the final annihilation of the moderate (Girondin) opposition, whose members had been forced out of the National Convention on June 2 after popular riots. By folding the modérantiste into the category of the muscadin, Dugazon attempted to direct the animus against the latter figure toward the defendants in the trial. Le modéré belongs to a series of plays about modérantisme produced in September and October 1793, many of which revisit and rewrite the most notorious pro-moderate play of the year, Jean Louis Laya’s L’ami des loix (The friend of the laws), which had premiered at the Comédie-Française in January during yet another controversial trial: that of Louis XVI.76 Laya’s play, which instigated riots and contentious debate, features an aristocrat turned loyal republican, who generously distributes his wealth among the needy. To deprive him of political influence, several unscrupulous politicians of the extreme Left—obvious caricatures of Marat, Danton, and Robespierre—trump up conspiracy charges and incite the masses against him. In the end, however, the peuple shows its wisdom and respect for the law by examining the evidence and acclaiming the hero’s virtue and hon-

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esty. In a central scene of the play, the protagonist clarifies the meaning of modéré, which was often used as a derogatory term: “if fleeing factions is being a moderate,/then I have the right to be honored by that insult.”77 Needless to say, the work, with its centrist politics and blatant derision of Robespierre and Marat, did not endear the Comédie-Française to the political Left. It would be cited repeatedly nine months later during the Paméla scandal (another controversy about modérantisme), which shut down the theater and landed its troupe in jail.78 In the months following the closure of the Comédie-Française, at least two plays debuted offering left-wing versions of Laya’s plot: M.-C. Cammaille-Saint-Aubin’s L’ami du peuple, ou Les intrigans démasqués (The friend of the people, or The intriguers unmasked) and Citoyenne Villeneuve’s Le véritable ami des loix, ou Le républicain à l’épreuve (The true friend of the laws, or The republican put to the test).79 The former play explicitly repudiated the modérantisme of Laya’s work: “[t]hat moderate spirit serves to cover your crimes,” the hero tells the villains, “and blinds your victims to strike them harder.”80 Not surprisingly, the two new pieces received admiring reviews from the radical Feuille du salut public. What is interesting about these reactions is that they project the new label of “muscadin” back onto the moderate hero of the January play. Thus, the critic observes that the protagonist of Le véritable ami des loix “is not one of those bores who borrows the mask of patriotism to make the revolution turn back on itself. This is not, as in that perfidious piece [i.e., Laya’s L’ami des loix] that was performed at the ci-devant Théâtre de la Nation [i.e., the Comédie-Française], a noble muscadin who responds with the politeness of the ancien régime to the objections of an aristocrat whose absurd prejudices he seems afraid to destroy.”81 Revisited in the fall of 1793, the moderate hero of Laya’s play becomes a muscadin, an untrustworthy performer. A similar association appears in the Feuille article on Cammaille-Saint-Aubin’s L’ami du peuple, which the reviewer contrasts favorably with the plays applauded by the “muscadin regulars” of the Comédie-Française, such as “the cowardly and perfidious Ami des loix of M. Laya.”82 Like Cammaille-Saint-Aubin’s and Villeneuve’s works, Dugazon’s Le modéré gestures toward Laya’s plot. Its protagonist fashions himself as an ami des lois (“I have always had the most profound respect for the law”) though, in his heart of hearts, the very word “stings him.”83 And as in the other antimoderate plays, Dugazon denounces this avowed modérantisme and exposes its hypocrisy. At the beginning of the piece, Modérantin’s servant Dufour dismisses his master’s republican gestures as pure “char-

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latanism”: he “is a citizen . . . only on his card.”84 Modérantin seeks to keep a low profile but his muscadin friend is reckless. To Modérantin’s dismay, Fablenville mocks his politics in front of strangers and represents his patriotism as an empty performance: “In no time at all—it’s something unique!—one could make him [i.e., Modérantin] cry Vive la République.”85 And later the muscadin warns that “Duval is not safe, let’s be politic,/And in front of him above all, let’s talk up the Republic.”86 It is this suspicion of acting that ultimately dooms Modérantin. The strangers before whom Fablenville has made these comments turn out to be two police commissaries, whom he has mistaken for fellow dinner guests and right-wing allies. The agents immediately send for a justice of the peace, who puts Modérantin’s patriotism into doubt. The title character is compromised not only by Fablenville’s remarks but also by his choice of friends. His guests include ideological enemies of the Republic: an abbot and a counterrevolutionary who look forward to the day when “our people in the countryside” will defeat “messieurs of the Mountain.”87 The Duvals attempt to save Modérantin, who immediately repents of his unpatriotic ways and vows to unite Julie and the young Duval, but their support and his last-minute contrition are to no avail: the play ends with his and Fablenville’s imprisonment. In its conclusion, Le modéré veers away from the mild denouement of La première réquisition. Modérantin may put republican decorations on his house and a bonnet rouge on his head, but patriotism does not come from the outside in. Ultimately, the moderate characters lack real convictions and, in the servant Dufour’s opinion, “will never change.”88 Gafignac’s confidence in the reforming power of dress and the idea of a middle space are lost in this work. Unlike Valcour’s, Modérantin’s last-minute conversion is useless. Where Picard and Lépitre’s work suggests that the mask can change the man, Dugazon’s emphasizes the divide between the two. The ending of La première réquisition gestures toward the transformative side of the paranoid imagination, the way in which identity and posture reshape one another. The denouement of Le modéré, in contrast, adopts a more melodramatic approach. In its uncompromising condemnation of modérantisme, the work conformed to the general pattern of CammailleSaint-Aubin’s and Villeneuve’s plays. Nevertheless, Dugazon’s piece seemed somewhat more dubious to contemporary viewers. One critic found it difficult to take Modérantin’s final repentance under duress as a sincere conversion and called for a more rigorous punishment: “It was necessary to make an example of him.”89 And a police report about a performance a few months later complained that

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“the moderate received some rounds of applause that seemed . . . very suspect.” It also observed that the final arrest appeared to be caused by Modérantin’s refusal of Duval as a husband for Julie.90 The title character’s downfall, that is, seemed the result not of his ideological equivocation or lack of patriotism but of Duval’s retribution and personal interest.91 The play, indeed, lends itself to ambiguity in at least two ways. The first concerns its treatment of the ideological spectrum. The published script of the work includes an unusually detailed dramatis personae, which indicates both the dress and the personality of each character. Modérantin wears neutral tones (browns, blacks, and grays) and old-fashioned, bourgeois styles (a bag wig, culottes, etc.), which correspond to the centrist stance of his name. His son and Fablenville sport square coats, multiple waistcoats, lace cravats, and muscadin haircuts. In contrast, the fiercely patriotic Duval and his father appear in the colors of the Republic, blue and red, the former with a Jacobin-style haircut. As this list makes clear, the work seems to acknowledge various gradations in the political spectrum moving from the unforgiving and sarcastic servant Dufour, who rails against his master in Hébert-like tirades, to the loyal but lenient Duvals, to the centrist Modérantin, to the counterrevolutionary Fablenville. Dugazon, moreover, goes to some effort to distinguish degrees of patriotism. Unlike many of comparable wealth, Modérantin has neither emigrated nor sought refuge in the country. Far from a traitor, he has served in the guard, paid his taxes, and displayed the usual republican paraphernalia outside his house. Duval père finds fault not with Modérantin’s politics so much as with his choice of friends: “[h]e has taken part in no plot; he is just misguided.”92 His companions, moreover, are not “those who have betrayed [the nation]” but rather “mercenary people/Who by their vile calculations increase our miseries.”93 At a moment when greed, venality, and even passivity were considered high treason, Dugazon carefully weighs degrees of guilt. Modérantin is moderate in his politics and immoderate in his pleasures but otherwise relatively harmless. Even his frivolous son is not beyond hope: both Duvals believe that the draft will correct Lestanville’s self-indulgent ways. The denouement might fold the center into the right, but the work itself seems to acknowledge and adopt a more nuanced logic. A second source of ambiguity in Le modéré is the bidirectionality of the unveilings and exposures in the work. At the end, the justice of the peace and Dufour will reveal the hypocrisy of Modérantin, but throughout most of the work, it is the moderate and his son who uncover the emptiness of the more patriotic characters, debunking revolutionary terms and dis-

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missing them as empty phrases. Dufour complains that his master dismisses liberty as a “chimera” and denies that equality could ever exist.94 Later, Modérantin objects to the young Duval’s invocation of the law— “that word stings me”—and complains that he “understand[s] nothing of this new jargon.”95 Both Modérantin and his son, Lestanville, reject the abstract phrases of the Revolution. When Duval argues for the sovereignty of the people, Lestanville jokes that “[m]y driver will never be my sovereign.”96 And when Duval père refers to “the friends of the People and of Liberty,” Modérantin complains that he is speaking “a foreign language.”97 Even the ideological target of the Republic becomes mere verbiage: “despotism” is a term that Modérantin has lived fifty years without hearing.98 For him, it is an empty buzzword rather than an oppressive reality of the past. Each set of characters in the work debunks the other’s views and language as mere pretension, scripted lines. The anti-modérantistes might have the final word in the play, but this bidirectional structure—the mutual unveilings of the plot—introduces a certain confusion. Who is really unveiling whom in this play? Which side represents reality and which fiction? This equivocality would attach not only to the play but also to its creator. Although the Feuille du salut public generally approved of the work, its reviewer recalled that Dugazon, who played the title role, was once “the character whom he mocked today, when having dinner or supper with the infamous Dumouriez, he dared to engage in the most blameworthy mockery and ironies against Marat in order to please a monster whom the Friend of the People [i.e., Marat] had courageously pursued in the asylum of Brissotin pleasures.”99 The remark refers to a dinner in honor of the general Charles François Dumouriez held a year earlier by the actor Talma, who was at the time a partisan of the moderate Brissotin, or Girondin, faction. At one point in the evening, Marat, the scrofulous, radical author of L’ami du peuple (The friend of the people), dropped by. After he left, Dugazon burned sugar to purify the air and amuse his fellow guests.100 From the perspective of the fall of 1793, this mockery seemed a particularly grievous offense: in the spring Dumouriez had betrayed the Republic by turning his battalion against Paris, and Marat, assassinated by Charlotte Corday on July 13, was no longer the laughingstock of revolutionary society but rather the revered martyr of the Left. Modérantin, thus, is not the only one who has changed his tune; his creator, Dugazon, has also done an about-face and now ironically performs his own political opportunism onstage.101 In the Feuille article, the tendency to confuse the actor and his role and the distrust of the fence straddler combine to make even the parody of the political performer a

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politically suspect performance. To play a muscadin here is to be one, for with this figure, being is playing a role. The Feuille articles about both Paméla and Le modéré tap into the transformative side of the paranoid imagination—the confusion of subject and object, fiction and reality—but unlike Gafignac, they use it not to reform but to condemn the muscadin.

The Myth of the Muscadin After the execution of the Brissotins, the muscadin would become more invisible, yet paradoxically omnipresent and all-encompassing. In Père Duchesne, Hébert complained that “[a]ll the muscadins in small ankle boots and tight culottes have become strong-arms. . . . One no longer sees anything but long pants and sansculotte vests. The streets of Paris, the promenades, are like poppy fields; they are teeming with red bonnets. Never did the Faubourg Saint-Antoine see such a carnival. To avoid being confused with all the good-for-nothings, who have taken on their costume, it will soon be necessary for the sansculottes to wear tight culottes and to have themselves curled and pampered in their turn.”102 Once again, the muscadin is a figure that confuses fiction and reality; by a perverse irony, those posing as sansculottes have become so indistinguishable from the real ones that the latter must themselves play a role to recognize their own authenticity. It is important to note, however, that the function of the figure has begun to shift. The muscadins now stand not for a dissident party—the wishy-washy middle ground of the moderates, or Brissotins— but for difference itself. The muscadin here is an (imagined) other against which the sansculotte defines and recognizes himself. Hébert cannot see the sameness of the poppy field—the red consensus—without imagining a variation of shades (and allegiances) underneath.103 This new conception of the muscadin as a figure of difference is clearest in the myth of his origin recounted in Père Duchesne. “Long ago, before the Flood,” Hébert writes, “there were neither muscadins nor muscadines”; all men belonged to one family sharing food and chores and living in peaceful harmony.104 One day, however, a scoundrel began to dream of a life without work in which he would enjoy the fruits of his companions’ labor and sleep with their wives. Just at that moment, the sky darkened, a storm broke out, and the inhabitants scattered seeking shelter. When they emerged after the downpour, the rascal claimed to have seen God, who appointed him “master of affairs” and exempted him from other duties. Henceforth, all who disobeyed him would be punished by the devil.105

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Hébert’s story is at one level an etiology of religion, which serves to debunk its transcendental claims: God is simply a ruse invented by a scoundrel seeking to shirk his responsibilities. The tale, however, also accounts for the emergence of hierarchies and social difference. The muscadin is the figure who disrupts the equality and unison that reigned before the Flood. In a subsequent issue, Hébert complains that the army officers are “muscadins who do not want to take on the national uniform.”106 Once again, the figure stands for a lack of uniformity—here, quite literally, of uniforms. It was precisely this insistence on homogeneity that had come under attack in November when Hébert’s myth of the muscadin appeared. On November 10, two weeks after the judgment of the Brissotins, the deputy François Chabot, supported by Claude Bazire and Jacques-Alexis Thuriot, spoke out against the Terror as a system: “What is important to me is that there isn’t always just one opinion upon all decrees. For if there is no right wing, I will form one myself, even if I must lose my head, so that there will be an opposition.”107 Not only did the Terror eliminate discussion from public life but it also introduced the risk of self-annihilation. “Citizens,” Bazire warned, “do not jump so rashly upon the hook that some scoundrels might present to you in order to make us tear each other to pieces successively. . . . There is not a single muscadin who would not rejoice to see those who began the Revolution, those who first laid down the foundations of liberty, mount the scaffold.”108 Bazire’s approach here is not unlike Barère’s on September 5: he blames the muscadins in order to rein in the Terror. But where Barère sought to deflect attention from groups that might be targeted, Bazire calls the entire system into question. Bazire’s strategy, in a sense, is to break the frame, to suggest that the Terror is itself a performance, yet another of the shifty muscadin’s acts. We might think that we are unveiling the truth with each new denunciation, but the proliferating conspiracy theories are but a fiction—a fiction designed by the nation’s enemies to push the republicans toward selfdestruction. With this logic, Bazire is attempting to step outside the system itself, to bracket it as a convention. Curiously, however, Bazire seeks to debunk the genre of the conspiracy theory by theorizing that the genre itself is a conspiracy. At the very moment that he denounces the Terror, that is, he falls into its most basic logic: the denunciation of the muscadin. By a bizarre irony, the muscadins become here the very source of the system that seeks to eliminate the muscadins. Like Dugazon, who at once attacks and embodies the moderate, the muscadin here is both the creator of the system and its principal

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target. Bazire may attempt to stand outside the system, but he still has a foot within it. Just as Dugazon cannot condemn the muscadin without being a muscadin, Bazire is unable to condemn the condemnation of the muscadin without condemning the muscadin. Chabot’s and Bazire’s intervention would fall on deaf ears on November 10. The hard-core left immediately reasserted the need for the Terror, and Hébert denounced Bazire as “the muskiest of the muscadins.”109 Bazire would escape from neither the logic of the Terror nor its grip. Executed along with Chabot and the Dantonists on April 5, 1794, he was yet another victim of the all-consuming system that he condemned. The task of recovering a right wing and, more generally, a political spectrum would fall not to Chabot but to the jeunes gens of the Thermidorian period. Ironically, however, Hébert had met a similar fate on March 24, 1794, only twelve days before Bazire and Chabot. The man who had once exposed muscadins posing as sansculottes had himself been exposed. As one poem has him posthumously declare: Over my journal a horrific image Represented me in a horsehair wig; But in reality I was a muscadin And a sansculottes only in painting.110

Just as Modérantin’s moderation was projected upon Dugazon, so Hébert’s character, his muscadin-sansculotte, would come to haunt him.

Muscadin-Sansculottes Almost a year later, on March 23, 1795, a new sort of muscadin-sansculotte appeared in Paris. In a pamphlet titled Adresse des jeunes citoyens, à leurs frères les ouvriers de tous les âges (Address of the young citizens to their brothers, the workers of all ages), a group of jeunes gens reached out to the Parisian working class in an attempt to defuse tension between the two groups. “Who are the muscadins?” they asked. “[A]re they the jeunes gens?” If so, then the workers, in attacking them, had turned against their own relatives and companions, for the jeunes gens were all laborers themselves. And if “muscadin” referred to the wealthy, then the workers were cutting off the hand that fed them.111 Muscadins and sansculottes, the young citizens argued, were ultimately meaningless labels, “invented by intrigue” to wipe out both parties.112 “Let us foil their plans,” they proposed, “by

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mixing our sentiments: sansculottes, muscadins, let us extend a hand of fraternity to one another, and bound together by these sweet ties, let us create a formidable rampart around liberty, which will ensure our common happiness.”113 The authors of the Adresse draw attention to the emptiness and divisive function of the terms “muscadin” and “sansculotte” and attempt to create a common ground with the workers. Notably, in calling for this fraternal handshake, the authors do not use the terms ouvriers and “jeunes gens” but rather embrace the derogatory monikers “sansculottes” and “muscadins,” which they reinflect with a constructive, amicable spirit. They defuse these labels by voluntarily assuming them, conflating them into a composite creature: an idealized “muscadin-sansculotte” who will engage in a “fight to the death with the terrori-royalistes, with the royalist Jacobins, with the blood-drinkers, with the cutthroats.”114 In so doing, the pamphlet shifts the focus of the debate from the opposition between Left and Right to that between moderation and extremism: the struggle is not, as we might expect, muscadin-royalist versus sansculotte-terrorist but rather royalist-terrorist (the symbol of extremism) versus muscadinsansculotte (the rational middle ground). To understand this radical shift in attitude, we must situate this work within the politics of post-Thermidor Paris and, particularly, the Germinal Days. In the spring of 1794, Robespierre recalled Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron and Jean Lambert Tallien, along with several other deputies, from the provinces where they had been sent on missions and charged them with corruption and brutality. The disgraced politicians, suspecting that their names were next on Robespierre’s black list, banded together to oppose him. On 9 thermidor (July 27, 1794), Tallien interrupted SaintJust in the middle of a speech and unleashed a pandemonium in the Convention that led to the arrest of Robespierre and his supporters and their execution the next day. In the weeks that followed, the political direction of the country was at first unclear, but gradually a core group of deputies converged around a more moderate platform and set about dismantling the Terror. To save their own necks, the wayward terrorists had brought down the Terror, but now they had to wash the blood from their hands. Selffashioning was the order of the day. Tallien portrayed himself as a romantic hero. Just a month before 9 thermidor, his mistress, the beautiful Thérésia Cabarrus, had been imprisoned, her arrest warrant signed by Robespierre himself. Tallien’s intervention was inspired not by fear or self-interest but by love, gallantry, and heroism. After 9 thermidor and Thérésia’s release from prison, the couple would make good on this myth,

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marrying in December and becoming the symbolic figureheads of Thermidorian society. Although their union soon ended in divorce, and Tallien quickly dropped from the political scene, Thérésia would continue to reign as the queen of the merveilleuses, the arbiter of chic and the cynosure of Directory society. Fréron took on a more dapper persona, allying himself with the jeunes gens, elegant young men once disparaged as muscadins, who had mobilized against the Jacobins and former terrorists in the wake of 9 thermidor. With his journal, L’orateur du peuple, Fréron directed the youths’ activism and encouraged them in their patriotic self-fashioning.115 In the fall and spring of Year III (1794–1795), the jeunes gens shut down the Jacobin Club and lobbied for the punishment of former terrorists and the repeal of the more offensive policies of Year II: the Law of Suspects, the expulsion of the Girondins from the Convention, the pantheonization of Marat, and the Constitution of 1793. Their hot-headedness and thirst for revenge, however, often led them to extremes and to a thuggish behavior that increasingly antagonized the workers and sansculottes. These tensions came to a head in March 1795. On 1 germinal Year III (March 21, 1795), two of the poorer Parisian sections presented a petition to the National Convention. As on September 5, 1793, their principal concern was the scarcity of bread and other necessities in Paris. The winter of 1794–1795 had been one of the coldest of the century. Subzero temperatures had frozen the rivers, blocking the supply of firewood to the city, and a shortage of foodstuffs, aggravated by the plummeting value of the assignat and the repeal of the Maximum (government-mandated ceiling prices on basic commodities), had caused widespread hunger among the people, who could not afford the goods sold on the black market. In this context, the luxury and conspicuous consumption of the jeunes gens seemed particularly insensitive. The political climate, however, was very different from that of September 5, 1793. Since 9 thermidor, the influence of the sansculottes had waned considerably; the deputies of the National Convention dismissed their petition out of hand. Almost immediately, pandemonium broke out on the streets: the sansculottes cried, “Down with the muscadins!” and tousled the jeunes gens’ coiffed hair, while the latter fought back and in some cases arrested their assailants. The following day, Le messager du soir, a mouthpiece of the jeunes gens, called for a “fraternal address from the jeunesse to the patriotic workers and laborers.”116 The result was the pamphlet cited above, a conciliatory gesture intended to repair relations between the two groups. Using a logic not unlike Bazire’s in his denun-

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ciation of the Terror as a system, the pamphlet represented the attack on the muscadins as an attempt by the Republic’s enemies to make the two groups annihilate one another. Unlike Bazire, however, the young citizens did not attribute this machination to a muscadin. Rather, they adopted the term as a self-description, imagining a muscadin-sansculottes composite. They were not redeploying a label to deflect attention from a real group to an imaginary one but rather inhabiting the term, making themselves its referent. This system of identifying with a negative label and reinflecting it in a positive way would become an important strategy in post-Thermidor politics. The authors of the pamphlet sought to escape the melodrama of the paranoid imagination by shifting from a vertical to a horizontal model: rather than uncovering a difference between surface and depth (the muscadin beneath the sansculottes or vice versa), they placed the two labels side by side on a political spectrum. In this way, they sidestepped the anxiety about the ambiguous political sign. Nevertheless, the spectrum that they imagined lacked nuance: as in Year II, it included but two options. Muscadins versus sansculottes may have become muscadin-sansculottes versus terrori-royalistes, but the binary logic remained in place. The jeunes gens’ pamphlet had little impact. In a skeptical reply, the workers observed that if the jeunes gens truly wished to fraternize, they would reduce the price of merchandise and begin to use the debased assignat currency themselves.117 Ten days later, on 12 germinal (April 1), rioting convulsed Paris, and the poor again invaded the National Convention demanding bread. In the weeks that followed, the tensions between the two groups escalated as the young men pushed for the arrest of deputies who had opposed them and for reprisals against former terrorists.118 Several weeks after the Germinal Days, as the uprisings would become known, the muscadin-sansculotte would make yet another appearance in Paris. This time, however, his venue was not the Palais Royal but the stage: a comedy by Hyacinthe Dorvo titled Figaro de retour à Paris (Figaro back in Paris).119 The play tells the story of a gifted painter named Florval, who has lost his parents during the Terror and who has recently been recalled from his army post to Paris in order that he may cultivate his artistic talent in the service of the Republic. In the capital, Florval falls in love with a young woman named Laure, but her family objects to the match. Her uncles, the Jacobin Montclair and the royalist Dércourt, both wish to marry her themselves, and her pious aunt wants to choose her niece’s husband in accordance with her religious principles. All three find fault with Florval as a suitor. Montclair

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rejects him as a muscadin and accuses him of deserting the army; the aunt considers him a heretic; and Dércourt, an homme de bon ton, objects to his modern dress, his refusal to wear the courtly attire of the ancien régime. Like many of the jeunes gens of the Thermidorian period, Florval is an orphan in an artistic profession who is charged with avoiding military duty and who gravitates toward the political center. The basic plot of the play resembles that of Beaumarchais’s Le barbier de Séville (1773): the young hero vies for the heroine with an older generation and ultimately wins her hand through the help of the barber Figaro. And as in Beaumarchais’s play, this plot is an allegory for the nation at large. In Le barbier de Séville, the triumph of young over old represents symbolically the transition from the ancien régime to a more liberal age: indeed, Figaro’s famously antihierarchical politics would often be seen as a catalyst of the Revolution.120 Dorvo’s story, however, reconfigures Beaumarchais’s plot politically. In Laure’s family, the older generation represents ideological extremes, while the youths stand for the political center, a middle ground that the aunt and uncles find ambiguous and suspect. Figaro observes that this is the situation in all of France: The smallest household is a court of law, Where screaming about the people, one discusses rights The husband is a Jacobin, the wife a royalist, The children moderates; each one insists On his opinion; it’s a hubbub, a Sabbath.121

The point of the play is not to overthrow the old order but to overcome the political disputes that have riven the nation by forging a moderate consensus, represented here by the younger generation. As Figaro—the middleman himself—sums up, a citizen should “not be extreme in his views.”122 Like Gafignac in La première réquisition, Figaro redresses the problems of the nation by re-dressing the hero: he instructs Florval to wear a black wig and pants on one half of his body and a sword and courtly costume on the other. Dividing Florval sartorially, Figaro is recycling a common image in revolutionary iconography: the Janus-faced citizen, whose left and right sides gesture toward opposite parties. In early versions of the trope, the man is split between the ancien régime and the Revolution. Later, in images such as L’anarchiste: Je les trompe tous deux (The anarchist: I trick both of them), he vacillates between the wealthy muscadin and the impov-

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5. Simon Petit, L’anarchiste: Je les trompes tous deux (Paris: Lateur, [1797]). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

erished sansculotte (see fig. 5).123 In all versions, however, he is a reviled figure, a symbol of political opportunism, of a treacherous modérantisme. He is the ambiguous sign that triggers the paranoid imagination. In Dorvo’s play, however, the cloven man is a positive symbol. When Florval appears in his absurd getup, Laure’s aunt and uncles cannot refrain from laughing and quickly accept him as their nephew-in-law. As in the Adresse, the solution is a union of opposites, of muscadin and sansculotte, and this composite is formed by voluntarily assuming the problematic labels. Both Florval and the jeunes citoyens, by choosing to wear the terms, de-essentialize them: the stereotypes are no longer indices of the individual’s deep moral values but rather masks and postures that he assumes at will. Figaro’s solution is not simply to compromise—giving each of the siblings a piece of Florval—but also to put quotation marks around the labels they privilege, to draw attention to the performance

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involved in such positions. To the extent that it exposes the superficiality of all labels and emphasizes the common humanity of the characters, the play moves beyond the binary logic of the pamphlet. Ultimately, the strategy of these post-Thermidor texts is the opposite of the pattern in the muscadin literature of the fall of 1793. In the earlier works, the divide between fiction and reality was continually blurred. Distrustful journalists projected the role onto the actor or, inversely, regarded the real world as a stage and attempted to unmask ordinary citizens. Either way, the impulse was to step across the fourth wall. In Dorvo’s play, in contrast, Figaro draws attention to the footlights and to the artifice of the performance. Of the two-sided Florval, he observes, “You represent for us the current scene/How many people like you have different masks!”124 Like Hébert and Gafignac, Figaro recognizes the rampant acting and posturing in everyday life. His point, however, is not to reveal Florval’s true identity but rather to underscore the constructedness and malleability of social reality itself, the scene-like nature of the “current scene.” Figaro points not only to the construction but also to the constructive potential of such performances. At the beginning of the play, he hopes that “the Frenchman has already . . . lost the memory of his recent misfortunes.”125 But as the aunt’s and uncles’ behavior reveals, they have neither forgiven nor forgotten. Figaro’s final ruse is effective because it allows the family to replay—to relive in a theatrical setting—the conflicts that have torn them apart. Florval’s performance differs from the threatening ambiguity of the muscadin, for he is representing not a faction (the shifty middle ground) but rather the political rift itself: he is presenting a historical tableau of sorts. Acting here is a therapeutic reenacting: rather than engaging in the ideological conflicts, the hero performs them in such a way as to allow the siblings to view them from the outside. It is this reenactment that helps them to work through and move beyond the traumatic past. The play distances the ideological conflicts of Year II not only by reducing the political extremes to postures but also by projecting them onto the older generation: royalist and Jacobin fanaticism are now a thing of the past, to be replaced by the modern, and more rational, centrism of the young couple. Dorvo’s happy ending, however, is shortsighted. Like the Adresse, it ignores the real issues at stake. Dismissing the tension between the muscadins and sansculottes as an anachronistic ideological rift, both the play and the pamphlet ignore the class struggle and the economic hardship at the root of the workers’ activism. Only a week after the debut of the play,

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the renewed tensions of the Prairial Days (May 20–23, 1795) would end any hope of reconciliation between the two groups. But though Dorvo’s work turns a blind eye to these economic conflicts, it does take up one of the major political challenges of its day: the problem of coming to terms with the traumas of the recent past, of understanding the relation between Year II and Year III. The older generation in the play has fallen into a dangerous repetition compulsion; they are unable to avoid the knee-jerk reactions of the past. Figaro and Florval, in contrast, seek to escape these patterns through a conscious act of reenactment and performance. In the Adresse des jeunes citoyens and Figaro de retour à Paris, we begin to discern the new functions of the muscadin and jeunes gens in postThermidorian politics. On the one hand, the figure represents an ideological center, an alternative to the binary logic and with-us-or-against-us mentality of the Terror. On the other hand, the character becomes the protagonist of an attempt to understand, bracket, and distance the recent past: the challenge of the anachronistic imagination. In the Thermidorian period, the vertical model of the paranoid imagination—the idea of a beguiling surface that hides a treacherous depth—gives way to a model in which the sansculotte and muscadin appear side by side as in Figaro’s tableau, and nothing lies beneath them. The challenge of this new period will be to situate the two figures horizontally, be it on a more nuanced political spectrum or on the timeline of French history.

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Jeunes gens On February 5, 1795 (17 pluviôse Year III), a group of young men associated with the Parisian jeunesse dorée disrupted the second performance of the comedy Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou La folie du jour (The Feydeau Street concert, or The folly of the day) at the Théâtre de l’AmbiguComique.1 Shouting and whistling, the jeunes gens demanded that the script be burned. The protests died down only when a police commissary appeared onstage and promised to submit the work to the Committee of General Security.2 A reading of that body’s letter of approval preceded the performance the following evening but did not deter the irate young men. Now wielding clubs, they climbed onto the stage and denounced the piece as “immoral and even detrimental to the government and to Liberty.”3 This time, however, the director of the theater had taken precautions. The hall was surrounded by a group of armed men, who arrested the exiting protestors and escorted them to the local section for questioning. Upon their release the following morning, the protestors drafted a letter of complaint to the committee, in which they denounced the abuses of their captors; and one of them, Alphonse-Louis-Dieudonné Martainville, went on to publish a vituperative pamphlet about the experience. Four days later, after continued protests at the theater, the Committee of General Security suspended all performances of the controversial play and arrested the members of the revolutionary committee who had detained the young men.4 Looking back at the catalyst of these events, one is hard put to find cause for such uproar. The play in question, which was written by René Périn and M.-C. Cammaille-Saint-Aubin, revolved around a frivolous question:

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whether or not to buy a dress. If its heroine, Adèle Dorval, splurges on the glamorous gown, she is sure to draw attention at the Théâtre Feydeau, the gathering place of fashionable society and particularly of the jeunesse dorée. But the purchase would exhaust her husband’s modest government income and compromise her son’s financial future. At the end of the play, Adèle sensibly renounces her frippery and resolves to be a good wife and mother. In its plot and its critique, the play harked back to the anti-luxury literature of the ancien régime and to a commonplace of the comic repertoire: the correction of the spendthrift wife. Reviewers compared the work to prerevolutionary staples such as Marmontel’s story “Le bon mari” (“The good husband,” published in his Contes moraux of 1769) and Beaunoir’s drama Le danger des liaisons (The danger of liaisons, 1783), and in giving its initial approval, the Committee of General Security observed that it resembled many other plays that criticized contemporary manners.5 Little in the basic story was new or provocative. Nor was the Ambigu-Comique, a boulevard theater founded in 1769 by Nicolas-Médard Audinot and specializing in lighter theatrical genres, a hotbed of controversy or political debate.6 If we judge by the playwrights’ defense of the play after its closure, the catalyst of the uproar was not the story itself but a single line in the final scene. Adèle’s shopping spree is encouraged by a foppish young man named Desrosées, who has avoided the draft by claiming to be nearsighted and taking a government position, to which he rarely reports. At the end of the comedy, Adèle’s husband, who works in the same office, announces that Desrosées has been dismissed and that he will soon “go to the army to hear a concert.” The heroine objects, recalling Desrosées’s alleged myopia, but her husband is quick with a retort: “So then, he’ll be put in the front lines; he’ll have the enemy right before his eyes.”7 In the treatment of Desrosées, the authors rehash familiar stereotypes about the muscadins: the accusations of draft dodging, feigned nearsightedness, and government sinecures. The husband’s function is not unlike Gafignac’s in La première réquisition: he sends the muscadin back to the front, in this case to the very front lines. The quip, however, goes only so far in explaining the controversy at the Ambigu-Comique. For the young men’s reaction to the witticism seems out of all proportion. In frantic, ominous words worthy of Aeschylus’s Cassandra, they evoke a violence from the past hovering over the present, about to wreak havoc: on their arrest, “furies of the guillotine”—“the same harpies filling the Jacobins’ tribunals”—holler, “To the guillotine!”8 And greeting them at the local section is an aggressive interrogator who

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plays “the role of Dumas at the tribunal of blood”—a reference to RenéFrançois Dumas, president of the Revolutionary Tribunal during the height of the Terror.9 If in the young men’s letter they are reliving the “Grande Terreur,” in Martainville’s pamphlet they face an even more horrific fate: the committee members’ “lugubrious countenance, their Jacobin insolence, the ferocious joy that enlivened their hollow eyes, all brought back before me the tribunal of September 2.”10 The September Massacres of 1792—a four-day period during which over a thousand people were killed—emblematized the arbitrary violence and unsanctioned butchery of a populace out of control. The young men’s high-strung words draw the reader into a peculiar time warp. Confusing past and present, the traumas of the September Massacres and Terror with Thermidorian actuality, they bring the executed terrorist (Dumas) and the unruly mob of 1792 to life before our eyes. Is Year III, they ask, so very different from Year II? The young men’s writings and activism at the theater should be understood as part of a larger political movement: the culture wars of pluviôse Year III (January–February 1795). In the weeks following 9 thermidor, France had hovered uncertainly between terrorist and antiterrorist agendas. Robespierre and his cohorts were dead, but the institutions and members of the government had not changed. For many weeks, it remained unclear whether the executions marked the end of the Terror or whether the Terror had simply claimed its latest victims. These issues would occupy the National Convention and the press in the early months of the Thermidorian period. In the course of these debates, a group of shrewd deputies, many of them former terrorists, began to reposition themselves by forging an antiterrorist majority and attacking Jacobin holdovers. Their allies in this campaign were the jeunes gens, who pursued radicals, sansculottes, and Jacobins in street confrontations and newspaper denunciations. After the closing of the Jacobin Club on 22 brumaire Year III (November 12, 1794), however, the political direction of the country had become clear. Having won the power struggle, the Thermidorians and jeunes gens now set about dismantling the cultural baggage of the Terror. In pluviôse Year III, the young men uprooted liberty trees, erased “death” from the slogan “Fraternity or death,” and pressured for the depantheonization of Jean-Paul Marat.11 Many accounts of the period present the jeunes gens as the unthinking henchmen of the reaction, as knee-jerk partisans who sought to erase and uproot, to execute the executioners and make a clean break with the past. To a certain extent this critique is merited. Operating in small bands and

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wielding clubs, sticks, and pikes, the jeunes gens engaged in unruly and even thuggish behavior, which included disrupting sectional meetings, attacking cafés associated with “Jacobins,” assaulting working-class women and people who looked like sansculottes, hooting at actors with terrorist pasts and forcing them to sing the antiterrorist anthem “Le réveil du peuple” (The awakening of the people).12 It is at times difficult to reconcile the young men’s longing to end the Terror with the violence and obstreperousness of their behavior. This disconnect between discourse and deed is illustrated by an arresting image that features one of the dapper young men (fig. 6). The caption reads “The Friend of Justice and Humanity,” but in the background, his companions brutally attack Jacobin or sansculotte antagonists. It is undeniable that the jeunes gens were inconsistent, histrionic, and even ruthless and that their words and actions were often at odds with one another. Nevertheless, their writings offer an interesting window into the unique challenges of Year III: the problem of processing the recent past and of forging a new political culture and discourse. As is clear in their response to the theater conflict of 18 pluviôse, the young men had a tendency to bring back the past in the present. For them, the relation between Years II and III was still an open question. Had the political culture truly evolved or had power simply changed hands? The young men were not unquestioningly erasing the past but were rather engaged in a complex process of reenactment and remembrance, an attempt to work through recent history in order to move beyond it. The texts by and about the jeunes gens exemplify what I have called the anachronistic imagination. They grapple with the relation between past and present and seek to determine whether it is one of rupture or continuity. They also attempt to figure out where the jeunes gens sit on this temporal divide. Are these dandies nostalgic figures—throwbacks to the ancien régime like Desrosées—or are they at the forefront of a new era? It was this problem of coming to terms with and situating oneself vis-à-vis the past that fueled the controversy over Le concert de la rue Feydeau.

Blond Trouble Although Le concert de la rue Feydeau was a new piece, its heroine was not a debutante on the Parisian stage. Adèle had first appeared several months earlier in a play by Louis-Benoît Picard, La perruque blonde (The blond wig), which opened on 22 brumaire (November 12), the same day

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6. L’ami de la justice et de L’humanité ([Paris], ca. 1796–1797). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

as the closing of the Jacobin Club. Picard’s work dramatized an anecdote in an anonymous article titled “L’inconvénient des perruques des dames” (The inconvenience of women’s wigs) and published in the influential Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique, a staunchly republican journal that served as the mouthpiece of a group of intellectuals inclined toward Enlightenment thought and ideals (philosophes).13

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This unsigned article was, in turn, a reply to an essay titled “Sur les costumes” and signed by Polyscope (the pseudonym of Amaury Duval), which had appeared in the same journal only a few weeks after the death of Robespierre.14 In this earlier piece, Polyscope, the all-seeing chronicler of Parisian mores, and an old man in a powdered wig observe and comment upon the fashionable strollers of the Champs-Elysées: muscadins who must walk slowly so as not to burst their skintight breeches, sansculottes whose long pants waste valuable fabric, and women whose hair and eyebrow colors are glaringly at odds. The old man recognizes that such fashions are absurd and impractical but is not fully convinced until he experiences their awkwardness firsthand: his hat hits the eye of a young child, who bursts into tears, and his wig is hooked by an angler’s rod, becoming “a new species of fish.” “Such,” Polyscope concludes, “are the inconveniences of wigs.” In the immediate aftermath of Thermidor, Polyscope avoids going out on a political limb. Notably, he targets both Right and Left, muscadins and sansculottes, and his logic is moral and economic rather than overtly political: the article typifies the prerevolutionary, Enlightenment discourse on luxury, a critique guided by considerations of practicality and decency.15 The anonymous reply, “L’inconvénient des perruques des dames,” adds one more example to Polyscope’s list, the story of Juliette, a young woman who has recently married a government official named Ernest. Ernest’s elderly uncle has settled an annuity upon the young couple, and at the beginning of the anecdote, Juliette visits a justice of the peace to collect the first installment. Called away on business, the uncle has left his affairs in the charge of this judge, a close friend, and given his niece-inlaw a letter of introduction explaining the situation. As the judge reads it, he glances from time to time at its bearer. The showily dressed blond before him bears little resemblance to the woman described in the letter, a blushing country lass, simply attired and brunet. He is about to refuse her claim when the uncle himself arrives. The old man immediately understands the situation. This is the fall of 1794, and blond wigs are all the rage. As one journalist observed, blonds, brunets, and redheads alike had taken to the new fad, dyeing their eyebrows when they clashed with their headdresses, and poor women had begun to ridicule the trendsetters by snatching away the wigs to reveal their natural coloring.16 The style would even inspire a book: Henrion’s Histoires secrètes de toutes les perruques blondes de Paris (Secret histories of all the blond wigs of Paris).17 The blond lady in the anecdote is indeed Juliette, but she sports one of the garish new wigs, which, considering

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her husband’s modest income, is an extravagance. Although the uncle recognizes his niece, he decides to teach her a lesson. Dismissing her as an impostor, he brusquely sends her away. Such are the inconveniences of women’s wigs. In the fall of 1794, blond wigs were ubiquitous not only on the streets but also on the stage. On November 12, less than a month after this anecdote appeared, Picard’s dramatic version, La perruque blonde, premiered at the Théâtre de la République, with the heroine renamed Adèle.18 Picard, however, was not the only playwright to be inspired by the story. A week before the debut of his play, another writer addressed a letter to the Spectacles de Paris in which he claimed to be finishing a work of the same title: he hastened to acknowledge his debt to the Décade lest he be accused of plagiarizing Picard.19 The author, L. L., was undoubtedly Louis de Laus de Boissy, whose comedy La perruque blonde, ou Le bourru généreux (The blond wig, or The generous boor) opened on December 1, three weeks after Picard’s.20 The success of these versions (Picard’s work would be performed nineteen times at the Théâtre de la République and twice in 1795 at the Théâtre de Molière, and Laus de Boissy’s, twenty-five) encouraged at least two other playwrights to take up the theme. On December 25, three weeks after Laus de Boissy’s premiere, Charles-Augustin de Bassompierre Sewrin’s comedy La blonde et la brune, ou Les deux n’en font qu’une (The blond and the brunet, or The two are but one) appeared at the Théâtre ci-devant du Marais (it would be performed there and at the Variété Amusantes a total of ten times), followed only three days later by the unattributed L’art et la nature, ou La manie des perruques (Art and nature, or The wig mania; nine performances).21 The theme was so popular that it even inspired parodies: Joseph Aude’s lighthearted Perruques de toutes les couleurs (Wigs of all colors; debuted on December 12, 1794, and performed five times) and Rolland and Clairville’s Arlequin perruquier (Harlequin the wigmaker; premiered on February 3, 1795, eleven performances).22 And as we have already seen, Adèle reappeared in the controversial Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou La folie du jour, which opened on February 3, 1795 (15 pluviôse Year III), at the Ambigu-Comique. After the conflicts around the latter, Martainville, the protestor who wrote the pamphlet about the incident, would team up with Héctor Chaussier to offer a new version of the plot with a similar title, Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou L’agrément du jour (The Feydeau Street concert, or The pleasure of the day), which premiered on February 19 and was performed seventy-two times (after Martainville’s Les suspects et les fédéralistes, the work was the most repeated play debuted in 1795).23 On May 4, 1795, yet another ver-

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sion of the story appeared: the anonymous prose comedy Encore un concert, ou Les plaisirs du jour (Another concert, or The pleasures of the day; eleven performances).24 Over a six-month period, the anecdote generated nine plays, which would have a total of 166 performances.25 This theatrical outpouring is astonishing when we consider the flimsiness of the initial anecdote. As one early reviewer observed of Picard’s play—the first and most well-regarded of the series—the story was inherently tedious: the “idea, though felicitous in itself, loses all its merit through repetition; it bored the spectators, who loudly showed their impatience.”26 And yet this plot, which seemed repetitive even on its debut, would be repeated throughout the Thermidorian period. The appeal of the story is all the more intriguing given the fraught and uncertain moment in which it appeared. What did it mean to wear a wig in the immediate wake of the Terror, a period when headdresses and heads had been so routinely discarded? Did the styles represent a new freedom, deliverance from the sartorial orthodoxies of Jacobinism? Or were they rather a regression, a return to the decadence and artificiality of the ancien régime? The seeming rebirth of fashion (what Georges Duval later called the “resurrection of toilette”) was one of the most conspicuous—and commented upon—aspects of Thermidorian society.27 Cultural critics have generally accounted for this phenomenon in one of two ways. The first is to view the period as a moment of release following one of repression. After the austerity of the Terror, Paris burst into a dancing frenzy—la dansomanie—expressing its newfound liberty through libertinage and giving itself over to unbridled debauchery.28 The second account is somewhat more somber: the new delirium was not the unleashing of pent-up energies so much as an escape from a traumatic memory, a willful oblivion or an “ironic distantiation” of the recent past.29 This version often points to the profanation or ritual trivialization of the Terror and its victims during the post-Thermidor period—to the bal des victimes, whose attendees blithely aped the final dress and gestures of their guillotined relatives.30 Rather than deal with the past, the revelers converted it into yet another fashion, a stylish joke. What the two explanations share is an understanding of the cultural and social ethos of post-Thermidor Paris as flippant, disengaged, and indifferent and of the period as a radical break from the revolutionary tradition that preceded it.31 In recent years, however, historians of the Thermidorian Reaction have questioned many of these assumptions. In an insightful essay, Mona Ozouf has pointed to the vexed relation between memory and amnesia during the period: “the forgetting of the Thermidorian period, so often

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described as the revenge of the present against the obsessive burden of the past, the balls, the theaters, the songs, the fashion, the gallantry, . . . in short, a forgetting forgetful of itself, is in reality a forgetting always conscious of having to forget.”32 And others have questioned the interpretation of 9 Thermidor as a moment of rupture or an end point: was it really a turning point, and if so, what did it change? Marxist critics such as Albert Mathiez and Georges Lefebvre generally regarded the Thermidorian Reaction as a breaking point: betrayed by the bourgeoisie, the Revolution quickly degenerated into ugly and undisguised class struggle. The revisionist historian François Furet also viewed 9 Thermidor as a rupture but interpreted the shift more positively: as society became “once again independent of ideology,” of the monolithic political culture of Year II, conflicting interest groups and a plurality of opinions could reemerge and coexist in the political arena.33 More recently, however, the Polish historian Bronisław Baczko has contested this view, pointing to the antipluralist tendency of post-Thermidor politics: the Thermidorians were equally “unable to consider or imagine the political arena as necessarily divided into opposing tendencies, therefore as necessarily contradictory and causing conflict.”34 Baczko recognizes the Thermidorians’ efforts to end the Terror and to move toward stability but points to many elements of continuity between Years II and III—particularly an insistence on consensus—that stymied this project. As these plays will make clear, however, many of these conflicting interpretations were implicit and already subject to debate in some of the earliest literary output of the period. Far from frivolous or escapist, the Thermidorian plays about fashion and self-fashioning look back to the past neither to trivialize nor to forget but rather to interpret it, to reflect upon the causes and consequences of the Terror, and to understand its relation to the present moment. As the series developed, the figure of the muscadin or jeunes gens played an increasingly central role in this process. And in the final Feydeau play, the type becomes an embodiment of the challenge of memory in post-Thermidor France.

T h e P r o b l e m o f T r a n s pa r e n c y The complex issues surrounding the blond wigs are evident in the very catalyst of the series, the anecdote about Juliette in the Décade. The author claims to have learned of Juliette’s story from the judge, who offered the following commentary: “One would say that [these muscadines] often

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have motives for not wanting to be recognized; at least, we men have our identification card [signalement] in our wallet, and one can find out at any moment with whom one is dealing; but for women, you will see that for public safety, I would even say for their own interest, it will be necessary that they each have in their pocket a legal document.”35 For the judge, the problem with the wig is neither its tastelessness nor its extravagance but rather its lack of transparency. This concern about misleading appearances was a common anxiety during the early years of the Revolution and had led during the Terror to legislation banning disguises and to an insistence on sartorial legibility.36 Indeed, only six months before the Décade article appeared, Claude-François Payan had warned the Paris Commune against a group of counterrevolutionary ladies who wore blond wigs made from the hair of guillotined women.37 The judge is not just troubled by Juliette’s vanity and excess; her wig has obscured her identity and could be used by others seeking to hide their own. For him, the headdress triggers the paranoid imagination: the anxiety about false appearances, ambiguous signs, and counterrevolutionaries in disguise. For the uncle, however, the wig is a symptom of an even greater political problem. At the end of the episode, he relents in his treatment of his nephew’s bride and invites the young couple to dinner. By this time, Juliette has learned her lesson and now appears as a plainly dressed brunet. But though the uncle is pleased with her reform and forgives her frivolity, he is eager to avoid future relapses and confusions. Since Ernest lacks “the force to oppose the extravagance of [his] wife,” the uncle proposes that Juliette be required to present a procès verbal (legal statement) detailing her appearance each time she collects an installment of the annuity.38 For the old man, the problem is not simply a lack of transparency but also a lack of governance within the couple: the nephew’s inability to control his wife. With the procès verbal, the uncle seeks to reinforce the power structure of the marriage. As Suzanne Desan and Jennifer Heuer have shown, during the Thermidorian period, politicians and petitioners often focused less on individual rights than on the protection of the family unit, which was regarded as the key to restoring social and political order: “the idea of the nation as a family” gave way to “one of the nation as conglomerate of families, separated from the society of citizens and represented exclusively by an adult male head of the household.”39 Women’s control over common property, along with their new right to divorce and to an equal share of the parental inheritance, was particularly subject to attack, for it seemed to compromise family stability and property transmission and thus to endanger the

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nation at large.40 The uncle’s attempt to restrain Juliette’s out-of-hand spending and to remedy Ernest’s lack of control over her is consistent with this logic. Considered within the larger trajectory of the Revolution, however, the uncle’s analysis also has allegorical resonance.41 The weak-willed husband overpowered by a decadent and spendthrift wife recalls the impotence, both physical and political, of Louis XVI, unable to control the reckless expenditure of yet another blond known for over-the-top wigs: Marie Antoinette. As Antoine de Baecque has argued, the widespread gossip about the royal couple before the Revolution underscored the frailty and powerlessness of the ancien régime.42 The echoing of this trope in the essay suggests a similar vulnerability in post-Thermidor politics. Like Juliette’s marriage, Thermidorian France suffered from a power vacuum, a lack of firm leadership, which made it vulnerable both to subterfuge, counterrevolutionary deception, and to regression, a relapse into an ancien régime decadence that could destabilize the economy and government. Indeed, the woman most associated with the blond wig in Year III, the ravenhaired Thérésia Cabarrus—heroine of Thermidor, soon to be Madame Tallien and leader of the merveilleuses during the Directory—would be denounced as a “new Antoinette” only a few months later.43 For many, the post-Thermidor period seemed a precarious moment, one in which the Revolution risked turning back on itself. The uncle attempts to address this problem by legal means: through the introduction of a binding document that legitimizes its bearer and thus reinforces the union. At this point in time, France lacked such a document. In June 1793, a constitution had been hastily drafted and approved by the Convention but had never been put into effect. Fearing that it might lose its majority if elections were convened, the Mountain had postponed the implementation of the constitution until the end of the war and had taken advantage of the state of emergency to introduce repressive measures. After 9 Thermidor, the need for and desirability of a legal structure became increasingly clear, but the Convention still hesitated to implement the Constitution of 1793: not only was the document now associated with a repugnant “Jacobinism,” but also many of its provisions, particularly the right to insurrection, were ill-suited to the project of restoring order. The lack of a legitimizing document, however, made it difficult for the Thermidorian deputies to distinguish their government from that of Year II. The cast of characters, after all, was largely the same and still ruling in a state of exception, prone to arbitrary and ad hoc measures. This problematic continuity would be addressed in the first play based

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on the Décade anecdote through the introduction of a muscadin-like figure. La perruque blonde was the work of Louis-Benoît Picard, who (with Jacques-François Lépitre) was also responsible for La première réquisition, the 1793 comedy about the disguised and cross-dressing jeunes gens (discussed in chapter 1). Not surprisingly, Picard’s main departure from the newspaper anecdote was the addition of a foppish male character, again named Valcour. The play describes his species as “men who make their coiffure their great occupation, who sacrifice three quarters of an hour to studying in the mirror the slightest fold of their cravat, who are easily recognized by their square coats and the small, eighteen-inch canes, which they seem to have borrowed from conjurers.”44 Valcour’s attire—particularly his gnarled stick, or pouvoir éxécutif—identifies him with the jeunes gens of the Thermidorian Reaction. In Picard’s version of the story, the heroine, renamed Adèle, is not a married woman but a young, unwed linen maid, who must choose between two suitors, the dandified Valcour and the upright and sensible Dorval. Upon arriving in Paris, Adèle, a charming brunet, meets Dorval, who is instantly taken with her, but not long afterward she falls under the influence of Valcour, who convinces her to buy on credit one of the trendy blond wigs. In the opening scene of the play, Dorval encounters Adèle’s uncle and expresses his disappointment at her recent transformation. The old man, who shares Dorval’s taste, decides to teach her a lesson. When Adèle arrives to collect the money that her family has sent for her, the uncle bluntly rejects her claim, pointing to the disparity between her appearance and the description in her father’s letter. As in the Décade article, Adèle quickly repents and returns simply attired, her tresses undisguised. The uncle now welcomes her as his niece and denounces the impostor who attempted to usurp her place. But just as the family is reunited, Adèle’s hairdresser enters to collect his bill. Tearfully, the heroine acknowledges that she was the “impostor” in the blond wig. The uncle, however, promptly forgives her, pays the outstanding balance, and consents to her marriage with Dorval. In the opening scenes, Picard’s uncle seems to share the concerns of the old man in the Décade version. On his first encounter with Adèle, he dismisses her as an adventuress: if she wishes to impersonate a linen maid, he remarks, she would do better to dress down, to abandon the luxury of her station and adopt the simplicity of the lower orders. His insinuation not only taps into the anxiety of the paranoid imagination about false appearances but also hints at a politically troubling scenario: the aristocrat disguised as a republican, Marie Antoinette at Varennes. Toward the end

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of the play, the niece faces the symbolic penalty for such crimes: when she is unable to pay the bill for her wig, her hairdresser proposes cutting off her real hair instead. The threatened punishment for her duplicity is the loss of her head (of hair). Although the play echoes the anxiety about false appearances in the Décade article, it nevertheless makes clear that this is not the uncle’s real concern. Whereas in the newspaper anecdote the judge is genuinely baffled by the discrepancy between the lady and the letter, the uncle and audience in La perruque blonde know who the false blond is before she even appears onstage. Dorval has already explained the situation, so there is never any real danger of misidentification. And Picard dispenses altogether with the procès verbal detailing Adèle’s features and guaranteeing proper recognition in the future. The uncle’s true worry is not misleading appearances (the anxiety of the paranoid imagination) but rather Adèle’s expenditure and poor sense of style. The blond wig, he observes, ages the nineteen-year-old heroine: wearing it, she seems an over-the-hill twentysix! Though he is not an “enemy of toilette,” he believes that women should opt for flattering, rather than fashionable, styles.45 Dorval mercilessly seconds him: after recalling the beauty of the brunet, whose timidity and simplicity enhanced her charms, he directs the bewigged Adèle toward a mirror: “tell me if you can apply any traits from that picture to yourself.”46 The real issue here is not the relation between the dress and the body politic (social and political transparency) but between the dress and the body (aesthetic judgment). One of the main points of the play, indeed, is to dissociate fashion from politics. At the end of the work, the hairdresser explains how he came to make blond wigs. At the beginning of the Revolution, he invented the perruque noire à la romaine, a hairpiece designed to give men the “physiognomy of a patriot.” But as political tides turned and the “Jacobin” look went out of style, he began to focus on women’s headwear instead: “Now that we’re beginning not to judge people by appearances, I, along with my colleagues, have specialized in the blond wigs of our petites-maîtresses.”47 Where the fair-haired headdress in the Décade is politically worrisome—a throwback to Marie Antoinette—it becomes in the play a product of the depoliticization of fashions; it is merely the latest fad. The uncle similarly dissociates dress and ideology: he rejects “that mania of dishevelment that has prevailed in Paris for some time now among those people who think themselves great republicans because they have a dirty coat and sleeves worn at the elbows.”48 Thermidor, in this work, would seem to mark a

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positive break, a movement away from the surface judgments of the Terror and the sartorial orthodoxies of Year II.49 Of course, the play itself belies the hairdresser’s words. Its plot revolves around a surface judgment: the uncle’s summary rejection of his niece based on her looks. But although the play continues to judge by appearances and to insist on transparency, it does not do so in the public sphere. The contrast between the treatment of Adèle and that of the male fop, Valcour, serves to make this distinction clear. Like Adèle’s, Valcour’s self-fashioning attracts ridicule, but unlike the heroine, he is neither punished nor considered to be anything but innocuous. The opposition between male and female dandyism underscores the distinction between the public and private spheres. Sartorial verdicts—now based on aesthetic criteria—and the ideal of transparent appearance belong to the private (female) rather than the public (male) sphere. The work seeks to expel from the political forum surface judgments and the insistence on partisan clothing.50 In this respect, the use of gender in the play differs considerably from that of the Décade piece. The latter suggested a parallelism between private and public life: the wife’s waywardness reflected a lack of authority in the political realm, and the breakdown of the family unit compromised the social order of the nation. The play, in contrast, goes out of its way to avoid this type of reading. By depoliticizing Adèle’s wig and fashion decisions (her offense is against taste, not the social order), the work deallegorizes her story. The opposition between man and woman here serves to separate the public and private spheres: the personal story is not a metaphor for the national but is, rather, distinguished from it; it is untranscendent, politically insignificant. This separation of public and private domains was a hallmark of the Thermidorian moment, during which everyday life was divested of the ideological weight it had taken on in Year II. Picard’s decision to eliminate the judge and legal document illustrates this reluctance to legislate private life. Once again, Thermidor seems to represent a positive break, a recovery of the private realm as a nonpolitical space. The hairdresser’s comment on the Thermidorian rupture—“now that we’re beginning not to judge people by appearances”—epitomizes this separation of the political and the personal. But though people were no longer reading politics into appearance, this did not mean that they had stopped rewriting themselves politically through their fashion choices. At the end of the play, the hairdresser reminds Valcour that he has yet to pay his own bill, which includes a

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perruque à la romaine commissioned during the Terror. Valcour, we now learn, did not always belong to the jeunesse dorée. His dress has followed the political tides, the black wig of “Jacobin” orthodoxy exchanged for the bulky cravat of the center- and right-leaning jeunes gens. Valcour, as it turns out, is a political chameleon, a type known in French as the girouette (weathervane).51 His shift in costume suggests a critique of the Thermidorians, many of whom—notably Jean-Lambert Tallien and Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron—were themselves former terrorists who had literally “turned coat,” refashioning themselves as leaders of the jeunesse dorée. Although the representation of French political culture in the play suggests a positive rupture with the Terror (a rejection of surface judgment), the portrayal of Valcour points to a negative element of continuity between Years II and III: power lies in the same hands as it did before; it has only changed its wig. It is important, however, to observe the difference between this opportunistic re-wardrobing and the self-fashioning condemned in Picard’s 1793 work, La première réquisition. In both plays, the hairdresser “exposes” the muscadin. But where in the earlier work, the anxiety about Valcour had to do with what lay beneath the disguise—the culottes beneath his female dress—what is discovered in La perruque blonde is not a hidden identity but rather a disconnect between the past and the present. In the later play, the hairdresser reveals not so much an alternate self or a secret political belief but rather Valcour’s protean nature, the fact that he has a history of self-fashioning. The model of tearing away the mask to reveal a hidden reality no longer works here, for Valcour is nothing but surface; his politics are only on his sleeve. The perruque à la romaine was just as much of a posture as his current jeunes gens look. What the play explores, thus, is not the difference between appearance and reality (the anxiety of the paranoid imagination) but rather the degree of continuity or rupture between past and present (the concern of the anachronistic imagination). The play’s ultimate verdict on Valcour’s self-fashioning is ambivalent. The characters repeatedly point to the harmlessness of Valcour and his like: not only is he shunned in love, but his species, the petit-maître, is on the verge of extinction.52 Nevertheless, the uncle seems uncomfortable with such self-styling. Rejecting both the “mania of dishevelment” of the sansculotte and the primping of the petit-maître, he advocates sartorial passivity: “there is as much ridicule in overly avoiding luxury as there is in overly seeking it out; he is a fool who in either way gives such importance to his dress. The reasonable man lets his tailor dress him.”53 The

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play may eschew political judgments about fashion, but it still wants to prescribe a dress code. Although the uncle’s words seem regressive in their prescriptiveness, they do move forward in one respect. In defining a sartorial middle— neither overdressing nor underdressing—the uncle implicitly imagines an ideological center: somewhere to the left of the muscadin and to the right of the sansculotte. Through the uncle’s prescription, the play dissociates the idea of the moderate or a political middle from the figure of the muscadin and the girouette. The center that he is defining is not (as in Dugazon’s Le modéré) a form of flip-flopping or fence-straddling but rather a rational middle ground.

The Problem of Forgiveness The play that sparked the theater protests on 18 pluviôse—Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou La folie du jour—was a sequel to Picard’s comedy (its authors underscored this connection by giving their heroine the same name, Adèle). But in the months between the two premieres, several other works appeared that shaped the future direction of the controversy. The most important of these was undoubtedly Laus de Boissy’s La perruque blonde, ou Le bourru généreux, which was composed at the same time as Picard’s play and premiered three weeks later at the Lycée des arts. The play opens with a contrast between the uncle, Dufranc, whose name evokes his frank and trusting character, and his administrator, the skeptical L’Etang, who has a bleak view of human nature. In the first scene, L’Etang, alone on the stage, laments the gullibility of his master, who has lent a hundred thousand francs to his friend Citoyen Levasseur. At the beginning of the play, two parallel incidents seem to justify the administrator’s general distrust. The first is the entrance of the blond-wigged heroine, Juliette, who seeks to claim the dowry settled upon her by Dufranc. As in the Décade version of the story, L’Etang points out the incongruity between her appearance and the description of her in Dufranc’s letter and immediately refuses her claim. Just as he is about to send her away, Dufranc himself enters and is shocked to find his niece “thus masked.”54 As in Picard’s play, he pretends not to recognize her to teach her a lesson. The second episode is the news of Levasseur’s bankruptcy. At first, Dufranc hopes that his friend’s wife, a wealthy woman, will pay his debts, but L’Etang is doubtful: since the introduction of laws facilitating divorce, bankrupt husbands

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generally separate from their wives and assign them what remains of the estate to protect it from creditors.55 In the light of these visits, Dufranc’s confidence in humankind seems misplaced. These two incidents resemble one another in their conflation of credit with credibility, of truthfulness with financial stability. In an earlier scene, Juliette’s husband had warned her not to buy on credit lest she lose her “frankness and end up dishonoring [herself] with the most despicable lies or by something even worse.”56 To be frank and a worthy niece of Dufranc, she must have good credit, for debt here is inevitably a fall from virtue. Her wig is at once a sign of deceitfulness (a mask) and a strain on her husband’s salary. Similarly, it is Levasseur’s defaulting that makes his wife uncreditable in L’Etang’s and Dufranc’s eyes. At this point, however, Citoyenne Levasseur appears in person, and the lesson of the story begins to change. At first, Dufranc showers her with abuse: how dare she set foot in his house after her husband’s perfidy? Even when she assures Dufranc of Levasseur’s desire to make amends, he refuses to believe her: “who can guarantee me that you are not in cahoots with your husband, to trick me again, in order to suspend the effects of my vengeance?”57 Only after she reveals that she has not divorced her husband does she regain creditability in all senses. Charmed by her virtue and loyalty, Dufranc offers her six hundred francs to provide for her immediate wants. When she leaves, moreover, he praises the laws that he had earlier lamented: where dissolute husbands could once ruin their wives and children, now “when a prudent woman perceives the disorder in her husband’s affairs or his poor speculations, she breaks off forever an association that could only become ruinous or dishonorable for her.”58 The episode restores Dufranc’s faith in humankind and undermines the initial equation of credit history and credibility. Laus de Boissy underscores this lesson by expelling the skeptical L’Etang from the play. After the confrontation with the false blond, the administrator never reappears onstage; the uncle’s sidekick will now be the justice of the peace, Laloi, a more benign and trusting figure, who in name and profession represents legality. The play, that is, moves away from the culture of suspicion and false denunciation—L’Etang perpetuates the paranoia of the Terror about masks and hidden intentions—and toward a reflection on the law and proper judgment. In this respect, Laus de Boissy’s view of the Thermidorian moment coincides with Picard’s: in the new period, we are no longer judging by appearances. If this is the lesson of the play, however, the final scene seems oddly regressive, for as in the Décade article, Dufranc insists that Juliette carry a

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procès verbal in the future. The initial parallelism between the two suspect wives (L’Etang’s doubts about Juliette and Dufranc’s distrust of Citoyenne Levasseur) leads us to expect that Dufranc will reverse his judgment on the false blond as well. After all, just as Levasseur’s wife is not a ruthless schemer, Juliette is not the impersonator or adventuress that L’Etang has suspected her to be. When the heroine returns plainly dressed, however, Dufranc still demands a legal guarantee. Indeed, this is the only play in the series that follows the Décade anecdote in insisting on this measure. If the point of the opening episodes was to teach us to trust again, why does Dufranc still need a procès verbal guaranteeing his niece’s identity? The incongruity between the two parts of the play prompted one reviewer to accuse Laus de Boissy of forcing two works into one, throwing the spectator into a senseless “labyrinth.”59 His dismay is shared by the other characters onstage, who denounce the uncle’s measure as both unnecessary and mortifying: Dufranc, this lesson is quite humiliating. But necessary. LALOI . You’re going to give your niece a small mortification. DUFRANC . To spare her a more serious one. . . . CITOYENNE DUROSEL [i.e., Juliette]. May the most sincere repentance disarm you. DUFRANC . Only when I’ve been satisfied. . . . DUROSEL . Ah! You’re making her shed tears! DUFRANC . So that she won’t shed them again in the future. LALOI , as he writes. My friend: sometimes, an apt indulgence corrects better than the most severe punishment. DUFRANC . You don’t know what you’re talking about. LALOI , reciting. “Only pardon raises one above men.” DUFRANC . Oh! Like you, I can cite. “Who pardons easily invites offense.” LALOI , getting up and taking his paper. Oh! He won’t let go! DUFRANC . No. LALOI . Oh well! Hardhearted man: here is your procès-verbal drawn up! It’s still in my hands, and you may yet retrace your steps. DUFRANC . I have no desire to. LALOI . Do you want to make your Juliette truly despair? DUFRANC . No, Mr. Reasoner, I don’t at all want to make my Juliette despair; I love her too much for that: I only want, I only want for her not to be able to falsify herself again. After all, I’m asking her only to be always herself. What the devil? It seems to me that that’s not so hard, and if I were a flatterer, I would say that it’s in her own interest since she couldn’t change without its being for the worse. Look at her, and tell me if you’re not of my opinion. LALOI .

DUFRANC .

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You are right. I agree with my uncle. LALOI , handing him the procès-verbal. Here is the statement you desire. DUFRANC . That’s good, and I will pay all of the arrears of her rent; I will pay twice as much, because of today’s small chagrin. LALOI . What a singular man! A brusque humor and a good heart.60 LALOI .

DUROSEL .

I cite this passage at length to give a sense of the impact of the end of the play. Any amusement we might take in the uncle’s quirkiness—any pleasure in the final reconciliation—is dampened, if not extinguished, by the moral consensus of his family and friends against this use of the law. The words placed in italics are taken verbatim from the Décade piece, but here, the uncle’s final gallantry is overshadowed by the drawn-out protest against him. Even though Laloi finally accepts the measure and laughs off the uncle’s whim, the preceding outcry leaves us with a sense of the excess and insensitivity of this punishment. The Décade article could be read as an allegory for the situation of France post-Thermidor, which seemed in danger of returning to the decadence of the ancien régime: the procès verbal is an attempt to shore up the values and the unity of the family (and, by extension, the nation); it is a constitution of sorts. The episode about Citoyenne Levasseur, however, makes it difficult to apply this logic to Laus de Boissy’s play. For if marriage is dissolvable (as the uncle concludes it should be), then the couple are no longer an apt metaphor for the nation, indivisible and indestructible. And if the allegorical reading is no longer viable, the procès verbal cannot be understood as a constitution-like document. In praising the new divorce laws, moreover, the uncle defends precisely the principles that had come under attack for undermining the family unit and thereby compromising the social order. Laus de Boissy is clearly making a very different point from that of the Décade essay. The key to this ending lies in the exchange of citations in the middle of the passage. To reinforce his argument, Laloi quotes a line from PierreClaude Nivelle de la Chaussée’s 1738 tragedy Maximien, in which the title character conspires unsuccessfully against his daughter’s husband, Constantine. In the cited verse, the daughter begs her consort to forgive her father: “Only pardon raises one above men.” Dufranc counters with Augustus’s words from Pierre Corneille’s Cinna (1641). Augustus has killed Toranius, the father of Emilie, who now goads her husband, Cinna, to avenge his death by killing the emperor. Informed of the plot, Augustus weighs his options in a devastatingly self-critical monologue. Like

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Dufranc, he believes that “[w]ho pardons easily invites offense.” Nevertheless, he recognizes that he has himself set off this cycle of violence through his murder of Toranius and realizes that “[t]he blood of these conspirators when shed/Makes life more accursed and not more safe.”61 At the end of the play, he opts for compassion, forgiving his enemies. Considered in light of these quotations, the quarrel about the procès verbal takes on new meaning: this is a debate about how to deal with the transgressions of the past, about whether to forgive one’s political opponents. The mortification that Juliette will suffer parallels the morte (death) that looms over Cinna and Maximien. When and whether to pardon were the burning questions of Thermidorian politics in late fall 1794. Many of those responsible for the Terror remained unpunished, often occupying seats in the National Convention. On August 29, 1794, only a month after 9 thermidor, the representative Laurent Lecointre had boldly denounced seven Jacobin deputies as Robespierre’s accomplices, but at that still uncertain moment, the assembly had unanimously rejected these accusations as calumnies. On December 5, two days after the premiere of Laus de Boissy’s play, Lecointre repeated his denunciation. This time, however, the Convention took the charges more seriously, referring the case to three committees, which decided on December 27 to put four of the deputies—Barère, Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, and Vadier—on trial. In just four months, the Convention had completely reversed itself. This turn reflected a shift in public opinion, which had taken place over the course of the fall and gained particular momentum during the trial of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, a Jacobin deputy sent in 1793 to restore order in Nantes. During his mission, Carrier had committed (or at least tolerated) countless atrocities. As stories (often exaggerated) of drownings, firing squads, arbitrary arrests, and other perversions poured forth in the press, public animus mounted against him and the former terrorists.62 Laus de Boissy’s comedy (debuted on December 3) appeared at the height the Carrier trial, which began on November 24 and ended on December 16 with his conviction and execution. It is difficult, therefore, to read the exchange of quotes about forgiveness outside this context. The review of the work in the republican Journal des théâtres suggests an awareness of the larger issues at play in the final scene. The critic contrasts Picard’s ending, which won the approval even of the women whom it ridiculed, with Laus de Boissy’s, which stoops to “the grossest injury” to correct the heroine’s folly: “he has mistaken that tone for republican frankness. What frankness, good God! When will spectators

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do justice to such evil works?”63 As this final question hints, almost more upsetting than the work itself was the audience’s reaction: “the multitude applauded more at the raw rudeness of Dufranc,” the Journal des théâtres complained, “than at the fine and delicate epigrams delivered by the uncle in Picard’s piece.”64 For the critic, the crowd’s delight in Dufranc’s intransigence is troubling; it suggests a regression to the intolerance and cruelty of the Terror, a disturbing continuity between the political culture of Year II and Year III. The reviewer prefers Picard’s work, in which the heroine is forgiven unconditionally, her head (of hair) graciously spared. What is strange about this review is that it seems to overlook the almost universal outcry against the uncle’s measure in the final scene; it assumes that the play endorses Dufranc’s abusive form of justice. This supposition makes sense in light of Laus de Boissy’s previous works and the general repertoire of the Lycée des Arts, which had catered to Jacobin audiences. Only six months earlier, during the height of the Terror, the playwright had produced on the same stage La vraie républicaine, ou La voix de la patrie (The true republican woman, or The voice of the country), which adopted a more intransigent stance: “Let us show ourselves to be intrepid;/No pardon for the traitors.”65 The critic might well assume that the author identified ideologically with Dufranc. Nevertheless, this reading misses some of the nuance of the play. A key to understanding Laus de Boissy’s position is the subtitle of the piece, le bourru généreux (the generous boor), which gestures toward the 1771 hit Le bourru bienfaisant (The beneficent boor) by Carlo Goldoni, one of only two plays that the Italian playwright wrote in French and a work that enjoyed considerable success during the revolutionary period.66 The allusion was undoubtedly inspired by the ending of the Décade anecdote, in which the family, happily reunited, attends a performance of Goldoni’s play at the Comédie-Française. Recognizing herself in the errant niece of the comedy, the repentant Juliette sheds copious tears and resolves to reform her ways. In taking up this allusion, however, Laus de Boissy draws a connection not between the two heroines but between the two uncles. Goldoni’s uncle, the boor of his title, is well-meaning but truculent, impatient, and often rude. His short temper leads to constant misunderstandings among the characters, whose motivations he misconstrues and whose explanations he refuses to hear. His niece, Madame Dalancourt, enjoys a luxury that exceeds her husband’s income, but unlike Laus de Boissy’s false blond, she does so inadvertently. In his adoration for his new wife, Monsieur Da-

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lancourt has lavished gifts upon her without thinking of the expense and, fearing her disapproval, has never admitted the true state of his finances. It is only an accusatory remark from his sister, who blames Madame Dalancourt for his predicament, that leads the young wife to suspect that she has unwittingly brought about her husband’s ruin. At the end of the play, the uncle forgives her and aids the couple financially. But he is moved to do so by her repentance, which has made her faint in dismay, rather than by a recognition of her innocence or at least mitigated guilt. The play, indeed, leaves the question of her blame unresolved. Though Madame Dalancourt accepts responsibility for the situation—“I seem guilty, that is enough”—her sister-in-law asks forgiveness for misjudging her. The uncle, however, never enters into the subtleties of the situation; his brusqueness and impertinence go unquestioned. Not surprisingly, contemporaries found Goldoni’s conclusion problematic. For Diderot, the beneficence of the uncle did not make up for his boorishness: in Jacques le fataliste, he proposed a revision to the ending in which the uncle would be corrected and humiliated in front of his family for his mistreatment of a poor man.67 The paternal figure in the Décade anecdote is an Enlightenment hero, an incarnation of the Supreme Reason that will bolster the new Republic represented allegorically in the young couple’s relationship; the procès verbal is an attempt at rationally legislating the marriage (and, by extension, the nation). The old man in Laus de Boissy, in contrast, is the irrational heir of Goldoni’s boor and is contrasted with Laloi (the Law), whom he dubs “Mr. Reasoner.” Dufranc, that is, represents neither rationality nor legality. In the Décade article and Picard’s play, the uncle’s word is the last word of the work, but this is not as clear with the boorish Dufranc.68 It is important to distinguish, however, between Goldoni’s and Laus de Boissy’s representations of the bourru. In Goldoni, the uncle’s highstrung, spontaneous nature blurs his understanding of the situation but is also the source of his empathetic response to his niece. In a sense, he takes the wrong road but ends up in the right place. His boorishness is the source of both his blindness and his benevolence. Dufranc, in contrast, seems to take the right road—he moves toward trust and compassion in the opening episodes—but somehow gets lost in the final scene. His emotional extremism and unrestrained boorishness ultimately skew his sense of balance, his ability to determine a condign punishment. The portrayal of Dufranc suggests a commentary both on the causes of the Terror and on the dangers of relapsing into it in the Thermidorian period. Blind political enthusiasms can lead to intransigence and, worse, to a haphaz-

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ard manipulation of the law such as the procès verbal: little separates the bourru (boor) from the bourreau (executioner).69 Like Picard’s play, Laus de Boissy’s work uses the motif of the blond wig to probe the relation between Year II and Year III; it addresses the questions of the anachronistic imagination, the problem of interpreting a historical rupture. In each case, the author points to a troubling element of continuity with the past. But where in Picard this vestige is the figure of Valcour—the girouette— who is represented as relatively innocuous, in Laus de Boissy it is a perilous mind-set: political intransigence.

T h e P r o b l e m o f M e m o ry At the end of December 1794, after the proliferation of plays on blond wigs, Polyscope decided to intervene again to redirect the discussion prompted by his initial essay on costume. The result was another article in the Décade, “Sur un fameux concert” (On a famous concert), which continues the story of Juliette and recounts her relapse into luxury.70 Although the piece makes no mention of Laus de Boissy, it implicitly rebuts the boorish uncle. At the end of the essay, Polyscope invites playwrights to take up the plot of his story (as they had with “L’inconvénient des perruques des dames”) but advises them to avoid “acts of rigor, contrary to freedom,” or “severe and prohibitive rules.” As Juliette’s recidivism suggests, such strategies are ultimately ineffective; no procès verbal will hold her back. For Polyscope, the key to reform is neither force nor intransigence but a wise use of ridicule: “satire is the safest arm.”71 The article begins as Polyscope is walking along the streets of Paris and musing on contemporary politics. Since 9 thermidor, he observes, politics and public opinion have taken a turn for the better: “I saw with pleasure Justice taking up her scepter again, remounting the throne of the laws: I was happy. I again heard people saying the sweet words ‘probity,’ ‘humanity,’ and ‘virtues.’”72 In the midst of these reflections, however, Polyscope stumbles upon a long line of fashionable citizens waiting to buy tickets for a concert at the Théâtre Feydeau by the legendary tenor Pierre-Jean Garat, once a favorite of Marie Antoinette and later a model for the incroyables’ slurred speech patterns (known as garatisme). In the fall of 1794, the Théâtre Feydeau had quickly become the haunt of the Thermidorian glitterati—particularly the jeunesse dorée—and a frequent target of left-wing journalists. The hall was subject to attack on a number of grounds. First, its troupe featured many artists from the

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Comédie-Française who had been imprisoned during the Terror and remained politically suspect: these were the same actors who had been accused of being muscadins only a year before in the fall of 1793. The theater also drew criticism for its programming, which consisted largely of symphonic music rather than the standard canon of patriotic songs.73 As James H. Johnson has shown, music during the Terror had moved toward homophony; it attempted to evoke ideological harmony and national consensus through the uniformity of the chorus, through a literal harmonization of voices. Thermidorian Paris, in contrast, witnessed a resurgence of symphonic music and of complex, polyphonic scores—a style regarded by revolutionary theorists as too subjective and polysemic to create a common patriotic response.74 Perhaps most problematic, however, was the shameless luxury of the Feydeau’s audience and its exorbitantly priced tickets. The winter of 1794–1795 was one of the harshest in Parisian history and had resulted in widespread shortages of bread and other basic supplies. The cold had caused the rivers to freeze, which hindered the transport of wood to the capital, and government policy had only aggravated the situation: on December 24, 1794, the Convention repealed the Maximum (ceiling prices on coal, grain, and other essential goods), causing the price of bread and meat to skyrocket. In this context, the sumptuous costumes and finery of the Feydeau audience seemed out of place: “a foreigner who enters the concert from the streets must be singularly shocked by this contrast between misery and luxury.”75 Many observers considered the theatergoers’ ostentation to be insensitive: it “insult[ed] the simple and decent dress of the majority of citizens.”76 Only a week after the publication of Polyscope’s article, the deputy Pierre Joseph Cambon would inveigh at the National Convention against those deputies whose speeches were “composed in boudoirs and in the midst of the square coats [i.e., jeunes gens] who attend the concerts of Feydeau street.” Cambon described these Feydeau supporters as unpatriotic men “who pay 600 livres for a cab to discredit the assignats.”77 Not only did the Feydeau theatergoers partake in an uncivic luxury but they also scorned the republican currency (assignats), compromising the national economy. These economic issues were of particular concern to Polyscope’s journal, the Décade philosophique. During the Thermidorian period and the Directory, it would be the main mouthpiece for the ideal of the agrarian republic, advocating a return to agriculture (and to the virtue and stoicism of working the land) as an alternative to a precarious and degenerating luxury trade.78 Intrigued by the long lines and the devotion of Garat’s fans, Polyscope

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decides to attend the concert himself and procures a ticket for three times the price from one of the scalpers swarming outside the theater. Once inside, he is shocked by the luxury, ostentation, and vapid repartee of the audience. Judging by the “éclat of the women,” whom he mistakes for courtesans, and the “muscadin-like figure of the men,” one would think that the Revolution had never happened; the theater seems “a spectacle from monarchical times.” The telltale sign of this regression into ancien régime decadence is the presence of many petits-maîtres in the hall: “the race has not been lost . . . for some time now they have begun to show themselves again, to pullulate in a strange way.” At the end of the essay, Polyscope warns against the “mob of muscadins” who go to the Feydeau “to disseminate antirepublican maxims.”79 Curiously, however, at the same time that the muscadins seem to revive “monarchical times,” they also parrot the discourses and behaviors of the Terror. As the audience files into the hall, Polyscope overhears the following discussion: “Women in front! French gallantry is the order of the day! These were the cries that were heard for twenty minutes. Many of these messieurs wanted to reclaim their rights. . . . They demanded the floor to argue that there was such a small difference between them and women. . . . Boos interrupted these feeble-voiced orators. It was necessary to obey the supreme will of the gallant people of the parquet.”80 The muscadins’ exchange echoes the political buzzwords of Year II: “Terror is the order of the day”; “the supreme will of the people.” In describing the Feydeau audience, Polyscope attributes to the monarchist and even counterrevolutionary Right the discourse of the terrorist Left. This strategy of conflating the far ends of the political spectrum was not an unfamiliar one. In Year II, Robespierre had resorted to a similar tactic when he lumped together citras (Dantonists) and ultras (Hébertists) as the enemy of the Revolution. Antiterrorist literature similarly conflated extremes, presenting the Terror as a royalist plot against the nation or Robespierre as an aspiring king.81 Polyscope, however, is using this trope in a somewhat different way. The point of his passage is not to reveal the Left as the Right in disguise, or vice versa, so much as to point to the continuity between two historical moments: unwittingly, the muscadins are falling back into the patterns and language of the Terror in their own frivolous present. Where the anonymous author of the first article about Juliette (“L’inconvénient des perruques des dames”) was concerned about misleading appearances and ambiguous signs (the anxiety of the paranoid imagination), Polyscope’s sequel to the story reacts against a troubling repetition of the past (an anachronism).

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The problem with this repetition is that it is involuntary, an unthinking reversion or repetition compulsion rather than a conscious act of remembrance.82 From the beginning of the essay, Polyscope stresses the passive and unreflective nature of the jeunes gens’ behavior: he “consider[s] with pity all those automatons queuing up,” who belie the stereotype of the French as “lively, impatient, carried away.”83 The concert at the Feydeau only mirrors this blind uniformity: “nothing lessens one’s interest as much as the sight of those automatons on the benches whose arms, moving all at the same time, seem to obey strings, springs.”84 Like the musicians, the muscadins seem programmed, repeating in unison a dated script. Because the repetition is unconscious, historical boundaries are blurred: the muscadins confuse their Thermidorian present with the ancien régime and with the Terror. The unconscious obeys no chronology. Ultimately, this type of memory verges on oblivion: “it is like seeing the gravediggers of Hamlet laughing in a cemetery and playing with the heads of the dead. . . . Is this not dancing on top of tombs?”85 Polyscope’s question echoes the numerous reports during this period of macabre dancing such as the bals des Zéphyrs, held in the Saint-Sulpice cemetery. For Polyscope, Thermidorian Paris suffers from a collective amnesia, a failure to remember and honor the recent past. The end of the essay, however, begins to define an alternative to the muscadin’s unreflective relation to history. Addressing himself to the women in the audience, Polyscope reminds them of the relatives they have lost since the beginning of the Revolution—“a father, a husband, a lover unjustly immolated”—and asks them not to fall back into their old habits.86 The solution is not to repeat the past but to mourn it. Polyscope’s advice echoes his earlier prescription about women’s fashions in which he warned against ornamentation—“the luxury of the Asians”—and recommended plain gold chains, “above all if they serve to hold portraits of a father or a husband.”87 Just as he prescribes keepsakes pointing to fathers and husbands, so he seeks to “chain” the women to the memory of lost male relatives. As in the initial Décade anecdote about Juliette, the solution is to bind woman to man, but the method has now changed. The earlier article resorted to juridical measures to assert the husband’s control over his wife. Juliette’s relapse, however, has revealed the ineffectiveness of the procès verbal. Polyscope’s approach, consequently, is not legal but mnemonic: he ties women not to living husbands but to the memory of lost ones. Read as an allegory for the nation, the story advocates not legislative palliatives but a recovery of the meaning of the past, the earnestness, energy, and ideals of the Revolution at its outset.

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U n s ta b l e S i g n s It is this focus on remembrance that ultimately distinguishes Polyscope’s approach from Picard’s. Like La perruque blonde, the essay introduces a muscadin into the blond-wig plot, but the two works differ in their definition of the type. In the play, as we have seen, the foppish Valcour is a political animal who changes wigs according to the ideological fad of the moment. Picard’s treatment of the figure echoed a common skepticism about the self-definition of the jeunesse dorée: though the young men claimed to be opponents, orphans, and near victims of the Terror, they were by many accounts a more heterogeneous group, including nouveaux riches who benefited from the Revolution, former Jacobins refashioning themselves as moderates, and draft dodgers of the première réquisition.88 Polyscope also expresses suspicion about the muscadins—they might attend the concert to spread antirepublican propaganda—but this is not the main focus of his essay. His real concern is the peculiar form of amnesia that afflicts the Feydeau audience. Picard’s anxiety in La perruque blonde and La première réquisition is a voluntary rewriting of the past, an expedient self-fashioning. The emphasis in Polyscope, in contrast, is an involuntary repetition of history, an unconscious echo. The first dramatic treatment of the Feydeau anecdote, Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Aubin’s Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou La folie du jour, would take up Polyscope’s plot but revert to Picard’s view of the jeunes gens. In a letter distributed at the first performance, the playwrights warned the Parisian youth against the sketchy characters who frequented the Feydeau: In a well-regulated country, luxury, the father of the arts and commerce, supports the column of the state with one hand and presents the palm of emulation with the other: this is the luxury of abundance and the only one that we should encourage. But we don’t believe that our young compatriots would recognize their features in that immoral being, a worm with a human face, who, without genius, without resources, without a profession, derives his copious revenues from debauchery and gambling and sets the price for every kind of vice, on which he has a monopoly. True republican women will equally disdain those shameless Bacchantes who make a game out of pushing up their value through borrowed charms, who, contemplating every morning in a mirror how many assignats each curl of hair might bring in, bait virtue and then strangle it in golden taffeta.89

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The opposition between two types of luxury in this passage echoes Polyscope’s article, which draws a similar distinction between the luxury of monarchies (glittering ostentation) and that of republics (an ideal of taste, propriety, and utility).90 But what is in Polyscope an opposition between two historical moments (or forms of government) takes on a moral cast in the playwrights’ letter: what the latter condemns is not an anachronism but a deception (“a worm with a human face,” “borrowed charms” that “bait virtue”). The logic is once again that of the paranoid imagination, but what lies beneath the showy appearance is not a threatening ideology but rather a lack, an absence of genius or position, beauty or honor. The hidden truth is now the worthlessness of the commodity. As at the beginning of Laus de Boissy’s play, this empty self-fashioning is associated with an ungrounded, speculative economy, with a lack of credit and credibility. The references to gambling and “borrowed charms” suggest a value generated ex nihilo, an inflated economy sustained upon a void. This critique echoes attacks on the jeunes gens in the press of the period. During the crisis of the winter of 1794–1795, it was not uncommon for journalists and politicians to scapegoat the young men for the economic woes of the country. Only a few weeks before the debut of the play, Cambon had complained in a speech before the National Convention that the Feydeau regulars used livres—the prerevolutionary currency— rather than the republican assignats. But Périn and Cammaille-SaintAubin’s charge is somewhat different. The young men here are not introducing value from the past, based on a more secure standard, but are rather creating a simulacrum or performance of wealth and status, circulating empty signs—unbacked and insecure—that jeopardize the alreadyfloundering economy. This association between the jeunes gens and unstable currency would be repeated several weeks later in the critical discussion of the second play about the Feydeau, Martainville and Chaussier’s Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou L’agrément du jour. The new piece defended the concert hall against Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Aubin’s attacks and pointed to the social benefits of opulence, which, by putting money into circulation, stimulated growth. The critic for the Décade, however, remained unconvinced and dedicated a large part of his review to rebutting Martainville and Chaussier’s “political economy”: The jeunes gens who made that piece do not realize that our problem is not that our currency, our assignats, do not circulate; they circulate only

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too much. It is to their superfluous abundance, caused by enormous government spending, that we owe in part the high cost of all commodities. Commodities no longer abound as before; their money value has tripled. And the more the government or individuals put [assignats] into circulation, the more they debase them. It is commodities that need to be put in circulation, not assignats. The more we buy commodities, the more we deprive people in need of necessities; it is therefore false to say that he who keeps his money “steals from the state and the artisan.” And in another place that “we don’t lack hands [i.e., labor] but rather buyers.”91

These objections hark back to an eighteenth-century distrust of currency and a physiocratic view of wealth as produce from the land. Privileging commodities over cash, the critic seeks to move away from signs and back to things, to avoid an unwieldy form of signification. His argument, however, relies on a specious logic. One of the main problems of the French economy was that the government had issued too many assignats, thus driving down their value. The Décade critic, however, conflates public and private actions, the government’s putting money into circulation with individuals’ use of that currency. And in so doing, he projects the suspect, ungrounded nature of the assignat itself onto the jeunes gens who spend it. As in the letter distributed before the first Feydeau play, the young men are associated with unwieldy, free-floating signs. Desrosées, the muscadin in the first Le concert de la rue Feydeau play, introduces precisely this type of precarious and ungrounded economy. Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Aubin’s work takes up the story of Adèle, the heroine of Picard’s work, who is now the wife of Dorval and the mother of a young child, Auguste. At the beginning of the play, she has fallen back into her expensive and ostentatious habits, and once again it is a muscadin who encourages her in her recklessness. The temptation is now a sumptuous gown, which Adèle hopes to wear to the next concert at the Théâtre Feydeau. The dress is an extravagance, given her husband’s modest income, which is already strained by her out-of-hand spending, but Desrosées suggests that she buy it on credit using her son’s legacy as a down payment. In such splendid array, she is sure to dazzle at the Feydeau and may well attract protectors who could sustain her luxury and advance her husband’s career. Offering to serve as a middleman in the transaction, Desrosées assures her that by buying the dress she is investing the money “at the highest possible interest.”92 By listening to Desrosées, Adèle enters into a world of skewed repre-

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sentations, where words and meanings do not match up. At the beginning of the play, she seeks to use the art of dress to complement her natural beauty: Art is “the child of Nature,” she observes. “By my caresses I will bring it closer to its mother.”93 For Adèle, the bond between mother and child is a metaphor for the relation between Nature and Art. Before she even utters the phrase, however, its tenor (Art) and vehicle (the child) are at odds. The play begins with a soliloquy by Adèle’s husband, Dorval, who disapproves of her fashionable new friends and obsession with couture: because the “ridiculous excesses of a lying art” have turned her head, “the child who caresses her no longer finds his mother.”94 Adèle’s simile, it seems, reflects her priorities: just as in her observation the word “child” is merely a metaphor for her finery, in her life she privileges her adornment over her son. At the end of the play, when Auguste reminds Adèle that he is her child, she repents of her fashionable ways. “I am a mother,” she declares, pointing to the child in her arms, “and here is my finery.”95 At this point, the tenor and vehicle of her initial metaphor have inverted. The “child” who was but a figure for Art has become the reality, and clothing is now but metaphorical dressing. The play restores the parental bond by insisting on transparency, on the literal meaning of the word “child.” As in Polyscope’s article, the solution is mnemonic: both the essay and the play jog the memory of the female theatergoer. But what Adèle must remember is not the past but the future, her son’s prospects. History, indeed, is strikingly absent from the plot, which makes no allusion to recent traumas or the Terror. The work seems to sidestep the questions raised by the texts that precede it. Laus de Boissy’s play had grappled with the issue of whether to forgive, and Polyscope’s essay had underscored the importance of active recollection. But Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Aubin’s piece sets aside these debates. Its ending, moreover, unproblematically recycles one of the doctrines of Year II: the idea of the theater as a “school of virtues.”96 Nothing in the work registers overtly the rupture or change in political culture marked by 9 thermidor. The play also seems regressive when compared with Picard’s piece. Although La perruque blonde similarly insisted on transparency in women’s dress, it exhibited a certain leniency toward self-fashioning. It discouraged judging by appearances and approved of toilette provided it flattered a woman’s natural graces. Furthermore, Picard sought to introduce an in-between, a political center expressed through an ideal of sartorial moderation. All these elements, however, disappear in the uncompromising literalism and binary logic of Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Aubin’s play.

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L a n g u a g e a n d H i s t o ry The ultimate example of this literalism was, of course, the controversial quip in the final scene. When Adèle reminds her husband that Desrosées cannot serve in the army because he is nearsighted, Dorval tells her not to worry; the young man will be put in the front lines, where “he’ll have the enemy right before his eyes.”97 Taking the muscadin’s shortsightedness shortsightedly—as a literal reality—Dorval assigns him a front-row seat in the avant-garde of the army. Clearly, this retort was offensive to the jeunes gens who attended the play. In the fall of 1793, they had reacted against a similarly negative portrayal in La première réquisition. But in Le concert de la rue Feydeau, I would argue, it is not simply the dandy-bashing to which they object. The line also crystallized the regressive spirit of the play: its insistence on abstract dictionary definitions and proper representation. The controversy that ensued would be a debate about language and its relation to history. On one side of the controversy were the play’s authors. Defending the quip in the published version of the work, Périn and Cammaille-SaintAubin resorted to the same literalist logic that typified the play. Several passages in the script made clear that Desrosées’s eyesight was perfect. Therefore, the playwrights argued, the final witticism was not cruelty toward the blind. This reasoning depends on the criteria that are privileged in the work itself: the correspondence between representation and reality, between words and things. As Desrosées’s myopia is a fiction—a false representation—Dorval is not abusive but patriotic in dispatching him to the front. This logic would also govern the playwrights’ revision of their work for publication. In the printed script, Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Aubin altered a central episode of the plot: the landlord’s visit to collect the rent. In the performance, the latter is a repugnant old man, who uses his financial leverage over the couple to seek amorous favors: the heroine will avoid bankruptcy only by yielding to his desire.98 In the published version, in contrast, the landlord becomes a spokesman for the authors and counters Desrosées’s airs of superiority with a redefinition of the term “jeunes gens”: The jeunes gens, true friends of the Nation, constant supporters of Justice, have placed atop the bloody debris of terrorism the ever-consoling palm of humanity. . . . All of them would surely disavow . . . a being lacking

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genius whose sole occupation is ignominiously dragging out his scandalous idleness. Protect commerce and the arts, defend innocence and virtue, make your bodies a rampart for the Convention, the regenerator of France, pursue without pity and to the death the terrorists and blooddrinkers, and you will merit the honor of being counted among the Parisian youth.99

The landlord seeks to return to the proper definition of the word, which self-styled jeunes gens such as Desrosées have abused. Both the play and the published script insist on proper representation, the correspondence between word and meaning. On the other side of the debate were the protestors at the AmbiguComique, whose arguments suggest a somewhat different conception of language. For them, words are not a mirror of reality so much as an instrument—a weapon—by which the world might be influenced or changed. What they object to in the quip about Desrosées’s shortsightedness is not its meaning—they are not championing the rights of the visually impaired—but rather its function, its attempt to “divide citizens. The so-called muscadin in this piece is a young aristocrat employed in the offices of the military hospitals, he ridicules the faubourgs, and speaks with the affectation of the ci-devant Palais Royal, so one perceives in his character’s role nothing but an attempt to make the Parisian youth seem odious.”100 The young men’s description of the figure skews the plot: at no point does the script indicate Desrosées’s noble origin, and his government office deals with army strategy rather than military hospitals.101 Correct representation, however, is not the goal here. The declaration focuses not on the accuracy of the work but on its function and effects, the division that it is designed to create in its audience and that it has in fact provoked at the theater. Interestingly, the discussion of the incident in the Décade is preceded by a lengthy reflection on the role of language in politics. The author of the article rejects the practice—common during Year II—of altering canonical texts to avoid taboo phrases: for example, replacing roi (king) with loi (law) in Molière or Racine. Editors who fiddle with the classics assign too much importance to language. For the critic, words are generally innocuous; they become dangerous only when they are skewed, hijacked from their usual sense. As an example of this distortion, he offers the term “Jacobin”: “If [it] had never been used to express anything other than a poor recluse checkered in black and white, it would certainly never have caused a drop of blood to fall.” Stretched beyond its meaning, the

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word “Jacobin” had become the “banner” of “all the scoundrels, all the killers of France. . . . [I]t has served to tie together the most disastrous brotherhood ever mentioned in history.”102 The Terror, he seems to suggest, was caused by a breakdown of the language system: had people only used their dictionaries, it might never have happened.103 At the end of the essay, the Décade critic dismisses the jeunes gens’ behavior at the Ambigu-Comique: “Let us pursue the blood-drinkers in the Forum, in our popular assemblies: our liberty, our existence, depend on their annihilation, but let’s not sully with their horrible memory the place of our relaxation and the asylum of the Arts.”104 The implication of the essay is that the jeunes gens are overreacting to language (just as the editors of Molière and Racine had) and that the words to which they were reacting were not stretched beyond their meaning. As in Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Albin’s defense of the play, the logic seems to be that the work is inoffensive because it does not threaten the correspondence between sign and reality. The charge that the jeunes gens overreacted to language was not ungrounded. During the culture wars of pluviôse Year III, the young men had engaged in practices that resembled those of Year II. Instead of replacing roi with loi, they rewrote “La fraternité ou la mort” as “La fraternité ou l’humanité,” but the basic strategy remained unchanged: they were resorting to the same censorship and insistence on consensus, the unanimous repetition of political buzzwords. Nevertheless, in many of their declarations, the young men seemed to view language in a somewhat different way. What they protested was not an inappropriate signified insinuating itself into the definition of a word (the case of “Jacobin” in the Décade essay) but rather a deliberate act of labeling, the projection of a loaded signifier onto an innocent person. For Martainville, Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Albin’s play was objectionable because it sought to “resuscitate the hateful monikers of Muscadins and Sansculottes.”105 And the young men signing the declaration denounced the arbitrariness of arrests made “on the pretext that they were muscadins.”106 They were not trying to set straight the definition of these terms—to clarify the language system—but were rather opposing a language practice, the political uses to which speakers put these labels. By shifting the focus to the use and function of words, the young men were also foregrounding the relation between language and history, the shifting contexts that inform the meaning and impact of terms. For them, language was a contested site: what lay between a word and its mean-

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ing was not an equals sign (a formula forever valid) but the mediation of history and the context of utterance (political expediency, personal interest, ideological manipulation). Where the landlord with his definition of jeunesse parisienne attempted to settle linguistic scores—to tally accounts—the youths acted, like Desrosées, as middlemen: they recognized the milieu, the mi-lieu (middle place), of language, the history and context of an utterance.107 The young men’s approach to language reflects the shifting political logic of the Thermidorians. On August 28, 1794, only a month after 9 thermidor, Tallien had delivered a speech before the National Convention on the problem of establishing a revolutionary government that was not tyrannical. For Tallien, the question hinged on the definition of “revolutionary government”: did the term refer to a government “designed to achieve a revolution” or to one “acting in the manner of revolution”? The government that attempts to be like revolution is one of continual overturning, for revolution is “the movement of putting on top what was on bottom.” In such a government, all of France becomes a battlefield. A government designed to achieve revolution, in contrast, cannot resort to violence or tyranny, for this would “corrupt the love of liberty” by accustoming the people to despotism. Rejecting the Terror, Tallien comes down squarely in favor of the latter. As Baczko points out, however, “no one at the Convention was fooled” by this speech. Only a few months before Tallien had been an advocate of precisely the system that he now condemned.108 His speech is yet another example of this disconnect between the Thermidorians’ acts and words. Nevertheless, it is interesting to observe that what Tallien is attempting to articulate is a distinction between representation and function, between government as a mirror and government as a tool. And like the jeunes gens in the Feydeau controversy, he endorses the functional view. For both Tallien and the jeunes gens, the goal is to move away from a conception of government as a symbolic replica of revolution—one that periodically reproduces the strife that gave it origin—and toward a focus on the effects of policies and language, their efficacy in realizing the goals of the uprising. The question is not whether laws and discourses are faithful mirrors of political dogma or orthodox republican sentiment but whether they are effective tools in a given historical situation. In a sense, the goal is similar to Polyscope’s: they want to move away from repetition compulsion (a revolution that never stops revolving). But the protagonist of this shift is now the jeunesse dorée.109

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Forgetting to Forget Martainville and Chaussier’s Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou L’agrément du jour, which premiered on February 19, two weeks after the controversy at the Ambigu-Comique, sketched out this new protagonist, shifting the focus away from economic issues and toward the problem of evaluating the recent past. Once again, the story revolves around preparations to attend a Feydeau concert, but this time it is not simply the mother but the whole family, children included, who will attend the spectacle. Here, the Feydeau is neither a nest of immorality nor a speculative bubble compromising the national economy but rather a legitimate form of entertainment, one that is at once family-friendly and aesthetically superior. Pointedly, the playwrights have changed the surname of the couple. The Dorvals of the earlier play, who came to understand the value of gold (valeur d’or), are now the Belvals, who appreciate the beautiful (bel) music of the concert. With this shift in focus, the plot of the play changes significantly. Where the earlier work revolved around Adèle’s dress and debt, the heroine in Martainville and Chaussier’s piece has little interest in selffashioning: in the opening scene, she is so concerned about her husband’s safety that she has neglected her toilette. An irreproachable mother and patriot, Citoyenne Belval safeguards the play against ethical attacks from the Feydeau’s detractors and against the insinuations of immorality that surround Juliette in Polyscope’s article. Given the equation of the fashioncrazed with the loose woman and the growing anxiety about the breakdown of the family unit, it was problematic for the playwrights to defend female self-fashioning or to attempt to portray a virtuous élégante. The play, therefore, will celebrate not female but male dandyism, exemplified by its hero, a sprucely dressed young man named S. Albin. By placing the spotlight on this character, the playwrights respond to and seek to correct the portrayal of the jeunesse dorée in both Picard’s and Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Albin’s plays. Unlike Valcour in La perruque blonde, S. Albin is not an erotic rival but a member of the family, who stands up for its interests. And unlike the draft-dodging Desrosées of the first Feydeau play, S. Albin is a war hero, who, though wounded on the front, continues to defend the Republic on the streets of Paris, disbanding Jacobins and terrorists with his club. S. Albin has a debonair, lighthearted, and distracted manner, which strikes the serious paterfamilias Belval as extravagant. But as Citoyenne Belval observes: “I even believe that, proud of the wound that has forced him to return to Paris, he puts even more

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liveliness and lightness into all his actions.”110 S. Albin’s frivolity, that is, derives not from apathy or egotism but from his political engagement and loyal service to the nation. S. Albin’s peculiar nature is the focus of the main episode of the plot: a visit from the Belvals’ neighbor, the Jacobin Brise-Scellé. During the Terror, the latter denounced the couple to a revolutionary committee and took advantage of their incarceration to steal their fortune, to briser les scellés (break the seals) of their coffers. Now the Jacobin seeks Citoyen Belval’s forgiveness, hoping to avoid arrest for his misdeeds. In the remaining scenes, the characters debate the proper course of action: whether to forgive and forget or to punish, and what form such punishment might take. Throughout these scenes, S. Albin vacillates bizarrely between memory and amnesia. He has come to escort the Belvals to the Feydeau concert, but he forgets his purpose as soon as Brise-Scellé appears. Recognizing the visitor immediately as the “former Torquatus, member of the old revolutionary committee,” S. Albin recalls his crimes against the Belval family. And later he remembers the terrorist past of the detractors of the Feydeau.111 He forgets, however, that their upright friend Florville has recently become a member of the revolutionary committee.112 S. Albin’s discussion of the Théâtre Feydeau typifies this vacillation between remembering and forgetting. After recalling the horrors of Year II, he praises the Feydeau “for effacing that disagreeable impression.”113 But it does not seem to distract him for very long. He soon forgets to forget.114 S. Albin’s behavior illustrates the troubled form of remembrance that Mona Ozouf identifies with the post-Thermidor period.115 His condition, however, is a memory disorder of a very particular sort. What he forgets is not the past so much as the present: the pleasant evening that awaits him at the Feydeau; the new, more honest officials who are now in power (Florville). His memory brings the past back in the present but in so doing forgets that the past is past, that France has turned a new page. As in Martainville’s pamphlet about the Ambigu-Comique uproar, he does not seem to register the historical break. To put it another way, we might say that S. Albin suffers from a form of anterograde amnesia: he is unable to encode recent history—Thermidor onward—in his long-term memory. His condition is in many ways that of the nation at large. S. Albin’s predicament resembles that of the muscadins of the Feydeau audience in Polyscope’s essay: both have lost their sense of historical markers and seem to float in and out of different political moments. But what is in the essay a symptom of a failure to historicize—reenacting rather than remembering—becomes in the play a representation of the

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challenges involved in historicizing. While the theatergoers in the Décade piece are reduced to a repetition compulsion—automatic, cyclical, and unconscious behaviors that they cannot overcome—S. Albin is constantly pinched back into awareness. We witness his efforts to put the past in its place, to wake up to the new realities of the present. The analysis of S. Albin’s condition in the play is complex and ambivalent. The work begins with a reflection on the problems involved in writing history. Its opening dialogue celebrates a new law mandating a ten-year waiting period between the death of a noteworthy citizen and his interment in the Panthéon. Passed on 20 pluviôse (February 8), only two days after the Feydeau fiasco, the measure was very likely an attempt to appease the angry young men. Applied retrospectively, the law effectively “depantheonized” Marat, whose ubiquitous busts were a prime target of the culture wars of pluviôse Year III.116 (Indeed, the Feydeau was one of the theaters where the jeunes gens had destroyed a statue of Marat.) Martainville and Chaussier’s work, which premiered a week after the decree and a week before the much anticipated depantheonization, applauds Marat’s fall from grace but also recognizes the wisdom of the law itself: as Citoyenne Belval points out, “In the space of ten years/Especially in our century/Alas! How the scythe of time/Can diminish great men!”117 Without distance, one cannot remember objectively. The opening suggests that the Thermidorian period is different because its leaders have the wisdom to defer historicizing: they are conscious of the epistemological limits of their own age. The subsequent appearance of S. Albin and the peculiar time warp in which he exists could be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, his dilemma might represent the consequence and danger of such a policy. If official reflection on the past is postponed, individuals lack the guidance and historical markers necessary for processing collective experience, for encoding it into the larger story of the Revolution. On the other hand, S. Albin’s predicament might be seen not as the result of deferred historicizing but rather as the reason for postponing it. His constant vacillation between memory and oblivion illustrates the unreliability of the present perspective: he is too close to the past to understand it fully. The views of the Belval couple support this second reading. Citoyenne Belval applauds the reasoning of the law of 20 pluviôse, and her husband seeks to rein in S. Albin, who tends to be high-strung and irrational. Distinguishing between public and private forms of punishment, he encourages the young man to seek vengeance “by laws and not with clubs.”118 After all, he observes, Brise-Scellé was not “one of those disgusting an-

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thropophagi of blood and carnage” but rather “a machine without reason that the craftier scoundrels made use of.” Does the unthinking henchman deserve the same fate as his master? Judging such cases is a complex matter that requires emotional distance, the neutrality of the law. In his exaggeration and gut reactions, S. Albin introduces the same danger as Laus de Boissy’s boor: an emotionalization of the political sphere that might lead to abusive or unfair treatment. At one point, indeed, S. Albin sounds curiously like Dufranc: just as the latter cites Augustus’s “Who pardons easily invites offense,” S. Albin argues that “crime/Is encouraged by leniency [indulgence].”119 The play could be read as an attempt to rein in the excesses of the jeunes gens, to put a check on this unbridled aggressivity. Nevertheless, the work also glamorizes the passionate engagement and heroism of S. Albin, who upstages Belval with his witticisms and sung ditties. At the end of the play, it will be he who convinces Belval to forgive his former foe. Belval and S. Albin may respond to the situation with different types of logic, but they ultimately arrive at the same conclusion. The last word of the play does not fall clearly on one side or the other of the debate. Just as the couple and S. Albin decide to let bygones be bygones, Florville arrives to arrest the Jacobin. Although the family may forgive Brise-Scellé’s wrongs against it, his violation of the law is a matter of state. Florville’s intervention reinforces Belval’s insistence on legal procedures. But his words also echo S. Albin’s: “Tolerance [indulgence] of crime is itself a crime.”120 In arresting the former Jacobin, he puts into action the latter’s gut response. A similar ambivalence colors the final vaudeville, in which the authors hope “[t]hat all good republicans/Will be indulgent with them/Because they are not Jacobins.” The ambiguous antecedent of “they” encapsulates the vacillation of the work as a whole. Is the audience to forgive the flaws of the play because its authors are not Jacobins? Or will the spectators demonstrate indulgence because they themselves are no longer Jacobins? Given the high-strung, often neurotic tone of Martainville’s pamphlet, it is compelling to interpret the pronoun as a reference to the authors, who encourage us to approve of their work out of political allegiance. Just as S. Albin’s pleasure at the theater is enhanced by his sense of factional victory—“I will taste the divine attraction/Of an enchanting music/And to complete my happiness/I see a Jacobin being punished”—so the spectators may also take satisfaction in the Jacobins’ defeat (indeed, in early 1795, the Théâtre des Variétés staged a number of anti-Jacobin pieces and was very likely drawing a partisan audience).121 The restraint advocated by Belval is ultimately not Martainville’s own modus operandi.

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Nevertheless, given the contiguity of “they” with “good republicans,” it is also possible that the audience, on hearing these verses, understood “they” as referring to themselves: having given up “Jacobin” intransigence, the spectators will be generous to the authors of the play. At least one early critic interpreted the work as a sermon about forgiveness: “the system of leniency [indulgence] that [the authors] preach, above all in the ending, displeased spectators who want innocent blood to be avenged.”122 This possibility suggests a new role for theater in society. Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Albin’s Le concert de la rue Feydeau ended by declaring the stage “the school of virtues,” a place to condemn vice and applaud goodness.123 Martainville and Chaussier’s play, in contrast, might be seen as a lesson in humanity, in which the audience learns to imitate its indulgent protagonists. Questioning the emotionalization of political life—the street violence of the post-Thermidor period—the work channels the jeunes gens’ enthusiasm and energy toward the artistic sphere, toward the sublime music of the Feydeau, which has a positive and potentially humanizing force. Historical accounts often refer to the fifteen months between 9 thermidor and the beginning of the Directory as the Thermidorian Reaction, a term that began to appear toward the end of this period. Until then, the word “reaction” had belonged not to politics or history but to the science of mechanics, where it designated the resistance of an object to the pressure of another object, an opposite action caused by a preceding action: in Newton’s third law, every action has an equal but opposite reaction.124 Understood in this way, the violence and turbulence of the post-Thermidor period was simply the inevitable swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction; Year III was not a backlash against Year II but a continuation of its motion. The application of this principle to history, however, introduces a problematic determinism into discussions of the period. For when we reduce politics to mechanical actions and reactions, we often lose sight of the actors themselves, of the complexity of human responses to and reflections upon traumatic situations. Viewed as a “reaction,” the jeunes gens’ activism in Year III is equal and contrary to the terrorists’ in Year II; in many ways, indeed, the two groups did use the same strategies in inverse directions. But as I have attempted to show in this chapter, the jeunes gens’ response was not just reflex, an unmeditated and inevitable countermovement. Texts such as Polyscope’s essay and the second Le concert de la rue Feydeau suggest an attempt to move away from the mechanical model of reenactment and repetition and toward a more conscious form of remembrance, an active reflection on history.

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Incroyables In late December 1796, the artist Carle Vernet published a caricature featuring two debonair young men decked out in the latest styles (fig. 2). Sporting a two-cornered hat, wide-lapelled jacket, and gnarled cane, one figure holds up a quizzing glass to inspect his fashionable acquaintance. Unperturbed by this scrutiny, the other strikes a lackadaisical pose, slouching on a walking stick, his hand in his pocket and his jacket casually unbuttoned. The image of “les incroyables,” as Vernet famously dubbed the two men, was an overnight success. Passersby lingered in front of print shops chuckling at the overdressed figures and the excesses of contemporary fashion. According to one newspaper, the incroyables themselves rushed out to buy the print, which even they found funny.1 Almost immediately, imitations began to appear that carried the joke to more absurd extremes.2 “Caricatures,” proclaimed one journalist, were “the order of the day” and were multiplying “in an incroyable way.”3 The cartoon soon spawned not only prints but also plays, articles, a journal—the Journal des Incroyables, ou Les hommes à pa-ole d’honneur—and even a personal ad in which an incroyable seeks an equally trendsetting mate.4 This proliferation of texts and images converted the caricature into a type and gradually filled in its profile. In addition to his ludicrous dress— the voluminous cravatte écrouélique (goiter cravat), the sidelocks known as oreilles de chien (dog’s ears), the hoop earrings, and the pointed shoes— the figure took on mannerisms, gestures, and speech affectations. As the Goncourt brothers memorably put it, the incroyables “put the alphabet on the bed of Procrustes,” severing the consonants r and j from the French

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7. Henry William Bunbiry, La rencontre des incroyables, engraving by Louis Charles Ruotte (Paris: Basset, [ca. 1797]). Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo © Musée Carnavalet / RogerViollet.

language.5 Their standard affect was one of surprise and disbelief; their standard riposte, “c’est inc-oyable, ma pa-ole d’honneu-!” (that’s incredible, my word of honor!). The type even developed a signature greeting, the pinky-finger salutation illustrated in Henry William Bunbiry’s print La rencontre des incroyables (the encounter of the incroyables, fig. 7). Few of these characteristics were particularly new. The incroyables’ costume was simply an exaggerated version of the jeunes gens’. Their quizzing glass recalled the lunettes with which the muscadins had dodged the draft (indeed, the lorgnette was a standard feature of the petit-maître type even before the Revolution), and their cane derived from the pouvoir éxécutif (executive power), the stick with which the jeunes gens had attacked the Jacobins during the Thermidorian Reaction. Their curious speech defects and ripostes also had clear antecedents. Although the standard explanation attributes their slurred pronunciation to the legendary singer Garat (the affectation is known as garatisme), the lisping was

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also associated with the aristocracy of the ancien régime.6 The dropped r and slurred j appear already in parodies of the jeunes gens of Year III: in the summer of 1795, an article in the Journal de Paris diagnosed in the fashionable young men “a paralysis of the organ of speech,” which caused them to “bone the language,” removing “the strong articulations” and “vigorous touches of pronunciation.”7 And, as we saw in the play La première réquisition, the expression “c’est incroyable, ma parole d’honneur” may already be found in the literature concerning the muscadin in the fall of 1793; indeed, the exclamation seems to have become an in-phrase much earlier.8 Even the use of “incroyable” as a noun referring to an extravagantly dressed young man seems to predate Vernet’s prints.9 But though almost all the attributes of the figures were familiar, the image Les incroyables somehow added up to more than the sum of its parts. Charmingly goofy, Vernet’s print invited viewers to set politics aside and to take pleasure in the playful over-the-topness of the image. The new figure seemed to represent a social “type” rather than a specific political faction.10 Unlike the (relatively rare) visual depictions of the jeunes gens or muscadins (many of which postdate Year III), the focus in Les incroyables was not the actions and party affiliation of the young men— their draft dodging or vengeance against the sansculottes—but rather their tout ensemble and nonchalance.11 Consider, for example, the contrast between Vernet’s print and L’ami de la justice et de l’humanité (fig. 6). Vernet’s incroyables are not subjects or political agents but rather objects of vision, an amusing spectacle too incredible to be real. Many contemporary and later commentators, indeed, would regard the fad as a movement away from the political, an evasion of history. For Louis Sébastien Mercier, the luxury and excess of the incroyables and their female companions, the merveilleuses, seemed a perverse erasure of the past. During the Thermidorian Reaction, he observed, women still carried “fans adroitly planted with fleurs-de-lis” and danced at the bals des victimes (uncanny reenactments of guillotine executions), but the social gatherings of the Directory, with their out-of-season fruits, “Asiatic luxury,” and Grecian beauties, seemed otherworldly, entirely divorced from historical reality: “Who would have said, seeing these salons sparkling with lights, and these bare-footed women, all of whose fingers were adorned with diamonds, that one had just come out of the Reign of Terror? So many thousands of men devoured by it leave no traces.”12 But though Vernet’s incroyable prints seemed to avoid politics and to step away from the reality of the day, they had an immediate impact on the world around them and quickly became a subject of debate.

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“Who would believe it?” wrote Mercier, echoing the incroyables’ riposte. “[T]he print of the incroyables has popularized the oreilles de chien: it is in this way that inept journals, frondeurs of republicanism, produced many republicans.”13 Just as the muscadins before them had stepped across the footlights from the stage into reality, the incroyables seemed to jump off the page and into the world. And as Mercier’s comparison suggests, it was a leap into politics. One remarkable image shows a young boy holding up one of the caricatures and laughing in delight at two men in the foreground whose stances reproduce those of the image (fig. 8). To his astonishment, the cartoon has come to life before his eyes! And in crossing the divide between fiction and reality, the incroyable has reentered the world of politics. According to one print catalog from the period, the image represents the “arrest of a young man of the première réquisition”—a draft dodger—by a soldier who is about to beat him.14 The officer sadistically mocks his victim: “Tell me then,” the caption reads, “does my lorgnette make you scared?” When enacted on the street, the seemingly innocent encounter of Vernet’s image translates into a confrontation of social and political antagonists.

8. Ah! Qu’il est donc drôle! Hai! dis donc ma lorgnette te fait peur? ([Paris, 1797–1799]). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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This potential for violence was an immediate source of concern in early reactions to the images and literature concerning the incroyable. One newspaper, for example, attacked the Journal des incroyables for seeking to “exasperate the jeunes gens,” to rile them up and push them toward an uncivic action that would discredit them politically.15 Others feared for the safety of the young men. In a letter to the editor, a soi-disant incroyable, who claimed to be the model of Vernet’s image, voiced his fear of being lynched in the event of a popular uprising. He advised Vernet to draw a companion image of “Jacobins in their revolutionary costume” to deflect public hatred from the incroyables.16 Another writer accused Vernet of “encourag[ing] with a hazardous pencil those cruel innovators, those perfidious anarchists always ready to take advantage of anything that might animate the people against the leisured classes.”17 And the Journal des incroyables reproached the artist for forgetting that until recently the cut of a jacket or hairstyle could be grounds for a death sentence.18 Similar reservations appear in an article by the journalist Charles Cobiolis. In a monarchy such as England, he argued, caricature is a harmless and inconsequential genre, but in a republic, the “weapon of ridicule can become a weapon of murder.” Like the Journal des incroyables, Cobiolis observed that oreilles de chien used to be known as oreilles de chouan (after the counterrevolutionary insurgents in western France) and could once provoke a lynching. And he reminds readers of the “war . . . against the muscadins” waged during the Terror: “Yesterday it was the muscadins, today it’s the incroyables.”19 Cobiolis was not alone in likening the incroyable to the muscadin: Before, during the time of the Jacobins, Our attire was suspect; People called us Muscadins, They detested our long tresses Another party wants to stand out In our miserable country, They begin to call us Merveilleux and incroyable.20

In drawing this connection between the muscadin and the incroyable, commentators underscored the function of language and particularly the dangers of labeling. One journalist observed that derogatory monikers such as incroyable, chouan, and counterrevolutionary served only “to excite new troubles.”21 Another writer went even further, identifying the practice as the modus operandi of the Terror: “To deepen the word in order to

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poison the thing was the feat of those Argus in terrorism, who sought the likes of their suspects everywhere: incroyable, in their idiom, hence means muscadin, which had been almost the synonym of aristocrat.”22 As with the jeunes gens’ critique of the Feydeau controversy in 1795, these texts object to a language practice in which words are used to target individuals. But where the controversy in Year III revolved around the question of memory, the problem of understanding the past and its relation to the present, the texts about the incroyable express an anxiety about the future. Brimming with anticipation, they represent a society on the brink of collision. The danger in this literature is not deception (as in the paranoid imagination) or regression (as in the anachronistic) so much as social implosion, a cataclysmic confrontation between opposing parties, the nightmare of the catastrophic imagination.

From the Jeunes Gens of Year III t o t h e I n c r o ya b l e s o f Y e a r V The concerns of these writers would soon prove justified. In the summer of 1797, tension irrupted on the streets of Paris between soldiers and young men sporting one of the signature accessories of the incroyable costume: the collet noir (black collar), a term also used metonymically to refer to its wearer. In the weeks leading up to the coup d’état of 18 fructidor (September 4, 1797), accounts of skirmishes between the two groups became a regular feature of the daily news, and writers began to warn the jeunes gens against the dangerous apparel, which made them vulnerable to such attacks. In early fructidor, a soldier at the Invalides assaulted and attempted to remove the collar of a seventeen-year-old, who defended himself by shooting his aggressor in the arm. The soldier’s companions rapidly came to his aid, beating the collet noir with their bayonets and leaving him to die a gruesome death.23 The casualty would only increase the hysteria over the collets noirs and the growing anxiety about the military presence in and around Paris, which seemed the harbinger of a coup. This was not the first time that conflict had broken out over controversial neckwear. In the months following the theater wars of pluviôse Year III (February 1795), the jeunes gens had gradually lost support among the legislators of the Thermidorian Convention. Although they had come to the defense of the assembly during the popular uprisings in germinal and prairial (April and May 1795), their involvement had been

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in many ways a mixed blessing. Their partisan enthusiasm and disdain for the sansculottes had only increased popular anger, and they were unable to prevent the protestors from occupying the Convention for a number of hours on 1 prairial; the crisis was resolved only through military intervention. After the final defeat of the sansculotte activists in the Prairial Days, moreover, the jeunesse dorée became less necessary as a counterweight to the radical Left, and their obstreperous rhetoric and wild conduct became an increasingly divisive and embarrassing force. Gradually, the Thermidorian deputies, including former supporters such as Fréron and Tallien, began to distance themselves from the young men and took measures to rein in their excesses. One of the most important was a propaganda campaign spearheaded by the mudslinging journalist Louvet de Couvray, a former jeunes gens who had been bribed to discredit his onetime allies in the newspaper La sentinelle. In the summer of 1795, the tension between the jeunes gens and the Convention manifested itself in street conflicts over their green cravats and black collars and in a series of “song wars,” in which the young men forced performers to sing the “Réveil du peuple” (an antiterrorist anthem) and hooted at the “Marseillaise” and “Ça ira” (both associated with the September Massacres and the Terror).24 In La sentinelle, Louvet de Couvray denounced the jeunes gens as new terrorists and decried their peculiar form of dress. Just as the Jacobins of Year II had their labels, rallying signs, preferred hairstyle, and symbolic color, so too did the jeunes gens and Thermidorians; their goal, Louvet de Couvray claimed, mocking their lisping speech, was “to reestablish the te-eur.”25 Like Hébert’s writings against the muscadins in Year II, he sought to unmask a counterrevolutionary threat. But where Hébert collapsed the muscadins into the extreme Right, conflating them with the aristocrats, Louvet de Couvray folded them into the extreme Left, discovering a “red peril” beneath their green. Ironically, it was just as Louvet de Couvray was assimilating the jeunes gens into the radical Left that they themselves were beginning to move further and further in the opposite direction. Abandoned by the Convention, the young men now felt excluded from the political stage, and the proposals for a new constitution seemed designed to reduce their power: the introduction of minimum age requirements would keep many of the young men out of public office (one of the two legislative branches was to be a Council of Elders). Moreover, the conventionnels, reluctant to give up power, had proposed a décret des deux tiers mandating that two-thirds of the new deputies be chosen from among the outgoing legislators. This

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meant that the new Conseils would be largely made up of the same people as the Thermidorian Convention, many of whom had been deputies during the Terror. The change so eagerly desired by the jeunes gens was nowhere in sight. Disillusioned with legal methods, many moved farther to the right and began to conspire against the Convention. The collar conflicts of the summer of 1795 would ultimately end with the Vendémiaire Insurrection (October 5, 1795), in which a group of jeunes gens took up arms against the government only to be quashed by forces led by the up-and-coming general Napoleon Bonaparte. Some three hundred people died or were injured in the uprising. The main issue in this rebellion was not the form of government so much as the décret des deux tiers: as François Gendron puts it, “[t]he question of the regime—royalty or republic—was not at issue. The basis of the debate was the legislative mandate, which was contested by two groups of politicians.”26 In the aftermath, however, the revolt was generally represented as a royalist or counterrevolutionary plot, and the jeunesse momentarily fell into disgrace, as the government imposed punitive measures (such as the prohibition of the “Réveil du peuple” and a crackdown on draft dodgers). When the incroyable prints and literature appeared in early 1797, the specter of the Vendémiaire Insurrection still loomed large: one author warned that the goal of the caricatures was to “exasperate the all-tooinflammable heads of our jeunes gens,” to “vendémiatriser them again.”27 Another feared that it would “push them to excesses in order to renew the Vendémiaire days.”28 And yet another paired a sketch of Vernet’s Les incroyables with a dialogue titled “The Arrival in Paris of Two Generals of the Army of the incroyables, with 60 Thousand Men and Their Plan of Attack for a Second Vendémiaire.”29 But the political landscape of France was also changing in significant ways. As expected, the elections of vendémiaire Year III had ushered in a predominantly left-wing legislature (two-thirds chosen from among the outgoing Convention), which had in turn selected five directors, all of whom were former conventionnels. Nevertheless, the political tides nationwide were shifting to the right. The remaining third, the legislative positions that were not limited to former deputies, went in large part to royalist or counterrevolutionary politicians—a clear sign of a conservative turn in the voting public. In the months that followed, a number of events would confirm this tendency. The exposure of the Babeuf conspiracy, whose threat the government greatly exaggerated, frightened many citizens, who saw the foiled plot as an attempt to return to the Terror.

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The collapse of the revolutionary currencies (by February 1797 neither the mandat nor the assignat had any monetary value) also concerned the electorate, which now consisted principally of the bourgeoisie (the new constitution had made property ownership a requirement for voting eligibility). Many of these bourgeois voters yearned for stability, which they increasingly identified with the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. This longing is clear in a pamphlet titled La république traitée du haut en bas ou chaque chose remise à sa place (The Republic discussed from top to bottom, or Everything put back in its place), in which an incroyable and a republican debate the relative merits of monarchies and republics. The incroyable prefers the former because they provide greater tranquillity and are most suited to “the frivolity of our character.”30 Frustrated by the failures and perceived bias of the Directory, many moderate and conservative republicans were moving toward this view. As the elections of germinal Year V (April 1797) approached, these voices increasingly made themselves heard. A third of the legislative seats were up for vote, and the incoming deputies would replace half of the conventionnels who had benefited from the décret des deux tiers. A right-wing majority was now extremely likely, an eventuality that might make possible the restoration of the monarchy by lawful means. A circle of jeunes gens who gathered at the Club de Clichy had already begun exploring legal avenues for a return to constitutional monarchy. The controversy over the Vernet prints, which appeared in high campaign season, offers a window into this tense moment. Though frivolous in appearance, the images target a party that had become a formidable political force and that, for many, seemed to threaten the Republic from within. A right-wing conspiracy exposed at about the same time (January 1797) only confirmed these fears. One part of the plot was the formation of the Institut philanthropique, which had put forward several legislative candidates, represented as advocates of peace and tranquillity. These office seekers, however, were actually royalist agents plotting the restoration of the Count of Provence, Louis XVI’s brother, who had declared himself Louis XVIII after the death of the Dauphin in 1795. The royalist victory in the April 1797 elections (all but ten of the open seats went to the Right) was consequently a source of enormous anxiety for the Left. The Republic now stood on unstable footing, with many of its elected deputies known opponents of the very form of government that they had been chosen to represent. Recognizing the danger, the more left-leaning directors immediately began contemplating military intervention, and the ultraroyalist Right was hatching similar plans. By the

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time a second round of collar wars broke out in late summer 1797 (thermidor and fructidor Year V), rumors of conspiracies and plotted coups were rife, and all of Paris was on edge. The conflicts between the soldiers and the collets noirs resembled the incidents of the summer of 1795, but the political context had completely changed. Whereas in the autumn of 1795 the jeunes gens had been cast aside by the government and were objecting to the legitimacy of the decrees by which it had constituted the new regime, the collets noirs of 1797 had a stronger political foothold and supported the elected legislature. It was not just the position of the jeunes gens that had changed. So had their arguments, their mode of critique, and their self-representation. In what follows, I will argue that the literature around the incroyable would be central to the development of these new strategies. In 1797, the passionate, rambunctious, and scatterbrained S. Albin would be replaced by a wittier, more ironic and self-reflexive figure. Rather than defiantly attacking his opponent, the incroyable would parodically place himself in the position of his target, becoming both the subject and the object of critique. This double stance was mirrored in the very ambiguity of his name: “incroyable” suggested both the disbelieving subject (the one who exclaims, “C’est incroyable”) and the object of disbelief (the one who is unbelievable). This new form of commentary, in a sense, reflected the incroyable’s new position: he was now criticizing the system from within. But, as will become clear, it was also an attempt to forge a new type of political culture and activism—a more detached and self-reflective form of criticism that avoided the oppressive earnestness, transparency, and emotionalism of the early years of the Revolution. The final three sections of this chapter will examine how these strategies played out in the critical moment of fructidor Year V. In histories of the French Revolution, the Directory has generally received short shrift. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Marxist historians tended to demonize the period as one of reaction and regression. In their analysis, the bourgeoisie entrenched itself in the government during the Directory, excluding the people from the public sphere and from the electorate and abandoning the egalitarian and democratic ideals of the early Revolution.31 Newer scholarship on the period, however, has painted a somewhat more positive picture. François Furet has characterized the Directory as “the first attempt in the history of France to establish a republic on the normal functioning of representative institutions,” and in a seminal work on the period, Isser Woloch has pointed to the institutional advances and the transformation of the “civic

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order” of France during these years.32 More recently, Pierre Serna has described the Directory as a “laboratory” in which the major currents of nineteenth-century politics of left, right, and center were developed and tested, and Andrew Jainchill has shown the importance of the period in the development of French liberalism.33 James Livesey has gone so far as to argue that the Directory witnessed the birth of “democratic culture.”34 In many ways, indeed, 1795–1799 was the great window of opportunity for the Republic: with foreign invasion no longer a threat and the trauma of the Terror behind it, the conditions for success had never been better. The reason for its failure, consequently, has long been a subject of debate among historians, who have pinpointed a series of possible causes: the rigidity of the Constitution of 1795, continued economic hardship, and the failure to incorporate the Jacobins into the political life of the country. Although the incroyables and merveilleuses make a cameo appearance in most French school texts, historians of the Directory have tended to overlook these figures. As Rebecca Spang observes: This era’s reputation for idle enjoyments and its status as a legitimate topic of research have been inversely proportional. Scholars who appreciate the importance of the economic and political policies formulated in the period after Thermidor have had generally little patience with the Goncourtian collage of dancing, gambling and “women—undressed, half naked, naked,” while those who wax lyrical about Madame Tallien’s beauty have only a few harsh words for the political cabals and greedy speculations of the period.35

Studies of the incroyable, indeed, are very rare and generally focus on the psychology or sexual disposition of the figure rather than its politics.36 Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, for example, has emphasized the homoeroticism of many of these images, the pleasure that men take in seeing and being seen.37 And Lynn Hunt has interpreted the type as the last holdout in what the psychologist J. C. Flügel called the “great masculine renunciation.”38 Flügel had attributed the shift in male fashion in the late eighteenth century to the upheaval of the French Revolution, which both swept away sumptuary laws and discouraged lavish dress. To convey the moral sobriety and democratic spirit of the new regime, men abandoned their finery and adopted the sober black suit that has been the bourgeois male uniform ever since. Class distinctions would henceforth be most visible in female clothing, where exhibitionism and frivolity continued to reign.39 For Hunt, the incroyables of the Directory represent the last gasp

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of male narcissism, a final claim to be, as Carlyle would write of the dandy, “a visual object, or a thing that would reflect rays of light.”40 The incroyables, however, were neither clinging to the luxury and ostentation of the ancien régime nor attempting to avoid political engagement by escaping into a make-believe world of incredibility. Their selffashioning was a profoundly ideological gesture, although, unlike that of the jeunes gens of Year III, it was not conceived of as a marker of ideology. In the summer of 1795, the black collar was a signe de ralliement, a sign of their opposition to the direction in which France was moving. In Year V, however, the accessory would not be the symbol of a party or faction so much as an emblem of its own meaninglessness, of the depoliticization of clothing itself. Paradoxically, it was a political sign pointing to its own political designification. In the weeks leading up to the coup d’état of 18 fructidor, the collets noirs were defending the constitution and the Conseils, but they were also fighting for the possibility of an empty sign, for the salutary force of nontranscendence in a public sphere long torn apart by paranoia and overinterpretation. Their assertion of the incredible was not a retreat into fantasy but rather a refusal to suspend disbelief, an insistence on putting words and phrases in ironic quotation marks, on underscoring the constructedness of social and political discourses.

T h e U n b e l i e va b l e “Again with the incroyable!” moaned one author. “[T]he word has been found; everyone contends for it.”41 Soon after its coinage, indeed, the term became disputed territory as the young men and their critics vied to fix its meaning and application. The word functioned in two different ways. In its original use, the label was a citation of an exclamation; it abbreviated the dandy’s characteristic utterance (“c’est incroyable”), which came to stand metonymically for the man himself. Early uses of “incroyable” in this sense (indicated through the use of italics) often couple it with the word incrédule, reinforcing the connection between the figure and his favorite phrase, his tendency toward disbelief: the restaurant Rose, thus, becomes “le rendez-vous de tout ce qu’il y a de plus incroyables dans les incrédules” (the rendezvous of all that is most incroyable among the incrédules).42 This example, however, suggests a second usage of the term: the word “incroyable” may also be understood as an adjective modifying the man to whom it is applied. The ambivalence of the label, which may describe either the subject (the incredible dandy) or the object (the world

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that he finds incredible), reflects one of the main strategies of the figure: the confusion of the critic and the target of critique. Commentators on both sides of the debate would exploit the possibilities of “incroyable” as an adjective describing the extravagantly dressed man. In the anti-incroyable use of the term, the figure is incredible in the sense of “unbelievable,” unworthy of trust or credence. In pro-incroyable literature, in contrast, the word means “incredible” in the sense of marvelous or amazing. The captions that accompany the caricatures of the incroyables illustrate the negative use of the term. One printing of Vernet’s image puts the following words in the mouths of the two dandies: “Ah! But it’s impossible, I thought that he had emigrated”; “Ah! It’s incredible; here’s La Fleur, my ci-devant valet.”43 The conversation reveals the true identity of the laidback young man, a former servant whose upper-class airs are not to be believed. A similar explanation accompanies the image La rencontre des incroyables (fig. 7).44 According to a print catalog from the period, the figure on the left exhibits the “thick corpulence of a parvenu” while his companion combines “a rich getup” with a “very common physiognomy.”45 The two men’s social pretensions are again unbelievable. This sense of phoniness appears as well in responses to the caricature Les merveilleuses (fig. 9). In Mercier’s account, the thin woman recognizes her portly counterpart as “Jeanneton, who used to sell peas by the quarter peck.”46 And another journalist supplies a dialogue that concludes: “Ces belles, je t’assure,/Sont des ci-devant.—Oui . . . Marchandes de poisson” (Those beauties, I assure you,/Are ci-devant . . . Yes, ci-devant fishmongers).47 In all these examples, the incroyables and their female counterparts perform a social standing that is not to be believed. The negative use of the adjective captures the concerns of the paranoid imagination—the anxiety about false identity—but it also defuses them: often the figure’s true identity is inscribed on the body itself, in the ungainly corpulence of the nouveaux riches.48 Appearances are ultimately legible, despite the incroyable costumes. So strong was this association between the incroyable and the unbelievable that one play, C. F. L’Heureux’s Les incroyables, ou Le danger des plaisirs (The incroyables, or the danger of pleasures), dispensed altogether with the figure’s extravagant clothing.49 In the absence of his guardian, the main character, Dorval, is led astray by the incroyable Damis, who has encouraged him to gamble recklessly and to pursue wanton women. A Machiavellian character, Damis attempts to discredit Dorval in order to seduce his fiancée. The hero, however, continues to believe in Damis’s loyalty. Dorval’s eyes are opened only after Damis, believing him to be

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9. Carle Vernet, Les merveilleuses, engraving by Louis Darcis ([Paris: L. Darcis, 1797]). Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet.

penniless, deserts him. What is self-fashioning (the valet who has remade himself) in the prints becomes here simply selfishness. Clothing and appearance never enter into this plot; the incroyable is now simply the incarnation of falsity. This sense of trickery and deception is reinforced by a secondary type known as the croyable, who also became the subject of caricatures and a comedy.50 The term referred to the con artists and speculators who congregated on the steps (“Perron”) of the Palais Royal. In the play Les croyables, a young man orphaned by the Terror is robbed of his wallet by one of these sharpers only to have it restored to him by an upright citizen who has witnessed the theft. The work dramatizes the print Les croyables au Péron, which, according to one announcement, represents a croyable filching the handkerchief of an incroyable (fig. 10).51 In this scenario, ironically, the croyable is less than credible, and the incroyable is far from incredulous. The play and the print create an opposition between the croyable and

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the incroyable, but many texts would conflate the two types. In Henri Alexandre Allaire’s play Les hommes du jour (The men of the day), for example, a father is momentarily duped by an incroyable who seeks his daughter’s hand in marriage. The suitor is an ex-valet who has taken advantage of the social fluidity of Directory Paris to refashion himself as an upper-class citizen, and his friend, the incroyable Parfait, is a former croyable du perron and usurer who has amassed a fortune through dubious

10. Les croyables au Péron, engraving by J. P. Levilly ([Paris, ca. 1797]). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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business deals.52 As a servant observes, “[u]nder a borrowed costume,/ He who seems to us an incroyable,/Is often, when the mask has fallen,/ Only a scoundrel, who is very croyable.”53 The denouement reveals the usurious lending practices of the croyable, which ultimately discredit his companion as well. Ironically, by revealing the incroyable to be a croyable, the comedy exposes his incredibility, his discreditability. Or, to put it another way, the disclosure of his unbelievability makes him all-toobelievable, an all-too-real example of the fraud rife in Directory Paris. The examples above illustrate the melodramatic impulse of the paranoid imagination, revealing the truth beneath a social mask, but other texts tap into its ludic potential, playing on the ambiguity between the subject and the object of the critique. Like Allaire’s play, the pamphlet Les hommes du jour démasqués (The man of the day unmasked) adopts a strategy of revelation, unveiling the true identities of Directory glitterati.54 Its author, however, has added a playful twist: here it is the incroyables who point to their own incredibility. At the Théâtre Feydeau, the narrator overhears the conversation of several incroyables, whose gossip reveals the hypocrisy and false pretense of their companions; the author’s social commentary emerges almost entirely from the mouths of the people whom he condemns. At once incredulous and uncreditable, the incroyables are both the speakers and the referents of the phrase “c’est incroyable.” As the author playfully puts it, “what is becoming most incroyable, since the word itself is becoming it [i.e., incroyable], is that the incroyables of the incroyables band together.”55 In this sentence, the word alternates between its two functions, serving as a marker of both incredulity and unbelievability. The second part of the pamphlet describes an opera ball where the narrator, believing himself to have been mistaken (because of his costume) for an incroyable or an homme à pa-ole d’honneur, approaches a glamorous group and begins to imitate their repartee, eviscerating the assembled celebrities with his critiques. His interlocutors respond with uproarious laughter, “perceiving that they had launched him on the path of backbiting and of truth.”56 The final irony of the piece is that the uncreditable incroyables have taught the satirist to speak the truth. The pamphlet confuses and inverts the divide between the critic and the target of critique: if at the Feydeau the incroyables become the critics, at the opera ball the critic (the narrator) becomes an incroyable. The satirical use of “incroyable” as an adjective, thus, could be purely negative—a description of the falsity, posturing, and untrustworthiness of Directory society—but it could also be used in more playful ways that blurred the distinction between the subject and the object of the critique.

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The Incredible Many writers, however, reacted against this pejorative use of the word. A negative review in the Courrier des spectacles in April 1797, for example, objected to the representation of the incroyables in the comedy Les précieux du jour as “agioteurs, libertines, scoundrels, roués” and hinted at the author’s “perfidious intentions.”57 And the same journal complained that Les hommes du jour assigned incroyable costume to “parvenu people made rich at the expense of honnêtes gens.”58 Another piece, published in February 1797 in Le déjeuner, parodied the paranoia about dress that led many to condemn the incroyables. On November 12, 1796, the bureau central of the police had ordered the arrest of men sporting oreilles de chien, the incroyables’ signature hairstyle.59 The author of the article in Le déjeuner facetiously approves of such measures. Where people once believed that conspirators hid themselves from sight and used secret codes to communicate, the police force now know better: “it is the muscadin with his cocked head, whose getup strikes the eyes, who, being seen everywhere, does not feel himself sufficiently observed, . . . who conspires against the nation.”60 The author of the piece adopts the discourse of the paranoid imagination—representing incroyable accessories as signes de ralliement—but does so only to reveal its absurdity and the emptiness of the sartorial sign. Not only did these writers satirize the satire of the incroyables but they also began to take up its terms, giving them more positive meanings and values. An article written in defense of the singer Garat, known as the “coryphaeus of the incroyables,” praises him for both his munificence and his virtuosity, qualities that are truly incroyables.61 In this tribute, Garat is incredible in the sense of amazing: his extraordinary goodness challenges belief but is quite real. Other works attribute a similar generosity to the incroyables as a group. A print answering the Vernet caricature represents two young men giving alms to a poor woman, who comments, “Ah! Many criticize you! But few imitate you.”62 And at the end of a performance of the play Les vieux incroyables (The old incroyables), the actors praise the figure in song: We are much too reasonable To criticize the jeunes gens, And we know that the evildoers are not incroyables. . . . . . . . . .

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The jeunes gens’ method Is to love novelty greatly; But they retain, in changing fashions, Their wit and their loyalty. Yes, my friend, do not take it badly, One has always found honor Under the exterior and the color Of French frivolity.63

As with the terms “muscadins” and “jeunes gens” in Year III, some writers sought to reinflect the label, giving it a more positive meaning. This reappropriation of the term is clear in a series of texts whose authors identify themselves as incroyables or merveilleuses and defend their companions. The print Les merveilleuses (fig. 9), for example, provoked a facetious letter to the editor by a soi-disant merveilleuse, who lamented its mockery of female fashions: Jacobin raillery against muscadin fashions is “an allowable little vengeance,” but the fair sex should not be a target in this “war.” She defends the right of women in a republic to determine their own attire without male intervention: “in Rome and in the ancient republics, ladies dressed as they pleased.”64 A response, signed by “an incroyable,” sought to reassure the offended young lady: no one could confuse the “disfigured bodies” of the caricature with the elegance of a true merveilleuse; it was rather the incroyables, whom Vernet represented all too accurately, who ran the risk of being attacked on the streets.65 By identifying themselves (facetiously) as an incroyable and a merveilleuse, the authors of the letters seek to defuse these monikers and to reclaim the frivolity of fashion. This identification with the incroyable takes on a more playful tone in a quatrain on Vernet’s print: When you paint for us the features of the élégans of the day, Lend them at least your special touch. There you have only made their portraits; I would like their caricature.66

On the surface, these verses endorse the artist’s critique of the young men. So wild is their dress that what seems an exaggeration is actually an accurate representation—all-too-croyable. But though the poem seems critical, it is signed “By an Incroyable.” By identifying himself with the parodied

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figure and asking for its (and, by extension, his own) caricature, the poet revels in the flamboyance and over-the-topness of the incroyable pose. Another example in which an incroyable identifies himself with the image appears in an anonymous play performed on 6 pluviôse Year V (January 25, 1797) at the Théâtre Montansier, Les incroyables. The work gestures back to Picard’s La perruque blonde (discussed in chapter 2): not only are its principal characters named Adèle and Valcour as in the post-Thermidor piece, but the family servant—and deus ex machina—is also called Picard. Once again, two suitors vie for Adèle’s hand in marriage, but now it is the dandy Valcour whom she truly loves. His rival, Belmont, an old man who has become rich by illegal means, shows Vernet’s caricature to Adèle, in an attempt to discredit Valcour. In this play, however, the revelation backfires. Valcour recognizes himself in the image and proudly assumes the incroyable label. He then reveals the bullet holes in his military uniform, which prove his heroism and loyalty to the nation. “It is better,” he tells his rival, “to follow the trends than to wear an old-fashioned suit and to glut oneself on the sustenance of the people.”67 As in the letters to the editor by the soi-disant incroyable and merveilleuse, the point of the play is to dissociate appearance from morality and political identity, to discourage the ideological interpretation of dress. In the examples above, the use of “incroyable” as an adjective takes on a more positive sense, as writers and characters begin to identify with the term and to represent costume not as an ideological marker but as an empty sign that may be inhabited at will.

The Incredulous A similar process of reappropriation can be observed in the treatment of “incroyable” as an exclamation, in the use of the posture of incredulity. The ending of the Montansier play Les incroyables announces Bonaparte’s recent victory at the Battle of Rivoli, which prompts Belmont to exclaim, “8,000 men dead and 23,000 prisoners, c’est incroyable.”68 Ironically, the anti-incroyable finds himself echoing the incroyable’s characteristic riposte. His disbelief and annoyance at the news betray his lack of republican loyalty. Another text, a pamphlet titled Les inc-oyables à l’agonie: Pot-pourri (The inc-oyables at death’s door: Pot-pourri), in contrast, attributes this same reaction to several royalist-incroyables: “23,000, c’est inc-oyable!” As the pamphlet lists other successes of the Republic, the incroyables’ chagrin and disappointment increase, their riposte becoming

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an agonizing litany.69 The two works assign the exclamation to opposite sides (anti-incroyable vs. incroyable), but in both cases the incredulity is unpatriotic. That valorization, however, would also begin to change. Just as incroyable writers reinflected the adjective (shifting from incroyable as “unbelievable” to incroyable as “incredible” or “amazing”), so too would they take up the exclamation (“c’est incroyable!”) and use it as a deliberate strategy of critique. A poem published in the Rapsodies du jour and also inspired by Bonaparte’s victory in Italy illustrates this shift and explores the nuances of the phrase. At the beginning of the poem, the author, who signs himself Cap. L., recognizes that the set phrase is just that, a verbal fad: Seven whole years, for better or for worse, The Frenchman battles, rants, harangues; Today, more original, He corrects his language: Anyone else would say, “That argument Is surprising, is admirable.” To follow the current fashion, One says, C’est incroyable.

In these verses, the poet seems to regard the expression as did the muscadins’ and incroyables’ opponents: as an affectation of fashion, an empty phrase. But as he goes on, the refrain begins to accrue new meaning: Thus, when the government, Putting aside all politics, Promises us lasting happiness Under the laws of the Republic, One should say at that moment: “That is a very praiseworthy proceeding”; But, by the shock of the change, One says, C’est incroyable.70

Like the earlier stanza, these verses set up an opposition between an expected usage and the new phrase, but where the difference between them in the former is a question of fashion (c’est incroyable is trendier than surprenant or admirable), in the latter it is a matter of historical perspective. “C’est incroyable” here is not the meaningless buzzword of the present— the latest fashion—but an expression of the real disbelief caused by the

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startling discrepancy between the past and the current situation. Here the phrase expresses the perplexity of the anachronistic imagination. If in the verses above the poet hesitates before a truth that at first seems unbelievable, in the following stanza he refuses to believe a calumnious falsehood. When a “new Sartine” (Antoine de Sartine was a reviled chief of police in Paris during the ancien régime) attempts to expose the tentacles of “some conspiracy,” the Frenchman’s response is now “D’honneur, c’est incroyable.” Here, the phrase is neither a fad nor a historically conditioned bafflement but rather a healthy skepticism: a refusal to jump to conclusions and an implicit rejection of the paranoid imagination of the Terror with its ungrounded accusations and conspiracy theories. The poem, however, concludes by hinting at a more cynical type of disbelief: O you who hold the balance Of our unhappy country, Be so kind as to second its wishes, And alleviate its existence; Put an end to its torments By making a lasting peace; Or else, with our jeunes gens, I say, C’est incroyable.71

“C’est incroyable” here is not a judgment of inverisimilitude or falsehood so much as a gesture of dismissal, exasperation, and ironic distance. The poem, thus, explores four possible uses of the phrase: “c’est incroyable” may be (1) an empty affectation, (2) an expression of shock at the new (in relation to the past), (3) a refusal to believe a false denunciation, or (4) the verbal equivalent of throwing up one’s hands in response to an unpalatable reality. In all these cases, however, the exclamation expresses patriotic sentiment. The final sense of the expression—exasperation with a hopeless situation—forms the basis of a song, Citoyen Joron’s “La justification des incroyables (The justification of the incroyables),” that similarly legitimates the phrase as a form of political critique: Incroyable! that’s the word That everyone repeats endlessly; And with that word more than one idiot Seeks to insult the youth.

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As for me, I prove in my song That one can, without being an agréable,72 At every moment, with good reason, Say, “C’est incroyable!”73

In this poem what changes from stanza to stanza is not the nuance given to the phrase (in all cases Joron resorts to the fourth type, rejecting what he considers true facts as too disappointing or abhorrent to be believed) but rather the catalyst of the poet’s incredulity. The strophe that follows the verses cited above decries the hypocritical and corrupt fauna of contemporary society: the crooked government supplier (fournisseur) who profits from his position without munitioning the armies, the disreputable pamphleteer who now lives in luxury. The next stanza rejects inappropriate comparisons between the past and the present: discussions of Robespierre as a latter-day Cromwell or of the playwright Joseph Aude as a new Molière. Finally, the poem turns to the past itself, to the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Terror, which condemned women and children to death. Subtly moving from the present to the past, Joron blurs the distinctions among the different moments of the Revolution: the Terror and the postThermidor period run together in the general accusation of unbelievability. Where the verses in the Rapsodies du jour offer a narrative of progress (a shocking improvement), Joron takes a somewhat bleaker view: what is unbelievable and exasperating is the continuity between the past and the present. As Joron makes clear in the first and last stanzas, “incroyable” is but a new version of the derogatory label “muscadin,” and its inventor is “a destroyer, an executioner”: little has changed in France since the Terror. Another poem, however, adopts the same structure—first the present, then the present versus the past, and finally the past—but arrives at a very different conclusion. Published in Le menteur (The liar), the poem—“By an author who is very croyable even if he subscribes to the MENTEUR”—has as its epigraph a line from Boileau’s Art poétique: “The true can at times not be verisimilar.” In his opening verses, the poet affirms that this was never so much the case as in Directory France: “One has seen so many changes,/That doubt is very forgivable,/Successes, costumes, events/Today everything is incroyable.” These verses focus on the second sense of “c’est incroyable”: the unbelievability of the present when considered in relation to the recent past. The subsequent stanzas give examples of events that are unbelievable but true: Bonaparte’s victories (present); the contrast between old and new fashions and the altered for-

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tunes of the rentiers and the Brise-Scellés (present vs. past);74 and finally the horrors of the Terror (past). But in dealing with the latter, he clearly divides the past from the present (and future): They are past those days of horror, When innocence was immolated; The sweet aurora of happiness Begins to shine over France. What crimes we have seen During an abominable regime! When one remembers these facts, One will reply, c’est incroyable.75

Just as the present (Directory) is incroyable in light of the recent past (Terror), so Year II, the poet hopes, will be incroyable from the perspective of a more stable and peaceful future. Both Joron’s poem and the Menteur piece address the concerns of the anachronistic imagination, but where the former offers a narrative of continuity, the latter emphasizes the rupture between historical moments. This insistence on the break between the incredible past and the incredible present is the starting point of what is perhaps the most important (and widely reprinted) of these poems, “Le monde incroyable, ou Les hommes et les choses” (The incredible world, or Men and things), by the well-known author and playwright Armand Charlemagne.76 Future generations, he observes, will find unbelievable both the “disastrous deeds” of the recent past and the absurdities of the new age, but “for his health” he chooses to amuse himself by reflecting on the latter—a more lighthearted pastime. Like the other poets, Charlemagne lingers over the unbelievable personalities of the present: its nouveaux riches, its inept leaders, its acclaimed yet talentless authors. Charlemagne, however, adds two distinctive twists, which are important for understanding the function of the incroyable. The first relates to his handling of the relation between the satirist and the satirized, the subject and the object of critique. In the other “c’est incroyable” poems, the lyric voice adopts the stance of the incredulous subject in order to critique an incredible object, an unbelievable social reality. At first, it would seem that Charlemagne reproduces this pose: “I am an onlooker: everything amazes me,/ . . . /My eyes are dazzled.” By the end of the poem, however, his position has changed:

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And we, in the heart of all of this, On the crater of Etna Posing as beautiful, as agreeable, Without a compass and without an almanac Dancing gaily on the upper deck, When pirates cut the cables Of our disarrayed vessel, About to go to the devil . . . . . Seeing thus what I see, My dear fellow citizens, my faith, We are all quite incroyable.77

In these verses, the incredulous “I” becomes an unbelievable “we,” as the subject and object of the critique merge (notably, one abbreviated version of the poem is signed “by an incroyable”).78 If in Les hommes du jour démasqués the satirized society figures become the satirists, here the satirist becomes the object of satire. Charlemagne’s poem, thus, combines the two strategies that we have seen so far: the appropriation of “c’est incroyable” (the incredulous posture) as a weapon of critique and the reinflection of a derogatory label (embracing incroyable as a positive attribute). The second twist in Charlemagne’s poem relates to the target of his critique. What he satirizes is not an unbelievable situation so much as a lack of correspondence between truth and representation, reality and language: And the more I see, the more I suspect That there are virtues, talents, And eminent merits That no one had suspected; . . . . . . . . . . Incredible truths In the speeches of the Tribunal, An incredible honesty In the offices of our authorities, . . . . . . . . . . . An incredible equality, An incredible liberty, From one end of France to the other.79

By pairing the clichés of republican language with the adjective “incroyable,” Charlemagne in a sense puts them in quotation marks; in each case the phrase is showcased as such, as nothing more than a phrase. While the

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poet poses as the naïve admirer of such incredible (i.e., amazing) truths, the other sense of “incroyable” marks these discourses as “unbelievable,” hinting at the gap between the word and the thing. It is important, however, to distinguish this strategy from the unveiling of hypocrisy common in revolutionary discourse. Charlemagne is not revealing a reality that lies beneath the fiction so much as pointing to the constructedness of political discourses. With his signature adjective, Charlemagne puts quotation marks around the roles and code words of Directory politics. The two strategies of Charlemagne’s poem—ironic citation and the confusion of subject and object—converge again in the following passage from Le menteur: “Oh! How he has done well to lie, this Menteur [Liar] whose title has shocked people of little reflection! The freedom [liberté] of the press will soon be like all the other liberties, a liberty. . . . Damnation! I was going to forget my title and stupidly say the truth. Let’s just say that [the] freedom [liberté] will be incroyable, and the Menteur will be able to lie with impunity.”80 The author of this passage at once deflates a contemporary buzzword, putting quotation marks around the term “liberté,” and represents himself as incroyable in every sense: he is both an unreliable narrator (a liar, an object of disbelief) and an incredulous observer (the subject who doubts the existence of true freedom). Playing on the double sense of liberté (freedom and impropriety) and of “incroyable” (amazing and unbelievable), he revels in the uncertainties and mutual mirroring of a lying reality and a lying subject. His own unbelievability reflects and reveals that of the world around him. The incroyable’s relation with his dress reflects these rhetorical strategies. For just as he puts political signs and discourses into quotation marks, he also brackets and points to the irony of his own appearance. The political implications of this approach are clear in another anecdote, in which an incroyable responds to an onlooker who has mistaken his jacket for a short petticoat: Does monsieur not know that this is an habit à la république? . . . Well, monsieur, this cut without buttons, without legs, all united, these tails, which are not separated behind, and crossed in front, all of this forms an ensemble, a sort of cluster, which represents perfectly unity and indivisibility; if you add the liberty that is allowed by its ampleness, the equality and fraternity that exist between the small chains designed to close the lapels ‘en schall’ over the chest, you will have, I believe, the true image of a republican state. And they dare to say that we are chouans, when we carry on our back and on our shoulders the whole Republic! C’est incroyable, monsieur, c’est incroyable!81

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On the surface, it might seem that this passage dismisses republican discourses by reducing them to sartorial fads. Its critique, however, goes beyond mere trivialization. For the incroyable is also satirizing the idea of wearing ideas, the expectation of ideological transparency in appearance. In the early years of the Revolution, republican orthodoxy had often imposed a dress code: de rigueur accessories such as the cockade or bonnet rouge, a virtuous dressing down (sansculotterie). The habit à la république, however, suggests the shallowness and inefficacy of such propaganda through dress. Ironically, the incroyable deflates this idea by citing it, by parroting the discourse of sartorial legibility. He is, in a sense, wearing the idea of wearing ideas: he is at once the subject of the critique and its object. Both the orthodox republican subject and the incroyable use dress to make a political commentary, but it is important to register the difference between their strategies. Revolutionary accessories point to a meaning beyond themselves; incroyable getup points to its own status as a sign. These incroyable strategies would become central in the debates about the collets noirs, which similarly involved a paradoxical type of critique, one in which clothes become the signifiers of their own designification.

Collets Noirs In the final stanzas of “Le monde incroyable,” Charlemagne imagines the incroyables dancing on the crater of Etna, oblivious to the danger lurking beneath and about to erupt. This sense of imminent doom increased in the summer of 1797. After the germinal elections confirmed a right-wing majority in the Conseils, rumors of conspiracies and coups circulated widely, creating a growing sense of anxiety and instability. In this charged atmosphere, the daily confrontations between the collets noirs and the military seemed to signal a catastrophe on the horizon. One poet saw the street conflicts as a clear portent of a coup by the triumvirs, the three left-leaning directors, Barras, Reubell, and La Réveillière-Lépeaux: “[T]hree members of the Directory/Have in mind a vast plot,/And want to make a coup de main./ When some of their satellites,/Using illicit means,/Cut off a bourgeois’s collar,/Ah! . . . that is ugly.”82 And another poem, addressed to the “cutters of black collars,” spelled out the historical parallels even more bluntly: While you have, with your crimes, Covered France with scaffolds, We wear mourning for the victims,

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Just as you do the costume of the executioners. To prove our patience And to put an end to your fury, Of the costume that offends you We could change the colors; But your indiscreet menacing Has revealed to us your projects And you reserve for our heads The same fate as for our collars.83

In these verses, the attacks on the collar wearers do not just profane the mourning for the victims of Year II; they also seem a reversion to the violence of the Terror.84 The poet’s parallelism was not altogether ungrounded: condemnations of the collets noirs often echoed the harangues of Père Duchesne against the muscadins, with similar accusations of draft dodging and pusillanimity.85 Mercier, for example, defined the blackcollared youths as AWOL conscripts, émigrés or “edgy petits-maîtres . . . whose sole merit consists of aping ridiculously the idiocies of the day.”86 In such an atmosphere, paranoia was inevitable. Many suspected that the soldiers who attacked the collets noirs were actually Jacobins in disguise, intent on inciting trouble or pushing the young men toward excesses such as those of vendémiaire Year III.87 But rumor also had it that General Pierre Augereau, whose regiment menacingly surrounded Paris, had ordered his troops to bring him “the shoulders of all those zeunes zens à collets noirs”—the first step in putting Babeuf ’s plot into effect. 88 Others suggested that the collets noirs were actually “satellites of Robespierre” who were attempting to provoke anger against the jeunes gens.89 Some journals went so far as to claim that the entire conflict was staged, with Jacobins—true “Proteans”—playing both roles.90 Still others denounced the collets noirs as royalist intriguers, associated with figures involved in the right-wing Brottier conspiracy or with the turncoat general JeanCharles Pichegru, whose treachery the triumvirs would use as a pretext for the coup of 18 fructidor.91 Hoping to allay the tension, some writers advised the young men to give up their controversial accessory.92 Others suggested that they trade it for the uniform of the national guard, the reorganization of which had been mandated by a recent law in an attempt to protect the Conseils and private property.93 But a large number of commentators insisted that the jeunes gens wear their costume proudly and advocated self-defense in the event of an attack.94 One journalist, for example, anticipated that “incroyables with open shoes and large cravats would blow out the brains of the

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insolent croyables (1) who took it into their head to touch their collar.” In the footnote, he cites the caricature Les croyables au Péron (fig. 10), which he interprets as a depiction of a “Jacobin robbing an honnête homme.”95 What was in earlier descriptions a representation of the fraud and pilfering of the Palais Royal had now become a political allegory. In fructidor Year V, it was not the petty thieves and sharpers but the Left, the Jacobins, who most threatened private property. The collets noirs were on the defensive, but unlike the muscadins of Year II, they were prepared to fight back.

Signs without Meaning Discussions of the collets noirs recall not only the images of the incroyables but also the strategies and logic of the literature around the figure: they question the paranoid thinking that has led to the skirmishes and willfully inhabit and reinflect the negative sign (they quite literally inhabit it). Their opponents assume that the black collar is a signe de ralliement, a symbol pointing to a political affiliation and project, but for the young men and their defenders, the collar is a sign that gestures only to its status as a sign. As in the incroyable literature discussed above, the collets noirs do not expose a truth hidden beneath but rather draw attention to the surface as surface. A playful example of this reinflection and reappropriation of the contested term is the song “Les collets noirs” by Ange Pitou, the legendary troubadour of the Right, who was routinely thrown into jail for his provocative performances.96 The ditty, which would once again lead to his arrest, begins by insisting on the innocence of fashion: why, he asks, should we “turn the world upside down” for a black collar or a blond wig? But he then sets aside the political question to offer an intriguing etiology for the offending collar: On radiant Olympus, When Venus, emerging from the waves, Was admitted to the rank of the gods, One would say that she was blond. To give her the art of pleasing, Love made appear Near the temple of mystery His/her collar [son collet] bordered with black. To the mother of Love Each god made his oblation;

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But Mars took, before his turn, The first right of offering. Oh! My most beautiful accessory, She told him, is to have Beneath my girdle Your collar bordered with black. To punish the extreme audacity Of a collar destroyer, Love, the judge of the misdeed, Knew how to avenge it by the thing itself. The gallant, by chance, Going up to Thisbé’s place one evening, Finds under her girdle A red and white and black collar.97

Pitou’s verses lend themselves to a number of readings. At one level, the poem offers a mythological allegory of current events: the cutter of black collars profanes the ribbon sacred to Venus and is punished for his crime by her son Love. The poem, however, is also an obscene joke, the temple of mystery bordered in black a not-so-subtle allusion to female genitalia. It is not difficult to imagine why Venus delights in having Mars’s black collar beneath her girdle. Pitou’s strategy is to depoliticize the black collar by eroticizing it. His composition illustrates a tendency that Laura Mason has observed in the song culture of the Directory: an attempt to dissociate singing from politics, to “[replace] republican enthusiasm with taste, literary accomplishment, and wit.”98 But it would be a mistake to dismiss the song as merely ludic or lewd. For the basic dichotomy of these verses—oblation versus sacrilege—is at once an opposition between two relations to clothing. On the one hand, the song alludes to the tradition of Venus donning the armor of Mars: the goddess wears his black collar. Cross-dressing and self-fashioning, she takes pleasure in the disconnect between surface and depth, between the bellicose and the amorous. On the other hand, the “destroyer of collars”— the one who profanes the surface—looks for a truth beneath the clothing and discovers signs of his lover’s infidelity. The miscreant is punished by precisely the type of revelation or unmasking that typified Jacobin discourse and the paranoid imagination. The promiscuity that the transgressor discovers is in a sense the perfect metaphor for Pitou’s strategy, for the polyvalence he finds in the term “collet noir.” Just as Thisbé has many men (red, white, and black), the black collar has many possible meanings in the song (a fashionable accessory,

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Venus’s or Mars’s genitalia, etc.). The song’s final verses, however, move from this multiplicity of senses to a multiplicity of signs and styles: If Aristide is in love, With grimy pants, A red or gray garment, Let him dress as he pleases; If the bonnet and the pike Tickle his fancy, Let him take them up without reprisal, As for me, I want a black collar. One can, without being mischievous, Say with certainty That it is the dress of Harlequin That best suits France. Because the demon of fashion, Among us, from morning until night, Makes, unmakes, and mends A red collar, and white and black.

The last verse of the song links the mutability of fashion to the promiscuity of Thisbé. Both consort with collars of many colors. Craftily, however, Pitou has moved from a sign that can mean many different things to a plurality of signs that mean nothing, to the empty theatricality of Harlequin. What enables this transition is the confusion between subject and object, between wearing and wanting. When Pitou craves a black collar, is it an object of desire (a woman) or a tool of self-fashioning, a way to style himself as a subject (a collar)? In these verses, the critic once again in-habits the controversial sign (he puts on the black collar), but Pitou, winking at his audience, gives inhabiting a whole new meaning. His point would seem to be that dress is but an expression of desire; wearing is wanting. If our longings are constantly changing, styles must always be in flux. Ultimately, the poem serves to empty fashion of meaning, to reveal the sign as a sign, mere passing fancy. Pitou’s final image of a multicolored collar has a visual analogue in a print from the same period: Collets dit parasabre: Pouvant servir de traité de paix entre les puissances belligerentes de Paris (The so-called parasabre collar: which may serve as a peace treaty among the belligerant forces of Paris, fig. 11). The caricature represents a soldier cutting off the collar of an elegantly dressed young man at the insistence of an irate sansculotte, who

11. Collets dit parasabre ([Paris, ca. 1797]). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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accuses the victim of being a member of the right-wing Clichy Club and a partisan of the traitor Pichegru. His patriotism, however, is not without self-interest: “Tear it off,” yells the ragged zealot, wielding the left-wing Révélateur and Ami du peuple. “[H]is collars are just right for making us cravats.” Caught in between, the soldier expresses misgivings: “In listening to all these derelicts,” he confesses, “I feel that I lose my glory.” To the left, a tailor seeks to intervene, holding up a checkered collar that he calls a collet parasabre (i.e., a collar that protects against a sabre). In an article in Le grondeur, a writer claiming to be the tailor explains the origin and meaning of the garment. To make up for the many deaths caused by the tight culottes he sold during the “reign of the carmagnole” (i.e., the Terror), he has decided to create a collar that would be “a peace treaty for the belligerent powers of Paris.”99 The accessory has forty-eight squares “because that is more or less the number of different public opinions that I have witnessed in the last six years.”100 Thus, the wearer may vary his color according to his interlocutor, avoiding conflict and violence. As in Pitou’s song, the accessory is a sign that accommodates a multiplicity of meanings. Other works, however, insist that the collar has no meaning whatsoever: it is a reflection of fashion alone. This is the lesson of J. Boullault’s comedy Les incroyables, ou La liberté des modes (The incroyables, or The freedom of fashion), which premiered in Brest on August 11, 1797, less than a month before the coup d’état, and which took up the plot of the Montansier play of pluviôse Year V. In the play, a young man named Forlis is about to marry his cousin Jenny when a rival attempts to discredit him by calling him an incroyable. As in the earlier work, the dénouement reveals Forlis’s selflessness and honor and restores him to the good opinion of his uncle. But where in the Montansier play, the interloper was a wealthy old man who simply drew attention to the absurdity of the hero’s attire, the villain here is M. Tribune, a slanderer whose name evokes the Revolutionary Tribunal. To separate the young lovers, Tribune convinces Jenny’s father that Forlis has betrayed both his nation and his fiancée. In a soliloquy, he praises his own ruse with the buzzwords of the Terror: he has dispensed with the nephew and rescued the “res publica” by “a measure of sûrété général [general security],” by staging a “revolution.”101 What was in January a benign domestic comedy has now become overt political allegory—a commentary on the growing tension in France on the eve of Fructidor. As in many of the poems, the play elaborates its political commentary by probing the nuances of the word “incroyable.” In the opening scene,

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the servant describes Tribune as “one of those people who don’t like the jeunes gens in squared jackets; he calls them Incroyables, Chouans, Royalists, as if tailors’ scissors had cut the counterrevolution.”102 In this instance, “incroyable” is a dangerous label much like “muscadin” in Year II. Almost immediately, however, the servant introduces another use of the term: disgusted by the many “frères et amis” (i.e., the Jacobins, or former terroristes) who have taken advantage of their political position to make a fortune, he observes that “everything here is incroyable.”103 “Incroyable” is now an expression of exasperation with a frustrating reality. The word appears again in the sense of “unbelievable” in the love scene between Forlis and Jenny: “when I paint for you my love,” he sings, “I am not at all an incroyable.” In all of these cases, “incroyable” has a negative inflection. As the play goes on, however, the connotation of the term begins to shift. In praising Jenny, Forlis begins to embrace the fashionable terminology: when she complains about being called a merveilleuse while walking in the Tuileries, Forlis observes that her charms are indeed marvelous.104 And by the end of the play, “incroyable” too will have a positive sense. Forlis’s friend, the soldier Francœur, observes that the youths to whom the term refers were the heroes of the Battle of Fleurus in 1794 (an important victory over the Austrians) and the defenders of the Convention during the Prairial Uprising of Year III. “All Frenchmen,” he concludes, “are Incroyables in war as in love.”105 As the term becomes innocuous and even positive, so too does the vision of fashion in the play. When Francœur returns from the war sporting a squared jacket and tressed hair (an incroyable style), Tribune accuses him of wearing signes de ralliement. “Yes,” the young man retorts, “the rallying signs of fashion.”106 Not only does Tribune judge Francœur by his clothing but he also takes advantage of appearances to discredit Forlis: he shows Jenny’s father a letter from Forlis that he has intercepted and whose “expressions offer the appearance of a crime.”107 Tribune projects false meaning onto both clothing and writing. The heroine, however, refuses to accept these superficial signs as evidence of her lover’s treachery: “his pure heart,” she argues, “is painted in his accents.”108 Jenny privileges orality, the tone of Forlis’s voice, and the body, his heart, over the written word and dress. In this opposition, the work resembles the many revolutionary plays that reveal the truth of the body beneath false or misleading disguises. But where such texts generally reject ambiguous appearances and insist on transparent signs, Les incroyables, ou La liberté de la mode suggests that we stop reading the surface altogether, for fashion is a rallying sign that points only to itself.

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I m p e n d i n g C a ta s t r o p h e Toward the end of the play, Jenny’s father advises Forlis to give up his squared redingottes for “public tranquillity.” Francœur, however, defends his friend’s fashion: In following your advice, your nephew would show a blameworthy docility. It would only toughen those men who would like to chain us up again. Even if monsieur changes tomorrow the cut of his coat, the day after tomorrow, he will be equally subject to ill will, which will believe that fear alone has made him yield. It [i.e., ill will] will become bolder from this; it will demand every day something more; and we will find ourselves, by degrees, once more metamorphosed into frères et amis.109

Francœur’s words echo a common argument in newspaper discussions in the days leading up to 18 fructidor.110 Two days before the coup, a writer for the Journal général de France envisioned a similar but more extreme scenario. As soon as the young men gave up their collars, he observed, their cadenettes (long locks) would give offense. When they cut their hair, it would be their tight culottes and their squared jackets. And after they adopted grimy pants and the carmagnole, their hats would remain “a rallying sign of the muscadins.” Soon they would be forced to wear the bonnet rouge of the frères et amis. And once the jeunes gens were “[t]ransformed into Jacobins from head to foot,” their enemies would insist that wealth and food be redistributed equally. But even this would not appease the Jacobins, for they would still need to find out the “opinions, the secret thoughts,” of their adversaries. The prisons would quickly fill with “suspects,” and “since it is better to be judged in any old fashion rather than to be given over to the braves of September 2 and 3 [i.e., the September Massacres of 1792],” they would establish tribunals and erect a guillotine in the Place de la Révolution.111 With each garment removed, the jeunes gens would take a step back in time until not only their neckwear but also their necks were on the line. In espousing the nontranscendence of fashion and drawing attention to the sign as a sign, the young men were not engaging in empty rhetorical play or an apolitical “deconstructionism.” As the summer wore on, such nightmarish scenarios became increasingly frequent in the press. Only a few weeks before, an article titled “Du calme et du courage!” (Calm and courage!) in the Journal général de France had recalled a similar situation discussed in Montesquieu’s Considérations

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sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734).112 The passage in question concerned a division that arose between two factions in Byzantium under Justinian: the greens and the blues. Originally the two groups were fans of different actors and chariot racers, but soon they became full-fledged political parties. Exercising an arbitrary favoritism, Justinian privileged the blues over the greens and denied the latter access to justice. This bias only intensified the opposition between the two groups and weakened the force of law. Backed by the emperor, the blues no longer had any reason to obey rules, and the greens ignored them as well because they no longer protected them from their enemies. The situation devolved into a civil war in which “[a]ll ties of friendship, blood, duty, and gratitude were broken,” and entire families were annihilated.113 The anecdote represents the nightmare of the catastrophic imagination, a conflict over signs that results in mutual destruction. The relevance of this anecdote to the situation in Year V was clear as early as the germinal elections, when the right-wing journal Le thé reprinted the Montesquieu passage under the title “Les croyables et les incroyables, ou Les verts et les bleus (The croyables and the incroyables, or The greens and the blues).” The interpretation of the passage, however, would shift tellingly between the version in Le thé in the spring and that of “Du calme et du courage!” in fructidor. The germinal reprinting had included and added emphasis to the following sentence in Montesquieu: “but divisions, always necessary in a republican government to maintain it, cannot but be fatal to a government of emperors, because they produce only a change in sovereign, and not the reestablishment of the laws and the end of abuses.”114 After the elections, the incroyables might seem, like the blues, to enjoy a privileged position, one that might lead to resentment and conflict, but the point of the passage is that in a republic such divisions are not a threat. Indeed, the possibility of difference is necessary in such a government. The August article “Du calme et du courage!” took up the passage from Montesquieu but neglected and omitted the distinction between republics and empires. Writing at the height of the collar conflicts, the division between the collets noirs and bonnets rouges seemed just as perilous as that of the greens and blues in Byzantium. The author concludes, “This is what will be, among us, the fate of the Constitution. . . . This is what will be, in France, the fate of the families who have escaped the decemviral blade” (“decemvir” was a pejorative term for the members of the Committee of Public Safety). Montesquieu’s confidence in republican law has now disappeared. What strikes the commentator is rather the triviality of the cause and the catastrophic nature of its effect: “it is for words and

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for costumes that men have killed one another at all times.”115 As in many of the texts that we have seen, the author draws attention to the sign as a sign, to its fundamental emptiness, but this observation is in no way reassuring. It was not necessary, however, to travel as far back or so far away as Justinian’s Byzantium to arrive at the same conclusion. A writer for Le thé would find several analogues for this war over words in French history. His first example is the invention of bouts rimés by the minor poet Dulot in the seventeenth century. According to legend, Dulot was the victim of a robbery in which three hundred of his sonnets were stolen. When he complained of his loss, his friends expressed skepticism: how could such a talentless soul have amassed such a “poetic fortune”? But Dulot explained that the sonnets were bouts rimés, lines that contained nothing but the final rhyming words. His circle found the idea of fill-in-the-blank poetry so amusing that it quickly became a favorite game of court society. In 1653, Jean François Sarasin composed a mock epic titled Dulot vaincu, ou La défaite des bouts-rimés (Dulot vanquished, or The defeat of the rhyming endings), which satirized the fad. Written in the style of the Batrachomyomachia, the Homeric battle between frogs and mice, the work recounts how an army of bouts rimés, led by Dulot, besieged good poetry in Paris and how the latter ultimately prevailed. “Nothing else was necessary,” observes Le thé, “for bouts rimés to be proscribed.”116 The second analogue of the costume wars deals not with words but with hair. In 1096, the archbishop of Rouen threatened to excommunicate men who wore their hair long. Obediently, Louis VII of France sacrificed his locks and beard. His wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, however, despised the new style and sought to dissolve their union. After the annulment, Eleanor married Henry, the Duke of Normandy and future king of England, bringing him as her dowry Poitou and Guyenne. The incident set off three hundred years of war between the two countries in which over three million Frenchmen died.117 The example clearly stretches historical causality, but its logic reflects the situation of fructidor Year V. In both the dispute over the black collars and the papal ordinance about hairstyles, trivial proscriptions carry the risk of violence and destruction. As in the discussion of the greens and the blues in “Du calme et du courage!,” the author foregrounds with this anecdote the meaninglessness of the signs that cause such catastrophes.118 What distinguishes the article in Le thé, however, is the commentary implicit in the first example, the bouts rimés. For here it is not a silly interdiction that provokes a civil war but rather a contrived confrontation (the

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fictional battle of genres that Sarasin imagines) that leads to the prohibition. The author’s commentary on the contemporary situation reflects this anecdote structurally. After laying out his historical analogues, he argues that the triumvirs are attempting to provoke an offensive move on the part of the jeunes gens, which would justify military intervention in support of “national representation” and against tyrannical enemies.119 This strategy is ultimately the same as Sarasin’s: through his fiction, he makes the bouts rimés attack good poetry, which reacts by defending the standards of taste and expelling its rivals. The parallelism between the jeunes gens and the bouts rimés is interesting in light of the opposition established in the anecdote about Dulot. The conflict between the two forms of poetry is not an opposition between two empty signs (greens vs. blues; long hair vs. short). Rather, it is a distinction between empty and full, between surface and depth, between a fill-in-the-blank structure that accommodates a variety of contents and contexts and the completed, artful lyric, which has a more fixed range of meaning. In the logic of the article, the young men are not championing the black collar (the example of Louis VII’s hair has already exposed its meaninglessness) so much as the possibility of a sign divorced from meaning. They revindicate not the empty sign as full—as a conveyor of ideological meaning—but rather the empty sign as empty. Like Dulot, however, they would be defeated. On 18 fructidor, Barras, Reubell, and La Réveillière-Lépeaux used a recently exposed royalist conspiracy as a pretext for a military occupation of Paris. Overturning the results of the germinal election, they sent sixty-five deputies and the two right-leaning directors, Carnot and Barthélemy, into exile. Almost all the journals cited above were closed, their staff deported to Guiana. The incroyables and collets noirs had been defeated: in one print from the period, the triumvirs appear spanking an incroyable (fig. 12). The title of the image is telling: Correction croyable. The lens of incredibility and nontranscendence through which the incroyables had viewed Directory society had cracked; the end of the Republic a few years later would be all-too-believable. Although the muscadin and the incroyable succumb to a similar fate, the literatures surrounding them differ dramatically in their logic. The idea of the muscadin, as we saw in chapter 1, triggers the anxieties of the paranoid imagination: concerns about false identities and hidden truths. In Père Duchesne, Hébert constantly seeks a difference that underlies the superficial sameness between the modéré and other republicans. He attempts to reveal the different shades beneath the homogeneous poppy

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12. Correction croyable ([Paris, ca. 1797]). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

field of bonnets rouges. The paranoid imagination reacts to simulacra, artificial replicas, and seeks to uncover the truth, an underlying difference of belief. The incroyable and collet noir texts, in contrast, underscore the sameness that underlies superficial differences in appearance. The tragedy of the blues and the greens is that minor distinctions take on exaggerated importance and divide the nation, introducing an us-versus-them scenario. The incroyable writers attempted to avert such catastrophic confrontation by putting quotation marks around the “us” and the “them,” by insisting on the insignificance of fashion. And in so doing, they sought to make room for differences, to make possible the coexistence of political opponents and to introduce a more nuanced ideological spectrum: not a poppy field but a multicolored collar. Disbelief is the common denominator of the literatures concerning the muscadin and the incroyable. But what is distrust of appearances in the former becomes in the latter a distrust of depth, an insistence on the superficiality of the surface. Like the hero in Dorvo’s Figaro de retour à Paris, the incroyables perform difference in order to underscore its nontranscendence.

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The texts around the jeunes gens swing back and forth between the heaviness of the muscadin and the lightness of the incroyable. In this literature, the problem of similarity and difference is projected onto historical periods. Is Year III but a continuation of Year II with superficial differences? Or is there a real rupture between the two moments despite the apparent similarities? The jeunes gens were unable to resolve this question in part because their own political culture (street confrontations, labeling, etc.) was so very similar to the one that they condemned. The importance of the incroyable literature was its attempt to move away from the contradictions and excesses of the jeunes gens and toward a lighter and more ironic form of political discourse.

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Currutacos In early May 1795, Juan Antonio de Iza Zamácola, writing under the pseudonym of Don Preciso, published a letter in the Diario de Madrid that gave birth to a new fad. The subject of the newspaper piece was a phenomenon that Preciso had observed while walking through the streets of Madrid: the enormous popularity of a group of caballeritos (little gentlemen) who, though only four feet tall, seemed to be turning the heads of all the young ladies. At first, Preciso is unable to understand the social success of these pint-size men, but after overhearing a conversation, he realizes that they excel at a new form of contredanse innovated by one Don Currutaco and his companion, the abate (abbé) Pirracas. Hoping to increase his own appeal, Preciso resolves to master this new style, to become a “scientific professor” of choreography and composition “to see if with study and application I could one day occupy the place of the Currutacos, the Pirracas, and other illustrious men who have made discoveries in the contredansarian science.”1 In his letter to the newspaper, he announces his invention of new tunes and dances, which have won him (or so he believes) great acclaim among the señoritas de nuevo cuño (the new-minted misses). Don Currutaco, however, is not impressed. In a letter of reply—probably penned by the Augustinian friar Juan Fernández de Rojas (1750– 1819)—he rejects Preciso’s fashionable pretensions and accuses him of insulting “the most brilliant and numerous part of Madrid, that is, the Currutacos, Pirracas, and Señoritas del nuevo cuño.” Defending his tiny comrades, he advises the oversized Preciso to dance with the trees of the Prado or with the Giralda (in Seville). In the process, he converts the terms Cur-

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rutacos and Pirracas, used in Preciso’s first letter to refer to the creators of the new style, into common nouns alluding to the class as a whole.2 The currutacos would become even more common in the weeks that followed. Debates about the miniature dancers filled the Diario de Madrid and soon spread to Barcelona, Zaragoza, and other areas.3 Within months, the facetious polemic had spilled out of the press and into other genres, including poems, vaudeville plays, and mock treatises such as the flamboyant Libro de moda en la feria (Book of fashion at the fair, 1795), attributed to Fernández de Rojas.4 In August 1795, Luis Moncín produced a short theatrical piece titled Los currutacos del día (The currutacos of the day), which featured Don Preciso himself, who boasted that his “name already fatigue[d] the presses.”5 And fatigue it did. So voluminous was the literature on the subject that one writer claimed that it had driven up the price of paper.6 Even Fernández de Rojas—Don Currutaco himself !— began to complain about the phenomenon in his Censor mensual column in the Diario de Madrid.7 Soon it became common for currutaco letters to begin by lamenting the commonness of currutaco letters.8 This vulgarization of the term—its journey from proper noun to common noun to commonplace—has at times led to a distorted vision of the figure to which it referred. The earliest incarnations of the type were midgets with “screeching little chicken voices,” fantastical, allegorical creatures identified in one text with Swift’s Lilliputians.9 (In Los currutacos del día, the abate Pirracas hangs himself from his door at night in a futile attempt to stretch himself to normal human length.) Later writers, who were not always in on the joke, however, often assumed that currutacos and pirracas actually existed.10 In 1797, two years after the initial exchange, Fernández de Rojas would lament that the term was frequently misused, applied to “all those who dress according to fashion.”11 Indeed, as the word became common, it was often employed as a synonym for petimetre, the term used for the dandified male throughout the eighteenth century.12 An adaptation of the French petit-maître, the petimetre was from its beginning a Francophile, an absurd figure with which satirists reacted against Bourbon influence and fashions in Spain and against imported luxury goods that threatened national industries and values.13 As the two terms began to be used interchangeably in later writings, the currutaco would take on this feature, and by 1800, as the fad was dying down, reactions against his Francophilia became common.14 These later representations of currutacos as afrancesados have led a number of critics to assume that the figure was simply another expression of anti-French sentiment.15

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But if we look back to the early Madrid texts—those identified with Don Preciso and Don Currutaco—it becomes clear that the originators of the fad consistently avoided ascribing to it the Francophilia of the petimetre.16 The Libro de moda eschews references to France and French clothing and considers London to have assumed an “interim governance of fashions” during the Revolution. And in the currutaco family tree, which includes almost all of Europe (even Germany gets a branch, if a tiny and distant one!), France is pointedly absent.17 When Don Preciso writes his Elementos de la ciencia contradanzaria (Elements of the contredansarian science), he turns not to French but to Spanish sources, cribbing from a treatise on Valencian dances. Indeed, where he finds most inspiration is in the traffic patterns of the Puerta del Sol, a square in Madrid considered to be the very center (the so-called “kilometer zero”) of Spain.18 In these early texts, currutaquería involves a conscious Hispanization of the petimetre figure, a repression of its Frenchness.19 This is clear even in the name of the figure. As Joan Corominas and others have observed, the word currutaco derives from curro (a nickname for Francisco, which came to designate a majo, or stylish Andalusian peasant) and retaco (small).20 What I would add is that this combination is simply an inversion of the French term: petit (small) + maître (master or gentleman). The new term, it would seem, de-Gallicizes the existing convention, turning it on its head and giving it a Spanish flair. René Andioc, who has most exhaustively and insightfully studied the currutaco, relates the figure to the incroyable.21 Here too, however, some clarification is necessary, for the Spanish type actually precedes the French one chronologically. The latter became popular with the publication of the Vernet prints in late December 1796; the currutaco outpouring dates to the spring of 1795. Incroyable literature certainly influenced currutaco works published from 1797 on (most notably, as Andioc has argued, Francisco Goya’s Caprichos), but it is not the source of the figure.22 Nor is the currutaco simply a Spanish version of the muscadins or jeunesse dorée of the Thermidorian Reaction. For while these figures are certainly in the background (as will become clear when we turn to the Libro de moda), the Spanish literature about the currutaco takes on a decidedly different feel and form. “Muscadin” is generally a derogatory term and target of satire, not a persona that writers assume and play with, and the writings of the jeunes gens and their leaders (the articles of Fréron, Martainville, etc.) have a polemical, strident tone that is lacking in the more ludic Spanish texts. Indeed, it is not a simple matter to line up the figure with its contem-

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poraries across the Pyrenees. Some later texts do pair the currutaco with the incroyable: the title character of Pablo del Moral’s tonadilla “El poeta” (ca. 1800), for example, has on his bookshelf a “Dialogue of the Currutaco and the Increíble,” and the currutaco wannabe in Luis Santiago Bado’s El libro a gusto de todos (Book to everyone’s liking, ca. 1800) admires the hairstyle known as “á la Incroyable.”23 (Figure 13, one of the few visual representations of the type, also recalls the Vernet prints.) In some texts,

13. Perfecto currutaco (ca. 1795–1800). Museo de Historia. Ayuntamento de Madrid.

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moreover, the currutaco sports a chaleco de guillotina (guillotine waistcoat), a style worn by the jeunes gens and incroyables in solidarity with the guillotined aristocrats.24 Other works, however, dress the currutaco not in incroyable but in sansculotte styles such as the frac á lo sansculot (sansculotte frock coat), corbatas á la Jacobina (Jacobin cravats), pelo á la Jacobina (Jacobin haircut), and the caramañolas (carmagnole, the short jacket of the sansculottes).25 In the satirical poem “Judas, instructor de currutacos” (1798), a peasant asks a companion what a citoyen is and is told that it is a long cloak worn by the currutacos when their breeches are torn: therefore, according to what we’re told by the broadsheets from France, the currutacos would be new sansculottes.26

In this reactionary text, the sansculotte puts on his citoyen—he adopts the discourse of citizenship—not out of ideological conviction but out of poverty (to cover his tattered clothing). The rest of the poem takes the form of an exorcism, a Holy Week procession in which Judas, the leader of these “new sansculottes,” is conjured away with rattles. Another text, featuring the same Judas, complicates the politics of the figure even further: its currutaco defines himself as an incroyable sansculotte!27 And an article in the Diario de Madrid dubs the figures ultro-citroques, a conflation of citras and ultras, terms for opposed factions during the Terror.28 Critics have at times assumed that any reference to French characters or fashions, even to right-wing ones, would be considered subversive in the 1790s.29 The cordon sanitaire imposed in Spain after the outbreak of the French Revolution—the censorship of French texts and customs restrictions on printed matter—was one of the strictest in Europe, and prohibitions at times included even counterrevolutionary fashions such as the scarf à la guillotine.30 In the opening years of the uprising (1789–1792), the Conde de Floridablanca, the chief minister of Spain, attempted to root out not just revolutionary propaganda but any discussion of French politics: the newspapers were either closed or forbidden to mention events across the Pyrenees. After his dismissal in 1792, however, the censorship and customs bans became considerably more lenient during the ministries of the Conde de Aranda (1792) and Manuel Godoy (1792–1798). While the declaration of the French Republic and the advent of the Terror would momentarily lead to more rigorous measures, by the spring of 1795, when

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the currutaco literature first appeared, the restrictions had again relaxed. The Spaniards’ haste to take up arms following the execution of Louis XVI and the Convention’s declaration of war on Spain in March 1793 had demonstrated a healthy counterrevolutionary spirit among the populace. French propaganda, it turned out, was not as much of a threat as Floridablanca had feared. In July 1795, moreover, Godoy negotiated at Basel a peace treaty with France, which led to greater communication and exchange between the two countries. Although discussion of foreign events would remain cautious, it was not altogether silenced, and the association, encouraged by Floridablanca, of all things French with subversion and treason was no longer as prevalent. It is a mistake, therefore, to judge the politics of the figure by his (sometimes Gallic) sleeve alone. The currutaco’s ideological position is far from clear-cut. As we will see, the figure does not fall on one side or the other of the political divide but rather offers a space—an alternative society of sorts—for reflecting upon, reenacting, and working through the tensions and traumatic scenarios that were being played out across the Pyrenees. Currutaco literature explored three issues in particular. The first was the cultural or ideological origins of the Revolution: were the insurrection and Terror the result of Enlightenment thought or was this philosophy rather a way to prevent turmoil? The second question regarded the social and economic catalysts of revolution: many currutaco texts would explore the proper organization of society and the most effective distribution of wealth and opportunity. Finally, a number of works focused on the political culture introduced by the Revolution and drew attention to problems similar to those raised in the French literature concerning the muscadins: the fear of political infiltration, the insistence on transparent appearances, and so forth. In addressing these issues, currutaco texts drew on the three imaginations that we observed in the French context, but as will become clear in what follows, these approaches functioned in very different ways in the Spanish context.

From Don Líquid o to Don Preciso The immediate antecedent for the currutaco is the figure of the petimetre, which in the early eighteenth century had come to replace the lindo, a stock character of seventeenth-century theater.31 The classic definition of these earlier types appears in Diego de Torres Villarroel’s Visiones y visitas con Don Francisco de Quevedo (Visits and visions with Don Fran-

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cisco de Quevedo, 1727), a satirical work in which the Golden Age writer Francisco de Quevedo returns to life to take a tour of contemporary Spain guided by Torres Villarroel himself. Among the characters whom they observe is a petimetre named Don Líquido, “cleaner than a poet’s pocket” and “more powdered than a rat in a mill.”32 Torres Villarroel and Quevedo briefly watch him in action and take in his effeminate appearance, cloying gallantry, and affected language, full of diminutives. Not long afterward, they come across six or seven individuals who are “a mill of rags, a warehouse of grease, a refectory of lice, and a profundis of misery.”33 These, Torres Villarroel explains, are dandies undressed, lindos who, having wasted their capital on clothes and cosmetics, are now reduced to beggary. In an ironic reversal, the living (the beggars) beg the dead (Quevedo) for a means by which to live. In this passage, Torres Villarroel contrasts rich and poor, dandy and drudge, but rather than imagining a conflict between them, he presents a before-and-after narrative. The focus is not class struggle but rather the financial downfall of an individual, which is the consequence of his moral laxity. This double emphasis—ethical and economic—characterizes most of the literature about petimetría in the eighteenth century. The figure of the petimetre first appeared in Spain shortly after the Bourbon succession to the throne following the War of the Spanish Succession (1701– 1714). United by a common dynasty, Spain and France had developed new ties, including policies that encouraged trade across the Pyrenees. The influx of French imports increased the availability of luxury goods, which became affordable for a wider sector of Spanish society. The result was an increasing disregard for the sumptuary laws that had regulated dress and commodity consumption throughout the seventeenth century and a growing anxiety about the threat of foreign competition to national industries.34 At the same time, the new French influence introduced changes in customs and particularly in the role of women, who gradually assumed a greater visibility in social life, attending public spectacles, dances, soirées, and the Italian opera (introduced by the Bourbons). These functions occasioned considerable expense not only on dresses and hairstyles but also on the lessons necessary to master the complicated French contredanses that were de rigueur in elite circles.35 Much of the literature about the petimetra (the female equivalent of the petimetre) reacts against these new financial demands by parodying the fashionable woman who ruins her family in an attempt to sustain an exaggerated luxury. A stock character in such denunciations is the figure of the cicisbeo or cortejo, a male compan-

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ion, often represented as a petimetre, whose sole occupation in life was to amuse the lady of the house with his gallantry, fashion advice, and empty conversation (Don Líquido is a typical example).36 These new customs not only drained pockets but also raised moral eyebrows in the satirical literature of the period. Dissipation, both erotic and economic, is the hallmark of petimetría.37 When we turn from Don Líquido to Don Preciso, however, a somewhat different picture begins to emerge. Where Torres Villarroel offers a morality tale—presenting the petimetre in his full glory and then anticipating his unmaking and demise—Don Preciso gives us a minibildungsroman, an account of the making of a currutaco. The literature of petimetría often allows us to peek into the petimetre’s dressing room, to observe the elaborate artifice and grooming that go into his dapper appearance. We do not witness, however, his apprenticeship in this art, the petimetre in fieri, nor do we learn his beauty secrets, the recipe for reproducing his look. Don Líquido’s petimetría seems part of his essence: he does not don his clothes so much as he is his clothes. The literature of currutaquería, in contrast, is inaugurated by Don Preciso’s attempt to assimilate to the customs of an urban environment, and many of its foundational texts are manuals, albeit facetious ones, about how to become a currutaco (both Don Preciso’s Elementos and Don Currutaco’s Libro de moda belong on the self-help shelf). Unlike petimetría, currutaquería becomes in this literature a desirable goal, an ideal to which one might aspire. In newspaper articles on the subject, one begins to find positive definitions of the term. For one writer, “currutaco” means “a gallant lad, a graceful and well-formed petimetre,” and for another, it applies to “those who are rigorously in style, extremely religious, moral, enlightened, and of public use.” In their cultivation of appearances, the currutacos not only promote the national economy but are also a positive role model for the “lazy and criminal youth,” whom they inspire to behave properly.38 Yet another contributor considers the currutacos a necessity for the military because of their “civility, eloquence, and cultivation.”39 Other texts, tapping into the anachronistic imagination, stage battles between the Ancients and the Moderns, between the old-fashioned rodrigones and the avant-garde currutacos, in which the latter triumph.40 These positive attributes come to distinguish the currutaco from his antecedent, the petimetre, a term that is almost always used as an insult. Thus, the 1796 text El mundo al revés, ó Contra-verdades dedicadas a los hombres (The world upside down, or Countertruths dedicated to men) contrasts the old-style petimetres, who have three-inch heels, painted

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faces, and multicolored stockings, with the newer species of currutacos, who are more sober in dress, speech, and morals.41 And a letter to the editor in the Diario de Barcelona rejects derogatory terms such as petimetres, pisaverdes, and chisgaravises in favor of the new labels of “Cocorrabos, Currutacos, Pirracas, Monómicas, and Madamitas de último cuño; flashy, lavish, and high-sounding monikers, which give at first glance an utterly unequivocal idea of our small brains.”42 As the final clause of this list reveals, the new labels are often just as mocking as the earlier ones, but what distinguishes them is the use of the first person, the author’s voluntary and playful assumption of the terms (the author of the Diario de Barcelona letter identifies himself as the abate Jazmin de Zoronguillo, secretary of the Academia cocorrabicocurrutático-barcelonesa). This gesture suggests the amusement and pleasure that these writers take in the excesses that they condemn. The literature of petimetría is for the most part a third-person affair: as in Torres Villarroel’s piece, the author generally adopts the role of the satirist, and the petimetre is an object of critique.43 The literature of currutaquería, in contrast, delights in its proximity to its hero and often confuses subject and object (in this respect, it resembles the texts about the incroyables during the Directory). As is clear in Don Preciso’s and Don Currutaco’s letters, the first person predominates, and countless letters to the editor sign off with currutaco pseudonyms. This is a literature not only of selfhelp but also of the self. Paradoxically, however, at the same time that these works move toward the self and self-fashioning, they also move away from an individual focus. The classic texts of petimetría generally isolate a single specimen such as Don Líquido. The literature of currutaquería, in contrast, tends to portray the currutacos as a group. Its titles are often in the plural: Defensa de los currutacos, “Retrato de los currutacos,” Los currutacos del día, Los currutacos chasqueados, Los payos currutacos, “Los currutacos herrados y caballos habladores.”44 And its texts constantly refer to imaginary currutaco organizations: a junta of currutacos, a “currutacal society,” the “illustrious guild of the Currutacos,” a “horde, or squad,” “armies of currutacos,” and “our brilliant and amiable class.”45 In Torres Villarroel, the lindo becomes a member of a class only when he ceases to be a petimetre, when, having squandered his fortune, he joins the gaggle of nameless beggars. Líquido sans liquidity ceases to be a unique individual. For Don Preciso, in contrast, to become a currutaco is to join a group. As his name suggests, he depends not on his liquidity, his wealth, but rather on his precision, the “scientific”

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study of manners and dance that will allow him to fit into a plurality of currutacos, pirracas, and señoritas de nuevo cuño. Newspaper discussions of the figure often wrangle over who may be admitted to the group. One writer, for example, complains that Don Preciso’s list omits the orteras currutacos—the tacky shopkeepers of Madrid.46 In earlier eighteenthcentury critiques of fashion, what “counts” as a petimetre is never at issue. Currutaco texts, in contrast, seem obsessed with the borders of currutaquería, with its inclusions and exclusions and with the definition of a class consciousness, however facetious.47 Fittingly, the catalyst of this entire literature is an exclusion: Don Preciso’s own from the currutaco clique. The petimetre may also have companions, but rarely do these amount to a social unit with a sense of itself as a group with a shared agenda and interests. When the plural does appear, moreover, the focus is more on the colorfulness of the type than on its place in the social hierarchy. Like the macaroni prints in England (see chapter 5), this literature tends to have an atomizing effect: it isolates the group from the social whole and disregards its relations to other classes. As we have seen, Torres Villarroel’s text includes dandies and drudges but does not pit one group against the other. Even in texts where disparate types interact, the juxtaposition serves to contrast character types or national quirks rather than to represent a collision of class interests. A work such as Ramón de la Cruz’s vaudeville Los majos vencidos (The majos defeated, 1771) may confront upper- and lower-class figures, petimetres and majos, but their meeting is ultimately innocuous, a bandying of clichés and stereotypes that ends in a collective sing-along. The opposition between these groups has less to do with social hierarchy than with national difference, the contrast between the affected Francophile (petimetre) and the saucy Spaniard (majo or manolo). At times, moreover, the majo and petimetre types are conflated or aligned as flamboyant and stylized figures.48 This alliance springs in part from the fad of majismo, the adoption by aristocrats of the dress, diction, and dances of the majos.49 In such games, rank is placed in quotation marks, reduced to a set of amusing stylistic quirks.50 In contrast to the relatively innocuous feuds of petimetres and majos, the currutacos as a group often appear in a more sinister light, as, for example, in José González Carvajal’s poem “Pintura de un currutaco” (Painting of a currutaco).51 The opening lines of the work represent the currutaco in a bucolic scene, napping beside a fountain where “more than asleep/He seemed painted.” When the poet’s gaze lights on his subject’s legwear, however, the tone of the piece shifts:

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Culottes with a narrow point, So indecent and transparent That they hide nothing and could Embarrass Priapus. Multicolored stockings With summer boots; And the club of a madman As sturdy as an arm, A little over a yard in length, Which many currutacos Carry in their hand Without knowing what they wield, And if some of them know, It is necessary to tie them up.52

Without warning, the focus has moved from a singular to a plural subject (“many currutacos”) and, at the same time, from an idyllic “portrait” to a potentially violent reality that threatens to break the frame. Although the poet seeks to disarm the currutacos by displaying their ignorance, his insistence on the need to restrain them and the alignment of their clubs with what their culottes reveal suggest a dangerously potent collectivity. Lurking beneath the bucolic picture is a threatening social reality.

Terror and Enlightenment This potential for violence would become the central focus of the foundational text and verbal tour de force of currutaquería: Fernández de Rojas’s 1795 Libro de moda en la feria. This mock treatise of dandyism ends with a Supplement, which records the proceedings of a junta of currutacos who have gathered to discuss the growing popular hostility against them. Since the publication of Don Preciso’s letters in the Diario de Madrid, working-class and old-fashioned Spaniards have begun to insult the currutacos in the street, causing alarm in the dapper community. One member of the group, who has recently visited London, dismisses these concerns; enlightened people everywhere must recognize the baselessness of Don Preciso’s claims. His companions, however, are not reassured: as another participant observes, Spain, unlike England, is a backward nation whose inhabitants drink hot chocolate rather than coffee or tea. In such a place, one can only fear the worst: “Tremble, my friends. We are threatened with a fall into absolute ignorance and brutishness.” The com-

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moners might even cut off the currutacos’ sidelocks! “Who is capable of calculating,” he asks, “the point to which the human spirit can regress when the spring breaks that held it in the forced tension that civilization requires of it?” The assembled currutacos, however, do not understand the question. Confused by terms such as “tension and regression,” they assume that the speaker, who has recently been in France, has resorted to a foreign language in order to hide thoughts too “sublime” for the common people. Even when he tries to clarify, his explanation is “more confusing than the text.”53 Although the currutacos at the meeting miss the point, Fernández de Rojas’s readers would undoubtedly have understood the political allusion in this speech. Across the Pyrenees, Jacobins had décoiffé numerous jeunes gens, shearing off their oreilles de chien or cadenettes in a symbolic beheading of sorts.54 Similar incidents had occurred in Spain in which women sporting a French coiffure had been forced to unbind their hair in street confrontations. Responding to such episodes, a number of currutaco texts would call for a junta, like that in the Libro de moda, to discuss “the insurrections of our enemies.”55 Echoing the fears generated by the Vernet prints in France, one columnist warned that the fad of ridiculing the currutacos encouraged the common people (vulgo) to disrespect “those creatures, who usually belong to the affluent class of society.”56 And many texts represented the currutacos as victims of increasingly sadistic acts. In two poems set in Seville, a currutaco is punished with an enema injection (geringazo), and in a Murcian text, a “swarm of swarthy, uncultured, and foolish youths” heckles and stones currutacas dressed in fashionable white rather than the black garb traditional in Spain.57 The worried currutaco in the Libro de moda Supplement is not speaking gibberish; he is voicing the anxieties of the catastrophic imagination. In addressing these fears, the Libro de moda is exploring the relation between Enlightenment and revolution, the question of the ideological underpinnings of the French uprising. Not surprisingly, the junta member who has visited London has greater confidence in enlightened thinking than the member who has just returned from France. Both, however, share the presupposition that civilization and reason are forces that keep society in check. They disagree as to the strength of these barriers, but they consider the Enlightenment to be a safeguard against (rather than a cause of) revolution. A similar assumption informs a Mexican poem from the period in which a currutaco, upended by his donkey, finds himself surrounded by unruly onlookers who spit, slap, and strip him bare. In the final verses, the

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narrator distances himself from the violent mob: readers may “celebrate the failure” of the currutaco but they should “[o]bserve this little paper [i.e., the poem]/It is a clean and plain way/to exile these creatures/without a stick or a cane.”58 The true path to reform is not abuse but education, though in this case the “little paper” makes its satire by appealing to precisely the sadistic impulses that it rejects. For many, however, Enlightenment critique was not the solution but the problem. In the aftermath of 1789, this would be the view of the chief minister Floridablanca, who attempted to limit not only discussion of the French Revolution but also the influence of the philosophes: he banished or imprisoned enlightened thinkers, prohibited discussions of political economy at the progressive societies known as Amigos del país (Friends of the nation), and prosecuted translators of Voltaire. The Aranda and Godoy ministries would relax this censorship, but the notion of a causal relation between the Enlightenment and insurrection continued to inform many discussions of current events: works such as Juan Pablo Forner’s Preservativo contra el ateísmo (Defense against atheism, 1795) and Pablo Olavide’s El evangelio en triunfo, ó Historia de un filósofo desengañado (The gospel triumphant, or The story of a disillusioned philosopher, 1797– 1798) blamed the philosophes for the excesses of the French uprising. This association of enlightened thought and revolution appears in many currutaco texts as well. A clear example is the sainete (a short theatrical genre) titled Los currutacos chasqueados (The foiled currutacos), in which several majos and majas (lower-class figures) intrude on a currutaco ball. The currutaco host wants to stop the dancing since “it is not fair to mix gente de moño y capote [people who wear a bun and a cape (popular dress)] with those who wear a frac [frock coat].”59 But his commonsensical, enlightened brother insists that the majos perform their seguidillas (a popular Spanish dance), and he assumes the role of bastonero (dance leader) himself, using as castanets a pair of pistols. While the majos dance, the currutacos, held at gunpoint, are forced to support several lamps in absurd and undignified positions. This coercive illumination is a parodic form of Enlightenment: the brother seeks to restrain the excesses of the currutacos, who are identified as usías (an upper-class title), by confronting them with the terror of being replaced by the underclass.60 Where the Mexican text privileges enlightened critique over terror as a form of correction, the “enlightened” lesson in the sainete is itself a form of terror. The connection between Enlightenment discourse and popular aggression appears again in an exchange of letters in the Diario de Madrid

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in which the currutacos are related to the inhabitants of the imaginary country explored in the novel Viaggi di Enrico Wanton (1749, 1764) by the Italian writer Zaccaria Seriman (1708–1784).61 This fictional voyage narrative, a takeoff on Gulliver’s Travels, tells the story of a young Englishman, Henry Wanton, who finds himself shipwrecked on the shores of Simiopolis, a kingdom of apes. As Wanton gradually learns the language and customs of the natives, Seriman makes an indirect commentary on Venetian and European society, particularly on the excessive consumption and absurd refinement of contemporary manners. The exchange in the Diario de Madrid begins with a letter by a country bumpkin named Prudencio, who assumes a position similar to Wanton’s. Having recently traveled from his rustic village to Madrid, he is astonished by the bizarre habits of its currutacos, in whom he believes to have found the fantastical apes of Seriman’s book, creatures distinguished for their finery and imitation of all things foreign.62 In a letter of reply, another writer, signing L. de T. and identifying himself as a currutaco, turns Prudencio’s claim on its head. Although he agrees that Wanton’s creatures do exist, he notes that they tend to hide themselves in small villages. It is, consequently, astonishing to find one publishing in a major Madrid newspaper. In this response, it is not the currutacos who are simiopolitizándose (taking on the habits of the ape residents of Wanton’s Simiopolis) but rather Prudencio who has attempted to critico-politanizar, to imitate the habits of serious, cosmopolitan critics though he lacks ideas and education. As with the prints depicting incroyables, the danger of such attacks and of anticurrutaco literature generally is that they might “give illusions to the lower classes,” encouraging them to mistreat innocent people.63 The exchange between Prudencio and L. de T. expresses the anxieties of the catastrophic imagination; their letters adopt an anthropological discourse to explore the opposition between two societies that are diametrically opposed and anticipate a confrontation between them. What L. de T. finds most objectionable, however, is a detail of Prudencio’s letter: An even greater poverty of wit, a weakness incomparably harder to hide, is his attempt to introduce in place of the original, sonorous, and humorous word “currutaco” the precarious, frozen, and miserable sincapites. This, this has been his principal goal and the glory to which he aspires. . . . If he has not had a success equal to his efforts, attribute it to the fact that the

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common people, which is not terribly intellectual, has not yet understood the etymology and the value of the little term. As soon as that happens, I assure him a triumph.64

Prudencio’s coinage introduces an uncomfortable ambiguity. Sincapites, of course, could refer to the airheadedness of the dandies, their brainless obsession with dancing and dress, but it might also be interpreted less innocently: Prudencio has linguistically beheaded the entire currutaco class. It is in this latter sense that the word could be “precarious,” particularly among commoners. Like the jeunes gens and incroyables, L. de T. is reacting against a dangerous language practice—labeling—that has the potential to set groups against one another.65 In this letter, it is not Enlightenment discourse so much as its misappropriation by the masses that poses the true threat. L. de T.’s response mirrors that of many ilustrado thinkers who adopted more cautious stances in the wake of the Terror, advocating top-down, authoritarian reform rather than democratic revolution. All these examples play out in different ways the relation between Terror and Enlightenment that Goya would enigmatically illustrate in his well-known print in the Caprichos series, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The sleep/dream of Reason produces monsters). If we interpret sueño as sleep, then chaos breaks out when Reason naps. In the junta of the Libro de moda, it is the absence of education and rational thinking that produces the monstrously abusive mob. Many texts, however, reflect the other interpretation of sueño in which the real cause of the Terror is the ideal—the “dream”—of Enlightenment. In Los currutacos chasqueados and L. de T.’s article, it is an aggressive manipulation of satirical discourse (Prudencio’s criticopolitanización) that creates a terrifying situation and hostility among social groups. Here, the Enlightenment imagination cuts off heads. For L. de T. the ignorance of the lower classes is a safeguard against the Terror at which Prudencio hints. As his final sentence suggests, however, their eventual enlightenment only bodes ill.66

C u r r u ta c o C l a s s e s In the fall of 1789, the first volume of Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro’s Idea dell’universo (Idea of the universe) appeared in Spanish translation under the title Historia de la vida del hombre (History of the life of man). Written by a former Jesuit and a virulent enemy of the French Revolution, the treatise was for the most part a conservative work, but the volume

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included several controversial ideas. For instance, it did not recognize any social distinction other than that between the monarch and his subjects. The latter were “equal among themselves and unequal only in personal merit.”67 Not only did the text reject distinctions of nobility and rank but it also attacked the principal institutions of the landed aristocracy: entail and primogeniture. Published in the wake of the Declaration of the Rights of Man (adopted in August 1789), the volume frightened the Spanish minister Floridablanca, who quickly suppressed it. Its ideas, however, would gain ground during the Godoy ministry. In 1795, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos published his seminal economic treatise, Informe de ley agraria (Report on agrarian law), which attacked aristocratic and church entail. Although the Inquisition denounced the work as “conducive to ideas of equality,” its publication had official support: Godoy was gravitating toward Jovellanos’s economic theory.68 These debates about social organization and the distribution of land and wealth would be played out in the literature of currutaquería as well. The fad offered a facetious and innocuous space in which writers could probe such ideas, exploring what would happen if they were taken to their logical extreme. Nowhere is this exploration more playful than in Fernández de Rojas’s Libro de moda, which revels in the relativity of class and other hierarchies. This fascination with perspective is clear in the opening description of the work, which is attributed to Don Currutaco. Here we learn that the book is not a treatise about how to be a currutaco so much as a treatise about how to write a treatise about how to be a currutaco.69 Each sentence, therefore, has the potential to be expanded into a full chapter: “What is inferred is infinitely greater than what is said.”70 This idea of compression allows Don Currutaco to play with notions of relativity: “since [the last chapter] is long in comparison to the infinitely small divisibility of my work, it is short relative to the infinite extension that the mass of ideas would have if unfolded from the compression, abbreviation, or analysis.”71 This sense of relativity informs not only Don Currutaco’s writing but also his vision of hierarchies. Early in the book, for example, he rejects aesthetic standards as arbitrary and changing. Paragons of beauty, he argues, appear in all eras and places: among the fat-bellied Chinese women or bowlegged Laplanders one may find “models for a statue of Venus that are just as good as those of ancient Greece.” Since beauty is a random convention that varies from one place or period to another, currutaco readers should overturn aesthetic canons and abandon “pretty” women in favor of hunchbacked mulatas or toothless hags. In the culminating words of the

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passage, Don Currutaco banishes the ci-devant beauties and puts them in their place: “Lock yourselves up, lock yourselves up! Humiliate yourselves before the ugly women, respect the horrible-looking ones.”72 This relativity reaches absurd extremes in the discussion of the currutaco social hierarchy.73 Once again, Don Currutaco begins by acknowledging the arbitrariness of classifications: “Art invents those divisions; do not believe that they exist in reality.”74 Although the currutacos may be divided into two groups, the nobler currutaco in species and the inferior, bastardized pirracas, these distinctions are subject to constant change. Thus, a currutaco from Madrid who is in species relative to a provincial fop becomes a pirracas in the company of a dandy who has recently returned from London. The inversions can be so volatile that the basest currutaco who spends fifteen minutes in a crowded and fashionable place such as the Puerta del Sol goes back and forth between in species and pirracas status at least twenty times. These considerations lead the narrator to moralize, warning his fashionable acolytes against snobbery and pride: “A new individual will seize your scepter, and then? Oh, what pain! You will be confused with the pirritacaria rabble and perhaps, perhaps never to leave it again or only for short periods.”75 The threat that hangs over the currutaco is not simply a declassing but also a dethroning (losing a scepter)—a historically resonant metaphor in the 1790s. Fernández de Rojas’s work exhibits a clear fascination with revolution in its etymological sense, with revolving and overturning. He takes the French revolutionary model to its most radical extreme, imagining an unsettling and vertiginous world in which hierarchy is unhinged and constantly changing. Even as Fernández de Rojas evokes this world, however, he is at pains to recontain it, to harness its relativity and flux. At one point, a “man of judgment” inserts a footnote pointing out that currutacos do not constitute the entire nation: “they are only four little monkeys, whom it is fair and proper to satirize in order to ridicule and confound them.”76 And shortly after the Puerta del Sol passage, Don Currutaco offers an alternate and more stable version of the currutaco class system. Here, status depends not on one’s position relative to other dandies but rather on height and weight, which are subject to rigorous formulae: one hundred señoritos de ciento en boca (the lowest rank) amount to an eighth of one pirracas, which is half of a currutaco. Or, as the narrator summarizes, one currutaco equals sixteen hundred señoritos de ciento en boca.77 Though absurd, these calculations reintroduce a fixed conception of class hierarchy, which mirrors the triangular structure of the ancien régime: an elite minority occupies the top of the pyramid, and a vast majority lies at the

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bottom. Pointedly, this new classification is introduced in a section dedicated to the lowest rung of the social ladder, the señoritos de ciento en boca, while the relative vision of the Puerta del Sol belongs to the discussion of the middle-ranked pirracas. It is when Don Currutaco faces the specter of the masses that he introduces the most rigid and immobile system of his book. The work may embrace a flamboyant relativism, but the gap between the lower and the middle class remains unbridgeable: “is there not an enormous difference between a currutaco born, raised, and spoiled on the Calle de Alcalá or the Calle de la Montera, who is called señorito at home, and another currutaco from the Calle Real del Barquillo, whom the servant boys call manolo?”78 This height-weight system, however, is not the last word on class in the Libro de moda. In the junta of the Supplement, the assembled currutacos attempt to establish a series of rules about dress and behavior that will reduce street confrontations in the future. Among these measures is a new social hierarchy, a ladder of five neatly delineated “classes,” which seems to be the currutacos’ answer to the taxonomies of the main body of the text.79 Ironically, their system is the one that most mirrors the social reality of the period. The top echelon (currutacos de quinta esencia, ó de punto de azúcar; literally, “quintessential currutacos, or currutacos with just the right amount of sugar”) resembles the aristocracy in its reckless expenditure and ostentatious consumption; the middle class (currutacos Milflores; literally, “millefleur currutacos”) is like the bourgeoisie in its economy, hygiene, work ethic, and moderate pleasures; and the lowest (the plebe currutaca; literally, “the currutaco plebs”) reflects the commoners of Madrid, dressing up only on festival days. What begins as a prescriptive measure, a currutaco resolution, is actually the most descriptive vision of all. Although these categories might seem to reinforce hierarchy, the dynamic of their interrelations is fluid and strikingly modern. One’s place on the ladder is determined not so much by birth as by merit, and social mobility among ranks is not only possible but inevitable: the currutacos de quinta esencia ruin themselves through their wild and unsustainable luxury, and others invariably rise.80 Indeed, the system seems a compromise between the two extremes of the main body of the text. Where the vertiginous inversions of the Puerta del Sol introduce absolute flux and instability, and the height-weight formulae return to fixity and immobility, this final classification allows changes that are not random but predictable, a gradual movement within the hierarchy rather than a lurch that overturns it. This middle course—the introduction of social mobility however limited—ultimately suggests a clear strategy on the currutacos’

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part: to conciliate their antagonists on the street, they envision a society in which doors are left, if not open, at least ajar. In its concern with the tempo of change, Fernández de Rojas’s text addresses the concerns of the anachronistic imagination. The Puerta del Sol scenario illustrates the notion of revolution as rupture, a world in which the only continuity is change itself. Fernández de Rojas draws back from this possibility by introducing a more evolutionary model, a system of rational, gradual modifications. Other works, however, would define less moderate solutions. In an undated tonadilla, “Los majos y los currutacos,” the dandy is once again a figure who confuses social distinctions.81 Pantaleón, the first currutaco to appear onstage, prides himself on his “fame” as “an incroyable sansculotte” and on the success of his disciple, the currutaco Don Judas, who through Pantaleón’s tutoring has become “a perfect sansculotte.” This conflation of opposites—incroyable sansculotte—clearly involves a pun: “incroyable” might simply mean “incredible” (it is used interchangeably here with perfecto), and “sansculotte” could just mean “without culottes” (Pantaleón shares his name with the commedia dell’arte type—Pantaleone—from which the word pantalón, “pair of trousers,” derives). The plot of the work, however, suggests that the currutaco confuses more than just words. For Pantaleón, lacking funds, has set out to fleece the elderly Don Judas, who pays him for lessons in French dress and style. Not only does Pantaleón drink and dine at his student’s expense, but he also plots to empty his pocket: “Arm for war,” he exclaims, “this plaza is very easy to assault.” Pantaleón is thus an incroyable in the sense of “not credible” and a sansculotte in his poverty and (metaphorical) warfare against richer men. As in the Puerta del Sol in the Libro de moda, the currutacos of the tonadilla overturn and confuse hierarchies: the currutaco has made the rich Don Judas into a perfect sansculotte. The climactic moment of the play is a confrontation between the currutacos and the majo Terremoto, whose girlfriend the dandies have courted in his absence. Judging by the title of the work, we might expect this antagonism to be a conflict between upper- and lower-class figures: “Los majos y los currutacos” seems a Spanish version of the French rivalry between sansculottes and muscadins. Ultimately, however, the opposition of the work is not between noble and plebeian figures, muscadins/currutacos versus sansculottes/majos, but rather between national and foreign: the majos, who love popular music and sport Spanish costumes, and the Gallicized incroyables sansculottes, who cross social lines and confuse class distinctions. The latter are menacing figures because they introduce

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change, revolution as rupture. The triumph of the majo Terremoto over his currutaco adversaries at the end of the work represents the victory not of the working class over the wealthy but of class hierarchy as a national principle over foreign styles that break down differences. Where the Libro de moda concludes with a relatively moderate solution—social mobility—the tonadilla adopts a more reactionary stance. A similar defense of social hierarchy appears in another treatise, the 1799 Currutaseos: Ciencia currutaca which is, like the Libro de moda, a mock scientific study and how-to manual. This work divides “currutaco science” into three branches: the arts of speaking, walking, and dressing. All three are important, but the last is privileged, for one may be a currutaco without speaking or walking (as in the case of a mute or disabled person), but it is impossible to be one without a wardrobe, for “[t]hat is the condition of the poor.”82 Where the Libro de moda gives the majos and manolos a branch on the currutaco family tree, Currutaseos excludes the humbler ranks, who cannot afford the requisite attire.83 The most forceful and direct reply to the Libro de moda, however, was undoubtedly Serapio Amansi’s Defensa de los currutacos, pirracas, madamitas del nuevo cuño y señoritos de ciento en boca. Published in 1796, this text rebutted the social relativity of the Libro de moda by appealing to the rules of logic. Don Currutaco’s distinction between currutacos and pirracas—the catalyst of so many inversions in the Puerta del Sol passage— presupposes that species and genera are determined by “relations.” Logic, however, dictates that such categories be defined only by “attributes or essential properties.” If they were defined relationally, one would find many species “among men . . . and even in the same individual.” In contrast to Don Currutaco, who prides himself on the “infinitely small divisibility” of his subject matter, the Defensa rejects the relativity that such subdivisions introduce into the social order.84 Amansi goes on to argue that even the lowliest of currutacos, the señorito de ciento en boca, reinforces the existing class structure and the principle of monarchy: The señoritos de ciento en boca are delicate; they are served; they make their servants respect them; they manage to distinguish themselves from the common people, and they do not become overly familiar with them; and this contributes to the conservation of the monarchy. For if the populace has respect for these señoritos, it will also have it for those of the upper classes, for the nobles and grandees; and if this respect and submission prevail in a monarchy, peace, tranquillity, and good order will reign.85

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Paradoxically, the weakness of the señoritos de ciento en boca gives strength to the great and brings peace to the kingdom. The converse is also true: if the señoritos did not turn their noses up at their inferiors, they might be confused with the common people, who, considering themselves their equals, would look down on them and all higher ranks. For “he who despises the lesser things little by little falls into a disdain for the greater ones, as the sacred scripture tells us. He will love liberty and equality; and when this plague prevails in the monarchy, good-bye; it goes to ruin. All the world is seeing the example of this.”86 The political subtext that is implicit but not understood by the attendees of the junta in the Libro de moda is acknowledged outright in this passage at the heart of the Defensa. The two texts differ, however, in their solutions. Where Fernández de Rojas ultimately leaves the door ajar, the Defensa slams it shut: any concession to an inferior being here undermines the hierarchy as a whole. This question of social mobility was, of course, the bone of contention in the initial exchange of letters in the Diario de Madrid: while Don Preciso believed that one could become a currutaco through costume and contredanses, Don Currutaco considered Don Preciso too ungainly and tall to be a member of the club.87 In the Libro de moda en la feria and the Defensa de los currutacos, the question of whether the currutaco is born or bred takes on political urgency: is the closure of the group a provocation to violence or, on the contrary, is its openness an invitation to revolution?

T h e C u r r u ta c o U n d e r c o v e r The dangers of openness would be the central focus of one of the most ludic and baroque texts of currutaquería, Don Abestruz: Novela vurlesca (1799)—a story of identity theft avant la lettre—which has been attributed to Rafael Crespo Roche.88 The title character of this novella disguises himself as a currutaco and introduces himself as Don Papis, the son of a friend of the narrator: “I am in body and soul,” he claims, “what I just explained to you by the most explained explanation of the most explicable explicability explained by the most explaining explainer.”89 Taking him at his overwrought word, the narrator welcomes Don Papis into his home. When night falls, he helps his guest out of his “unstitched pantaloons created . . . on the pantaloonic loom of Don Gerundio Substantivo, the most celebrated pantaloonist in Denmark.” What the narrator discovers beneath is a scabrous and skeletal body, but he is so delighted to meet the “crème de la crème of the currutacos” that he takes little notice.90

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The attribution of the pants to Don Gerundio Substantivo (literally, “gerund noun”) draws a connection between the currutaco’s dress and his language. Both, it turns out, cover up realities that belie the dandy’s glittering surface. Just as the initial scene reveals the decay beneath the dandy’s dapper dress, the ending of the novella exposes the emptiness and falsity of his words. The character who precipitates this final revelation is Don Destripacuentos (literally, “strips stories”), whose name links the denouement to the stripping of the opening pages. The visiting currutaco, it turns out, is actually a swindler named Don Abestruz who has robbed Don Papis and stolen his letter of introduction. This information, however, comes too late: at the end of the story, the narrator finds his house “despoiled of all that was despoilable, as only the despoiler could despoil it by the most despoiled despoilability.”91 The vacuity of Don Papis’s initial polyptota is reflected in the final emptiness of the narrator’s house. The currutaco represents a beguiling simulacrum, an illusion of meaning generated out of nothing. But this meaningless surface is far from innocent: Don Abestruz is the embodiment of the despoiler, the threat of an upwardly mobile underclass.92 He demonstrates the danger of Don Preciso’s open vision of currutaquería: the infiltration of rapacious posers. In Crespo Roche’s novella, the concerns of the catastrophic and paranoid imaginations converge: the currutaco threatens both class hierarchy (with his despoiling) and the legibility of dress. Many texts about the currutacos echo this anxiety about false appearances: if the currutaco is bred rather than born—if his pose is an act of self-fashioning—how can one determine his real identity? One of the most powerful evocations of this problem is the dark world of Francisco Goya’s print collection Los caprichos, which appeared in 1799. Goya, who belonged to the same intellectual circles as Fernández de Rojas, was undoubtedly familiar with the literature of currutaquería, and in a number of the prints, he depicted men in currutaco dress and postures. In print 27 (fig. 14), for example, Goya himself appears as a currutaco courting the elegant Duchess of Alba.93 The type also appears in print 7 (fig. 15), Ni así la distingue (Even thus he cannot make her out).94 With his quizzing glass and inclined stance, the gentleman clearly echoes Vernet’s print Les incroyables from a few years before (fig. 2). But in Goya’s reworking, the emphasis of the scenario has shifted. Vernet’s image depicts a recognition scene: a dandy encounters a drudge posing as a dandy but is nevertheless able to identify him as his former valet. The focus of the image is class distinction, which remains visible, despite the valet’s new incroyable getup. Goya’s print, in contrast, is a scene of nonrecognition. It illustrates not a social but an epistemo-

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14. Francisco Goya, Quién más rendido? (Los caprichos, no. 27; 1799). Pomona College, Claremont, California.

logical problem: self-fashioning and disguise are so ubiquitous that the peering figure cannot distinguish the reality in front of him. Goya underscores this nonrecognition by juxtaposing it to the masked encounter of print 6, which has as its caption Nadie se conoce (No one is known; my translation). The Spanish artist, thus, draws on Vernet’s image but shifts the focus from the catastrophic to the paranoid imagination.

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The literature of currutaquería is concerned not simply with the confusion of social rank (Don Abestruz’s impersonation of the wealthy Don Papis) but also with false partisanship. This anxiety is clear in the newspaper exchange that inaugurates the fad. When Don Currutaco rejects Don Preciso’s “false presumption,” the issue is not just his admissibility to the group (his excessive height) but also the sincerity of his avowed currutaquería: the letter accuses Preciso of ridiculing the tribe, of falsely claiming allegiance in order to undermine the group from within.95 Such allegations appear again and again in the newspaper letters: currutaco defenders continually “out” earlier apologists as anticurrutacos who surreptitiously attack the group. Thus, while Don Currutaco expels Don

15. Francisco Goya, Ni así la distingue (Los caprichos, no. 7; 1799). Pomona College, Claremont, California.

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Preciso from the club and accuses him of satirizing it, the Censor mensual points his finger at Don Currutaco, whom he considers to be “of the same stuff as that Don Preciso, since he treats the tiny people with more impiety than he did.”96 Another writer, who signs Currutaco pegadizo (sticky currutaco), rebukes the “insolent author of the Libro de moda” (i.e., Don Currutaco) for satirizing the dandies but vindicates Don Preciso, lauding his defense of them.97 And a letter by El Ex-Currutaco accuses both Don Preciso and Don Currutaco of maligning the group and inciting the ridicule of the lower ranks.98 In all these texts, what lies beneath the surface is an anticurrutaco in disguise. Other texts, however, suggest an opposite scenario: a currutaco hiding behind anticurrutaco discourse. The Censor mensual, for example, observes that the “currutacos, seeing that they were going to be the object of the derision of the pueblo, have sought to fold their hand by writing currutacamente against themselves, so that those who do not know how to distinguish among styles believe that the banalities of the currutacos are the work of Don Preciso.”99 In their constant anxiety about infiltrators, currutaco texts recall the paranoid imagination of the literature about the muscadins, which constantly unmasks seemingly virtuous patriots as counterrevolutionary agents in disguise. The Censor mensual’s final scenario, in which the currutacos adopt the pose of the anticurrutaco currutaco (Don Preciso), recalls Père Duchesne’s image of Paris as a poppy field of bonnets rouges. All the articles have become anticurrutaco, but like Hébert, the Censor mensual suspects secret differences of opinion—hidden currutacos—beneath the surface uniformity. In the Spanish texts, however, these revelations take on a more playful tone. In one newspaper letter, for example, a writer signing Doña Lagartija complains about the pamphlet Aviso al público: Anatomía de modas, which mockingly praises her for having invented the female neck scarf in order to hide a skin condition caught from a currutaco suitor. The author who has so indelicately exposed her neck, she surmises, must be a “rival enemy . . . of the noble order of currutaquería.”100 The Censor mensual, however, applies the same technique of unmasking to the letter itself: he reveals it to be a publicity stunt by the author of the pamphlet, a pathetic attempt to promote “a miserable little work.”101 Such second-degree revelations give a ludic quality to this literature, which revels in the irony, ambiguity, and epistemological uncertainty of the figure. As each author “outs” the previous one, unmasking becomes an infinite regress, the reductio ad absurdum of the paranoid imagination. The playful series of “outings” is ultimately a critique of the political culture of the period.

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A number of articles draw attention to the ludic strategies at work in this literature. In one piece, for example, the Censor mensual praises the seriousness of the Caballero de J., whose defense of the currutacos is not “ironic like those that have been put in the Diario up until now,” and criticizes the “Petit Currutaco” for rebutting the Caballero’s arguments: “And what weapons does this Mr. Petit use? Sometimes reason, at other times irony, prohibited arms, which can have no other effect than convincing.”102 The same paragraph that censures the use of irony playfully employs it to make the opposite point.103 The Censor mensual’s ironic denunciation of irony is ultimately a celebration of the playfulness of this literature. Such use of irony, which here works against the currutacos, is identified elsewhere with the dandies themselves: the Currutaco pegadizo encourages his companions to ridicule the author of the Libro de moda by “giving him ironic praise and, above all, insulting him with insolence, according to the ancient and uninterrupted custom of every currutaco writer.”104 Here, the author who facetiously lauds the currutacos is defined not, as we might expect, as an anticurrutaco in disguise but rather as a currutaco himself. In the introduction to his Elementos de la ciencia contradanzaria, Don Preciso describes the Libro de moda as “written by a true currutaco” since it exhibits “humor [gracia] in making use of all the humorous [graciosas] inventions to destroy [these inventions] and make them bothersome.”105 The currutaco writer is again a satirist of his own class, and it is in this paradox that the gracia, the playfulness, of his writing lies. Lighthearted self-parody seems to be an element of this form of dandyism. Whereas earlier eighteenth-century texts accused their targets of being petimetres, these works accuse them of not being currutacos. This shift suggests a ludic identification with the figure, a desire to partake in the spirit of what is condemned.106 In this blurring of subject and object, currutaco literature plays with the transformative side of the paranoid imagination and with the dual function of the dandy, who is at once an artist (subject) and a work of art (object). As in the texts about the incroyable, currutaco writers often step into the role of the dandy. Their strategy, however, is somewhat different. The incroyable literature seeks to step out of the paranoid ethos of the Terror by adopting a stance of amused incredulity, an ironic, removed approach to political language and reality. It replaces the impassioned denunciation of the false partisan with a cooler form of critique, a sort of winking citation. The currutaco literature, in contrast, enters into the paranoid imagination, takes its revelations to their utmost extreme and thus exposes its absurdity. Where the incroyable texts put quotation marks around

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specific rallying signs and monikers to reveal their discursivity and emptiness, the currutaco literature parodies the paranoid imagination itself and the political culture that it represents—the obsessive unmasking and distrust of appearances. Some letters to the editor critiqued the emergence of this paranoid political culture in Spain. Following the coup of 18 fructidor, for example, a number of writers echoed the arguments about the collets noirs, rejecting the practice of reading into appearances. Before the invention of the term “currutaco,” one correspondent observed, the world knew only two types of men, “the admirable and the despicable”; to distinguish between them one had to study extensively texts such as La Bruyère’s Caractères and Rochefoucauld’s Maximes. The emergence of the new term, however, introduced a convenient shortcut, for now one could determine from clothing alone whether a man was a currutaco, and therefore an “idiot, a madcap, a fool, an ignoramus, an idler, a useless man, a cutter of corners, a perpetual inhabitant of cafés, billiard tables, operas, and comedies,” or a rodrigón, and by extension “a great, wise, and virtuous man, incapable of evil acts, active, moderate, well raised, civic, industrious, a great philosopher, mathematician, historian, physicist, and everything that is good in the world.”107 The passage clearly draws on the anachronistic imagination: not only does it make a distinction between an antiquated system for determining character and a newer one, but the two stereotypes of the latter system suggest a contrast between the ancient and the modern (where “currutaco” is a newfangled term, “rodrigón” recalls Rodrigo, the given name of El Cid, the symbol of old Spanish values). But what the author of the letter condemns in the new is not the modern form of dress (currutaco styles) but rather the tendency to judge by appearances, to leap to conclusions based on superficial differences. A letter by L. de T., published a year later, makes a similar point: the anticurrutaco writers have made the same mistake as the common people in assuming that “the man who dresses in the style of the Goths is an hombre de bien [an upright individual], that the man in glasses is very scholarly, that the weak man is a prudent one, that the hypocrite is virtuous, and that anyone who is not like them is crazy.”108 In these texts, the defense of currutaquería is a defense of complexity and interpretation, of a subtle surface that requires reading and reflection.109 In ridiculing surface judgments, binary logic, and the insistence on transparency, these letters echo the defenses of the jeunes gens, incroyables, and collets noirs.110 But where in France this is a rejection of the political culture of revolution, in Spain it is a reaction against the assump-

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tions of the reactionary populace. Significantly, the (seemingly modern) distinction between rodrigones and currutacos is attributed in the first letter to a “wise rodrigón.”111 The attempt to impose clarity—a transparent relation between clothes and identity—is not a radical but a conservative impulse, a defense mechanism for dealing with the ambiguities of modern society. L. de T. similarly identifies this type of reading with the prejudices of the unenlightened rabble, which privileges “Gothic” men in old-fashioned dress.112 As is clear in the discussion above, currutaco literature in Spain manifests many of the same concerns as the texts about the muscadins, jeunes gens, or incroyables in France: anxieties about beguiling appearances, false partisanship, labeling, surface judgments, a potentially violent polarization, the lack of a middle ground, and so on. All three imaginations are clearly at work in this literature. The Spanish texts, however, have neither the urgency nor the uniformity of their French counterparts. Where the French texts sought to effect immediate change, to correct a dangerous political culture, the Spanish works have a more hypothetical and facetious tone; they respond less to reality than to a disturbing “what if ?” The literature of currutaquería is, in a sense, a laboratory in which the new ideas and tendencies of the Revolution are probed and put to the test. The result is often a reductio ad absurdum: the split-second inversions of hierarchy at the Puerta del Sol or the infinite regress of the anticurrutaco “outings.” But the political reflection underlying these texts is quite serious: they attempt to understand the economic and ideological causes of the uprising in France and imagine ways to address these problems in Spain.

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Crops In 1819, during the height of the so-called dandymania, the popular British songwriter and rhymester Thomas Haynes Bayly published a poem titled “The Dandies of the Present and the Macaronies of the Past.” Its heroic couplets set forth the following argument: Dandy and Macaroni are the same Alike in all respects except the name.1

Like the macaronis, their eighteenth-century predecessors, the dandies of Bayly’s day were useless, ignorant, and frivolous creatures who converted dress into a science and paraded their absurd inventions in society and at the theater. The similarities between the two figures were so striking that Bayly postulated a common origin: Surely ye fair, devoted slaves like these, In word, or deed, can never fail to please; And call them Dandy—Macaroni,—Beau, Or what you will;— ’twas you that made them so. First the mamma beholds her son with joy, And in his hearing calls him “lovely boy,” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . When more mature, the belles surround the man, And soon complete what fond mamma began.2

Just as the mamma’s boy grows up to become the ladies’ man, so the macaronis of the past have become the dandies of the present.

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And yet, if we consider an image such as Philip Dawe’s The Macaroni: A Real Character at the Late Masquerade (fig. 16) alongside Isaac Robert Cruikshank’s caricature of dandies dressing (fig. 17), we cannot help but note the differences between them. The most obvious is the volume that the figures occupy in space. The macaroni aesthetic constantly adds on, accumulating baubles and whatnots that obscure the body beneath. To make a macaroni, one poem advises, “take hair, fourteen pounds—for a dozen won’t do,” from a horse’s or cow’s tail and attach it to the head, then add lace “puff ’d, and frill’d in the form of a Queen Bess’s ruff,” a nosegay the size of a “large Colliflower,” “snips, snappers and jags,” “tassels and tags,” “silk stockings, with clocks interwoven with gold,” and “buckles of Lilliput’s mould.”3 The dandy style, in contrast, whittles down such excesses and emphasizes the angles and lines of the figure; the corset shapes our perception of the natural body. The exaggeration of this aesthetic yields the emaciated, almost anorexic forms of Cruikshank’s image. Where the macaroni cultivates the surface for the surface’s sake—his external accoutrements draw attention to themselves and to the artificiality of the ensemble—the dandy cultivates the art of the cut, an elaborate trompe l’oeil that sculpts the body, subtly manipulating our impression of his natural shape. The dandy’s art is one that hides its artistry. Both figures push their self-fashioning to absurd extremes, but their underlying logic is very different. The macaroni cultivates artificiality, spectacularity, and extreme visibility.4 The dandy, in contrast, privileges understatement, an erasure of effort. The distinction between the two aesthetics is perhaps clearest in the ways in which they are ridiculed. The macaroni satires tend to reveal the emptiness that belies the surface display: the fop’s head may reach towering heights but nothing dwells within. In “Sir Amorous Whimsy, or the Disappointed Macaroni,” the title character loses his lady love because he cannot sustain a conversation.5 Similarly, our mock recipe for making a macaroni concludes: The ornaments outward I’ve shewn; now I’ll shew The inward Contents of this gold-letter’d beau. —Alas, a mistake!—for I’ve search’d, but in vain, To find worth in his heart, or wit in his brain.6

What is revealed with the dandy, in contrast, is not the emptiness but the filling: the false padding with which he bulks up his calves or the stays that hold in his waist.7 To deflate this figure is to lay bare the devices. The movement from the macaroni to the dandy marks not merely an

16. Philip Dawe, The Macaroni: A Real Character at the Late Masquerade ([London]: printed for John Bowles, 1773). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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17. Isaac Robert Cruikshank, Dandies Dressing (1818). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

aesthetic shift but also a change in the social function of the figure. As legend has it, the term “macaroni” derived from the upper-class youths returning from the Grand Tour who preferred Italian pasta to the hearty roast beef of British cuisine. These young men, who reputedly congregated at a Macaroni Club, imported not only the culinary but also the sartorial taste of the Continent, adopting extravagant powdered hairstyles and intricately embroidered fabrics.8 At first, the style was associated with the upper crust of British society. Some critics have understood the macaroni prints as an attempt to discredit aristocratic and Whig circles and particularly the opposition leader Charles James Fox by associating them with an unpatriotic love of foreign luxury. In The Young Politician, for example, Fox appears with a lupine head and tail, stripping the Magna Carta into curling papers with which to shape his decadent coiffure.9 But though the type began as a figuration of the excess and exaggeration of the British elite, the macaroni style quickly spread to other walks of life, and the word soon became “a term of reproach to all ranks of people, indifferently, who fall into this absurdity.”10 The Mary and Matthew Darly prints (the most important collection of macaroni satires), thus, include A Law Macaroni, The Clerical Macaroni, The Butcher Macaroni, A Macaroni Printseller, The Oxford Macaroni, and The Macaroni Liv-

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eryman, as well as macaronis from various neighborhoods of London, not just The St. James Macaroni but also The Waiter of Drury L—e and The Grub Street Macaroni.11 As the term spread, it became less a marker of rank or income—“No single class of men this merit claim,/Or high, or low, in faith ’tis all the same”—and more a sign of eccentricity.12 Observing this variety of types and ranks, some critics have interpreted the Darly prints as satires of the social climbing of the lower and middle classes, who molded themselves to the aristocratic aesthetic.13 In this reading, the point of the collection would be to reveal the universality of the style and its vulgarization through degraded repetition. The fascination and pleasure of the series, however, derives not so much from the similarities—the common costume and paraphernalia—as from the obvious differences among the images: the diverse ways in which distinct walks of life are refracted through the defamiliarizing macaroni lens. Each image gives us the oddball of a profession or group, often with such idiosyncratic detail that viewers of the day could recognize the author’s model: on his personal set of Darly prints Horace Walpole jotted down the names of the real people depicted.14 For the art historian Amelia Rauser, the paradox of these images is that the inauthentic and artificial trappings of macaroni dress served to reveal the authenticity of the individual represented, his natural singularity.15 This celebration of eccentricity expressed a very British notion of liberty: as another critic observes, “Variety of character was interpreted as a natural development of the English constitution.”16 The emphasis on idiosyncrasy of character, however, tended to obscure other forms of difference such as class. The prints capture the fringe figures of different groups and ranks, but this edge is represented as the limit of normality—as a space for misfits and marginal types—rather than as the border separating one class from another. The focus on the authenticity and singularity of the type ultimately obscures the relations among groups in society, the tensions that occur when these characters occupy the same frame. The early literature of dandyism, in contrast, emphasized the interrelations and interactions among social ranks. Like the Darly prints, texts such as the collection Dandyism Displayed, or The Follies of the Ton depict many types of dandies: Female Dandies, Dandy Actors, Dandy Pawnbrokers, Dandy Jews, Dandy Salesmen, Dandy Linen-Drapers, Dandy Haberdashers, Dandy Hatters, Dandy Booksellers, Dandy Staymakers, Dandy Pastry Cooks, Dandy Fruitiers, Dandy Undertakers, Dandy Tailors, Dandy Hair-dressers,

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Dandy Male Servants, Dandy Female Servants, Dandy Milliners, Dandy Girls, and dandy concubines.17

But where the macaroni images tend to be in the singular—each portrait represents the oddball, the singularity, of a given profession or rank— the dandy categories appear in the plural. The interest has moved from the eccentric of a group to eccentrics as a group. With this shift in focus, relations among groups and ranks become a central concern. Another text, Dandymania, Being a Dissertation on the Modern Dandies, for example, defines dandyism as “a scale divided into a certain number of degrees, at the summit of which stands the Wealthy Independent Dandy, and at the extremity the Dandy Beggar, or rather, since beggary is not so ignoble as dishonesty, the Dandy Pickpocket.”18 The treatise offers each of these groups instructions on how to behave in society in order to be included among the dandies. In conversation with an Independent Dandy, the Dandy Lawyer must “damn all attournies as so many leeches” and “compare them with the most abandoned thief living,” and the Dandy Parson must “damn all clergymen as hypocrites, and swear by God that the profession smells musty.”19 The basic rule is to disdain one’s equals so as to appear superior. To put it another way, the dandy cultivates the art of the cut not only in his wardrobe but also in his social life. The master of this technique was George “Beau” Brummell, whose success in Regency London was as much a function of his ability to cut as of his tailor’s. On one occasion, Brummell went so far as to slight the prince regent himself. According to some accounts, this cut led to his loss of royal favor and his financial ruin, but in the long run it would secure his reputation as the king of the dandies.20 Where the focus in macaroni literature is the figure’s curious mode of being—a static eccentricity—the emphasis in dandy texts is the process of his becoming, which is always a struggle for belonging, an attempt to win entry into the dandy club. Dandy titles appear not only in the plural but also with gerunds: Dandies Dressing, Skaiting—Dandies Shewing Off, Dandies and Dandizettes Dressing for the Easter Ball, Dandies Preparing for a Promenade, etcetera.21 He is a figure in process, always striving toward a higher social standing. The macaroni is a good-for-nothing whose daily agenda is a litany of frivolities. Dandyism, in contrast, is hard work: in False Appearances, an American play from 1819, two apprentices run away from their masters to become dandies and take turns wearing a single suit only to discover that working life is much easier than the constant scrambling to keep up appearances.22 As a popular pun would have it, the dandy

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who appears sans souci (without a care) in society—cool and unflappable in his elegance—is more often than not a dandy sans sis sous (without a sixpence), someone who has no shortage of souci.23 Historians have interpreted the general shift in male style from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century in a variety of ways. The influential psychologist of dress, J. C. Flügel, referred to the period of the French Revolution as the Great Masculine Renunciation, a movement away from aristocratic ostentation and exhibitionism (overt distinctions of status and affluence) and toward a more sober, restrained, and homogeneous aesthetic associated with the bourgeoisie and an emerging democratic ideal (a costume that expressed the “common humanity of all men”).24 Fashion historians have often echoed this view, attributing the shift to the embourgeoisement of the aristocracy.25 More recently, however, this consensus has come into question. David Kuchta has argued that the ideal of simplicity and the anti-luxury discourse that came to be associated with the middle classes in the nineteenth century originated in aristocratic debates of the seventeenth century. The shift marked not the emergence of a new middle-class aesthetic so much as an appropriation of an aristocratic style and critique to express the bourgeois ideal of the self-made man. Regardless of the direction of influence (aristocratic adoption of bourgeois styles or vice versa), Kuchta’s research makes clear the gradual and long-term nature of this sartorial shift. The movement away from ornament was not a renunciation—a conscious and immediate resolution—but rather a slow evolution in which fashions were increasingly stripped down over the course of a century.26 What remains to be explained, however, is the relatively rapid change in the portrayal of the self-fashioning male character. As James Laver has observed, the macaroni of the 1770s and 1780s sought to resist the increasing simplification of male fashions.27 He distinguished himself from the homogenizing trend by adopting a counteraesthetic, one of extreme visibility and over-the-top effects. Only forty years later, however, the selffashioning man would stand out precisely for his conformity to a general rule of inconspicuousness. The question that remains to be resolved is how self-fashioning became a self-fashioning in denial of itself. Or to put it another way, why did self-fashioning against the toned-down fashions turn into a self-fashioning through these fashions? This chapter will attempt to address this question by considering the influence of the French Revolution on British discussions of masculine style and particularly on the most obvious distinction between our macaroni from the “late masquerade” and the Dandies Dressing their hair. Thomas

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Haynes Bayly may have equated the macaronis of the past with the dandies of the present, but even he could not fail to remark upon this difference: The irons hissed, and round about their ears, Stiff tortured curls arose in even tiers; And, lest in fascination curls should fail, Tradition tells us thereby hung a tail. ’Twas thus our father’s [sic] heads enormous rose;— “Hide your diminished heads,” ye modern beaux.28

It is the lost tale of this lost tail and its political significance to which we now turn.

A Poll Tax In the winter of 1795, British support for the war against France was rapidly dwindling. Over the winter, the English army had suffered a number of reversals: the French had invaded the Netherlands and pushed the Austrians beyond the Rhine. On the home front, meanwhile, the war effort was placing a strain on the British economy, which was already weakened by a staggering national debt, unchecked royal spending, and loans to foreign allies. As in France, the winter of 1794–1795 was one of the harshest of the century, and many anticipated that the crop yield would be particularly poor. Indeed, by late March the price of bread had risen by more than 50 percent.29 Faced with hardship at home and frustrated by disappointing military news, the British public increasingly questioned the necessity of and rationale for the war. The same conditions that had produced tensions between the sansculottes and jeunes gens in Paris during the Germinal and Prairial bread riots threatened England and similarly revealed glaring social inequities. To address these economic woes, the British prime minister William Pitt proposed an unusual measure: the Hair Powder Act of 1795.30 The purpose of the legislation was to levy money for the military from those most able to pay: wearers of hair powder were generally affluent.31 The idea of taxing a luxury was certainly not a novelty in eighteenthcentury Britain. Sumptuary laws were quite common, and hair powder was already subject to an impost. What was unusual about Pitt’s proposal was the form of the tax. To powder their hair, citizens would henceforth be required to pay a guinea for an annual permit. The names of all licensed

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citizens would be posted in public places to facilitate the identification and prosecution of violators, who would be subject to a twenty-pound fee. The tax was unprecedented in that it applied not to the object—hair powder— but to its use. Opponents would quickly point to the redundancy of this legislation: soon, one pamphleteer predicted, the British would pay not only “the duty on candles” but also a guinea per year “for the liberty to burn them.”32 By taxing the act of wearing rather than the object worn, Pitt’s bill would in effect set off a national referendum about self-fashioning. The cost of the license, a guinea per year, was not a token sum. Clerks, who were often required to powder, earned a guinea per week, and laborers, who were accustomed to powdering on Sundays, were lucky to make twenty-six guineas in a year.33 The bill would force many citizens to make a hard choice: to give up the habit and risk ridicule or to bankrupt themselves in keeping up appearances. As one wag put it, To crop or not to crop, that is the question:— Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The plague of powder, and loquacious barbers, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by the scissars [sic] end them?34

Or, as another Hamlet pondered: To wear a wig or not to wear a wig’s the question; Whether ’tis cheaper for a man to suffer The odious payment of unwelcome taxes, Or to bear up against the tide of fashions, And by a jasey [a plain, brown, woolen wig] end them?35

In introducing the measure to Parliament, Pitt described the bill as a tax on “vanity.”36 His underlying assumption was that powdering was a luxury, an act of pride, rather than a necessary component of decent grooming. This valorization and definition of vanity, however, was far from universal. In the weeks and months that followed, an outpouring of pamphlets, newspapers articles, songs, and caricatures both for and against the measure would betray a clear lack of consensus on these issues. To many critics, the act seemed the straw that would break the camel’s back. Throughout the 1790s, Pitt had piled one impost after another on the shoulders of the British taxpayers, who now tottered under the strain (fig. 18). The latest tax threatened to crush them altogether. A poem on

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18. Isaac Cruikshank, No Grumbling (London: S. W. Fores, [1795]). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

the Hair Powder Act by the satirist Peter Pindar reminded Pitt of how Britain lost its American colonies: Think on America, our cow of yore, Which oft the hand with Job-like patience bore; Who pinch’d, and yet denied a lock of hay, Kick’d the hard milkman off, and march’d away.37

Like the Americans’, the British taxpayers’ patience had its limits. At the end of the poem, Pindar gestured toward an even more immediate and ominous precedent: Yet, if resolv’d to worry wigs and hair, And, Herod-like, not little children spare, Say, (for methinks the land has much to dread) How long in safety may we wear the head? 38

Pitt’s act was headless in every sense; it risked provoking the same violence and unrest that had for six years riven France. Throughout 1795 and 1796, the shadow of the French Revolution and the debates about self-fashioning across the Channel would loom over

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the hair-powder controversy. This anxiety manifested itself in two ways. Some commentators feared that the measure would be the catalyst of a similar insurrection in England. Others complained that the tax created in England a disturbing mirror of the Revolution. (The remainder of this section will deal with the first group of texts, and the next will examine the second.) Authors who anticipated that the tax would provoke an uprising tended to focus on economic considerations. In the years leading up to the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette had often come under attack for her ever more towering hairstyles, which required vast amounts of powder. Her coiffure, which instantly set the trend in the court and aristocracy, struck many as insensitive to the poor, a waste of flour that would have better been used for bread. This blatant waste and inequality, some argued, were among the causes of the Revolution. Discussing the new tax, one commentator pointed to a disturbing parallelism between the British throne and the fallen French monarchy: Fifteen thousand pounds for a head-dress for the Princess of Wales!!! What an insult is this prodigality to a People bending beneath such an enormous load of taxes, and involved in a war the most ruinous and expensive that ever any country was afflicted with! The contempt and abhorrence in which the Princes of the Blood in France were held, were principally owing to their enormous extravagance and to the indecent manner in which they contracted debts which they knew the people would be called upon to discharge.39

The luxury of both crowns impoverished their people. The Hair Powder Act seemed to invite this sort of zero-sum logic: the higher and whiter the headdress, the less bread for the masses. In presenting the new measure before Parliament, however, Pitt scrupulously avoided this type of reasoning. When a deputy arguing for a complete prohibition of hair powder mentioned predictions of a poor crop yield and impending scarcity, the prime minister denied the existence of the shortage and shot down the remark as “very disorderly, and as calculated to do no good, while it might be attended with a deal of mischief.”40 The introduction of a zero-sum mentality risked social disorder and possibly even an uprising. According to Pitt, the act was simply a way to raise money for the war from those most able to part with it, a purely voluntary tax to be paid only by the upper echelon of British society. Nevertheless, as John Barrell has pointed out, it is clear from the legislation itself that

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Pitt intended the act to ameliorate the food shortage as well, for it applied not only to the use of hair powder, which was made from starch, but also to the substitution of flour, the so-called hair powder of the poor. If the goal had been to target the rich alone, it would have been much simpler to increase the already-existing sales tax on hair powder; Pitt need not have introduced the cumbersome idea of taxing the use of powder, which required mechanisms for selling licenses, posting names, and punishing violators. The measure also seems designed to stem the practice of flouring, which depleted the bread supply.41 In November, a second bill would prohibit the production of hair powder from any foodstuff whatsoever, another indication of the zero-sum logic implicit in the initial legislation.42 Although Pitt refused to recognize this reasoning in the public discussion of the measure, commentators quickly spelled it out. According to some reports, the use of hair powder wasted an amount of grain that would supply more than thirty million quartern loaves.43 Many considered that a more sensible and sensitive response to the crisis would be a total prohibition of powdering. This zero-sum logic may have been ungrounded. As John Hart explained in a lengthy and extremely technical pamphlet, the starch used to produce hair powder came from inferior and inedible kernels of corn.44 Moreover, the amount of hair powder already produced and in stock in 1795 was sufficient to meet the needs of the country for at least a year: England, that is, could continue to powder without draining resources from the bread supply during the scarcity.45 For Hart, Pitt’s tax was not only unwarranted but also perilous, for by insinuating a zero-sum logic, it risked inciting popular anger. Several pamphlets had already appeared causing “popular odium against wearers of Hair-Powder” and “murmurs among the lower orders, against government,” which might “endanger the peace of the community.”46 Indeed, similar fears were expressed in the initial discussion of the bill in Parliament: “if an idea went abroad that [wearing powder] had a tendency to produce a famine,” John Courtenay observed, those who did so would “run the further risque of being knocked on the head.”47 In August, a journalist complained that the papers had misled the poor and encouraged them to consider powdered heads their enemies; he warned that the many ballads on the subject were “calculated to excite riots.”48 In the wake of the French Revolution, such measures seemed particularly dangerous: the present moment, one critic observed, was precisely the time to eschew any measure that would “kindl[e] the indignation, and resentment of the people.”49 Many critics felt that the tax drew dangerous attention to the unequal

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distribution of wealth in British society. In the past, powdering had been a status symbol but also a sign of decency and formality: the lower orders had often powdered or floured their hair for church on Sunday “not out of vanity” but as an expression of personal dignity and as a “conspicuous discrimination of the Sabbath . . . from the ordinary days of the week.”50 With the new legislation, however, the look became a marker of class and a much more exclusive one. The law had the effect of polarizing English society, dividing it into those who powdered and those who did not.51 In the literature about the tax, a vivid vocabulary evolved to evoke this polarization. Within a few weeks of the announcement of the bill, the Morning Chronicle came up with monikers for the opposing sides: By Nob that’s black, or brown and greasy, You may distinguish very easy, One of the common herd of swine; This is a never failing sign: But, by his powder’d hair or wig, You recognize the guinea-pig.52

Another epithet for the unpowdered was the “swinish multitude,” a phrase drawn from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).53 The polarization would also be represented visually though images such as Isaac Cruikshank’s print The Rival Pigs, which divided England into the guinea pigs and the pigs without a guinea (fig. 4). Soon after the bill took effect, a pamphlet warned that the law would introduce “unwarrantable distinctions” evident already in “the appellation of Guinea Pigs now given to the powdered party by the unpowdered.”54 And another commentator complained that the bill served only “to create discordiality between the rich and the poor; and to give rise to odious epithets of reproach and sarcasm.”55 The tax excited the worst fears of the catastrophic imagination. For many commentators, the danger of the new law was not simply the polarization but also the unprecedented visibility it gave to this divide. A letter in the Morning Post complained that the bill would “operate nearly in the same manner as a parish badge on the arm of a Pauper”; it would “make Distinction too visible,” and the Morning Chronicle observed that the tax was “contrived to make the distinctions in society more manifest.”56 Perhaps more dangerous than the visibility of the guinea pigs, however, was that of the masses. “It has generally been the

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policy of the governments,” observed one critic, “to avoid every measure that could lead the Mass of the People to the discovery of their numbers and strength.—Mr. Pitt, however, seems to disregard this policy, and by imposing a Tax on the wearing of Hair Powder, to invite the people to the contemplation of their irresistible energy.”57 By dividing England so overtly into haves and have-nots, the bill risked creating a sense of collective purpose among the lower orders, which could lead to revolt. Only a few years before, indeed, the visibility of social rank in France—the enforced dress codes of the Estates General—had helped to underscore the common interests of the Third Estate. For many other critics, however, the problem with the act was not that it drew “unwarranted distinctions” but rather that it did not distinguish enough: the law failed to take into account the nuances of particular situations and social levels. Its fee was the same for those who powdered once a month as for those who did so every day. And visitors would have to pay a full year’s license, though their stay in England might last no more than a month. Many commentators felt the law should be progressive, taking into account the financial limitations of each taxpayer.58 One writer suggested that it be structured in the same way as the window tax, which went up according to the number of windows in each residence (an index of wealth).59 Another proposed a tax based not on economic ability but on social hierarchy: “Such a sum might be placed upon the head of his Grace, something less upon that of a Marquis, less upon that of an Earl, Viscount, Baron, Bishop, and on down to the lower order of society.”60 Just as the excessive polarization risked social upheaval, so too did the failure to distinguish. Almost as soon as the law was proposed, politicians and journalists began to refer to it as a poll tax.61 The term was in part a joke, for the new measure was literally a tax on polls (another word for “heads”), but it also alluded to a troubling historical precedent: a similarly nonprogressive poll tax introduced by Richard II in 1377 to raise funds for a war against France.62 The measure was so unpopular that it provoked the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 (also known as Wat Tyler’s Rebellion), which would lead to social reforms, including the abolition of serfdom. In a satirical poem, an author signing Grizzle Baldpate reminds Pitt of the sad fate of Richard II’s chancellor: For Hist’ry, if his Memory does not fail, Hints, Dick’s Collector lev’d by the Tail, For which his Head was broke by Tyler’s Axe.63

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In both its distinctions and its indistinctions, the law placed heads on the line. The nobs by far the most affected by this failure to distinguish were those of the middle class, a group that depended more than any other on the visibility of social status: Their situation in life is so equivocal, being placed between their superiors and their inferiors, obliged to maintain a constant access to and intercourse with the former, and, at the same time, mixing with, and by imperceptible gradations confounded among the latter, that it behooves them to be uncommonly tenacious of those appearances, by which the necessary distinctions are kept up, and by which their footing in the superior class of society is secured.64

For these middle ranks, invisibility was essentially inexistence; the selfmade middle-class man depended on self-fashioning to perform the social status to which he aspired. Those unable to pay the yearly guinea would suddenly find themselves subsumed into the swinish multitude: “But now, by the sordid manner of their appearance, particularly with their mean and beggarly black wigs, without powder, they are not to be distinguished from coachmen, or horse-jockies.”65 As in France, a binary logic threatened to eliminate the middle ground, but in England it was not the political center but rather the social in-between that was at risk. The result of the law, some feared, would be to make the multitude swinish: “we shall instantly become, what a great man has been rather premature in calling us, emphatical and eloquent as his language is, a swinish multitude!!!”66 A general slovenliness in appearance could, in turn, lead to uncivilized, unruly behavior and an increased likelihood of uprising: “it is not very wise to take away any of those habits, which refine perhaps, which soften, which improve their manners, and render them more obedient subjects.”67 In his treatise on powder production, John Hart spells out this danger even more bluntly: “The levelling of personal appearance to an almost actual state of Sans culotism” was the first harbinger of the “state of anarchy which has so long desolated, and still desolates, a neighbouring kingdom.”68 Hart’s presupposition is a radical one: social hierarchy exists only through its performance, through its outward marks and symbols. To avoid an uprising such as that in France, Hart recommends that “the gentry and nobility increase, rather than relax their attention to dress.”69

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Other writers, however, offered the opposite advice: for them, the path to revolution was a powdered one. A pamphleteer who favored a general discontinuation of the powdering recalled the fate of the princess of Lamballe, the stylishly coiffed friend of Marie Antoinette, whom the Parisian crowd had lynched and dismembered during the September Massacres.70 Other commentators rejected the practice for its French origins and recalled its undignified source. According to the Telegraph, several performers at a fair in France in the seventeenth century had powdered their hair “like our chimney-sweepers on a May-day” to amuse an audience. The newspaper warned Britons against becoming “the vile imitators of buffoons and ballad-singers.”71 Sir Adam Gordon considered the practice “one of the abominable abuses imported from our infidel neighbours; who, when they have effectually corrupted us by their fopperies, may in time be permitted to punish us for our unmanly, and unchristian imitation of their contaminating manners.”72 And another writer warned against the influence of French hairdressers, who might spread dangerous ideas while powdering their clientele.73 Powdering was not a reaffirmation of the social order but rather an invitation to revolution. These debates clearly tap into the anxiety of the catastrophic imagination, but they differ considerably from those in France. Across the Channel, the binary opposition tended to be framed in political terms: blues versus greens, Right versus Left, Constitution versus conspiracy. The British texts discussed above, in contrast, focus on an economic divide: haves versus have-nots. Another difference between the French and English discussions is their attitude toward difference. Where incroyable texts generally minimized the importance of superficial distinctions in order to emphasize underlying commonalities—a shared humanity or republican loyalty—British texts sought to uphold distinction, though they often varied in their understanding of the nature of these differences. Those who feared making class boundaries too visible considered the distinctions to be deep and significant and therefore wished to protect them by making them less evident, by allowing a self-fashioning that created an illusion of mobility in a highly stratified society. Those who feared making differences invisible, in contrast, viewed these distinctions as superficial: class difference existed only to the extent it was visible; for a man to be middle class he had to be recognizable as such. But whether they viewed the differences as superficial or profound, almost all the texts wished to preserve them in order to avoid a situation such as that which had developed in France.

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Powder Politics The authors of the texts examined above considered the tax dangerous because they feared it would provoke an uprising. For many observers, however, the tax seemed not a catalyst of revolution so much as an uncanny mirror of the political culture across the Channel. As in France, large numbers of people suddenly found themselves losing their “heads”: Attend all ye Natives of this sea-girt Isle: The subject is serious, nor warrants a smile; For, strange as the sound, yet the Minister’s hand Is contriving to crop all the Heads in the Land!74

And as in France, this “decapitation” had a leveling effect on society: more and more people, unable to pay the tax, found themselves assimilated sartorially with the lower ranks. In each case, a traditional marker of status had come under attack, and many citizens began to adopt an unpowdered and often cropped look associated with the democratic ideals of the Roman Republic. As the Oracle and Public Advertiser observed, “[o]ne of the most formidable objections to such a law having operation in Great Britain, especially at this time, is, that it will directly introduce a simplicity of dress, which is the invariable effect of all Republican Governments.”75 Indeed, commentators would note disturbing echoes of French politics even in the way the bill was approved. As the Register of the Times noted, it was passed “by what the French term acclamation, no objection having been made to the substance or manner of it.”76 The voice vote suppressed debate and dissension, producing a false appearance of consensus, a disturbing mirror of the political culture of the Terror. This contrived uniformity worried the critic for the Register, who feared the law pressured citizens to dress in a certain way lest they be taken for “enemies of the war.”77 The goal of the measure was “to stigmatize, with the epithets due to disloyalty, every man who, from whatever motives, does not enter ardently into their views, and applaud their measures.”78 The sartorial polarization, that is, was not simply economic—guinea pigs versus swinish multitude—but also ideological. One public debating society framed the question of whether to powder in entirely political terms: “to discontinue the use of Hair Powder, to mark their dislike of the War and the minister; or else to continue it, as supporters of the Administration.”79 Many writers felt that the distinction between powdered and unpowdered

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introduced a dangerous binary logic into British politics. Not only was the middle class relegated to invisibility but so was the political middle ground, the nuances of the center. For the author of the Meal-Tub Plot, Pitt was forcing “the people to make party distinctions,” which, like the opposition between the low and high heels in Gulliver’s Travels, might come to “distress the state.”80 The law subtly introduced into England the withus-or-against-us mentality of French political culture. More troublingly the measure forced citizens to take a stand for or against the government and its war policy in the most public and visible way: in their personal appearance. A Scottish poet lamented that the measure opened private beliefs to public scrutiny: It will be a test to a whean, Wha twa great straits will be atween; To pay a tax like this they’l e’en Be very laith, But fain their principles wad screen, For fear o’ skaith.81

Another wag observed that “[a]s a party distinction, the wearing or nonwearing of hair powder will have an odd effect. Instead of ad-dresses to know the sense of the nation, it will in future be collected by headdresses—and instead of a show of hands at a Common Hall, Mr. Pitt may demand a poll! ”82 Political views would henceforth be transparent. Powder wearers would be considered supporters of the war, while Whigs would now wear wigs, refusing to powder their heads “with human blood”: “Tho’ swine ye’re dub’d, turn not to guinea pigs,/damn warlike powder, and all take to wigs.”83 The discussion of the measure anticipated many of the concerns generated by Vernet’s incroyable prints in early 1797: the anxiety over political polarization and visible rallying signs. The result of this politicization of dress was an overdetermined sign system: powdering was now a marker not simply of class or decency but also of ideology and opinion. Just as in France culottes (or the lack thereof) had gone from being a marker of rank to being a marker of politics, so hair powder was taking on an unprecedented ideological weight. In the discussion of the bill in the House of Lords, the Earl of Moira spelled out this disturbing parallelism: Again, it marked a line of distinction which he considered very bad in this present disturbed time: they who did not wish to comply with the sever-

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ity of the Tax, would immediately be denominated Jacobins, and in time an unpowdered head might be equivalent to a national cockade, after the manner of the French. . . . The prevalence of watch-words and names of party, of squibs in newspapers, such as the guinea-pigs and Jacobin-cuts, and the like, excited more discontent, and kindled more Sedition than they were aware of.84

The inability to pay—a financial limitation—might be construed as a political statement.85 A similar confusion of economic and ideological motives had caused embarrassment among French émigrés, who were often reduced to poverty but who feared that not powdering would be interpreted as “a symptom of Jacobinism.”86 The overdetermination of the sign might even have dangerous effects. One commentator anticipated that citizens unable to afford a license would disguise their poverty by adopting more radical political positions: they “may be led in their own defence to say such and such things, which, at these times, may be very improper.”87 Not only would the powder “test” force citizens to take sides but it might also lead them toward more fanatical political viewpoints. The British measure invited comparisons with France not only by making politics observable but also by encouraging observation. One of the provisions of the bill awarded ten pounds to anyone who denounced a violator. Some commentators feared that the law would introduce a new regime of surveillance, spawning a host of spies and informers. The tax threatened to introduce the logic of the paranoid imagination into British political culture: not only the insistence on legible appearances but also the obsession with unmasking frauds. The enforcement measures struck many as an encroachment on civil liberties: within days of the announcement of the bill, the Morning Chronicle rejected the proposed register as “so hostile to the feelings of a free nation, that every constitutional man must object to it. It is laying a basis for requisitions that would extinguish the spark of personal freedom.”88 A year later, during the parliamentary discussion of another measure, the Dog-Tax Bill, Richard Brinsley Sheridan would hint at the parallel with France. One of the stipulations of the dog law was that anyone could appropriate for his own use a hound whose owner had failed to pay the tax. “[I]f this principle were applied to the hair-powder duty,” Sheridan observed, “the suspicion of [a gentleman’s] not having paid it, might induce some one to cut off his head, and convert it to his own uses.”89 Although the comment is in jest, the image of beheading suggested the danger of creating an ethos of suspicion and civilian surveillance: the Terror was but a step away.90

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Perhaps the most disturbing echo, however, was the increasing frequency of street violence provoked by the bill. Just as the jeunes gens and sansculottes were coming to blows in Paris during the spring of 1795, so too were the guinea pigs and swine of London. From the first announcement of the measure, poets and pundits alike anticipated porcine strife: “A glorious bustle, will, no doubt, ensue/Between the Powder’d and th’unpowder’d Crew.”91 At first, it seemed most likely that the unpowdered would be the target of attack. Just a few weeks after Pitt announced the bill, the Times, which supported it, observed that “flaxen-headed fops may perchance think of escaping Scot free; but to go unpowdered now, will naturally be deemed a mean and slovenly evasion; and the evaders will meet no doubt in the fashionable or indeed any decent circles, what they merit, a smart dressing.”92 The next day the Morning Post angrily denounced the Times for spreading “the Alarm Word to excite a war of parties.”93 Only a few months later, however, tables had turned. As popular anger over rising bread prices mounted, it had become far more dangerous to powder than not. Radical pamphlets encouraged the populace to put down haughty guinea pigs on the street: Your country’s enemy then each one deem, Who lost to all sense of its wretchedness seem; Who dare with the spoils of your bellies you meet, Insulting your meanness in every street Inviters of slavery who Tyrants thus aid, With scorning and contempt ought to be repaid; If haughtiness e’er you observe on their brow, Humility teach them e’er farther they go.94

In late May, the Morning Post reported an “affray” between the powdered and unpowdered at a tea garden.95 And by mid-July, it warned that one could not appear in powder on the streets without being insulted by the hungry.96 Even women were not safe from attack.97 A commentator for the Morning Post saw riots, if not revolution, on the horizon: At the commencement of the Hair-powder Tax, the Treasury mobs stigmatized those who did not wear Hair-powder, with the appellation of Jacobines [sic], and insulted men and women in the public streets. Now they sound the horn of party discord, and all those who wear Hair-powder, are likely to become marked men, and be mal-treated. The Birmingham Riots were supported in the Government Prints, and it was recommended to

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ill-treat those who did not wear Hair-powder. These circumstances should caution Slaves of Power, to beware how they encourage Rioting and Party Feuds, as they ultimately tend to their own final overthrow, and that of their employers.98

The catalyst of the Birmingham (or Priestly) Riots of 1791 was a dinner held at the Royal Hotel by prominent Dissenters in celebration of Bastille Day and the outbreak of the French Revolution. At the end of the event, rioters from the working class threw stones at the revelers and sacked the Royal Hotel, setting off three days of unrest in which many houses were burned. As the Morning Post writer points out, the local government played a role in instigating the attacks on the Dissenters. Just as the Birmingham incident had stemmed from an official attempt to curb revolutionary sentiment, which had gotten out of hand and led to rioting, so the animus of the government papers against the unpowdered was backfiring: now the opposition directed the same logic of labeling against the guinea pigs themselves. To many observers, the heavy-handed anti-Jacobinism of the government seemed the path to revolution in England, of which the street attacks on powder-wearers were unsettling harbingers.

Bountiful Crops From the first announcement of the tax, many resolved to defy it either in solidarity with the poor or in opposition to the war. Some decided simply to powder without paying the tax.99 Others, however, chose to display their dissent more visibly. In one of the early debates over the measure in the House of Commons, the deputy James Martin appeared without powder to the great amusement of his fellow members: “He would not compare himself to a picture of Vandyke, but surely the heads painted by that famous artist were not less graceful or venerable, because they wanted the suppositious ornament, which had been adopted by the meretricious taste of later times.”100 In the months that followed, a number of prominent citizens would imitate his gesture: the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, for example, not only stopped powdering but also awarded an extra two guineas per year to servants who gave up the custom.101 During the height of the uproar over bread prices in July, even the royal family refrained.102 A number of citizens, however, chose to go a step further, cutting their hair radically short, “docked as close as the Duke of Bridgewater’s old bay coach-horses.”103

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19. Isaac Cruikshank, A Crop, of 1791 (London: S. W. Fores, 1791). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

The fashion of cropping was not unprecedented in 1790s Britain. A few years earlier, during the spring and summer of 1791, a similar fad had emerged and inspired a brief flurry of articles and prints (see fig. 19). The initiators of the fad were Richard Barry, the seventh Earl of Barrymore, and his brothers, Augustus and Henry, young aristocrats who had gained notoriety at court for their wild adventures and dissolute lifestyle: their hobbies included boxing, racing, and reckless gambling.104 Lord Barrymore also loved private theatricals and had built a stage on his estate, where he excelled in the role of Scrub, the jaded, insolent servant of

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George Farquhar’s 1707 play The Beaux’ Stratagem. By all accounts, the role seems to have required little acting. Barrymore’s manners in real life were “low and vulgar,” his typical company some “pugilistic blackguard, horse-jockey or stable-boy.”105 (He would die as carelessly as he lived: in a shooting accident in 1793.) It was perhaps his slumming and outré manners that led to an association between the cropped look and a series of disreputable social types. A 1791 taxonomy of the hairstyle’s partisans assimilated the “noble crop” with various down-and-out characters: the “jack-a-dandy crop,” whose boots are worn; the “thundering crop,” who serves as a “flash-man to some prostitute”; the vulgar “City crop”; and the “man-milliner crop” with a soprano voice.106 Several newspapers likened the new style to that of a pickpocket, and the Morning Post compared the Duke of Hamilton’s cropped hair to that of “Townsend the thief-taker.”107 Another text, which defended the figure, rejected the common confusion of the crops “with puppies, pick-pockets and sharpers.” The author, a soi-disant professor of Croppology, considered this “misancropical” prejudice to be “the splenetic effusion of some eminent barber—no other person could be interested in proving that honesty is to be measured by the tail.”108 In its emphasis on social pretensions and con artistry, the literature around the 1791 crops anticipates some of the more negative representations of the incroyables during the Directory (fig. 20, indeed, uncannily resembles Vernet’s 1796 images [e.g., fig. 2]). By far the most common association, however, was with the figure known as the box-lobby lounger or box-lobby puppy, most notably represented in Charles Stuart’s 1787 interlude The Lobby Loungers.109 Preening and generally penniless young men, the puppies plagued London theaters, where they gathered in the lobby leading to the boxes and disrupted performances with drunken asides. As one wit observed, the loungers were “not men, but coats, waistcoats, and breeches moving upon spindles.”110 In September 1791, the Morning Chronicle published a parodic list of “Rules for the Box Lobby Puppies,” which required adherents to wear their hair unpowdered and cut “like an inverted basin” and to “jingle a few counterfeits in both the breeches pockets, and thereby give an appearance of money.”111 Occasionally, writers assigned the 1791 crops a larger political significance. The Times, for example, associated the style with the Opposition and published a facetious list of resolutions by a “Society of Levellers,” which advised young members to crop their hair: they should follow the example of the “Box Lobby Puppies, to the end that the Shop Boy shall not

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20. Isaac Cruikshank, The Knowing Crops: Ha! Jack Is It You, How Are You Dam-me (1791; reprint, London: Laurie and Whittle, [1794]). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

be known from the Peer—the Pickpocket from the Man of Fashion—or the Gentleman from the Blackguard.”112 The emphasis of this literature, however, lies more on the slumming of the nobility, their assumption of vulgar manners, than on any real ascent—or uprising—of the lower orders. The lobby loungers may have social pretensions but they fool no one, not even each other: the Bond-Street Crop disdains the vulgarity of the Cheapside Crop, while the latter derides the awkwardness of the former.113 Regardless of class origin, the 1791 crop is almost always an object of social disdain who, in turn, disdains others.114 He is never a positive figure nor is he a spokesperson for the masses or a serious vehicle of left-wing ideology. The 1791 fad was ultimately just that: a fad. And like all fads, it soon died out. By the fall of 1791, the newspapers were already declaring “the sans queue animals” passé.115 The fashion, however, would reemerge in the wake of the Hair Powder Act. As early as April 1795, the Times announced the formation of a Crop Club at Lambeth. But the trend really gained momentum in the early fall,

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when the Duke of Bedford, a prominent and dashing member of the Opposition, held a “cropping party,” at which he and his guests cut off their locks to protest the war.116 Shortly afterward, the Morning Post predicted for the winter a “general Cropping Match . . . among the Bloods of Fashion”: “Bets are laid, that in two years the Powder Tax will not produce a fourth of what it does at present.”117 In the weeks that followed, sure enough, crops sprouted throughout London. In a parodic inversion of the rosters of powder license holders posted in public squares, the newspapers began to publish lists of the important figures who had shorn off their hair, joining “the political corps of crops.”118 Even women began to take up the look, becoming “unpowdered belles” or “fashionable female crops.”119 Soon the crops, both male and female, were so numerous that the papers routinely joked about the bountiful harvest they would produce: And Fashion itself denotes plenty;— See all around, What Crops abound, For One of last Year we have Twenty; Fine Crops! Thick Tops!120

Another commentator recalled how Fox had mocked Pitt’s bill for attempting to generate revenue from such an unstable source as fashion: “At that time there were but very few crops out of the pugilistic circle; but their number is now so great, that the tax upon hair powder, in a year or two, is likely to be very unproductive.”121 The Bloods of Fashion seemed poised to win their bet. The critical response to the style in some ways resembled the “misancropical” discourses of 1791. Once again, the look became associated with lobby loungers, pickpockets, and other disreputable sorts. Thomas Morton’s 1796 play The Way to Get Married, for example, featured a crop who is a practiced con artist on the Exchange. And describing a particularly ill-conceived portrait of the Duke of Bedford, the Morning Post insinuated that the painter had attempted “to bring the whole tribe of Crops into contempt” by representing the aristocrat as “a lounging pickpocket.”122 Many accused the crops of having a stingy, “mercenary” nature, of taking advantage of the style to evade the tax and hide their poverty: “And if, to save appearances, they clip their hair away, sir,/Why, then, we call them Simple Crops, and laugh at them all day, sir.”123 Others attempted to discredit the fashion by representing the cropping party as a frivolous aristocratic

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orgy, not unlike Lord Barrymore’s wild antics several years earlier. Bacchus, one pundit recalled, “has a peculiar influence on the head, and often makes it go round.”124 And the Times warned that a fashion so conceived could never catch on: “Can it be supposed that a few drunken persons in a frolic, will be followed by the sober part of the people of England?”125 Unlike Lord Barrymore, however, the Duke of Bedford was a serious player in British politics, whose influence gave the cropped style a new ideological meaning and weight. Despite its earlier predictions, the Times would soon recognize the success of the fashion as well as the political danger it represented: “The seeds of Sedition which have lately been sown, have produced plentiful crops.”126 The “present reign,” the newspaper hoped, would “destroy the crops.”127 As with the 1791 crop, this threat was in part that of an egalitarian ideology. The style quickly became known as the Bedford Level, a reference to the Fens of Cambridgeshire, which the Duke of Bedford’s forebear, Francis Russell, the fourth Earl of Bedford, had undertaken to drain in the seventeenth century.128 But the word “level” also evoked the antihierarchical politics of the Levellers during the English Civil Wars. The print Whims of the Moment or the Bedford Level!! illustrates the dangerous equality introduced by the style: it juxtaposes a peasant who proudly struts his newly cropped hair with a gentleman who looks aghast at his severed tail and repeats Prospero’s words from the Tempest: “Tis gone,—and like the baseless fabric of a Vision,—left not a wreck behind” (fig. 21). The fashion seemed to endanger not just tails but the social hierarchy itself. The conservative Times responded dismissively to the egalitarian pretensions of the crops: “The attempt is vain to drive order and distinction out of the world. Even the Crops are distinguished into classes. There is the Noble Crop, the Citizen Crop, and the Beggarly Crop. One of these last being teazed by his acquaintance, cried out with great spirit, ‘I wish to God they would leave off their coats too; I should make as good an appearance as the best of them.’”129 The crops might eliminate one sine qua non of upper-class attire, but they had not entirely leveled the playing field of London society. The crops of 1795, however, took on a much more threatening cast than those of 1791. Where the literature around the latter satirized primarily the social by-products of the style—the pretensions of the Bond Street Crop or the degradation of the slumming noble—the 1795 discussions introduced more disturbing political references. One of the most common allusions was to the Roundheads of the English Civil Wars, Cromwell supporters whose cropped hair contrasted with the long locks of the Cav-

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21. Isaac Cruikshank, Whims of the Moment or the Bedford Level!! (London: S. W. Fores, 1795). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

aliers.130 The Morning Chronicle, for example, dismissed the fashion as an eerie return to the past: That the days of Chivalry are no more is abundantly proved by our modern Beaux:—instead of emulating the high-spirited Cavaliers who were friends of Charles the First and Second, and wore their three-cornered beavers, a la militaire, they imitate the Roundheads, and carry the appearance of a congregation of crop-eared fanatics, just started from a trance in which they have lain since the days of Cromwell, Prynn and Lambert.131

Another writer recalled approvingly how “many of those Crops not only lost the shape of their heads, but the heads themselves; and that that may be the case with all murderers and assassins, God in his infinite mercy grant.”132 And John Hart accused the Reverend Septimus Hodson—the author of a treatise discouraging the use of powder—of entertaining “political principles . . . of an Oliverian complexion.”133 Whereas the references to Levellers and Roundheads represent the figure as an anachronism and give him an English origin, other commentators would insist on the modernity of the crops, evoking not British history but current events across the Channel: in the early years of

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the French Revolution, the Jacobins had similarly introduced a fashion of cropping. Within weeks of Bedford’s cropping party, the Times began to associate the cropped style with the British Jacobins.134 It would not be long before the figure had a new moniker: “The Crops are now known by the name of the Guillotines.”135 In December, the Times reported that “[a] certain Democratic Lord has received a present from an ingenious mechanic, of a Cropping Machine. It is constructed upon the principle of the guillotine and may be converted into one occasionally.”136 And in January, it observed that “[t]he only variation in the present fashion between England and France, is, that the former cuts off the tail, and the latter the head.”137 The cropped style was not a vestige of the past but a symbol of the dangers of the present: revolution.138 Even nature seemed to confirm it: after a new comet was discovered on August 14, 1797, the Times joked that “[t]here must certainly be a Revolution in the planetary world, since even the Comets are turned Crops.”139 The irony of this association, of course, was that by 1795 cropped hair was hardly the dominant fashion in revolutionary France: “so far from the Jacobins being Crops, it is all the Fashion in Paris at present to have the Hair tied in two tails.”140 Many critics warned that the crops might become the victims of their own machine: “The Jacobin bloods crop close to the pole,” the Times observed, “they should take more care of their necks.”141 John Hart ominously recalled that the fashion of cropping had originated with the Duke of Orléans, Philippe Égalité, “who, if the reader will pardon a vile pun, was croped by the guillotine to the universal satisfaction of mankind.”142 And in a public letter attacking Bedford, Edmund Burke issued a grim warning: “They [the sansculottes] will not trouble their heads, with what part of his head, his hair is cut from; and they will look with equal respect on a tonsure and a crop. Their only question will be that of their Legendre, or some other of their legislative butchers, How he cuts up? how he tallows in the cawl or on the kidneys?”143 In Burke’s view, a conventionnel such as Louis Legendre (a butcher’s son) was unlikely to treat the crops any differently from the priests, who were often executed in Year II. The crops would escape neither the guillotine nor the carnage of the Terror. Setting aside such admonitions, however, a number of crops would boldly take up the same revolutionary allusions in their own writings. The author of The Minister’s Head—Dressed according to Law, for example, signs “by a Round Head,” and Grizzle Baldpate warns Pitt against the “Follies of a Charles’s Reign,” a hint at the possibility of revolution and regicide.144 Perhaps most forcefully a song by W. H. Green titled “The Republican Crop” recalls not only how the earlier Roundheads “cropt off ”

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Charles II’s head in a struggle “[f]or Equality’s laws, and the freedom of man” but also recent events in France: When Frenchmen appeared with long hair on each head Then tyranny triumph’d, and Liberty fled, But cropt they have thrown off the despots controul, And the love of fair freedom inspires every soul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Britons off with your hair, and you are sure to prevail, For a crop strikes with terror, a slave with a tail145

Unlike the 1791 figure, the “republican crop” of 1795 explicitly defined himself as an agent of revolution and a disciple of the French radicals. The new cropped style, however, was not simply a rallying sign; it was also becoming an aesthetic in its own right, a new mode of dandyism.

The Crop Aesthetic When the new tax was first announced, commentators surmised that it would be a blow to humbly circumstanced macaronis, coxcombs, and fops: the “downfall of guinealess beaus/Who unlicenced will all look like so many crows.”146 Along with redheads, bald men, and aging spinsters, indeed, the penniless fop featured regularly on lists of the bill’s victims: Mark you Beau, so pale and skinny! See his sconce, so bald before! Must he pay his only guinea, Or be powder’d out no more?147

A poem in the Philanthropist from June 1795 takes up the voice of Jacky Dandy, a clerk and aspiring beau, who laments the harsh new measure: ’Tis very hard To be debar’d In what concerns us most; For well ye know, that outside show Was all our heads could boast.148

Jack Dandy, however, would not suffer for long. The advent of the cropped fad in the early fall was soon to rescue him from his plight.

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Unlike the 1791 fad, the new style was not just fashionable slumming; it was a serious gesture. It prevailed not only in the box lobby but also in the most exclusive circles in London: one writer, recalling how the elite Brooks’s (a gentleman’s club) had once excluded the Duke of Bedford for his straight hair, joked that were such policies now enforced, “the club would be wonderfully docked.”149 All steps of the social ladder embraced the fashion. As in 1791, critics of the style assailed it on aesthetic grounds: “who can behold the Crops,” asked the conservative True Briton, “without a disagreeable sensation very like disgust?”150 And a poem in the Whitehall Evening Post offered an account of the origin of the fad based on Aesop’s fable of the fox who lost his tail. In the story, an ape falls afoul of several bullies, who cut off his appendage. To save face, he attempts to create a new fashion: Of his loss the blade soon made a boast “Of the natural case of the Crop, ’Twas a fashion would long rule the roast” [sic]— So ’twas follow’d by each Brother Fop. They are justly deserving derision, All those who adhere to the plan: Men of sense sure must give their decision— That the Crop’s a disgrace to the Man.151

The handsome Duke of Bedford, however, seems to have had a more powerful sway than either the ape or the fox of the legend. In October, the Morning Post reported that his “striking and manly appearance” at the theater had inspired various beaux to follow his example.152 And soon the argument of the “natural case”—the naturalness and ease of the cropped look—would catch on in discussions of the style. The movement toward more natural attire was not an innovation. A general trend toward informality and simplicity may be observed over the last quarter of the eighteenth century. But it is nevertheless striking that the arguments for naturalness do not appear in the 1791 texts. The 1791 crop was but the latest affectation of fashion and was far from an understated look: Tippy Bob proudly struts his cropped hair in both his song and the accompanying print (fig. 22).153 The 1795 style, in contrast, was not just another trend or form of artifice: it would be justified aesthetically, through precepts and maxims drawn from literature and the fine arts. A number of texts recalled the advice of The Seasons (1730), a

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poem by the Scottish author James Thomson: “for loveliness/Needs not the foreign aid of ornament,/But is when unadorn’d adorn’d the most.”154 Citing these verses, the Morning Chronicle observed that “the frame which nature has given to every face, is, in almost all cases, the best calculated to set that face off to the most advantage.”155 Other defenders of the style resorted to classical models. A letter by an unpowdered crop to the Sporting Magazine praised the style for introducing “the attractive simplicity of nature” and cites the restrained aesthetic of statuary as an example.156 The same journal would later choose as the modern beau’s motto Horace’s “brevis esse laboro.”157 Still others, such as a soi-disant “Republican Crop,” recalled biblical precepts such as Paul’s letter to the Corinthians favoring short hair in men: For nature ordains that we should be all shorn, And thus are we crops from the time we are born. Yes nature doth teach, even Paul doth declare, ’Tis a scandalous shame not to cut off your hair.158

And some would go back even further in time: Curls, such as Adam wore, we wear; Each simpler generation blooms more fair, Till all that’s artificial expire.159

Unpowdered hair was a return not only to nature but also to a lost paradise.160 In advocating this minimalist aesthetic, a number of writers would ridicule the guinea pigs for their unnatural habits. In one print, the coccyx-less beast is not the opposition leader Fox but rather Pitt himself, who appears as a “guinea pig without a tail.” The image hints at Pitt’s famed frigidity and ambiguous sexual inclinations, a recurring insinuation in literature against the powdered party.161 “That this minister should not hesitate, by his late extraordinary tax, to form his principal attack against the heads of the fair sex,” observed a round head, “is not much to be wondered at; since it is so notoriously known that he is equally unwilling and unable to assail them in a less exposed quarter.”162 Grizzle Baldpate similarly observed that “Mister P-tt, not fond of things below,/Feels most attach’d to what regards the crown.”163 These hints at emasculation attached not only to Pitt but also to the artificial style he espoused: another writer rejected powdering as “a practice which has introduced an effeminacy into the national character, by engaging men’s attention in the orna-

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22. Tippy Bob (ca. 1792). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

menting of their persons, and taking it off from things of importance.”164 Suggestions of sexual ambiguity were commonplace in the literature against the macaroni in the eighteenth century: in figure 16, for example, the carving of the cat face on the chair behind the macaroni suggests his catamite (or sodomitical) nature.165 The crops defined themselves against this unmanly tradition of foppery: “Then every brave freeman no more be a fop,/But shew to your foes a Republican crop.”166

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Of course, all of this simplicity was not without artifice. As the misancropical Times reminded its readers, “[w]hat with the curling and blacking of a Crop’s head, the greasing and ungreasing, and coaxing their brissles into a natural curl, it is a fact, that a Crop’s head takes as long dressing as another calf ’s.”167 The crop was indeed a style and involved an act of selffashioning, but it was a fashion in denial of itself as a fashion: the Times would refer to it as an “anti-fashion.”168 In the early discussion of the tax, the London Packet published a pointed query, which was echoed in several pamphlets about the bill: “Is an actor, who in his own private character uniformly appears in a scratch wig, or wears his hair without powder, liable to pay the tax imposed by the new act, for any of the parts which he is necessitated to dress with powder on the stage?”169 Though seemingly frivolous, the question reveals the underlying logic of the bill: citizens who paid the tax were buying the right to create a character. They were authoring as much as was the actor who took on a role. To protest the bill and the war against France, consequently, was to renounce authorship. With the Whig macaronis, self-fashioning—extreme visibility—had been an oppositional strategy. Pitt’s new measure, however, had made exaggerated self-fashioning the hegemonic stance. An authorship that drew attention to itself was no longer a form of defiance. The new resistance would be an aesthetic of invisibility, a self-fashioning so natural that it seemed to involve no self-fashioning at all. In both the French context and the British, fashion moved toward a form of self-denial. The collet noir of the incroyable was a rallying sign in denial of its status as a rallying sign, and the docked hair of the crops was fashion masquerading as antifashion. But it is important to distinguish between these two forms of self-denial. In France, the young men wearing collets noirs were concerned about the way people were reading fashion: they sought to curb a tendency to overload clothes with significance and defended the meaninglessness of attire. The main anxiety in the English texts, in contrast, was not so much the reception of the style as the act of styling, the authoring of the self. Where the incroyable styles were in denial about their own content, about the existence of any meaning that one might read into them, the new aesthetic of dandyism emerging in England was in denial about its intentions, about the act of self-fashioning that created it. As in the French context, however, this self-denial was clearly an act of defiance. Ironically, the aesthetic that would come to represent a meaningless, apolitical sublime was in its origins an absolutely political gesture, a statement of opposition inflected by the republican ideals of the French Revolution.

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The Art of the Cut The year 1795 witnessed not only the hair powder tax but also the emergence of George “Beau” Brummell on the London social scene. Just a year or two before, the teenage Brummell had struck up a friendship with the crown prince—the future King George IV—who, though some sixteen years his senior, was taken with the young man’s good looks, high spirits, and sharp wit. In April 1795, on the occasion of his marriage to Caroline of Brunswick, the prince distinguished Brummell by naming him one of his “best men,” along with Lord Moira and the Duke of Bedford, two of the fiercest opponents of the new powder tax. Brummell would soon become an intimate of their circle and seems to have shared Bedford’s taste for bare hair: according to one (possibly apocryphal) anecdote, Brummell left his military post out of disgust for the mandatory powdered style of his regiment. (In his 1822 treatise on style, Male and Female Costume, he would particularly ridicule wigs and powder.)170 Brummell seems also to have imbibed the spirit of the antifashion fashion of Bedford’s circle. For the next twenty years, he would be the perfect exemplar (and main promulgator) of this pared-down aesthetic and ideal of inconspicuousness. The term by which this aesthetic came to be known—dandyism— would not come into general use until after Brummell’s downfall and exile in 1816. Beginning in 1817, a series of newspaper texts and caricatures by George Cruikshank and Isaac Robert Cruikshank began to popularize the word and figure.171 The novelty of the term is attested by a series of articles debating its provenance. One writer traced it to the French dandin, designating an idler, or to the verb se dandiner, “to tilt on a chair in a foolish or affected manner.”172 Another—a soi-disant dandy—pointed to the title character of Molière’s 1668 play Georges Dandin, “a tame cuckold, a ninny, a contemptible simpleton.”173 Some, however, objected to the foreign derivation of the term. A writer offering a “true English parentage” traced the word to the noun “dandler, one given to dandle and fondle.”174 Another suggested that the term, “which has recently been applied to a species of reptile very common in the metropolis,” was derived from “dandy prat,” which designated a coin of minimal value from the reign of Henry VII and which came to mean, by extension, a “worthless and contemptible” individual.175 And still another pointed to a figure called Jacky Dandy or Jack Dandyprat, who appeared in playful verses for children such as the following enigma: “Little Jack Dandyprat, in a white petticoat,/The longer he lives, the shorter he grows” (the answer is a candle).176

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The word, however, was not a nineteenth-century coinage, nor was its application to the modern “reptiles” entirely unprecedented. A similar term, “Jack-a-dandy,” appears in a number of eighteenth-century songs, among which one of the most repeated was “The Dandy-O,” sung by Caleb, a character in Frederick Pilon’s 1786 comedy He Would Be a Soldier.177 The play concerns the family of one Captain Talbot, a wealthy widower who has entrusted his infant son to a close friend and innkeeper. At the age of twelve, the child abandons his tutor to enlist in the army. The comedy opens as Talbot returns to England to reunite himself with his son. Fearing the captain’s wrath when he learns of the latter’s disappearance, the innkeeper attempts to pass off his own child, Caleb, as Talbot’s heir. The humor of the piece derives from Caleb’s maladroit imitation of foppish attire and mannerisms. Some actors performing the role inserted a comic song in which Caleb revels in his new position: Tho’ late, as a waiter, I ran up and down, With bottles, glasses, Claret, Rum and Brandy-O; Now an officer I’m made, I’ll have servants of my own, And be among the ladies quite the dandy-o.

In the verses that accompany the 1787 print of Mr. Moss in the role, Caleb sports an elaborate, powdered coiffure and boasts that his “Military Cue you see’s the Dandy O” (fig. 23).178 Singing the same song in 1791, Mr. Munden seems to have altered the verse: “And crops I’m sure you’ll own are quite the dandy-o.”179 Like “Tippy Bob” and the 1791 crop, the dandy is a vulgar social pretender who clumsily takes on upper-class affectations. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle would oppose the Dandy to the Drudge, but in his first emergence the dandy was a drudge. This notion of the dandy as an awkward pretender is clear in what is perhaps the most famous eighteenth-century treatment of the figure, the ditty “Yankee Doodle Dandy”: Yankee Doodle came to town Riding on a pony, Stuck a feather in his hat And called it Macaroni.180

The dandy of American folklore is far from the consummate stylist of the nineteenth century. His getup is haphazard; his flamboyance, improvised. He is not a macaroni but a wannabe with a make-do look: he “calls”

23. Mr. Moss in the Character of Caleb (ca. 1787). Reprinted with permission from the Jewish Museum London.

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it macaroni, because it is not the real thing. As legend has it, the song was originally a British composition used to ridicule the colonists during the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War). During the struggle for independence, however, the revolutionaries appropriated the song as a marching anthem, proudly espousing the motley dandy as a symbol of homespun American identity. In one play from the period, John Murdock’s The Beau Metamorphized, or The Generous Maid (1800), two patriotic Philadelphian women force an affected and disloyal macaroni to undress to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”181 The American rebels defined themselves against the English macaroni style by identifying with the makeshift figure.182 Their strategy anticipates that of the jeunes gens and incroyables of the French Revolution: they reappropriate a negative label and give it a positive meaning. Although the dandy took on positive connotations in America, it was in Britain that he became a standard of elegance. Our modern notion of dandyism seems to have emerged from the convergence of the caricatured figure of the dandy as social pretender and the understated aesthetic ideal elaborated in the 1790s in the fashionable circles of the Duke of Bedford and Beau Brummell. What paved the way for this peculiar conflation was the literature concerning the crops. In the 1791 texts, “crop” and “dandy” were more or less interchangeable terms and referred to vulgar upstart figures, be it the preening Caleb or the lobby lounger. After the hair powder controversy of 1795, however, the crops began to acquire prestige. Adopted by the elegant circle of the Duke of Bedford, the cropped style became an aesthetic ideal. This shift in value would affect not only the crop but also his semantic double, the dandy. Although the parody of the dandy as a social climber would continue throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, it coexisted with a positive aesthetic ideal, the nuanced form of elegance that became known as dandyism. As we have seen, it was the politics of revolution that led both to this new form of self-fashioning (subtlety rather than exaggeration) and to the positive reinflection of the term. With Beau Brummell and the dandies of the 1810s, the ideological connotations of the aesthetic would gradually fade into the background. The crop ceased to be a provocation and became the norm of male style, and the dandy ceased to dress against the tides of fashion and became instead an emblem of sartorial simplicity. As I have argued in these pages, however, this ideal of understatement was in its origins a very powerful statement. For in a former life, the dandy was a crop, and the crop was a Guillotine.

{ epilogue }

Many of the texts and images examined in this study seek to depoliticize fashion and self-fashioning, to underscore the insignificance of attire. This does not mean, however, that the dandyism they describe is purely aesthetic. The self-fashioning of these figures is almost always a political gesture but one that often consists paradoxically in denying the political meaning of dress. Although the five figures emerge in different moments and contexts, a number of features and strategies recur throughout these chapters. One of the principal tactics that we have seen is the attempt to redefine a label, to give a negative word either a more positive or a less threatening meaning. During the Terror, some writers attempted to defuse the derogatory term “muscadin” either by emptying it of a referent—applying it not to a specific class or group but to an imaginary antagonist—or by representing the type as fundamentally innocuous. In so doing, they deflected attention from groups that might otherwise be scapegoated. Post-Thermidor writers similarly sought to reinflect negative labels; they represent the jeunes gens not as the con artists or reactionaries of the Théâtre Feydeau but rather as patriotic, republican, and antiterrorist youths. Some texts about the jeunes gens, incroyables, and currutacos even embrace these monikers, making them a badge of honor. By in-habiting these terms, voluntarily wearing them, the defenders of these figures denied the negative political meanings projected upon them by their antagonists. Not only do these texts contest specific labels, but many of them also reject the very practice of labeling. The jeunes gens of Year III blame the inventor of the term “muscadin” for the institution of the Terror, and the

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texts from Year V denounce monikers such as “collet noir” or “incroyable,” which unnecessarily provoke conflict. Similarly, currutaco texts point to the dangers of loaded terms such as sincapites, which encourage reductive judgments and intolerance. And in England, the powder tax texts warn against divisive phrases such as “guinea pig” and “swinish multitude.” In many cases, the struggle to depoliticize fashion was an attempt to introduce a middle ground in a context that had been reduced to a binary opposition or that was moving in that direction. The jeunes gens in their Adresse des jeunes citoyens à leurs frères (1795) to the people of Paris sought to find a space between royalists and terrorists by introducing the term “muscadin-sansculottes.” In so doing, they attempted to carve out an ideological center: the possibility of being at once antiterrorist and republican. The crops in England similarly sought to sidestep an ideological either/or. Pitt’s powder tax had made overt self-fashioning a political gesture. The Duke of Bedford and his fellow crops, therefore, invented a form of self-fashioning in denial of itself, which introduced a space for an opposition that was nevertheless patriotic. Even currutaco texts seem to veer toward a more graduated social and political spectrum: Fernández de Rojas’s Libro de moda en la feria (1795) rejects the binary system of the Puerta del Sol, which pits currutacos against pirracas, in favor of a more nuanced division of society that includes various degrees of difference and the possibility of social mobility. In each case, the defense of the middle classes or of the ideological center is an attempt to avoid the violence of a polarized society, of a world divided into dandies and drudges, patriots and traitors. Finally, the literature around these figures emphasizes the insignificance of fashion and self-fashioning in order to reject a political culture that insisted on the legibility of appearances. Picard’s La perruque blonde (1794), for example, celebrates a world in which clothing is no longer a sign of political affiliation. In the texts from Year III, the jeunes gens reclaim not only their freedom of dress but also the freedom of dress from meaning; proclaiming the insignificance of clothing, they decry the practice of reading into apparel. And during the Directory, the literature about the incroyables and collets noirs put signes de ralliement and other political discourses in quotation marks, underscoring their discursivity, emptiness, and superficiality. In Spain, similarly, currutaco texts react against hasty judgments based on appearances, against the tendency to divide humankind into currutacos and rodrigones. Finally, the literature responding to the powder tax expresses an anxiety about the new need to

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wear one’s politics on one’s sleeve: the law was in effect a “poll test” that separated the loyal from the treacherous. The crops’ apparent refusal to self-fashion (though itself, of course, still a political gesture and an act of self-fashioning) is a rejection of this political ethos. Through all these strategies, writers of the revolutionary period sought to overcome the political culture of the Terror and to divorce selffashioning from politics. And in the end, their wish would come true: the nineteenth-century ideal of the dandy would become increasingly rarified as the figure came to incarnate an aestheticism divorced from mundane reality. The purely self-referential figure celebrated in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Du dandysme et de G. Brummell (1845) is the ultimate expression of this separation of ideology and dress. Gradually, the dandy shed all traces of the tumultuous context of his birth. Nevertheless, some vestiges of these struggles may be gleaned in nineteenth-century attempts to define the figure and to elaborate a theory of his art. As we will see below, the French Revolution casts a shadow over three of the most important early treatises of dandyism. Written in the wake of the July Revolution of 1830, Balzac’s Traité de la vie élégante (Treatise of elegant life) identifies the Revolution of 1789 as the turning point in the emergence of a new brand of elegance. Similarly, Baudelaire, in “Le peintre de la vie moderne” (The painter of modern life, 1863), begins to reflect on the dandy as he flips through fashion plates from the revolutionary period. And the quintessential English portrayal of the figure belongs to the pages of Thomas Carlyle, the great historian of 1789 and its aftermath. Contrasting Dandies with Drudges, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–1834) evokes a looming underclass on the verge of rebellion, about to overturn society as we know it. In these texts, to think about the dandy is to reflect upon revolution. In what follows, I will examine the afterlife of revolutionary dandyism and its three imaginations in these texts and in the definition of the modern figure.

A n i m at i n g E l e ga n c e In the middle of Balzac’s Traité de la vie élégante, a “committee” of Parisian élégans makes a pilgrimage to Boulogne to visit the aging Beau Brummell, whose many debts have forced him into exile on the Continent. Their goal is to systematize the Beau’s art, to reduce his dress and behavior to a “code” similar to the regulatory treatises (the civil code, the maritime

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code, the military code, etc.) that had proliferated under Napoleon. From the outset, however, Brummell objects to both their project and their democratic diction. Adopting a “prophetic voice,” he warns against opening “the doors of the temple to all the people”: not all legs were “equally called to wear a boot or pants.”1 At first glance, dandyism would seem to be the very opposite of revolution: an unapologetic sartorial elitism. As will become clear below, however, the structure and logic of the treatise create a subtle parallelism between Brummell and 1789. At the beginning of the essay, Balzac discusses recent French history, which he represents as a circular experience. In the ancien régime, he observes, a passerby could easily distinguish the upper from the lower classes— the idle from the working—simply by observing their clothing. With the Revolution, however, the old wardrobe disappeared and with it the rigid hierarchy in dress. For a brief moment, the French enjoyed sartorial equality. But as man, by nature, longs to differentiate himself, the revolutionaries soon began to covet the leisure and distinctions they had once opposed and gradually reintroduced distinctions into social life: “society was reconstituted, restocked with barons and counts, beribboned.”2 The Revolution, in this vision, is a revolving—a cycle of inversion and reversion—that could easily come full circle. As Balzac develops his reflections, however, he moves away from this circular narrative. After the uprising, differences reemerged, but with a difference. In the ancien régime, the display of distinction was a purely material spectacle: a luxurious wardrobe or monumental estate sufficed to demonstrate an aristocratic lineage. No “attitude toward life” or further study was necessary. The elegance that emerged after the Revolution, in contrast, relied on “intellectual” distinctions: “Then differences disappeared in our society: there was no longer anything but nuances. . . . ‘Speak, walk, eat, and dress yourself, and I will tell you who you are’ has replaced the old proverb, an expression of the court, an adage of the privileged.”3 In postrevolutionary society, one’s rank became clear from one’s behavior, one’s style, through the act of dressing rather than the dress itself. With this distinction, Balzac introduces a new metaphor: “the Christianity of our revolution overthrew the polytheism of feudalism,” but French society has ultimately “returned to the point from which we departed: to the adoration of the golden calf.”4 In its exaltation of the poor and leveling impulse, Christianity becomes a symbol of the Revolution, while paganism represents the stratified, acquisitive societies before and

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afterward. Once again, however, Balzac quickly retreats from this circular narrative. French society may have reverted to a heathen creed, but the new fetish differs from the old: now “the idol speaks, walks, thinks, in a word, it is a giant.”5 Unlike the fetishes of the ancien régime, the new money is alive, an acting and thinking idol. This new god reflects the values that Balzac associates with the bourgeoisie. The beginning of the essay divides humankind into three groups: “the man who works, the man who thinks, and the man who does nothing,” which represent the lower, middle, and upper class respectively.6 If the ancien régime is the apogee of the fainéant nobility and the Revolution is that of the working man, then the postrevolutionary faith, with its living, thinking idol, reflects the advent of the bourgeoisie. Because this new fetish is alive, Balzac considers it more stable and powerful than the figureheads of the ancien régime: “A popular revolution is impossible today.”7 What has allowed France to escape from the cycle of revolution and reaction is the introduction of the third term, an energetic and reflective bourgeoisie. This ideal of energy and reanimation is the key not only to Balzac’s vision of history but also to his theory of style: elegant life is “the art of animating repose.”8 Balzac takes as his epigraph Virgil’s “mens agitat molem” (the mind moves the matter), which he playfully translates: “a man’s spirit may be divined from the way he holds his cane.”9 It is the act rather than the thing that counts. Or more precisely, it is the act of bringing the thing into motion, the intelligence with which one animates one’s apparel. Animation will also be central to Balzac’s literary method. The middle section of the essay is a fictional interview with Beau Brummell, who dictates the outline of the Traité itself. The center of Balzac’s work is thus a curious metatextual game in which the character he has created becomes the author of his own work. Engaging in a sort of prosopopoeia, Balzac addresses the absent dandy and makes him come to life on the page. But his trope turns on itself, for once animated, the Beau becomes the animator of Balzac’s own essay: subject and object trade places.10 As in his vision of revolution, thus, Balzac creates a cycling in which a hierarchy is turned on its head. Balzac’s metatextual game taps into what I have called the transformative side of the paranoid imagination: the playful confusion of author and character. This inversion of subject and author reflects the circularity of dandyism and self-fashioning. Through his dress, the dandy (creator) creates a persona (creation), which ultimately transforms his very identity; his creation becomes his creator. Brummell, similarly,

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is a character who becomes the author of his creator’s text. Balzac, thus, introduces an element of circularity and instability, an inversion of hierarchy, into the heart of his essay. The circularity in the treatment of Brummell subtly parallels the revolving of revolution. Just as the Revolution conveys its energy and living spirit to the new bourgeoisie, so Brummell is the source of the Traité and its animating form of elegance. And just as the Revolution is aligned with Christianity, the introduction of the Beau is an Incarnation of sorts: the creator (Balzac) inhabits his creation (Brummell), who becomes the creator. Finally, just as Balzac retreats from the cycling of revolution by introducing a third party that stabilizes the political situation, so he will draw back from the Beau and the circularity of his dandyism in the final section of the essay. In the interview, Brummell is presented both as an authority on elegance, the source of the Traité, and as the “ex-god of dandyism.”11 After the conversation, however, Balzac draws a distinction between elegance and dandyism and defines the latter negatively as “a heresy of elegant life.” Devoid of philosophy or depth, the dandy is a “piece of bedroom furniture,” too material and unthinking to be truly refined.12 Moreover, Brummell himself is subtly critiqued in the later chapters. In the interview, Balzac describes the spectacle of the aging dandy in a wig as one of the great tragic falls of recent history: “Brummell in a wig; Napoleon as a gardener; Kant returned to infancy; Louis XVI in a bonnet rouge; and Charles X at Cherbourg! . . . these are the five greatest spectacles of our era.”13 A later axiom casts this detail in an even more negative light: “Forced elegance is to true elegance what a wig is to hair.”14 Thus, while Brummell is initially credited with the definition of elegance and the animation of dress and style, his school, his “ism,” would seem to be a throwback: like the fetishes of the ancien régime, it has failed to register the impact of the Revolution, the advent of intellect in fashion. At first, the final part of the essay seems designed to put Brummell’s ideas into practice, to define a more revolutionary form of elegance, one that conveys the energy and animation introduced by the uprising. The division between dandyism and elegance, however, serves to recontain the circularity of the middle section, the revolving at the heart of the text. The dandy, who had taken on life and authorship, now becomes an inanimate object (“bedroom furniture”), and the division between fiction and reality is firmly reasserted: Balzac attributes the first axiom of the final chapter not to Brummell but to “a young writer whose philosophical spirit has given a serious cast to the most frivolous questions of Fashion.”

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With these words, Balzac, who wrote numerous articles on fashion, seems to allude to himself, reclaiming authorship and authority over his own text. Where in the middle section subject and object, Balzac and Brummell, could trade places, here the Beau is reduced to an object, as Balzac takes up again the reins of his text. The axiom in question—“Toilette is the expression of society”—returns to the historical commentary of the initial chapters and insists on the social significance of fashion through the ages.15 A shift in styles, Balzac now observes, has accompanied every major social change, revolutionary or reactionary. To understand history correctly, therefore, one must consult sumptuary laws, church edicts on dress, and the shifts in fashion from one period to another. As an example, Balzac points to the peripeteias of the French Revolution, in which fashion choices indicated political allegiance: “Do you have white hands? . . . Your throat will be cut to cries of ‘Long live Jacques Bonhommes, death to the lords!’ . . . Do you wear a tricolor cockade? . . . Flee! Marseilles will assassinate you.”16 Far from frivolous, dress reveals “the whole man, the man with his political opinions, the man with the text of his existence, the hieroglyphed man.”17 Indeed, despite the homogeneity of modern dress, Balzac argues, the astute observer can make out from a person’s attire his neighborhood, profession, and class. While the center of the treatise seemed to play with the transformative variant of the paranoid imagination—the confusion of subject and object—the latter part of the essay reflects its melodramatic side: an insistence on the transparency of appearance and an obsession with deciphering identity from apparel. Balzac’s ideal of elegance, which demands that “each thing seem to be what it is,” inflects his vision of society, which allows for no disguise or impersonation, no social mobility through dress: try as one may to hide one’s past and one’s thoughts, they will always shine through “all veils.”18 Balzac is so confident about the legibility of clothing that he exalts its study to a science—vestignomia—which he considers “almost a branch of the art created by Gall and Lavater.”19 Nuances in dress, thus, take on the fixity and decipherability of head structure and facial features in phrenology and physiognomy. With these metaphors, Balzac moves away from the circularity of dandyism. Where the middle section of the treatise explored self-fashioning— Brummell’s artistic creation of himself—Balzac’s final insistence on the social legibility of dress effaces the agency and volition of the wearer. Toilette is the expression of society, not of the individual; it is no longer the mind that moves the sartorial matter. Not surprisingly, the final passage also moves away from the incarnation or prosopopoeia in the treatment of

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Brummell. When Balzac asks his imaginary historical subjects if they are wearing the tricolor cockade, they do not answer. Creator and creation no longer engage in exchange. In this case, the trope does not turn, because the ambiguity between subject and object has disappeared, because dress is no longer a form of self-fashioning. Clothing is not a mode of subject formation but rather an inanimate object produced by social forces. This movement away from the prosopopoeia and revolving of the middle section is clear in Balzac’s reassertion of the distinction between the reader and the “text,” the social spectacle. The middle section creates an ambiguity between subject and object, between the author and his creation, between the dressing dandy and the dandy dressed. The final pages, in contrast, avoid this confusion by introducing a third party. The individual and his clothes are no longer playfully transforming one another; their relation is, rather, determined by a spectator-scientist, the vestignomist “reader.” The meaning of the dress comes not from the wearer but from the spectator, who deciphers its social significance. These final reflections cast Balzac’s rejection of dandyism in a different light. At first, he seemed to dismiss it because it lacked the animation that the Revolution introduced, because it was a throwback to the unthinking style of the ancien régime. His subsequent concern about transparency and decipherability, about the reading of fashion, however, suggests that dandyism is threatening not for its anachronism so much as for its inscrutability. Like the muscadins’ pose during the Revolution, the dandy’s guise is ambiguous, a slippery façade. Balzac sets out to create an ideal of elegance that carries the energy of the uprising, but ultimately his essay recontains this animation, restraining the cycling of dandyism and Revolution. Dandyism is not the opposite of Revolution so much as what Balzac seeks to edit out of the Revolution: the ambiguous sign. Balzac’s essay taps into both sides of the paranoid imagination. In its metatextual games, it flirts with the transformative aspect: the playful confusion of subject and object. Its final section, however, draws back from this ambiguity. In his insistence on legibility, Balzac veers toward the melodramatic side of this imagination: the compulsion to reveal true identities.

APRÈS MOI, LE DÉLUGE Carlyle’s views on the dandy in “The Dandiacal Body,” chapter 10 of Sartor Resartus, seem initially to coincide with those of his British compatriot in the Traité. Just as Brummell divides men into two groups—“the poets

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and the prose writers, the élégans and the majority of martyrs”—Carlyle adopts a binary approach to both his society and his text. England is made up of Dandies and Drudges, who are separated by a thin divide: they are two whirlpools with a “mere film of Land between them.”20 The Drudges are an underclass on the verge of overflowing, of destroying the dandified aristocracy. In this binary vision of society, Balzac’s third—“the man who thinks,” the bourgeoisie—disappears altogether. As in the Traité, however, this initial opposition between dandyism and the forces of revolution (the Drudges) begins to fall apart as Carlyle’s narrative and images develop. Most of the chapter is a citation from an esoteric work by the fictional Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, who studies the fate of religion in the modern world: having been “driven out of most Churches,” the Religious Principle now “wanders homeless over the world like a disembodied soul seeking its terrestrial organisation.”21 Faith is a spirit in search of a body, of a theology that will give it expression, of a text through which it can communicate with humankind. “The Dandiacal Body” represents one possible “home” in which this soul may find shelter. In the first section of the essay, Teufelsdröckh tries out this option. He begins by attempting to read a fashionable novel, one of the “Sacred Books” of the Dandy sect. Almost immediately, however, he stops short, overwhelmed by the bizarrely visceral effect it has on him: at the end of some short space, I was uniformly seized with not so much what I can call a drumming in my ears, as a kind of infinite, unsufferable Jew’s-harping and scrannel-piping there; to which the frightfullest species of Magnetic Sleep soon supervened. And if I strove to shake this away, and absolutely would not yield, came a hitherto unfelt sensation, as of Delirium Tremens, and a melting into total deliquium: —till at last, by order of the Doctor, dreading ruin to my whole constitution, I reluctantly but determinedly forbore.22

The content of this book is so discombobulating that the uninitiated reader cannot begin to fathom it. Teufelsdröckh is momentarily stunned and bewildered by its mysterious bodily force. A serendipitous discovery, however, soon helps him to understand the Dandy sect. In the wrapping paper of a book package sent from England, Teufelsdröckh stumbles upon a newspaper article that is written “from the Secular [i.e., antidandiacal] point of view” and that condemns fashionable novels, specifically Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham; or The Adventures of a

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Gentleman (1828). In this shred, Teufelsdröckh finds what had eluded him in his earlier reading: “the true secret, the Religious physiognomy and physiology of the Dandiacal Body.” This hidden meaning—the Dandy theology—is revealed in seven “articles of faith” instructing observers on such delicate matters as how to roll a collar or the proper cut of a coat. As it turns out, the “physiognomy” of the Dandy sect, its true body, is nothing more than its clothing. It is not coincidental that this credo appears on wrapping paper: dandyism in this document is reduced to the purely exterior. What liberates Teufelsdröckh from the threat of the Dandy text is the revelation that the Dandiacal Body is little more than wrapping or clothes. Ultimately, the religious spirit cannot find a body in such a doctrine. In the second part of the extract, Teufelsdröckh explores another sect in which the wandering “Principle” might incarnate itself: Drudgism. Like the Dandies, the Drudges seem to offer a body of sorts: “the original Sect is that of the Poor Slaves; whose doctrines, practices, and fundamental characteristics, pervade and animate the whole Body, howsoever denominated or outwardly diversified.”23 The shelter offered by the Drudges, however, is not a physical body but a body politic, a group of people with similar grievances and aspirations. Once again, the professor is baffled by many of the customs of the group (particularly the Drudges’ fondness for potatoes) and struggles to understand the logic of the cult. As the shift in the meaning of the “body” suggests, what Teufelsdröckh has stumbled upon is not a religion but rather the reality of class struggle. At the end of this section, indeed, he will hint at an imminent revolution: “Dandyism as yet affects to look down on Drudgism: but perhaps the hour of trial, when it will be practically seen which ought to look down, and which look up, is not so distant.”24 He anticipates a social Armageddon, a catastrophe so dire that “Noah’s Deluge is outdeluged,” an explosion of opposed electricities that does away with the planet itself.25 If Balzac is the heir to the paranoid imagination, Carlyle inherits the catastrophic: his text offers a binary vision of a society on the verge of implosion. Although the two objects of Teufelsdröckh’s study are ostensibly opposed—Dandies and Drudges are bitter enemies—the structure and logic of the two halves of the essay are curiously similar. In each case, we are presented with a disturbing and unfathomable body that unsettles the observer. Just as the fashionable novel confounds Teufelsdröckh and causes physical distress in the Dandy section, the collective existence of the Drudges is both an enigma and a peril, a destructive energy on the verge of explosion. Structurally, the idea of revolution in the second

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part is the analogue of the Dandy text (Pelham) in the first. The reaction to each threat, moreover, is similar. At the end of the first half, Teufelsdröckh moves away from a vision of the text as a potential “body” for his ideas and toward an understanding of the text as dress—inconsequential surface. At the close of the second part of the chapter, Carlyle cuts off the citation from Teufelsdröckh, lamenting the professor’s penchant for “likenings and similitudes.”26 The calamity that the German scholar fears is reduced to mere metaphor, rhetorical dressing. Carlyle’s Dandy has, thus, a double function. On the one hand, he stands in for the upper classes, for whom the proliferation of Drudges posed a threat. But on the other hand, the parallelism between the two parts of the extract makes the Dandy text the incarnation—the embodiment—of the conflict between these two classes. The paroxysms brought on by the book are the bodily analogue of the turbulence and uprising that Teufelsdröckh anticipates. Like Balzac, thus, Carlyle creates a parallelism between dandyism and revolution. The two texts, however, examine this connection in very different ways. Carlyle’s strategy for neutralizing the dandy is to reduce him to meaningless textuality, to clothing without a body, surface without depth. He defuses the danger of the dandiacal body by showing that there is nothing beneath the surface, nothing to be read. Balzac, in contrast, reacts against the confusing prosopopoeia and free-floating signs of the dandy by insisting on social legibility, an ideal of transparency in which clothing has a clear significance, be it the ideology or the class of the wearer. Carlyle reveals the physiological makeup of the dandy body to be his tight trousers and wrinkle-free coat: it is reassuringly meaningless. Dress in Balzac, in contrast, turns out to be as predictable an indicator as Lavater’s physiognomy: it is reassuringly meaningful. Where Balzac seeks to make differences indelible, embodied, to convince himself that revolution cannot be repeated, Carlyle seeks to disembody the dandy, to make the difference between him and the drudge purely sartorial. The two texts differ as well in the way they relate to the dandy. Balzac allows us to come very close to the figure. Not only do we witness a fictional interview with Brummell, but the essay also blurs the distinction between author and character, breaking down the opposition between literature and reality. Carlyle, in contrast, distances the dandy from us through layers of textuality: we perceive the dandy through Carlyle’s incorporation of Teufelsdröckh’s reaction to a fashionable novel that is never cited and to a shred of wrapping paper. This transmission is further compromised by Teufelsdröckh’s “amaurosis suffusions,” which “cloud

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and distort his otherwise most piercing vision.”27 If the dandy is, as the narrator initially defines him, a creature who asks only that we recognize him as “a visual object, or thing that will reflect rays of light,” Teufelsdröckh’s eyes are the worst possible vantage point.28 Both essays flirt at first with a form of dandyism that mirrors revolution, but ultimately they find the concept unsettling and draw back from it in different ways. Balzac resorts to the melodramatic tropes of the paranoid imagination. By claiming a rigorous correspondence between appearance and identity, he attempts to make the ambiguous sign into a meaningful one. Carlyle, in contrast, embraces the logic of the catastrophic imagination. Like the incroyables of the Directory, he seeks to convert an ambiguous sign into a meaningless one, an empty wrapper.

A D e c l i n i n g D ay s ta r Like Carlyle, Charles Baudelaire, in his “Le peintre de la vie moderne” (1863), anticipates a flood that will do away with dandyism. In Sartor Resartus, this inundation is the “Noah’s Deluge” provoked by the collision of the Dandy and the Drudge. In Baudelaire, it is “the rising tide of democracy,” which is “pouring floods of oblivion upon the footprints of these stupendous warriors.”29 Both writers attribute the catastrophe to the ascent of the plebs, but where Carlyle imagines an apocalyptical eruption of class struggle, Baudelaire’s interest is, rather, memory and forgetting (“oblivion”), the relation between past and present. The essay begins with a reflection upon one of the processes by which we commemorate the past: the canonization of works of art. In the opening lines, Baudelaire ridicules museum visitors who admire only the paintings that they recognize from engravings. The goal of his essay is to recover some of the “minor” works left out of this canon: specifically, the prints of Constantin Guys (1802–1892), a lithographer who produced sketches of everyday Parisian life in the mid-nineteenth century. Before introducing Guys, however, Baudelaire pauses to reflect upon impermanent and popular forms of art. Flipping through fashion plates of the French Revolution and Consulate, he distinguishes between two types of beauty: a general beauty, associated with classical poets and artists, and a particular form of beauty, which he identifies with the engravings before him. The fashion plates interest him because they express the specificity of their period, the particularity of an age now alien to us. Baudelaire will return to his theories about beauty a few paragraphs

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later, but before he does so, he pauses to imagine the bodies that once wore the clothes depicted, that gave “flowing movement to what seems to us too stiff.” He even envisions the performance of a historical play based on the plates that would make the past present, “resurrecting” and conferring life on the dated costumes. This exercise in historical reenactment, he argues, would demonstrate a continuity between the French past and present, a harmonious and natural development: “If an impartial student were to look through the whole range of French costume, from the origin of our country until the present day, he would find nothing to shock nor even to surprise him. The transitions would be as elaborately articulated as they are in the natural kingdom. There would not be a single gap: and thus, not a single surprise.”30 At first, Baudelaire seems to appreciate the fashion plates as the snapshot of a historical period, a slice of life at a particular moment. But as he animates the dresses, giving them bodies, he begins to place them within a historical continuity, linking past and present. Significantly, he introduces the metaphor of evolution, attempting to impart to the contingent, arbitrary, and socially determined phenomenon of clothing the predictability and fluidity of nature. Baudelaire’s introduction, thus, moves away from the historical alterity that initially fascinated him and attempts to incorporate the past within a more familiar trajectory by literally in-corporating it, giving imaginary bodies to the dresses. The subsequent discussion reflects this movement. Where at first Baudelaire distinguished between two types of beauty—general beauty and particular beauty—now he differentiates between two elements found within all beauty: an “eternal, invariable element” (the “soul of art”) and a “relative, circumstantial element” (the “body” of art).31 Rather than opposing one another, the two elements exist in symbiosis: neither is compelling without the other. Baudelaire’s interest is now the way in which the universal—the continuous and diachronic—suffuses that which is synchronic and historically specific. Just as he gave a living body to the dresses, which demonstrated their connection to the present, so he gives a “soul” to the body of art. Baudelaire may question the canon and defend the contingency and historical particularity of impermanent art, but his argument gravitates toward the universal, toward the soul. At the end of the essay, indeed, he will seek to reinscribe Guys’s works within the “precious archives of civilized life,” within precisely the “high art” he set out to challenge.32 The discussion of the dandy later in the essay repeats the trajectory of Baudelaire’s initial discussion of the fashion plates of the Revolution. Like the dated dresses, the dandy stands for historical rupture. Dandyism—

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“[t]he last spark of heroism amid decadence”—emerges in “periods of transition when democracy is not yet all-powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fall.”33 The dandy is “provocative in [his] very coldness,” similar to “the declining daystar . . . glorious, without heat and full of melancholy.”34 Like the clothes without bodies in the fashion plates, the dandy lacks inner warmth: since his energy belongs to a dying era, it seems inaccessible to us. The essay emphasizes the circumstantial and historically limited nature of the dandy: although the figure still thrives in England, his days in France are numbered. Baudelaire’s presentation of the figure focuses on the questions of what I have called the anachronistic imagination: the dandy is a throwback that must be situated on the historical timeline. At this point, however, Baudelaire veers away from dandyism, this figure of “great antiquity,” and returns to the subject of his essay, Constantin Guys, the painter of modern life: It is hardly necessary to say that when Monsieur G. sketches one of his dandies on the paper, he never fails to give him his historical personality— his legendary personality, I would venture to say, if we were not speaking of the present time and of things generally considered as frivolous. Nothing is missed: his lightness of step, his social aplomb, the simplicity of his air of authority, his way of wearing a coat or riding a horse, his bodily attitudes, which are always relaxed but betray an inner energy, so that when your eye lights upon one of those privileged beings in whom the graceful and the formidable are so mysteriously blended, you think: “A rich man perhaps, but more likely an out-of-work Hercules!”

Like the historical play that Baudelaire imagines at the beginning of the essay, the return to Guys’s drawings is a turning point in the discussion that seems to animate the figure. Just as the dramatic reenactment makes the shawls and tunics of the Directory rustle and come to life, so Guys’s drawings confer movement, body, and energy: he captures not just the dandy’s clothes but also the way he carries them off, his grace in social interactions, his “air” and hidden passion. Where before the dandy was a daystar without heat, Guys taps into the “latent fire” of the figure.35 In each case, moreover, this projection of corporality onto stiff and inanimate figures overcomes a historical divide or rupture and creates a bridge between past and present: just as the play makes accessible and naturalizes a past that at first seemed remote and alien, Guys’s drawings capture the “historical personality” of the present-day figure of the dandy. The

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artist seems almost to occupy the vantage point of the future in his ability to tap into the historical essence of the present. A useful counterpoint to Baudelaire’s discussion of the dandy is a later section titled “Women and Prostitutes,” in which he describes the painted ladies of modern Paris, who engage in similar self-fashioning and theatricality. Just as the dandy cultivates “absolute simplicity,” the prostitute “aspires . . . toward the simplicity which is customary in a better world.” Nevertheless, Guys’s treatment of the prostitute is markedly different. Where the artist captures the latent fire and hidden passion of the dandy, the prostitute’s “envelope of show” is ultimately empty. Quoting La Bruyère, Baudelaire notes that “[s]ome women possess an artificial nobility which is associated with a movement of the eye, a tilt of the head, a manner of deportment, and which goes no further.”36 Where the dandy is, like the setting sun, “full of melancholy,” the prostitute exudes “a weariness which imitates true melancholy.”37 She is but a simulacrum. In the company of such women, even the dandy loses his depth. At one point, Baudelaire describes a vacuous woman sitting next to “one of those halfwit peacocks whose elegance is the creation of his tailor and whose head of his barber.” Utterly empty and devoid of thought, the couple see nothing “[u]nless, like Narcissuses of imbecility, they are gazing at the crowd as at a river which reflects their own image.”38 The description here recalls Balzac’s vision of the dandy as furniture. Where Guys’s representation of the dandy in the earlier passage uncovers a depth—a “personality”—the treatment of the prostitute and her entourage focuses on the trompe l’oeil of the surface. With this shift from depth to surface, from body to dress, Baudelaire emphasizes not the universal and aesthetic so much as the impermanent and social aspect of the figure. The goal here is not “to distil the eternal from the transitory” or to create coherent links between historical moments so much as to chronicle “beauty in modernity,” the variable and transient reality of contemporary society.39 The images now reveal “differences of class and breed . . . immediately obvious to the spectator’s eye, in whatever luxurious trappings the subjects may be decked.”40 Curiously, Guys’s intuition begins to resemble that of Balzac’s social scientist, who accurately deciphers social identity from dress. The presentation of the images to the reader also changes significantly. Focusing now on the present in isolation, Baudelaire offers a series of disconnected snapshots, linked only by phrases that insist on their immediacy: “Next we watch . . .”; “Now for a moment we move to . . .”; “And now the doors are being thrown open at Valentino’s.”41 This effect reaches a climax with the presentation of the

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prostitute, the “Protean image of wanton beauty”: “Now she is majestic, now playful; now slender, even to the point of skinniness, now cyclopean; now tiny and sparkling, now heavy and monumental.”42 As the focus shifts to the present, Guys disappears altogether: after the initial paragraph, we lose sight of the artistic work that mediates our perception of this reality. Indeed, the prostitute is so immediate that she “advances toward us, glides, dances . . .” Her effect is so real that the pictorial becomes but a metaphor: “her eye flashes out from under her hat, like a portrait in its frame.”43 In their mercurial nature and disconnected immediacy, the women and prostitutes of this section introduce a historical rupture that is not assimilated into the narrative of continuity that Baudelaire has sought to construct through Guys. Like Brummell in Balzac’s Traité, Guys’s art involves animation: uttering, “Arise Lazarus,” he creates pictures “more living than life itself.”44 This infusion of depth, body, and life bridges a temporal divide. Conferring corporality and animation, he mediates not only our perception of reality but also the relation between different eras, making the past live in the present and neutralizing historical rupture. The women, however, resist this process. Lacking interiority, they offer no plane beyond the pure present of the surface that would resonate with other moments and allow the artist to situate them within a historical continuum. In their immediacy, they defy mediation, and Guys accordingly disappears in their portrayal. Nothing distances us from this representation of “woman in revolt against society.”45 Where the mediated, evolutionary narrative creates a familiarity that allays the disturbing otherness of the past, the treatment of the women lays out before us the whirlpools of Carlyle’s essay, the class differences and fragmentation of Parisian society. In this respect, Baudelaire’s use of animation works very differently from Balzac’s. Although Balzac initially praises the animating force of the Revolution and engages in prosopopoeia, the end of his essay recontains the inversions of the trope by presenting a snapshot of society as a legible system. Baudelaire, in contrast, begins with an unassimilable moment— the Revolution as a rupture that defies evolutionary narratives—and moves toward an animating art that recovers the living urgency of the past and reconnects it to the present. Animation in Balzac introduces a threatening revolving; in Baudelaire, in contrast, it attenuates the otherness of the past and allows it to be situated in a comfortingly comprehensible narrative. Studies of the dandy have often followed Baudelaire’s lead and attempted to construct a narrative of continuity, a seamless progression

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from Brummell to Beerbohm, Wilde to Warhol. And as in the essay, these evolutionary accounts tend to smooth over the historical specificity of the dandy; they generally overlook the rupture and revolution from which he emerged. This forgotten origin, however, clearly lies in the background of the nineteenth-century reflections on the figure examined above. The three essays adopt different perspectives on dandyism and revolution. Balzac, writing in the immediate wake of the Revolution of 1830, has lived it in his present and reacts directly to its beguiling surfaces. Carlyle, writing in England during the social struggles of the 1830s, imagines on the horizon a clash between cultures that will do away with the world as he knows it. For Baudelaire, writing thirty years later during the Second Empire, this threat is no longer as imminent. What is pending disaster in Carlyle has become a historical problem in Baudelaire, an enigma of the anachronistic imagination. What all three treatises have in common, however, is a tendency to conceptualize the figure through the lens of the revolutionary period. Although the modern dandy might seem a transhistorical or apolitical type, what informs both his character and his aesthetic—the art of the cut—is ultimately the logic of revolution.

{ acknowledgments }

An earlier version of part of chapter 2 was published as an article titled “Blonde Trouble: Women in Wigs in the Wake of Terror” in Fashion Theory 13, no. 3 (2009): 299–324. I would like to thank Berg Publishers, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., for permission to reprint this material. I am grateful to the staff of the following archives, libraries, and institutions for giving me access to primary materials: Archives nationales de France, Biblioteca de Castilla La Mancha, Biblioteca de Catalunya, Biblioteca histórica de Zaragoza, Biblioteca histórica municipal de Madrid, Biblioteca national de España, Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, Bibliothèque municipale de Caen, Bibliothèque nationale de France, British Library, British Museum, Cambridge University Library, Columbia University Library (and in particular its Interlibrary Loan staff), the library of the Comédie-Française, Hemeroteca municipal de Madrid, Jewish Museum London, Lewis Walpole Library, Musée Carnavalet, Museo de historia de Madrid, the library of the Museo nacional del Prado, Newberry Library, Oxford University Library, Pomona College, Real Academia Española, Senate House Library of the University of London, Sterling Library of Yale University, the library of the Universidad de Zaragoza, University of Chicago Library, University of Georgia Library, and University of Liverpool Library. I would like to give special thanks to David Moore, who went out of his way to procure a number of documents for me. The initial research for this project was completed during a sabbatical leave spent at the Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall in Paris in 2006–7. I

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would like to thank the staff and fellow scholars at the institute for their warm welcome and stimulating conversations. I am particularly grateful to Mihaela Bacou for helping me to find my way in Parisian libraries and for always correcting my French. I completed the final revisions during a sabbatical funded by the Bijzonder Onderzoeksfond of Ghent University, for which I am very thankful. I would like to thank the many friends and colleagues who gave me advice and encouragement during the research and writing of this book: David Andress, Tom Augst, Naby Avcioglu, Sarah Bershtel, Stephen Clay, Matt Connelly, Frederick de Armas, Yuval Erlich, Rubén Gallo, David Gies, Pat Grieve, Danielle Haase-Dubosc, Marius Hentea, Tamar Herzog, Liz Irwin, Matt Jones, Bruce King, Max Kramer, Muisi Krosi, Michael Kwass, Maureen McClane, Ken Moure, Patrick O’Connor, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Laurel Schwartz, Todd Shepard, Laura Slatkin, Jonathan Soffar, Joanna Stalnaker, Katherine Stern Brennan, Mary Ruth Strzeszewski, Aurélie Van de Peer, Steven Wagschal, Charles Walton, Caroline Weber, and Adam Winkel. Special thanks go to Laura Mason for her encouragement, guidance, and insightful feedback on the manuscript. I would also like to thank the students in my seminars on dandyism at the University of Chicago, Yale, and Columbia for their enthusiasm and participation. The anonymous peer reviewers of the manuscript provided many helpful suggestions. Bob Ellis prepared the index. I am especially grateful to my editor at the University of Chicago Press, Douglas Mitchell, and to his assistant, Tim McGovern, for their unwavering support of the project, and to Pamela Bruton for her rigorous and judicious copyediting. A final thanks goes to my parents, Ross and Marguerite Amann, for their love and encouragement.

{ abbreviations }

BHM BM

Biblioteca histórica municipal de Madrid British Museum, London

BNE

Biblioteca nacional de España, Madrid

BNF

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

CESAR

Calendrier électronique des spectacles sous l’ancien régime et sous la révolution, http://www.cesar.org.uk/ cesar2/

{ notes }

1.

2.

3. 4.

introduction In this study, I often use the word “dandy” as a generic term encompassing all the figures examined. In the final chapter, I turn to “dandy” in its historically specific sense, tracing the history and evolution of the word and distinguishing the nineteenth-century figure from earlier incarnations. See “The Dandiacal Body,” chapter 10 of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 207–217. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, The Anatomy of Dandyism: With Some Observations on Beau Brummell, trans. D. B. Wyndham Lewis (London: P. Davies, 1928). Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (New York: Viking Press, 1960). Studies that begin after Napoleon include James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Jacques Boulenger, Sous Louis-Philippe: Les dandys (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1932); Françoise Coblence, Le dandysme, obligation d’incertitude (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988); Günter Erbe, Dandys: Virtuosen der Lebenkunst (Berlin: Böhlau Verlag, 2002); Patrick Favardin and Laurent Bouexière, Le dandysme (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1988); Jessica R. Feldman, Gender on the Divide: The Dandy in Modernist Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press); Rhonda Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Roger Kempf, Dandies: Baudelaire et Cie (Paris: Seuil, 1977); Michel Lemaire, Le dandysme de Baudelaire à Mallarmé (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1978); Marie-Christine Natta, La grandeur sans convictions: Essai sur le dandysme (Paris: Félin, 1991); and Richard Pine, The Dandy and the Herald: Mind, Manners, and Morals from

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Brummell to Durell (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). A few notable exceptions are Jean-Claude Boulogne, Histoire de la coquetterie masculine (Paris: Perrin, 2011); John C. Prevost, Le dandysme en France, 1817–1839 (Geneva: Droz, 1957); Chris Ritchie, The Idler and the Dandy in Stage Comedy, 500 BC–1830: A History of a Dramatic Character Type (New York: Edwin Mellen, 2007); and Domna Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnête Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 5. On the determinist and expressive views of clothing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Cissie Fairchild, “Fashion and Freedom in the French Revolution,” Continuity and Change 15, no. 3 (2000): 419–433. For general discussions of fashion during the French Revolution, see Paula A. Baxter, “When Rakes Ruled: French Masculine Dress of the Revolutionary Era,” Antiques, February 2007, 58–65; Lynn Hunt, “The Freedom of Dress in Revolutionary France,” in From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 224–249; Katell Le Bourhis, The Age of Napoleon: Costume from Revolution to Empire, 1789–1815 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989); James A. Leith, “Fashion and Anti-fashion in the French Revolution,” in Consortium on Revolutionary Europe: 1750–1850; Selected Papers, 1998 (Tallahassee, FL: Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1998), 1–18; Madeleine Delpierre, ed., Modes et révolutions, 1780–1804 (Paris: Éditions Paris-Musées, 1989); Nicole Pellegrin, Les vêtements de la liberté: Abécédaire des pratiques vestimentaires en France de 1780 à 1800 (Aix-en-Provence: Alinea, 1989); Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988); and Richard Wrigley, The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (Oxford: Berg, 2002). 6. See Richard Sennett’s distinction between dress as sign and dress as symbol in his The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1974), 79. 7. Honoré de Balzac, Traité de la vie élégante, ed. Marie-Christine Natta (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2000), 112. 8. Barbey d’Aurevilly, Anatomy of Dandyism, 51. 9. Fairchild, “Fashion and Freedom in the French Revolution.” 10. The study will focus primarily on male fashion, which during the revolutionary period began to diverge in function and meaning from its female counterpart. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, masculine and feminine attire had a similar role in society: both served to signal a person’s rank and status. At the beginning of the Revolution, men and women alike embraced the politicized fashions of the uprising (the bonnet rouge, the tricolor cockade, etc.). The adoption of these accessories by women, however, quickly sparked controversy. In October 1793, disputes over female revolutionaries’ use of the bonnet rouge led to the prohibition of women’s

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11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

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political clubs in France. As women were discouraged from taking part in the public debate, their fashions were gradually depoliticized. Women opted for modest, austere styles that reflected the ideals of domesticity and self-sacrifice but did not flaunt their allegiance with overt revolutionary signs. Ideological self-fashioning was now primarily the function of male clothing. The association of male dress with the public and political sphere and of female dress with private and domestic space would persist after Thermidor (see chapter 2). During the Directory, male and female fashion continued to have very different symbolic functions. The literature on the merveilleuse, the female equivalent of the incroyable, tends to focus on morals and mores. During the Directory, upper-class Parisian women enjoyed unprecedented freedoms (including the rights to inherit and divorce) and no longer had to conform to the shackling gender codes and the ideology of domesticity of the early years of the Revolution. The fashions from the period, with their plunging necklines and transparent or flesh-toned fabrics, reflect the relaxed morals of the period. The figure of the merveilleuse came to embody the libertinage of the Directory. Texts about the incroyables, in contrast, often focused on politics and the public sphere (see chapter 3). After the French Revolution, male and female fashion continued to part ways. As masculine styles became increasingly homogeneous, simple, and monochromatic, women’s clothing assumed the role of marking status and wealth through lavish ornament and ostentatious detail. Male dress was no longer an extravagant performance of social standing but rather a uniform attire that admitted little variance. Muted personal touches—a deftly tied cravat or a well-cut waistcoat—were the only forms of distinction. This division between male and female fashions would shape the development of dandyism. Where the eighteenth-century figures almost always have a corresponding feminine form (petimetra, macaroness, petite-maîtresse), the nineteenth-century dandy is an almost exclusively male phenomenon. On the interest in physiognomy and physiognotracy during the period, see Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–1800, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). On the anxiety about appearances during the Revolution, see Wrigley, Politics of Appearances, 229–258. The warning about the folded assignat (republican currency) appears in Journal des hommes libres, no. 131 (20 vendémiaire Year IV [October 12, 1795]). Père Duchesne, no. 284 (n.d., ca. 1793): 4–6. Alexis Chataignier, engraver, Ah! Quelle antiquité!!! . . . Oh! Quelle folie que la nouveauté (Paris: Depeuille, n.d., ca. 1797), BNF, QB-201(141). Polyscope [Amaury Duval], “Sur un fameux concert,” Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique 3, no. 24 (30 frimaire Year III [December 20, 1794]): 527.

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16. N. T. H. Bayly, “The Dandies of the Present and the Macaronies of the Past: A Rough Sketch” (Bath: J. Barratt and Son, 1819), 4. 17. Mona Ozouf, L’école de la France: Essais sur la Révolution, l’utopie et l’enseignement (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 93. 18. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Histoire de la société française pendant le Directoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1929).

1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

chapter one Réimpression de l’Ancien moniteur: Depuis la réunion des États-Généraux jusqu’au Consulat (hereafter Moniteur) 17, no. 251 (September 8, 1793): 531. As we will see below, Barère drew the phrase “make Terror the order of the day” from a speech by a delegate from the Jacobin Club earlier in the session. See François Gendron, La jeunesse dorée: Épisodes de la Révolution française (Quebec: Presses de l’Université de Québec, 1979), 11–28. Gendron seeks to identify the political and social constituency that corresponded to the term: many of those labeled muscadins in September were the same men who had been arrested in early May for protesting the draft. My interest in what follows will not be the referent so much as the symbolic weight of the label. Louis Sébastien Mercier, Le nouveau Paris, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), 504. Père Duchesne, no. 283 (n.d., ca. 1793): 1. “Couplets des jeunes gens,” Le messager du soir, no. 887 (4 pluviôse Year III [January 23, 1795]): 2–3. Pierre Constant lists the author of the lyrics as Lamotte in his Les hymnes et chansons de la Révolution: Aperçu général et catalogue, avec notices historiques, analytiques et bibliographiques (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1904), 753. The classic formulation of this theory is volume 3 of Alphonse Aulard’s The French Revolution: A Political History, 1789–1804 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965). See Furet’s entry for “Terror” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1989), 137–150, esp. 147–148. See Mona Ozouf, “War and Terror in the French Revolutionary Discourse (1792–1794),” Journal of Modern History 56, no. 4 (1984): 579–597. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 61. See Lynn Hunt’s review of Furet’s Penser la Révolution française in History and Theory 20, no. 3 (1981): 313–323, esp. 321 (quotation). Pincé, Un vieillard de la Butte des Moulins aux jeunes gens de Paris (Paris: n.p., thermidor Year III [July–August 1795]), 10. Paul Pellisson, Histoire de l’Académie françoise, 3rd ed. (Paris: Coignard, 1743), 1:156. See Marie-Madeleine Bonafon, Tanastès: Conte allégorique (La Haye: Van der

notes to chapter 1

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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Slooten, 1745); and Marie-Madeleine Bonafon, Suite de Tanastès, conte allégorique (La Haye: Van der Slooten, 1745). The work was considered so scandalous that its author was condemned to fourteen years in confinement. On Bonafon and Tanastès, see Robert Darnton, “Mademoiselle Bonafon and the Private Life of Louis XV: Communication Circuits in Eighteenth-Century France,” Representations 87 (2004): 102–124; Lisa Jane Graham, If the King Only Knew: Seditious Speech in the Reign of Louis XV (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 56–95. Bonafon, Suite de Tanastès, 125–126. A copy of the novel at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal includes a handwritten key identifying the characters with prominent figures of the day. According to this gloss, the real-life Muscadin is the duc de Richelieu, whom Barbey d’Aurevilly would identify as a dandy avant la lettre. Very minor characters named Muscadin also appear in Anne Maudit de Fatouville’s La fille sçavante (Brussels: H. Frick, 1696) and in Fonpré de Fracansalle’s burlesque play from 1778, La bataille d’Antioche, ou Gargamelle vaincu (Amsterdam: Cailleau, 1782). Muscadin is also the name of the protagonist of Fonpré de Fracansalle’s 1778 play L’ambigu tragique (Lille: P. S. Lalau, 1778 or 1779), a parody of a tragedy with scullery cooks as the main characters. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, La faculté vengée (Paris: Quillau, 1747), 135–137, esp. 137 (quotation). W. D. Edmonds, Jacobinism and the Revolt of Lyon, 1789–1793 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 112–113. Ibid., 120–121. Journal de Lyon, ou Moniteur du département de Rhone et Loire, no. 85 (August 22, 1792): 337–339. Charles Riffaterre, “L’origine du mot ‘muscadin,’” Révolution française 61 (1909): 385–390. See tome 2 (“Manufactures et arts”) of the Encyclopédie méthodique, ou par ordre des matières (Paris: Panckoucke, 1784); and Boissier des Sauvages, L’art d’éléver les vers à soie (Avignon: J. J. Niel, 1788), 211–212. Another theory for the origin of the word appears in the September 1802 issue of the Monthly Review or Literary Journal, which derives it “either from the sweet wine called muscat, that powerful odour, musk, or those delicate words (paroles musquées) which usually issue from their perfumed lips” (95). See, e.g., Journal de Lyon, no. 25 (February 1, 1793): 103. Ibid., no. 40 (February 21, 1793): 161. Edmonds, Jacobinism, 150. Journal de Lyon, no. 40 (February 21, 1793): 161. Sébastian Charléty, “La journée du 29 mai 1793 à Lyon,” Révolution française, no. 39 (1900): 370–374, 385–426. Cited in ibid., 386.

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

notes to chapter 1

Edmonds, Jacobinism, 151. Journal de Lyon, no. 40 (February 21, 1793): 161. Edmonds, Jacobinism, 153–155. Cited in ibid., 187. Following the siege of Lyon, the word “muscadin” would spread throughout the provinces. Outside Paris, the term generally served as a synonym for “counterrevolutionary.” As one triumphant song put it, “The Lyonnais have surrendered to us,/The muscadins have been put down/ . . . /And all those mitred Tartuffes,/Those good friends of émigrés,/Will go, like Denis/Without a head in Paradise.” See “La reddition de la ville de Lyon,” in Recueil de chansons républicains, chantées par les citoyennes Pagny & Louison (Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, 18,148). Paul Mansfield, “The Repression of Lyon, 1793–1794,” French History 2, no. 1 (1988): 74–101, esp. 75. Père Duchesne, no. 276 (n.d., ca. 1793): 1, and no. 279 (n.d., ca. 1793): 1–2. In no. 306 (n.d., ca. 1793), Hébert uses the term to refer to “the ribbon merchants of Lyon, who, to find a better profit for their silks and for all the garbage they make, would like to reestablish royalty and bring back to Versailles all the scoundrels of the ancien régime” (5–6). Ibid., no. 274 (n.d., ca. 1793): 8. Ibid., no. 281 (n.d., ca. 1793): 6. In this passage, Hébert essentially combines two types that appeared in isolation in earlier issues: the muscadins of Lyon and the foutriquets of the Palais Royal, distinguished by their “tight culottes and square jackets.” For examples of the latter, see nos. 234, 271, and 274. Ibid., no. 281, 6. Ibid., no. 282, 3–4. A few issues later, Hébert would level similar attacks at the muscadines (female muscadins). Since the summer, tension had flared in Paris between the market women of Les Halles and the members of the Society of Republican and Revolutionary Women, the female equivalent of the Jacobin Club. Reacting against the masculine manners of the Jacobines (female Jacobins), the vendors had begun to tear off their cockades. Hébert, however, attributes their misbehavior to the muscadines, who, disguised as working women, “have slipped among them . . . to give them bad advice.” See ibid., no. 288 (n.d., ca. 1793): 1 and 8. On the cockade wars, see Hunt, “Freedom of Dress in Revolutionary France,” 225–227 (see introduction, n. 5). Another example of this scapegoating of the muscadines is the discussion at the Jacobin Club on September 16, 1793, in which a citizen blamed women for “all the troubles that have occurred in Paris” and demanded the “arrest of the muscadines as well as of the muscadins.” See F.-A. Aulard, La Société des Jacobins: Recueil de documents pour l’histoire du Club des Jacobins (Paris: Jouaust, 1889–1897), 5:406.

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41. Cited in Keith Michael Baker, ed., The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 338–339. 42. Père Duchesne, no. 284 (n.d., ca. 1793): 4–6. 43. Feuille du salut public, no. 66 (September 4, 1793): 3. The term “ci-devant” was generally applied to the French nobles of the ancien régime who had lost their privileges and status during the Revolution. 44. On the Paméla controversy, see Cecilia Feilla, “Performing Virtue: Pamela on the French Revolutionary Stage, 1793,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 43, no. 3 (2002): 286–305; and Arthur Pougin, La ComédieFrançaise et la Révolution: Scènes, récits et notices (Paris: Gaultier, Magnier, 1902), 69–117. 45. Feuille du salut public, no. 65 (September 3, 1793): 4. 46. For Barère’s speech, see Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860: Recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des chambres françaises (Paris: Dupont, 1908) (hereafter Archives parlementaires), 73:425–426. 47. Feuille du salut public, no. 66 (September 4, 1793): 3, emphasis in original. 48. On the controversy over Pamela’s birth, see Feilla, “Performing Virtue,” 289–295. 49. On the confusion between fiction and reality during the Terror, see James H. Johnson, “Revolutionary Audiences and the Impossible Imperatives of Fraternity,” in Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary France, ed. Bryant T. Kagan Jr. and Elizabeth H. Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 57–78. 50. Feuille du salut public, no. 66 (September 4, 1793): 3, emphasis in original. 51. Ibid., no. 75 (September 13, 1793): 3, emphasis in original. 52. For another example of this concern over the confusion of actors and their roles, see Journal de la Montagne, no. 97 (September 7, 1793): 673–674. 53. On unmasking in revolutionary discourse and politics, see Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 39, 66–67; Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–1800, trans. C. Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 219; James H. Johnson, “Versailles, Meet Les Halles: Masks, Carnival, and the French Revolution,” Representations 73 (2001): 89–116; Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 53–57. 54. Archives parlementaires, 73:420. 55. Ozouf, “War and Terror,” esp. 589–592. 56. Archives parlementaires, 73:417. 57. Moniteur 17, no. 251 (September 8, 1793): 529. 58. In his autobiography, Barère expressed annoyance with Bazire’s speech: when Bazire questioned the meaning of the word “suspect,” the expectation was that he would enter into “legal ideas in order to dispel vagueness and arbitrari-

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59.

60.

61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66.

notes to chapter 1

ness,” but instead he developed “ideas of revolutionism which enlarged the circle of suspects.” See Mémoires de B. Barère (Brussels: Meline, Can et compagnie, 1842), 2:343. In this retrospective account, it is of course in Barère’s interest to diminish his responsibility for the Terror, but it does seem to be the case that his speech and Bazire’s differed considerably in tone and strategy. At the September 17 session of the National Convention, Robespierre would adopt a similar strategy. When a delegate of the Parisian sections requested the repeal of Danton’s measure limiting their meetings to twice a week, Robespierre invoked the threat of the muscadins, who attended the sections when the sansculottes were absent and who pushed through “the most senseless propositions, presented in the most patriotic colors.” Once again, the muscadin is represented as a crafty infiltrator and used to rein in the sansculottes. Moniteur 17, no. 262 (September 19, 1793): 683. In a recent study, Jean-Clément Martin reminds us that Terror was not the order of the day on September 5: the expression appears in an attempt to placate popular demands, but it “does not receive a political and juridical translation.” For Martin, the discourses around the Terror were often more severe than the political, legal, and institutional measures adopted. See J.-C. Martin, Violence et Révolution: Essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 188. Picard and Lépitre’s La première réquisition, à propos patriotique en un acte et en prose (BNF, Rondel MS 633) premiered at the Théâtre du Palais-Variétés. For various accounts of this debate, see Archives parlementaires, 64:72–76, esp. 72 (quotation). Claude François Beaulieu attributes the invention of the word “muscadin” to Chabot’s speech. See his Essais historiques sur les causes et les effets de la Révolution de France (Paris: Maradan, 1803), 279. As I have noted, the term actually originated in Lyon, but Chabot seems to have been among the first to apply it to the draft dodgers of the première réquisition. The word is used in a similar way in a letter by the deputy Dartigoeyte to the Committee of Public Safety dated September 12, 1793 (Archives nationales, Paris, AF11/168, pl. 1383, pieces 40 and 42). In the spring, Hébert’s Père Duchesne had railed against the petty shopkeepers, messengers, sugar merchants, and bankers with curled hair and tight culottes who were protesting their recruitment and encouraging counterrevolution in Paris. See, e.g., Père Duchesne, no. 234 (n.d., ca. 1793). Archives parlementaires, 73:421. Picard and Lépitre, Première réquisition, 6. Ibid., 7. Another work on the première réquisition—Vallienne and Bizet’s La caserne, ou Le départ de la première réquisition (Paris, 1793), which premiered on October 11 at the Théâtre du Palais-Variétés—would similarly come to the defense of the jeunes gens: “True Frenchmen should not/Judge a man by his dress./Even with a tight costume/One can be a good Patriot;/Sometimes the best culotte/Is the most sans-culotte” (7).

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67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78.

79.

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Picard and Lépitre, Première réquisition, 6. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17. A subject of controversy in recent scholarship on revolutionary theater has been the level of audience involvement. According to Paul Friedland, spectators, who had actively participated in performances throughout the eighteenth century, became increasingly passive during the Revolution as emphasis was placed on the suspension of disbelief. Susan Maslan, Jeffrey S. Ravel, and James H. Johnson, in contrast, point to their intense intervention in the spectacle. Inspired by the participatory and democratic ethos of the times, revolutionary audiences asserted their right to control and to intervene in their own entertainment, insisting on the performance of particular works (e.g., Chenier’s Charles IX) and reacting loudly to the events onstage with whistling and catcalls. The debut of La première réquisition confirms a high degree of audience involvement but also suggests the extent to which the footlights were a contested site during the period. For these differing perspectives, see Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Susan Maslan, Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Jeffrey S. Ravel, Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). On the debut of La première réquisition, see Journal des spectacles, no. 93 (October 3, 1793): 739. Feuille du salut public, no. 101 (18 vendémiaire Year II [October 9, 1793]): 4. A few days later, they would react similarly against the addition of the words “that muscadin of an abbot” to the play L’abbé Vert. In response to this disturbance, one reviewer warned actors against “odious epithets that may, by waking up hatred and discord, light the incendiary torch of civil war.” Journal des spectacles, no. 100 (October 10, 1793): 796. Dugazon’s Le modéré debuted at the Théâtre de la République (Paris: Maradan, Year II [1793–1794]). The published version incorrectly lists the premiere date as 17 brumaire instead of 7 brumaire. L’ami des loix premiered on January 2, 1793 (Paris: Maradan, 1793). Ibid., 28. The National Convention decided that “[t]he comedy Paméla, like L’ami des loix, . . . could only trouble public tranquillity.” Reported in Journal des spectacles, no. 66 (September 5, 1793): 525. L’ami du peuple premiered at the Théâtre du Palais-Variétés on September 6, 1793 (Paris: Maradan, 1793). Its author would go on to coauthor the con-

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80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101.

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troversial Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou La folie du jour, which would set off riots among the jeunes gens (discussed in the next chapter). Le véritable ami des loix opened in late September at the Théâtre de Molière (Paris: Barba, Year III [1794–1795]). Its author, François Cizos-Duplessis, published his works under the name of his wife, Citoyenne Villeneuve. Cammaille-Saint-Aubin, Ami du peuple, 42. Feuille du salut public, no. 97 (October 5, 1793): 3. Ibid., no. 75 (September 13, 1793): 3. Dugazon, Modéré, 32, 13. Ibid., 4, 7. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 8. Révolutions de Paris, no. 214 (15 brumaire Year II [November 5, 1793]): 194. Pierre Caron, Paris pendant la Terreur (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1910), 4:153. Cammaille-Saint-Aubin’s L’ami du peuple would also be the object of equivocal reactions. In a prologue to the published piece, the playwright mentions complaints that “many of the principles advanced by the modéré [moderate] Doucement were avidly seized upon by the public, which applied them in a malign way” (ix). For more favorable reviews of the play, see L’almanach des Muses ou choix des Poésies fugitives de 1793 (Paris: Delalain l’ainé, 1794), 227–228; Journal des spectacles, no. 121 (10 brumaire Year II [October 31, 1793]): 957; and the supplement to Affiches, annonces et avis divers, ou Journal général de France (hereafter Petites affiches), 9 brumaire Year II (October 30, 1793), 4611–4612. Dugazon, Modéré, 33. Ibid., 17, 16. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 18. Feuille du salut public, no. 121 (9 brumaire Year II [October 30, 1793]): 4, emphasis in original. Francis W. Blagdon, Paris As It Was and As It Is, or A Sketch of the French Capital Illustrative of the Effects of the Revolution (London: C. A. Baldwin, 1803), 2:207. Ironically, Dugazon would suffer the same fate as his character several days after the debut. To celebrate a fête honoring Marat, several maratistes on the

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102. 103.

104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

111. 112.

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revolutionary committee of Dugazon’s section decided to imprison the actor to punish him for his mockery of the martyred Friend of the People. On his arrest, Dugazon reproduced Modérantin’s act in the final scene of his play: “Transformed into a maratiste himself the evening of his arrest, Dugazon recognized before his comrades that he had erred at the aforementioned dinner and that there had been a bit too much punch involved in that affair.” His performance seems to have been more compelling than Modérantin’s: the committee promptly released the actor, freeing him to “mock the ridiculous modérés.” Just as the word “muscadin” begins as a description of the actors of the Comédie-Française and is transferred to their audience, so Modérantin’s moderation moves from fiction to reality, bizarrely imprinting itself on real life. Feuille du salut public, no. 127 (15 brumaire Year II [November 5, 1793]): 3, emphasis in original. Père Duchesne, no. 325 (n.d., ca. 1793): 4. Hébert’s carnivalesque vision of Paris during Year II would reappear after Thermidor in an issue of L’ami du peuple in which Lebois celebrates the end of the “universal masquerade” and “comedy” in which muscadins and aristocrats dressed up as sansculottes (no. 50 [12 vendémiaire Year III (October 3, 1794)]: 1). Once again, the muscadin is a figure who confuses life and the stage. Père Duchesne, no. 307 (n.d., ca. 1793): 3. Ibid., 4–6. Ibid., no. 311 (n.d., ca. 1793): 5. Moniteur 18, no. 52 (November 12, 1793): 395. Ibid., 394. Père Duchesne, no. 312 (n.d., ca. 1793): 4. “Histoire de la conjuration du Père Duchesne et ses adieux a sa Jacqueline,” cited in Charles Brunet, Le père Duchesne d’Hébert: Ou notice historique et bibiographique sur ce journal publié pendant les années 1790, 1791, 1792, 1793 et 1794 (Paris: Libr. de France, 1859), 37. Adresse des jeunes citoyens, à leurs frères les ouvriers de tous les âges (Paris: Imprimerie des Jeunes Citoyens Français, 1795), 4. A similar argument appears in a pamphlet by Camille Saint-Aubin that rejects the term jours sans-culottides (the name for the last few days of the revolutionary calendar) because it derives from a divisive political label. As in the Adresse, Saint-Aubin goes on to redeploy the word “muscadin” in a positive context in a passage in which he “translates” from Isocrates’s Areopagiticus into “modern French”: “in that golden age, every sansculotte, far from wanting to dunk an elegantly dressed muscadin, contemplated with secret pride that ease that announced the prosperity of the Republic; while the muscadins, far from avoiding contact with a sansculotte, shared their excess clothing with him.” See Camille Saint-Aubin, Réflexions sur le nouveau Calendrier

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113. 114.

115.

116. 117. 118.

119.

120.

121. 122. 123.

124. 125.

notes to chapter 1

et sur la nécessité d’élaguer au moins les Décadis de cet avorton du système décimal; avec un mot en passant sur les effets du fanatisme politique, comparés à ceux du fanatisme religieux; sur la nouvelle Ere, et sur l’indécence des Sans-Culotides, à quoi on a joint la traduction d’un passage d’Isocrate, sur les Sans-Culotes et les Muscadins (Paris: Pougin, n.d.), 23. A song by Pierre-Antoine-Augustin de Piis, “Le vœu des citoyens paisibles,” similarly rejects these labels, deconstructing the distinction between the two terms: “Let us first forbid certain words/That have seared our language;/And of jacobins,/And of muscadins,/ Let us speak no more./Because one has seen jacobins/Who are friends of law, not of carnage;/Because one has seen muscadins/Of whom Mars gives a very good testimonial.” Journal de Paris, no. 140 (February 8, 1795): 566. Adresse, 6. Ibid., 8. Pierre Serna has argued that this strategy of embracing the center on the pretext of rising above partisanship is one of the hallmarks of modern French politics. See his La république des girouettes, 1789–1815 et au-delà: Une anomalie politique; La France de l’extrême centre (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005). See particularly Fréron’s article “Invitation à la jeunesse française de sortir de son sommeil lethargique, et de venger la mort des vieillards, femmes et enfans, en exterminant les massacreurs et égorgeurs,” L’orateur du peuple, no. 59 (23 nivôse Year III [January 12, 1795]): 473–478. Fréron’s metaphor of awakening was taken up a week later in a song that would become the anthem of the jeunesse dorée: “Le réveil du peuple” (lyrics by Jean Marcel Souriguère de Saint-Marc and music by Pierre Gaveux). Messager du soir, no. 937 (2 germinal Year III [March 22, 1795]): 2. Réponse des ouvriers de Paris, à l’adresse des jeunes citoyens (Paris: Imprimerie des Ouvriers, 1795), 6–7. For a detailed account of the Germinal and Prairial Uprisings, see Gendron, Jeunesse dorée, 146–164, 177–189, 203–245. Gendron argues that the jeunes gens’ role in the defense of the National Assembly has been greatly exaggerated. Hyacinthe Dorvo’s Figaro de retour à Paris, comédie en un acte et en vers (Paris: Barba, Year III [1794–1795]) debuted at the Théâtre Martin on 30 floréal Year III (May 19, 1795). In his Dictionnaire des idées réçues, Gustave Flaubert defined “Figaro (Le Mariage de)” as “another of the causes of the French Revolution.” Œuvres complètes (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 2:308. Dorvo, Figaro, 31. Ibid., 32. See also Le roi Janus, ou L’homme à deux visages (BNF, De Vinck 4308) and L’homme de la cour 1791; L’homme du peuple 1789: Tantot froid, tantot chaud, tantot blanc, tantot noir, à droit maintenant, mais autrefois à gauche, je vous disois bon jour, et je vous dis bon soir (BNF, De Vinck 4036). Dorvo, Figaro, 43. Ibid., 8.

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chapter two René Périn and M.-C. Cammaille-Saint-Aubin, Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou La folie du jour, comédie en un acte, en prose (Paris: Marchands de nouveautés, Year III [1794–1795]). 2. François-Alphonse Aulard, Paris pendant la réaction thermidorienne et sous le Directoire: Recueil de documents pour l’histoire de l’esprit public à Paris (Paris: Quantin, 1898), 1:455–456. In a footnote, Aulard mistakenly identifies the play as Martainville and Chaussier’s Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou L’agrément du jour, a work that would premiere several weeks later at a different theater. 3. Aulard, Paris, 1:459. 4. Ibid., 1:471; Moniteur 23, no. 114 (24 pluviôse Year III [February 12, 1795]): 426. For another account of the protests, see Vedette, ou Gazette du jour, 25 pluviôse Year III (February 13, 1795), 2. On the theater wars of pluviôse Year III, see Gendron, Jeunesse dorée, 110–120; and Sergio Luzzatto, L’automne de la Révolution: Luttes et cultures politiques dans la France thermidorienne, trans. Simone Carpentari Messina (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001), 118–123. 5. On the Committee of General Security’s reaction, see Vedette, ou Gazette du jour, 20 pluviôse Year III (February 8, 1795), 3. For comparisons to prerevolutionary works, see Journal des théâtres, Second trimestre, no. 25 (23 pluviôse Year III [February 11, 1795]): 396. 6. On the history of the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique, see Nicolas Brazier, Chroniques des petits théâtres de Paris (Paris: Rouveyre and G. Blond, 1883), 1:51–83. For an overview of boulevard theater during the Revolution, see David Trott, “Le théâtre de foire à l’époque révolutionnaire: Rupture ou continuité?,” in Les arts de la scène et la Révolution française, ed. Philippe Bourdin and Gérard Loubinoux (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2004), 73–92. 7. Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Aubin, Concert, 30. 8. Alphonse-Louis-Dieudonné Martainville, La nouvelle Henriotade, ou Récit de ce qui s’est passé relativement à la pièce, intitulée, “Concert de la rue Feydeau” (Paris: Brigitte Mathé, Year III [1794–1795]), 3. 9. Moniteur 23 (24 pluviôse Year III [February 12, 1795]): 426. 10. Martainville, Nouvelle Henriotade, 4. As this passage illustrates, the word “Jacobin” was often used in Year III to refer to the terrorists and the excesses of Year II. This usage is, of course, historically questionable, as many Jacobins had adopted more moderate positions (e.g., the Girondins), but it reflects the political thought and sentiment of the later period. When using this term in this particular post-Thermidor sense, I will place the word in quotation marks. 11. On the culture wars of pluviôse Year III, see chapter 2 of Gendron’s Jeunesse dorée. 1.

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12. Bronisław Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre, trans. Michel Petheram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 178. 13. “L’inconvénient des perruques des dames,” Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique (hereafter Décade), no. 18 (30 vendémiaire Year III [October 21, 1794]): 147–154. On this journal, see Josiane Boulad-Ayoub and Martin Nadeau, “Le décade philosophique” comme système, 1794–1807 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003). 14. Polyscope [Amaury Duval], “Sur les costumes,” Décade, no. 12 (30 thermidor Year II [August 17, 1794]): 136–144. 15. On these discourses, see Michael Kwass, “Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 631–659. Polyscope would go on to write essays about the ideal national costume, attempting to define the most practical male and female attire. See Décade, no. 13 (10 fructidor Year II [August 27, 1794]): 211ff.; no. 14 (20 fructidor Year II [September 6, 1794]): 278ff. 16. Vedette, ou Gazette du jour, 29 brumaire Year III (November 19, 1794), 2. 17. Henrion, Histoires secrètes de toutes les perruques blondes de Paris (Paris: Marchands de nouveautés, Year III [1794–1795]). 18. Louis-Benoît Picard, La perruque blonde (Paris: Maradan, Year III [1794– 1795]). The play would also be performed twice at the Théâtre de Molière in 1795. 19. Spectacles de Paris, no. 16 (23 brumaire Year III [November 13, 1794]): 153. The letter, which is dated 15 brumaire Year III (November 5, 1794), appeared a day after the debut of Picard’s play. 20. Louis de Laus de Boissy, La perruque blonde, ou Le bourru généreux (Paris: Cailleau, 1794). The play premiered at the Thêátre du Lycée des Arts. 21. Charles-Augustin de Bassompierre Sewrin, La blonde et la brune (Paris: Barba, Year III [1794–1795]). L’art et la nature premiered on December 28, 1794, at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique. For its plot, see Journal des théâtres, Second trimestre, no. 15 (19 nivôse Year III [January 8, 1795]): 236–237. 22. Perruques de toutes les couleurs premiered at the Théâtre de la Montagne, which was renamed Théâtre des Variétés, maison Égalité the day after the performance. It was also performed once at the Théâtre de la Cité-Variétés. For a summary of its plot, see Journal des théâtres, Second trimestre, no. 9 (29 frimaire Year III [December 19, 1794]): 132–133. Rolland and Clairville’s Arlequin perruquier, opéra-vaudeville en un acte (Paris: Barba, Year III [1794–1795]) debuted at the Théâtre de la Cité-Variétés. It also played at the Théâtre des Variétés, maison Égalité. For a reaction to Arlequin perruquier, see Journal des théâtres, Second trimestre, no. 25 (23 pluviôse Year III [February 11, 1795]): 391–392. For other reviews of the play, see Feuille critique et littéraire, no. 21 (10 ventôse Year III [February 28, 1795]): 57–59;

notes to chapter 2

23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

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and Journal des théâtres, Troisième trimestre, no. 11 (6 germinal Year III [March 26, 1795]): 170–172. Alphonse-Louis-Dieudonné Martainville and Héctor Chaussier, Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou L’agrément du jour (Paris: Barba, 1795). The play debuted at the Théâtre des Variétés, maison Egalité and was performed alternately at that theater and the Théâtre de la Cité-Variétés. Encore un concert, ou Les plaisirs du jour exists only in manuscript form (BNF, Nouvelles acquisitions françaises MS 2907, no. 1482). As is clear from the title, its author consciously inscribes it in the Feydeau–perruque blonde tradition: not only do the protagonists prepare to go to “that concert so much discussed in the newspapers,” but its heroine sports “the divine blond wig that our dramaturges have made so famous” (78, 87). The work debuted at the Théâtre de la Gaîté. These calculations are based on the number of performances listed in André Tissier’s indispensable Les spectacles à Paris pendant la Révolution: Répertoire analytique, chronologique et bibliographique, de la proclamation de la République à la fin de la Convention nationale (21 sept. 1792–26 oct. 1795) (Geneva: Droz, 2002). Journal des théâtres et des fêtes nationales, no. 89 (24 brumaire Year III [November 14, 1794]): 710. Georges Duval, Souvenirs de la réaction thermidorienne (Paris: Victor Magen, 1844), 2:79. The classic version of this story is in the Goncourt brothers’ Histoire de la société française pendant le Directoire (Paris: E. Dentu, 1855). On the dansomanie of the Thermidorian period, see Duval, Souvenirs, 2:69–85. The term “ironic distantiation” is drawn from Ewa Lajer-Burcharth’s Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 193. As Ronald Schechter has recently shown, the bals des victimes were most likely an urban legend. See his “Gothic Thermidor: The Bals des Victimes, the Fantastic, and the Production of Historical Knowledge in Post-Terror France,” Representations 61 (1998): 78–94. This understanding has often led to a neglect of the cultural production of the period: many studies of the theater of the Revolution take 9 thermidor as their end point. Ozouf, L’école de la France, 93. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 72. Baczko, Ending the Terror, 254, emphasis in original. Décade, no. 18 (30 vendémiaire Year III [October 21, 1794]): 148. On the anxiety about deceptive appearances during the period, see chapter 6 of Richard Wrigley’s The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (Oxford: Berg, 2002). Payan’s speech, delivered on May 10, 1794, appears in Journal de la Montagne,

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38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

notes to chapter 2

no. 17 (24 floréal Year II [May 13, 1794]). On this phenomenon, see also the article about the chignons à la Pitt in Feuille de la République, no. 318 (28 floréal Year II [May 17, 1794]): 2. The association between the blond wig and counterrevolutionary politics is clear already in representations of the princess of Lamballe and of Charlotte Corday. After killing the princess— one of Marie Antoinette’s favorites—during the September Massacres, the rioting crowds summoned a wigmaker to curl and powder her hair and then paraded the severed head on a pike before the queen’s window at the Temple. See Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 262–265. According to legend, Corday, naturally a brunet, had her hair plaited and powdered before murdering Marat on July 13, 1793. As Nina Rattner Gelbart has observed, JeanJacques Hauer in his 1793 painting La meurtre de Marat “tried to indicate by the artificial powdery color of the murderess’s hair that there was indeed something aristocratic and hence duplicitous about her.” See Gelbart, “The Blonding of Charlotte Corday,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (2004): 203. The legend of wigs made of guillotined women’s hair would outlive the Terror. Observing the ubiquity of blond wigs in Paris at the end of 1795, Jakob Heinrich Meister traced their origin to “greedy speculators” profiting from the “hair cut off during Robespierre’s reign, be it forcibly by the guillotine or voluntarily in prison to avoid being devoured by vermin.” See Meister, Souvenirs de mon dernier voyage à Paris (1795) (Paris: Picard, 1910), 93n1. Louis Sébastien Mercier repeats the story, citing Payan’s speech at the Paris Commune, in Le nouveau Paris, 249. Décade, no. 18 (30 vendémiaire Year III [October 21, 1794]): 153. Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 72. Suzanne Desan, “Reconstituting the Social after the Terror: Family, Property and the Law in Popular Politics,” Past and Present 164 (1999): 81–121. C.-A. de Bassompierre Sewrin’s La blonde et la brune, ou Les deux n’en font qu’une would draw out the allegorical implications of the anecdote. Changing the heroine’s name to Marianne, Sewrin makes her story a symbol for that of the nation at large. To correct the false blond, to restore her to her natural coloring, is to put the Revolution back on track, to recover its purity and earnestness. For a longer discussion of this play and of Arlequin perruquier, see my article “Blonde Trouble: Women in Wigs in the Wake of Thermidor,” Fashion Theory 13, no. 3 (2009): 299–324. See Antoine de Baecque, “The Defeat of the Body of the King: Essay on the Impotence of Louis XVI,” in his The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–1800, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Moniteur 23, no. 101 (11 nivôse Year III [December 31, 1794]): 82. As An-

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44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

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drew Jainchill observes, post-Thermidor writers often blamed women for “the corruption of the nation’s mœurs” and called for “their exclusion from public life.” See his Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 70. Picard, La perruque blonde, 18. Ibid. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 30. The comedy Arlequin perruquier echoes this predicament: at the beginning of the play, Arlequin’s success as a wigmaker seems unlikely, for the black wigs of the Jacobins have recently fallen out of vogue (5). Picard, La perruque blonde, 19. A vaudeville response to Picard’s play would go even further in this direction, insisting on the meaninglessness and innocence of wigs. In Joseph Aude’s Perruques de toutes les couleurs, a father who has recently seen La perruque blonde visits a wigmaker and begs him never to make his daughter a blond headdress, in hopes of sparing her an experience such as Adèle’s. His strategy sidesteps the entire problem of correcting and educating the frivolous young lady: rather than curb demand, he simply cuts off supply. Ultimately, the father seems concerned not by the moral consequences of his daughter’s self-fashioning or the possibility of misrecognition but rather by the threat posed to her by overbearing uncles who judge by appearances. The true danger of wearing a wig is the wig opposition. At the end of the work, the characters attend a play titled L’apologie des perruques (An apology for wigs), which is an alternate title for Aude’s own work. An account of its plot may be found in Journal des théâtres, Second trimestre, no. 9 (29 frimaire Year III [December 19, 1794]): 132–133. A shorter review appears in Feuille critique et littéraire, no. 7 (5 nivôse Year III [December 25, 1794]): 145–147. Sewrin’s La blonde et la brune would insist much more rigidly on proper representation, on the correspondence between identity and appearance and more generally between word and meaning. In this work, the movement from the Terror to Thermidorian society is a movement from deception to proper representation. In the final vaudeville, the author denounces the terrorists as “traitors to the Nation” who “had taken on a deceptive exterior” and celebrates Justice, which has revealed their true identity: “How many people change endlessly/From black to white, from white to black./Such inconstancy only denotes/That their hearts are false, full of blackness./The true, the excellent patriot/Never changes color” (33). On the history of the girouette as a type in French politics and literature, see Serna, République des girouettes, 2005. The debut of a play titled La girouette on January 12, 1795, attests to the relevance of the figure to the Thermidorian political situation (373n4). Picard, La perruque blonde, 24.

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53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

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Ibid., 19. Laus de Boissy, La perruque blonde, 22. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 14. This association between financial and moral credit was central to the pamphlet literature condemning Marie Antoinette. See Clare Haru Crowston, “The Queen and Her ‘Minister of Fashion’: Gender, Credit and Politics in Pre-revolutionary France,” Gender and History 14, no. 1 (2002): 92–116. Laus de Boissy, La perruque blonde, 29. Ibid., 31. Journal des théâtres, Second trimestre, no. 19 (3 pluviôse Year III [January 22, 1795]): 297. Laus de Boissy, La perruque blonde, 40–43, emphasis mine. Pierre Corneille, “The Cid,” “Cinna”: The Theatrical Illusion, trans. John Cairncross (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975), 168. For an insightful discussion of the Nantes and Carrier trials, see Baczko, Ending the Terror, 136–184. Carrier was a particular target among the jeunes gens, for he had denounced them as muscadins only a few months earlier on 18 fructidor. See Moniteur 21, no. 350 (20 fructidor Year II [September 6, 1794]): 679. Journal des théâtres, Second trimestre, no. 6 (19 frimaire Year III [December 9, 1794]): 96. By all other accounts, however, Picard preached to the very unconverted. Reviews of the premiere indicate that the work failed in large part because the fashionable women in the audience resented its “lesson.” One critic observed that attacking their wigs was not the best way to “win their suffrage”: Petites affiches, no. 55 (25 brumaire Year III [November 15, 1794]): 818. According to another report, the female spectators actually disrupted the performance: Feuille de la République, no. 45 (25 brumaire Year III [November 15, 1794]): 4. Indeed, even the Journal des théâtres et des fêtes nationales notes on two different occasions the negative influence of “femmes à la mode” on the reception of the work. See Journal des théâtres et des fêtes nationales, no. 89 (24 brumaire Year III [November 14, 1794]): 710–711, emphasis in original, and no. 95 (30 brumaire Year III [November 20, 1794]): 759, emphasis in original. Journal des théâtres, Second trimestre, no. 19 (3 pluviôse Year III [January 22, 1795]): 294–299, and no. 20 (6 pluviôse Year III [January 25, 1795]): 312– 316, esp. 314 (quotations), emphasis in original. Louis de Laus de Boissy, La vraie républicaine, ou La voix de la patrie (Paris: Cailleau, Year II [1793–1794]), 32. The CESAR database lists 111 performances between 1789 and 1799 in Paris alone. See Denis Diderot, Œuvres romanesques (Paris: Garnier, 1966), 593–594. Both Goldoni’s and Laus de Boissy’s uncles belong to the type of the benevolent misanthrope, which is most associated with Alceste, the title character

notes to chapter 2

69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

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of Molière’s Le misanthrope (1666). During the early years of the Revolution, the figure would have a brief comeback. In his Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758), Rousseau had famously sided with Alceste over the more well-mannered and socially conventional Philinte. In 1790, the republican playwright Fabre d’Eglantine took up the idea in his play Le Philinte de Molière, which denounced the hypocrisy of Philinte and praised the spontaneous empathy of Alceste. As Susan Maslan has argued, Fabre d’Eglantine’s play attempted to encourage pity and sympathy in the audience by illustrating Alceste’s empathetic responses to suffering that he has not even witnessed. Alceste becomes Fabre d’Eglantine’s model republican—honest, transparent, and empathetic. To a certain extent, the treatment of Dufranc echoes this ideal: he too demonstrates extraordinary empathy in his encounter with Citoyenne Levasseur. In the final scene, however, he reverts to intransigence. Laus de Boissy seems to point to a darker side of the republican misanthrope, a political enthusiasm that impedes empathy. For an insightful discussion of Rousseau’s and d’Eglantine’s works, see Susan Maslan, Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 74–124. On December 28, 1794, only a few weeks after Laus de Boissy’s premiere, another version of the story appeared under the title L’art et la nature, ou La manie des perruques. The play was never printed, but a summary of its plot appears in Journal des théâtres, Second trimestre, no. 15 (19 nivôse Year III [January 8, 1795]): 236–237. At the beginning of the work, the uncle instructs his notary to refuse his niece her pension and then hides to observe their encounter. Not only is the notary tipped off but so are the police, who arrive shortly after to arrest her for carrying a false passport. Of all the variants on the story, the lesson in this work is undoubtedly the most forced and forcefully imposed. This time, however, the audience objected. As the critic concludes, the playwright ought to have remembered Jean de Santeuil’s maxim, “Castigat ridendo mores.” Polyscope, “Sur un fameux concert,” Décade 3, no. 24 (30 frimaire Year III [December 20, 1794]): 526–535. Ibid., 534. Ibid., 526. For a comprehensive history of the Théâtre Feydeau, see Michael McClellan’s dissertation, “Battling over the Lyric Muse: Expressions of Revolution and Counterrevolution at the Théâtre Feydeau, 1789–1801” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1994), and his article “Counterrevolution in Concert: Music and Political Dissent in Revolutionary France,” Musical Quarterly 80, no. 1 (1996): 31–57. On the preference for music with words among music theorists such as JeanBaptiste Leclerc, see James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 135–136, 140–141.

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75. Vedette, ou Gazette du jour, 1 ventôse Year III (February 19, 1795), 2. 76. Petites affiches, no. 83 (23 frimaire Year III [December 13, 1794]): 1275. 77. Moniteur 23, no. 101 (11 nivôse Year III [December 31, 1794]): 82. As the Vedette reports, Cambon’s denunciation seems to have had no effect on the theater itself. See Vedette, ou Gazette du jour, 10 nivôse Year III (December 30, 1794), 3. 78. On this ideal, see James Livesey, “Agrarian Ideology and Commercial Republicanism in the French Revolution,” Past and Present 157 (1997): 94–121. 79. Décade 3, no. 24 (30 frimaire Year III [December 20, 1794]): 527. 80. Ibid., 528, emphasis in original. 81. On this strategy, see Serna, République des girouettes. 82. On the notion of repetition compulsion, see Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Bantam, 1959). 83. Décade 3, no. 24 (30 frimaire Year III [December 20, 1794]): 527, 534. 84. Ibid., 531. 85. Ibid., 533. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., 528n1. 88. Similar attacks were leveled at the women in these circles. A commentary on the Feydeau concerts, for example, observes that the female spectators are “neither the wives of former nobles nor those of businessmen.” Vedette, ou Gazette du jour, 1 ventôse Year III (February 19, 1795), 2. 89. Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Aubin, Concert, 5. According to the Journal des théâtres, the letter, which is dated February 2, was distributed to the audience at the door before the debut of the play at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique (February 3). See Journal des théâtres, Second trimestre, no. 25 (23 pluviôse Year III [February 11, 1795]): 392–397. 90. Décade 3, no. 24 (30 frimaire Year III [December 20, 1794]): 534–535. A week later, the Journal des théâtres would publish a defense of the Feydeau directed against “the moral stories of our polyscopes,” which relies on precisely the distinction drawn in the Décade piece. The author, however, has subtly retooled it: “We don’t mean here that luxury that brings in its wake a great number of slaves, that oriental luxury that depopulates the countryside without offering more arms to the industry of the cities, but rather that invigorating luxury that produces the happiest and most equal distribution of wealth in a state.” What is in Polyscope a historical and political distinction (old vs. new regime) becomes here a geographical and economic one (East vs. West, slavery vs. a more equitable distribution). The author justifies the expenditure at the Feydeau by observing that the pricey, first-class seats of the wealthy defray most of the cost of the entertainment; this allows the humbler classes to attend the spectacle at much more reasonable rates. The Feydeau, that is, represents the “invigorating” sort of luxury. See Jour-

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91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103.

104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109.

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nal des théâtres, Second trimestre, no. 11 (6 nivôse Year III [December 26, 1794]): 162–164. Décade 4, no. 32 (20 ventôse Year III [March 10, 1795]): 490. Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Aubin, Concert, 24. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 30. Journal des théâtres, Second trimestre, no. 25 (23 pluviôse Year III [February 11, 1795]): 394. Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Aubin, Concert, 19–20. Moniteur 23, no. 144 (24 pluviôse Year III [February 12, 1795]): 425–426. Although the playwrights seem to have altered some aspects of the work in the published version, the review of the debut in the Journal des théâtres confirms these details. Décade 4, no. 30 (30 pluviôse Year III [February 18, 1795]): 366–367. Thermidorian and Directory thinkers often saw the Terror as a distortion of language and words. See Sophia Rosenfeld, Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 181–226. Décade 4, no. 30 (30 pluviôse Year III [February 18, 1795]): 367–368. Martainville, Nouvelle Henriotade, 2. Moniteur 23, no. 144 (24 pluviôse Year III [February 12, 1795]): 426. As Jainchill (Reimagining Politics, 83) observes, “whereas the Jacobins had been antihistorical and rejected the lessons of historical experience, the post-Terror republican center tended to venerate experience against abstract theory.” Baczko, Ending the Terror, 49. For Tallien’s speech, see Moniteur 21, no. 343 (13 Fructidor Year II [August 30, 1794]), 612–615. These contrasting views of language appear as well in a vaudeville opera that debuted on the same night as the controversial Le concert de la rue Feydeau: Rolland and Clairville’s Arlequin perruquier, opéra-vaudeville en un acte premiered on February 3, 1795, at the Théâtre de la Cité-Variétés. At the beginning of the play, the wigmaker Arlequin celebrates the return to fashion since 9 thermidor: now that those who sought to “advertise [afficher] their virtues/By looking down on coiffure” have been discredited, the luxury trades will make a comeback. His business strategy is “to obtain credit” by making “a big show,” plastering Paris with advertisements: “More than one author tricks us/And really has no other talent/Than a title and a poster” (12). The opposition between his plan and the “Jacobin” attitudes toward fashion illustrates two different approaches to language. The ter-

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110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115. 116.

117. 118.

notes to chapter 2

rorists attempted to establish a correspondence between the inside and the outside; their disdain for fashion supposedly reflected their inner virtue and seriousness. Arlequin, in contrast, acknowledges up front that his posters point to nothing, that he is self-fashioning toward a goal rather than revealing a preexisting identity. Martainville and Chaussier, Concert, 7. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17. Forlis, the dandy of the anonymous prose comedy Encore un concert, ou Les plaisirs du jour, resembles S. Albin in this respect. Like Martainville and Chaussier’s hero, he is politically engaged and a good republican and has valiantly fought against the terrorists in street confrontations: early in the play he is identified as the inventor of “the squared redingotte, the very sight of which nowadays makes a Jacobin tremble” (78). And like S. Albin, he vacillates continually between memory and oblivion. At the outset, he is so debt-ridden that he has forgotten his fiancée and resolved to marry a rich widow. But at other points, he remembers his beloved and forgets his financial obligations. As in Martainville and Chaussier’s play, this wavering is associated with the luxury and gallantry of the Théâtre Feydeau. When Madame Dalville expresses her continued anxiety about “the maneuvers of terrorism,” Forlis advises her to “forget those distressing creatures of the human species [and] to concentrate on the pleasures and charms that the concert should offer us tonight.” Nevertheless, like S. Albin, he immediately forgets to forget, unable to think of the Feydeau without invoking “those infernal monsters,” who have for so long militated against the arts (81). Ozouf, Ecole de France, 93. The close relation between the controversy over the Marat busts and the sartorial debates of the moment is clear in another play, which premiered on 17 ventôse (March 7, 1795) at the Théâtre des Variétés, maison Égalité: Pierre Villiers and Armand-Gouffé’s Les bustes, ou Arlequin sculpteur, comédie en un acte et en prose, mélée de vaudevilles (Paris: Barba, Year III [1794–1795]). In this work, Arlequin, who sells statues of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Franklin, triumphs over Gilles, who specializes in Marat busts, after the jeunes gens begin to destroy the latter. Upon his victory, the title character sings: “The Jacobins are not so crafty/My dear, I assure you/Because in Paris, we are quite/Free in our coiffure” (28). On the controversies around Marat in pluviôse Year III (January–February 1795), see Gendron, Jeunesse dorée, 90–109. Martainville and Chaussier, Concert, 3. Arlequin perruquier similarly questions the vigilantism of the jeunesse dorée. One of the wigmaker’s customers is an upright citizen named Bonnefoi (literally, “good faith”), whom the young men have accosted on the street, mistaking him for a Jacobin because of his coëffure à la Brutus. Traumatized

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119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124.

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by the episode, he has resolved to change his appearance lest another time he be made to “[d]ance the carmagnole [a revolutionary jig]/To the lovely beat/Of a cane” (25). Arlequin, however, discourages Bonnefoi from buying a wig: “let us show ourselves as we are, strong in our conscience; since it has nothing to reproach us for, let us fear nothing” (28). In this play, the jeunes gens’ street activism perpetuates the surface judgments of the Terror. Martainville and Chaussier, Concert, 13–14. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 24. Other anti-Jacobin plays performed at the same theater (Théâtre de la Cité-Variétés) include Les Jacobins du 9 thermidor, et les brigands, ou Les synonymes (debuted March 26, 1795), Charles-Pierre Ducancel’s L’intérieur des comités révolutionnaires, ou Les Aristides modernes (debuted April 16, 1795), and Pierre Villiers and Armand-Gouffé’s Les bustes, ou Arlequin sculpteur (debuted at the Théâtre des Variétés, maison Égalité on March 7, 1795, and first performed at the Théâtre de la Cité-Variétés on March 11, 1795). Feuille de la République, no. 157 (8 ventôse Year III [February 26, 1795]): 3. Périn and Cammaille-Saint-Aubin, Concert, 16. On the use of the word “reaction,” see Baczko, Ending the Terror, 242–248; and Jean Starobinski, “La vie et les aventures du mot ‘reaction,’” Modern Language Review 70, no. 4 (1975): xxi–xxxi.

chapter three Petite poste de Paris, no. 3 (13 nivôse Year V [January 2, 1797]): 30; Courrier républicain, no. 1169 (7 pluviôse Year V [January 26, 1797]): 43. 2. See Chronique de Paris, no. 25 (April 12, 1797): 2; and Le conteur de la ville et des théâtres, no. 15 (6 pluviôse Year V [January 25, 1797]): 2. 3. Rapsodies du jour, no. 57 (11 ventôse Year V [March 1, 1797]): 14. 4. The personal ad appeared in Petite poste de Paris, no. 43 (23 pluviôse Year V [February 11, 1797]): 479. 5. Goncourt and Goncourt, Histoire, 418. For a “medical” explanation of garatisme, see Le menteur, ou Le journal par excellence, no. 8 (ca. 1797): 68–70. See also Journal des incroyables, ou Les hommes à pa-ole d’honneur, no. 1 (ca. 1797): 6–7. 6. For several theories about the prerevolutionary origins of the affectation, see René Rouault de la Vigne, Les origines de la prononciation des incroyables et le “parlage” de Figaro (Rouen: A. Lainé, 1936). A similar fad, known as the Devonshire drawl, would take hold among certain factions of the British upper class in the 1780s. 7. Journal de Paris, no. 293 (23 messidor Year III [July 11, 1795]): 1184. 8. In 1789, a pamphlet in dramatic form appeared under the title C’est incroyable, ou La confession amphigouri-tragi-comique (Paris: Laporte, 1789). 9. See, e.g., Rapsodies du jour, nos. 13 and 15, which date from around thermidor Year IV (July 1796). 10. In the months that followed, the image would inspire several other new

1.

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11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

notes to chapter 3

types, which represented social groups rather than political factions: the merveilleuse (the female counterpart of the incroyable), the croyable (the con artist of the Palais Royal), the impayable (the destitute rentier), and the inconcevable, payable, or impossible (the prostitute or loose woman). Visual representations of the jeunes gens and muscadins are infrequent, and many of those that do exist postdate Year III: L’ami de la justice et de L’humanité (fig. 6; QB-370[51]-FT4), Ze ne suis pas zun Terroriste Mais, bien zun vendémiairiste (BNF, QB-201[140]-FOL), and Ils l’ont pri; il faut le rendre (BNF, QB-370[51]-FT 4) are from Year V (1796–1797). See also Épargne de grâce (BNF, QB-1[1795-05-29]-FOL). Mercier, Nouveau Paris, 339. Ibid., 421–422. Quelle folie, ou Galerie des caricatures depuis les incroyables, jusqu’au bœuf à la mode (Paris: Ouvrier, n.d.), 16. Le conteur de la ville et des théâtres, no. 15 (6 pluviôse Year V [January 25, 1797]): 2. Le déjeuner, no. 23 (4 pluviôse Year V [January 23, 1797]): 91. Such images would in fact appear. Among many -ables generated by Vernet’s print are the effrayables and the abominables, both referring to former terrorists. See Quelle folie, 51, 59. Feuilleton de littérature, spectacles, anecdotes, modes et avis divers, 2 germinal Year V (March 22, 1797), 3. See also Courrier républicain, no. 1169 (7 pluviôse Year V [January 26, 1797]): 43. Journal des incroyables, no. 1 (ca. 1797): 3. Charles Cobiolis, “Des incroyables, ou Du danger d’un ridicule,” Le miroir, no. 279 (15 pluviôse Year V [February 3, 1797]): 3, emphasis in original. Citoyen Joron, “La justification des incroyables” (Paris: Marchand, 1797), 2. See also the Feuilleton de littérature, spectacles, anecdotes, modes et avis divers, 2 germinal Year V (March 22, 1797), and the song “Je chante les incroyables . . . ,” which has as its refrain “Allons donc les muscadines,/Allons donc les muscadins” (BNF, Nouvelles acquisitions françaises MS 6620, p. 73). Petite poste de Paris, no. 29 (9 pluviôse Year V [January 28, 1797]): 325; see also 16 pluviôse Year V (February 4, 1797), 400. Quelle folie, 6, emphasis in original; Nouvelles étrennes curieuses des incroyables, merveilleuses, inconcevables, et des raisonnables de Paris (Paris: n.p., n.d.), 4. On the dangers of labels such as “incroyable,” “muscadin,” and “merveilleux,” see also the song that accompanies the print Portraits des hommes croyables, no. 3, ou L’histoire curieuse des patriotes du jour (BNF, OA-19-FOL). See Rousseau, Proscription des habits bleus et des collets noirs, ou Détails du massacre qui vient d’avoir lieu dans l’hôtel des Invalides, où les militaires se sont livrés à l’insurrection (Paris: Frondeur, n.d.); Le déjeuner, no. 243 (14 fructidor Year V [August 31, 1797]): 966; and Journal général de France, no. 348 (18 fructidor Year V [September 4, 1797]): 672.

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24. On the conflicts over neckwear, see Courrier républicain, no. 599 (8 messidor Year III [June 26, 1795]): 454–455. On the song wars of summer 1795, see Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 130–156. 25. La sentinelle, 29 messidor Year III (July 17, 1795), 94. 26. Gendron, Jeunesse dorée, 295. 27. Le déjeuner, no. 30 (11 pluviôse Year V [January 30, 1797]): 119. 28. Le conteur de la ville et des théâtres, no. 15 (6 pluviôse Year V [January 25, 1797]): 2. 29. “Arrivé à Paris, de deux Généraux de l’Armée des incroyables, de 60 milles hommes, & leur Plan d’attaque pour un second Vendémiaire” (BNF, QB1 1797). 30. Grabit [Joseph Despaze], La république traitée du haut en bas, ou Chaque chose remise à sa place: Dialogue entre un Incroyable et un Républicain (Paris: Frères Fleschelle, n.d.), 6. 31. See, e.g., Georges Lefebvre, Le Directoire (Paris: Colin, 1946); Albert Mathiez, Le Directoire: Du 11 brumaire an IV au 18 fructidor an V (Paris: Colin, 1934); A. Soboul, Le Directoire et le Consulat, 1795–1804 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1967). 32. François Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution française (Paris: Fayard, 1973), 32; Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994). On the important changes in the form of the state during this period, see also Pierre Rosanvallon, L’état en France de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1990). 33. Serna, République des girouettes, 415–416; Jainchill, Reimagining Politics. 34. James Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 13. 35. Rebecca L. Spang, “The Frivolous French: ‘Liberty of Pleasure’ and the End of Luxury,” in Taking Liberties: Problems of a New Order from the French Revolution to Napoleon, ed. Howard G. Brown and Judith A. Miller (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 111. 36. One of the few discussions of the incroyables that veers toward a political interpretation is Susan L. Siegfried’s analysis of Louis-Léopold Boilly’s portrayals of Directory society in The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 70–84. However, she avoids placing the figures “on the subversive/non-subversive axis” and reads the prints instead as “paranoid expressions of middle-class anxieties about a social invasion from below and corruption from above” (80). In her view, the prints served as “release valves for social tensions,” converting class conflict into “‘harmless fun” (84). As I will argue below, the incroyable literature responded not only to social tensions but also to the political culture of the period. 37. Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines, 181–204. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby draws at-

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38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48.

notes to chapter 3

tention to the inversion of gender roles in fashion during the Directory: “It was men’s bodies, not women’s, that bore the weight of artifice; they were sinking within its perverse folds and crevices while women had co-opted the masculine Republic’s vision of classical simplicity.” See Grigsby, “Nudity à la grecque in 1799,” Art Bulletin 80, no. 2 (1998): 311–335, esp. 324 (quotation). On the incroyable as a figure who resists this renunciation, see Hunt, “Freedom of Dress in Revolutionary France,” 241–242. J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 110–119. For a suggestive discussion of Flügel’s ideas, see Kaja Silverman, “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse,” in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 139–152; and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “The ‘Muscadins’ and the ‘Merveilleuses’: Body and Fashion in Public Space under the Directory, 1795–1799,” in Repression and Expression: Literary and Social Coding in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Carrol F. Coates (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 139–140. Another interesting discussion of the the incroyables and merveilleuses is that of the sociologist Richard Sennett, who understands the phenomenon as “a revolt against the language of the body in the ancien régime.” See Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 184–187, esp. 184 (quotation). Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. McSweeney and Sabor, 207. Quelle folie, 13; Nouvelles étrennes curieuses, 5. Rapsodies du jour, no. 11, p. 16 ; see also no. 13, p. 16. These issues date from ca. July 1796. Cited in Au temps des merveilleuses: La société parisienne sous le Directoire et le Consulat (Paris: Musée Carnavalet, 2005), 72. Henry William Bunbiry, La rencontre des incroyables: Hé! bonjour mon ser comme tu es engraissé depuis que je ne tai vu; ma pa-ole d’honneur c’est inconcevables, engraving by Louis Charles Ruotte (Paris: Basset, n.d., ca. 1797). Nouvelles étrennes curieuses, 6. Mercier, Nouveau Paris, 624. A similar anecdote appears in Nouvelles étrennes curieuses, 25. Censeur des journaux, no. 124 (4 pluviôse Year V [January 23, 1797]): 4; Petite poste de Paris, no. 25 (5 pluviôse Year V [January 24, 1797]): 274. See also the dialogue in Feuilleton de littérature, spectacles, anecdotes, modes et avis divers, 20 thermidor Year V (August 7, 1797), 2. Critiques of social arrivisme and of the figure of the parvenu appear constantly in Directory literature. The classic examples are Joseph Fiévée’s 1798 novel Le dot de Suzette and the comic opera from 1796 Madame Angot, ou La poissarde parvenue by Antoine-François Éve (pseudonym, Maillot). In Jean-Augustin Amar du Rivier’s play Les vrais incroyables, ou Les métamor-

notes to chapter 3

49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

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phoses modernes, which premiered in Lyon on 27 prairial Year VI (June 15, 1798), a woman plans to marry her daughter (against her will) to an incroyable named Floricour. The latter’s true identity, however, comes to light when a perruquier (wigmaker) stops by to collect his outstanding bill and recognizes the suitor as his former apprentice, who still owes him money. As its subtitle suggests, the play displays the confusion and uncertainty of identity in the socially fluid and unstable world of the Directory. Amar du Rivier, Les vrais incroyables, ou Les métamorphoses modernes (Lyon: Matheron, 1798), 33. C. F. L’Heureux, Les incroyables, ou Le danger des plaisirs (Paris: Pierre Vachot, n.d.). According to the CESAR database, this play was performed at the Théâtre de Montansier on April 2, 1797. See Les croyables au Péron (fig. 10) and Les croyables au tripot (BNF, QB-201[141]-FOL). On the figure of the croyable, see Quelle folie, 8–11, 51; and Petite poste de Paris, no. 76 (26 ventôse Year V [March 16, 1797]): 858. The play Les croyables debuted on February 14, 1797, at the Théâtre de Molière. For a review, see Courrier des spectacles, no. 40 (27 pluviôse Year V [February 15, 1797]): 2–3. On the print, see Petite poste de Paris, no. 35 (15 pluviôse Year V [February 3, 1797]): 391; and Quelle folie, 8–11. See also the narrative and song that accompany the version of the image titled Portraits des hommes croyables, no. 3, ou L’histoire curieuse des patriotes du jour (Paris: Citoyenne Prévost, [1797]). The valet or lackey who has become rich through con artistry or the misappropriation of government funds is a common figure in the literature of the period. One newspaper article describes “an inco-yable, become Monsieur Mondor through incredible means, made rich by soumissions”; and another poem, “Les réminiscences des Incroyables,” mocks Mondor, a chauffeur turned incroyable, who on exiting the theater instinctively climbs onto the driver’s seat, forgetting his social pretensions. See Petite poste de Paris, no. 15 (25 nivôse Year V [January 14, 1797]): 166; and Nouvelles étrennes curieuses, 8. Henri Alexandre Allaire, Les hommes du jour, vaudeville en un acte (Paris: Huet, 1797), 23. Louis-Melchior Legrand, Les hommes du jour démasqués, ou Ce qui vient de la flûte, retourne au tambour (Paris: Marchands de nouveautés, n.d.). Gendron lists this text as one of the pamphlets published around 3 thermidor Year III (July 21, 1795) in an attempt to calm the jeunes gens. The work, however, is almost certainly from Year V, as it mentions Beffroy de Reigny’s La petite Nanette, a comedy that premiered on December 7, 1796. Legrand, Les hommes du jour, 5. Ibid., 11. Courrier des spectacles, no. 101 (28 germinal Year V [April 7, 1797]): 3.

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58. Ibid., no. 124 (21 floréal Year V [May 10, 1797]): 4. 59. On the concern over the oreilles de chien in November 1796, see Aulard, Paris, 3:562, 564, 572, 573, 576–578. 60. Le déjeuner, no. 58 (9 ventôse Year V [February 27, 1797]): 230. 61. Petite poste de Paris, no. 36 (16 pluviôse Year V [February 4, 1797]): 400. 62. Ibid., no. 88 (8 germinal Year V [March 28, 1797]): 994. See Quelle folie, 56. 63. Cited in Courrier des spectacles, no. 42 (29 pluviôse Year V [February 17, 1797]): 3; see also Petite poste de Paris, no. 50 (30 pluviôse Year V [February 18, 1797]): 570. The review in the Courrier des spectacles does not give the plot of Les vieux incroyables but mentions that it is a revival of the 1794 play Les vieux élégants by Barré, Radet, and Desfontaines. A summary of the plot of the latter may be found in Spectacles de Paris, no. 4 (13 vendémiaire Year III [October 4, 1794]): 62–64. 64. Le déjeuner, no. 22 (3 pluviôse Year V [January 22, 1797]): 86. 65. Ibid., no. 23 (4 pluviôse Year V [January 23, 1797]): 91. 66. Ibid., no. 27 (8 pluviôse Year V [January 27, 1797]): 105. 67. Cited in Petite poste de Paris, no. 29 (9 pluviôse Year V [January 28, 1797]), p. 326. It seems that Vernet’s work inspired more than one theatrical adaptation. Taking advantage of the publicity for the Montansier production, another company produced a work with the same title at the Palais-Egalité. See Courrier des spectacles, no. 18 (5 pluviôse Year V [January 24, 1797]): 3. For reviews of the Montansier production, see Courrier des spectacles, no. 20 (7 pluviôse Year V [January 26, 1797]): 4; Le déjeuner, no. 27 (8 pluviôse Year V [January 27, 1797]): 107; and Le conteur, no. 18 (9 pluviôse Year V [January 28, 1797]): 3–4. 68. Petite poste de Paris, no. 29 (9 pluviôse Year V [January 28, 1797]): 326. 69. René-François Lebois, Les inc-oyables à l’agonie: Pot-pourri (Paris: Imprimerie de l’Ami du peuple, n.d.), 5. Although Bonaparte would later oppose the incroyables, he was often represented as one during the first Directory. See, e.g., Rapsodies du jour, no. 54 (26 pluviôse Year V [February 14, 1797]): 2; no. 57 (11 ventôse Year V [February 28, 1797]): 14. The print Le nouvel incroyable, ou L’oie à la mode (BM 1989,1104.71) represents Napoleon as a fashionably dressed goose. He also appears in Jean-Baptiste Isabey’s wellknown drawing of Directory incroyables and merveilleuses, Le petit Coblentz (Musée Carnavalet). Interestingly, a print at the Musée Carnavalet depicts Bonaparte in incroyable dress with the caption “C’est incroyable/vingt trois mille prisonniers.” Here, the costume and exclamation seem to have a positive force. 70. Rapsodies du jour, no. 54 (26 pluviôse Year V [February 14, 1797]): 6–7, emphasis in original. 71. Ibid., emphasis in original. 72. The term agréable (usually placed in italics) seems to have referred to the supporters of the directors, particularly the more left-leaning ones. 73. Joron, “La justification,” 2. Though the poem is undated, it seems to be con-

notes to chapter 3

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

85.

86. 87.

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temporary to Armand Charlemagne’s poem “Le monde incroyable, ou Les hommes et les choses” (Paris: Besnier et Plane, 1797). Joron’s poem appears in a slightly modified form in La quotidienne, no. 281 (13 pluviôse Year V [February 1, 1797]): 2–3. “Brise-Scellés” was a label applied to terrorists who took advantage of the political situation to steal the fortunes of the victims of the Terror. Le menteur, no. 47 (ca. 1797): 349–351. Charlemagne, “Le monde incroyable.” Ibid., 5, 8. La quotidienne, no. 81 (13 pluviôse Year V [February 1, 1797]): 3. Charlemagne, “Le monde incroyable,” 5. Le menteur, no. 15 (ca. 1797): 133. Feuilleton de littérature, spectacles, anecdotes, modes et avis divers, 23 thermidor Year V (August 10, 1797), 2, emphasis in original. Petite poste de Paris, no. 232 (3 fructidor Year V [August 20, 1797]): 2255. See also no. 227 (27 thermidor Year V [August 14, 1797]): 2215. Feuilleton de littérature, spectacles, anecdotes, modes et avis divers, 7 fructidor Year V (August 24, 1797), 2–3. Another journalist similarly speculated that the Jacobins targeted the collars “only because they were near the neck.” See Le grondeur, no. 263 (30 thermidor Year V [August 17, 1797]): 2. A piece in the same journal cites mock legislation against the wearing of black collars, which, like tight culottes and powdered hair, should be considered suspect according to the Law of 17 September (i.e., the Law of Suspects of 1793). See Le grondeur, no. 268 (5 fructidor Year V [August 22, 1797]): 2–3. Connections would similarly be drawn between women’s wear and the Terror. An article on female fashion in the Journal des modes drew attention to a “taint of terrorism” in recent styles such as the headbands à la Marat: “It is doubtlessly to awaken our indignation against the Jacobins that the ladies from time to time show us their costume and, thus, recall to our memory the horrors that they [i.e., the Jacobins] made us suffer.” Cited in Feuilleton du miroir, no. 487 (13 fructidor Year V [August 30, 1797]): 3. See, e.g., the “Dialogue entre les journalistes clichiens et un collet noir” in the pamphlet Départ des cinq rois et des cinq reines, pour Saint-Cloud (Paris: Durand, n.d.), 4–8. Mercier, Nouveau Paris, 671. See, e.g., Le déjeuner, no. 226 (27 thermidor Year V [August 14, 1797]): 899; no. 231 (2 fructidor Year V [August 19, 1797]): 919; no. 243 (14 fructidor Year V [August 31, 1797]): 966; Le miroir, no. 479 (5 fructidor Year V [August 22, 1797]): 2; and Le défenseur des collets noirs au Directoire exécutif et au peuple français (Paris: Imprimerie de P. G. Bicant, n.d.), 2. It is interesting to note that one version of the print L’ami de la justice et de L’humanité (fig. 6), which dates from ca. 1796–1797, has as its subtitle, “ou le Jacobin déguisé” (or the disguised Jacobin).

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notes to chapter 3

88. Le déjeuner, no. 226 (27 thermidor Year V [August 14, 1797]): 898–899; Le miroir, no. 473 (29 fructidor Year V [September 15, 1797]): 1. 89. Gillet, Avis important aux jeunes gens de Paris sur les collets noirs et la Garde nationale (Paris: Imprimerie de la rue Saint-Louis, n.d.); Le miroir, no. 476 (2 fructidor Year V [August 19, 1797]): 3; Rousseau, Proscription, 3. 90. Le miroir, no. 483 (9 fructidor Year V [August 26, 1797]): 3; Le grondeur, no. 271 (8 fructidor Year V [August 25, 1797]): 2. 91. Rapsodies du jour, no. 97 (6 fructidor Year V [August 23, 1797]): 8–9; Leveau, dit Beauchant, La trahison découverte (Paris: Alexandre Daniel, n.d.). Even women were not above suspicion: Le thé jokingly reported that Minister of the Police Sottin was cracking down on élégantes who wore stockings à la François Premier, which featured a fleur-de-lis and a replica of the famous painting by François-Guillaume Ménageot of King Francis I at Leonardo da Vinci’s deathbed. Le thé, ou Le journal des dix-huit, no. 135 (11 fructidor Year V [August 28, 1797]): 539. 92. Le défenseur des collets noirs, 6. 93. Gillet, Avis important, 1. 94. See, e.g., Le déjeuner, no. 226 (27 thermidor Year V [August 14, 1797]): 98– 99; no. 228 (29 thermidor Year V [August 16, 1797]): 906; Feuilleton de littérature, spectacles, anecdotes, modes et avis divers, 7 fructidor Year V (August 24, 1797), 2; Petite poste de Paris, no. 232 (3 fructidor Year V [August 20, 1797]): 2255. 95. Le déjeuner, no. 226 (27 thermidor Year V [August 14, 1797]): 899. 96. On the career of Ange Pitou, see Mason, Singing the French Revolution, 179–183. 97. Louis-Ange Pitou, Le chanteur parisien: Récueil des chansons de L. A. Pitou (Paris: Freres Mames, 1808), 1:11–12. 98. Mason, Singing the French Revolution, 194. 99. This idea of a peace uniform would appear in the British press as well at about the same time: “It has been the fashion lately to exhibit political principles in articles of dress. Cockades, cropt heads, green handkerchiefs, and black velvet collars have had their respective days of triumph. All these, however, are war emblems, and tend only to mutual irritation. We hope the parties soon will agree upon a peace uniform” (Morning Chronicle, August 22, 1797, emphasis in original). 100. Le grondeur, no. 263 (30 thermidor Year V [August 17, 1797]): 2–3. 101. J. Boullault, Les incroyables, ou La liberté des modes (Brest: Audran, Year V [1796–1797]), 18. The work debuted at the Théâtre de Brest on 24 thermidor Year V (August 11, 1797). 102. Ibid., 4–5. 103. Ibid., 5. 104. Ibid., 9–10. 105. Ibid., 20–21.

notes to chapter 4

106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

112.

113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

119.

1.

2.

3.

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Ibid., 20. Ibid., 14, emphasis mine. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 32. See, e.g., Le défenseur des collets noirs, 6. Journal général de France, no. 346 (16 fructidor Year V [September 2, 1797]): 663–664. For a similar argument, see Le déjeuner, no. 228 (29 thermidor Year V [August 16, 1797]): 906. M., “Du calme et du courage!,” Journal général de France, no. 331 (1 fructidor Year V [August 18, 1797]): 604–605. For the passage in Montesquieu, see Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Paris: Bossange, 1830), 192. Cited in M., “Du calme et du courage!,” 605. Le thé, no. 4 (30 germinal Year V [April 19, 1797]): 15–16. Le journal général de France, no. 331 (1 fructidor Year V [August 18, 1797]): 605. Le thé, no. 125 (1 fructidor Year V [August 18, 1797]): 498. Ibid. This was not the first mention of the Rouen archbishop in connection with the collar skirmishes: looking back on the fashion wars of the summer of 1795, Mercier had drawn the same comparison. See “Cadenettes, coiffures à la victime” (thermidor Year IV [July–August 1796]), in Mercier, Nouveau Paris, 1155–1158. Louis VII would also come up in discussions of the crops in England. See Sporting Magazine (London) 7 (1796): 320; and Public Ledger, December 26, 1795. Le thé, no. 125 (1 fructidor Year V [August 18, 1797]): 499. chapter four Don Preciso’s letters appeared in the Diario de Madrid on May 14–15 and June 5–6, 1795; they are reprinted (along with Don Currutaco’s reply) at the beginning of Juan Antonio de Iza Zamácola, Elementos de la ciencia contradanzaria, para que los currutacos, pirracas y madamitas del nuevo cuño puedan aprender por principios á baylar las Contradanzas por sí solos, ó con las sillas de su casa, etc. etc. etc. (Madrid: Impr. de la Vda. de José García, 1796), xvii–lv. On Iza Zamácola, see Domingo Hergueta y Martín, “Don Preciso, su vida y sus obras,” Revista de archivos, bibliotecas y museos 50 (1929): 2–32, 322–355; 51 (1929): 41–67. Diario de Madrid, May 24–26, 1795. On Fernández de Rojas, see the introduction to Noel Fallows, Satire and Invective in Enlightened Spain: “Crotalogia, o Ciencia de las castanuelas” by Fray Juan Fernandez de Rojas (Newark, NJ: Juan de la Cuesta, 2001). Not only did currutaquería spread throughout Spain but it also crossed the Atlantic: the figure is the hero of the 1799 Mexican pamphlet El currutaco

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por alambique, by D. Manuel Gómez, and appears in Cuban and Argentinian texts as early as 1801–1802. For Cuban examples, see Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, La literatura costumbrista cubana de los siglos XVIII y XIX (Havana: Oficina del historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana, 1962), particularly the chapters “Modas, petimetres” and “Mujeres, petimetres, bailes, El patán Marrajo.” A later Cuban incarnation of the figure is the stylish black figure known as the negro curro. The definitive study of this type is Fernando Ortiz, Los negros curros, ed. Diana Iznaga (Havana: Editorial de ciencias sociales, 1995). For an early Argentine example, see José Prego de Oliver’s 1801 poem “Definición del currutaco,” reprinted in Paul Verdevoye, Costumbres y costumbrismo en la prensa argentina desde 1801 hasta 1834 (Buenos Aires: Academia Argentina de letras, 1994), 165–166. A passing reference to the currutacos and madamitas del nuevo cuño appears in a 1798 text about Peru, Estéban de Terralla y Landa’s Lima por dentro y fuera (Madrid: Villalpando, 1798), iii–iv. 4. Juan Fernández de Rojas, Libro de moda en la feria que contiene un ensayo de la historia de los currutacos, pirracas, y madamitas del nuevo cuño, y los elementos, ó Primeras nociones de la ciencia currutaca (Madrid: Viuda e hijo de Marín, 1795). On the sources of and influences on this work, see my article “Scarlet Letters: Translation, Fashion and Revolution in 1790s Spain,” Dieciocho 31, no. 1 (2008): 1–21. 5. Luis Moncín, Los currutacos del día (BHM, MS 163–3). 6. Diario de Madrid, July 12, 1797. 7. Ibid., November 12, 1797. The column offered commentary on the articles of the previous month. 8. See ibid., January 6, 1796; July 4, 1796; and February 9, 1798. 9. Iza Zamácola, Elementos, xxxvii, 20. See also the letter in Diario de Madrid, July 12, 1797, which equates the currutacos with Lilliputians. 10. This is a common assumption in contemporary criticism as well: see Jacques Chastenet, Godoy: Master of Spain, 1792–1808, trans. J. F. Huntington (New York: Kennikat Press, 1972), 37; Amalia Descalzo, “Costumbres y vestimentas de la Madrid de la tonadilla,” in Paisajes sonoros en le Madrid del siglo XVIII: La tonadilla escénica (Madrid: Museo de San Isidro, 2003), 73–91; Carmen Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos del dieciocho en España (Madrid: Anagrama, 1987); Juan Francisco Fuentes, “Moda y lenguaje en la crisis social del antiguo régimen,” in L’image de la France en Espagne pendant la seconde moitié du XVIII siècle, ed. Jean-René Aymes (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 1996), 85–95; and Luis Martínez Kleiser, Del siglo de los chisperos (Madrid: Voluntad, 1925). Rebecca Haidt, however, cautions that the petimetres “did not reference persons.” See her Embodying Enlightenment: Knowing the Body in Eighteenth-Century Spanish Literature and Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 108. And Frédéric Prot recognizes that the representation of the type ultimately replaces the referent. See his “Las afinidades equívocas

notes to chapter 4

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

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del petimetre con el discurso ilustrado en la España del siglo XVIII,” Dieciocho 25, no. 2 (2002): 304. Diario de Madrid, November 12, 1797. Many critical discussions equate currutacos and petimetres. Haidt considers the former to be “subsumed within the larger category of deviancy represented by the petimetre-type” (Embodying Enlightenment, 226n36). A similar conflation appears in René Andioc, “Goya y el temperamento currutáquico,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 68 (1991): 80; and Prot, “Las afinidades equívocas,” 309. On petimetría, see also Mireille Coulon, Le sainete à Madrid à l’époque de don Ramón de la Cruz (Pau: Publications de l’Université de Pau, 1993); Gérard Dufour, “Juan de Zabaleta et Ramón de la Cruz: Du ‘galán’ au ‘petimetre,’” Les langues neo-latines 212 (1974): 81–89; Rebecca Haidt, “Fashion, Effeminacy, and Homoerotic Desire(?): The Question of the Petimetres,” Letras peninsulares 12, no. 1 (1999): 65–80; Haidt, Embodying Enlightenment, chap. 3; Alberto González Troyano, “El petimetre: Una singularidad literaria dieciochesca,” Ínsula 574 (1994): 20–21; Jerónimo Herrera Navarro, Petimetres y majos: Saineteros madrileños del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Ediciones del oro, 2009); Manuel Lucena Giraldo, “El petimetre como estereotipo español del siglo XVIII,” in ¿Verdades cansadas? Imágenes y estereotipos acerca del mundo hispánico en Europa, coord. Víctor Bergasa (Madrid: CSIC, 2009), 39–52; Matthieu P. Raillard, “Petimetres, pseudoeruditos and eruditos a la violeta: Anti-models and the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Republic of Letters,” Revista de estudios hispánicos 42 (2008): 109–129; Josep Maria Sala Valldaura, “Gurruminos, petimetres, abates y currutacos en el teatro breve del siglo XVIII,” Revista de literatura 71, no. 142 (2009): 429–460. The definition of “petimetre” in the Diccionario de autoridades (1737) is illuminating: “the young man who takes too much care with his appearance and in following the fashions. It is a word composed of French words, and introduced unnecessarily.” During the Napoleonic occupation of Spain, the currutaco would be associated with the French invaders and their supporters in Spain. See, for example, the anonymous letter from December 23, 1808, cited in Agustín Martínez de las Heras, “La crítica al gusto afrancesado en la España de Carlos IV: El fenómeno currutaco,” Revista de história das ideias 10 (1988): 410. Consider, for example, the title of Martínez de las Heras’s article on the subject, which identifies the “currutaco phenomenon” with the critique of “afrancesado taste in the Spain of Charles IV” (Martínez de las Heras, “La crítica al gusto afrancesado”). Nationalist impulses may have encouraged this viewpoint. Looking back at the fad in 1925, Martínez Kleiser decried currutaquería as another instance of “that irreflexive passion for Europeanizing ourselves,” which he considered a “national defect” from time immemorial (Del siglo de los chisperos, 271). Don Preciso’s discussion of pants, a revolutionary fashion, exemplifies this

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

notes to chapter 4

avoidance of French attribution. Etymologists, he observes, might assume the so-called pantalón transpirinaico is a style imported from across the Pyrenees, but it is actually the invention of Spanish currutacos. Its name derives from the verb transpirar, “to breathe,” because this type of legwear allows “for foul humors to be expelled and to evaporate with greater freedom” (Iza Zamácola, Elementos, 122–123). Fernández de Rojas, Libro de moda, 36–37. Iza Zamácola, Elementos, xxiv–xxvii. Currutaquería and petimetría refer to the act or status of being a currutaco or petimetre respectively. See the entry for curro in Joan Corominas, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico (Madrid: Gredos, 1991–1992). See Andioc, “Goya”; René Andioc, Personajes y rostros de fines del XVIII: El currutaco, según Goya y la literatura de su tiempo (Alicante: Biblioteca virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2001); as well as Chastenet, Godoy; and Fuentes, “Moda y lenguaje.” Even when the incroyable and currutaco appear together, the connection between them is not always clear. Juan Ignacio González del Castillo’s “Los literatos” deals with a number of ridiculous characters, including a neglectful father who has allowed his daughters to consort with “a horde/of incroyables, conversing/about matters of honor/in a new Castilian” (39) and a group of currutacos who use the máquina calzonaria, an absurd contraption that they use to squeeze themselves into their tight culottes without wrinkles (48). Though they appear in the same text, the currutacos and incroyables seem to represent separate groups and different social sins, the former parodied for their clothes and the latter for their corrupted Castilian and threat to moral values. See Juan Ignacio González del Castillo, Obras completas (Madrid: Librería de los sucesores de Hernando, 1914), 2:31–52. Pablo del Moral, “El poeta,” in José Subirá, Tonadillas teatrales inéditas (Madrid: Tipografía de archivos, 1932), 267. The tonadilla was a short theatrical genre including song and dialogue. Luis Santiago Bado, El libro a gusto de todos, o Sea colección de cartas apologéticas de los usos, costumbres y modas del día (Murcia: Juan Vicente Teruel, n.d.), 33. See also Diario de Madrid, January 29, 1798, and October 13, 1798. An article from 1803 identifies the Madrid currutaco with the Parisian muscadin; see Diario de Madrid, January 28, 1803. D. J. E. D. L. T., Aviso al público: Anatomia de las modas para desengaño de los incautos (Madrid: Don Plácido Barco Lopez, 1797), 19. A similar association between the currutaco and the guillotine fashion appears in the anonymous 1796 comedy La moda (Fashion), in which an old-fashioned butler complains that he understands nothing “of pants/nor of guillotines.” The maidservant attempts to explain, pointing to the outfit of the currutaco figure in the play: “Do you see what Don Claudio is wearing? Well, those are pants,

notes to chapter 4

25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

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and what they call guillotine.” See La moda, comedia en tres actos (Madrid: Benito Cano, 1796), 8. Currutaseos: Ciencia currutaca, ó Ceremonial de currutacos (Madrid: D. Plácido Burco López, 1799), 41; D. J. E. D. L. T., Aviso al público, 33; Diario de Madrid, June 6, 1796, and June 18, 1796; Josep M. Mas Casells i Enrich, La heredera astuta; por otro título, La más sutil currutaca: Comedia en tres actos (Barcelona: La compañía de Jordi, Roca y Gaspar, n.d., ca. 1800), 27; José Acosta Enríquez, Sueño de sueños, ed. Julio Jiménez Rueda (Mexico City: Universidad nacional autónoma de Mexico, 1995), 129. Another article refers to their philosophy as “sansculótico-currutaca”; see Diario de Madrid, June 24, 1795. F. J. A. M., “Judas, instructor de currutacos, ó Conversación de dos charros del campo de Salamanca, donde refieren lo que observáron en uno de los dias de Semana Santa de este año de 1798; á la que se agrega una tertúlia que tuviéron con su querido maestro estos amados discípulos” (Salamanca: Impr. de la Calle Prior, 1798), 30–31. “Los majos y los currutacos (tonadilla á cinco)” (BHM, MS 156–7), n.p. Diario de Madrid, November 26, 1798. Fuentes, “Moda y lenguaje,” 93; Andioc, Personajes y rostros, 176; and Martínez de las Heras, “La crítica al gusto afrancesado,” 403. On the reaction to the French Revolution in Spain, see Gonzalo Anes Alvarez, “La revolución francesa y España: Algunos datos y documentos,” in Economía e ilustración en la España del siglo XVIII (Barcelona: Ariel, 1981), 139–198; and Lucien Dupuis, “Francia y lo francés en la prensa periódica española durante la Revolución francesa,” in La literatura española del siglo XVIII y sus fuentes extranjeras (Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 1968), 95–127. The classic literary portrayal of the lindo is Agustín Moreto’s comedy El lindo don Diego (1662). On this figure, see Rufino Cuervos, “Lindos,” Revue hispanique 9 (1902): 5–11; and Paul-Jacques Guinard, “Remarques sur lindo et petimetre chez Torres Villarroel,” in Les cultures iberiques en devenir: Essais publiés en hommage à la memoire de Marcel Bataillon (1895–1977), ed. Georges Duby et al. (Paris: Fondation Singer-Polignac, 1979), 217–224. Diego de Torres Villarroel, Visiones y visitas con Don Francisco de Quevedo, ed. Russell Sebold (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1991), 182. Ibid., 186. On luxury consumption in eighteenth-century Spain, see Juan Sempere y Guarinos, Historia del luxo, y de las leyes suntuarias de España (Madrid: Imprenta real, 1788); and Felipe Rojo de Flores, Invectiva contra el luxo (Madrid: n.p., 1794). On women’s roles and the representation of the petimetra, see Rebecca Haidt, “Luxury, Consumption, and Desire: Theorizing the Petimetra,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 3 (1999): 33–49; Rebecca Haidt,

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36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

notes to chapter 4

“A Well-Dressed Woman Who Will Not Work: Petimetras, Economics and Eighteenth-Century Fashion Plates,” Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos 28, no. 1 (2003): 139–157; and Rebecca Haidt, Women, Work and Clothing in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011). On the literature about the chichisbeo (cicisbeo) and the changing role of women in eighteenth-century society, see Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos del dieciocho en España. For a counterargument to Martín Gaite, see Alberto González Troyano, “Sobre el cortejo y algunos otros tópicos de la sociabilidad dieciochesca,” in Ideas en sus paisajes: Homenaje a Russell P. Sebold, ed. Ignacio Javier López et al. (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 1999), 239–244. Gérard Dufour observes that Ramón de la Cruz approaches issues of luxury and destitution from a purely moral standpoint. His works condemn the expenditure rather than the structural inequalities of the system. See Gérard Dufour, “Lujo y pauperismo en Ramón de la Cruz,” in El teatro español del siglo XVIII, ed. Josep Maria Sala Valldaura (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida), 1:329–336. Diario de Madrid, October 11, 1797, and October 10, 1798. Ibid., November 8, 1797. Rodrigo is the Christian name of Spain’s epic hero El Cid and therefore suggests Spanish tradition and antiquity. See “Triunfo de las estacas de los currutacos, y derrota de los rodrigones,” Diario de Madrid, November 16, 1797; see also the issues for July 2, 1796, and October 19, 1797. The hero of another text observes that the powdered wigs of the eighteenth century turn a young man into “a true Methuselah,” while the new currutaco styles have the opposite effect: rejuvenation. Bado, Libro a gusto de todos, 54. El mundo al revés, ó Contra-verdades dedicadas a los hombres (Madrid: Joseph López, 1796), 15–17. Diario de Barcelona, December 26, 1796. See, e.g., the articles in the journal El pensador, esp. “Vida ociosa de muchas de nuestras damas” (vol. 2, Pensamiento 20, pp. 191–220), “Sobre los petimetres” (vol. 5, Pensamiento 55, pp. 35–49), and “Vida ociosa de algunos caballeros” (vol. 2, Pensamiento 21, pp. 223–252). Published by José Clavijo y Fajardo between 1762 and 1767, El pensador was one of the main mouthpieces of Enlightenment thought and social critique in Spain. The article “Sobre los petimetres” not only maintains a rigid opposition between the satirist and the object of satire but is also signed with an alias (the author claims to be a concerned female reader). This false attribution further distances the author from his subject matter: “El Pensador” is so far from petimetría himself that it is beneath his dignity to waste words on the topic. To ridicule such a figure, he implies, is “women’s work.” Clavijo y Fajardo also wrote influential satirical works on petimetría: see his El tribunal de las damas: Copia auténtica de la Executoria que ganó la Modestia en el Tribunal de la

notes to chapter 4

44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

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Razón, representado por las Damas juiciosas de España (Madrid: Joseph Francisco Martínez Abad, 1755) and Pragmática del zelo, y desagravio a las damas (Madrid: Herederos Gorde Vera, 1755). Serapio Amansi (pseudonym of Francisco Sanponts), Defensa de los currutacos, pirracas, madamitas del nuevo cuño y señoritos de ciento en boca (Barcelona: Oficina de la viuda Aguasvivas, 1796); Francisco Gregorio de Salas, “Retrato de los currutacos,” in Leopoldo Augusto de Cueto, Poetas líricos del siglo XVIII, Biblioteca de autores españoles 67 (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1875), 3:536; Moncín, Los currutacos del día; Los currutacos chasqueados, o El abate Pirracas (Madrid: Viuda e hijos de D. J. Cuesta, 1866); Los payos currutacos (BNE, MS 14521–7); José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, “Los currutacos herrados y caballos habladores,” in Obras completas (Mexico: Universidad nacional autónoma de México, 1963), 1:172–176. For this language, see Iza Zamácola, Elementos, 23–24; Diario de Barcelona, November 18–19, 1796; and Diario de Madrid, October 13, 1795, December 2, 1795, May 21, 1796, June 17, 1797, September 20, 1797, September 29, 1797, October 20, 1797, and October 9, 1798. Diario de Madrid, May 21, 1796, and June 11, 1796. See, e.g., the letter in Diario de Madrid, June 17, 1795. The author of the 1762 El petimetre por la mañana uses “majo” as but another synonym for “petimetre”: the hero belongs to the type of “the pisaverde, the majo, the lindo.” The text is included in Jesús Cañas Murillo and Miguel Angel Lama, “De petimetres y petimetras de la ilustración: El petimetre por la mañana y el Petimetre por la tarde, de Luis Alvarez Bracamonte,” Anuario de estudios filológicos 17 (1994): 27–55. On the trend of majismo and its popularizer, the Duquesa de Alba, see Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos del dieciocho en España. The most famous literary condemnation of this fad is Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos’s poem “Segunda sátira a Arnesto.” See also the discussion in “El contacto entre majos y usías: La peti-majía,” in Eduardo Huertas Vázquez, Teatro musical español en el Madrid ilustrado (Madrid: El Avapiés, 1989), 220–224; and Haidt, Women, Work and Clothing. The classic study of the majos appears in Julio Caro Baroja, Temas castizos (Madrid: Istmo, 1980), 15–101. An example of this role-playing is the tonadilla “Los duendecillos,” in which the popular actress La Caramba becomes a peti-maja (a hybrid of maja and petimetra): although “In the past, hair nets/differentiated/the your-ladyship [usía] and the petimetra/from the total maja,” La Caramba has so popularized maja headwear that she has made the two groups equal “since I made a compound/of two contraries.” Translation cited from Dorothy Noyes, “La maja vestida: Dress as Resistance to Enlightenment in Late-EighteenthCentury Madrid,” Journal of American Folklore 3 (1998): 197–217, 204 (quotation). It is important to note, however, that the maja becomes a peti-maja rather than a petimetra: the maja’s social ascent can occur only to the extent

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51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

notes to chapter 4

that she adheres to the style and dress of her own class. Maja characters who take on petimetra attire are generally looked down upon. On La Caramba, see Antonina Rodrigo, María Antonia la Caramba: El genio de la tonadilla (Madrid: Prensa Espannola, 1972). On majas posing as petimetras, see Haidt, Women, Work and Clothing, 230–236. This distinction is particularly clear in the contrast between Luciano Francisco Comella’s 1781 sainete (a short theatrical genre) El petimetre en la aldea (The petimetre in the country, BHM, MS 168–36) and a later work with a similar title, El currutaco en la aldea (The currutaco in the country, BHM, MS 1–154-22). Where the former work revolves around the rivalry between two nobles—an urban petimetre and a sensible local—for the heroine’s hand in marriage, the latter represents a confrontation between an upper-class man from Madrid and country peasants who react against his extravagant ways (the local squire must restrain the locals from abusing their bizarre visitor). The contrast between the heroes’ motives is also illuminating. Whereas the petimetre goes to the village to marry a wealthy woman and thus defray his debts, the currutaco is en route to Valencia, where he hopes to find new clothes in order to keep his place as a currutaco xefe (currutaco boss) in the constantly shifting urban class hierarchy. The focus in the earlier text is financial and moral, while that of the later work is social. The poem is included in Augusto de Cueto, Poetas líricos del siglo XVIII, 3:576–577. Fernández de Rojas, Libro de moda, 100–102. See the entries for “Coupeurs de tresses” and “Dé-coiffer” in Nicole Pellegrin, Les vêtements de la liberté: Abécédaire des pratiques vestimentaires en France de 1780 à 1800 (Aix-en-Provence: Alinea, 1989). Diario de Barcelona, November 18–19, 1796. See also Diario de Madrid, October 20, 1797. Similar fears are expressed in a letter in Diario de Barcelona, December 26, 1796, that rails against “plebeian men, timid talents, miserable beggars, dime-store talents.” In Diario de Madrid, September 20, 1797, a writer signing as Petit Currutaco longs to be “free from the little fear that until now has kept us from presenting ourselves in cachirulo and zorongo [types of eighteenth-century headwear].” Similarly, the narrator of a currutaco novella attributed to Rafael Crespo Roche complains about the artisans and other riffraff who shower the currutacos with abuse on the streets; Fermín Gil Encabo, ed., Don Abestruz: Novela vurlesca (Zaragoza, 1799), Rafael Crespo Roche (Huesca: Ediciones del Fénice, 1991), 3. In a more playful poem, “La batalla currutaca” (The currutaco battle), the currutacos feel so menaced by the “infamous people/barbarous and atrocious” that they decide to confront their enemies at the Prado (Diario de Madrid, November 26, 1799). Like the Libro de moda, the Defensa de los currutacos concludes with a Supplement that describes a junta (a “currutáquico congress”), at which the satirized dandies resolve to take action in their own defense. Denouncing

notes to chapter 4

56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

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the fickleness of the common people, which “in the manner of a weathervane yields as easily to Aquilon as to Auster,” Doña Tilde Madamisela issues a call to arms against Don Currutaco (80). Diario de Madrid, November 18, 1797. “El currutaco de Sevilla: Romance nuevo en el que se declara el mas gracioso chasco que le sucedió á un Currutaco con un estudiante, pues pensando geringarlo el currutaco, fue el currutaco geringado por el estudiante, con lo demás que verá el que no fuera ciego” (BNE, VE/1312/7); “Breve y curioso romance, sobre lo ocurrido en Sevilla a mediados de diciembre de 1798, con un Currutaco oficial de tropa y un fraile mercedario” (BNE, MSS/12976/51); Bado, Libro a gusto de todos, 41. See also Diario de Madrid, October 20, 1797. P. D. M. J. de M., “El chasco del currutaco y escarmiento de los demás” (Mexico: n.p., n.d.), 5, 8. Los currutacos chasqueados, 7. Although this play is undated, the first performance of it listed in René Andioc and Mireille Coulon’s Cartelera teatral madrileña del siglo XVIII (1708–1808) (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 1996) is in 1798. This terror is heightened in another version of the sainete titled Los petimetres burlados por los marineros del Perchel (BNE, MS 14.611/12), which is set in the working-class Perchel district of Málaga rather than in Madrid. Although the text is essentially the same, the author has added a number of lines that accentuate the violence of the plebeian antagonists, here the seamen of Perchel, whom the currutacos fear will knife them to death. Zaccaria Seriman’s Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle terre incognite Australi ed al paese delle scimie, ne’ quali si spiegano il carattere, li costumi, le scienze e la polizia di quegli straordinari abitanti appeared in Venice in 1749 and, in a significantly expanded version, in 1764. In 1769 and 1771, Joaquín Vaca de Guzmán y Manrique published a (substantially modified) Spanish translation, Viages de Enrique Wanton, which was reprinted several times in the late eighteenth century (he added a supplement in 1778). The idea of linking the currutacos to this text probably comes from the Libro de moda, which traces the species to the “monkey of which Henry Wanton speaks in his Travels” (35). Diario de Madrid, September 27, 1798. Ibid., October 9–10, 1798. Ibid. L. de T. is so insistent on this point that the Censor mensual would later marvel at the amount of “artillery” deployed (Diario de Madrid, November 13, 1798). For Prudencio’s reply to L. de T., see the November 25–26, 1798, issues. For another condemnation of labeling, see Diario de Madrid, July 12, 1796. This connection between the Enlightenment critique of fashion and the Terror is clear in a letter published in Diario de Madrid, August 20, 1795, in which a fashionable woman responds to a satire against the long trains on

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67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

notes to chapter 4

women’s skirts that appeared in the August 8, 1795, issue. Convinced by the latter, the female reader has resolved to apply “capital punishment” to her dresses, cutting off their offending trains. Just as she is about to do so, however, a level-headed friend stops her and rebuts the arguments of the satire. The averted train-cutting echoes the de-tressing feared in the Libro de moda. For a similar exchange regarding male hairstyles, see Diario de Madrid, July 21– 22, 1799, which reacts to an article published on June 25–27, 1799. Cited in Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 260. Cited in ibid., 380. This metatextual playfulness characterizes several later currutaco texts as well, which present themselves as sketches of books that will be written later: Currutaseos: Ciencia currutaca, ó Ceremonial de currutacos, also attributed to Fernández de Rojas; and the Ensayo de una historia de las pelucas, de los peluquines, y de los pelucones, en la que se ridiculiza la moda de los peynados y se presentan las ventajas de cortarse el pelo (Madrid: Don Josef Doblado, 1806). The latter is yet another example of an unacknowledged translation of a French text, C. Deguerle’s Eloge des perruques, enrichi de notes plus amples que le texte (Paris: Maradan, Year VII [1798–1799]). A letter in Diario de Madrid, September 20, 1797, similarly gives an outline for a currutaco oration that the author plans to write. Fernández de Rojas, Libro de moda, n.p. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 14–15. Ibid., 35. One striking departure of currutaco literature from the tradition of petimetría is the former’s ascription of physical attributes to the dandy: a short, weak, and wiry figure with tiny feet and hands, the currutaco is in constant danger of being carried off by “a violent gust” (25). Ibid., 40. Ibid., 42–44. “Pirritacario” is a made-up adjective for “pirracas.” Ibid., 36n1. Ibid., 51. “Ciento en boca” means literally “one hundred in the mouth.” The expression was used to describe a type of pear (pera de ciento en boca) that was very small. Here, it is used similarly to evoke the petiteness of this lowest class of currutacos. Ibid., 33. For a critical reaction to Fernández de Rojas’s caste system, see Diario de Madrid, October 13, 1795. Fernández de Rojas, Libro de moda, 111–128. “Los majos y los currutacos (tonadilla á cinco),” n.p. Currutaseos, 25. D. J. E. D. L. T.’s Aviso al público similarly excludes the poor and the humble from the “brilliant guild” of the currutacos (78). At the same time that Currutaseos retreats from the relativist vision of the

notes to chapter 4

84. 85.

86.

87.

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Libro de moda, it also departs from its playful spirit. Although it shares much of the breeziness and metatextual play of the earlier treatise, it ultimately abandons the identification of subject and object: at the end of the book, the author disavows his subject and insists that he is not a currutaco. A pamphlet written in reply, Anti-currutaseos, ó Crisis del ceremonial de currutacos, signed by F. A. J. M. (Salamanca: Manuél Rodríguez y Manuél de Vega, 1799), distinguishes Currutaseos from the earlier satires and accuses its author of seeking to “amuse himself at others’ expense” (3). Amansi, Defensa, 29–30. Ibid., 46. The difference between Fernández de Rojas’s and Amansi’s perspectives may be informed by the distinct contexts in which the two authors wrote. Published in Barcelona rather than Madrid, the Defensa was addressed to a mercantile society, which profited from precisely the consumerism that Fernández de Rojas denounces. Although the frame of the Defensa is clearly tongue-in-cheek, the arguments themselves often border on the serious. For example, the author observes that the currutacos’ constant need of clothing benefits textile mills, reduces unemployment, and puts money into circulation (35, 42). Where Fernández de Rojas is interested in probing the social consequences of revolution, Amansi focuses more on economic implications. His arguments were echoed not long after in a more serious piece in Diario de Barcelona, August 5–7, 1796. And an article in Diario de Madrid, July 2, 1796, would defend the orteras currutacos (tacky currutacos), who, though tasteless and lower class, contribute to “the prosperity of the monarchy.” For a parodic version of this type of economic logic, see the letter in Diario de Barcelona, November 19–20, 1796. Lamenting “the insurrections of our enemies,” its author advises the currutacos to become their own “panegyrists . . . saying in a currutacal tone that our society is the foundation of monarchies.” After all, he observes, what would become of most hairdressers and tailors without a currutaco clientele? Presented with such arguments, the enemies of the currutacos will be “as convinced of their error as Sancho Panza was of his regarding the Giants, which he mistook for windmills, before hearing the logic of his master Don Quixote.” Amansi, Defensa, 47. Another letter, about “the pestiferous plague of miserable insects, well known by the name of currutacos,” links the proliferation of luxury goods to an erosion of class distinction and recommends “the wise and zealous vigilance of a tribunal, which with its rewards and punishments would enforce a national costume that distinguishes classes.” See Diario de Madrid, July 4–5, 1796. The Censor mensual (Diario de Madrid, July 6, 1795) adopted religious diction to distinguish between born currutacos, or currutacos por esencia, who conform to the height limit, and currutacos por gracia, who attain the status through their perseverance in the art and who are therefore “the most meritworthy of currutaquería.”

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88. The novel was serialized in the Diario de Zaragoza in 1799. In what follows I cite from Gil Encabo’s critical edition of the work. On the attribution, see Gil Encabo’s introduction to his edition: “Un relato bifronte sobre el currutaco,” in Don Abestruz: Novela vurlesca, xiii–lvi. The title of the work playfully misspells the Spanish words avestruz (ostrich) and vurleca (burlesque). 89. Don Abestruz, 4. 90. Ibid., 10. 91. Ibid., 18. 92. Like Don Abestruz, many currutacos are social climbers who seek to dress or dance themselves into a higher class. In Moncín’s Los currutacos del día, Don Preciso works as a dance instructor in noble homes, courting his students in the hope of marrying his way out of poverty, and a letter in the Diario de Madrid (December 19, 1795) signed by El mal casado tells of the marriage, presided over by Don Preciso, between an aspiring currutaco and a wealthy but decrepit widow, whose fortune will defray the groom’s fashionable lifestyle. A common motif in currutaco literature is the use of clothing to conceal poverty and to suggest a higher social standing. In Bado’s Libro a gusto de todos, the levita (frock coat) is described as “the asylum and true refuge of the beggars of currutaquería,” for it hides dirty culottes (22). For similar observations, see “La ciencia currutaca,” in Tonadillas teatrales inéditas, ed. José Subirá (Madrid: Tipografía de archivos, 1932), 58; and Diario de Madrid, August 8, 1795. A recurrent feature in currutaco literature is a recipe for making a cravat from a bedsheet, if one is too poor to buy one. Unlike the petimetres, who tend to belong to the higher ranks, the currutaco class comprises various social levels and includes many pretenders. 93. The identification between Goya and the figure is established by contemporary manuscript commentaries, which are included in Edith Helman’s Trasmundo de Goya (Madrid: Revista de occidente, 1963), 219–241. 94. Edith Helman, “Fray Juan Fernández de Roxas y Goya,” in Homenaje a Rodríguez-Moñino (Madrid: Castalia, 1966), 1:241–252. On the connection between Goya and the currutacos, see Andioc, Personajes y rostros; and “Goya y el temperamento currutáquico.” Unless otherwise noted, the translations of Goya’s captions are from Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Los caprichos (New York: Dover, 1969). 95. Diario de Madrid, May 24–26, 1795. Though Don Currutaco recognizes it immediately, Don Preciso’s irony seems to have escaped many later readers of his work. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter observes how historians of Spanish dance have often taken Iza Zamácola’s Elementos de la ciencia contradanzaria as a serious treatise and used it as a source text. See her “Satirical Dance Texts as Historical Sources: Two Examples from Spain,” Cairon: Revista de ciencias de la danza 1 (1995): 73–84. 96. Diario de Madrid, June 9, 1795.

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97. Ibid., October 13, 1795. 98. Ibid., October 26, 1795. For another example of this sort of accusation, see the letter of “El amante del bien público” in Diario de Madrid, July 2, 1796. 99. Diario de Madrid, June 14, 1796. 100. Ibid., October 20, 1797. 101. Ibid., November 12, 1797. 102. Ibid., November 11, 1797. 103. In another letter, the Petit Currutaco is “outed” through teasing close reading (ibid., October 19, 1797). 104. Ibid., October 13, 1795. 105. Iza Zamácola, Elementos, v. 106. This identification is clear in an article that gives mock praise to Don Preciso for his mock praise of the currutacos—a stance that ultimately amounts to a defense of the latter (Diario de Madrid, January 19, 1798). 107. Ibid., November 18, 1797. 108. Ibid., October 10, 1798. 109. One writer observed that the “erudite currutacos and señoritas del nuevo cuño” presented their ideas in such an indirect and “masked” way that they were impossible to “untie and undress without an immense effort” (Diario de Madrid, November 19, 1795). 110. A number of writers would reject or parody the insistence on a correspondence between clothing and identity. See Diario de Madrid, October 26, 1795, November 10, 1796, and October 10, 1798. Another author dissociates dress from “the qualities of the soul” and invites his fellow currutacos to give free rein to their sartorial imagination, provided they patronize national establishments: “let us invent, combine, and vary at whim the cut of our suits” (Diario de Madrid, November 28, 1795). 111. Many texts would echo this opposition between the old and the new. See Diario de Barcelona, September 12, 1796, and November 18, 1796. 112. Diario de Madrid, October 10, 1798.

1. 2. 3. 4.

chapter five Thomas Haynes Bayly, The Dandies of the Present and the Macaronies of the Past; A Rough Sketch (Bath: J. Barratt and Son, 1819), 4. Ibid., 11–12. Evan Clark, Miscellaneous Poems (Whitehaven: J. Ware and Son, 1779), 53–54. The classic example of this aesthetic of visibility is the Vauxhall Affray of 1773, a quarrel instigated by a macaroni who stared impertinently at an actress at the Vauxhall Gardens. The ensuing controversy hinged on the politics of the gaze and the extreme visibility and visuality of macaroni culture. On the Vauxhall affair, see The Vauxhall Affray; or, The Macaronies Defeated (London: J. Williams, 1773); Peter de Bolla, “The Visibility of Visuality,”

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5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

notes to chapter 5

in Vision in Context, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York: Routledge, 1996), 65–81; and Miles Ogborn, “Locating the Macaroni: Luxury, Sexuality and Vision in Vauxhall Gardens,” Textual Practice 11, no. 3 (1997): 445–461. “Sir Amorous Whimsy, or The Disappointed Macaroni” (London: T. Evans, 1772). For another example of vapid macaroni repartee, see William Madden, “The Bath Macaroni with Other Sketches from Nature” (Bath: n.p., 1781), 14–16. Clark, Miscellaneous Poems, 54. In this chapter, italics in quotations are in the original unless otherwise noted. For an example of this type of exposure, see the denouement of the play The Ultra Exquisite, or Which Is the Dandy (manuscript 2090 in the Huntington Library Larpent Collection, dated April 22, 1819). For an eighteenth-century account of the origins of the macaroni, see Town and Country Magazine, March 1772. On the figure of the macaroni, see De Bolla, “Visibility”; Ogborn, “Locating the Macaroni”; Peter McNeil, “‘That Doubtful Gender’: Macaroni Dress and Male Sexualities,” Fashion Theory 3, no. 4 (1999): 411–448; Peter McNeil, “Macaroni Masculinities,” Fashion Theory 4, no. 4 (2000): 373–404; Amelia Rauser, “Hair, Authenticity, and the Self-Made Macaroni,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (2004): 101–117; Aileen Ribeiro, “The Macaronis,” History Today 28, no. 7 (1978): 463; Valerie Steele, “The Social and Political Significance of Macaroni Fashion,” Costume 19 (1985): 94–109; and Shearer West, “The Darly Macaroni Prints and the Politics of ‘Private Man,’” Eighteenth-Century Life 25 (2001): 170–182. Ogborn, “Locating the Macaroni,” 448. See also Steele, “Social and Political Significance,” 104–105; and McNeil, “Macaroni Masculinities,” 386–387. On the association between Fox and the macaroni style, see the prints The Original Macaroni, M. Darly, BM 1915,0313.143; and The Young Politician (London: Bryer, 1771), BM 1868,0808.4464. The Macaroni and Theatrical Magazine, October 1772. See also Universal Magazine, October 1772; and Town and Country Magazine, May 1772. The Darly prints were published between 1771 and 1773. For a comprehensive inventory of the macaroni images, see volume 5 (compiled by Mary Dorothy George) of Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Political and Personal Satires (London: British Museum, 1935). Richard Hitchcock, The Macaroni: A Comedy (York: A. Ward, 1773), 78. Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 83–84, 98–99. McNeil has observed that “[w]hen caricatures deride men of lesser social standing as macaroni they generally present them as lumpish, deformed or wearing an odd mixture of middle-class and court dress” (“Doubtful Gender,” 423). West, “Darly Macaroni Prints,” 174.

notes to chapter 5

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15. Rauser, “Hair,” 114. 16. West, “Darly Macaroni Prints,” 176. 17. Dandyism Displayed, or The Follies of the Ton (London: Duncombe, n.d., ca. 1817). 18. Dandymania, Being a Dissertation on the Modern Dandies (London: Duncombe, n.d., ca. 1817), 6. 19. Ibid., 11–12. 20. See Ian Kelly, Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style (New York: Free Press, 2006), 190–191. 21. For the dandy caricatures, see volume 9 (compiled by Mary Dorothy George) of the Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Political and Personal Satires (London: British Museum, 1949). 22. False Appearances, or A Hit on the Dandies (New York: n.p., 1819). 23. See, e.g., Charles Williams’s 1819 caricature Dandies Sans-Sis-Sous (BM 1867,0713.418). 24. J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (New York: AMS Press, 1976), 112. 25. See, e.g., John Harvey, Men in Black (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23–40; and George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 17–19. 26. David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550– 1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 27. James Laver, The Concise History of Costume and Fashion (New York: Harry Abrams, 1969), 139. 28. Bayly, “Dandies,” 5. 29. Colonel Macleod observed in Parliament that the poor were paying nine pence halfpenny for bread formerly priced at six pence. Parliamentary Register (London: J. Debrett, 1795), 41:72. 30. For the Hair Powder Act, see An Exposition of the Hair Powder Act, Setting Forth Its Legal Operation; with a Full Abstract of the Act, by a Barrister (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1795), 43–60. For a comprehensive and thoughtful discussion of the measure, see chapter 5 of John Barrell’s The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), which explores the legislation in relation to the increasing encroachment on civil liberties in Britain during the period. In what follows, I will be looking at many of the same documents and discussions but focusing instead on the shadow cast by the French Revolution over these debates. 31. On the use of hair powder in the eighteenth century, see Barrell, Spirit of Despotism, 147–152; and the special issue on hair edited by Angela Rosenthal in Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (2004). 32. The Minister’s Head—Dressed according to Law, or A Word of Comfort to Hairdressers in General, respecting the Powder-Plot of 1795, by a Round Head (London: Glindon, 1795), 24.

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notes to chapter 5

33. Letter to the Deputy Manager of a Theater-Royal, London, on His Lately Acquired Notoriety, in Contriving and Arranging the Hair Powder Act, Commonly Called the Poll Tax (London: Allen and West, 1795), 6; John Coakley Lettsom, Hints respecting the Distresses of the Poor (London: C. Dilly, 1795), 4. 34. Oracle and Public Advertiser, March 9, 1795. 35. Ibid., March 16, 1795. 36. Parliamentary Register, 41:71. 37. Peter Pindar, Hair Powder: A Plaintive Epistle to Mr. Pitt (London: J. Walker, J. Bell, n.d.), 17–18. 38. Ibid., 24. 39. Cabinet of Curiosities (London: n.p., 1795), 177. 40. Parliamentary Register, 41:70. 41. Barrell, Spirit of Despotism, 172. As the Quaker commentator John Coakley Lettsom pointed out, it would have made more sense to outlaw the use of starch than the use of flour, for two pounds of flour were required to produce a pound of starch. See Lettsom Hints, 13–14. According to one commentator, the bill actually increased the use of flour in place of powder. See “Consumption of Grain for the Purpose of Whitening the Head,” Morning Chronicle, January 7, 1796. 42. See The Statutes at Large, from the Thirty-Fifth Year of the Reign of King George the Third, to the Thirty-Eighth Year of the Reign of King George the Third (London: George Eyre and Andrew Strahan, 1798), 17:250–251. 43. Oracle and Public Advertiser, May 9, 1795; John Donaldson, A Letter to the Right Hon. William Pitt on the Use of Hair-Powder, &c. &c. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1795), 5. For similar calculations, see Morning Chronicle, July 22, 1795. 44. John Hart, Address to the Public on the Subject of the Starch and Hair-Powder Manufactories (London: B. Corcoran, 1795), 18. 45. John Hart, “To the Right Hon. the Lord Mayor,” Times, July 31, 1795. 46. Hart, Address to the Public, 8, 98. 47. Parliamentary Register, 41:71. 48. St. James’s Chronicle, August 4, 1795. 49. Brutus, Cursory Remarks on Mr. Pitt’s New Tax of Imposing a Guinea per Head on Every Person Who Wears Hair-Powder (London: Eaton, 1795), 12. 50. Oracle and Public Advertiser, June 24, 1795. 51. As the radical writer Thomas Spence rhymed, “The rich and poor assunder to keep,/A tax is devis’d with malice most deep.” See Thomas Spence, An Address to the Insulted Swinish Multitude on Account of the Hair Powder Tax (London: T. Spence, 1795). 52. Morning Chronicle, March 10, 1795. See also the issue of March 4, 1795. 53. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790), 117.

notes to chapter 5

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

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Letter to the Deputy Manager of a Theater-Royal, 10. Oracle and Public Advertiser, June 24, 1795. Morning Post, June 13, 1795; Morning Chronicle, March 4, 1795. Cabinet of Curiosities, 179. See, e.g., Brutus, Cursory Remarks, 9n. Letter to the Deputy Manager of a Theater-Royal, 13. The Meal-Tub Plot, or Remarks upon the Powder Tax (London: n.p., 1795), 13. See, e.g., the print Billy’s Poll-Tax, or King’s Place in an Uproar (Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 2004679029); and “The Poll-Tax: A New Song,” Philanthropist, no. 19 (August 3, 1975): 7–8. Even Robert Burns used the term in a quatrain about the bill: “Pray Billy Pit explain thy rigs,/This new poll-tax of thine!/‘I mean to mark the guinea pigs/From other common swine.’” See James Kinsley, ed., The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 2:803. Richard II’s poll tax was levied three times. The 1377 measure imposed a flat rate, while the 1379 and 1381 versions introduced a sliding scale. On the comparison between the Hair Powder Act and the later formulation of the poll tax, see An Exposition of the Hair Powder Act, 31–35. The author of this work considers the fourteenth-century measures to be less offensive and more lenient than Pitt’s bill. Grizzle Baldpate, The Poll Tax, an Ode (London: Vaughan Griffiths, 1795), 8. “Cursory Thoughts on the Proposed Tax on Powdered Heads,” Register of the Times 4 (April 11–21, 1795): 303. Oracle and Public Advertiser, June 24, 1795. Brutus, Cursory Remarks, 14. Ibid., 13. Hart, Address to the Public, 77. Ibid., 67. Philanthropos, “Sir, as a Friend to Human Kind” (London: n.p., 1795), n.p. Telegraph, no. 178 (July 24, 1795). See also Donaldson, Letter, 4; J. Thelwall, Tribune (London: Thelwall, 1795), 80; Morning Chronicle, March 27, 1795; and “On the Use of Hair Powder,” Arminian Magazine 19 (April 1796): 205. Sir Adam Gordon, Discourses on Several Subjects: Being the Substance of Some Select Homilies of the Church of England (London: J. Stockdate, 1795), 1:338n. Donaldson, Letter, 15. Morning Chronicle, March 2, 1795. Oracle and Public Advertiser, April 28, 1795. Register of the Times 4 (April 11–21, 1795): 302. Ibid., 304. One writer, for example, feared that citizens would conform to the law simply to avoid being seen as “an enemy to the constitution, and . . . a marked man” (Brutus, Cursory Remarks, 5–6). Register of the Times 4 (April 11–21, 1795): 304.

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notes to chapter 5

79. Morning Chronicle, April 30, 1795. 80. Meal-Tub Plot, 9–10. See also Morning Post, March 19, 1795. 81. “The Complaint: A Poem, on the Proposed Tax on Powdered Heads” (Edinburgh: n.p., 1795), 9. 82. St. James’s Chronicle, March 3, 1795. 83. Christopher Caxon, letter to editor, Courier and Evening Gazette, March 3, 1795; Grizzle Baldpate, Poll-Tax, an Ode, 20. See also Review and Sunday Advertiser, March 22, 1795. The pun on Whig and wig appears in many discussions of the tax: see The Blessings of Billy’s Budget, the Heaven-Born Tinker: A Sermonical Address to the Right Hon. John Bull by a Loyal Layman (Chester: n.p., 1795), 8; and Morning Chronicle, March 3, 1795. 84. Reported in Morning Post, April 29, 1795. 85. For an example of the slippage between political and economic meaning and of the shadow cast by the French Revolution over this debate, see the letter to the editor signed Pulvurulentus in St. James’s Chronicle, April 16, 1795. 86. Star, May 11, 1795. 87. Letter to the Deputy Manager of a Theater-Royal, 11. 88. Morning Chronicle, March 3, 1795. 89. Reported in Evening Mail, April 25, 1796. 90. For similar objections, see also Brutus, Cursory Remarks, 16; and Meal-Tub Plot, 10. 91. Grizzle Baldpate, Poll-Tax, an Ode, 18. 92. Times, March 10, 1795. 93. Morning Post, March 11, 1795. 94. Spence, Address to the Insulted Swinish Multitude. 95. Morning Post, May 22, 1795. 96. Ibid., July 15, 1795. The same issue reports that a bludgeoner attacked several powder wearers at Charing Cross, an incident that an onlooker jokingly summed up as a “citizen giving a Lecture on Heads!” (an allusion to George Alexander Steven’s 1764 speech mocking physiognomy). 97. See John Hart’s letter to the Times on July 31, 1795. 98. Morning Post, July 9, 1795. 99. See, e.g., Oracle and Public Advertiser, September 6, 1796. 100. Parliamentary Register, 41:72. 101. Morning Post, May 6, 1795; see also Telegraph, June 29, 1795. 102. St. James’s Chronicle, July 21, 1795. 103. Times, April 14, 1795. 104. Lord Barrymore appears as a crop in a number of prints from the period. See, e.g., Les Trois Magots (BM 1868,0808.10337), The Levee, or The Mæcenas of Scrubs and Scaramouches (BM 1868,0808.6061), and The Peerless Scrub (BM 1868,0808.12495). 105. Times, September 24, 1791. 106. Evening Mail, September 26, 1791.

notes to chapter 5

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107. World, September 27, 1791; Times, September 13, 1791; Morning Post, August 18, 1791. 108. Public Advertiser, November 24, 1791. 109. For the association between the box-lobby lounger and the crop, see Morning Post, September 14, 1791, and September 29, 1791; Oracle, January 9, 1792; Morning Chronicle, September 21, 1791; Evening Mail, November 2, 1791; and the print Cropp’d Loungers in Bond Street (BM J,5.153). The figure would also be known as the “Lobby Crop.” See, e.g., Morning Post, October 7, 1791; and Public Advertiser, October 17, 1791. 110. Public Advertiser, November 24, 1791. 111. Morning Chronicle, September 19, 1791. 112. Times, October 13, 1791, and December 24, 1791. 113. Evening Mail, September 19, 1791. 114. The hero of one song, a “nice natty crop” named “Tippy Bob,” cries, “Damn the mob! Let them laugh,/I dress not by them to be seen.” The song, “My Name’s Tippy Bob,” was first sung by Mr. Munden in the pantomime Blue Beard. It is included in The Whim of the Day (for 1793) (London: J. Roach, 1793), 77–78. 115. World, September 30, 1791; and Evening Mail, November 30, 1791. 116. Times, April 14, 1795. The announcement of Bedford’s cropping party appears accompanied by a poem in Morning Post, September 2, 1795. 117. Morning Post, September 28, 1795. 118. Sporting Magazine 7 (1796): 106. For lists of crops, see Oracle and Public Advertiser, December 19, 1795; Telegraph, October 1, 1795; and Sporting Magazine 7 (1796): 202–203. 119. On October 7, 1795, the Morning Post reported: “Ladies of all descriptions are beginning to crop their Hair, but we trust they will not carry the fashion to that extent which some of the prints insinuate.” See also Morning Post, February 29, 1796. The journal regularly recorded the names of new initiates (see, e.g., issues for December 14, 1795; February 10, 1796; and December 29, 1796). 120. Oracle and Public Advertiser, June 2, 1796. For a similar jest, see Morning Post, September 13, 1796. 121. Oracle and Public Advertiser, January 7, 1796. 122. Morning Post, May 4, 1797. 123. Whitehall Evening Post, May 21, 1795; New Fashions, or A Puff at the Guinea Pigs (London: n.p., 1795). See also Morning Chronicle, October 28, 1795; and Times, March 10, 1795, and April 14, 1795. 124. Sporting Magazine 7 (1796): 45. 125. Times, September 29, 1795. See also Morning Chronicle, October 28, 1795. 126. Times, January 1, 1796. 127. Ibid., January 6, 1796. 128. Ibid., September 29, 1795; and January 11, 1796. The pun on the term “Bed-

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129.

130.

131. 132.

133.

134. 135. 136. 137. 138.

139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

144.

notes to chapter 5

ford level” predates the haircut. See the print (dated April 14, 1795) The Bedford Level (BM 1917,1208.4106) from the series “Outlines of the Opposition in 1795 collected from the works of the most capital Jacobin Artists.” Times, January 28, 1796. The Times also observed that “[i]f they want to equalize the world in reality, the quickest way is by marriage” (March 2, 1796). The Times, for example, describes Bedford’s crops as a “corps of round heads” (December 26, 1795). See also Oracle and Public Advertiser, March 16, 1795; London Packet or New Lloyd’s Evening Post, April 18, 1796; and MealTub Plot, 9. Morning Chronicle, February 26, 1796. Sporting Magazine 7 (1796): 45. See also the commentary on the print The Fashionables, 1795 in Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, or Compendium of Entertaining Knowledge, September 1795, 193. Hart, Address to the Public, 85. For Septimus Hodson’s discussion of powder, see his An Address to the Different Classes of Persons in Great Britain on the Present Scarcity and High Price of Provisions (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1795), 24–26. Hodson too alludes in passing to the Glorious Revolution in his discussion of the shortage (51), prompting a vitriolic response from Hart (Address to the Public, 85–86). Times, September 19, 1795. Ibid., November 6, 1795. Ibid., December 1, 1795. Ibid., January 1, 1796. In May 1796, the papers announced the emergence of “a new Jacobin crop started up at Gloucester, called the Kydd-Wake crop!”—a reference to a protestor condemned to five years of hard labor in Gloucester for hooting at the king and crying, “No war.” “If all the Jacobins were made Kydd Wake crops, by shaving their heads,” the Oracle observed, “it would greatly cool their ardour for the new order of things.” See Oracle and Public Advertiser, May 28, 1796. See also the facetious poem “The Battle of Vauxhall,” which describes a “Jacobin hunt” that aimed to extirpate the “Damn’d Democrat crops” (Morning Post, August 29, 1797). Times, August 29, 1797. Morning Post, December 14, 1795. Times, January 8, 1795. Hart, Address to the Public, 66. Edmund Burke, A Letter from the Right Honourable Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord on the Attacks Made upon Him and His Pension, in the House of Lords, by the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, Early in the Present Sessions (London: J. Owen and C. Rivington, 1796), 68–69. Grizzle Baldpate, Poll Tax, an Ode, 18.

notes to chapter 5

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145. W. H. Green, “The Republican Crop: A New Song,” Philanthropist, no. 42 (January 18, 1796): 5–6. 146. “Poor Old England, Written and Compos’d by Mr. Dibdin, and Sung by Him in His New Entertainment Called Great News, or A Trip to the Antipodes” (London: n.p., 1795), 2–3. 147. Whitehall Evening Post, March 17, 1795. 148. “Jacky Dandy’s Lamentations,” Philanthropist, no. 10 (June 1, 1795): 7–8. 149. Sporting Magazine 7 (1796): 44n. 150. True Briton, January 21, 1796. 151. “The Crops, a New Song,” Whitehall Evening Post, December 19, 1795. Aesop’s fable reappears in a print from 1798, The Fox That Lost His Tail (BM 1868,0808.6740), in which Charles James Fox attempts to convince his friends to sacrifice the useless appendage. 152. Morning Post, October 13, 1795. 153. Another example of how the 1791 style calls attention to itself is the epilogue to Frederick Reynolds’s play Notoriety (London: W. Woodfall, 1793), in which a crop seeks to become notorious for docked hair: “Dam’me, I’m up to that, cries Bobby Crop,/No fellow in the town shall me out-top;/I’ll have a dock as close as young Lord Wizen,/For dam’me, an’t my head as thick as his’n?” (n.p.). Like the macaroni, the 1791 crop seeks visibility. 154. James Thomson, The Seasons, “Autumn,” lines 204–206. 155. Morning Chronicle, March 30, 1795. The True Briton responded angrily to this use of Thomson, accusing a “Jacobin Journal” of “sedition and disloyalty” (April 3, 1795). For another example of the use of Thomson, see the poem “The Complaint: A Poem, on the Proposed Tax on Powdered Heads,” 7. 156. Sporting Magazine 7 (1796): 202. 157. Ibid., 258. 158. Green, “Republican Crop,” 5. See also the letter signed Amicus Crop in Times, January 22, 1796. Both texts refer to 1 Corinthians 11:14. 159. Poem ascribed to Lord Erskine, cited in Nuts to Crack, or Quips, Quirks, Anecdotes and Facete of Oxford and Cambridge Scholars (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1935), 158. 160. The newspapers would also remark upon the unpowdered look in women, which enhanced their natural charms. Far from leveling distinctions, the style of the “fashionable female crops” restored aesthetic variation: “The expression of fine features is greatly augmented by the abolition of powder. We now see feminine beauty unsophisticated; and we observe that those ladies who have the darkest hair, have been the first to leave off the use of an ingredient which brings all countenances to a level” (Oracle and Public Advertiser, December 16, 1795). Similarly, when the celebrated actress Mrs. Siddons performed without powder, the papers acclaimed the “additional expression” given to her face by “the contrast of her dark hair” (ibid.,

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161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170.

171.

172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182.

1.

notes to epilogue

January 27, 1796). See also the quatrain “On Mrs. Siddons Performing without Powder” in Tomahawk or Censor General, January 29, 1796. See the print Buy My Pretty Guinea Pigs (BM 1876,1014.20). Minister’s Head—Dressed according to Law, 8. Grizzle Baldpate, Poll Tax, an Ode, 8. Morning Post, April 16, 1795. McNeil, “Doubtful Gender,” 426. Green, “Republican Crop,” 5. Times, January 28, 1795. Ibid., December 1, 1795. London Packet or New Lloyd’s Evening Post, May 15, 1795. See also Meal-Tub Plot, 13; and Letter to the Deputy Manager of a Theater-Royal, 24. George Bryan Brummell, Male and Female Costume: Grecian and Roman Costume, British Costume from the Roman Invasion until 1822 and the Principles of Costume Applied to the Improved Dress of the Present Day, ed. Eleanor Parker (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1932), 119. The British Museum collection of satires includes a Gillray print dated 1810 and titled The Dandy (BM 1868,0808.7950), and Byron mentions a “dandy ball” in a letter from 1813, but the term would not become common until 1816. Life, Letters, and Journals of Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1839), 189. Times, January 29, 1823. Ibid., April 19, 1819. Ibid., February 1, 1823. Ibid., January 27, 1823. Samuel Johnson defines “dandiprat” as “a little fellow; an urchin” and derives the term from the French dandin. Gentleman’s Magazine, July–December 1819, 599. Frederick Pilon, He Would Be a Soldier (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1786). A Series of Original Portraits and Caricature Etchings (Edinburgh: Hugh Paton, Carver and Gilder, 1838), vol. 1, pt. 2, 226–228. The Muse in Good Humour, or Momus’s Banquet: A Collection of Choice Songs, Including the Modern (London: William Lane, n.d.), 32. J. A. Leo Lemay, “The American Origins of ‘Yankee Doodle,’” William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1976): 6n19. John Murdock, The Beau Metamorphized, or The Generous Maid: An After-piece in Two Acts (Philadelphia: Joseph C. Charles, 1800). See Kate Haulman, “Fashion and the Culture Wars of Revolutionary Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2005): 625–662. epilogue Balzac, Traité, 112. In what follows, the translations of Balzac’s text are my own.

notes to epilogue

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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Ibid., 87. Ibid., 98. The “old proverb” probably refers to the expression “Dis-moi qui tu fréquentes, je te dirai qui tu es” (tell me whom you frequent, and I’ll tell you who you are). Ibid., 98–99. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 100. This circular structure typifies the trope of prosopopoeia. See Paul de Man’s essay “Autobiography as De-facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67–81. Balzac, Traité, 108. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 137–138. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 110; Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. McSweeney and Sabor, 217. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 208. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 212. Ibid., 216. Ibid., 217. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 207. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. John Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), 29. In what follows, I cite Mayne’s translation of Baudelaire. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 28–29. Ibid. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 29, 36, emphasis mine. Ibid., 35.

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39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

notes to epilogue

Ibid., 12, 34, emphasis in original. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 36, emphasis mine. Ibid. Ibid., 9, 17. Ibid., 37.

{ index }

9 Thermidor, 49, 64, 68–69, 85 Address to the Public on the Subject of the Starch and Hair–Powder Manufacturers (Hart), 173, 176, 188, 189 Adresse des jeunes citoyens, à leurs frères les ouvriers de tous les âges, 48–49, 51, 54, 55, 200 agrarianism, 79, 149, 240n78 agréable, 116, 248n72 Allaire, Alexandre: Les hommes du jour, 109–11 allegory, 52, 66, 69, 74, 77, 81, 108, 122, 123, 126, 135, 236n41 Amansi, Serapio (Francisco Sanponts): Defensa de los currutacos, et al., 142, 153–54, 258–59n55, 261n85 Amar du Rivier, Jean-Augustin: Les vrais incroyables, 246–47n48 ambiguity, 6, 44, 80, 93, 104, 110, 148, 158, 161, 192–93, 206; appearances, 9, 31, 65, 80, 127, 210; political, 10, 28, 39, 41, 51–54 American Revolution, 6, 7, 198 Amigos del país, 146 amnesia. See memory and forgetting anachronistic imagination, 5, 8–9, 11, 14, 55, 59, 70, 78, 99, 100, 115, 117, 141,

152, 160, 161, 212, 215. See also memory and forgetting Andioc, René, 136, 253n12, 259n59, 262n94 anglophilie, 2 Anti-Currutaseos, 260–61n83 Aranda, Conde de, 138, 146 Arlequin perruquier (Rolland and Clairville), 62, 234n22, 236n41, 237n47, 241–42n109, 242–43n118 assignat, 5, 25, 50, 79, 83, 84, 103 Aude, Joseph, 116; Perruques de toutes les couleurs, 62, 234n22, 237n49 Audinot, Nicolas-Médard, 57 Augereau, Pierre, 121 Aulard, Alphonse, 224n6, 233n2 Austria, 25 Babeuf, François-Noël, 102, 121 Baczko, Bronislaw, 64, 89, 238n62, 243n124 Bado, Luis Santiago: El libro a gusto de todos, 137, 262n92 Baecque, Antoine de, 66, 223n11, 227n53, 236n42 Baldpate, Grizzle, 175, 189, 192 bals des victimes, 97, 235n30 Balzac, Honoré de: Traité de la vie élégant,

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Index

Balzac, Honoré de (continued) 4, 17–18, 201, 202–6, 207, 208, 209, 210, 214, 215 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules: Du dandysme et de G. Brummell, 3, 4, 201, 225n15 Barére, Bertrand, 9, 19, 20, 32, 34, 35, 36, 75, 224n1, 227–28n58 Baroja, Julio Caro, 257n49 Barras, Paul François Jean Nicolas, 120, 131 Barrell, John, 172, 173, 265n30 Barry, Augustus, 183 Barry, Henry, 183 Barry, Richard (Earl of Barrymore), 183–84, 187, 268n104 Barthélemy, Louis Joseph Schérer, 131 Battle of Fleurus (1794), 127 Baudelaire, Charles: “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” 18, 201, 210–14, 215 Bayly, Thomas Haynes, 162, 169 Bazire, Claude, 35, 36, 37, 47, 48, 50–51, 227–28n58 beau, 1, 2 Beaulieu, Claude François, 228n62 Beaumarchais, Pierre: Le barbier de Séville, 52 Beau Metamorphized, or The Generous Maid, The (Murdock), 198 Beaunoir: Le danger des liaisons, 57 Beaux’ Stratagem, The (Farquhar), 184 Bedford Level, 17, 187, 269–70n128 Beerbohm, Max, 4, 215 Belgium, 14 Billaud-Varenne, Jacques Nicolas, 75 Birmingham (or Priestly) Riots (1791), 182 black collars. See collets noirs black wigs, 30, 38, 39, 52, 68, 70, 176, 237n47, 242–43n118 Blagdon, Francis W., 230n100 blond wigs, 11, 59, 61–62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 78, 82, 122, 235n24, 235–36n37 blurring: of fiction and reality, of person and role, of author and character, or of subject and object, 6, 7, 9, 13, 24, 32, 33,

45, 46, 54, 98, 110, 119, 124, 136, 142, 159, 203, 205, 209, 227n49, 230–31n101, 231n103; of historical boundaries, 81, 116 Boileau, Nicolas, 116 Boilly, Louis-Léopold, 245n36 Bolla, Peter de, 264n8 Bonafon, Marie-Madeleine: Tanastès conte allégorique, 23, 24, 224–25n13 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 102, 113, 114, 116, 202, 204, 248n69 bonnets rouges, 4, 120, 128, 129, 132, 204, 222–23n10 Boullault, Joseph: Les incroyables, ou La liberté des modes, 126–28 bouts rimés, 130, 131 box-lobby loungers/puppies, 184, 185, 186, 198, 269n109 bread prices/supply, 16, 30, 34, 35, 36, 50, 51, 79, 169, 173, 181, 182, 265n29 Brissot, Jacques Pierre, 28, 41 Brissotins, 28, 35, 41, 45, 46, 47, 50, 233n10 Brooks’s, 191 Brottier conspiracy, 121 Brummell, George “Beau,” 3, 4, 17, 167, 195, 198, 201, 202, 203–4, 205–6, 209, 215 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward: Pelham; or The Adventures of a Gentleman, 207–8, 209 Bunbiry, Henry William, 96 Burke, Edmund, 189; Reflections on the Revolution in France, 174 Burns, Robert, 267n61 Byron, George Gordon (Lord Byron), 272n171 “Ça ira,” 101 Cabarrus, Thérésia, 49, 50, 66, 105 Cambon, Pierre Joseph, 79, 83, 240n77 Cammaille-Saint-Aubin: L’ami du people, ou Les intrigans démasqués, 42, 43, 229–30n79, 230n90; Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou La folie du jour, 56, 57, 59, 62, 71, 82, 83, 84–85, 86–87, 88, 90, 94, 229–30n79, 240n89

Index Carentan, Jullien de, 31 Carlyle, Thomas: Sartor Resartus, 2, 4, 18, 106, 196, 201, 206–10, 214, 215 carmagnole, 4, 126, 128, 138 Carnot, Lazare, 131 Caroline of Brunswick, 195 Carrier, Jean-Baptiste, 75, 238n62 catastrophic imagination, 5, 7, 9, 13, 14, 16, 100, 120, 129, 132, 145, 147, 155, 156, 160, 161, 174, 177, 208, 210 Catherine the Great, 27 Cavaliers, 188 Censor mensual. See Fernández de Rojas, Juan: Censor mensual censorship, 14, 88, 138, 146 c’est incroyable (exclamation), 13, 37–38, 96, 97, 104, 106, 110, 113–19, 243n8, 248n69 Chabot, François, 37, 47, 48, 228n62 Chalier, Joseph, 26, 27 Charlemagne, Armand: “Le monde incroyable, ou Les hommes et les choses,” 117–20 Charles I, 188 Charles II, 188, 189, 190 Charles IX (Chenier), 31, 229n72 Charles X, 204 Chaumette, Pierre-Gaspard, 35 Chaussier, Héctor: Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou L’agrément du jour, 62, 83, 90–94, 235n23, 242n114 Chenier, Marie-Joseph: Charles IX, 31, 229n72 chisgaravises, 142 cicibeo, 140–41, 256n36 Cinna (Corneille), 74 citras, 80, 138 Civic Certificates, 30 Clairville: Arlequin perruquier, 62, 234n22, 236n41, 237n47, 241–42n109, 242–43n118 class tension, 7, 8, 14, 16, 29, 54, 64, 140, 152, 208, 210, 258n51 Clavijo y Fajardo, José, 256–57n43 Club Central of Lyon, 26 Club de Clichy, 104, 126

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Cobiolis, Charles, 99 Coblentz, 25, 31 Cobourg, Frédéric Josias de, 20 cockades, 4, 120, 180, 205–6, 222–23n10, 226n40, 250n99 coiffure à la victime, 11 collets noirs (black collars), 12, 13, 18, 100–101, 104, 106, 120–24, 126, 128–31, 194, 200, 249n83, 251n118 Collot d’Herbois, Jean-Marie, 75 Comella, Luciano Francisco, 258n51 Committee of General Security, 26, 56, 57, 126, 233n5 Committee of Public Safety, 31, 34, 36, 129, 228n62 Commune of Lyon, 26 Conseils, 102, 106, 120, 121 Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Montesquieu), 128–29 conspicuous consumption, 1, 50, 61, 79–80, 147. See also luxury conspiracies and conspiracy theories, 20, 21, 26, 41, 47, 103, 104, 115, 117, 120, 121, 131 Constant, Pierre, 224n5 Constitution of 1793, 50, 66 Constitution of 1795, 103, 105, 106 Corday, Charlotte, 45, 235–36n37 Corneille, Pierre: Cinna, 74 Corominas, Joan, 136, 254n20 corruption, 3, 13, 49, 89, 116, 177, 236–37n43, 245n36, 254n22 cortejo, 140–41, 256n36 Coulon, Mireille, 253n12, 259n59 Count of Provence. See Louis XVIII Courrier des spectacles, 111 Courtenay, John, 173 cravats, 11, 27, 44, 67, 70, 95, 101, 121, 126, 138, 262n92 Crespo Roche, Rafael: Don Abestruz: Novela vurlesca, 154, 155, 157, 258–59n55, 262n88 Cromwell, Oliver, 116, 187, 188 crop, 1, 2–3, 17, 18, 186, 187, 196, 198, 200, 269n119, 270n138, 271–72n160;

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Index

crop (continued) aesthetics, 191, 192, 193, 194, 200–201; association with Jacobins and revolutionary ideas, 187–88, 189, 190, 200, 270n138; defenses of, 184, 189–90; negative connotations, 184, 186–87 Crop Club, 185 cross-dressing, 39, 40, 67, 123 croyables, 108, 109, 110, 122, 129, 243–44n10 Cruikshank, George, 195 Cruikshank, Isaac, 174 Cruikshank, Isaac Robert, 163, 195 Cruz, Ramón de la: Los majos vencidos, 143, 256n37 culottes, 11, 20, 30, 39, 44, 46, 70, 126, 128, 144, 152, 179, 226n38, 228n63, 249n83, 254n22, 262n92 currency: depreciations/collapses, 25, 51, 103; distrust, 79, 83–84 currutaco, 1, 2, 6, 13–14, 134–36, 139, 141–44, 147, 149–50, 155, 157–59, 161, 251–52n3, 254–55n24, 259n61, 260n69, 260n73, 260–61n83, 261n87, 263n109; antecedents, 139, 140; definitions, 142, 143, 144, 160, 161; fashion, 137–38, 155; harassment of, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151, 157, 158, 160; ideology, 139, 253n14, 253n15, 263n109; lexical shift, 135, 200; relationship with incroyables, 136, 137, 254n22; social hierarchy, 143, 149, 150–52, 153, 154, 157, 262n92; social mobility, 151, 153, 154, 155, 200, 258n51, 262n92; surface judgments, 160, 161, 200 Currutaseos: Ciencia currutaca, 153, 260n69, 260–61n83 Dandies Dressing (I. R. Cruikshank), 163, 168 dandy (nineteenth-century figure), 1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 13, 17, 18, 106, 162, 163, 166–68, 198, 201, 203, 204, 206, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215; origins of word, 195, 196, 198 dandyism (nineteenth-century ideal), 1,

2, 4, 6, 17, 18, 166–68, 195, 198, 201, 202–4, 206, 207–8, 209, 210, 211–13, 221n1, 221–22n4; connection with revolution, 1–2, 5, 201, 215; understatement, 3, 163, 195. See also self-fashioning Dandymania, Being a Dissertation on the Modern Dandies (Dandy), 167 dansomanie (dancing frenzy), 11, 63, 235n28 Danton, Georges Jacques, 34, 35, 41, 228n59 Darly, Mary & Matthew, 165, 166, 264n11 Dawe, Philip: The Macaroni: A Real Character at the Late Masquerade, 163 “De calme et du courage,” 128–30 debauchery. See decadence decadence: of ancien régime, 63, 66, 74, 80; post-Terror, 12, 63, 82, 211–12, 222–23n10 Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique, 60, 62, 64, 67, 69, 71, 72–73, 74, 76, 79, 81, 83–84, 87, 88, 92, 240–41n90 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 149 décret des deux tiers, 101, 102, 103 Defensa de los currutacos, pirracas, madamitas del Nuevo cuño y señoritos de ciento en boca (Amansi), 142, 153–54, 258–59n55, 261n85 depantheonization, 10, 58, 92 Desan, Suzanne, 65 Diario de Barcelona, 142 Diario de Madrid, 134–35, 138, 143, 146–47, 154, 258–59n55 Diderot, Denis: Jacques le fataliste, 77 Directory, 11, 104–5, 109–10, 116, 119, 123, 131, 222–23n10, 245n36, 245– 46n37, 246–47n48; debauchery, 3, 66, 97, 222–23n10 disguise, 33, 36, 38, 65, 127, 180, 205; currutacos, 154, 156, 158–59; Jacobins, 39, 40, 121, 249n87; jeunes gens, 67; muscadins, 6, 20, 30–31, 70, 226n40 Dissenters, 182 divorce/divorce laws, 50, 65, 71, 72, 74, 222–23n10 dog’s ears (haircut). See oreilles de chien

Index Dog-Tax Bill, 180 Don Abestruz: Novela vurlesca (Crespo Roche), 154, 155, 157, 258–59n55, 262n88 Don Currutaco. See Fernández de Rojas, Juan Don Líquido, 142 Don Preciso. See Iza Zamácola, Juan Antonio de Doña Lagartija, 158 Donald, Diana, 264n13 d’Orléans, Philippe (Philippe ‘Égalité’), 17, 189 Dorvo, Hyacinthe: Figaro de retour à Paris, 51, 52, 53–54, 55, 132, 232n119 draft dodging, 9, 19, 35, 36–40, 41, 57, 82, 90, 96, 97, 98, 102, 121, 224n2, 228n62 drudges, 2, 140, 143, 155, 196, 200, 201, 207–9, 210 Ducancel, Charles-Pierre: L’intérieur des comités révolutionnaires, ou Les Aristides modernes, 243n121 Du dandysme et de G. Brummell (Barbey d’Aurevilly), 3, 4, 201, 225n15 Dufour, Gérard, 256n37 Dugazon (Jean-Henri Gourgard), 31, 44, 47–48, 230–31n101; Le modéré, 40–41, 42–43, 44–46, 71, 229n75, 230–31n101 Duke of Bedford. See Russell, Francis Dumas, René-François, 58 Dumouriez, Charles François, 45 duplicity/deception, 5, 9, 30, 66, 68, 83, 235–36n37; in appearance, 38, 39, 108, 237n50; political, 66, 100 Duval, Amaury. See Polyscope Duval, Georges, 63 eccentricity, 3–4, 166, 167 effeminacy/emasculation, 1, 20, 140, 192 El Cid, 160, 256n37 El evangelio en triunfo, ó Historia de un filósofo desengañado (Olavide), 146 El libro a gusto de todos (Bado), 137 El lindo don Diego (Moreto), 255n31

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El mundo al revés, ó Contra-verdades dedicadas a los hombres, 141–42 El pensador, 256–57n43 El petimetre por la mañana, 257n48 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 130 élégant/elegante, 1 Elementos de la ciencia contradanzaria (Iza Zamácola), 136, 141, 159, 253–54n16, 262n95 émigrés/exiles, 3, 25, 26, 121, 180 Encore un concert, ou Les plaisirs du jour (anonymous), 63, 235n24, 242n114 English Civil Wars, 17, 187, 188 Enlightenment, 6, 60, 61, 77, 256–57n43, 259–60n66; as cause of revolution, 14, 139, 145, 146–47, 148; as safeguard against revolution, 14, 139, 145 enragés, 34 entail, 149 Evans, T.: “Sir Amorous Whimsy, or the Disappointed Macaroni,” 163 Éve, Antoine-François: Madame Angot, 246–47n48 exhibitionism, 105, 168 Fabre d’Églantine, Philippe-FrançoisNazaire: Le Philinte de Molière, 238–39n68 Fairchild, Cissie, 4 False Appearances (1819), 167 family unit, Thermidorian vision of, 65, 69, 74, 90 Farquhar, George: The Beaux’ Stratagem, 184 fashion, 3, 4, 95, 69, 168, 254–55n24, 263n110; eighteenth century, 3, 4, 5, 11, 143, 222n5, 222–23n10, 250n99; frivolity, 105, 112; nontranscendence of, 3, 13, 106, 128, 131, 132; political affiliation, 3, 4, 5, 68, 69, 70, 71, 113, 120, 179, 186–87, 189, 198, 199–201, 205, 222–23n10; post-Terror, 11, 12, 63–64, 105, 122, 126, 127, 128, 132, 222–23n10, 241–42n109, 250n99, 251n118, 259–60n66 Fernández de Rojas, Juan, 134, 135, 136, 142, 155, 157, 158, 251n2, 262n95;

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Index

Fernández de Rojas, Juan (continued) Censor mensual, 135, 158–59, 259n64, 261n87; Libro de moda en la feria, 135–36, 141, 144–45, 149–50, 151–54, 158–59, 200, 252n4, 258–59n55, 261n85 Feuille du salut public, 31, 32, 40, 42, 45 Feydeau. See Théâtre Feydeau Fiévée, Joseph: Le dot de Suzette, 246–47n48 Figaro de retour à Paris (Dorvo), 51, 52, 53–54, 55, 132, 232n119 Flaubert, Gustave, 232n120 fleur-de-lis, 5, 7, 97 Floridablanca, Conde de, 138, 139, 146, 149 Flügel, J. C., 105, 168, 246n39 food shortages, 30, 34, 35, 36, 50, 79, 173 forgetting. See memory and forgetting Forner, Juan Pablo: Preservativo contra el ateísmo, 146 Fox, Charles James, 165, 186, 192, 264n9, 271n151 Francis I, 27 Francophilia, 2, 135, 136 French Academy, 23 French and Indian War, 6, 198 French Republic, 33, 49; Directory, 12, 200; National Convention, 100, 101; Terror, 3, 10, 11, 50, 51, 54, 55, 59, 64, 69, 76, 85, 87, 88, 94, 189; Thermidorian Reaction, 8, 10, 22, 50, 55, 58, 59, 63, 64, 65–66, 67, 69, 76, 88, 94, 96, 136, 199 French Revolution, 2, 4, 194, 201, 205; economic/political causes, 14, 139; effects abroad, 13, 14, 138, 146, 171, 178, 188–89, 255n30; ideological causes, 14, 16, 139; storming of the Bastille, 24–25, 182 Fréron, Louis-Marie Stanislas, 49, 50, 70, 101, 136, 232n115 Freud, Sigmund, 240n82 Friedland, Paul, 229n72 Furet, François, 21, 22, 33, 64, 104 gallantry, 49, 64, 74, 80, 140, 141, 242n114 Garat, Pierre-Jean, 78, 79, 96, 111 garatisme, 78, 96

Gelbart, Nina Rattner, 235–36n37 Gendron, François, 19, 102, 224n2, 232n118, 247n54 George IV, 167, 195 Germinal Days, 49, 50, 51, 100, 169, 232n118 Germinal elections (Year V), 12, 103, 120, 129 Gil Encabo, Fermín, 262n88 Gilibert, Jean-Emmanuel, 27 Girondins. See Brissotins Godoy, Manuel, 14, 138, 139, 146, 149 Goldoni, Carlo: Le bourru bienfaisant, 76, 77, 238–39n68; Pamela nubile, 32 Gómez, D. Manuel, 251–52n3 Goncourt brothers, 105; Histoire de la société française pendant le Directoire, 11, 95 González Carvajal, José, 143 González del Castillo, Juan Ignacio, 254n22 Gordon, Adam, 177 Gourgaud, Jean-Henri. See Dugazon Goya, Francisco, 14, 136, 148, 155, 156, 262n93, 262n94 Grande Terreur, 21 Great Masculine Renunciation, 105, 168, 246n38, 246n39 Green, W. H.: “The Republican Crop,” 189–90, 192, 193 grenadier musqué, 26 Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo, 245–46n37 Guillotines. See crop Guys, Constantin, 210, 211, 212, 214 Haidt, Rebecca, 252–53n10, 253n12 hair powder, 16, 17, 20, 22, 27, 177–80, 192, 198, 265n30, 266n41, 268n96 Hair Powder Act (1795), 16, 169–76, 178, 180–82, 185–86, 194, 195, 200–201, 267n62 Hart, John: Address to the Public on the Subject of the Starch and Hair–Powder Manufacturers, 173, 176, 188, 189 Hastings, Francis Rawdon (Earl of Moira), 179–80, 195 He Would Be a Soldier (Pilon), 196 Hébert, Jacques-René, 6, 37, 40, 48, 54,

Index 101; critique of the muscadins, 46, 47, 48, 101, 158, 225n36, 226n38, 226n40; Père Duchesne, 6, 10, 20, 29–31, 33, 39, 46–47, 48, 121, 131–32, 158, 226n36, 226n38, 226n40, 228n63, 231n103 Henrion: Histoires secrètes de toutes les perruques blondes de Paris, 61 Henriot, François, 30 Henry II, 130 Henry VII, 195 Heras, Martínez de las, 253n15 Hérault de Séchelles, Marie-Jean, 32 Hervás y Panduro, Lorenzo: Idea dell’universo, 148, 149 Heuer, Jennifer Ngaire, 65 Histoire de l’Académie françoise (Pellison), 23 Histoire de la société française pendant le Directoire (Goncourt brothers), 11, 95 Histoires secrètes de toutes les perruques blondes de Paris (Henrion), 61 hoarders, 29, 34, 35, 36 Hodson, Septimus, 188, 270n133 homoeroticism, 105 Hunt, Lynn, 21, 105–6, 246n38 hypocrisy, 5, 13, 35, 42, 44, 110, 116, 119, 160, 167, 238–39n68. See also duplicity/ deception Idea dell’universo (Hervás y Panduro), 148, 149 identification with a negative label, 6, 10, 13, 24, 49, 51, 53, 113, 118, 127, 142, 146, 158, 198, 199 impayable, 243–44n10 incroyable, 1, 2, 6, 8, 11–13, 18, 95–96, 102, 103, 109–10, 111–13, 120, 129, 131–33, 136–38, 142, 152, 155, 159–60, 177, 179, 184, 194, 200, 222–23n10, 245n36, 246n38, 246n39, 248n69; as disbelieving/incredulous, 113–19; double stance, 104, 106–7; as incredible/amazing, 111–12, 127; lexical shift, 114, 116, 118, 126–27, 198; negative connotation, 13, 97, 100, 200; speech affectations, 23, 95, 96, 97, 243n6; threats of violence against, 98, 99, 112; as unbelievable/ false, 107–10

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Informe de ley agraria (Jovellanos), 149 Inquisition, 149 Institut philanthropique, 103 inversion of class hierarchy, 110, 150, 151, 153, 161, 186, 202, 204, 214, 245–46n37 irony, 6, 13, 45, 46, 47–48, 63, 104, 115, 119, 133, 158–59, 189, 262n95 Isabey, Jean-Baptiste, 248n69 Iza Zamácola, Juan Antonio de, 134, 135, 136, 142, 144, 154, 157, 158, 159, 251n1, 263n106; Elementos de la ciencia contradanzaria, 136, 141, 159, 253–54n16, 262n95 Jacobin Club, 10, 34, 50, 58, 60, 226n40 Jacobines, 226n40 Jacobins, 12, 26, 27–28, 36, 37, 49, 50, 54, 59, 66, 70, 76, 87–88, 90, 99, 105, 112, 122, 127, 128, 180, 233n10, 241n107, 249n83, 249n84; politics, 82, 121, 233n10; theatrical portrayals, 91, 93, 94, 243n121 Jacques le fataliste (Diderot), 77 Jainchill, Andrew, 105, 236–37n43, 241n107 jeunes gens, 1, 2, 9, 10–11, 13, 18, 37, 39, 40, 48, 56, 70, 78, 81, 84, 86, 88, 89–90, 93, 97, 101, 131, 136, 200, 228n66, 247n54; activism, 94, 100, 133; definition, 82, 87, 104; dismissals of, 88, 238n62; as draft dodgers, 57, 82, 90; lexical shift, 22, 198, 199; persecution of radicals/ sansculottes, 58, 59, 101, 169, 181; Reign of Terror, 19, 20; rightward movement, 102, 103 jeunesse dorée (guilded youth). See jeunes gens Johnson, James H., 79, 229n72 Johnson, Samuel, 272n175 Journal de Lyon, 25, 26, 27, 29 Journal de Paris, 97 Journal des Incroyables, ou Les hommes à pa-ole d’honneur, 95, 99 Journal des théâtres, 75 Journal général de France, 128 journée of September 5, 9, 19, 33–36, 47, 227–28n58, 228n60

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Index

Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de, 257n49, Informe de ley agraria, 149 Justinian, 129, 130 Kant, Immanuel, 204 Kleiser, Martínez, 253n15 Kuchta, David, 168 L. de T., 147–48 La blonde et la brune, ou Les deux n’en font qu’une (Sewrin), 62, 236n41, 237n50 La Bruyère, Jean de: Les caractères, 160, 213 La Caramba, 257–58n50 La Chaussée, Pierre-Claude Nivelle de: Maximien, 74, 75 La faculté vengée (La Mettrie), 24, 32 La jeunesse dorée (Gendron), 19, 102, 224n2, 232n118, 233n4, 242n116, 247n54 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de: La faculté vengée, 24, 32 lapels (wide), 11, 95, 119 La perruque blonde (Picard), 59, 62, 63, 67, 68–71, 72, 75–76, 77, 78, 82, 85, 90, 113, 200, 238n63 La perruque blonde, ou Le bourru généreux (Laus de Boissy), 62, 71–78, 83, 85, 93, 238–39n68 La première réquisition (Picard & Lépitre), 36–40, 43, 52, 57, 67, 70, 82, 86, 97, 229n72 La république traitée du haut en bas ou chaque chose remise à sa place, 103 La sentinelle, 101 La vraie républicaine, ou La voix de la patrie (Laus de Boissy), 76 labeling, 10, 20, 22, 33, 37, 40, 48, 88, 99, 127, 133, 142, 148, 161, 182, 199, 231–32n112, 244n22, 259n65 Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, 105, 235n29 L’ami des loix (Laya), 32, 41–42 L’ami du peuple (Marat), 45 L’ami du peuple, ou Les intrigans démasqués (Cammaille-Saint-Aubin), 42, 43, 229–30n79, 230n90 L’art et la nature, ou La manie des perruques, 62, 239n69

Laus de Boissy, Louis de: La perruque blonde, ou Le bourru généreux, 62, 71–78, 83, 85, 93, 238–39n68; La vraie républicaine, ou La voix de la patrie, 76 Laussel, François-Auguste, 25 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 205, 209 Laver, James, 168 Law of 20 Pluviôse, 92 Law of Suspects, 30, 31, 50, 249n83 Laya, Jean Louis: L’ami des loix, 32, 41–42 Le barbier de Séville (Beaumarchais), 52 Le bourru bienfaisant (Goldoni), 76, 77, 238–39n68 Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou La folie du jour (Périn & Cammaille-Sain-Aubin), 56, 57, 59, 62, 71, 82, 83, 84–85, 86–87, 88, 90, 94, 229–30n79, 240n89 Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou L’agrément du jour (Martainville & Chaussier), 62, 83, 90–94, 235n23, 242n114 Le danger des liaisons (Beaunoir), 57 Le déjeuner, 111 Le dot de Suzette (Fiévée), 246–47n48 Le menteur, 116–17, 119 Le messager du soir, 50 Le modéré (Dugazon), 40–41, 42–43, 44–46, 71, 229n75, 230–31n101 “Le monde incroyable, ou Les hommes et les choses” (Charlemagne), 117–20 Le Philinte de Molière (Fabre d’Églantine), 238–39n68 “Le réveil du peuple,” 59, 101, 102, 232n115 Le thé, 129, 130, 250n91 Le véritable ami des loix, ou Le republican (Villeneuve), 42, 43, 229–30n79 Lecointre, Laurent, 75 Lefebvre, Georges, 64 Legendre, Louis, 189 legibility of appearances, 5, 39, 65, 107, 120, 155, 180, 200, 205, 206, 209, 214. See also transparancy Legislative Assembly, 25 Legrand, Louis-Melchior: Les hommes du jour démasqués, 110, 247n54 Lépitre, Jacques-François: La première

Index requisition, 36–40, 43, 52, 57, 67, 70, 82, 86, 97, 229n72 Les caractères (Bruyère), 160, 213 “Les collets noirs” (Pitou), 122–24, 126 Les hommes du jour (Allaire), 109–11 Les hommes du jour démasqués (Legrand), 110, 247n54 Les incroyables (Montansier play from pluviôse Year V), 113, 126, 248n67 Les incroyables, ou La liberté des modes (Boullault), 126–28 Les incroyables, ou Le danger des plaisirs (L’Heureux), 107, 108, 247n49 Les précieux du jour, 111 Les vrais incroyables (Amar du Rivier), 246–47n48 Levellers, 17, 184, 187, 188 L’Heureux, C. F. L.: Les incroyables, ou Le danger des plaisirs, 107, 108, 247n49 Libro de moda en la feria (Fernández de Rojas), 135–36, 141, 144–45, 149–50, 151–54, 158–59, 200, 252n4, 258–59n55, 261n85 “L’inconvénient des perruques des dames” (anonymous Décade article), 61–62, 64, 65, 67, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 84, 234 lindos, 1, 139, 140, 142, 255n31 L’intérieur des comités révolutionnaires, ou Les Aristides modernes (Ducancel), 243n121 Livesey, James, 105 livres, 79, 83 lobby lounger. See box-lobby loungers/ puppies Lobby Loungers, The (Stuart), 184 L’orateur du peuple, 50 lorgnette/quizzing glass, 13, 95, 96, 98, 155 Los currutacos chasqueados, 142, 146, 148 Los currutacos del día (Moncín), 135, 142, 262n92 Los majos vencidos (de la Cruz), 143, 256n37 Louis VII, 130, 131, 251n118 Louis XV, 23 Louis XVI, 26, 31, 41, 66, 139, 204 Louis XVII, 5 Louis XVIII, 103

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Louvet de Couvray, 101 luxury, 9, 16, 25, 37, 67, 79, 83, 85, 135; critiques of, 67. See also conspicuous consumption Lyons: emergence of the muscadins, 19, 22, 24–26, 27, 29, 36, 226n33, 228n62; Jacobins, 27, 28; luxury-based economy, 26, 28, 38, 226n36, 226n38; siege of, 9, 29; silk industry, 9, 24; uprising against Convention, 28–29, 30, 34, 226n33 macaroni, 1, 2, 7, 9, 17, 143, 165–67, 190, 193–94, 196, 263–64n4, 264n13; artifice/excessiveness, 162, 163; fashion, 165, 166, 168, 198; hairstyles, 168, 169; social class, 165, 166 Macaroni: A Real Character at the Late Masquerade, The (Dawe), 163, 168 Macaroni Club, 165 Madame Angot (Éve), 246–47n48 Madame de Chateauroux. See MaillyNesle, Marie Anne de Madame de Pompadour. See Poisson, Jeanne Antoinette Madame de Rambouillet. See Vivonne, Catherine de Madame de Tallien. See Cabarrus, Thérésia Mailly-Nesle, Marie Anne de (Madame de Chateauroux), 23 maja, 146, 257–58n50 majismo, 143, 247n49 majo, 14, 136, 143, 146, 152–53, 257n48, 49 Man, Paul de, 273n10 mandat, 103 máquina calzonaria, 254n22 Marat, Jean-Paul, 10, 26, 41, 42, 45, 50, 58, 92, 230–31n101, 235–36n37, 242n116 Marie Antoinette, 66, 67, 68, 78, 172, 235–36n37 Marie Louise of Savoy (princess of Lamballe), 177 Marmontel, Jean-François: “Le bon mari,” 57 “Marseillaise,” 101

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Index

Martainville, Alphonse-Louis-Dieudonné, 56, 58, 62, 88, 93, 136; Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou L’agrément du jour, 62, 83, 90–94, 235n23, 242n114; Les suspects et les fédéralistes, 62 Martin, James, 182 Martin, Jean-Clément, 228n60 Maslan, Susan, 229n72, 238–39n68 Mason, Laura, 123, 244–45n24, 250n96 Mathiez, Albert, 64 Maximes (Rochefoucauld), 160 Maximien (La Chaussée), 74, 75 Maximum, 50, 79 Meister, Jakob Heinrich, 235–36n37 melodrama. See paranoid imagination: melodramatic side memory and forgetting, 11, 54, 63–64, 81–82, 85, 91, 94, 99, 100, 210; collective amnesia, 81, 82; historicizing, 91, 92; vacillation between, 63, 91, 92, 210, 242n114. See also anachronistic imagination Mercier, Louis Sébastien, 19, 20, 97, 98, 107, 121, 235–36n37, 251n118 merveilleuse, 1, 11, 50, 66, 97, 105, 108, 112, 113, 127, 222–23n10, 243–44n10, 248n69 middle class, 16, 151, 168, 176–77, 179, 245n36, 264n13 Minister’s Head—Dressed according to Law, The, 189 modéré/modérantisme, 2, 10, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 42, 49, 131; condemnation of, 2, 10, 35, 42, 43, 53, 230n90, 230–31n101; theatrical representations, 10, 32, 40–43, 44–45, 46, 52–53, 71, 131, 229n75 Moers, Ellen, 3 Molière, 87, 88, 116, 195, 238–39n68 Moncín, Luis: Los currutacos del dia, 135, 262n92 Montesquieu: Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, 128–29 Moral, Pablo del, 137 Moreto, Agustín: El lindo don Diego, 255n31

Morton, Thomas: The Way to Get Married, 186 moscardino, 23 Mountain, 28, 34, 66 mules révolutionnaires, 4 Murdock, John: The Beau Metamorphized, or The Generous Maid, 198 Muscadin, 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 10, 13–14, 30, 44, 46, 61, 133, 136, 206, 224n2, 225n22, 228n62; blurring of fiction and reality, 32, 33, 46; characters named, 23–24, 30, 32; derogatory connotation, 10, 19, 26–27, 29–30, 36, 57, 82, 88; as figure of difference, 46–47; invention/origin of word, 20, 226n33, 228n62; lexical shift, 20, 21–22, 37, 40, 41, 42, 49, 199, 226n33; as moderate, 10, 26–28, 31, 40–44, 46–48, 53; positive connotation, 11, 22–23; Reign of Terror, 19, 20, 26, 99, 199; relations with sansculottes, 30, 31, 46, 48–55, 231–32n112 muscadine, 64, 226n40 National Convention, 19, 28, 29, 32, 34, 39, 41, 50, 58, 75, 79, 83, 127, 139, 228n59 National Guard, 25, 28 negro curro, 251–52n3 Neufchâteau, François de, 31, 32 Nicolaïe, Louis François. See Clairville 9 Thermidor, 49, 64, 68–69, 85 Nivière-Chol, Antoine, 26, 27 Notoriety (Reynolds), 271n153 Olavide, Pablo: El evangelio en triunfo, ó Historia de un filósofo desengañado, 146 Oliver, José Prego de, 251–52n3 oreilles de chien, 11, 95, 98, 99, 111, 145, 248n59 Ortiz, Fernando, 251–52n3 Ozouf, Mona, 11, 35, 63–64, 91 Pamela (Richardson), 31, 32 Pamela nubile (Goldoni), 32 Paméla, ou La vertu recompense (Neufchateau), 31, 32, 41, 42, 46, 227n44 paranoid imagination, 2, 6, 7, 9, 10, 33, 36,

Index 106, 121, 122, 131–32, 155, 156, 161, 208; anxiety about false appearances, 5, 65, 67, 80, 83, 99, 111, 131; melodramatic side, 31, 51, 110, 210; Reign of Terror, 12, 40, 72, 115; transformative side, 32, 46, 159–60, 205 Paris Commune, 25, 27, 34, 35, 37, 65 parvenu, 107, 111, 246–47n48 Payan, Claude-François, 65, 235–36n37 Peasant’s Revolt (1381), 175 Pelham; or The Adventures of a Gentleman (Bulwer-Lytton), 207–8, 209 Pellison, Paul: Histoire de l’Académie françoise, 23 Père Duchesne (Hébert), 6, 10, 20, 29–31, 33, 39, 46–47, 48, 121, 131–32, 158, 226n36, 226n38, 226n40, 228n63, 231n103 Périn, René: Le concert de la rue Feydeau, ou La folie du jour, 56, 57, 59, 62, 71, 82, 83, 84–85, 86–87, 88, 90, 94, 229–30n79, 240n89 Perruques de toutes le couleurs (Aude), 62, 234n22, 237n49 peti-maja, 257–58n50 petimetra, 140, 222–23n10, 255–56n35, 257–58n50 petimetre, 1, 2, 135, 136, 140, 141, 142, 143, 159, 253n12, 253n13, 256–57n43, 257n48, 258n51, 262n92 petit-maître, 1, 2, 3, 10, 24, 28, 70, 96, 135, 136 physiognomy, 5, 205, 209, 223n11, 268n96 Picard, Louis-Benoît: La perruque blonde, 59, 62, 63, 67, 68–71, 72, 75–76, 77, 78, 82, 85, 90, 113, 200, 238n63; La première requisition, 36–40, 43, 52, 57, 67, 70, 82, 86, 97, 229n72 Pichegru, Jean-Charles, 121, 126 Pilon, Frederick: He Would Be a Soldier, 196 Pindar, Peter, 171 pirraca, 134, 135, 142–43, 150–51, 153, 200 pisaverde, 142 Pitou, Ange, 122, 250n96; “Les collets noirs,” 122–24, 126

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Pitt, William, 14, 16, 17, 20, 169, 170, 171, 172, 175, 179, 181, 189, 192 Poisson, Jeanne Antoinette (Madame de Pompadour), 23 political culture: in England, 178–79, 180; in France, 2, 10, 14, 24–25, 59, 64, 70, 76, 85, 104, 133, 200–201, 245n36; in Spain, 139, 158, 160–61 poll tax, 175, 267n61, 267n62 Polyscope (Amaury Duval), 234n15; “Sur les costumes,” 61; “Sur un fameux concert,” 78–81, 82, 83, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 240–41n90 popinjay, 1 Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste. See Molière pouvoir éxécutif (gnarled cane), 67, 95, 96 Prairial Days, 55, 100, 101, 127, 169, 232n118 précieux, 1, 111 Preservativo contra el ateísmo (Forner), 146 primogeniture, 149 prosopopeia, 203, 205, 206, 209, 214, 273n10 prostitution, 31, 184, 213–14, 243–44n10 Prot, Frédéric, 252–53n10, 253n12 Quevedo, Francisco de, 140 Racine, Jean, 87, 88 Rauser, Amelia, 166 Ravel, Jeffrey S., 229n72 reenactment vs. repetition, 13, 54–55, 59, 63, 66, 76, 80, 94, 97, 100, 104, 145, 211–12 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 174 refractory priests, 26 Regency England, 3 Reign of Terror, 9, 26, 29, 58, 65, 75, 79, 80, 81, 97, 102, 126, 180, 199, 227n49, 228–29n58, 235–36n37, 237n50, 241n103; causes, 19–21, 48, 77, 88, 148, 199; criticisms of, 14, 22, 47, 49, 51, 59, 64, 70, 89, 228n60, 238n62, 241n103; excesses, 2, 13, 14, 72, 76, 82, 85, 101, 105, 116, 117, 120, 121, 189, 249n74; fashion

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Index

Reign of Terror (continued) of, 63, 97, 178, 241–42n109, 249n83, 249n84, 259–60n66; philosophy of, 35, 40, 55, 115, 159; politics of, 2, 10, 80, 99, 138, 148, 178, 201, 228n60, 236–37n43 Reubell, Jean-François, 120, 131 Révellière-Lépeaux, Louis Marie de la, 120, 131 Revolutionary Tribunal, 26, 34, 58, 116, 126 Reynolds, Frederick: Notoriety, 271n153 Rapsodies du jour, 114–15, 116 Richard II, 175, 267n62 Richardson, Samuel: Pamela, 31, 32 Riffaterre, Charles, 25 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 10, 20, 21, 34, 41, 42, 49, 58, 75, 80, 116, 121, 228n59 Rochefoucauld, François de la: Maximes, 160 rodrigones, 141, 160, 161, 200, 256n40 Roland, Jean-Marie, 25, 26 Rolland: Arlequin perruquier, 62, 234n22, 236n41, 237n47, 241–42n109, 242–43n118 Roundheads, 187, 188, 189, 270n130 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 238–39n68 Rousselin, Alexandre, 31, 32, 33, 36 royalists, 10, 25, 32, 36, 49, 51–52, 54, 80, 102, 103, 113, 121, 131, 200 Russell, Francis (Duke of Bedford), 16, 17, 186, 187, 189, 191, 195, 198, 200 Ruyter, Nancy Lee Chalfa, 262n95 sainetes, 146, 258n51, 259n60 Saint-Aubin, Camille, 230–31n112 Saint-Just, Louis Antoine de, 49 Sanponts, Francisco. See Amansi, Serapio Sansculottes, 4, 7, 27–28, 34–35, 36, 37, 58–59, 124, 152, 176, 189, 228n59; clothing, 7, 30, 46, 61, 70, 120, 138; publications, 6, 20; relations with muscadins and jeunes gens, 14, 30–31, 40, 48–55, 71, 88, 97, 101, 169, 181, 200, 231–32n112 Santeuil, Jean de, 239n69 Sarasin, Jean François, 130, 131

Sartine, Antoine de, 115 Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), 2, 4, 18, 106, 196, 201, 206–10, 214, 215 satire, 6, 24, 78, 110, 111, 117, 118, 120, 130, 136, 138, 140–41, 142, 146, 148, 150, 158, 159, 163, 165–66, 175, 187, 256–57n43, 258–59n55, 259–60n66 scarf à la guillotine, 4, 138 Schechter, Ronald, 235n30 Seasons, The (Thomson), 191, 192 self-fashioning, 8, 18, 82, 108, 123, 124, 177, 203, 205–6, 213; of the crops, 163, 168, 201; of the currutacos, 142, 155, 156; of the jeunes gens, 38, 64, 69, 83; male vs. female, 5, 69, 85, 90, 176, 223– 24n10, 237n49; of the muscadins, 10, 40–41, 64, 70; politics of, 2, 13, 16, 41, 50, 170, 171–72, 194, 198, 199, 200–201, 222–23n10, 241–42n109 Sennett, Richard, 222n6, 246n39 señoritas (madamitas) del nuevo cuño, 134, 143, 251–52n3, 263n109 señoritos de ciento en boca, 150, 151, 153–54, 260n77 September Massacre (1792), 34, 58, 101, 128, 177, 235–36n37 Seriman, Zaccaria: Viaggi di Enrico Wanton, 147, 259n61 Serna, Pierre, 105, 232n114, 237n51 Sewrin, Charles-Augustin de Bassompierre: La blonde et la brune, ou Les deux n’en font qu’une, 62, 236n41, 237n50 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 180 Siegfried, Susan L., 245n36 signes de ralliement, 5, 127, 200 silk industry, 9, 24, 25, 28 social mobility, 7, 107, 109, 151, 153, 154, 166, 177, 184, 185, 196, 198, 200, 205, 246–47n48, 247n52, 262n92 Spang, Rebecca, 105 Spence, Thomas, 266n51 squared jackets, 127, 128 street violence, 58, 94, 120, 133, 145, 151, 181, 242n114 Stuart, Charles: The Lobby Lounger, 184 sumptuary laws, 140, 169, 205

Index surface judgments, 69, 70, 160, 161, 228n66, 237n49, 242–43n118 “Sur les costumes” (Polyscope), 61 “Sur un fameux concert” (Polyscope), 78–81, 82, 83, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 240–41n90 surveillance, 10, 21, 33, 180 Sweden, 25 symphonic music, 79, 90, 93–94, 239n73 Tallien, Jean Lambert, 49, 50, 66, 70, 89, 101 Talma, François-Joseph, 31, 45 Tanastès conte allégorique (Bonafon), 23, 24, 30, 224–25n13 Théâtre ci-devant du Marais, 62 Théâtre de Brest, 250n101 Théâtre de la Cité-Variétés, 234n22, 235n23, 241n109, 243n121 Théâtre de la Comédie-Française, 31, 32, 40, 41 Théâtre de la Gaîté, 235n24 Théâtre de la Montagne, 234n22 Théâtre de la Nation, 31, 32, 42 Théâtre de la République, 31, 41, 62, 229n75 Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique, 56, 57, 62, 76, 79, 87, 88, 90, 233n6, 234n21, 240n89 Théâtre de Molière, 62, 229–30n79, 234n18, 247n50 Théâtre des Variétés, maison Égalité, 93, 234n22, 235n23, 242n116, 243n121 Théâtre du Palais-Variétés, 228n61, 229n79 Théâtre Feydeau, 8, 57, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 89, 91, 94, 110, 119, 239n73, 240n88, 240–41n90, 242n114 Théâtre Martin, 232n119 Théâtre Montansier, 113, 126, 247n49 Thomson, James: The Seasons, 191, 192 Thuriot, Jacques-Alexis, 47 Tissier, André, 235n25 tonadilla, 137, 152, 153, 254n23, 257n50 Torres Villarroel, Diego de: Visiones y

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visitas con Don Francisco de Quevedo, 139–40, 141, 142, 143 Traité de la vie élégante (Balzac), 4, 17–18, 201, 202–6, 214, 215 transparency, 5, 6, 65, 68–69, 85, 104, 120, 127, 139, 160, 161, 179, 205, 206, 209, 238–39n68. See also legibility of appearances trauma, 2, 11, 20, 21, 34, 54–55, 58, 63, 64, 85, 88, 94, 105, 139, 249n84 treason, 2, 11, 34, 35, 44, 126, 139, 237n50 triumvirs, 120, 121, 131 ultras, 8, 138 unmasking/revelation of identity, 6, 7, 13, 33, 39, 54, 61, 70, 101, 107, 110, 113, 123, 127, 131, 155, 158, 159, 160, 180, 206, 227n53, 237n50 Vadier, Marc-Guillaume, 75 Vauxhall Affray (1773), 263–64n4 Vendémiaire Insurrection, 102, 121 Vernet, Carle, 11, 95, 97, 98, 99, 102, 103, 107, 111, 112, 113, 136, 137, 145, 155, 156, 179, 184, 248n67 Viaggi di Enrico Wanton (Seriman), 147, 259n61 Ville Affranchie (Lyon), 29 Villeneuve, Citoyenne (François CizosDuplessis): Le véritable ami des loix, ou Le républicain, 42, 43, 229–30n79 Visiones y visitas con Don Francisco de Quevedo (Torres Villarroel), 139–40, 141, 142, 143 Vivonne, Catherine de (Madame de Rambouillet), 23 Voiture, Vincent, 23 Voltaire, 146 voting rights, 103 Walpole, Horace, 166 War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), 140 Warhol, Andy, 215 Way to Get Married, The (Morton), 186 wealth inequality, 14, 41, 83, 128, 139, 149, 169, 172–73, 174, 177, 240–41n90

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Index

West, Shearer, 166, 265n16 Whigs, 165, 179, 194, 268n83 Wilde, Oscar, 4, 215 Woloch, Isser, 104 women, 11, 19, 27, 69, 72, 75, 85, 116, 123, 124, 198, 214, 236–37n43, 238n63, 240n88, 256n36, 256–57n43; fashion, 69, 70, 81, 82, 85, 97, 105, 112, 140–41, 158, 186, 222–23n10, 234n15, 245–46n37, 249n84, 250n91, 255–56n35, 258–59n50, 259–60n66; hairstyles, 60–61, 62, 65,

66, 68, 145, 181, 186, 195, 235–36n37, 238n63, 271–72n160; ideas of beauty, 85, 149–50, 213; libertinage, 12, 80, 90, 105, 107, 236–37n43, 243–44n10; property rights, 65, 222–23n10; republican women, 76, 82; self-fashioning, 85, 90, 237n49. See also divorce/divorce laws; prostitution “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” 6, 196, 198