10
Freedom of Dress in Revolutionary France
Lynn Hunt
"Freedom of dress" is not usually counted as one of the inalienable human rights central to modern democratic politics. It might be related to Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence, but freedom of dress hardly seems central to life, liberty, or the protection of property. Even so, dress, with both its freedoms and constraints, turned out to be one of the most hotly contested arenas of revolutionary cultural politics. It provided the most visible marker of both adherence and resistance to new social and political conceptions, including notions of gender definition. Its powers of signification went far beyond the vagaries of la mode , beyond even the identification of political groupings; it touched on the very definition of the new body politic and especially on the definitions of the many different bodies, both male and female, that made up that new body politic.
As in many other questions of cultural politics, French revolutionaries veered between two extremes in their attitude toward dress: on the one hand, they wanted to erase all the supposed legal encumbrances of the Old Regime and make what one wore yet another arena for free choice (and market forces); on the other hand, they harbored a more repressive wish to insist on consensus by enforcing completely new regulations about personal adornment. The cockade is a prime example of the latter impulse. The red, white, and blue cockade appeared on men's hats as early as 16 July 1789, spontaneously signaling adherence to the new nation. Over the years, however, the appearance of the cockade, its size, and the material used in making it all became the subject of controversy. Large woolen
ones soon seemed more democratic than small silk ones. On 5 July 1792 the Legislative Assembly ordered all men to wear it by law, a requirement repeated by the National Convention on 3 April 1793.[1]
These laws apparently did not apply to women. When the Society of Republican and Revolutionary Women was founded in May 1793, one of their first acts demanded that members wear the cockade (fig. 10.1). The club also sent an address to the forty-eight sections of Paris inviting all women to follow their example. In the summer of 1793, a "cockade war" broke out pitting club militants against market women who made a practice of ripping off the cockade to show their disdain for the female Jacobines and their mimicry of men. At the beginning of September, a group of women from another club initiated a petition drive to force the municipal and national governments to take action. In response, the city government forbade women to appear in public without a cockade. The National Convention, meanwhile, temporized, and street battles erupted once again. On 21 September the Convention finally ordered all women to wear the cockade, promising a six-year prison term as punishment for tearing off someone's cockade.
Matters did not end there. In October, the struggle shifted to the red liberty cap, frequently worn by female club members during their meetings. On the twenty-eighth of that month a pitched battle erupted during one of the meetings of the Republican and Revolutionary Women. Some of the women who had come to watch shouted, "Down with the red cap, down with the Jacobines, down with the Jacobines and the cockade."[2] Faced with a full-scale melee, the club members fled.
The next two days their opponents took the floor of the Convention. A deputation of women appeared to present a petition complaining of the efforts of "supposedly revolutionary women" to force them to wear the red liberty cap. The president assured them that the Committee on General Security was in the midst of preparing a report on the subject. Fabre d'Eglantine then took the floor in an angry mood:
There has already been trouble over the cockade. You decreed that all women must wear it. Now they want the red cap: they won't rest there, they'll soon ask for a belt with pistols, in such a way that this will coincide perfectly with
[1] Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 57–59.
[2] For the most complete account, see Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); originally published as Citoyennes tricoteuses: Les Femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française (Aix-en-Provence: Alinéa, 1988), 163–77.
Figure 10.1
Citoyenne au pied , anonymous
engraving, ca. 1791. By permission
of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
the maneuver of raising crowds about bread, and you will see lines of women going for bread like men march to the trenches. It is very adroit on the part of our enemies to attack the strongest passion of women, that is, their attire [ajustement ].
Fabre went on to attack women's clubs, claiming, to much applause, that they were composed of "adventuresses, wandering female knights, emancipated girls, and amazons." He called for a decree forbidding all efforts to force changes in dress. The Convention then ruled that "no person of either sex may constrain any citizen or citizeness to dress in a particular manner, each individual being free to wear whatever clothing or attire of its sex that pleases him, under pain of being declared suspect." At the same time, and in somewhat contradictory fashion, the Convention explicitly maintained its previous decrees requiring the cockade.[3]
The next day, 30 October, Amar delivered the eagerly awaited report of the Committee on General Security. He began with a description of recent troubles: "Several women, so-called Jacobines, of a Society that pretends to be revolutionary, promenaded this morning at the markets ... in pantaloons and red liberty caps; they tried to force other women to adopt the same costume.... A crowd of some 6,000 women formed. All the women agree in saying that violence and threats will not force them to wear a costume that they honor but which they believe to be reserved to men."[4] He went on to develop at some length the rationale for the exclusion of women from the public, political sphere and for the suppression of women's clubs as dangerous to public order and to the natural division of sexual functions. The Convention thereupon officially suppressed all women's political clubs.
Thus the conflicts over women's fashions ended in the simultaneous declaration of freedom of dress and the suppression of women's political organizations. A curious progression in concerns had developed in the course of these disputes. The deputies to the Convention wanted to enforce wearing the cockade as a badge of revolutionary belonging, but they drew the line when it came to women forcing other women to wear more controversial tokens of revolutionary enthusiasm such as the red liberty cap. Such women supposedly played on "the strongest passion of women,"
[3] Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur universel , no. 39 (9 Brumaire Year II/30 October 1793), recounting the session of 8 Brumaire Year II. All translations from the French, unless otherwise noted, are mine.
[4] Moniteur universel , no. 40 (10 Brumaire Year II/31 October 1793), recounting the session of the preceding day.
their concern for dress, and turned it into a form of masculinization, wearing "a costume reserved to men." Dress had become too public an issue for women, and it signaled their intrusion into a public sphere seen as masculine (thus requiring masculine dress). The answer, it seems, was to reaffirm freedom of dress for women as long as their choice of dress remained confined to the private sphere and to feminine sartorial options. It would soon become apparent that men did not enjoy the same freedom of dress.
The declaration of freedom of dress obviously grew out of motives much more complicated than a simple break with Old Regime sumptuary laws. As Daniel Roche has argued, sumptuary laws had long been disregarded and were in any case caught up as much in royal monetarist policy as in efforts to defend the distinctiveness of the nobility.[5] The revolutionaries, however, had been habituated by their reading of the philosophes, especially Voltaire, to see in sumptuary regulation an attack on liberty.[6] Lying behind this conception of liberty was some notion of the operation of the market, but this was never fully elaborated either in the discussion of sumptuary regulation or in the many revolutionary discussions of dress.[7]
In 1789 the crown seemed to revive sumptuary legislation when it insisted that the deputies of the three orders wear distinctive costumes for the opening session of the Estates General: the clergy wore clerical costumes reflective of rank; the nobility wore hats with white feathers and clothing adorned by lace and gold; and the deputies of the Third Estate wore the sober black and three-corner hats of the magistrature (fig. 10.2). These prescriptions revived the spirit if not the letter of sumptuary laws and instantly politicized the question of dress. On 10 May 1789 Mirabeau published a letter from Jean-Baptiste Salaville denouncing the distinction in costume decreed by His Majesty's master of ceremonies as "absurd,"
[5] Daniel Roche, La Culture des apparences: Une Histoire du vêtement (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle ) (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 54.
[6] Old Regime sumptuary laws have apparently attracted only the attention of legal historians interested in the long-term development of the practice. See, for example, Etienne Giraudias, Etude historique sur les lois somptuaires (Poitiers, 1910). I have not been able to locate any source that discusses eighteenth-century sumptuary laws in detail.
[7] In the eighteenth century the marchandes de modes suddenly increased in number; they were first attached to the merciers and then, after 1776, to the plumassiers-fleuristes . See Madeleine Delpierre, "Rose Bertin, les marchandes de modes et la Révolution," in Madeleine Delpierre et al., Modes et révolutions, 1780–1804 [Catalogue of an exposition at Musée de la mode et du costume, Palais Galliera, 8 February-7 May 1989] (Paris: Delpierre Editions Paris-Musées, 1989), 21–25.
Figure 10.2
Deputies of the three Estates, anonymous engraving, 1789. By
permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
"ridiculous," and "the height of despotism and debasement." The prescription of different dress for the different orders, he charged, only reinforced "that unfortunate distinction between orders that can be regarded as the original sin of our nation." Yet even Salaville did not conclude from this that all notions of official costume should be discarded; instead he argued that the National Assembly should be responsible for adopting any such costume, operating on the principle that all deputies represented the "universality of the kingdom" and hence should be dressed exactly the same.[8] This same tension between dressing for difference and dressing for equality would appear again and again. For the moment, however, Salaville's suggestion fell on deaf ears; the deputies soon opted for the elimination of signs of difference between the three orders, leaving to each deputy the choice of individual costume.[9]
Freedom of dress had a very ambiguous history during the revolutionary decade because the deputies followed competing agendas: they wanted to wrench French society away from past habits of social dis-
[8] Lettre du comte de Mirabeau à ses commettans , as published in the Moniteur 's account of the early days of the Estates General, Réimpression de l'Ancien Moniteur (Paris, 1847),1:27 (6–14 May 1789).
[9] Jean-Marc Devocelle, "D'un costume politique à une politique du costume: Approches théoriques et idéologiques du costume pendant la Révolution française," in Delpierre et al., Modes , 83–103.
tinction and at the same time underline the legitimacy of the new regime, in part by introducing distinctive markings for officials and also, of course, by maintaining gender differentiations. New kinds of functional distinctions had to replace the old objectionable social ones. On 20 May 1790, for instance, the National Assembly voted to dress all mayors in a tricolor sash.[10] In April 1792, in contrast, the Legislative Assembly decreed that members of the suppressed religious orders could no longer wear their customary costume. In proposing this decree, Bishop Torné explicitly rejected the argument that this constituted an attack on freedom of dress (la liberté des vêtements ):
Would it be permitted to one sex to wear indistinctly the clothing of one or the other sex? Do not the police prohibit masks and cockades that might be a sign of a party opposed to the Revolution? Do not the police prohibit clothing that undermines morals? And if the simple clothing of a citizen is susceptible to a multitude of wise regulations, would religious costume, which can entail so many abuses, then not be submitted to any police rule?[11]
Freedom of dress could not mean complete absence of regulation, at least not for men.
Thus, it is not surprising that the Convention did not explicitly declare freedom of dress until confronted with the very particular problem of women's political insignia. Long after they rendered their declaration, moreover, dress continued to be a subject of potential regulation, especially insofar as official costume was concerned. In March 1794 a local Parisian deputation appeared on the floor of the Convention to demand the suppression of judge's costumes "because they seem to us to recall monarchical, feudal, and chivalric ideas; because the robe, by its form and its color, retraces the memories of nobles and priests, which contrasts too violently with our republican sentiments."[12] Decrees requiring the cockade were repeated all during the Directory government, but at the same time, the government also restated its insistence on freedom of dress in order to prevent street fights over the color of clothing, black collars in particular being associated with royalism.[13] Dress had to be regulated in its
[10] Ibid., 85.
[11] Réimpression de l'Ancien Moniteur , 12:62 (7 April 1792).
[12] Ibid., 20:64 (8 Germinal Year II/28 March 1794).
[13] See, for example, ibid., 28:490 (26 Brumaire Year V/18 November 1796; requirement to wear the cockade); 28:770, 771 (30 Thermidor Year V/17 August 1797; reaffirmation of freedom of dress and troubles over black collars); 28:797 (21 Fructidor Year V/7 September 1797; troubles over a black costume).
official modes, free in its absolutely private ones, and was therefore a subject of constant contention in the areas in between (in particular the private/public wearing of the cockade).
Despite the best efforts of revolutionary legislators, dress necessarily crossed over the line separating private and public, especially since the distinction between public and private itself came under intense pressure with the politicization of many aspects of daily, private life. As the case of the Society of Republican and Revolutionary Women shows, the question of dress intersected at least two different axes of concern: the gender axis of the appropriate differentiation between men and women, and the political axis of the necessary differentiation between friends and enemies, insiders and outcasts, in the new revolutionary order.
Gender and political differentiation operate in every society, but during the French Revolution they became especially charged because their very definition came into question. The system of gender differentiation by dress underwent a profound transformation, what J. C. Flügel called "The Great Masculine Renunciation." As he put it, "Men gave up their right to all the brighter, gayer, more elaborate and more varied forms of ornamentation, leaving these entirely to the use of women.... Man abandoned his claim to be considered beautiful."[14] Men began to dress alike, whereas women's dress took on more of the burden of class signification. I will return to Flügel's argument in greater detail below; for now I want simply to suggest that disputes about appropriate female dress involved more than a simple reassertion of gender distinctions. They took place against a backdrop of subtle but momentous realignments of the gender/dress system.
Similarly, the very foundations of the political system shifted. A body was no longer defined by its place in a cosmic order cemented by hierarchy, deference, and readily readable dress; each individual body now carried within itself all the social and political meanings of the new political order, and these meanings proved very difficult to discern. With sovereignty diffused from the king's body out into the multiple bodies of the nation, the old codes of readability broke down and new ones had to be elaborated. The uncertainty of this situation was reflected in the seesaw of regulatory practice concerning dress.
The body assumed such significance in the French Revolution because the long-term shift from a sacred to a secular framework of legitimacy made the workings of the social both more visible and more problem-
[14] J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (New York: Hogarth Press, 1969), 111.
atic. In an important theoretical work on the role of the French Revolution in the process of secularizing legitimacy, Brian Singer offers what he calls "a history of social visibility." Using concepts first developed by Cornelius Castoriadis, Singer argues that the Revolution fundamentally altered the relation of visible powers to the larger society. Under the Old Regime, schematically speaking, society seemed to be given from without, transcendentally, that is by the will of God, with the king—the only visible power—embodying the presence of the divine. Society had no immanent, self-given status; society was only appearance or façade. The separation of state and society did not become possible, Singer insists, until society was successfully designated as the source of its own power. The Revolution completed the auto-institution of society, and it was this transference that made the revolutionary process revolutionary (and, some would argue, violent, because auto-institution is inherently unstable). The Revolution was made possible by the claim that society provided its own legitimation, and it was driven forward by disputes over the exact meaning of this claim.[15]
The development of a secular, societal framework for legitimacy does not mean that all notions of the sacred disappeared. Sacrality was still present but now displaced from the king's single body into the collectivity of bodies in the nation. As a result, the social came more closely into focus, and the bodies of individuals were even more intensely invested with significance. In other words, the Revolution brought into consciousness a new awareness of the social as a category. Bodies had to be closely examined for their meanings, but the system of decodification was constantly in flux. The strangest incidents of the Revolution can only be explained in this way, from the concern over the greenish putrefaction of Marat's body during his funeral to the executioner's slap of the severed head of Charlotte Corday, causing it to blush. All bodies had to be examined closely because all bodies now made up the body politic; every body literally embodied a piece of sovereignty, or at least some connection to it. As a consequence, the whole subject of appearance was valorized in new and particularly significant ways.
This long-term shift explains, as well, why the body is so central to the disciplinary practices analyzed by Michel Foucault. Almost all of Foucault's investigations concerned the body in the crucial transition period toward modernity: the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth cen-
[15] Brian C. J. Singer, Society, Theory, and the French Revolution: Studies in the Revolutionary Imaginary (New York: Macmillan, 1986), esp. 5.
turies.[16] This is the period of the secularization of legitimacy, the challenge to divine-right theories and the rise of socially immanent ones as a replacement. Although he never says so, Foucault's image of the dispersion of power rests on the eruption of democracy in the eighteenth century, and much of the characteristic postmodern problem of differentiating between democracy and totalitarianism can be traced back to Foucault's own inability or unwillingness to distinguish between the two. For him, all forms of bodily discipline are essentially the same: democracy and totalitarianism are equally carceral. Although both democracy and totalitarianism are made possible by the shift of sovereignty from the king to the nation, their common sources of enablement do not make them the same phenomenon.
We do not yet have a history of the body that enables us to distinguish clearly between totalitarian and democratic forms of discipline.[17] The question of dress provides an especially significant window onto this set of problems because dress was the field in which both gender and political differentiation were played out, and at times played upon, as the case of the Society of Republican and Revolutionary Women shows. Foucault did not discuss dress, just as he did not discuss gender (except in the most abstract terms), yet it seems likely that dress—and gender, one of whose most visible components is dress—are crucial to modern conceptions of the individual, and by extension to the modern conception of democracy. Anne Hollander makes the link in Sex and Suits when she argues that the modern aesthetic principles of fashion reflect the modern democratic "ideal of self-perpetuating order, flexible and almost infinitely variable."[18]
Democracy, especially in practice, creates enormous tensions about the various forms of social and gender differentiation.[19] In the most radical moments of the French Revolution, the idea of social differentiation itself came under attack. There is no need to belabor the obvious signs of the disintegration of a body politic based on deference and the clearly read-
[16] It might be argued that Foucault's chronological focus steadily shifted from the seventeenth century toward the nineteenth century from the time of his writing Madness and Civilization (first published 1961) to The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976). Only in his last two posthumous volumes did he shift away from this central period.
[17] Dorinda Outram certainly does not provide it, since her work is fundamentally confused on just this issue; see The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
[18] Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1994.), 9. She does not, however, recognize that this same ideal may be more closely tied to the operation of the capitalist market than to democracy.
[19] I discuss the tensions surrounding gender differentiation in Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
able signs of social status: the killings of the king and queen, the elimination of titles of nobility, the drive to repress the vous formal form of address and the title Monsieur and replace them with a universal tu and Citoyen , the imitation of the dress of the sans-culottes by various political figures, and so on. Even the recommended style of writing letters changed. According to Le Secrétaire des républicains , a letter-writing manual of 1793, those who had been reduced by misfortune to serving "their equals" should no longer be called lackeys or domestics but rather "homme ou femme de confiance." Letters should be simply signed "salut" or "salut et fraternité."[20] This attack on an ancien régime based on deference and evident social distinctions inevitably created anxiety about the legitimacy of any form of social difference (class especially, but also to some extent race and gender).
This is not to say that most revolutionaries dreamed of a society utterly without distinctions. They wanted to install a new system of signs, marking individuals by their utility and republican virtue (and, of course, maintaining gender differentiations as well). Thus festivals instituted new kinds of functional divisions. More sinister forms of marking were suggested but not taken up. One deputy proposed in October 1791 that all nonjuring priests should wear a badge on the left breast reading, "Priest, suspected of sedition." Others suggested that prostitutes be forced to wear special colors. Saint-Just proposed that injured soldiers wear gold stars on their clothing over the spots of their wounds.[21] These all reflected an obvious concern with transparency, inspired by Rousseau: clothes should reveal the inner person, not provide a means of dissimulation.
At the center of anxiety about social differentiation stood the body, the preeminent site for revolutionary signification and symbolization.[22] Although the body was central to the revolutionary reformulations of political and social meaning, its clothing always raised more questions than it could solve. Clothing inevitably underlined political and social differences, whereas republicans wanted to emphasize sameness and consensus (except in the arena of gender, where the republicans insisted on differ-
[20] As quoted in Janet Gurkin Altmam, "Teaching the 'People' to Write: The Formation of a Popular Civic Identity in the French Letter Manual," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture , vol. 22, ed. Patricia B. Craddock and Carla H. Hay (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press 1992), 159–60.
[21] Nicole Pellegrin, Les Vêtements de la liberté: Abécédaire des pratiques vestimentaires en France de 1780 à 1800 (Aix-en- Provence: Alinea, 1989), 123–24.
[22] On the meanings of the French word corps and its allegorical and symbolic development during the Revolution, see the remarkably rich work of Antoine de Baecque, Le Corps de l'histoire: Métaphores et politique, 1770–1800 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993).
ence). As a consequence, contemporary clothing came to seem virtually incompatible with republican ideals. Rarely did either Liberty or Hercules, two of the most current republican icons, appear in contemporary garb in revolutionary allegories. Roman dress and nudeness both had the effect of erasing the reference to contemporary social distinctions and enforcing the sense of consensus that stood above social differentiation. Pornography, the underside of revolutionary idealization, operated in a similar fashion. The nude pornographic scene made the basic materialist point that all bodies are alike. Clothing in pornography—showing monks or nuns in their customary dress, for example—served to inject a social distinction into the action, but by implication, such figures were in the process of losing their clothing too, of becoming like everyone else.[23]
To control the signifying possibilities of clothed bodies in the revolutionary festivals, organizers tended to rely on either uniforms or special dress. As Mona Ozouf explains, the revolutionaries tried to reduce social man to biological man in the festivals. In the Festival of the Supreme Being of June 1794, everyone had an indispensable part to play, "whether as father or husband, mother or daughter, rich or poor, young or old." Yet when one club in Compiègne suggested that a simple village girl march alongside an elegant citizeness, the festival organizers rejected the proposal because it would call too much attention to social divisions. Even rich and poor were to be alike in some fashion in the festivals. The program for the Festival of the Supreme Being called for young ladies to use powder with restraint and to bunch up their skirts in the Roman style. In other festivals women most often appeared in white dresses crowned with oak wreaths.[24]
Given the heightened importance of the social and its signification by the body, it might be presumed that men's and women's public appearances would be equally freighted. Or alternatively, men's dress might matter more than women's because men mattered politically whereas women presumably did not (women could not vote or hold office, and after October 1793 they could not even form their own political clubs). The story is more paradoxical, however, than either of these formulations would suggest. Put most schematically, men's dress mattered more politically, but the result was to make it more uniformlike over the long run; in other
[23] For more on the relevance of pornography to these questions, see Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1993).
[24] Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution , trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 114–15.
words, because of its greater potential political signification, it came to be evacuated of some of the most obvious signs of difference.
The long-term shift in the coding of men's dress has recently attracted attention from film and literary critics and art historians much more than from historians. At issue is "The Great Masculine Renunciation," the homogenizing of male dress at the beginning of the nineteenth century to eliminate the obvious sartorial display that characterized aristocratic society.[25] The sumptuary legislation that had once guaranteed the accurate display of social rank for both men and women under the Old Regime gave way to a more implicit code of masculine sameness and female difference. As Kaja Silverman has argued, this historical shift provides the grounds for the modern equation of spectacular display with female subjectivity (that women are objects to be looked at by men), and the very fact that it is historical undermines all the psychoanalytic explanations (insofar as they are ahistorical) of the controlling male "gaze," so central to film theory. In the past, men were as much subject to being looked at as women. The difference between beholding and being beheld is therefore not part of an intrinsic gender identity, whether imagined as biological or cultural.
Silverman only sketches out her argument, but it is very suggestive. The history of fashion shows ornate dress to have been a class rather than gender prerogative during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, a prerogative protected by law. (The eighteenth century represents a transitional period in this regard, one in which commercial fashion steadily replaced sumptuary legislation in the determination of dress.)[26] Under the ancien fashion régime, extravagance in clothing signified aristocratic power and privilege; it was, as Silverman insists, "a mechanism for tyrannizing over rather than surrendering to the gaze of the (class) other."[27] The elegance and finery of male dress at least equaled that of female dress during the classical period—and indeed, since the end of the Roman empire; hence visibility was a male as much as or even more than
[25] Flügel relates this shift to the French Revolution and the idea of fraternity, but his main center of interest lies elsewhere than in a historical account. Hollander explicitly dismisses Flügel's thesis only to reincorporate it into her own analysis: speaking of the eighteenth century, she claims, "men gradually came to look similar; and to desire to look similar" (Sex and Suits , 97; cf. 22).
[26] Jennifer Jones of Rutgers University is preparing a book on this transitional period. I have benefited from the observations she offers in her introduction.
[27] Kaja Silverman, "Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse," in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture , ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 139–52, quote 139.
a female attribute. Most commentators seem to agree that a major change took place in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but no one has offered a compelling explanation of just why and how it occurred then. Why did men give up their hair, for example, their long locks, their wigs—or as one observer puts it, their century and a half of immunity to the crowning injustice of nature?[28]
In other words, class distinctions within male dress blurred toward the end of the eighteenth century, while gender distinctions between men's and women's dress became all the clearer. (Thus French republicans could insist on all men wearing the cockade even while insisting on freedom of dress for women.) Women's dress carried all the messages of social distinction, while men's dress began to shun them. Eventually all men wore trousers of somber colors, rather than expressing their class differences by the length and color of their pants (silk, brightly colored breeches for the rich; gray or brown woolen trousers for the working poor). Trousers, according to Philippe Perrot, constituted one of the rare examples of a fashion moving up rather than down the social scale.[29] Men also now wore their own and only their own hair rather than wigs or powdered hair for the upper classes. They stopped using makeup, except on the stage. In short, they cut off all resemblances to female finery.
The Revolution did not transform the dress codes overnight, and men's dress continued to carry some of the freight of social distinction. Yet the Revolution did put enormous stress on male dress and on the signification of the male body. Mona Ozouf has remarked, for example, that women and children in processions and festivals often appeared indiscriminately, without social categorization, while men were always carefully ordered and categorized.[30] The presence of women and children was taken to symbolize the community as a whole rather than any particular social station or function (other than motherhood or childhood, the biological categories). Men had more individual representativity, as it were.
As a consequence, it was perhaps inevitable that the republican government would consider the introduction of uniforms not only for all officials but for all male citizens. As early as 1792 David made sketches for a new national male costume. According to John Moore, his sketches at
[28] Quentin Bell as cited in ibid., 140.
[29] Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century , trans. Richard Bienvenu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 31.
[30] Ozouf, Festivals , 41.
that moment resembled "the old Spanish dress, consisting of a jacket with tight trowsers, a coat without sleeves above the jacket, a short cloak which may either hang loose from the left shoulder or be drawn over both; a belt to which two pistols and a sword may be attached, a round hat and a feather."[31] In 1794, on official request, David designed a national male costume that combined Renaissance and antique motifs with a tight-fitting tunic, a cloak, and classical tights (fig. 10.3).[32] The pantaloon and tights obviated the choice between breeches and trousers.
The Popular and Republican Society of the Arts defended the idea of a national costume on the grounds that it fulfilled the goal of "announcing or recalling everywhere and at every instant the fatherland, of distinguishing French citizens from those of nations still branded by the irons of servitude; it would offer easy means for designating both the age and the diverse public functions of the citizens, without altering the sacred bases of equality."[33] In other words, a national costume would reinforce the break with the Old Regime and mold republican citizens for the new one. Here freedom of dress for men has clearly been much attenuated, if not effaced altogether.
Although the government never manufactured these civil uniforms, Denon produced an engraving of David's sketch, and discussion of appropriate dress continued even after the fall of Robespierre.[34]La Décade philosophique , soon to be one of the leading Directorial journals, carried lengthy discussions of dress throughout the summer of 1794. One of the contributors to the journal recommended a new style of men's dress that in many ways resembled a uniform: tunics with sleeves that did not go below the elbow (so that men's muscles would be evident—"that is the beauty of men"); unpowdered hair falling just below the neck; no hats except when traveling because they were not healthy; simple slippers or sandals that left the toes free and could be taken off at the doorway; and a formless coat, "a kind of portable tent." Similar but much briefer recommendations were offered for women's dress: they should also wear tunics and similar shoes and wear their own hair held back in a simple knot, washed and lightly perfumed with ribbons as decoration.
[31] Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution (London: B. T. Batsford, 1988), 101.
[32] For more on David's uniform, see Jennifer Harris, "The Red Cap of Liberty: A Study of Dress Worn by French Revolutionary Partisans, 1789–1794," Eighteenth-Century Studies 14 (1981): 283–312.
[33] As quoted in La Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique 1 (10 Floréal Year II): 62.
[34] On previous projects for civil uniforms, including some for children's dress, see Devocelle, "D'un costume politique," 89–90.
Figure 10.3
Denon, after David, sketch for a new national costume,
1793. By permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
La Décade went on at some length about the inconveniences of women's wigs.[35]
The Directorial republic eventually established official costumes for all branches of government, and the Consulate and Empire continued the practice.[36] When Grégoire presented the official report of the Committee of Public Instruction on the subject of official costumes on 14 September 1795, he specifically referred to the emotions caused by dress regulations at the opening of the Estates General, a long six years before:
The suppression of orders, which had presupposed a difference between civil and political modes of existence, brought in its train the suppression of costumes; but the Constituent Assembly was wrong not to substitute a costume common to its members. From that moment the dignity of its sessions steadily diminished. The harm worsened until the epoch when the tyrants who oppressed the National Convention did all but put cleanliness and decency on the list of counterrevolutionary crimes and prided themselves on wearing their contempt for propriety on their sleeves.[37]
The legitimacy of the government seemed to depend on being able to represent itself coherently in an immediately apprehendable fashion. But navigating between the excessive social distinctions of the ancien régime and the erasure of all social distinctions under the Terror proved nearly impossible.
The official costumes now seem quaint and sometimes even bizarre, yet they did announce an important break with Old Regime habits. In the royal court uniforms appeared only on exceptional occasions, such as the crowning of the king, and most often they had a religious significance; secular dress codes for the various professions conveyed social status and rank. Revolutionary and Napoleonic uniforms, in contrast, signaled the representativity of power: an official carried the marks of popular sovereignty rather than of his specific position within a social order defined by relative proximity to the body of the king. Even the uniforms introduced in Napoleon's imperial court to reestablish links to the monarchy signaled different purposes: they served as a kind of livery with a touch of militarism.[38]
[35] La Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique , 2 (30 Thermidor Year II): 136–43 (Lettre de Polyscope au Rédacteur de la Décade sur les costumes); esp. 2 (20 Fructidor Year II): 279–86 (Troisième lettre de Polyscope); and 3 (30 Vendémiaire Year II): 147 (on wigs). I am grateful to Elizabeth Colwill for bringing this discussion to my attention.
[36] Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class , 75–81. See also Devocelle, "D'un costume politique," 92–97.
[37] Réimpression de l'Ancien Moniteur , 25:763 (3eme jour complémentaire Year III/19 September 1795).
[38] For brief remarks on this subject, see Madeleine Delpierre, "Le Retour aux costumes de cour sous le Consulate et l'Empire," in Delpierre et al., Modes , 33–39, esp. 38.
Figure 10.4
Incroyables , anonymous engravings, 1795. By permission of the
Bibliothèque Nationale.
The efforts to enforce uniformity of male dress predictably produced reactions, even among ardent revolutionaries. While some men donned the red liberty cap and mimicked the dress of the sans-culottes in 1793–94, others stuck by their middle-class forms of dandyism. Robespierre, for example, always wore a powdered wig, knee breeches, buckled shoes, and silk shirts. After the end of the Terror, sartorial opposition became the order of the day, the most spectacular examples of which were the incroyables and muscadins (a word used in the mid-eighteenth century for scented fops) who appeared in 1795 in the aftermath of the fall of Robespierre. They usually wore knee breeches in the old style, powdered hair or shaggy side locks falling like spaniel's ears, and fancy footwear (fig. 10.4). Their costumes seemed designed to emphasize individuality of choice rather than any consistent form of royalist dress. In Paris they roamed the streets looking for a fight, singing anti-Jacobin songs (including the taunting "Remettez vos culottes"), effacing revolutionary inscriptions, and ripping the cockade off suspected Jacobins. "Remettez vos culottes" played on the different possibilities of the term "sans-culottes," which could mean (in addition to simply "without culottes") not a wearer of knee breeches and hence someone who wore trousers instead. One verse ran: "Don't trust the intriguer / Who praises the indecent costume of our false patriots. / Don't push liberty to the point of letting down your pants, / Put your pants back on! [Remettez vos culottes ]." The other side in these costume street battles would grab a muscadin and tear off his black or green collar
(considered counterrevolutionary colors) and shear his hair "à la Titus," that is, in the new short style associated with neoclassical austerity and republican virility.[39]
Still, the trend toward the Great Masculine Renunciation was clearly present, even if vehemently resisted by the incroyables and later by Napoleon himself. Napoleon tried to reinstitute much of ancien régime fashion after 1804, wearing the kind of coat worn at the court of Louis XVI and gradually replacing his republican pantaloons with aristocratic knee breeches (in part to hide his increasing portliness). Certain trends, however, were not reversible. More and more men wore English-inspired tailored costumes in dark colors with few adornments. Although returning aristocrats tended to favor powdered hair and tight-fitting knee breeches in the old style, most middle-class men wore trousers or pantaloons and kept their hair in a natural style, whether tousled or à la Titus. Even Napoleon kept the Titus cut of his youth (fig. 10.5). Whereas women wore clothes to show their sex, especially in the transparent whites of the Directorial period, men began to dress to look alike.[40]
The trend toward masculine sameness already attracted commentary during the decade of revolution. In February 1792, for instance, the Journal de la mode announced that "for some time now, men's apparel has hardly been worthy of attention ... coats, for the most part, are brown or black; frock coats of the worst taste; vests are almost all red."[41] In contrast, women's fashion changed at a vertiginous pace, which the Journal de la mode attributed to the disappearance of the nobility: "Since the abolition of titles, many women can only distinguish themselves by a continual variety in their attire." Such comments were appearing as early as August 1790.[42]
The fashion journals that sprang up after the end of the Terror sounded similar notes. In 1800, Le Mois offered a little history of French fashion in its pages, claiming that "in the first centuries of the monarchy, the clothing of men varied more in its major forms than that of women."[43] This was no longer true. The post-Thermidor fashion journals showed continual variation in women's fashion and commented little if at all on men's
[39] The best brief account is in Ribeiro, Fashion , 115–17.
[40] It should be noted, however, that in 1796 women also started wearing a version of the Titus cut. The mode lasted until 1809 with several variations. See Françoise Vittu, "1780–1804, ou vingt ans de 'révolution des têtes françaises,'" in Delpierre et al., Modes , 41–57, esp. 51. Most commentary on this fashion for women seems to have come after 1800.
[41] Journal de la mode , 5 February 1792, 2.
[42] Journal de la mode , 5 August 1790, 2.
[43] Le Mois , [Prairial] Year VIII, 288 (at this time the journal no longer specified the month; Prairial was determined here by counting backward).
Figure 10.5
Bonaparte as first consul, 1800.
By permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
fashion. The Journal des modes et nouveautés , for example, claimed in the spring of 1799 that the Titus cut so dominated among men that even those who had to wear wigs to cover their baldness wore wigs with a Titus cut. In 1797 the same journal insisted that women's fashion changed all the time: "The fashion now is to follow none. In a circle of thirty women, you will not see two hairstyles, two dresses, two get-ups that resemble each other."[44] In his Encore un tableau de Paris published in 1800 (Year VIII), Charles Henrion claimed that "In the past, [a fashion] lasted three or four months, and sometimes a whole semester; now, it changes every fifteen days, and there is never one pronounced enough to enjoy preference over the others. This comes from the fact that there is no longer a court, and as a result, no longer a rallying point for a fashion. In the olden days, Versailles set the tone."[45]
[44] Journal des modes et nouveautés , 15 Ventôse Year VII 516; 20 Frimaire Year VI, 10.
[45] Charles Henrion, Encore un tableau de Paris (Paris, Year VIII), 125.
Men's fashion seemed to fall into oppositional categories rather than multiple variations, no doubt because of the politicization of the revolutionary decade. According to a 1799 issue of Le Mois , for instance, "men are divided into two classes for hairstyles only, the Titus and the Powdered "—and powdered hair was definitely losing out. In 1800, the same journal described "a great quarrel" that had arisen between the pantalonistes (trouser wearers) and the culotistes (sic , wearers of knee breeches). In its view, the pantalonistes were bound to win because the new consuls and ministers gave their audiences in trousers.[46] The trend in men's clothing was there to be seen, even if the final outcome remained in doubt in the 1790s and early 1800s.
The post-Terror fashion journals carried forward the same ambivalence about women's fashion that had characterized their eighteenth-century precursors.[47] The Rousseauian disdain for women's use of their adornment to get their way still appeared in the very journals that sold precisely because they provided women with indicators of the latest fashions. Le Mois , for instance, reproduced the Rousseau line in 1800: "Women, this enchanting sex, born for the happiness of one part of our sex and for the torment of the rest, women, I say, discontent with the little that the laws have done for them in the distribution of direct power, have sought in all epochs to acquire by cunning what they cannot reasonably hope to obtain by open force." Clothing was obviously central to this cunning. Yet the same journal concluded that "we must be fair; women dress infinitely better today than in the past, with more taste and lightness."[48]
Women's dress seemed to elude all facile categorizations such as the purported divisions between men who wore powdered hair and those who wore Titus cuts or those who wore trousers and those who wore knee breeches. Yet one stylistic innovation in women's wear does catch the eye and call out for further investigation: the white muslin dress worn in an antique manner. White gowns in neoclassical style had appeared in fashionable and artistic circles during the neoclassical revival of the 1780s. Vigée-Le Brun held a famous "Greek supper" in 1788 in which she and her female guests wore white draped like a tunic. In September 1789 the painter David's wife and other wives and daughters of leading artists dressed in white with tricolor cockades in their hair when they went to
[46] Le Mois , Germinal Year VII, 18; Prairial Year VIII, 283–85.
[47] On the eighteenth-century journals, see Roche, Culture des apparences , 447–76.
[48] Le Mois , Prairial Year VIII, 286–87, 302.
publicly donate their jewelry to the National Assembly (fig. 10.6). David then chose the same style of dress for his festivals (fig. 10.7). Manon Roland and Lucille Desmoulins wore simple white dresses to their own executions, perhaps to make the point that they were the true republicans, not their executioners.
A similar style dominated Directorial fashions. Louis-Sébastien Mercier complained in 1798 that there is "not a petite maîtresse , not a grisette , who does not decorate herself on Sunday with an Athenian muslin gown, and who does not draw up the pendant folds on the right arm, in order to drop into the form of some antique or at least equal Venus aux belles fesses ."[49] The Tableau général du goût, des modes et costumes de Paris that appeared in 1799 published twenty fashion plates; of the fifteen that depicted women's dresses, nine showed women in white dresses and six showed women in dresses of all other colors. The journal concluded that "white is so advantageous to women that the use of it is constant, even though it is the most costly."[50] The style was immortalized in David's 1800 portrait of Madame Juliette Récamier. Napoleon, however, explicitly discouraged the style, which depended on expensive English muslins, in favor of French made silks.[51]
But what are we to make of this fashion? Can it be termed a kind of uniform for women, since it figured so prominently in republican festivals and portraiture (or at least in David's imagination)? Viewed in this way, and contrasted with the wild variation of the costume of the incroyables and the muscadins , we might be tempted to conclude that the Revolution drove women toward uniformity and sameness and men toward variation and playfulness, thus inverting Flügel's proposed gender/dress system for a time. Like trousers for men, with their origins in the lower classes, the simple-looking muslin dress, often worn with natural-looking, even untidy hair, had filtered up as a fashion from milliners' assistants and farm girls, having been first adopted by Marie Antoinette and her circle.[52]
[49] My account of the white dress comes from Mercier, quoted in Ribeiro, Fashion , 128–29.
[50] Tableau général du goût, des modes et costumes de Paris (Paris, Year VII/1799), 130. This is the only year of the journal I could locate at the Bibliothèque Nationale; the issue in question was supposed to be the first of a series, but many fashion journals disappeared after a year or so.
[51] Akiko Fukai, "Rococo and Neoclassical Clothing," in Revolution in Fashion: European Clothing, 1715–1815 , ed. Jean Starobinski et al. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), 109–17, esp. 116.
[52] Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (New York: Avon, 1975), 385.
Figure 10.6
The Patriotic Gift of Illustrious French Women , n.d. By permission of the Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille.
Figure 10.7
The Festival of the Supreme Being , 1794. By permission of the Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille.
Many different interpretations might fit the evidence of the white muslin dress draped in antique fashion. Did the white suggest the effacement of difference implicitly required by the republican project of a "new man" (or, in this case, woman)? Did the drapery reinforce the revival of neoclassical austerity and simplicity associated with republicanism? Was it as well an anti-aristocratic, antisilk, probourgeois statement, since the dress depended on fabric provided by the nation of shopkeepers, the English? Or was the naturalness of the line—often coupled with a high waistline that emphasized the maternal in women—a kind of preromantic gesture, a carrying through of Rousseauian ideals for women?
Faced with a plethora of possible meanings, the historian should probably hesitate. Dress can mean many things, perhaps because changes in fashion have no deep rationale beyond the desire to attract the attention of others. That desire takes undeniably historical and social forms, but there is no clear logic to their evolution or to the choices made at any particular moment. As Anne Hollander has argued, "The art of dress has its own autonomous history, a self-perpetuating flow of images derived from other images."[53] Desires for naturalness and simplicity, for purity and rejection of tradition, for sensibleness and practicality can and all do take a myriad of different forms, largely in reaction to the images that came before. Adam Gopnik insists, "The truth is that reason really doesn't have much to do with the reasons of fashion."[54] The white muslin dress, after all, was expensive, and for all their depictions of its multiple variations, fashion journals never offered much in the way of an explanation for its popularity.
Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to make much of specific changes in male or female fashion, it nonetheless remains true that questions of dress more broadly conceived went to the heart of the Revolution in both its democratic and totalitarian aspects. At some moments, republicans clearly hoped to break with the previous aristocratic domination of society by taking over the fashion system and literally redesigning it, that is, by providing a new code of signs for a new kind of society. But who should control these signs? The market with its drive toward constant novelty, constant expenditure, constant wasteful excess? Fashionable women with their reputed taste for luxury and control through bodily presentation?
[53] Ibid., 311.
[54] "What It All Means: Fashion? Well, Here's the Main Thing: It's Fun," New Yorker , 7 November 1994, 16.
The women of the Society of Revolutionary and Republican Women with their penchant for cross-dressing and purported masculinization? Male fashion writers and publishers with their ambivalences toward the very world from which they profited? Or the government that invented those slightly ridiculous official uniforms, half antique, half Renaissance, which never aroused any contemporary enthusiasm (thus proving that fashion could not be legislated)? There was no single answer to these questions, which in itself shows that dress could not be controlled by any one group or agency. This was so because dress was the social itself, the arena in which all social and gender distinction came into being and came under fire. As such it embodied the effervescence, as Durkheim called it, of all social interaction. We can search for its rules, but those rules constantly escape from our grasp, just as social life itself changes form just when we think we know what it is.