Changing Appearances: From Court to Beau Monde

The redefinition of taste was not only the philosophical result of a will to distinguish art from luxury. It may well have also been prompted by the rise of another phenomenon inseparable from luxury, indeed made possible by increased wealth and luxury, namely fashion , which, like economics and aesthetics, also achieved its autonomy with the decline of baroque society. The significance of fashion in the course of the eighteenth century thus merits a digression that may help to answer the questions raised above when we wondered whether eighteenth-century Parisian society was or was not a proto-consumer society.

Around 1755, Rousseau, prompted in part by his very real sickness but also by moral considerations inseparable from appearances, decided to reform his life. He began with a reform of his appearance, to bring it into correspondence with his self, his true being: "I began my reform with my dress; I quit gold gilding and white stockings, took on a round wig, gave up my sword, sold my watch, telling

myself with incredible joy: Thank Heaven I shall no longer need to know what time it is" (Confessions , bk. 8, 363). Rousseau's change of appearance signaled his resolution to break the fetters of opinion and fashion and to live in independence and poverty rather than continue wearing a mask, the mask required by polite society and one which the philosophes were willing to assume even while condemning the baroque society epitomized by that mask. Diderot, as Rousseau later realized, after they had gone their separate ways, had become a monsieur . Rousseau, whatever his success, still felt himself of the people, certainly not at ease in Parisian society, and he would dress accordingly, as dictated by his health and sentiments rather than by fashion. As for the watch he gave up, it was a gesture pointing to another aspect of fashion: the regulation of social appearances, calls to be made, obligations to be seen at certain places and at certain times. Time, one might say, regulated entrances and exits in the world just as it did changes of scene on stage.

Rousseau's gesture may seem revolutionary from our present-day perspective; to his philosophical acquaintances it was simply madness. One may, however, also argue that is was a profoundly conservative, even reactionary, gesture, for it implicitly accepted the traditional requirement that appearances correspond to being. Rousseau thus pointed to a baroque society gone wrong because appearances no longer corresponded to reality. Dress in baroque society, ever since the early seventeenth century and the first appearance of satires on fashion, had oscillated between two poles, stability and fashion, with fashion invariably associated with change. Both luxury and fashion thus constituted threats to the assumed correspondence between appearance and being, and therefore to the stability of society. The comic element in Molière's Bourgeois gentilhomme derives from the gap between Monsieur Jourdain's pretensions and his being—between what he would appear to be with the help of his tailor, his master of arms, his philosophy tutor, and his dancing master, and what in reality he

was born to be, a well-off commoner in trade. From the point of view of baroque society, pretensions to quality threatened the correspondence between appearance and reality on which the social world was founded. Political, social, religious, and artistic considerations required that in baroque society everyone remain in his or her God-given station and look as if he or she did indeed belong there.

This relation of appearance to being was nothing if not the general aesthetic principle of convenance , linked to bienséance , or decorum, and even to verisimilitude. It is obvious that while baroque society may have taken its justification from religion, it ultimately rested on merely aesthetic principles. It is the aesthetic and social discrepancy between appearance and being which made for the innumerable comic and ambiguous moral situations of the novels and plays of the period, and of course in real life as well. What made Casanova, a commoner of dubious extraction, possible was precisely the power which imagination as fashion exercised in the face of evidence to the contrary. He was fashionable, and he appeared and played his role in fashionable society, a new scene which appeared in the course of the eighteenth century, a scene different from that of the court yet an offshoot of it, and by the end of the century unmistakably cosmopolitan. Curiously enough, even Rousseau, for all his antisocial gestures, would also become fashionable, too much so for his peace of mind and the repose of his body. In the eighteenth century as in our own time, "the system," here fashion, had a way of absorbing even its opponents. The power of fashion was such that it transformed the old baroque court society into what we may call the beau monde . The change becomes evident in the art of portraiture.

The grand flowering of the portrait in the baroque testifies to the age's belief in the importance of appearances

even when it was suspicious of appearances. For the age believed that appearances ought to be in harmony with being, with reality; it distrusted appearances only because it knew that this was not always the case. Thus kings ought to look like kings, princes ought to look princely, the great of this world ought to look their part, and so on down the social scale. Where there was no or little correspondence between appearance and reality, between nature and the ideal, then art might correct and improve on nature. Thus if a king did not look very kingly, as with Charles I of England, then a Van Dyck might very well improve upon the king and produce a representation which made him truly look the part of the realm's First Gentleman. Louis XIV was lucky enough to be a handsome youth and to look the part he was born to; similarly Louis XV, though not Louis XVI. As for the Hapsburgs of both Austria and Spain, despite their chins and lips, a Titian or a Velázquez left no one in doubt as to what they were: the emperor looked like an emperor and the king like a king. Even ministers like the Count-Duke of Olivares and Cardinal Richelieu were represented with the grandeur, dignity, and gravity befitting their high office. The very idea of monarchy thus found its emblematic representation in the official standing portrait with its by-now-familiar attributes—the crown, the scepter, the grand column, the billowing curtains, the sword of Charlemagne for Louis XIV—while the equestrian portrait made of the king a leader of armies, a conqueror, a hero.

Attributes as signs of rank might extend from the highest echelons of society down to the lowest rank still worthy of being represented for the public gaze. And as Diderot, following Montesquieu, perceived, each rank had its own air, its own attitudes, its own expression, determined not only by the conventions of art but also by its position in society and the form of that society—monarchy, republic, despotism. Princes, bishops, dukes, and lesser ranks all had to look their part. But it was apparent, too, that the merely

rich might also, by art, be made to look grand and princely. Thus the wealthy Samuel Bernard, who was privileged to lend money to Louis XIV, had himself portrayed with the same grand column and billowing curtains as a prince would, though to signify his earthly role the painter did not neglect to include a globe and a fleet of ships to point out Bernard's grand commercial interests. Monarchs, like popes and saints, might also be portrayed in their moment of apotheosis, rising to the heavens where angels awaited their coming; or monarchs might be portrayed accompanied by the allegorical figures of certain virtues which, as some contemporary observers did not fail to note, they did not personally possess. Then there were the beauties of the court, who might also be portrayed, and beautified, as muses or pagan deities that no one believed in.

By the mid-eighteenth century these conventional portraits had been reduced to just that, a convention of limited appeal and interest. The art of portraiture in this manner had reached a certain limit. For the true type of Enlightenment portraiture one must look elsewhere.

The allegorical portrait was of course already a departure from the baroque-Christian moral requirement of the conformity of appearance to being. But this was a mere game, a play of the fancy, somewhat as the opera was a free play of the fancy. Verisimilitude was kept to a minimum. But together with the critique of opera, of poetic imagination, and of luxury, there also came an associated critique of baroque dress, in the name of both nature and health—and this was bound to affect the art of portraiture. Increasingly over the course of the eighteenth century it was no longer the court alone which set the tone and presumably determined those appearances which were supposed to correspond to being. The call for a more natural model, and the influence of the town, both began to play a role in the creation of appearances. Fashion, in short, began to determine the representation of men, women, and children, thus in effect altering the relation of appearance to being. Where

Van Dyck had improved upon nature to make Charles look like a king, the portraitists of the eighteenth century were called upon not so much to make sitters look their rank as to make them appear in harmony with something far more fluid and undefinable: the need to look fashionable. One might say that in the course of the century the town rivaled and eventually triumphed over the court by creating "society," even when "society" left town for its summer houses and châteaux in the country. By the end of the eighteenth century, court and town were united as participants in a new spectacle: society and its ever-varying fashions. And not only did fashion create fashionable portraitists, but the portraitists in turn created a fashion and made it known abroad—for fashion required a whole host of portraitists and draftsmen and engravers to spread its own creations.

In this long and by no means uniform transformation of portraiture, the roles of Reynolds and Gainsborough are of particular importance. It may well be that in England the influence of the court was weaker in matters of taste and fashion than in France, so that English society was less obliged to follow the court. Gainsborough and Reynolds would find their French equivalent later in the work of Madame Vigée-Lebrun, but for the moment they were innovators of appearance: they invented appearances as fashion rather than as representations of rank. Fashion might be described as the result of life dominated by the imagination and imitating art—which is not the same thing as rank submitting to artistic conventions of representation in order to embody the idea of what a king, a duke, a count, a great magistrate, or a hero ought to look like, so that appearance is made to correspond to being, to substance.

Thus when Reynolds adapts certain poses gleaned from antique statuary to the modern Englishman or when Gainsborough adapts Van Dyck dress and style to modern men and women, they are creating not a representation of rank in the baroque manner, as Rigaud or Rubens or Velázquez

did, but a new appearance not necessarily corresponding to any supposed substance or being or rank. They are creating pure appearance, what we call an image . What critics of baroque portraiture had seen as mere convention and illusion, discord between appearance and being, was here replaced by illusion of a new sort, one which conveyed the appearance of naturalness rather than observing the obligations and rules of representation imposed by rank. A lord need not appear as a lord, but as a man of fashion; a duchess need not appear as the Duchess of Devonshire, but as a lady of fashion. This shift was not gratuitous, for fashion dictated naturalness—a naturalness which was enhanced by the park backgrounds, the children, sometimes the melancholy of certain feminine portraits, as well as color, pose, and costume. Fashion replaced the representation of rank, which presupposed a social hierarchy, with a new creation, one which lifted those represented out of the social to a new realm of existence: distinction. These new portraits made visible the aesthetic elite.

In his 1925 work, La Barrière et le niveau , the French philosopher Goblot perceived distinction to be that which characterized the nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie. For him, distinction was a separate category, a separate trait, from the aesthetic. The aesthetic, in his view, remained linked to the beautiful; thus he associated the old nobility with the aesthetic and the bourgeoisie with distinction. In truth, if he had considered portraiture from the Baroque through the end of the eighteenth century, he might have discerned his category of distinction in the making and come to see that here, as in so many other matters of social usage, the bourgeoisie was merely imitating the old nobility.

With Reynolds, Gainsborough, Vigée-Lebrun, Lawrence, and Gilbert Stuart, portraiture enters into the system of fashion, which gains its autonomy over the course of the eighteenth century. Montesquieu, as early as his Lettres persanes of 1721, had perceived that luxury begets fashion,

which begets distinction, which saps the stability of the social hierarchy. When a chambermaid can look like a duchess, social stability is threatened; but comedy is possible. It is precisely this drive for distinction that in portraiture means individuation and makes of the eighteenth century portrait such a rich source of interest and enjoyment. This adaptation of art to the creation of the new appearance makes for an element of aestheticism which is inseparable from the work of certain British portraitists who depicted high society. Reynolds in the Academy and in his Discourses may have sought to maintain the true taste of the grand manner, but in fact he lived off fashion. Dandyism was not far off.

As a result of the power of fashion, court society in the eighteenth century was gradually displaced by a new creation: the beau monde. If the courtier, the honnête homme, the English gentleman, the hero, and perhaps even the newly arrived philosophe might all represent baroque types, what, given the critique of appearances, would be the new man and woman represented in the new portraiture? We have said they would be given more individuality than their forebears; but one can nevertheless also see them as representing a new type. Historically speaking, there is no doubt that they do in fact represent the new elite of the eighteenth century, as distinct from the old nobility. What then do they have in common?

One is tempted to say, borrowing from the Physiocrats but giving the word a different meaning, "class"—class, in other words, as we still use the term today, as something standing apart from economic considerations. The new elite was no longer founded on inherited rank or mere title but on wealth and accomplishment, and what the portraits of this new elite do, in effect, is to give wealth and accomplishment "class." It is one thing to be rich, quite another to have class. The instrument used to confer this "class" was fashion, as the beau monde supplanted the court as general model for society. The painters of this new beau monde

were Madame Vigée-Lebrun, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Gilbert Stuart, and others. They managed to give this new elite an air of naturalness, affability, civility, and ease, so that one quite naturally and without question accepted their ruling position in society and their distinction from the generality of mankind recently declared to be born equal and endowed with natural rights. Appearances had, despite philosophical criticism, once again triumphed over reality. Daniel Roche in his book on dress in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, La Culture des apparences , sums up the trend as follows:

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among the higher classes, ornament and finery dictate masculine and feminine habits and a maximum of artificiality and decorative increase. A quarter of a century before the Revolution, philosophical criticism denounces the generalized excesses of fashion and aristocratic consumption in the name of Nature, which results in imposing the artificiality of the natural which is anything but economical. (51)

For Roche, the old baroque problem of the correspondence between appearance and being is resolved through the rise of fashion and its eventual autonomy in the triumph of appearances. Might this then imply that by 1789 society was more baroque than ever—that the Baroque had in fact triumphed over the Enlightenment?

If, as historians would have it, baroque society was the solution to the general crisis of the seventeenth century, then fashion was the fatal flaw within the structure of the Baroque. As Maravall has pointed out, innovation was blocked in religion, in politics, in law, even in science and technology in some countries, and consequently could thrive only in artistic and poetic caprice. Novelty in the arts

hid the lack of it in the social structure and the power structure: "Passion for the outlandish, where it was permitted, developed monstrously among peoples who found their ways blocked to a rational criticism of social life" (Culture of the Baroque , 229). The Enlightenment critique of modern life, of society, of established customs and tastes, hardly eradicated the outlandish: the freedom of imagination inherited from baroque fantasy was now perceived in negative terms, in both art and fashion—in the arts as decadence, in fashion as something unnatural and unhealthy. Fashion thus continued to be seen by Christian moralists, now seconded by philosophes and economists, as opposed to reason and nature, and as frivolity, caprice, and excess. The author of the article "Mode" in the Encyclopédie could thus write that "fashions destroy and succeed each other sometimes without the least appearance of reason, the bizarre often being preferred to the beautiful simply because it is novel" (quoted by Roche, 435). Thus, the Encyclopédie author continues, when a rhinoceros turned up in Europe, probably the one painted by Pietro Longhi in Venice, there was not a woman without three or four such creatures upon her as ornamentation; later these same women would be rushing about town to get a bonnet au lapin, au zéphir, au cupidon, à la comète , or what have you.

Had the article "Mode" been written in the 1780s, its author might also have mentioned the coiffure à la Junon , to wit, a coiffure decorated with a model of the frigate Juno , which had participated in the American War of Independence. For hairdressing was one art which triumphed over nature even after Rousseau. Marie Antoinette paid her fashionable hairdresser Leonard 1,574 livres for his work in 1784 and allowed him to dress the hair of other ladies, so that he was soon the favorite choice to dress one's hair for court receptions. Here the Baroque survived with all its fantastic freedom of expression intact. Some elaborate constructions had to be prepared the day before the reception, thus forcing the ladies to sleep sitting up or standing the night before the

event so as not to disturb these magnificant artefacts. Some coiffures were decorated with real flowers, which drew water from glass vials hidden within their complicated structures. Others sported mechanical birds which might be set to trill. And there was one type of coiffure, called à la mère , which might be raised or lowered at will by a mechanical device in case an overly lofty headdress alarmed some elderly lady. One might thus say that just as the last fireworks at court were the manifestations of a surviving baroque art form—a typically ephemeral art form—so these fantastic coiffures were likewise a surviving manifestation of baroque play, caprice, fantasy, and imagination.

Despite its excesses, to follow fashion had become an obligation for higher society and for those who wished, on a more modest level of expense, to follow in its wake. The life of society came to be regulated by the vicissitudes of fashion, affecting not only dress and coiffure but also pleasures and amusements, places to be, things or persons to see, events to be attended. Parisian and London society became a spectacle which already had its taste setters. In the Paris of Louis XVI those who set the tone were the queen herself, her friend the Duchesse de Polignac, the Comte de Vaudreuil, the king's brother the Comte d'Artois, and Duc d'Orleans, and generally the fashionable beauties portrayed by Madame Vigée-Lebrun, herself a fashionable artist. But then even Benjamin Franklin was fashionable; after all, he was so very different.

What under Louis XIII, Charles I, Louis XIV, and Charles II had still served to represent the grandeur of monarchy had thus, by the end of the eighteenth century, turned into pure appearance with no corresponding being. As Roche points out, fashion had become an autonomous phenomenon. It was considered frivolous by critics of luxury and by moralists, but it was in fact far from frivolous, since it allowed the individual to free him- or herself from the constraints of rank and hierarchy. It was also, if we follow Roche, the manifestation of a new type of culture which was largely invented for and by women.

The second half of the eighteenth century saw in France the flowering of a new type of literature, the fashion magazine. There had been satirical accounts of fashion since its beginnings in court society, but with the eighteenth century fashion prompted a far more serious type of literature. The fashion press was created by men for women, though it was sometimes also written by women. The most successful of these magazines was the Cabinet des modes , which was first published by the Parisian bookseller François Buisson in 1785. The following year it was renamed, significantly, the Magasin des modes nouvelles françaises et anglaises , signaling in effect the arrival of English fashion in France. From 1790 to 1793 this same magazine appeared as the Journal de la mode et du goût . This was the longest-lived of such journals, which appeared prolifically for greater or lesser spans of time after the 1750s and which in essence constituted a feminine press. The Journal des dames , for example, found readers from Cadiz to St. Petersburg, from Stockholm to Naples. It was a literature differing from both the literature of the Enlightenment and the low-life literature discerned by Robert Darnton. The literature of the Enlightenment, as Roche points out, produced books and writings on the sciences, arts, and philosophy; the provincial press continued to produce a good number of religious titles. What the feminine press produced showed a greater interest in belles lettres, theater, poetry, and novels—in short, a leisure culture that was also entirely lay.

This feminine culture of leisure, fashion, and taste in effect contributed, as did the Enlightenment in its own way, to undermining the foundations of the traditional hierarchies of society. For this was a culture which stressed an ethic of pleasure and a life given over to the cultivation of the agreeable arts. In this regard the new feminine culture was squarely at odds with the ethic of the economists. Indeed the economists had indirectly criticized this culture as part of their general critique of luxury even before it was singled out as specifically feminine. This new feminine culture was inseparable from the publicity given to objects

of consumption, even if such publicity was still restricted to the higher levels of society. In short, from the point of view of the critics of luxury, fashion was merely one special aspect of it, one which implied yet another form of deficit spending.

Traditional baroque society, we may suggest, is one in which appearances must correspond to being; a consumer society is one in which there are only appearances; and a bourgeois society is one in which appearance is dictated by one's budget, which the bourgeois likes to see balanced. If we follow Roche's examination of dress in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it becomes evident that by the 1780s the upper layers of the social pyramid had all the earmarks of a consumer society, with consumption evident above all in fashion—whence the significance of his title, The Culture of Appearances . From an economist's point of view this culture was the result of baroque spending, and over the course of the century the requirements of fashion drove a good part of the nobility of court and town, that is, of Paris, to overspend on appearance. The obligation to spend, once restricted to the nobility, had by now spread downward to the lesser levels of society. Deficit spending on dress was thus no longer dictated by rank alone, but by the far more capricious requirements of fashion. Dress was the most expensive item among consumer goods, not only because it had to be replaced due to wear, but also because it was subject to the variations of fashion, the tug-of-war between stability and current fashionability. Some favored stability and opted for modesty, though of course within the bounds of acceptable appearance; others opted to follow the fashion no matter what the cost or their budget. Thus the Montesquiou family, singled out as one example by Roche, was from 1780 to 1793 almost constantly running a deficit. Not all nobles spent in this manner, to be sure—witness the Schombergs, who maintained an equilibrium between their budget and the requirements of appearance—and in the provinces the requirements of fashion were far

less expensive than in Paris. What is of interest in the case of the Montesquious, the Polignacs, and others close to Marie-Antoinette is that precisely here baroque spending met its splendid apotheosis ... in the red. In Roche's words: "Fashion thus appears under its multiple faces, animator of change, magician of distinction, creator of social equality, stage manager of inequalities of appearance" (476).

During the Revolution there were a few attempts to create a national costume which would restore the old relation of appearance and being, but this attempt had no chance of success. With the Directoire, fashion regained its old dominance over a renewed society; appearance would henceforth be determined by autonomous fashion and the requirements, not of rank, but of distinction. Looking back then upon the tensions between the Enlightenment and the Baroque, between art and luxury, luxury and taste, frugality and baroque spending, we can see that the end of baroque society, taken as an aesthetically unified society in which appearance must correspond to being, implied the rise of three different autonomies: economics, aesthetics, and, last but by no means least, fashion. Kant's careful distinction between aesthetic art and the merely pleasurable arts may be more readily understood within the context of a time in which fashion was at odds with art, reason, and true taste, and still perceived by moralists, economists, and philosophers as frivolity.