They Eat Horses, Don't They?

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  Certainly, at least until the end of the nineteenth century, there wasn’t much difference in washing habits throughout Western Europe. Everybody was pretty stinky by current standards, the rich possibly slightly less so than the poor. As we have already seen, the Palace of Versailles in the reign of Louis XIV famously had no toilets, and courtiers relieved themselves wherever they happened to be. The Scottish writer Tobias Smollett, travelling in France and Italy in 1766, remarked of the palace that, ‘In spite of all the ornaments that have been lavished on Versailles, it is a dismal habitation. The apartments are dark, ill-furnished, dirty, and unprincely.’8 This was the heyday of so-called ‘dry’ ablutions, a period when bathing was avoided at all costs, as water was believed to be the carrier of germs and ‘bad humours’. Thus courtiers seldom washed, and elaborate perfumes were devised to cover up the stink of sweat and other bodily emissions. Not that all French people despised bodily odours. Some positively revelled in them. ‘Madam, I will be with you in eight days. Do not wash…’ were the celebrated words allegedly uttered by King Henri IV to his mistress, and two centuries later Napoleon wrote to his mistress Joséphine in similar terms.9 In a somewhat different context, the Duc de Villeroi is said to have congratulated his men on the ‘strength of their goatish essences’ before the Battle of Ramillies in 1706; and General de Gaulle is credited by numerous sources as having the most eye-watering halitosis. The equation of a certain pungent body odour with masculinity, and the view that overenthusiastic washing and self-daubing with perfumed concoctions was the sign of a pampered and emasculated dandy, persisted well into the twentieth century across many cultures. As late as 1975, for example, the British magazine New Scientist, while observing approvingly that Britain at that point led Europe in soap consumption, nevertheless warned:

  ‘But our pride in standing top of the lather league should be tempered by heed to the warning of Mark Twain that soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. As borne out by the decline of the Roman Empire when its people became so obsessed by lying around in hot baths that they could no longer face sleeping out on cold battlefields and thus succumbed to the unwashed barbarians.’10

  Though Britain might have arrived at the head of the ‘lather league’ in 1975, it began the race to get there in the late nineteenth century. Regular washing with soap was a phenomenon that started in Britain in the 1880s, with the spread of piped domestic water supplies. British soap consumption per person per year stood at 3.1 lbs in 1791; in 1881, by which time soap use had reached a mass market, it stood at 14 lbs per capita. In that same year, French per capita soap consumption was only 6 lbs.11 As early as the 1830s, English visitors to Paris such as the novelist Frances Trollope had noticed that the French public authorities seemed to prioritize city monuments over plumbing. Unimpressed with the splendours of the newly erected Church of the Madeleine, Trollope noted, ‘I think it would have been more useful, for the town of Paris, to have saved the sums it cost to build for the construction and laying of pipes to distribute water to private houses.’12 The Gallic aversion to washing was exacerbated by a profound Catholic mistrust of nakedness, and the perceived sinful possibilities of intimate contact with bodily parts that ablutions necessarily entailed. Many girls in convents were required to bathe in shirts or a shift, and a manual of hygiene, published in 1844, stated that ‘certain [unnamed] parts of the body’ needed to be washed only once a day. Observing that some women washed these parts more than once, the manual admonished: ‘We do not advise this. We wish to respect the mystery of cleanliness. We will content ourselves with observing that everything which goes beyond the boundaries of a healthy and necessary hygiene leads imperceptibly to unfortunate results.’13

  THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF THE TUB (skip)

  In 1819, an ingenious man by the name of Monsieur Villette came up with the clever idea of a home bathing service for Parisians, known as the bain à domicile. This consisted of a bath on wheels that was delivered to the door of apartments, complete with towels, hot water and other bathing requisites. The bain à domicile was the subject of numerous satires, songs and pranks, but somehow it never really took off. Paris continued to be highly suspicious of the bath tub, so the home bath remained a rare phenomenon, as attested by an incident when the painter Édouard Manet sank his coat in a tub of water in the hall of a friend, mistaking it for a smoothly reflective marble table top.

  In mitigation, it should be borne in mind that France remained a largely rural country for far longer than Britain, and mains water came to homes in France much later than was the case in the United Kingdom. In 1930, for example, 92 per cent of the homes in Bradford were equipped with piped water, had a mains water supply, and at least a WC, while 43 per cent also had a bathtub; as a result of which, in the words of one observer, ‘the bathing habit has become more general’.14 In France, on the other hand, only 10 per cent of homes in the 1950s had a bath or shower, and only 58 per cent running water. In that same decade, half of French people took a bath only once every two years, and three in ten washed their hair just once a year.15 In 1951, the Larousse médical advised its readers ‘to take care of appearances’, and that ‘a bath or shower can be taken weekly’. As late as the 1960s, when the English wife of the Vicomte de Baritault inspected his château, Roquetaillade, she found it contained sixty chamber pots, no toilets, and one bathroom.16

  The late arrival of mains water in la France profonde is therefore almost certainly the source of the myth of the Great Gallic Unwashed. The sensitive nostrils of American GIs, returning from the battlefields of the Second World War (at a time when most French villagers still had to take a dip in the village fountain), were outraged. Two of the 112 Gripes about the French (a pamphlet produced immediately after the war by the US military, which was aimed at quelling rising anti-French sentiment among their forces) were that the French didn’t bathe, and that they were not as clean as the Germans. The pamphlet explained that the French couldn’t bathe during the war, because the Germans had nicked all the soap. And even four months after hostilities ceased, the soap ration for the French was ‘two cakes of poor ersatz soap per month’ – in other words, a mere 20 grams. Even if the Germans were cleaner, the pamphlet opined reproachfully, ‘an untidy friend is better than an immaculate enemy’.17 The leaflet also reminded American troops that the French could not afford decent plumbing systems, that their standard of living was lower than that in the United States, and that even in the US, 9,400,000 homes still had no electricity, 80 per cent of farmhouses did not have bathrooms and running water, and 3,607,724 homes did not have their own flushing toilets.18

  In Paris, the devout do not wash their bottoms.

  EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT, JOURNAL, 1895

  Despite the efforts of the US military to defend French standards of hygiene, however, the mud simply seemed to stick. It is no accident that in 1945 – just as the GIs were returning home – a new Looney Tunes cartoon character appeared on American television screens: Pepé Le Pew. A skunk with a heavy French accent given to strolling around Paris in the springtime filled with thoughts of ‘lurve’, Pepé’s numerous attempts to find a mate are stymied by his rank odour and obdurate refusal to take ‘no’ for an answer. And – like the Gallic male stereotype – he also spends a lot of time spraying on perfume to try and put his victims off the scent. (His surname, Le Pew, was probably an allusion to the words pooh or phew, a traditional exclamation in response to a disagreeable smell. Hard as it may be to believe, linguists have spent entire careers debating its etymological origins. Some believe it derives from the Latin puteo, meaning to stink; while others maintain it comes from the Indo-European word pu, meaning to rot or decay – as in ‘putrid’. The most appealing theory – although, sadly, probably apocryphal – ascribes a Chinese origin to the exclamation, namely the ancient Confucian saying, ‘He who fart in church sit in own pew’.) Most French people are blissfully unaware of the true nationality of Pepé Le Pew, s
ince in the French version of the cartoon, he was dubbed with an Italian accent. Banished to obscurity for many years, rumour has it that Pepé is soon to be resurrected by Disney, with actor Mike Myers (Austin Powers /Shrek) voicing the character – though whether with a French or Italian (or indeed Scottish) accent, is as yet unclear.

  In spreading the stink about the French, the British – and their tabloid newspapers in particular – have been historically at least as much to blame as the Americans. During the ‘lamb wars’ of the 1980s, when French farmers responded to the threat of British meat undercutting the price of their home-reared product by burning lorryloads of imported lamb, the editor of the Sun newspaper, Kelvin MacKenzie – who had read a report that the French used less soap than any other country in Europe – hit back with such headlines as ‘The French are the filthiest people in Europe’, and ‘Many French people smell like kangaroos which have been kept in cages’. A Page Three girl was dispatched to the French embassy to deliver toiletries and clean underwear as British aid to the ‘needy nation’.19 In fact, as various surveys of the time confirmed, the French did use less soap than the Anglo-Saxons – but that was because they were already, along with other Europeans, leading the market in the consumption of liquid soaps and shower gels.20

  But do the French of today really wash less than everybody else? In September 2011, the pollster BVA carried out a survey on behalf of the hygiene product company Tork, which found that 20 per cent of French people questioned skipped a shower every other day, 3.5 per cent had a shower only once a week, and 12.5 per cent omitted to wash their hands after going to the toilet.21 On the other hand, a survey by US consulting firm United Minds for the Swedish personal hygiene product company Tena/SCA in 2010 found that 94 per cent of French women felt uncomfortable if they had left the house without showering, as opposed to only 74 per cent of British women. This poll also found that the French dedicated the most time of any nation questioned to the pursuit of cleanliness, with French men spending 35 minutes a day on personal hygiene, and French women 46 minutes.22 A further, detailed comparative report on hygiene issues in nine countries by SCA in 2008 found that 73 per cent of French people showered at least once a day, compared to 71 per cent of Americans and just 61 per cent of British.23 (Australians and Mexicans showered the most, and the Chinese the least.)

  Admittedly, for older generations of French people, hygiene is a fraught issue, evoking images of cold showers during compulsory military service, or being whacked with a ruler at school for having dirty ears. Hygiene was incorporated in the French school curriculum by the great educational reformer Jules Ferry in 1882, and schoolchildren grew accustomed to dictations such as ‘Conjugate: I know my duty. I wash my hands. I wipe and polish the brasswork.’24 In the early twentieth century, the French government took on the task of spreading the word on cleanliness through its ranks of martial primary teachers, who were known as the hussards noirs (‘black hussars’) from their sombre militaristic uniform. Every class started with a ‘cleanliness inspection’ of the head, neck, ears and hands, and those found lacking were given a good hiding. In the 1950s, the role of the hussards noirs was taken over by the French company L’Oréal, with its pioneering shampoo DOP. DOP executives ran journées des enfants propres, or ‘clean children days’, when free soap and shampoo were handed out to schoolchildren, while the teacher expounded the rules of cleanliness at the blackboard. At the same time Eugène Schueller, the canny founder of L’Oréal, organized vast publicity campaigns to market DOP, including mass rallies of 30,000 people in Calais and 50,000 people in Brussels, all chanting the mesmerizing slogan, DOP, DOP, DOP, c’est un shampooing qui rend les cheveux souples et vigoureux (‘DOP, DOP, DOP, the shampoo that softens your hair and beats the flop’).

  The French cleanliness cause, it must be said, has not been helped by certain of their intellectuals, who have taken a perverse delight in celebrating the bodily pungency of the French as a Gallic rebellion against Anglo-American germophobia and ‘hygiene fascism’. As the social historian Alain Corbin has written, France is a ‘somatic culture’ that revels in the delights of everything sensory, from the enticing aromas of the kitchen to the pungent whiff of bodily effluvia.25 This is in stark contrast to the puritanical Americans and British, for whom any hint of corporeal odour must instantly be obliterated and ‘sanitized’ by a deluge of soap and deodorant, as though the faintest whiff of animality were in danger of unleashing a destructive and rampaging animal instinct. ‘The English think soap is civilization,’ the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke once observed. The French reply to that assertion would likely be, ‘But of what uncivilized force are they so afraid?’

  Myth Evaluation: False. Contemporary surveys show that the French now wash at least as much as most of the other countries of the developed world, although this was not the case in the past. Yet the French – unlike the British and Americans – are not obsessed with expunging all traces of bodily odour.

  EVERY FRENCH BATHROOM HAS A BIDET

  Will custom exempt from the imputation of gross indecency a French lady, who shifts her frousy smock in presence of a male visitant, and talks to him of her lavement, her medicine, and her bidet!

  TOBIAS SMOLLETT, SCOTTISH NOVELIST (1721–71), TRAVELS THROUGH FRANCE AND ITALY, 1766

  We have already had cause to note that, while squat toilets still exist in France, they are definitely on the wane. There is, however, another Unidentified Foreign Object in the French bathroom that has acquired a mythic status for foreigners: the strangely squat, tub-like contraption sandwiched between the basin and the toilet, otherwise known as the bidet (pronounced ‘bee-day’). To most British people, a bidet is as much a feature of the quintessential French privy as a pile of Sunday newspapers in the British loo. But do all French bathrooms really have one? And, most importantly, what on earth are they are for?

  Those who do know what a bidet is for are in an élite minority of British people. They are also as likely as not to be middle-aged, as the heyday of the bidet in British bathrooms was the 1970s and 80s. In the age of water beds, jacuzzis and other such items of suburban luxury, Armitage Shanks sold hundreds of bidets for installation in the bathroom suites of newly cosmopolitan Britons, fresh from the first wave of foreign holidays in Europe, and eager to relax in luxurious bathrooms with continental fixtures. There was just one problem. Nobody knew – or at least, nobody dared say – for what purpose these arcane objects were intended (even Armitage Shanks gave no explanation in their catalogues). Many and creative were the uses to which the bidet was put in the British bathroom: watering pot plants, washing the dog, cooling beer. But few knew the dark and salacious reality of its true purpose.

  The English adore horses, but know nothing of the bidet.

  ALPHONSE ALLAIS, FRENCH WRITER AND HUMORIST (1854–1905)

  Why, one might ask, such coyness over washing one’s nether regions after going to the toilet? Nobody, after all, is reticent about the purposes of a toilet roll. The reason is because that’s not what a bidet is really for (at least, not in France). No: a bidet in France has traditionally been used for female hygiène intime – in other words, intimate feminine ablutions. Bidets were probably invented in Italy,26 and became popular in France in the eighteenth century: the earliest reference to one dates from 1739, on the business card of Rémy Pèverie, a master cabinet-maker of Paris.27 In an age when showers were non-existent and having a bath involved droves of minions heating buckets of water on a stove and hauling them to a tub, the bidet (originally a free-standing item of furniture) developed as a convenient way for mistresses at Versailles to have a quick and convenient ablution after an assignation, without having to go to the inconvenience of a full bathe. No royal mistress would dream of going to bed without one: Louis XV’s mistresses Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, whom we encountered in the chapter dealing with adulterous affairs, both had splendid personalized bidets coordinating with the king’s bathroom suite. One of Madame de Pompadour’s ma
ny bidets, for example, was made of walnut, equipped with crystal flasks; its lid and back were covered in red leather with gold nails.28 The word bidet itself comes from a French word, first used in the sixteenth century, meaning ‘pony’ (the reference is to the act of riding the contraption, an innately bawdy innuendo of which full use was made by less-than-highbrow French writers).29

  After the French Revolution of 1789 and the fall of the ancien régime, the principal locus of bidet use shifted from the royal boudoir to the Parisian brothel. At Le Chabanais, for example – one of the most famous bordellos, established in 1878 by a certain Madame Kelly and the haunt of the playboy Bertie, Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) – there was a magnificent bath and coordinated bidet in the shape of an enormous swan made of red copper, water streaming from its beak.* Le One-Two-Two down the road,† famous for its extravagant staging (hay barns with girls disguised as milkmaids; African huts; igloos; train carriages; the obligatory ‘torture chamber’, with handcuffs, whips, hunting crops and flails), had bidets on every ‘set’, cunningly concealed in the furnishings.

  * The Japanese Room in this bordello was given an official prize at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, as an example of French refinement and taste.

  † Le One-Two-Two derived its name as an English translation of its address, 122 rue de Provence, in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. It was one of the most famous and luxurious of Parisian brothels in the early twentieth century.

  The notorious Parisian restaurant Lapérouse, a place where the bourgeois rubbed shoulders with the demi-monde, was famous for its bidets concealed under its banquettes. The bidet was thus indissolubly linked to the toilette intime of the high-class courtesan. But the jasper and crystal bidets of the grandes horizontales had poor relations in their grimy tin counterparts to be found in the seedier red-light districts. The famous Hungarian photographer of the Parisian underclass, George Brassaï, recalled his Paris hotel in the 1930s as a place where ‘each room had heavy, flowered curtains, a wardrobe with mirror, a large all-purpose bed... and that most important piece of furniture, a bidet. Down in the hall below, the patroness distributed towels and kept track of the tricks.’30