The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris

"This is the only book on my list that’s not about Britain, but it’s going back to this idea I mentioned earlier of unpicking things that we take for granted. The smile is second nature to some of us. We just assume that it is some kind of almost involuntary reaction to a real emotion. Therefore, we might expect it to be ever-present and unchanging in the past. This books blows that out of the water. It really is the story of the changing nature of the smile in 18th-century France, and 18th-century Paris in particular. Jones argues that the relaxed, open-mouthed smile became a more commonly practiced and increasingly acceptable form of bodily communication in Paris over the course of the 18th century. The smile revolution can be explained through a number of different stories, all of which he tells beautifully. And yes, it is partly about dentistry. Certain people’s teeth are looking better, and this means that a big, open-mouthed smile becomes more permissible, partly because humans have more teeth for longer and they’re in a much better state than they used to be. So, dentistry is really important. But it’s also about other things: it’s about new codes of politeness, which counsel people in very detailed ways about how to use their body—on quite an intimate level. There are lots of discussions about whether you should fart, or can you burp. There’s a lot of detailed advice on how to use your body and how not to use it. A full, open-mouthed smile becomes more permissible within this culture of politeness, specifically the culture of sensibility, which valorized someone’s open expression of genuine feeling. Again, this is partly about a new urban world of public sociability. But of course, there are only certain people who can or should smile, delimited by wealth, culture and status—all of which provide access to dentistry and thus fantastic, clean, white teeth, or false teeth. So, one uses one’s ability to use this form of bodily communication in expressing your cultural and economic resources quite openly. Jones also makes the point that this is not just about individuals. It’s about a buoyant, thriving, globally successful French culture, and the smile revolution expresses that. That’s the rise, the Smile Revolution. The fall happens after the French Revolution proper, the advent of the Terror (from 1792) and the closing down of public life. The smile is almost discredited in this dreadful world, in which the promise of later 18th-century France hasn’t delivered. It’s a terrific account that brings together politics and gesture. No, you are right. The French court at the start of the 18th century did not favour open-mouthed smiling, or much facial expression at all. But the elite and middling classes in public life away from the court increasingly favoured a different kind of ‘facial regime’. You point to a really interesting tension that’s characteristic of discussions about the body in this period: the tension between something that is obviously crafted, performed and not genuine, and something that is natural. I mentioned at the outset that there’s an increasing interest in the naturalized body; nature is a really important concept in 18th-century discussions of the body. It becomes increasingly important through the writings of people like Rousseau , but also others, that all these public expressions of politeness, of sensibility, stem from genuine feeling. Codes of behaviour and of politeness present people with a catch-22: people are trying to practice good taste and good manners by trying to learn how to behave, and at the same time hiding all of that learning and presenting the most natural and genuine expression of feeling that one can muster. In a way, this is a story about how people try to make a particular sort of practice—the smile, in this case—habitual. It is about repeated bodily habits. Of course, once they’re learned they do appear natural because they are second nature. If you flick through the book, many of the images that Collins picks as exemplifying good smiles are not extreme smiles, because that would be unmannerly and uncultured. They are slightly more visible than the Mona Lisa’s smile, but they are relaxed and easy and suggest a lack of affectation. They are rather genuine, immediate, unmediated responses to fine feelings, positive feelings. Yes, and the emphasis on the natural in sensibility is partly a response to Chesterfield’s letters. No, he’s not attempting a general history of society. That’s partly because of the nature of the historical records and the sorts of sources that he’s working with. This is very much about ‘polite society’, the elite and middling ranks in Paris. The kinds of smiles he’s talking about are not sort of bawdy guffaws. And that’s important because he’s talking about the smile as a marker of not only natural, fine feeling, but also of culture and appropriate behaviour. It’s the smile as a marker of social distinction."