Smells. Robert Muchembled

Introduction

      In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias put forward an overarching vision of the progress of Western civilization based on the slow domestication of affectivity, increasingly leading the subject to develop self-control.¹ He explained how coarse emotionality gradually came to be driven out of its central position in the public sphere, giving way to highly codified attitudes of politeness that defined decency. His deeply optimistic, Eurocentric theory has given rise to much debate, at times heated, and has remained highly influential. It drew on a long-standing and diverse school of humanist thought, whose proponents believed in the capacity of their fellow humans to improve over time, following Erasmus – much quoted by Elias – who dreamed of a golden age in the near future, and Condorcet, who held that ‘the human race [is] advancing with a firm and sure step along the path of truth, virtue and happiness’.²

      When it was first published in 1939, Elias’s work offered a valuable intellectual antidote to the looming threat of Nazism; however, its approach to sensory phenomena does not reflect the latest in scientific research. It takes as its main example the court of Louis XIV, seeing the restriction of bodily functions in public and the increasing disapproval of excessive or indecent reactions in the presence of others as part of a broad civilizing process. Elias argued that these new models of behaviour became ingrained in childhood among the upper classes, leading to increasing suppression of aggressive tendencies at an individual level that were then slowly adopted by other social groups.

This valuable basic framework can be used to underpin new directions in research. Smells, the focus of this book, were a key point in innovative conduct manuals such as Erasmus’s De civilitate morum puerilium [On civility in boys], published in 1530 for a select readership. Recent scientific research has shown that smells are vital gateways for emotions and their recall. As the first chapter will demonstrate, smell is arguably the only one of our senses to be acquired from experience, rather than being innate. As it is binary in nature, it can easily be inflected by affective messages towards pleasure or, alternatively, fear and disgust. This opens the door to a sort of experimental history, drawing on the vast body of information left by people long since dead. This means trying to understand how their world worked, how they saw it and thought about it, rather than projecting our own presuppositions onto them. This is the path historical method must take to achieve a degree of objectivity, whatever claims may be made for other methodologies. Disgust at smells is a fundamental sensation in humans, but not one that is biologically programmed. It takes four or five years at least for European children, for instance, to construct disgust at their own excrement. Few people nowadays are willing to acknowledge this, preferring to believe that such disgust is as natural as it is universal; in fact, it is the result of several centuries of cultural pressure. Stubbornly maintained from generation to generation, this pressure has given rise to individual reactions of shame and disgust at anal excreta. The slightest suggestion of a whiff of excrement makes us literally nauseous. We can also feel the same uncontrollable repugnance at the mere sight or mention of it, even in a scatological joke; once the smell has become categorized as negative, all our senses seek to keep it at