The Foul and the Fragrant

The deodorizing effort of the Enlightenment was, in Corbin's telling, one of the great unremarked reform movements of the age. Administrators treated stench as an enemy of the state. They drained marshes, moved the dead beyond the city walls, paved and flushed streets, and demanded that hospitals be redesigned so that air could move rather than stagnate over the sick. The reeking, over-crowded ward became a symbol of everything an enlightened government was supposed to fix.

This was also a war against confinement. The most feared smells were the ones produced by bodies pressed together in closed space — the prison, the ship's hold, the poorhouse, the tenement. Doctors described the heavy, sweetish odour of the crowd as if it were a substance you could weigh, and they were not entirely wrong to worry: typhus and other fevers did rage in exactly these places. But the interpretation ran through smell, and so the remedy was framed as clearing the air.

The second half of Corbin's history moves indoors, into the bourgeois home and onto bourgeois skin. As the public air was cleaned up, attention narrowed to the individual. The rising middle class began to treat its own body as something to be managed, monitored and, above all, deodorized. Sweat, breath and the ordinary secretions of living became sources of private shame in a way they had not been before.

The tastes in perfume shifted to match. Corbin traces a movement away from the heavy animal scents of the old aristocracy — musk, civet, ambergris, smells that mimicked the body rather than masking it — toward the light, clean, floral notes of the nineteenth century: rosewater, lavender, the vegetal freshness that suggested purity rather than seduction. The new bourgeois wanted to smell not of the body but of the garden, of something washed and restrained. The jonquil of Corbin's French title stands for exactly this delicate, disciplined fragrance.

Step back from the individual scenes and Corbin's larger argument comes into focus: the long campaign against smell was, underneath the medicine, a way of drawing lines between people. Odour is the most intimate of the senses and the hardest to argue with. You cannot reason with a smell you find repellent; you simply recoil. That made it an unusually powerful, and unusually deniable, instrument of social separation.

Once the bourgeoisie had trained itself to be clean and lightly scented, the smell of the poor became the mark of the poor. The labouring body, the crowded quarter, the sickroom — these were now sensed as offensive, and the offence carried a verdict. To smell bad was to be read as disorderly, dangerous, not quite fully civilized. The reformer who wanted to deodorize the slum was expressing genuine concern for public health and, at the same time, rehearsing his own distance from the people who lived there. The two motives were braided together and impossible to separate.

Corbin's history runs from the emptied graves of the Cemetery of the Innocents to the lavender-scented drawing room of the respectable nineteenth-century family, and the through-line is a single sense growing steadily more exacting. What began as a fear of the city's poisoned air ended as a fear of the human body — and, more precisely, of other people's bodies. The miasma of the title was supposed to be the enemy; the jonquil was supposed to be the cure. In practice, the movement from one to the other traced the rise of a class that learned to define itself by what it could no longer bear to smell.