Meister on Zdatny (2024)

Steven Zdatny’s examination of how notions of cleanliness evolved in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France reveals hygiene to be a contentious process, one that is neither preordained nor a foregone historical conclusion, but is rather the result of a persistently incremental, if at times agonizingly slow, march towards greater education, improved sanitary infrastructure, and rising levels of income throughout French society. Progress towards improved hygiene in metropolitan France during this period, Zdatny compellingly argues, was hamstrung by insufficient public funds and the cost of bringing technological advances into individual homes. In contrast to previous accounts of hygienism, Zdatny challenges assumptions that cleanliness immediately became an irrefutable aspect of bourgeois identity, while he wisely eschews a triumphalist narrative that overstates the immediate impact of sanitary inventions on citizens’ everyday lives. 

Recalling Alain Corbin’s and Georges Vigarello’s histories, the subtitle of Zdatny’s work (“the Threshold of Disgust”) allows the reader to reflect on how the history of hygiene in France cannot be considered independent of the concept of “cleanliness” and the social institutions and cultural practices which ascribe value therein. From the French Revolution through the unprecedented economic expansion after World War II, Zdatny shows that this base line of hygienic standards rose steadily across all social classes and in all corners of metropolitan France, even if there was a generations-long lag between how experts theorized cleanliness and how these practices were implemented on the ground. Zdatny’s history documents this conflict between theory and practice through an impressive array of understudied sources—teachers’ memoirs from their assignments to rural schools, nineteenth- and early-twentieth century manuals on hygiene in the French military, commissioned municipal and departmental reports on insalubrious conditions in cities and the countryside, housing censuses—to emphasize the long arc bending towards greater cleanliness.

Zdatny analyzes these primary and archival sources on hygiene through a predominantly chronological exposition, one that spans eleven chapters from the eighteenth-century through the mid-twentieth century. Beginning with the deplorable living conditions in French cities and the countryside at the end of French Revolution, Zdatny’s monograph traces the recurring issues that plagued sanitary reformers, medical officials, and government administrators for well over one hundred and fifty years: the prohibitive cost of providing citizens with clean water; the infrastructural difficulties in ensuring the delivery of fresh and the disposal of used water; campaigns to educate rural and urban publics about the benefits of personal and collective hygiene. Taking Paris as one example among many, Zdatny compellingly notes that the cost of water was well-beyond the financial means of a common laborer in 1840, representing “20 wage hours per cubic meter” (62), and that while neighborhood fountains could provide city dwellers with water, they would then have to lug liters of it home. Given the cost and palaver of sourcing water, it should not be surprising that Parisians did not use as much water as denizens of European cities with more reliable water sources.

Despite its wide chronological scope, the chapters on the Third Republic comprise the core of Zdatny’s study: they constitute the crispest formulation of his argument, as they examine the growing sensibilization of the public to hygienic principles through public schooling and military conscription. In short, these civic institutions provided the social infrastructure for making peasants and the urban poor into Frenchmen à la Eugen Weber, a thinker whose presence Zdatny acknowledges throughout his study. Under the Ferry Laws (1881–82) which established free, compulsory, and secular primary education for French citizens, generations of schoolchildren were catechized about cleanliness in primers that “presented cleanliness as a matter of morals, one of the Republican rights and duties that they had toward themselves and others” (119). The students, in turn, would bring home their heightened awareness of cleanliness to their parents. Yet this crusade to instill hygienic precepts in young children remained incomplete because of their daily reality: it was “easier to publish manuals that described the proper routines for washing and bathing than to assure that children with no access to clean water followed them” (123); in other words, the “hygiene revolution requires a certain level of wealth and technology” (123) that education could only partially provide. Similarly, the system of short–term universal military conscription under the Third Republic sought to inculcate habits of cleanliness among recruits—washing hands, rinsing mouths, having one’s own towel, changing underclothes each week—who would then return, shaped by these habits, to their own villages and towns. Zdatny’s careful analysis of ministerial circulars, memoirs from recruits, and military doctors demonstrates the persistent gap between sanitary guidelines and their imperfect implementation on the ground. 

But these incremental improvements in hygienic sensibility cannot be merely written off as a nefarious form of social control wielded by the bourgeoisie, as some historians and cultural critics have tended to do. This is perhaps one of the greatest strengths of Zdatny’s history: his discussion of hygiene stays close to the ground and remains true to the impressive cache of primary and archival sources he has amassed, as he thinks carefully about how technological achievements in sanitary knowledge spread across social classes and throughout France, and how, most importantly, the cost of hygienic improvements—hook-ups to sewer systems, wastewater disposal, and the labor hours needed to purchase water—impeded the nation’s health. It would not be until after the Second World War, and the unprecedented economic expansion that followed it, that France experienced its hygiene revolution—when it finally became possible to be clean at a relatively cheap cost and to purchase commodities such as soap and deodorant cheaply. 

Written in lucid and compelling prose, Zdatny’s twenty-first century readers will find themselves borne along through almost two hundred years of urban and rural filth in metropolitan France and will have a much greater appreciation for their present-day sanitary comforts. The dazzling array of primary sources that Zdatny cites, however, could have benefited from a full bibliography at the end of the monograph; this would have facilitated an even greater ease of access to the works for a non-specialist audience. But specialists and non-specialist readers alike will find much that is new and unexpected in Zdatny’s thought-provoking account of how France became modern through its cleanliness.