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c o n t r i b u t o r s This month’s pulpit is written by Paul Lay. He is editor of History Today and is writing a book on Cromwell and the Crown. Diana Athill’s most recent book is Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend. Vaughan Bell is a neuropsychologist at King’s College London and a clinical psychologist in the NHS. Piers Brendon’s books include The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (Vintage). John Brewer is Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. Richard Canning’s most recent publication is an edition of Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory for Penguin Classics (2012). James Chapman is political editor of the Daily Mail. Rupert Christiansen is opera critic for the Daily Telegraph. Emma Christopher’s most recent book is A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain’s Convict Disaster in Africa (OUP). Anthony Cummins is a freelance reviewer. Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet magazine and reader in critical writing at the Royal College of Art. His Objects in This Mirror: Essays was published earlier this year by Sternberg Press. Michael Eaude, author of Catalonia: A Cultural History (Signal), writes about Spanish literature and politics. Charles Esdaile is Professor of History at the University of Liverpool. Alan Forrest is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of York. His latest book, on Waterloo, will be published in 2015 by Oxford University Press. Victoria Glendinning is writing a novel about 16th-century nuns. Tom Holland is the author of Persian Fire and has translated The Histories of Herodotus for Penguin Classics. Kevin Jackson’s monograph on Nosferatu is published by BFI Film Classics. Cosmo Landesman, former film critic for the Sunday Times, is the author of Starstruck: Fame, Failure, My Family and Me. Andrew Lycett’s most recent book is Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation (Hutchinson). Joanna Kavenna’s latest novel is Come to the Edge. She was listed as one of Granta’s Best Young Novelists 2013. James Kidd is a freelance arts journalist and Friends Secretary for the Keats– Shelley Memorial Association. Jessica Mann is the author of twenty-one crime novels (so far) and of non-fiction and journalism. Thomas Marks is editor of Apollo magazine and a founding editor of The Junket. Owen Matthews is a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine. Darrin M McMahon is Professor of History at Dartmouth College and the author, most recently, of Divine Fury: A History of Genius (Basic). Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist specialising in Chinese affairs. Leslie Mitchell is Emeritus Fellow at University College, Oxford. His interests lie in the high politics of the 18th century. Caroline Moorehead is working on a life of the Rosselli family, Florentine antifascists murdered by Mussolini. Jan Morris’s absolutely final book, the caprice Ciao, Carpaccio!, is published in November this year. Richard Overy’s latest book is The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945. Matthew Parris writes for The Times and The Spectator. Lucy Popescu is the author of The Good Tourist (Arcadia). Rachel Polonsky is the author of Molotov’s Magic Lantern: Uncovering Russia’s Secret History. She is a lecturer in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College. Linda Porter’s latest book is Crown of Thistles: The Fatal Inheritance of Mary Queen of Scots. She is working on a book about the children of Charles I and the Civil Wars. Hannah Rosefield is a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard University. Brian Rotman’s most recent book is Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being. He is currently thinking about mathematics – again. Malise Ruthven’s Encounters with Islam is published by I B Tauris, along with a reprint of The Divine Supermarket: Travels in Search of the Soul of America. Kate Saunders’s The Whizz-Pop Chocolate Shop is published by Marion Lloyd Books. Ruth Scurr is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Her next book, John Aubrey: My Own Life, will be published in March. Anne Sebba is writing a book about Paris from 1939 to 1949 through women’s eyes. Charles Shaar Murray’s biographies of John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix are published by Canongate. Martin Vander Weyer’s latest book is Any Other Business, a collection of his journalism from The Spectator and elsewhere, published by Elliott & Thompson. Alexander Waugh is general editor of a fortytwo-volume edition of the writings of Evelyn Waugh (OUP). His Shakespeare in Court is published this month (Kindle Single). Sara Wheeler’s last book was O My America! Second Acts in a New World. She is currently learning Russian. David Winters has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. He is co-editor-in-chief of 3:AM magazine. Literary Review | o c t o b e r 2 0 1 4 4
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h i s t o r y j ohn b r e wer Grin City The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris By Colin Jones (Oxford University Press 231pp £22.99) Colin Jones’s The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris is a marvellous, engaging and constantly enlightening study, one that is sure to make you purse your lips with pleasure. To judge from the accessible and illuminating mixture of medical, cultural and political history, my Beverly Hills dentist, an Armenian-American with impeccable teeth, a broad smile, ineffable charm and the latest (and least painful) technologies, would have been quite at home in ancien régime Paris. Jones’s book is about teeth and smiles, bodies and culture. In his deftly woven narrative, it becomes clear that the triumphs of late-18th-century French dentistry – professionalisation, a commitment to canine conservation and oral hygiene, skill in making and installing artificial dentures – were a crucial element in the complex process he calls the ‘Smile Revolution’. Only when an open mouth was able to expose white teeth (or, failing that, white dentures), only when dental hygiene dispelled the miasma of halitosis, could a full smile exposing the teeth be countenanced. And why does a smile, that most evanescent of expressions, matter? Because, rather like the grin of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, the smile is part of something larger. For Jones, smiles are vital signs, mixing nature and culture. The history of the Parisian smile, he maintains, involves ‘surgical and scientific advances; significant social, economic and political developments; and also changing notions of emotion, expression, behaviour, selfhood and gender’. There were not just different ways to smile, but also a politics and culture of smiling: a simper, a smirk, a grin or a beam might be the expression of a certain sort of feeling, but could also, according to circumstance, excite sympathy and friendship or incur wrath and punishment. What Jones gives us is a history of France seen from the smile’s point of view, taking the reader chronologically through what we might call a series of ‘smile regimes’. He begins with the stiff, courtly smile of supercilious superiority that emanated from the court of Louis XIV and which was associated with succeeding Bourbon monarchs – a look predicated on gross inequality, but also the result of appalling ‘Madame Vigée Le Brun’, self-portrait, 1786 dental hygiene and care. (In a book with its fair share of Grand Guignol moments, the accidental removal of Louis XIV’s upper right jaw during the extraction of his few remaining teeth in 1685, so that ‘every time the king drank or gargled, the liquid came up through his nose, from where it issued like a fountain’, has to be one of the best.) Courtly smiles were rare – La Rochefoucauld claimed to ration himself to one laugh a year – and could be treacherous when they cracked the facade of imperturbability. Tight-lipped smiles were part of a system of bodily control needed to survive in the duplicitous world of the royal court. They were also a social marker: no courtier wished to be seen (much less portrayed) as open-mouthed, which was at best a sure sign of demotic credulity, levity and bad manners, and at worst a feature of madness. The 18th-century cult of sensibility, spread through performances on the Parisian stage and nurtured by novels of deep emotional intensity by the likes of Samuel Richardson and Rousseau, loosened the grip of the costive, courtly smile. Charming and tender smiles – transparent expressions of feeling intended to be shared by all men and women, though, in practice, chiefly enjoyed by the Parisian cultural and social elite – became fashionable. Teeth and smiles were chic – and so were dentists. Practitioners like Pierre Fauchard made dental care a profession: they abandoned the street (where teeth had been brutally pulled by colourful showmen like ‘Le Grand Thomas’, who operated on the Pont Neuf and was known as the ‘Pearl of the Charlatans’ and ‘Terror of the Human Jaw’) and set up offices (upstairs so the patients’ screams could not be heard in the street below) in fashionable spots like the Rue Saint-Honoré. They encouraged tooth conservation, not brutal extraction, wrote treatises that established dentistry as a science, and emphasised the importance of patient self-care, which helped them peddle a succession of cleaners, whiteners, gargles, toothpicks and breath sweeteners. Fauchard invented spring-loaded denture sets, which, as Jones reminds us, ‘had the unfortunate habit of leaping dramatically out of the owner’s mouth at unguarded moments’. Nicolas Dubois de Chémant went one better and manufactured very expensive porcelain dentures, a set of which (illustrated in the text) belonged to the exiled archbishop of Narbonne, and were exhumed during the building of the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras. The smile of sensibility, according to Jones, ‘expressed the essence of character and was the icon of personal identity’. It was part of the repertory of self-presentation in a polite, public and urban culture. At first the Revolution broadened Parisian o c t o b e r 2 0 1 4 | Literary Review 5

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h i s t o r y j ohn b r e wer

Grin City The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris

By Colin Jones (Oxford University Press 231pp £22.99)

Colin Jones’s The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris is a marvellous, engaging and constantly enlightening study, one that is sure to make you purse your lips with pleasure. To judge from the accessible and illuminating mixture of medical, cultural and political history, my Beverly Hills dentist, an Armenian-American with impeccable teeth, a broad smile, ineffable charm and the latest (and least painful) technologies, would have been quite at home in ancien régime Paris. Jones’s book is about teeth and smiles, bodies and culture. In his deftly woven narrative, it becomes clear that the triumphs of late-18th-century French dentistry – professionalisation, a commitment to canine conservation and oral hygiene, skill in making and installing artificial dentures – were a crucial element in the complex process he calls the ‘Smile Revolution’. Only when an open mouth was able to expose white teeth (or, failing that, white dentures), only when dental hygiene dispelled the miasma of halitosis, could a full smile exposing the teeth be countenanced.

And why does a smile, that most evanescent of expressions, matter? Because, rather like the grin of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, the smile is part of something larger. For Jones, smiles are vital signs, mixing nature and culture. The history of the Parisian smile, he maintains, involves ‘surgical and scientific advances; significant social, economic and political developments; and also changing notions of emotion, expression, behaviour, selfhood and gender’. There were not just different ways to smile, but also a politics and culture of smiling: a simper, a smirk, a grin or a beam might be the expression of a certain sort of feeling, but could also, according to circumstance, excite sympathy and friendship or incur wrath and punishment. What Jones gives us is a history of France seen from the smile’s point of view, taking the reader chronologically through what we might call a series of ‘smile regimes’.

He begins with the stiff, courtly smile of supercilious superiority that emanated from the court of Louis XIV and which was associated with succeeding Bourbon monarchs – a look predicated on gross inequality, but also the result of appalling

‘Madame Vigée Le Brun’, self-portrait, 1786

dental hygiene and care. (In a book with its fair share of Grand Guignol moments, the accidental removal of Louis XIV’s upper right jaw during the extraction of his few remaining teeth in 1685, so that ‘every time the king drank or gargled, the liquid came up through his nose, from where it issued like a fountain’, has to be one of the best.) Courtly smiles were rare – La Rochefoucauld claimed to ration himself to one laugh a year – and could be treacherous when they cracked the facade of imperturbability. Tight-lipped smiles were part of a system of bodily control needed to survive in the duplicitous world of the royal court. They were also a social marker: no courtier wished to be seen (much less portrayed) as open-mouthed, which was at best a sure sign of demotic credulity, levity and bad manners, and at worst a feature of madness.

The 18th-century cult of sensibility, spread through performances on the Parisian stage and nurtured by novels of deep emotional intensity by the likes of Samuel Richardson and Rousseau, loosened the grip of the costive, courtly smile. Charming and tender smiles – transparent expressions of feeling intended to be shared by all men and women, though, in practice, chiefly enjoyed by the Parisian cultural and social elite – became fashionable. Teeth and smiles were chic – and so were dentists. Practitioners like Pierre Fauchard made dental care a profession: they abandoned the street (where teeth had been brutally pulled by colourful showmen like ‘Le Grand Thomas’, who operated on the Pont Neuf and was known as the ‘Pearl of the Charlatans’ and ‘Terror of the Human Jaw’) and set up offices (upstairs so the patients’ screams could not be heard in the street below) in fashionable spots like the Rue Saint-Honoré. They encouraged tooth conservation, not brutal extraction, wrote treatises that established dentistry as a science, and emphasised the importance of patient self-care, which helped them peddle a succession of cleaners, whiteners, gargles, toothpicks and breath sweeteners. Fauchard invented spring-loaded denture sets, which, as Jones reminds us, ‘had the unfortunate habit of leaping dramatically out of the owner’s mouth at unguarded moments’. Nicolas Dubois de Chémant went one better and manufactured very expensive porcelain dentures, a set of which (illustrated in the text) belonged to the exiled archbishop of Narbonne, and were exhumed during the building of the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras.

The smile of sensibility, according to Jones, ‘expressed the essence of character and was the icon of personal identity’. It was part of the repertory of self-presentation in a polite, public and urban culture. At first the Revolution broadened Parisian o c t o b e r 2 0 1 4 | Literary Review 5

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