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He claimed to throw out all earlier physiognomical writings except Aristotle and to start from scratch through close observation of his fellow men. His Essays on Physiognomy — a European best-seller published in numerous editions, translations and vulgarisations, that established him as one of the celebrities of his age — put humans at the centre of the physiognomic vision.
Lavater worked hard to develop ways of measuring and quantifying human heads, deploying, for example, the silhouette, craniometry, and consideration of the so-called facial angle. Following on from the break-up of the medieval and Renaissance cosmology in which physiognomy had been formerly grounded, the effect of Le Brun and Lavater was to keep it in play as an intellectual discipline — and indeed to give it a strong impulsion.
Moreover, even though both men stressed radical discontinuity and incommensurability between humans and animals, in fact both also showed themselves very open to the traditional physiognomical interest in human-animal resemblance. Lavaterian physiognomy was a very broad church that tended to have something for and from everyone.
Notwithstanding Le Brun and Lavater, some men at least could still be beasts. Indeed, the Terror had revealed the bestial in humankind, just as it had revealed, as we shall see, the tiger in Robespierre. What was it about tigers that made it possible for these poor creatures to be assimilated to Robespierre? Tigers were not well-known in medieval Europe, and they made few appearances in medieval bestiaries or heraldic sources. Striped pelts, cloth, and decor were generally viewed as denoting ignominy and treachery in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
In his multi-volumed and hugely influential Histoire naturelle , Buffon ranked the tiger, among carnivores, as a poor second to the lion, with which its character formed a stark contrast. Buffon was not out of line with his contemporaries. It is also worth mentioning in passing that Buffon and his contemporaries were hardly more warm-hearted towards the cat. Even crueller with birds and mice than tigers with lambs, cats took pleasure in the sufferings of their victims. The zoomorphic was probably the most widely used of four registers in which Thermidorian polemicists attacked Robespierre.
Robespierre was thus in good or rather, bad tiger-cattish company — and has remained there for the duration. Green eyes, the eyes of a cat. The eyes of a cat that would become, as Merlin had stated categorically, a tiger. Robespierre became, moreover, Michelet held, more and more cat-like as time went on. The tiger-cat comparison was deployed by historians across the political divide. This sequence of quotations certainly does not exhaust the presence in French Revolutionary historiography of Robespierre the cat-tiger.
It became a familiar trope, as it remains. For I have simply been unable locate any individual who made even the slightest reference to Robespierre in terms of cats or tigers before his death. People may have remembered or imagined Robespierre as a tiger cat after his death; there is no contemporaneous evidence I have found that anyone experienced him directly as such during his lifetime. Robespierre the ferocious cat-tiger owes everything, in sum, to the force of Thermidorian ideology and the ambient ethos of physiognomical theory.
In his lifetime, in fact, what physical description of Robespierre there was downplayed the physiognomic idiom. Far from standing out as physically wild, fierce or farouche, Robespierre passed in the crowd. He studiously eschewed the baggy plebeian trousers of the sans-culottes for a primped, polite and puffed up appearance. But this also led to him being viewed at times as yawn-inducing, even laughable. But they merely held that it was a deliberate smokescreen that he had thrown up to hide his true, ferociously mendacious character.
Fronti nulla fides, after all.
The claims of physiognomy were, moreover, neatly congruent with the concern for transparency that was a fundamental feature of Revolutionary political culture. Writing in the weeks after 9 Thermidor, the journalist Jean-Joseph Dussault opined that the art of physiognomy had in fact progressed since He continued, in a way that showed that Thermidorian propaganda was doing its job:. If physiognomy had hitherto failed to perform its democratic task in the case of Robespierre — for it had missed the tiger lurking underneath, in pussy-cat clothing — this was partly due to his dastardly dissimulation and partly to a rather personal characteristic that was increasingly evoked.
Indeed the facial tic is a godsend to modern authors wishing to attempt a psychoanalytical sketch of Robespierre. Strangely, this emerged in the final stages of his life: At the turn of the century, medical researchers were in fact becoming increasingly interested in the tic. There was a debate over whether the involuntary tic could be differentiated from horse sickness on one hand and on the other from facial neuralgia presenting symptoms of facial contraction. If Robespierre seemed unable to manage the sunny, smiling beam of humanity later to be praised by his sister as his everyday expression, it was because his facial tic was allegedly so extreme that it made his face difficult for even a trained physiognomic gaze to read and comprehend.
His attempt at a smile was a kind of bestial and cunning jamming device that prevented the physiognomic gaze from performing its work of detection: In his novel Quatre-Vingt Treize, published in , Victor Hugo imagined a tavern scene in which Robespierre discussed the destiny of the Revolution with Marat and Danton. The exquisitely well-dressed Robespierre presents a picture of characterless dedication to work — he has a pile of papers before him.
Marat has a cup of coffee on the go and Danton is drinking from a bottle of wine. It is also helpful to set it in the physiognomic tradition I have been discussing. Master-physiognomist Johann-Caspar Lavater waxed famously lyrical about the human smile and laughter. Although Lavater noted there was much theological debate over the question of whether Jesus had ever laughed, he thought it unimaginable that he had never smiled: Darwin had nearly fallen foul of popular physiognomical analysis personally — the captain of the Beagle almost refused to allow him on board in because the shape of his nose revealed a lack of energy and resolution according to Lavaterian textbooks.
Yet the word physiognomy was studiously eschewed, and the practice henceforth most likely to be evoked by cartoonists and caricaturists. Darwin was attracted by the notion that his pet dog was wont to grin at him — a sentiment many anthropomorphically-minded pet-owners must have shared.
Thus orangutans could chuckle and grin. The Cynopithecus niger might even flash a smile — as Darwin endeavoured to demonstrate with one of the most devastatingly unconvincing images ever to appear in a canonical scientific text. These view laughing and smiling as innate and universal attributes, noting, for example, that human babies can be found producing something approximating to a smile when they are less than three hours out of the womb.
But they divide over whether the human smile links to the benign play face of these mammals — as Darwin surmised — or else to gestures which communicate threat and aggression. The smile as we have seen with laughter 93 thus comes fraught with complex meanings that allows it to cross boundaries — emotional boundaries - between love and hate, attraction and repulsion. It is a point of which Lavater was more than aware: Yet the apparently timeless universalism of the evolutionary scientists still leaves some room for historians working with historical time-frames and deploying the methods of social and cultural construction.
That smiles are socially and culturally constructed within definable historical periods is evident when we consider their historical decelopment over course of the eighteenth century. It is striking to note the relative infrequency of the term sourire in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts. This usage linked to the court culture that the absolute kings of France had established, wherein facial impassivity was the template for kings and courtiers alike.
The s and s, however, witnessed a dramatic step change in regard to usage of the term, sourire. First, there was a doubling, then a tripling in the frequency with which the word was used in works of literature. They also notably transgressed codes of contrained good manners codified since the Renaissance by permitting the opening of lips to reveal white teeth — a gesture to which I will return that was now adjudged more sociable, more natural and in a way more moral.
Rather, it offered a transparent pathway into the soul, a gesture that was shared on terms of equality, not hierarchy, between two evenly-matched individuals. The ironical and sardonic superior smile did not of course disappear from the novel. Every plot had its villain, after all, every Clarissa its tiger-like Lovelace to encounter. Yet it now seemed that the smile could be read for character, and that one could know what a person was like by their smile.
One might be tempted to dismiss all this as merely something that took place only in fiction — were it not the case that the literature of sensibility had an enormous impact on social attitudes and behaviour. A broad swathe of the upper reaches of society in both England and France sought not merely to read about Clarissa and Julie and their ilk — but to be like them.
A mouth-opening gesture in the past that had been hugely criticised in conduct books as plebeian, crude and impolite was now legitimated as emblematic of a new humane politeness and moral transparency. A new facial regime, a new regime of faciality, and what we can recognise as the new, modern smile, was in gestation. Proof that the smile of sensibility was not just confined within the literary domain, but was strongly influencing behaviour in the public sphere is the fact that new technologies of mouth care were emergent precisely in this period, with Paris in the vanguard.
The public-toothpuller had been something of a one-trick pony. The new dentist achieved new standards of care, developing an armamentarium of operative tools, passing far beyond mere tooth-extraction — the very last thing a good dentist should be doing — to tooth-filling, cleaning, whitening, straightening, transplanting and replacing.
But now for the first time in human history this was to be done not simply with a cloth and a toothpick, but with dental powder or paste and with a toothbrush, a shamefully unheralded innovation of this very period. It was not the case, he maintained, that people with bad teeth could not in some cases be estimable in their way.
Robespierre inhabited the world of sensibility that was creating the French Smile Revolution. Had he died in , moreover, recollections of him would not, we can wager, be dwelling on his tigrish disposition, but on his exemplary sensibility. The small-time country-town lawyer from provincial Arras had worked hard, built up his practice, specialised in pro bono litigation for the disadvantaged, liked country walks and picnics, dabbled in science, penned soppy verses for example, an ode on the arts of nose-blowing and uses of the handkerchief , and written sentimental love-letters in the style of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Did he have white teeth, however? The evidence is that at least he tried to.
They found him how? Clearly the man had never read his Norbert Elias. But there is also a hint of the public display of private functions that had characterised the Bourbon court: Robespierre was thus displaying manners that were both reprehensibly Bourbon and irredeeemably bestial. He was dentally equipped as a regular man of feeling. And indeed, flippantly, one might think: What has been striking is the extent to which debates among historians and biographers have been influenced even to the present day by the strongly physiognomical hatchet-job performed on his character after his death, notably the ex post facto invention of his tigrish proclivities.
What is much more of a challenge is to understand how the Terror could have been created by men of feeling and good will. Robespierre was — of course - was no angel. But we can only hope to manage some sort of dispassionate historical judgement on such a complex figure if we deal firmly with the physiognomic language which has accompanied his reputation.
If we do not, we risk being only the ventriloquist dummies of Thermidorian propagandists. Readers may have felt that in the course of my argument, the smile of Robespierre has been waxing and waning before their eyes rather like the grin of a Cheshire cat. It set the seal on his alleged bestiality, and did so in style and in a way that has proved difficult to efface from the memory. That image derives from his execution. Arrested in the National Convention on 9 Thermidor, Robespierre escaped custody and sought to lead a counter-coup against the assembly.
Later that night, faced with its failure, he sought to blow his brains out with a pistol. Or at least he missed his brains. He blew a huge hole in his lower jaw, part detaching it from his face.
His captors that night bandaged up his face, subjecting him to taunting to which he was powerless to reply. Rushed through the Revolutionary Tribunal next morning, he was conveyed in a tumbril through the streets of Paris. What happened when the tumbril reached the guillotine is better attested. As Robespierre climbed the steps of the scaffold:. One of the guillotine crew brutally snatched away the bandage that held his poor broken jaw together.
He let out a howl … He could for an instant be seen pale, hideous, his mouth wide open and his teeth falling to the ground… there was a heavy thud… Or maybe — maybe equally correctly — the start of one. For this macabre episode would be much recounted and gleefully elaborated upon in histories of the Revolution throughout the nineteenth century twentieth-century historians tend to be more circumspect with the detail, or more squeamish. The tiger had lost its white and well-kept teeth even before its head had hit the bottom of the basket.
For many of those throughout the nineteenth century who contemplated the French Revolution, this was a fitting end for a tyrannical and bestial monster, pointing a moral, adorning a tale, and exemplifying a physiognominal precept. What lingered in the mind was not the well-groomed smile of sensibility, but rather the gaping, gothic black hole where once a smile had been. By reducing Robespierre to a kind of degree zero of humanity, suffused by a sheer animality that was proclaimed by that final, bestial howl, the nineteenth century would live with a monstrous, ideologically hyper-charged and nightmare vision of what revolutions were all about.
The bestialisation of Robespierre was equated with the bestiality of all revolutions and all revolutionaries. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U.
Trans R Hist Soc. Author manuscript; available in PMC Sep Copyright and License information Disclaimer. He continued, in a way that showed that Thermidorian propaganda was doing its job: As Robespierre climbed the steps of the scaffold: He let out a howl … He could for an instant be seen pale, hideous, his mouth wide open and his teeth falling to the ground… there was a heavy thud… End of story.
Much of this post-Thermidor literature, cited below, does not signal either a place or date of publication. Unless otherwise indicated, one can assume that the pamphlets were published in Paris in late I have given the BL call-marks in the relevant cases, to assist in location of these ephemeral and not easily locatable pieces.
Robespierre and the French Revolution. Their bibliographies give a sense of the huge volume and wide range of reactions Robesperre has always evoked. Il Terrore dal volto umano. The literature on the Terror is similarly immense. Helpful perspectives are provided by David Andress, The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution. Throughout all translations from the French are my own. The work is thought to be the work of Charles Reybaud. Les Portraits de Robespierre. Tales of Two Cities. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.
Key texts include Agamben Giorgio. A Thousand Plateaux Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights; pp. A good anthology of this literature is Atterton Peter, Calarco Matthew. See also Kemp Martin. The Horror of Monsters. Sheehan James J, Sosna Morton.
Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, Park Katherine, Daston Lorraine. Wonders and the Order of Nature Corbin Alain, Vigarello Georges. See however Trumble Angus. A Brief History of the Smile. The subject of physiognomy within the west European tradition has come increasingly into focus in recent decades, but still represents a poorly-covered field.
Much recent work has focussed on the later phases of the movement, dating from the work of Lavater in the late eighteenth century see below, note For the medieval and early modern period, particularly useful are Porter Martin. The assassination of President Boudiaf in and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria inspired him to write about his country.
Sansal writes in French and his work has won top literary awards in France, among them the Prix du Premier Roman in The book explores the fine line between Islamic fundamentalism and Nazism. Standing fast - Haaretz - Israel News Le Village de l'allemand is the first of Sansal's novels to be translated into English, and was published in the US as The German Mujahid and in the UK as An Unfinished Business Sansal continues to live with his wife and two daughters in Algeria despite the controversy his books have aroused in his homeland.
At the International Festival of Literature in Berlin, he was introduced as a writer "exiled in his own country. Since the publication of Poste restante: Le Serment des barbares , Gallimard. Prix du Premier Roman Prix Tropiques, AFD, L'Enfant fou de l'arbre creux , Gallimard.
Cited in Guichardet Jeannine. Only 6 left in stock - order soon. The veterinary meaning of the term remains primary in the major French dictionaries through to the present. His Essays on Physiognomy — a European best-seller published in numerous editions, translations and vulgarisations, that established him as one of the celebrities of his age — put humans at the centre of the physiognomic vision. This theme is explored in terms of Thermidorian propaganda, French Revolutionary historiography and the ancient discipline of physiognomy, which was reactivated by Johann-Caspar Lavater in the late eighteenth century and still influential through much of the nineteenth. The French Revolution after Robespierre.
Prix Michel Dard Dis-moi le paradis , Gallimard