Hygiene, the Flow of Light, Air, Water and Waste Common Definitions Of
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253 Part Two: Hygiene, The Flow of Light, Air, Water and Waste Common definitions of hygiene connect practices of cleanliness with prevention of disease. In both English and French, the word links cleanliness and health in a normative way. This has three major consequences. First, hygiene does not only concern how individuals can be clean and healthy. It is also profoundly social or collective, concerned to preserve the living conditions of the population at large and steer social relations. Second, hygiene is heavily value-laden. Far from objective measures of what practices help prevent disease, hygienic rules and norms are bound up with aesthetics and morals. What is unclean is often considered profane, undesirable, ugly, dangerous, barbaric, backward, subhuman, etc.1 Third, since the Enlightenment, hygiene has been bound up with progress, modernization and reform. Like a society's level of technological development, its degree of conformity to “modern” principles of hygiene has become a common measure of civilization.2 Hygiene played a crucial role in the civilizing mission of imperialists, and remains central in the post-colonial field of 'development.' As a result of these moral, aesthetic, and political entanglements, hygienic principles can be (and often are) used to justify actions that go far beyond keeping clean and preventing disease. 1 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo 2nd Ed. (Routledge, 1991-2000). 2 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Blackwell, 2000); Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideas of Western Dominance (Cornell, 1990); Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa (Stanford, 1997). 254 Many scholars have connected the French hygiene movement with the origins of the Third Republic.3 Somehow in the shadow of defeat by Prussia and the glow of Pasteur's breakthroughs, biology became national destiny in France after 1871. The hygiene movement emerged to heal the national body, trailing behind it all of the historical debris which linked the social and the biomedical in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. The Pasteurian revolution is such an important part of the scenery of fin-de-siècle and belle époque France that several important histories of social reform in this era include an obligatory chapter on hygiene.4 But Bruno Latour famously flipped this narrative on its head, arguing it was not Pasteur that created the hygiene movement, but the hygiene movement that created Pasteur. In The Pasteurization of France, Latour spoke of a “hygiene movement,” a “program of reforms” for “the reconstitution, the reorganization of human life,” which targeted the “urban masses” in particular.5 Hygiene was never the monopoly of doctors, social reformers, research scientists or even of a bourgeoisie afraid of the working classes. This was a wide-spread movement, wide enough to encompass different points of view, contradiction and debate, wide enough to attract attention from right and left alike. Latour called it “an enormous social movement [which] ran through the social body” and “a social movement of gigantic proportions that declared itself ready to take charge of 3 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, 1976); Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Yale, 1981); Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, 1984); Eugen Weber, France Fin de Siècle (Harvard, 1896); Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harvard, 1988); Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-1918 (Cambridge, 1989); Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (MIT, 1989); Jack D. Ellis, The Physician-legislators of France: Medicine and Politics in the Early Third Republic, 1870-1914 (Cambridge, 1990). 4 Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, and Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France. 5 Latour, The Pasteurization of France, p. 16-17. 255 everything.”6 This movement sought to remake society, or life, itself. Hence no domain per se was safe from hygienic scrutiny; no means were out of reach. The movement practiced a peculiar “mixture of urbanism, consumer protection, ecology…, defense of the environment, and moralization.” In his words, “the boundaries of hygiene are vague.” Its flexibility was a large part of its power: It has no central argument. It is made up of an accumulation of advice, precautions, recipes, opinions, statistics, remedies, regulations, anecdotes, case studies….Illness, as defined by the hygienists, can be caused by almost anything….Nothing must be ignored, nothing dismissed. Latour summed up, “it was necessary to act upon everything at once.”7 And so in Paris after Pasteur, many different things became objects of hygienic work—hotel rooms, Métro stations, night stands, public showers, water heaters, septic tanks, windows, kitchens, roads, hospitals, schools, neighborhoods, whole cities, suburban housing developments—the list could go on almost indefinitely. For example, the topics treated in an 1882 history of hygiene included: childhood hygiene, dietary hygiene, industrial and professional hygiene, unclean dwellings, urban vs. rural sanitation, hospitals, the basics of contagious disease theory, the organization of public medicine (administration), institutions where hygiene was taught, and records of different hygiene societies. Within each of these broad topics was a sub-set of finer- grained concerns: how to heat apartments, how to keep livestock, how to clean one's military uniform, disinfection, physical exercise and swimming pools, and special instructions for perishable foods like milk, meat and wine. There were special sections on trichinosis, beer taps, meat markets, and margarine, but also sections on factory 6 Ibid., pp. 23 and 33, respectively. 7 Ibid., pp. 19-20. 256 accidents, building materials, fertilizer, street lighting, prisons, slaughterhouses, cremation of human corpses, yellow fever, vaccination and faculties of medicine. Nothing, by definition, was out of hygiene's reach.8 In fact, the hygiene movement desired nothing less than to remake everyday life, to change people’s daily habits: the way they worked, ate, slept, washed, dressed, reproduced, etc. Hygienists also scrutinized how rooms and buildings were designed, built, arranged and furnished; the way food was produced, prepared, and consumed; the way waste was stored, disposed of, processed; the crucial issue of water; and the changing of schedules, rhythms and routines (how often people bathe, e.g.). They were deeply committed to the Republic's mission of “moral and material improvement.” This point about remaking everyday life opens up an important set of methodological questions. We are used to thinking that the word “design,” a term common in architectural history, technological history, and art history, can only be applied to writing the histories of artifacts, objects, material things. How, then, can we understand the hygiene movement, which so evidently sought to design not only healthy 8 Societé de Médecine Publique et d'Hygiène Professionnelle, L'Étude et les progrès de l'hygiène en France de 1878 à 1882 (Paris: G. Masson, 1882). The popular press is another important source for revealing the widespread and wide-ranging concerns of the hygiene movement. It also allows us to begin the difficult process of measuring how successful the hygienists' opinion campaign was. Popular newspaper Le Petit Parisien ran articles about: the hygienic power of light (Pontarmé, "De la lumière," Sept. 5, 1896), garbage disposal (Pontarmé, "Hygiène et économie," Aug. 27, 1897), the water supply (Jean Frollo, "Ce qu'on boit," July 8, 1898), sewers ("Les égouts de Paris," July 3 and July 7, 1899), public health and disease control ("La défense sanitaire," July 11, 1899), overcrowded tenements ("Les logements surpeuplés," Aug. 1, 1899) and pollution of the Seine ("L'Empoisonnement de la Seine," July 26 and July 27, 1900). Editorialists also adressed the special hygienic issues of summertime (Jean Frollo, "L'hygiène de l'été," July 19, 1902), of street cleaning ("L'Arrosage des rues de Paris," July 21, 1902), of hats and haircuts (R. Deuzères, "À travers la science," July 25, 1904), of large families ("Les Maisons hygièniques pour familles nombreuses" July 27, 1907), and of automobiles ("À travers la science", July 29, 1907). In its "advice for travelers" section, popular travel magazine A travers le monde (across the world), published articles on "the rules of colonial hygiene" (1895, no. 1, pp. 126-7) and "hygiene of the eye during travel" (1899, no. 5, p. 240). These publications were not exceptional. One could find just as many relevant titles by browsing other periodicals, the published record is so rich with hygienic texts. 257 ecosystems, cities, neighborhoods, blocks, buildings, apartments, or furnishings, but also human actions, habits, practice? In Paris after Pasteur, hygienists not only designed material objects—they also wrote social-cultural scripts for how to use these objects. This dual project of designing infrastructures and practices demands an interdisciplinary analysis. In the history of the hygiene movement we can see, all mixed up, the concerns of art history (aesthetics of design), architectural history (aesthetic concerns and structural