Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (15 page)

After more than a century of beardedness, European men once again abandoned facial hair in the late 1600s. What followed was the most smooth-faced century in Western history. This was also the century of absolutism, when European rulers centralized power and demanded a higher degree of elegance, grace, and discipline from their subjects. This turn to a more regulated society followed the upheavals of the Reformation, which had contributed to civil wars across Europe, including the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, and the horrific Thirty Years’ War in German-speaking lands. The quest for social order required men to discipline their bodies and their faces, and to show they were able and willing to abide by elaborate rules of deportment and etiquette.

The decline of facial hair also coincided with the birth of the Enlightenment, which might be assigned to the year 1687, when Isaac Newton published his scientific masterwork,
Principia Mathematica
. Newton’s precise, mathematical explanation of the laws of physical nature became the touchstone of the Enlightenment quest to discover natural laws governing human affairs, including economics, law, politics, and the arts. Only a few years before Newton’s book appeared, King Louis XIV of France and his court abandoned their pencil-thin mustaches, the last remnants of the Renaissance beard movement. The turn to reason and the razor were not directly linked, nor were they mere coincidences. As the mastery of nature now seemed more necessary and possible, it
was fitting that authoritative masculinity was being redefined as a matter of refinement and education. Natural hair was now less compelling; a carefully shaved face framed by a highly styled wig appeared more befitting the sort of manliness to which this century aspired.
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Hyacinthe Rigaud’s famous portrait of King Louis XIV at the height of his power in 1701 vividly illustrates these themes (
figure 7.1
). It seems incredible to modern viewers that a man bedecked in white tights, flouncy lace, red-ribboned high heels, and huge curly wig would be the very image of masculine greatness. But that is precisely what he was. This is the portrait of one of the most successful, admired, and imitated monarchs in history. The power and glamour of Louis’s court ensured that this French style, including the banishment of all natural hair, would rule polite society for more than a century.

Louis hoped to communicate several important messages about himself in this portrait. First, there is nothing small about the Sun King. His robes, his sleeves, and his hair are all big. He was a tall man made even taller by high heels and a towering wig. In this sense he cut an undeniably impressive figure. But size was not the whole story. Clearly he was proud of his legs and wished to show them to great effect. Louis and his court engaged in a sophisticated dance, literally and figuratively, that reflected the well-ordered government and society over which he presided. His serene mastery of the intricate steps of political and social ritual was critical to upholding order and the general good. Everything about him bespoke refinement and grace. There is both profusion and orderliness in his entire aspect, from his billowing ermine robe to his flowing curls. All is exquisitely fabricated and arranged. Nothing could be left to chance, and natural hair was certainly too chancy for such an elaborate show. Though Louis and other powerful men had worn styled beards or mustaches in the middle decades of the 1600s, even that small display of natural endowment was eliminated by 1680. Instead, the royal court employed dozens of wig makers working around the clock to supply the king and nobility with a rather different sort of magnificent and carefully controlled hair.

Rigaud’s portrait is a highly styled image of a highly styled man, but it faithfully represents the king’s personality and ideals. Louis was the star actor in Europe’s greatest stage production, supported by a cast of thousands at the glittering court of Versailles. At the time of this portrait, some ten thousand noblemen and their families lived at court for at least part of the year. There were vast, well-tended parks to walk in, shimmering, gold-trimmed halls in which to eat and dance, and innumerable salons for games and concerts. At the center was the Sun King himself, the source of political energy and social life. For Louis, there was no distinction between care for his body and care for the state. The most favored men at court were those permitted to attend him at intimate moments of his daily regimen, particularly his morning toilette, which, like the rest of his day, was a carefully choreographed ritual. A lucky few were selected each day to enter the king’s bedchamber when he arose, putting in a word for themselves or a client as their sovereign changed out of his bedclothes and put on his shoes, stockings, and wig.
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Every other morning, the king shaved himself as a servant held up a mirror, all the while listening to what favors this or that nobleman wished to ask of him.

There have been few times in history when the arrangement of the body politic was so closely tied to the arrangement of the ruler’s body. For all its faults and tyrannies, Louis XIV’s tightly regulated regime was a triumph of order after the chaos and trauma that France had suffered during a century of religious and civil wars. The passions and confusions of the Reformation had ignited fires of religious anger between Protestants and Catholics and inflamed fierce political rivalries among aristocratic factions. These fires had finally burned out by the 1590s, and a new order began to take shape. The French nobility surrendered to the monarchy a monopoly of force and violence in return for a lion’s share of privileges in the new order centered at Versailles. The weapons of war were cast aside in favor of a graceful ballet of political and sexual intrigue that became ever more sophisticated as time went on. The regulation of body and of manners was a critical piece of this social realignment. As Louis XIV’s portrait demonstrated, manliness was reconfigured to emphasize taste and sophistication rather than force or impulse. It is easy to see the appeal of this new model for Europe. France had found a solution to the ills of the age, and other nations scrambled to imitate its example. As the 1600s came to a close, tights,
lace, wigs, and razors became absolute necessities for any European man who aspired to social influence.

Although Louis XIV helped promote the new masculine style, and became its greatest exemplar, neither he nor any other king brought it about by his own initiative. Back in the 1620s, in the time of Louis’s father, Louis XIII, a worldly churchman named Louis Barbier, the Abbot of Rivière, first appeared in court with a blond wig. Soon after, Louis XIII, afflicted with baldness while still in his twenties, followed the abbot’s lead.
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By 1634, the court employed thirty-four barber–wig makers. This did not spell the immediate end of beards, however, for the king preserved a highly styled chin beard and mustache. Wigs and beards coexisted uncomfortably for a time. But natural hair often contradicted manufactured curls, and placed limits on the variety of wigs one might choose. As a result, the beards began to disappear, and mustaches became smaller and smaller. The king’s death in 1643 placed his young son, Louis XIV, on the throne under the care of regents. The new king was more fortunate in his hair than his father, and because he was capable of producing long, curly hair of his own, he forsook wigs. The gentlemen of his court and of the city of Paris nevertheless continued to pay for the services of wig makers. In 1673, Louis, now in his thirties and with thinning hair, finally yielded, ordering flowing curls for himself, and approving the establishment of a new guild of two hundred master wig makers for Paris. Shortly afterward, he also abandoned his small mustache. The era of big hair and smooth faces was well and truly begun. In England, Charles II had anticipated Louis’s switch to wigs by a decade, but only after several of his leading nobleman had done so. The impulse toward carefully managed manliness ran deep and strong.

This transition from natural to false hair was not simple or easy. It took some time for people to get used to it, and some stubbornly resisted. The experience of English diarist Samuel Pepys opens a window on the fits and starts of the wig trend. Pepys was an ambitious civil servant in the admiralty who was talented enough, and vain enough, to write a richly detailed account of his life among the London elite. As he rose in station during the 1660s, he urgently kept abreast of fashion. In 1663 he was still uncertain whether to shave his natural hair in favor of a hairpiece; he was looking, he wrote, but not yet buying. In October he made the plunge, ordering his first wig and taking his wife to the wig
makers to see it. Fortunately for him, she approved. Part of his worry was cost. The wig and accessories such as storage cases, cleaners, and combs were not cheap, but he reassured himself that it was a valuable social investment. He confided to his diary, “I perceive how I have hitherto suffered for lack of going as becomes my place.”
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Another worry for Pepys was whether others would see his new look as affected. He was very nervous about his first day at the office after his big purchase and was relieved that his new style caused no stir among his superiors. His claim to status as a bigwig had been accepted.
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Pepys soon discovered the advantages and disadvantages of hairpieces. In the spring of 1665, he caught a cold that he attributed to failing to wear his wig enough, thereby exposing his close-cropped head to the elements. At one point he had second thoughts about the whole enterprise, and grew back his own hair. In the end, however, he found he had become accustomed to the wig’s convenience. He even upped the ante. In the spring of 1667 he bought two new and finer hairpieces from a French maker, and the following Sunday attended church in one of them to “make a great show.”
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The bigger the hair, the higher he rose in society.
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As Pepys’s case reveals, wigs became the essential accessory of manliness and status in the late 1600s, rendering beards irrelevant and aberrant. Traditionalists lamented this turn of affairs, though their voices were gradually stilled. In western Germany in 1647, Johann Michael Moscherosch, a writer who satirized life in his war-torn homeland, viewed the abandonment of natural hair as dishonest and un-German.
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John Bulwer, a scientific writer in England in the 1650s, criticized the “beard-haters” of his day, who seemed unreasonably angry that nature had placed hairs around men’s mouths.
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This attitude was mistaken, he argued, because nature had a purpose for all things, including facial hair. Bulwer quoted Marco Olmo with approval, agreeing that nature intended the beard to be an index of the manly soul. As such it was an “impiety against the Law of Nature” to do away with it.

It was no coincidence that Bulwer launched his defense of beards at a time when his political adversaries in England, the so-called Roundheads,supporters of Parliament in its war against King Charles I, had rejected aristocratic long hair and distinguished themselves by cropping their hair and beards.
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In criticizing “beard-haters,” Bulwer was also striking at the “unnatural” and “effeminate” politics of his rivals.

In the later decades of the 1600s, the mighty fortress of beard defense was Lutheran Saxony, where wigs had been banned outright until 1662. Even after this line was breached, however, Saxon scholars and pastors persisted in defending natural manliness. In 1672, Jakob Thomasius, professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, illustrious philosopher, and onetime mentor to mathematician and philosopher Gottlieb Leibnitz, lectured on the cultural importance of beards. A generation later, in 1698, a professor at Wittenberg University, Georg Caspar Kirchmaier, published another learned discourse, insisting on the moral worth of manly hair. Sounding like a latter-day Bulwer, he denounced “beard-haters,” maintaining that nature gave men beards as evidence of dignity and mastery.
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Kirchmaier feared the loss of male authority, both individual and collective, if men were to forgo their God-given “ornament.”

In this flurry of Saxon fervor, the most accessible and sensible contribution emerged in 1690 from the pen of Samuel Theodor Schönland, a Lutheran minister in Lommatzsch. As a bearded pastor, Schönland was spurred to action by the publication of an anonymous tract attacking clergymen’s beards as antisocial and vain. Schönland deployed the traditional defense, quoting Valeriano on health benefits and affirming nature’s will “to adorn men with beards to increase their authority.”
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He offered more original arguments as well, discoursing on the beard’s positive contribution to male virtues. “A good man hunts out incitements to virtue from all quarters,” Schönland wrote. “Why then should he not do this by using his beard?”
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The beard was a symbolic expression of the masculine ideal: when a man trims his beard to prevent it from becoming tangled and uncontrolled, he is reminded to cultivate his spirit also, maintaining a good humor and avoiding the extremes of gloom or frivolity. When he keeps his beard clean, he thinks also of keeping his whole self undefiled by deception and lies. Avoiding dyes and proudly showing his natural hair encourages a man always to act with honesty and good faith.
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To Schönland’s thinking, the beard was not simply a symbol of virtue, but an instrument of its accomplishment, whose loss would literally and figuratively expose men to worldly temptations.

Schönland’s arguments, and those of other Saxon conservatives, proved fruitless, and German Protestants joined Western Europe in submission
to the razor. Johann F. W. Pagenstecher, a Calvinist professor of history and law in Marburg, put forth a valiant and learned discourse on the virtues of beards in 1708, and still another in 1714, deploying classical and biblical authorities to explain how beards helped preserve male social authority.
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But it was too little, too late. The razor and wig were more persuasive, and an engraved portrait reveals that Pagenstecher himself wore a fashionable curly wig and smoothly shaved face.

In the eighteenth century, facial hair was nowhere to be found outside enclaves that deliberately cut themselves off from the mainstream. The Mennonites, a German Protestant sect, were one such group, and their stubborn beardedness became for them a trademark of resistance. After suffering persecution in the 1500s for their rejection of civil authority, the radical, Bible-believing Mennonites, along with a smaller breakaway group, the Amish, withdrew to rural parts of Switzerland, Germany, and France, where they held fast to old patterns of life. Many later emigrated to William Penn’s American colony, again segregating themselves from the rest of society. To this day the groups’ members are immediately recognizable by their old-style dress and grooming, a true relic of Reformation Europe: bonnets and long hair for women; broad hats and long beards for men. The Amish in particular value their styles of hair and dress as proof of their freedom from the corruptions of the world. As their founder, Jacob Ammann, insisted in 1693, those who want “to be conformed with the world with shaved beard . . . and haughty clothing” should be corrected by the church or be banished.
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In the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other states, pockets of the long-lost Renaissance beard movement can still be found.