Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (17 page)

The Academie du Pont Saint-Michel was not an official body. It was the whimsical name chosen by a group of ambitious young Parisians for their literary club. Meeting weekly at the Café Girard in the heart of Paris, these friends shared their research, poetry, and fiction with one another. At one meeting in 1782, twenty-seven-year-old Jacques Antoine Dulaure presented his essay entitled
Pogonogogia: A Philosophical and Historical Essay on Beards.
Dulaure was a civil engineer trying to become a writer. His first efforts involved the things he knew best, the history of civil engineering and architecture, but he had begun to expand into theater reviews and poetry. Seeking something new and fresh, and hoping to amuse his friends, he delved into the curious lore of hair, soon becoming fascinated with the topic as a novel avenue for moral criticism. This was slightly embarrassing to Dulaure, who, in his later published introduction, apologized for being “led away” by his subject and for abandoning his original intent to produce a learned jest.
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Even so, his friends liked it and urged him to publish it. It was a measure of wider interest that a London press issued an English edition soon after it appeared in Paris.

Starting on a whim, Dulaure discovered an intriguing theme, but even more importantly, he found his voice as a writer. By writing about beards, he accidently discovered a cause, and he discovered the usefulness of history as tool of social and moral criticism. As a result, the engineer became a historian.
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When revolution came in 1789, the historian became a politician. Dulaure served for a short time as a representative in the National Convention, until he was forced out in 1793 by the leftist coup that launched the Terror. In many respects, Dulaure’s
Pogonogogia
was expressive of the latest and most fervent phase of the Enlightenment, in its greater passion for reform and criticism of the status quo. Inspired by an Enlightenment faith in the authority of nature and reason, he found in beard history two great moral forces ranged against each other: the superficial vanity of fashion and the solid integrity of nature. Society had fallen under the absurd spell of fashion. “Who, in this enlightened age,” he asked sardonically, “would put the least confidence in a physician who wears his own hair, were it the finest in the world? A wig, certainly, can’t give him science, but it gives him the appearance, and that is everything now-a-days.”
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Aligned with this antagonism of fashion and authenticity was the conflict between effeminacy and manliness. When men abandoned nature’s path, Dulaure reasoned, they rendered themselves effeminate, devoid of the vitality, seriousness, and fortitude they ought to have. Shaving was men’s misbegotten effort to depart from nature’s calling, resulting in subjection to the tyranny of the trivial. Revitalization of manliness was needed for social renewal. “To write an apology for long beards,” he extravagantly declared, “is to recall to men’s minds their ancient dignity, and that superiority of their sex which has been lost in Europe ever since the fabulous days of chivalry.”
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There can be no doubt that Dulaure and his young, middle-class friends struggled with their own feelings of inadequacy. They could assign some of the blame for their situation to what Dulaure derided as “our effeminate customs,” and dream of finding fresh courage to assert themselves and achieve honor and distinction.
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Dulaure’s history was a sweeping epic involving a grand contest between champions of honest beardedness—Demosthenes, Hadrian, St. Clement, Francis I—and “unmerciful enemies of bearded chins,” such as Alexander the Great, Pope Gregory VII, Louis XIV, and Peter the Great. Hebrews, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese—indeed, peoples all around the world—had reverenced long beards, which proved their innate force and underscored the notion that shaving was the tyranny of jealous rulers. The enemies of beards foolishly ignored the health benefits of facial hair and callously risked the collapse of the gender order. In contrast to Fangé’s calm recognition of bearded women, Dulaure derided them as repulsive and declared it appropriate for women to eradicate any show of hair on their faces. According
to
Pogonogogia,
the presence of facial hair on women, and the absence of it on men, were signs of social disorder and pointed to its source—the unnatural tyranny of fashion. Distracted by self-indulgence, men “know no other virtue than the talent of being agreeable.”
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It stood to reason, then, that a return to beards would improve the moral fabric, and Dulaure called upon independent, strong-willed men to lead the way. It sounded like a dare, and though they might thrill to the idea, he and his friends were not quite ready to act on it. Typically for Enlightenment thinkers, Dulaure was more talk than action. Like Rousseau, he was intrigued by the beard as a radical gesture, and especially as an assertion of masculinity, even if he was not ready to grow one himself.

During the eighteenth century, beards were an abstract idea, a concept around which a larger critique of cultural degeneracy could be built. For both Rousseau and Dulaure, fashion, refinement, and superficiality had removed men from a proper grounding in natural honesty and virtue. They looked to a bearded past and anticipated a bearded future. Russian traditionalists like the Old Believers had similar thoughts. They too perceived the beard as a symbol of true moral order and looked to a venerable past, before absolutist rulers like Louis XIV and Peter the Great had imposed smooth and immoral manners upon them. There can be no question that, as Samuel Pepys’s experience proves, elite men had invested dignity in artificial rather than natural hair, as well as elaborate conventions of dress and deportment. The reason these conventions did not wither under the assaults of beard champions is that the real benefits of social decorum trumped fantasies of liberated virility.

Revolution arrived in France just a few years after Dulaure’s study of beards, and dreams of a new political and social order stirred the hearts of hopeful young men like the little band at the Academie du Pont Saint-Michel. For a time Dulaure was himself a representative in the revolutionary legislature. The king fell from power, and the church was stripped of much of its wealth and influence. It was possible that fashion would suffer a similar defeat. An anonymous pamphlet distributed in the streets of Paris after the fall of the Bastille expressed this expectation. It congratulated the citizens of Paris for recovering the liberty of their medieval forebears, the Franks. “You will again become
like them,” the text announced, “strong and healthy, like them you will let your beard grow, and you will wear the long hair they favored. Goodbye hairdressers, beauticians and merchants of fashion, now you will cover yourselves with cotton or homespun. From now on you will scorn all the ornaments of luxury, and you will make use of all your physical and intellectual faculties.”
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As it turned out, of course, the revolution proceeded in fits and starts, proceeding from terror to war, Napoleonic glory, and military defeat. The dreams of liberty, equality, fraternity, and beardedness remained unfulfilled as the nineteenth century got underway.

The French Revolution stirred great hopes and fears throughout Europe. The hope was for a new birth of liberty and equality. The fear was the specter of political violence and war unleashed by revolutionary fervor. Many wondered what good could come of revolution if reason were crushed by the horrors of the guillotine. In the face of this grave obstacle, young and fervent romantics throughout Europe dreamed of a new spirit of sensitivity, intuition, and heroism that would quell disorder, foster unity, and achieve true liberty. Many hoped that Napoleon Bonaparte might be the man to secure these dreams, a man of genius able to keep both retrograde royalty and revolutionary terror at bay. Among Napoleon’s many early admirers was the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven, who dedicated his passionate and groundbreaking Third Symphony to him. Soon after history’s first romantic composer dedicated history’s first romantic symphony to Europe’s first romantic political hero, Bonaparte betrayed Beethoven’s aspirations, quashing the fledgling French Republic, declaring himself emperor, and embarking on a campaign of imperial conquest. The frustrated composer tore up his symphony’s title page and removed his dedication. It was painfully clear to him that Europe had not yet found its liberating hero, and that his soaring symphony would call to mind the unfulfilled hopes of a romantic generation.

A few years after Beethoven’s disillusionment, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain fell under Napoleon’s boot, and a deep gloom overshadowed liberal dreams in those countries. The French Revolution, once so full of promise, had become a nightmare. Conservatives raised the standard of resistance, calling on all to rally to monarchy and tradition. Beleaguered republicans clung forlornly to their fading hopes of equality and constitutionalism. Romantics proposed a third way: if men themselves changed, both national restoration and republican freedom would be possible. Like the conservatives, they looked to history; unlike the conservatives, they did not look to the immediate past but to a more distant, medieval past, whence bearded men beckoned as hopeful symbols of a restored future.

Outside Berlin in the summer of 1811, gangs of young robbers led by a vigorous, bearded man of middle age assaulted scores of travelers. Hidden among rocks and trees in a stretch of hilly countryside, the predatory bands would emerge suddenly, descend on their victims, wrestle them to the ground, and carry them off to their lair. If the prisoners were lucky, they might be rescued by counterattacking travelers. It was a dramatic scene repeated dozens of times over the course of the summer.

The robbers were not real robbers, however, nor were the travelers real victims. They were teenage boys playing a well-organized game. The mastermind was the boys’ rather unusual history teacher, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. With games like Robbers and Travelers, and gymnastic exercises in a nearby field, Jahn tested his students’ physical strength and skill and encouraged them to develop a sense of teamwork and strategy. These Prussian boys were growing up at a time when Germany lay broken and impotent in the grip of Napoleon’s revolutionary armies, and it was their teacher’s dearest ambition to instill in them a spirit of companionship, resourcefulness, and toughness that would eventually restore German independence.
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Like many of his generation, Jahn was a true Romantic who believed that human destiny was shaped by spirit and passion. He was convinced that his fellow Germans needed
a rebirth of national feeling and pride to regain their freedom, and that gymnastics exercises and field games were the best means to this end. Physical discipline would help revive the medieval spirit of daring, heroism, and honor, which in turn would redeem modern Germany.

Over the next several years, more and more boys and young men joined Jahn’s gymnastics club at the edge of the city, where they played, fenced, and trained on a range of apparatus, including the high bar, the pommel horse, and Jahn’s own invention, the parallel bars. There could be no mistaking Jahn for a gym teacher, however. He was first and foremost a mythmaker and nation-builder. The young men who flocked to his club were invited into an egalitarian brotherhood of German heroism, replete with a costume of linen trousers, loose gray shirts, and newfangled badges of chivalry. The emblem on each boy’s chest featured four dates alongside the word
Turnkunst
(Jahn’s coinage to replace the Greek
gymnastics
): 9, the year the Germans secured their freedom by defeating the invading Roman army; 919, the year the chivalric tournaments began; 1519, the end of tournaments; and 1811, the year Jahn revived manly tournaments in the guise of gymnastic games.
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The history teacher with the romantic spirit saw the future by looking into the past, or rather, the imaginary past. In a book on German nationality that Jahn published just before establishing his gymnastics club, he urged his countrymen to abandon their slavish admiration of foreign ideas and foreign ways. He called instead for the adoption of specifically German values, styles, and words—like
Turnkunst
. He wore a costume of cheap, durable, unbleached cloth with an open collar, which he imagined was authentically German, and he grew out his beard because he thought this too was both noble and German.
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Though he had reason to believe his beard and clothes were historically authentic, his choices were not determined by careful research. The two things he found most distressing in his day were the imitation of all things foreign—especially French—and the loss of German virility. Unbleached cloth and facial hair were emphatically unfashionable, and thus un-French. Beards especially denoted strength, by association with medieval chivalry. In his book on nationality, Jahn waxed poetical about the good old days of hairy masculinity. The ancestral German man was master of many sorts of warfare. “Later came the disappearance of the sword, regarded as superfluous, from his side, of
the troublesome beard from his face, and of the heroic courage of our ancestors from his heart.”
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In Jahn’s imagination, a new, bearded generation of gymnasts, cunning in field games, fierce with fencing foils, and fearless on high bars and pommel horses, would renew medieval glory for modern Germany.

Jahn’s back-to-the-future logic promised a nonrevolutionary path to the revolutionary goals of social equality, national unity, and constitutional
government.
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In his imagination, bearded men, tuning their bodies, minds, and spirits to the heroic German past, could bypass social and political divisions and controversies. No wonder Jahn let his beard grow thicker and longer with each passing year.

In 1813, Jahn and several hundred gymnasts served in the Prussian militia, helping to expel French forces from German lands. He then joined with others to organize a national patriotic student fraternity to promote physical revitalization, constitutional reform, and German unification. Jahn provided the guidebook of gymnastics, again announcing his goal of recovering lost manly traditions.
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The German authorities knew a threat to the aristocratic order when they saw it and viewed the gymnastics movement with great suspicion. In 1819, an overzealous gymnast at the University of Jena assassinated a critic of the student movement, and the authorities jumped at the opportunity to ban both patriotic fraternities and their gymnastic exercises. Jahn himself was apprehended, banished from Berlin, and placed under a house arrest for several years. The time for unity, constitutionalism, and beardedness had not yet arrived in Germany.

Friedrich Ludwig Jahn may not have realized his particular vision of manliness, but that did not mean the old social and gender order had survived the revolutionary era intact. On the contrary, the American and French Revolutions ushered in a new era of natural hair for men in the Western world. Before these upheavals, men used the artifice of elaborate clothing and false hair to demonstrate superior breeding and social privilege. Afterward, silk stockings, lace collars, high heels, bright ribbons, and powdered wigs were banished for good. In their place a contrary style emerged, featuring black trousers, black coats, black ties, and black hats. This “great renunciation,” as one scholar called it, enacted the modern idea of equality by simplifying and standardizing male fashion, emphasizing the natural physique and personal virtues such as sobriety and restraint over wealth and breeding.
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The new ideals of this era grounded social rights not in inheritance and rank but in manhood itself. Thomas Jefferson proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence (1776) that all men were endowed with inalienable rights, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) insisted that social distinctions should be based on individual merit rather than social rank or entitlement. Not
all European states ascribed to these egalitarian ideals, but in the age of the Napoleonic Wars all relied on their male citizenry as never before to fight for their homelands. In both theory and in war, then, manhood became the foundation of the political order.

Sober black clothing and natural hair was the appropriate look for a society founded on male citizenship. The move to a more natural look encouraged thoughts of beards as well, but concern for responsible self-discipline argued against it. The most popular European style in the first half of the nineteenth century was what the French called the
favoris
and English speakers called whiskers. This was a rather more impressive display of natural hair than was permitted in the previous century, but it was still restrained. The mustache, which became an important part of military style at this time, was a special case that will be considered later. The full beard became even less acceptable in polite society when young romantic radicals adopted it as a calling card of social rebellion.