Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (18 page)

While conservative governments in Germany kept Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and other liberals in check, France remained at the cutting edge of social ferment, and also the leading edge of hair experimentation. In the late 1820s and 1830s, young bearded romantics were the talk of Paris, much of it disapproving. A conservative gentlemen in Victor Hugo’s novel
Les misérables,
which was set in 1832, complained that “the nineteenth century is poison; the first little squirt that comes along grows his little goatee, thinks he’s a genuine rogue, and leaves his old relatives in the lurch. That’s republican, that’s romantic. What the hell is romantic about that?”
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The answer, of course, is that beards were romantic because they were natural and historic, and thus seemed to counter the vanities and corruptions of modern life. Hugo was himself partly responsible for the enthusiasm for beards in the 1830s. He was the brightest light among a new generation of artists and writers who were burning to try new ideas and experience new freedoms. After visiting an exhibit of romantic art featuring historic scenes and historic bearded men, Hugo gave voice to the hairy impulse of his generation.

Though he could not bring himself to wear a beard, Hugo penned a lighthearted, satirical argument for doing so. God had originally made men beautiful, Hugo wrote, with eyes, chin, mouth, and cheeks that expressed serenity, confidence, and strength. But the grandeur of the male face had been destroyed by modern commercial civilization. Men in modern times had become narrow-minded and unimaginative, and it showed in their faces. “The calculations of interest take the place of the speculations of the intellect . . . [and] when interest has superseded intelligence, pride disappears, the nostril contracts [and] the eye grows dull.”
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But God, he wryly proposed, had foreseen this development and in his wisdom provided man with a beard to cover “this ugliness bred of civilization.” The moral was “let your beards grow, all ye who are ugly and who wish to be handsome!”
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When this semijoking piece appeared in print, the controversy of the chin erupted. Hugo was astonished as critics rushed to denounce beards as “repulsive, unpatriotic, Jewish, abominable, and worst of all, romantic!” Champions of good taste pronounced the shaven chin to be classic and dignified, vowing that the French, the most intelligent people in the world, would never allow beards to triumph.

Young and old, radical and conservative, all took the beard question rather more seriously than Hugo had expected, and the excitement of the debate inspired even more young men to let their facial hair grow. Here was an effective way, along with colorful and historic clothing, to offend the priggish middle classes and pierce the smugness of the old guard. It was not necessary for
les jeunes-France
(Young France), as they called themselves, to be consistent about what period of history they evoked with their hair. Some hoped to model themselves on the supposedly pure authenticity of Homeric Greece. Some, influenced by Walter Scott’s wildly popular medieval novels, emulated the nobility of knighthood; others, the boldness of Renaissance courtiers. All eras were equally suitable because they all stood in colorful and hairy contrast to darkly clothed, smoothly trimmed respectability.

In 1830, revolution broke out again in Paris, and romantic beards reached full bloom. The deeply unpopular and very unliberal Bourbon king Charles X had done his best to turn back the clock on equality and liberty, but French citizens of almost all ranks had lost patience with his hopelessly outdated and oppressive rule. An early sign of the coming
revolt came in February 1830 when conservative guardians of literary taste were bested by Hugo and his romantic supporters in the theatrical riot known as the “Battle of the
Hernani
.”
Hernani
, Hugo’s untraditional new play set in Renaissance Spain, features a desperate confrontation between three men for the hand of a Spanish noblewoman, which ends rather badly when the lady and two of her suitors commit suicide. To men of taste, the sexual themes, passionate tone, and earthy, contemporary French dialogue were shocking and reprehensible. Alerted to its offensiveness, traditionalists turned out in force at the premiere to demonstrate their displeasure. Hugo and his romantic allies were ready for them. Deeming themselves “knights of the future” and “defenders of artistic liberty,” young students, poets, and artists stationed themselves around the theater, resplendent in colorful medieval or Renaissance outfits, long hair, and flowing mustaches and beards.
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They boisterously cheered the play, and countered conservative jeers and catcalls with gameful rejoinders. The costume drama in the seats overshadowed the one on stage, which proceeded with great difficulty amid the tumult. In the end, the critics pronounced the battle of the
Hernani
a triumph for the romantics, and Hugo collected a handsome price for the publishing rights. It was curtains for the restrained sophistication of French classical theater, and it was a portent of doom for King Charles.

The uprising in the streets of Paris that toppled the king the following July was immortalized by the romantic painter Eugène Delacroix in his monumental work
Liberty Leading the People
(
figure 8.2
). At the center is Lady Liberty, waving the flag of the republic and beckoning men to follow her toward national liberation. She is a symbol, of course, but so are the men to her right. One is a tanned, scruffy workman who stands in for the French laborer. Next to him is a young, bearded gentleman dressed in his bourgeois black coat, tie, and top hat, and carrying a musket. The man in black is really a mixed metaphor, combining the sober black outfit of the respectable middle class with the beard of Young France. This monumental canvas presented Delacroix’s vision of a nation invigorated by a liberal and romantic spirit.

The street battles of 1830 succeeded in overthrowing Charles X, but they did not manage to create a republic. Powerful landed and business interests prevented this by calling in a new king, Louis Philippe, who promised to be more moderate than his predecessor. The old regime was out, but the hopes of idealists like Hugo and Delacroix were
dashed. Just two years later, foolhardy radicals prematurely tried again. As described in Hugo’s
Les misérables,
“great strapping lads with long hair, beards, and mustaches” took to the barricades once more to fight the new king, only to be routed by shaved and disciplined troops.
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Within weeks of this debacle, Louis Philippe’s government cracked down on another, even more radical group of hairy men called the Saint-Simonians. In July 1832, dozens of them marched behind their charismatic leader Barthélémi-Prosper Enfantin into a Paris courtroom to face trial and conviction on charges of unauthorized meetings and moral depravity. The heavily bearded Enfantin had declared himself the prophet of a new brand of Christianity that would liberate the world, and especially women, for whom he outrageously advocated complete equality with men. The Saint-Simonians represented a curious mix of religious fervor and scientific calculation. Unlike the artists and poets of Young France, most members of this cult were engineers and scientists who hoped to use science, guided by a generous Christian spirit, to organize an ideal society. It was to be a sort of top-down socialism, planned by a talented elite for the benefit of all.

Though they staked a claim to both science and rational religion, Saint-Simonians were, like their Young France peers, essentially romantic dreamers. Beards suited Saint-Simonians for the same reason they suited other romantics: they were both old and new. Saint-Simonians admired the past in terms of Christian traditions and ordered social hierarchy, but they also yearned for a future in which a scientific elite would rule. The sight of these outlandish men on trial reinforced in the European mind the association of beards with recklessness and revolt. Hair was not simply hair; it was a challenge to the social order.

The revolution of 1830 and the failed revolt of 1832 did not settle political matters in France. Indeed, observers in subsequent years noted how ideological divides found expression in subtle variations of hair.
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Conservative royalists were, naturally enough, clean-shaven. On the other end of the spectrum, republicans sported sideburns extending to their jaws along with a
mouche
, a small tuft of beard below the lips. Moderate republicans did not grow a
mouche
. If one had a
mouche
and a mustache, but not the long sideburns, a style later referred to as the “imperial,” one was a Bonapartist, that is, a supporter of the fallen imperial regime of Napoleon. Liberals, who stood between the moderate republicans and the conservatives, favored mustaches, with or without sideburns. Full beards, of course, were not really acceptable, except for artists and radicals. In a country defined by political divisions, it comes as no surprise that facial hair was deployed as a badge of allegiance, and this studied variation in facial hair helped keep France at the forefront of masculine style during the nineteenth century.

The social threat of long beards was a universal language in the early nineteenth century, understood in America as well as Europe. The contexts and issues varied, but the fear of hairy nonconformity was fundamentally the same. In the same year that Young France shouted at conservative theatergoers in Paris, an American farmer faced the battle of his lifetime in defense of individual choice.

Joseph Palmer was an upstanding, churchgoing citizen of Fitchburg, Massachusetts. His choice to grow a long beard, however, was deeply shocking to his straitlaced neighbors. They denounced him as a disgrace,
even a monster, and they blanched at his proud refusal to do away with his obnoxious ruff.

In the summer of 1830 matters reached a head. As Palmer waited his turn to receive communion at the town’s Congregational church, the minister carrying the bread and wine simply passed him by. Infuriated, the bearded farmer advanced to the communion table, took the cup, and served himself, finally shouting to the assembly, “I love my Jesus as well, and better, than any of you do!”
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For the good citizens of Fitchburg, this was the final straw. Some days later, four men armed with shears, soap, and razor seized him in the street, intending to put an end to his offensive whiskers. Palmer was thrown to the ground but, with the aid of a jackknife, managed to escape with his beard intact.

Not to be denied, Palmer’s attackers accused Palmer of assault, and he was thrown in jail. Behind bars, he wrote letters to the newspapers declaring that the true reason for his imprisonment was hatred of his whiskers, not the trumped-up charges of battery. For nearly a year, Palmer kept up a stream of public complaints about his jailers and his treatment. Finally, exasperated officials unlocked his cell to be rid of him. Palmer denied his tormenters even this satisfaction by insisting that he would not leave until he had been reimbursed for what he believed to be the exorbitant fees charged for his upkeep. Officers simply lifted him in his chair and carried him into the street. Now free, Palmer had no more trouble about his hair, and he embarked on a long career as a social agitator. At his death in 1875 his family placed a tombstone with the epitaph JOSEPH PALMER
.
PERSECUTED FOR WEARING THE BEARD.
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Palmer’s beard was not a nationalist symbol like Jahn’s, a romantic statement like those of Young France, or a socialist emblem like Enfantin’s, but it was just as much a symbol of protest. Palmer was an idealist, and though not really a revolutionary, he was certainly a reformer. He was personally acquainted with the leading thinkers in New England, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Amos Bronson Alcott. He was active in the cutting-edge movements of his day, notably antislavery and temperance, and he eagerly joined Alcott’s Fruitlands, an unsuccessful utopian commune. In short, the townspeople of Fitchburg were not wrong to see Palmer as a rebel, even if they were wrong to think that a razor would put him in his place.

Facial hair was especially offensive to New Englanders because it suggested a willful independence that ran counter to the communal
ethic of the Puritan tradition. Even social reformers were likely to react negatively to such idiosyncratic displays. It would be hard to find a man with a more radical temperament than Massachusetts-born William Lloyd Garrison, the great lion of the American antislavery movement. But even Garrison took exception to facial hair. In 1829, just months before the attack on Palmer’s beard, Garrison, who was just starting out as an abolitionist journalist in Baltimore, displayed his precocious talent for ranting. “Of all the brutal inclinations,” he declared, “of all the vulgar rivalships for unenviable pre-eminence—of all fashionable absurdities propagated and maintained by fashionable monsters—there has been nothing half as indecent and ridiculous, as the present rage for sporting huge mustaches.”
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Garrison stood at the cutting edge of American social reform, but the arrogance of a mustache seemed to him the ugly side of American individualism.

Facial hair indeed became a matter of increasing controversy in the 1830s and 1840s, the decades following Palmer’s imprisonment. Garrison’s tirade is just one example. Self-assertion, whether ideological or not, inclined more and more men to experiment with hair in these decades, provoking, in turn, a reaction from guardians of moral order and good taste.

Americans were generally not so rigid as the stern New Englanders of Palmer’s town, and they were more likely to sprout beards than Europeans. But even in the “land of the free,” there was widespread resistance to facial hair in these years. Men of cultivation generally reaped the growth on their faces to meet shaven standards of decorum. A sophisticated southern contributor to the
Southern Literary Journal
mused appreciatively in 1838 about historic beards in art and literature, but still found no justification for facial hair attempted by the iconoclasts in his own day. In his eyes, “an undergrowth, like that of our swamps, covers the countenance, and the human face divine is metamorphosed into the image and likeness of a mop.”
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Two years later, a German historian named Hermann Hauff, made the same point, mocking arrogant young men in his country who attempted to project an unwarranted sophistication by growing facial hair. “It is now precisely the opposite of what we see in earlier bearded centuries. Whereas once the rough white-streaked beard commanded the respect of the younger generation, now the youthful, combed, and tediously nourished beard is meant to impress the smooth beaks of elders.”
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In spite of such dismissive objections, political conservatives infected by the romantic spirit joined others in testing the possibilities of unconventional hair. Their reasons were largely the same as those of leftists, that is, to invoke a vital and authentic masculinity that would legitimate their cause. The early nineteenth century witnessed two forms of conservative facial hair: the aristocratic beard and the martial mustache. Both would prove important in laying the foundations for a new beard movement in the Western world.