the same period, medicine explained terrifying recurrent outbreaks of plague by Satan’s poisonous breath corrupting the air. Ambergris, musk and civet came to be seen as vital bulwarks against the Devil’s breath, a metaphor for sin, which was held to cause dreadful epidemics. Scents were worn like armour against the plague, and doctors explained that harmful forms of pestilence were dispelled by even worse fetid stenches. Plague was thereby correlated with terrible stenches of all sorts in countless scholarly treatises, while pleasant scents such as those emanating from the bodies of saints were thought to open the gates of paradise (see chapter 5). The finest scents were therefore initially used as repellents and prophylactics as well as to increase the wearer’s desirability. This ambiguous role embodied negative and positive aspects: the scents were in many cases obtained from the sex glands of ruthlessly hunted exotic animals, transmitting a message on what death meant to people in the past, yet they were also closely bound up with the vital human impulses of eroticism and love. Their detractors may have promised eternal hellfire for those who used perfumes for pleasure, but all classes of society came to use them as a matter of course as their sole protection against the plague, and the only way of masking body odours that proved particularly rank in two centuries that took against water and bathing. Their popularity earned a fortune for the closely allied professions of glove-making and perfumery, as clothing and leather, whatever its intended use, had to be steeped in perfume to protect the wearer against contagion. Fashion did the rest to trigger the first revolution in smells and smelling of the modern age, from the Renaissance to the age of Louis XIV (see chapter 6). The second such revolution, over the course of the eighteenth century, saw a thoroughgoing rejection of musk-based fragrances in favour of fruity, floral and spice-based scents. In the absence of any decisive advances in the control of fetid stenches, this shift was essentially driven by social and cultural factors: it may be seen as a way of escaping the worsening stench of faeces which spared neither the rich nor the powerful. It was also rooted in increasing disgust at the somewhat ghoulish nature of perfumes and leather, both derived from animal carcases. Collective sensitivities were undergoing a deep-rooted shift. The disappearance of the plague after 1720 and sharp decline in fear of the Devil meant there was no longer any point in using perfumes to fight the forces of evil. A less misogynistic society also meant that it was no longer fashionable for men to wear virile, powerful perfumes to conquer women. Softer, sweeter perfumes came into fashion, heralding the triumphant return of femininity, rooted in a gentler vision of nature. This was particularly true of aristocratic culture and Enlightenment salons. Between 1789 and 1815, years of war and conquest, musk-based perfumes became relatively fashionable once more, though floral and fruity perfumes still reigned supreme (see chapter 7).
The women’s perfume sector is still dominated by fruity and floral scents. Contrary to some claims, the present day is by no means devoid of smells. Such claims merely reflect a striking shift in our attitudes to pain and mortality, now kept out of sight and out of smell. Western society has certainly not lost the use of a sense as vital as smell. Though science long paid our noses little attention, recent research has shown that they are in fact home to the sharpest of all our senses, capable of distinguishing between huge numbers of smells. This book sets out to explore this sudden return to favour, starting with an overview of the current state of scholarly research on this fascinating topic (see chapter 1).
Notes
1 1. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969, 1982 (1st German edn 1939).
2 2. Translator’s note: Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Condorcet: Political Writings, ed. Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 147; emphasis added.
3 3. Robert Muchembled, L’Invention de l’homme moderne: culture et sensibilités en France du XVe au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Hachette, 1994, pp. 55–61; and see below, chapter 3.
1 Our unique sense of smell
Prior to 2014, our sense of smell was significantly devalued, even derided. It was held to be too animalistic, an encumbrance in the human quest for exceptional status in an age of dazzling technology and scientific discovery. As a superfluous, vestigial remnant of our pre-human past, it came to be powerfully repressed in our deodorantaddled civilization. It barely raised a flicker of interest among scientists, who had never bothered to test the hypothesis commonly held by earlier generations of scholars that even the keenest human noses could only distinguish some ten thousand smells at best, making our sense of smell a distant runner-up to our eyes, able to detect several million different shades of colour, and ears, which can distinguish nearly five hundred thousand sounds. Smell seemed to be a biological dead end, doomed to gradual extinction.
Is science always objective?
Then 2014 brought a scientific bombshell. A team at Rockefeller University in New York claimed that humans are capable of discriminating over a trillion smells.1 Did the nose’s spectacular rise from also-ran to top dog, the sharpest of all the senses, prove the point of those who argue this is an age of dazzling progress? Alas, like the fleeting beauty of Ronsard’s poetic rose, the fabulous discovery soon lost its bloom. Two articles published soon after pitilessly skewered the flawed mathematical model used to scale up the team’s experiments on twenty-six volunteers.2 It could almost have been the episode of The Big Bang Theory in which Sheldon Cooper is thrilled when Stephen Hawking compliments him on his brilliant demonstration of a new theory, then crestfallen on hearing a moment later that the only problem is an error in arithmetic on page 2.
This is all very confusing for the historian. The science goes right over his head; he cannot work out which side is right and can only wonder what can justify such diametrically opposing views. After all, aren’t the critics of the ‘soft’ humanities always banging the drum of ‘hard’ science and its objectivity?
Experimental research on the human sense of smell has been gaining ground for some twenty-five years. The discovery of nearly four hundred olfactory receptors in humans has led to limited progress in molecular biology and physiology but has proved of major interest to neurobiologists.3 Scientists seeking to understand how cells recognize specific signals consider our sense of smell as an ideal subject for study because of the number and diversity of receptors. Furthermore, every individual has a practically unique set of olfactory receptor genes, creating a sort of personal ‘noseprint’ linked to our immune system, among other things.4
Yet it would be naive to think that science is driven solely by disinterested curiosity. The recent surge of interest in the human sense of smell is part of a vast cultural phenomenon whose underlying causes are deep-rooted, yet readily identifiable. You just have to follow the money. First and foremost are perfume companies, which come up with thousands of new products; in recent decades they have inclined to natural scents, which were considered beyond the pale until about 1990 by detractors of bad smells both physical and moral.5 Such companies, eager for information, are commissioning ever more studies. Other major sectors of the modern economy are also on the hunt for information – those that pollute our planet and their opposite numbers, the hygiene and health sectors, not to mention the vast food flavouring industry. Considerable amounts of money are at stake. Many promising young scientists are turning to potentially lucrative research projects in a highly profitable, fast-developing market. Some are hard at work identifying human
