opposite sex: their very existence is questioned by some experts, though one 2009 experiment did conduct tests that suggested the existence of ‘putative human pheromones’, secreted by the glands of Montgomery in the breasts of lactating women. The as yet unidentified volatile compounds are thought to play a vital role in helping the newborn infant learn to suckle and in developing the bond between the mother and her baby.6
The food industry also greedily latches onto discoveries that align with its own interests. Teams of taste scientists work hard on studies such as the aforementioned project on the ‘smellscape’ of lactating women’s areolas, conducted at Dijon University Hospital. The stakes are high indeed, as, unlike the perfume market, this has every man, woman and child on the planet as a potential customer. Our fate is in the hands of laboratories that decide what is, or is not, good for us. For example, in 2008, the European Union took the precaution of banning a number of ingredients added to foodstuffs to give them a particular aroma (i.e. taste and/or smell) or to modify their own natural aroma. The list includes various flavourings naturally present in foodstuffs, found in plants such as chilli peppers, cinnamon, tarragon, St John’s wort, mint, nutmeg and sage.7
In this context, it is easy to understand why there is so much competition among research teams to come up with new data on smells, tastes and flavours, covering the whole range of sensations detected by our mouths. Even though the claim that humans can detect one trillion smells has been debunked, the article is still regularly quoted, commented on and referenced in popular science material, unlike the two articles that pointed out the flaws in the claim.
My own intuitive, highly subjective reading of all this is that science without consciousness of the past is but the ruin of the soul. At the very least, the recent deluge of studies on smell points to a new interest in a sense that is often underrated and underestimated. While the major causes of this spectacular shift may be the market economy and the drive for maximum profit, they have at least brought the nose to the fore after several centuries of neglect. When I first began researching the topic in the early 1990s, I asked a particularly promising student to join me in the project,8 but I eventually had to drop the idea for a full-length book because no publishers showed any interest. Things have changed, and now the time seems ripe for a historian to play his own little tune in the great orchestral concert of Smell Studies. Indeed, it has become a pressing necessity to prove that the humanities and human sciences are neither dead nor passé; rather, they are what give life its meaning in a world run by robots, a dictatorship of aloof multinationals where what matters is the bottom line. In 2015, the Japanese government requested the country’s eighty-six public universities to close their humanities and social sciences departments, or at least downsize and reduce enrolments, to focus on ‘more practical, vocational education that better anticipates the needs of society’. In September 2015, twenty-six of them complied.9 Despite a considerable public outcry, seventeen immediately stopped enrolments in the humanities and social sciences for the academic year 2015–16. The ministry proved it was playing the long game by staggering the reform over several years, until 2022. Other countries have carried out similar measures, albeit more discreetly, leading in the long term to a genuine threat to the culture of the humanities. I hope to demonstrate in this book that history and her sister disciplines are vital to our understanding of the modern world.
A sense of danger, emotions and delight
The human sense of smell is remarkable and unique. The team of scientists who first discovered the role of molecules produced by the areolas of lactating mothers concluded that their role was to help the individual, and therefore the species, to survive. This is true for all mammals. The widely held idea that the human sense of smell is weak and residual is merely a myth with no real basis: in fact, our sense of smell fell prey to cultural repression with the triumph of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
While the fourth of Descartes’ Méditations métaphysiques ranked olfaction the third of all our senses, it was later scorned by philosophers and thinkers alike. Kant rejected it out of hand, considering it and its close relative taste to be the only subjective senses; Freud explained its supposed decline by ‘organic repression’, generated by the march of Western civilization. In around 1750, ‘aerist’ hygienists condemned smell for bringing people into contact with ‘putrid dangers’. Fast-paced urbanization in the industrial area saw smell become a major factor in class discrimination.10 The long period when our sense of smell was unloved and unsung is now coming to an end before our very eyes, and it is recovering some of the longlost glory the great historian Robert Mandrou intuited it must once have had. Way back in 1961, Mandrou argued that in the sixteenth century, when hearing and touch ranked higher than sight, people were ‘highly sensitive to smells and perfumes’ and delicious food. Ronsard’s poetry, for instance, associates kissing with the ‘sweet-smelling breath’ of his beloved.11
Our sense of smell has a number of highly original features. It develops in the foetus at twelve weeks. Learning about tastes and smells begins in the womb with amniotic fluid, which absorbs chemical traces of everything the mother eats. Some babies are born with a taste for garlic, for instance. It then takes another few years for the sense of smell to mature fully. The American experimental psychologist Rachel Herz is ‘convinced that our aroma preferences are all learned’, whereas the five basic tastes – salty, sweet, acid, bitter and umami (savoury) – are innate and therefore codify how we experience food and drink.12 My years of experience with American cuisine make me question her second argument somewhat, as the American love of combining sweet and salty foods is quite alien to the French palate and umami has a very different tone in the two countries. I do, however, agree fully with her former point, however subjective it may be, because it maps perfectly onto my own purpose in writing this book: demonstrating that smell is the most flexible and manipulable of the senses, making it a rich seam for any historian interested in the forces driving long-term cultural and social change.
A further characteristic specific to smell is its direct link to the oldest part of the human brain, as olfactory information is decoded in the prefrontal cortex. The ‘limbic system’, to use a familiar expression now out of favour among specialists, is also the site where memories are formed and emotions such as pleasure, aggression and fear are managed. Like smell, aggression and fear are controlled by the amygdala. In simple terms, our sense of smell is the primary seat of our emotions. It reacts in a flash to alert us to potential threats, before sight and the other senses validate the message. The initial warning is of necessity simple and binary: good or bad. For newborns to survive, they must latch on to the breasts of an unfamiliar woman who smells good before she tastes good. Conversely, children coming across a chopped onion for the first time cry when it triggers their trigeminal nerve; the pain becomes indelibly associated with a smell that is recorded as highly unpleasant. Things do not smell good or bad in and of themselves: our brains categorize them and then record the memory. Humans adapt perfectly to strong smells: after about fifteen minutes, we stop smelling even the worst stench or most delightful fragrance. Nor can we detect our own odour, which floats around us like an invisible bubble about a metre in diameter, protecting our personal space, on the model of the hero of Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume.13 The brain must learn to create an association, negative or positive, with smells that are impermanent and trigger an initial, fleeting danger signal. Even things that now disgust us deeply require a process of social conditioning that can, in some cases, be very lengthy indeed. In the United States, world-beaters when it comes to masking smells, Rachel Herz reports that children like the smell of their own excrement until the age of about eight. It takes them the same amount of time to come to appreciate the taste of bananas or to reject the ‘stinky’ cheeses that adults are so disgusted by. To my knowledge, no French researchers have explored the reverse mechanism by which French cuisine has come to be dominated by strong-smelling foodstuffs that disgust people across the Atlantic. This is a missed opportunity, because a well-thought-out marketing campaign targeting very young children, associating such products with pleasure rather than pain, could boost international sales considerably. A French anthropologist has studied the lack of disgust at faeces and
