A History of Hygiene in Modern France: The Threshold of Disgust

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This book tells the story of an epochal change in the human condition that was part of what is often thought of as modernization a process that remade culture and society in France in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hygiene, Steven Zdatny convincingly contends, was that change. He reflects on how the development of hygiene: changed the way people thought about and treated their bodies; put an end to age-old afflictions and brought comfort where discomfort had been the unavoidable companion of existence; and helped produce a tripling of life expectancy.

The book considers how the evolution of hygiene produced a society where people washed often, changed their clothes every day, lived without lice and scabies, and performed their natural functions indoors. It reflects on developments in industrial plumbing, public education, government investment, the invention of new products to keep bodies and homes clean, and a parallel makeover in the expectations, sensibilities, and practices about what is proper and what is disgusting. These developments, the study reveals, were not steady and did not happen everywhere at the same pace. But in the fullness of time, they produced a revolution in the human condition.

Reviews

This entertaining book reads like Eugen Webers classic Peasants into Frenchmen, as Steve Zdatny leads the reader on a veritable romp through earthy quotations from the archives, to memoirs, to literature. Along the way, he reveals a hygienic French revolution, as cleanliness definitively replaced crap in modern France. - Stephen L. Harp, Distinguished Professor, University of Akron, USA.
Deeply researched and charmingly written, it holds wide appeal for scholars of infrastructure, urbanism, nation building, and the sensesand the co-constitutive relationship between them. * H-Net Reviews *

Author Bio

Steven Zdatny is Professor of History at The University of Vermont, USA. He is the author of The Politics of Survival: Artisans in Twentieth-Century France (1990), Hairstyles and Fashion: A Hairdressers History of Paris, 1910-1920 (1999) and Fashion, Work, and Politics in Modern France (2006).