Introduction

In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias put forward an overarching vision of the progress of Western civilization based on the slow domestication of affectivity, increasingly leading the subject to develop self-control.¹ He explained how coarse emotionality gradually came to be driven out of its central position in the public sphere, giving way to highly codified attitudes of politeness that defined decency. His deeply optimistic, Eurocentric theory has given rise to much debate, at times heated, and has remained highly influential. It drew on a long-standing and diverse school of humanist thought, whose proponents believed in the capacity of their fellow humans to improve over time, following Erasmus – much quoted by Elias – who dreamed of a golden age in the near future, and Condorcet, who held that ‘the human race [is] advancing with a firm and sure step along the path of truth, virtue and happiness’.²

When it was first published in 1939, Elias’s work offered a valuable intellectual antidote to the looming threat of Nazism; however, its approach to sensory phenomena does not reflect the latest in scientific research. It takes as its main example the court of Louis XIV, seeing the restriction of bodily functions in public and the increasing disapproval of excessive or indecent reactions in the presence of others as part of a broad civilizing process. Elias argued that these new models of behaviour became ingrained in childhood among the upper classes, leading to increasing suppression of aggressive tendencies at an individual level that were then slowly adopted by other social groups.

This valuable basic framework can be used to underpin new directions in research. Smells, the focus of this book, were a key point in innovative conduct manuals such as Erasmus’s De civilitate morum puerilium [On civility in boys], published in 1530 for a select readership. Recent scientific research has shown that smells are vital gateways for emotions and their recall. As the first chapter will demonstrate, smell is arguably the only one of our senses to be acquired from experience, rather than being innate. As it is binary in nature, it can easily be inflected by affective messages towards pleasure or, alternatively, fear and disgust. This opens the door to a sort of experimental history, drawing on the vast body of information left by people long since dead. This means trying to understand how their world worked, how they saw it and thought about it, rather than projecting our own presuppositions onto them. This is the path historical method must take to achieve a degree of objectivity, whatever claims may be made for other methodologies. Disgust at smells is a fundamental sensation in humans, but not one that is biologically programmed. It takes four or five years at least for European children, for instance, to construct disgust at their own excrement. Few people nowadays are willing to acknowledge this, preferring to believe that such disgust is as natural as it is universal; in fact, it is the result of several centuries of cultural pressure. Stubbornly maintained from generation to generation, this pressure has given rise to individual reactions of shame and disgust at anal excreta. The slightest suggestion of a whiff of excrement makes us literally nauseous. We can also feel the same uncontrollable repugnance at the mere sight or mention of it, even in a scatological joke; once the smell has become categorized as negative, all our senses seek to keep it at arm’s length and communicate this to our consciousness. This was by no means the case in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the exception of a tiny minority who stood apart not only from the masses, materially mired in stench, but also from the majority of intellectuals, including storytellers, who took pleasure in spreading a lively scatological culture.³

While Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times draws admiringly on Norbert Elias’s pioneering work, it adopts a far less linear perspective. The significant shifts in our sense of smell from the Renaissance to the Napoleonic Empire cannot be framed in terms of inevitable human progress. Rather, they are approached here as first and foremost a reflection of the daily concerns of our ancestors. The aim is by no means to conjure up an image of the ‘good old days’. The stench in centuries past was dreadful and omnipresent, the air saturated with nauseating emissions and dangerous pollution, particularly in urban areas hemmed in by city walls. The air in towns and cities became even harder to breathe in the eighteenth century as the population swelled, reaching noxious new heights with the advent of industrialization, until mains drainage systems were installed from the late nineteenth century on (see chapter 2). The constancy of the situation makes it impossible to believe that developments in the sense of smell under the Ancien Régime were essentially driven by material progress, symptomatic of the broader struggle against the stench of widespread putrefaction. People simply lived with it as best they could. Having no choice but to see and smell what Rabelais called ‘joyous matter’ on a daily basis, they showed little disgust at faeces and urine, whether human or animal; indeed, both were widely used in medicine and beauty treatments. Until the 1620s, literature and poetry both delighted in excreta which now disgust us. The smells of excrement and body odours were both formative aspects of eroticism and sexuality, for the social elite and the popular classes alike (see chapter 3). The minority opposed to such practices grew following the devastating wars of religion. After 1620, the bands of Catholics and Calvinists preaching intolerance grew and fought hard against man’s animality. Making unwitting use of the simplifying binarity of smell, they taught increasing numbers of students and followers that the Devil lay nestled in the lower body, couched in excrement and urine, laying the distant foundations for the anal repression that underpins much modern psychoanalysis. Their most virulent discourse was aimed at women. Doctors relayed their opinions, believing women to be disgusting by their very nature, particularly when on their period. Older women were even a target for extraordinary hatred from men, as shown by numerous works of literature. They were accused of being close to the putrid Devil, and some were even burned as witches in the most misogynistic periods of our past (see chapter 4).

At 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. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969, 1982 (1st German edn 1939).
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. 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 pheromones. These are chemical substances supposed to attract the 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 urine in children up to the age of four or five; yet the sixteenth-century essayist Montaigne wrote that everyone likes the smell of their own excrement, while Erasmus said the same of farts.¹⁴ These monuments of sixteenth-century culture did not learn anal repression, as we will see in chapter 3.

Smell is useful in allowing us to swiftly identify and decide whether to approach or avoid everything from food and sexual partners to predators and toxins, promoting the survival of individuals and hence the human race.¹⁵ This multifaceted sense shapes our instinct for contact or revulsion, helping forge solid social bonds, training our taste buds, and encouraging procreation to keep the species alive. Far from casting us back to the animality of our earliest ancestors, such intertwined olfactory fields are part of the rich tapestry of what it means to be human. The earliest olfactory exchanges between mother and foetus in the womb from the twelfth week of pregnancy are followed in the first days of life by a powerful bond generated by the irresistible lure of the mother’s nipple. This is in turn followed by a long period of preferential attachment, as children can identify their mothers by smell alone, starting from between two to five, until they are around sixteen.¹⁶ This vigorously contradicts the old dogma of the deodorized society some argue we now live in. It also has potential long-term consequences for the dominant note of womanhood it foregrounds. Our experiences as infants ‘could be a sort of imprint that leaves its mark on us for the rest of our lives’.¹⁷ Recent experiments have demonstrated that women can detect, identify and memorize smells better than men. There seems to be some mysterious link, as yet unexplained, between our sense of smell and human reproduction.¹⁸ Research in this area could shed light on our understanding of the widespread terror caused by the power of women’s bodies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with numerous broadsides against their stench, as chapter 4 will show. Are the sudoriferous glands, which begin producing sweat in puberty, mainly around the nipples, anus, genitalia, groin and armpits, more active in women than in men? The current norm is to deodorize these body parts. This is relatively straightforward, as the substances emitted have no smell of their own. They are, however, very rich in proteins that are ingested by bacteria that then release foul-smelling gases.¹⁹ Five centuries ago, it was a very different matter: it was impossible to rid the body of such smells, since water and bathing were considered dangerous. At best, they could be masked by powerful scents.

The eighteenth-century philosopher Diderot held smell to be the ‘most voluptuous’ of the senses. Other Enlightenment philosophers such as Rousseau and Cabanis were of the same opinion.²⁰ Freud’s theories led the ethnologist Yvonne Verdier to research the role of excremental odours in male erotic sensibility. The sociologist Marcel Mauss posited the existence of a relationship between armpit sweat and the notion of personality, with bodily odours offering excellent clues to a potential sexual partner’s suitability.²¹ The exact mechanisms at work remain a mystery, since no formal scientific proof of the existence of human pheromones has been found. The most commonly accepted theories posit that such mechanisms are necessary to the survival of the species. Pleasant smells suggest excellent health rooted in a strong immune system that puts up a powerful fight against parasites and microbes, making the potential partner – male or female – a good bet. Unpleasant smells, on the other hand, are signs of disease, and therefore of danger and failure to reproduce successfully.²² Binary olfactory signals are connected to our emotions, as we have seen. The neurobiologist Antonio R. Damasio has identified six such ‘primary’ or ‘universal’ emotions: fear, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise and joy. Our emotional range is completed by secondary emotions reflecting well-being or discomfort, calm or stress. In the end, he considers biological regulation to be based on pleasure, connected to the notion of reward, and pain, aligned with punishment.²³ Our first olfactory impression is absolutely fundamental, particularly when it comes to falling in love.

Finding the perfect life partner should not be seen as a bolt from the blue, but rather as a brief instant of olfactory ecstasy. The romantic quest for a Prince Charming or Sleeping Beauty takes on a surprising new dimension. We all have our own unique smell, described by scientists as our ‘olfactory fingerprint’. There are currently over seven billion such signature smells on earth. And though we are unaware of it, it is our noses that lead us to the man or woman of our dreams, the Romeo or Juliet who will help us perpetuate our genes and thus protect the future of the species. It is no surprise that all sorts of myths have sprung up to explain the mystery. Plato’s concept of androgyny, taken up centuries later with lasting influence by the humanist philosophers and poets of the Renaissance, explains our constant quest for our twin soul: humans were originally dual beings with two sexes, before being split into two separate entities, both dissatisfied with their lot.

The roots of this myth may well lie somewhere in the biological quest for the ideal partner. Men and women are literally led by the nose to the one bubble of scent that suits them best, by a process of trial and error, illustrated by a series like Sex and the City. The flood of positive emotions that washes over us when we discover someone who smells right is automatically memorized along with their pleasant scent. Coming across the same scent again spontaneously triggers the whole bundle of affective memories in a sort of chain reaction that could be called the ‘madeleine effect’, after the famous scene in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Clever investors have doubtless seen this as a potential money-spinner, which explains why ‘natural’ scents have made such a comeback in perfumes and body-care products for men and women alike. Systematically stripping away our natural odour upsets human sexuality by removing the signals that instinctively guide it. It is an insidious cultural mechanism for controlling sexuality and setting humans apart from the animal kingdom – which can only be done by turning us all into robots or denying the obvious truth that we have a highly developed sense of smell, albeit downplayed by dubious legends. There are a number of other smell-related facts about animals. Did you know, for instance, that the mammal with the keenest sense of smell is not the dog, but the cat? It might have been awkward to admit before science stuck its nose in, because household cats, the most sensuous of all the animals tamed by man, make no attempt to hide their torrid sexuality. That is, when their owners have not had them neutered, supposedly for their own good, but actually in line with an unspoken moral vision of castration that deprives children of a once common erotic apprenticeship.

Smell is also a profoundly social sense, producing binary reactions of bonding or rejection. Each human grouping has its own preferred aromatic field arising in particular from the local cuisine and collective management of smells. Lucienne Roubin’s ethnological fieldwork in the Haut-Verdon region in the south-eastern French Alps in around 1980 provides one example. The local cuisine was dominated by pairings of garlic with onion and thyme with bay leaf for protection against disease and witchcraft. Onion was also associated with virility and parsley with lactation. In the first case, the painful sensation overcome by little boys first encountering the taste of onion was given a positive slant towards the expression of masculinity, indicating how infinitely flexible our sense of smell really is. The ideal life partner has the base note shared by the wider community, the note of their gender, and their own personal ‘smellprint’. Their smell will also vary from season to season. In the summer it is sweatier, in autumn more animal, after cleaning manure from the stables. Every stage of life is saturated with scented messages. The merry month of May is when young swains court their beloved by wearing hawthorn blossom and basil, and break up with them with cypress and thistles. Rosemary expresses the joy of shared attachment. Unpleasant smells are associated with social disapproval: the custom of charivari, or ritual public heckling, at the nuptials of ill-matched couples came with the stench of a donkey carcase being burned. As everywhere, wafts of foul smells heralded the arrival of elements likely to challenge the local social order, particularly strangers, who naturally smell unpleasant.²⁴ There is no need for words to see danger coming: it is inherent in anyone from other parts who eats other things and smells different. In Asia, Westerners are reputed to stink of butter.

In all cultures, smells are of major significance in the relationship between men and the supernatural, the gods, or God. Some three thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks laid the foundations for the Western concept of smells, which in their understanding could not be neutral. Either they were pleasant, like the delicious perfumes of Olympia, or unpleasant, like the fetid stench of the Harpies who would swarm in and devour everything, then fly off again leaving only their droppings. In the Greek world, pleasant smells were associated with the divine, as in Plutarch’s description of Alexander the Great’s delightfully fragrant mouth and body. Even after death, his body did not smell of decay and his tomb gave off a sweet fragrance: this was later picked up by the Christians, who invented the sweet ‘odour of sanctity’ for dead saints. Ordinary mortals were less fortunate. According to the medical theory of humours, men were warm and dry, and therefore supposedly smelled better than women, who were cold and damp, but there was no denying some individuals still smelled terrible. The worst insult the sixteenth century inherited from ancient medicine was to accuse someone of stinking like a billy goat: ‘A fearsome goat lodges in the hollow of thine armpits’, wrote one poet. Another wrote of a ‘pestilential stench’ more terrible than ‘a billy goat that has just made love’. Human beings were not to behave, or smell, like animals. Body odour, bad breath, faeces, urine and burping were stigmatized, sometimes humorously. In all cases it was doubtless a way of exorcising the inevitable slide towards death, hinted at by noxious whiffs. In the Greek myths, such smells were constantly bound up with death and sacrilege.²⁵

Perceiving a fetid smell was an immediate trigger for the fear of death in ancient Greece. In our own culture, lengthy exposure to a relatively smell-free environment suggests that our deodorized world now offers a kind of antidote to existential anguish, as olfactory ‘silence’ has developed in parallel with the silence surrounding disease and death, dating from around the same time. In France, the custom of burying the dead in and around churches in the centre of towns and villages, often in very shallow graves, was outlawed in 1776 by a royal decree that forced the transfer of graveyards far away from centres of population on grounds of public hygiene. Keenly opposed at first, the new norm gradually came to be accepted over the centuries. In parallel, the sick and dying were taken ever further out of the social sphere and isolated from the public gaze in hospitals. The recent positive reappraisal of our sense of smell doubtless reflects shifts in the deep-rooted bond linking it with our fear of ageing and death, though it is impossible to pinpoint their scope and cause.

One final aspect of this fascinating question is how extremely difficult it is to express olfactory experience verbally, whatever language you speak. Those in professions that deal regularly with smells, such as chefs, forensic pathologists and perfumers, encounter this problem on a daily basis. Perfumers have solved it by developing their own metaphorical jargon to differentiate ‘green’ and ‘pink’ fragrances, ‘spicy’ and ‘grassy’ perfumes, fruity and floral scents, dissonant, balsamic, fresh and amber notes.²⁶ The explanation for this mystery stems from the direct correlation between scents, emotions and memory, wholly unconnected to the parts of the brain that handle verbalization. The binary system warning of danger is triggered initially in a flash, with no need for language processing. The memory that remains has no link to the rest of memory function and cannot be conjured up at will. As a result, many scholars have sought to draw up typologies of smells with their own naming system, including the great Linnaeus in 1756. The results, however, have always been disappointingly subjective. In 1624, the doctor Jean de Renou took a great interest in smells, defined as ‘a vaporous substance emanating from odourable matter’, identifying a close analogy with flavours detectable by taste. The concept fills some hundred pages of his book, recording nine varieties of smell categorized according to the theory of humours. Acrid (or mordicant), bitter and salty smells were caused by heat; acid, austere and astringent smells by excessive cold, while soft, fatty and insipid smells were triggered by moderate heat. Jean de Renou further argued that our weak sense of smell explains why an infinite number of scents have no name of their own.²⁷

²⁸²⁹

Notes

1. Caroline Bushdid, Marcelo O. Magnasco, Leslie B. Vosshall and Andreas Keller, ‘Humans Can Discriminate More Than 1 Trillion Olfactory Stimuli’, Science 343, 2014, pp. 1370–2.
2. Richard C. Gerkin and Jason B. Castro, ‘The Number of Olfactory Stimuli that Humans Can Discriminate is Still Unknown’, eLife, 7 July 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.08127; Markus Meister, ‘On the Dimensionality of Odor Space’, eLife, 7 July 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.07865
3. Anne-Sophie Barwich, ‘What Is So Special about Smell? Olfaction as a Model System in Neurobiology’, Postgraduate Medical Journal, November 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/postgradmedj-2015–133249
4. Lavi Secundo et al., ‘Individual Olfactory Perception Reveals Meaningful Nonolfactory Genetic Information’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112(28), 14 July 2015, pp. 8750–5.
5. This trend can be traced back to Alain Corbin, Le Miasme et la Jonquille: l’odorat et l’imaginaire social, XVIIe–XIXe siècles. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1982, published in English translation as The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, tr. Miriam Kochan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
6. Sébastien Doucet, Robert Soussignan, Paul Sagot and Benoist Schaal, ‘The Secretion of Areolar (Montgomery’s) Glands from Lactating Women Elicits Selective, Unconditional Responses in Neonates’, PLOS One 23 October 2009, http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0007579
7. Regulation (EC) No. 1334/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 December 2008 on flavourings and certain food ingredients with flavouring properties for use in and on foods.
8. Aurélie Biniek, Odeurs et parfums aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Master’s dissertation, supervisor Robert Muchembled, Université de Paris-Nord, 1998.
9. As reported in Le Monde, 17 September 2015.
10. Patrice Tran Ba Huy, ‘Odorat et histoire sociale’, Communications et langages 126 (2000), pp. 84–107. See also Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, and Annick Le Guérer, Les Pouvoirs de l’odeur. Paris: François Bourin, 1998.
11. Robert Mandrou, Introduction à la France moderne: essai de psychologie historique, 1500–1640. Paris: Albin Michel, 1998 (1st edn 1961), pp. 76, 81.
12. Rachel Herz, The Scent of Desire: Discovering our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. New York: William Morrow, 2007, pp. 32–9, 183–6. Italics in the original.
13. Ibid., esp. pp. 53, 84, and Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, tr. John E. Woods. New York: Vintage, 1986.
14. Herz, Scent of Desire, pp. 33, 149–51; David Le Breton, Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses, tr. Carmen Ruschiensky. London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 134 (olfactory bubble), 140 (excrement and urine).
15. Gesualdo M. Zucco, Benoist Schaal, Mats Olsson and Ilona Croy, Applied Olfactory Cognition, foreword by Richard J. Stevenson. Frontiers Media, 2014, eBook, p. 15.
16. See Danielle Malmberg’s article in Pascal Lardellier (ed.), À fleur de peau: corps, odeurs et parfums. Paris: Belin, 2003.
17. Joël Candau, Mémoires et expériences olfactives: anthropologie d’un savoir-faire sensoriel. Paris: PUF, 2000, p. 85.
18. Richard L. Doty and E. Leslie Cameron, ‘Sex Differences and Reproductive Hormone Influences on Human Odor Perception’, Physiology and Behavior 97, 25 May 2009, pp. 213–28.
19. Herz, Scent of Desire, pp. 149–51.
20. Le Guérer, Pouvoirs de l’odeur, pp. 254–60.
21. Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, pp. 249–50, quoting research by the ethnologist Yvonne Verdier on foresters in the Châtillon region of central-eastern France in the twentieth century. Modern research would certainly seek to apply Freud’s theories to female sexuality. Mauss’s theory is quoted in Lucienne A. Roubin, Le Monde des odeurs: dynamique et fonctions du champ odorant. Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989, p. 237.
22. Herz, Scent of Desire, pp. 135–6.
23. Antonio R. Damasio, Le Sentiment même de soi: corps, émotion, conscience. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999, pp. 60, 83–5, 283.
24. Roubin, Monde des odeurs, pp. 186, 206, 210–11, 241, 257, 262, 269.
25. Lydie Bodiou and Véronique Mehl (eds.), Odeurs antiques. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011, pp. 80, 173, 223, 228–9, 232–3.
26. Lardellier, À fleur de peau, pp. 99, 137.
27. Jean de Renou, Le Grand dispensaire médicinal. Contenant cinq livres des institutions pharmaceutiques. Ensemble trois livres de la Matière Médicinale. Avec une pharmacopée, ou Antidotaire fort accompli, tr. Louys de Serres. Lyon: Pierre Rigaud, 1624, pp. 32–3. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are translated by the translator.
28. Jason B. Castro, Arvind Ramanathan and Chakra S. Chennubhotla, ‘Categorical Dimensions of Human Odor Descriptor Space Revealed by Non-Negative Matrix Factorization’, Plos One 18 September 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0073289
29. ‘Les 10 catégories d’odeurs les plus répandues’, Huffington Post 20 September 2013: http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2013/09/20/dix-categories-odeur-les-plus-repandues_n_3960728.html