A sunny afternoon in Paris. An intrepid TV presenter is making his way through the streets asking passersby to smell a bottle he has in his hand. When they smell it they react with disgust. One woman even spits on the floor as a marker of her distaste. What is in the bottle? It holds, we are told, the “pong de paris”, a composition designed to smell like an 18th-century Parisian street.
The interpretation of past scents that we are given on the television, perhaps influenced by Patrick Süskind’s pungent novel Perfume, is frequently dominated by offence.
It’s a view found not just on TV but in museums. In England, York’s Jorvik Viking Centre, Hampton Court Palace, and the Museum of Oxfordshire have all integrated smells into their exhibits.
The one smell that unites these attempts at re-odorising the past: toilets. Viking toilets, a Georgian water closet, and the highly urinous and faecal smell of a Victorian street, all included in the above examples, thread the needle of disgust from the medieval to the modern.
The consequence of such depictions is to portray the past as an odorous prelude, with foul-smelling trades and poor sanitation, to the clean and pleasant land of modernity.
Suggesting that people who are not “us” stink has a long history. It is applied to our forebears just as often as is to other countries, peoples, or cultures. It is not accident that, “Filthy Cities” – an English television program, highlighted the stink of 18th-century France – even in the 18th century the English had associated the French, their absolutist Catholic enemies, with the stink of garlic.
The toilet-training narrative is a simple and seductive story about “our” conquest of stench. But the “pong de paris” misses the point. Too busy turning the past into a circus of disgust for modern noses, it fails to ask how it smelt to those who lived there. New historical work reveals a more complex story about past scents.Previously on stinky, smelly awfulness:
A careful examination of the records of urban government, sanitation, and medicine reveal that 18th-century English city-dwellers were not particularly bothered by unsanitary scents. This was partly because people adapted to the smells around them quickly, to the extent that they failed to notice their presence....MUCH MORE
Things I Did Not Know: Sebaceous Cyst Edition (or: how to write about really bad smells)
Now There's Vomitoxin In the Corn
Great."Too hot? In 1858 a heatwave turned London into a stinking sewer"
Along with cadaverine and putrescine this is one of the most perfectly named of Mother Nature's offerings.
It does exactly what is said on the tin.
If you can get pigs to eat grain that has the chemical on it, well you can guess what happens.
Long Hot Summers
Between 1500 and 1900 Paris went from 8th largest city in the world with a population of around 185,000 to 3rd largest in the world with a population of, depending on how far out from the city center you measured, 2.7 to 3.6 million.Related:
Back in the day those big cities were aromatic, see the first link below, if interested.
"When Paris’s Streets Were Paved With Filth"
Faux Paris
"What Makes Paris Look Like Paris?"
