Mud into Gold: Baudelaire and the Alchemy of Public Hygiene (1996)

Tu m'as donne ta boue et j'en ai fait de l'or. The last lines of one of Baudelaire's unfinished projects for an epilogue to the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal suggest that Baudelaire considers poetic production to be both ornamentation, the gold of luxury and aristocratic elegance, and purification, the result of some mystical or alchemical exercise. Yet the poet's self-designation as parfait chimiste aligns him with the various bourgeois state functionaries who, beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century and especially throughout the nineteenth, elaborated corrective measures, regulations, and institutions based on new conceptions of cleanliness. The battle in the name of hygiene, as much a battle in the name of morality, was first waged in the cities and coincided with the rise of capitalism and industrialization. City air and water were the two elements to be reckoned with. They had to circulate cleanly, freely, and efficiently. Though hygienic practices were often first developed for and practiced by the middle and upper classes, the working class, the poor, prostitutes, often women in general, were eventually the prime targets, feeble and feminized, in the effort to make society function as efficiently and as waste-free as a successful industry. It is thus no surprise that the apostrophes of Baudelaire's epilogue projects are from a vieux paillard to his mistress, l'enorme catin that is Paris. That Paris is a woman is a commonplace in nineteenth-century literature.(1) The city that is mud- la femme est naturelle, c'est-a-dire abominable (MC, v)- must drape herself in gold- idole, elle doit se corer pour etre adore (CE, 492).(2) Chemists, with their analyses of the composition of air and their warnings against the potentially hazardous effects of miasmas, were the first to heighten public awareness of menaces in the environment, but doctors, architects, engineers, and that new figure, the public health specialist, all played a role in what amounted to nothing less than a total restructuring of town and society.(3) Under the pen of one such specialist, Alexandre Parent-Duchatelet, the language of the sewer expert converged with that of the inspector of brothels. Parent-Duchatelet's solutions to this natural, problem of prostitution, as inevitable as sewage itself, was the same utopian strategy of containment he devised for refuse and excrement.(4) One early moment in this rearrangement of town and society was the celebrated closure, in the 1780's, of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in the heart of Paris. With the transfer of the remains to the underground Catacombs south of Paris, the living were protected from the noxious vapors of the dead. Out of sight; out of mind. The transformation of the site into an open marketplace dominated by a fountain was a model for many of the urban purifications that were to follow.(5) Far from resembling medieval ossuaries, the Catacombs were carefully organized, their bones disposed so as to form regular patterns. Aristocratic visitors came to see the Catacombs as early as 1787. Only a few years after the first visits to the sewers, themselves impressively illuminated and billed un second Paris souterrain in time for the Exposition of 1867, the Catacombs were opened to the public.(6) Visits to the Catacombs and the sewers thus partook of that larger movement of domestication begun in the eighteenth century: tourism. Developments underground accompanied the more visible Haussmanization experienced by Baudelaire, with its evacuation of cluttered, crowded old buildings, its wide aerating and aerated boulevards infusing a darkened city with more light, its vast projects for underground water conduits, and its social dichotomy of purification,(7) the migration of the poor to distinct neighborhoods. The nineteenth-century (feminine) city underwent a topographical corresponding to a social of cleaning streets and organizing places of confinement(8) which in turn was reflected in the more literal toilette of the individual, for, as Georges Vigarello has noted, it is care of the body [which] involved a total reconstruction of the world above and below cities. …