Introduction

As Alain Corbin has shown, nineteenth-century French culture paid particular attention to smells, and especially unpleasant smells, for reasons mostly related to the success of hygienics and aerism, the development of the perfume industry, and the unchecked growth of urban centers.¹ Indeed, the quick pace of urbanization and industrialization shaped Parisian urban spaces into a complex network of concentric zones, all valued differently depending on the presence of greenery, the width of the streets, the absence of unpleasant smells, and the social class of the inhabitants.² In this particular context, the social imagination of urban odors was characterized by the enduring ubiquity of miasma theory as a theoretical framework to understand atmospheric pollution, which, in turn, encouraged cultural representations of the city as an open-air poisonous factory.³ As workshops became factories, industrial areas turned into fog-filled spaces where the heavy air became sticky with the smell of coal tar and creosote.

Nineteenth-century French culture’s obsession with the sanitary risks associated with unpleasant smells led to legislations in which the spatial distribution of industries according to their degree of nuisance and toxicity for humans was unambiguously dominated by olfactory criteria.⁴ Like in other large industrialized cities of the time, the most polluting and malodorous industries were located far as possible from upper and middle-class residential areas, even if this meant that the overall cohesion of the urban fabric suffered.⁵ In Paris specifically, the surprising survival of miasma theory in popular and scientific culture, despite Pasteur’s victory against Pouchet, seems to have led to enduringly and singularly hostile collective attitudes towards unpleasant smells and “bad” air. ⁶ Parisians seemed significantly more smell-adverse compared to Londoners for instance.⁷ As such, the Parisians’ extreme fear of the dangers of industrial malodor consequently fostered center-periphery dynamics meant to push out polluting industries–for the sake of public safety–into underdeveloped suburban areas through a combination of crapulous administrative practices and ruthless land speculation.⁸ Given that the presence of polluted malodorous air devalues certain spaces, occupations and bodies, this outlook on urban and suburban atmospheric quality in literary and historical texts of nineteenth-century France reveals how tactics of spatial segregation relied on claims of real or perceived smell nuisance as processes akin to “olfactory violence” against working-class populations.⁹

Using qualitative methods, the article demonstrates how, in nineteenth-century Paris, the olfactory appreciation of atmosphere was used as a medium for class domination through spatial segregation and atmospheric control. By gathering, contextualizing, and interpretating olfactory data from historical and literary sources, I not only argue that, in nineteenth-century France, class violence became mediated by olfactory processes given the survival of miasmatic beliefs, but also that political readings of olfactory phenomena are indispensable to a thorough understanding of the atmospheric manifestations of violence. Not unlike Gernot Böhme, who considers smells as sensory manifestations of atmospheres, ¹⁰ the article exposes how the perception of olfactory phenomena in context of socio-political tension reflects and shapes existing conflicts, usually at the benefit of those already in positions of power.

Space, Smell and Socio-Political Violence in Nineteenth-Century France: An Overview

In his 1958 study entitled Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes, the historian Louis Chevalier uses Victor Hugo’s famous Les Misérables (1862) as one of his many sources to explore the ramifications of urban malodor and social inequalities. Chevalier points out, as Dominique Kalifa will confirm a few decades later, how Hugo’s depictions of Paris’ underground sewage system implicitly feed into substantialist beliefs of the time associating malodorous emissions, lower-class labor, atmospheric threats and criminality.¹¹ Despite frequently voicing political opinions defending the poor, Hugo’s writing is not untouched by the cultural and scientific belief that all malodor is miasma, and thus can lead to illness and moral corruption. In many cultures, malodorous and dangerous work is very much the job of pariahs. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish asserted that the handling of the dead during early-modern pandemics used to be the sole occupation of outcasts, thus further justifying, in hindsight, their segregation from most spaces.¹² In his theorization of the panopticon, Foucault notes how the strict territorialization of public space in fixed zones is characteristic of repressive uses of power. Similarly, for Henri Lefebvre, space, far from being a neutral, concrete notion, is in fact thoroughly ideological and political, as it reflects, in its own organization, the constant shift of power dynamics between social groups.¹³ This led to the elaboration of several socio-political readings of space addressing the history of urban territorialization of an inherently violent exclusionary process.¹⁴

While spatial segregation can take many forms, the scholarly consideration of atmospheric and olfactory variables as devices meant to willfully harm is still an emerging topic. ¹⁵ Surprisingly—and despite a considerable volume of publications regarding smell in French and French-speaking contexts—the topic of olfactory violence is, in fact, rarely touched upon in that regard. Most literary-historical studies of olfaction focus on poetics and aesthetics rather than critical analysis,¹⁶ while less-aesthetically inclined endeavors favor descriptive rather than analytical and critical approaches. Indeed, in the earliest studies of olfactory culture in nineteenth-century France, the intersection between space, smell and socio-political violence mostly appears as a subtext. Alain Corbin, Julia Csergo and David S. Barnes all highlight the stigmatizing function of hygienic ideology to discipline, neutralize and civilize the lower classes, often deemed threatening by nineteenth-century French people for ethical and political reasons.¹⁷ As Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott have explained, the evolutionary role of smell in socialization and danger-detection led to its cultural uses gravitating towards the representation of alterity. Odorlessness characterizes the powerful, while emitting any sort of smell (especially unpleasant) often suggests, in most Western societies, transgressive, non-normative, if not implicitly threatening, behavior.¹⁸

As widespread as these beliefs are, and though further comparative enquiry on this matter is required, the nineteenth-century French context seems particularly fraught with instances of smell perceptions being used—in fictional and historical sources—to segregate, stigmatize, and eventually harm individuals and groups belonging to socio-economic minorities. This abundance of sources is mostly due to industrial, epistemological, political and ideological factors, which are, in no particular order, 1) the undefeated cultural and commercial domination of the French perfume industry across the globe, powered by commercial expansion and agriculture, 2) the enduring presence of miasmatic beliefs in popular and scientific culture despite the birth of germ theory, 3) the frequence of urban unrest and insurgent movements in Paris throughout the century, 4) and finally the success of hygienic ideology in parallel to the refection of Paris according to Haussmann’s dream of an aerated, hygienic city.¹⁹ Even while nineteenth-century French peoples’ obsession with bad smells and the threat they may pose should be further explored, these four factors could be the main culprits of why French olfactory culture appears so exemplary of the politics of malodor, presenting it as an ideal terrain to explore the mechanics of socio-environmental and olfactory violence.

Despite the reasons listed above, one needs to explore scholarship focusing on other periods and areas to deepen our understanding of how the mechanics of class domination and the representations of smell perceptions coalesce. The works of Melanie Kiechle, Shivani Kapoor and Adam Mack are in that regard some of the most significant as they articulate the correspondence between the environmental consequences of industrial development and the forms of structural violence they entail.²⁰ As Hsuan L. Hsu, Jean-Thomas Tremblay and Aleesa Cohene argue, olfaction, as it is functionally tied to breathing, is a biopolitical sensory modality.²¹ Olfaction would as such benefit from further critical, politically-engaged but thoroughly embodied scholarship.²² While these works provide valuable insight into American and Indian contexts, this present essay focuses on the already well-studied²³ context of nineteenth-century France to explore how specific cultural and scientific beliefs on smell can reinforce and justify socio-environmental inequalities, leading to atmospheric and olfactory violence.

Urban Geography and Atmospheric Disparities

Since the sense of smell is essential to navigate space, it is no surprise that olfactory criteria are crucial to the organization of cities and the general logic of urban planning.²⁴ In nineteenth-century Paris, odors were used to describe and organize urban and peri-urban spaces into different olfactory zones according to economic and sociological imperatives. It resulted in an exclusionary distribution of space between different industrial activities, their workers and, by extension, socio-economic classes.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the cities of the global North went through rapid demographic growth, which challenged the organization of urban space and the distribution of populations. In the United States, the location of factories and manufactures was particularly decisive. As Melanie Kiechle has argued, American cities were organized in conformity with a “geography of nuisance” demanding the exclusion of malodorous trades, pushing them into underdeveloped neighborhoods so as not to affect upper-class residents.²⁵ In Paris, this phenomenon was also present, but was particularly exaggerated by the city’s concentric organization. The ring-like structure of Paris facilitated the exclusion of malodorous industries and their workers to the outskirts of the city. As early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, malodorous industries were legally divided into specific classes according to the odors they emitted and their intensity, because Parisians believed that unpleasant smells meant danger. The release of bad smells and the perception of these industrial odors caused these industrial zones to be pushed away from residential areas:

Odorous manufactures and workshops have been divided into three classes. The first one includes the ones that must be set up far away from lodgings. The second includes manufactures and workshops that do not imperatively need to be separated from residential areas. In the third class are establishments that do not require specific precautions. The law protects long-standing manufactures and grants compensations for the damage they could cause on neighboring properties.²⁶

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The chemist and minister Jean-Antoine Chaptal, author of this excerpt, was actively involved in the formulation of laws favoring the establishment of certain malodorous industries close to housing in order to protect his own financial interests and those of his peers.²⁷ Industrial regulations regarding pollution and nuisance were, in fact, as Alain Corbin points out, designed to favor the interests of the richest industrialists and landowners. ²⁸

This olfactory and atmospheric zoning of Parisian urban spaces reflects the economic and financial stakes involved in the growing industrialization of the city, often to the detriment of the poorest inhabitants. As malodorous industries are progressively pushed outside of inner-city Paris, in turn, suburban space became socially and economically devalued. In her study of unsanitary housing claims, Elsbeth Kalff notes how official nuisance and hygiene complaints were more likely to be dismissed depending on the social standing and living area of whoever wrote said claims.²⁹ Relying on extremely rare accounts of urban olfactory nuisances from the point of view of lower-class Parisians, Kalff’s archival work and analyses should be further explored to provide multifaceted insights into the effects and perception of olfactory pollution across varied social groups. By the same token, without immediate access to Kalff’s sources, one needs to make do with fictional representations of administrative negligence and poor living conditions in working-class neighborhoods. In an 1899 novel titled La Fille de l’Ouvrière, Dramatique Roman d’Amour, Paul Féval and A. Dangé depict a fictitious cityscape located in the then-industrial Chaillot neighborhood:

The ruelle aux Roses, a sort of narrow passageway running alongside the Cité Verte, was formed by the rear part of the Cité’s houses and the wall of a chemical factory. Both sides of the alley were slightly sloped, incompletely paved, and in the middle formed a gully through which stinking water constantly flowed, carrying the factory’s waste and exhaling a stench made even more nauseating by the fact that, in many places, the spoiled water remained stagnant where the cobblestones were missing.³⁰

Industrial stench is the trademark of lower-class atmospheres, the malodor signaling both social, sensory and health disparities between specific urban spaces. Unregulated chemical pollution and general lack of maintenance of the pavement indicate the extent of the neglect imposed on suburban spaces by the administration. The apparently fictional “ruelle aux Roses” (literally “Roses Lane”) is said to have received its name by “antiphrasis” but the narrator does not specify if the toponym was given by residents or passing outsiders. The use of irony in representing lower-class smellscapes might be interpreted differently depending on the positionality of the narration. Given Féval’s personal experience of extreme poverty.³¹, and while La Fille de l’Ouvrière uses an impersonal third-person narration in typical nineteenth-century French realist fashion, one can still potentially interpret the author’s ironic toponym as a satirical feature meant to discreetly attack the state of hygienic and sensory neglect forced onto working-class spaces. Despite this account being fictional, historical texts of the time seem to validate Féval and Dangé’s literary representation. They often mention “ruelles” being used as urinals, open-air trash deposits and sewers, as one can read, for instance, in the 1852 edition of the Gazette municipal: the Nevers Lane is described as being used as a sewer for animal blood, which leads to “intolerable pestilence” during summer and is perceived as a threat to public health by some of the aristocratic inhabitants.³² Based on a collective report addressed to Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in the years before he seized power, the inhabitants the 10th arrondissement deplored the olfactory threat caused by the meat industry and its workers and asked for larger and more aerated streets, especially considering that the Nevers Lane was mostly comprised of dilapidated rental houses that were ready for demolition. Indeed, in the wider context of the Haussmannian remodeling of Paris from 1853 onward, as inner-city Paris became brighter, cleaner and better-smelling, malodorous industries were pushed to the margins of the city, bringing their workers with them. As such, atmospheric and olfactory disparities between “rich” and “poor” spaces manifested an underlying order of value of spaces and bodies dictated by socio-economic criteria.

This double standard of atmospheric nuisance and pollution was made even more patent by the highly documented “Great Stink” of 1880.³³ In August 1880, nauseating odors produced by suburban industries flooded inner Paris thanks to the scorching heat and a light north wind. While industrial workers and suburban residents were familiar with the malodor,³⁴ wealthier Parisians suddenly discovered the atmospheric cost of poorly regulated industrial development. As Émile Raspail explains, the foul smell resulted from the emissions of the Hautes-Bornes factory in Arcueil which specialized in the processing of feces for agricultural fertilization. ³⁵ Atmospheric pollution previously contained in the suburbs suddenly erupted before the upturned noses of the Parisian elite, eager to call on immediate political action to ease their olfactory distress.³⁶ Significantly—and while the nuisance had been an issue in Arcueil since at least 1875—it took the discomfort and influence of the upper-classes for the issue of olfactory pollution to be brought up in public debate. Municipal reports of the time offer invaluable insight into the sudden concern of Parisians regarding industrial emissions and their potentially harmful health effects. Looking for precedents to justify state intervention into the matter, elected advisors Benjamin Raspail and Leneveux both pointed out just how much industrial regulation in underprivileged areas favored the interests of the already powerful. Despite being closed-down in 1875 because of its malodorous emissions, the Hautes-Bornes factory reopened a few years later “due to the influence of Mr. Léon Say, former school alumnus of the factory’s general director.”³⁷ Léon Say, famous economist and politician, would have had the power to influence the enforcement, or lack thereof, of industrial regulations. The debate apparently became particularly heated when Benjamin Raspail directly attacked the police commissioner for being complacent with regard to the enforcement of industrial olfactory nuisance law. Leneveux contributed to the already palpable tension by reminding the audience that “a Nanterre factory has been closed thanks to the influence of high-ranking notables, disturbed in their secondary residences by the odorous nuisance caused by the factory.”³⁸ Affirmative political action regarding atmospheric and olfactory pollution in underprivileged areas was only executed when the upper-class was directly affected, either in its lifestyle or its wallet. Indeed, as Adam Mack noted in the context of Chicago, olfactory nuisance in urban spaces raises the question of land and property value.³⁹ The same logic applies in the context of nineteenth-century Paris and its larger suburbs, as publications of the time highlighted the real-estate risks associated with malodorous industries:

Everyone knows how much the fumes from a coal-fired gas plant bother neighboring homes over a fairly wide radius and depreciate their value. Often, the soil surrounding the plant is penetrated by the fumes; vegetation growing on this land languishes or perishes, and the water filtered through it becomes unsafe. We can therefore only approve the decree by which the Paris police have ordered that all coal-fired gas plants be moved, within a given time, outside the city limits.⁴⁰

As olfactory nuisances associated with industrial activities significantly reduced the value of land and houses in the vicinity, the fear of economic loss, rather than actual concern for the welfare of the working classes, drew the attention of public decision-makers and Parisian elites to the potentially harmful effects of industrial fumes on the health of local residents and factory workers.

Indeed, Émile Raspail reported several cases of debilitating respiratory and dermatological conditions supposedly caused by the malodorous emissions of the Hautes-Bornes factory, using outdated beliefs surrounding miasma to stir public debate regarding the safety of malodorous fumes.⁴¹ As David S. Barnes observed, the Great Stink of 1880 reflected a turning point between the survival of miasmatic tradition and the triumph of Pasteurian germ theory.⁴² Miasmatic notions surrounding unpleasant smells fostered the widely spread cultural and scientific belief that industrial malodors themselves (rather than polluting toxic emissions) led to physiological pathologies. Medical popularization treatises of the time are particularly enlightening in that regard:

Some countries and some cities have their own special smells. These domestic smells considerably influence the general health of the people forced to live in this relatively infected and corrupted atmosphere as well as the bodily odor of women themselves, which is never favorably altered by the proximity of suspicious and antihygienic establishments, made necessary by our industrial needs. Aubervilliers, Pantin, Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen, Billancourt, etc., etc...., are long-standing sources of infection. We fail to understand the carelessness of our higher administration with regard to these populations so worthy of interest and a better fate.⁴³

For Auguste Galopin, the atmospheric cost of urban pollution was tied to aesthetic, civilizational and economic loss, as embodied in the physiology of working-class women living in the industrial suburbs of Aubervilliers, Pantin, Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen, Billancourt. Industrial malodors were said to potentially hinder reproduction by altering the odor di femina, ⁴⁴ and therefore, by extension, the desirability and fertility of working-class women. Public alarm regarding the impact of olfactory and atmospheric disparities did not reflect actual concern for the living and working conditions of the lower classes but rather natalist anxieties focused on ensuring the economic prosperity of the nation.⁴⁵ While reoccurring exposure to malodors posed a significant risk to psychological health, miasma theory provided a conceptual framework—albeit scientifically irrelevant—to envision the impact of atmospheric industrial pollution on workers’ bodies. As Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Hsuan L. Hsu and Aleesa Cohene have suggested, extreme and chronic malodors are not benign: they often become actual psychological threats, too often disregarded as “moderate” or “less violent,” notably because the people they target are perceived as expendable.⁴⁶ In this regard, lower-class bodies were subject to “morbid speculation:” economic and political imperatives justify slower and more passive forms of violence, such as olfactory and atmospheric violence, as if workers’ bodies were commodities fit for bargaining.

Controlling the Malodorous Classes

Manual labor considered repulsive has long been an exclusionary factor for workers through the essentialization of work-related malodors.⁴⁷ In French nineteenth-century texts, the emphasis placed on the stink of the lower classes serves a political function that goes beyond stigmatization and exclusion. The social and olfactory territorialization of nineteenth-century Paris forced the lower classes to work and live in a constant state of atmospheric vulnerability. In no uncertain terms, these tactics demand to be understood as a punitive means of social control,⁴⁸ sanctioning social groups deemed lesser, malodorous and, ultimately, threatening.

As Dominique Kalifa observed, early nineteenth-century nuisance law required that polluting and olfactorily unpleasant industries be situated in the outskirts of Paris. These laws also allowed for the devaluation of neighborhoods that housed the poorest and most criminalized Parisian populations.⁴⁹ In this regard, the criminalization of the lower classes living in the Parisian suburbs was associated with the perception of industrial smells: through the surprising survival of miasma theory in nineteenth-century French culture, the perception of malodor reflects both sanitary and socio-political anxieties. In social hygiene treatises of the time, the stench of insalubrity became associated with criminality and moral degeneration. This coincides with the work of hygienist Jules Rochard, who described workers’ housing as hotbeds of epidemics, criminal activity and repugnant moral transgressions. While Rochard deplored the “overpopulation of suburban neighborhoods” as well as “the excessive rent” collected by landlords,⁵⁰ his depiction of working-class atmospherics relied on conspicuously sensational rhetorics to elicit readers’ disgust and fear:

A mephitic atmosphere, a moldy, damp smell emanates from these small, low-lying houses, where garbage piles up on rotten staircases. Rain or shine, the floor is always muddy. A sort of mist escapes from these foul alleys, weighed down by low, dark skies. […] In these foul cesspools, honest workers live with their families amongst thieves, murderers and prostitutes⁵¹

For Rochard, degraded atmospherics inevitably lead to criminality: poverty must be eliminated through the work of hygiene, not for the sake of poor people themselves, but to protect the rest of the population against both crime and disease. Smell acted as a medium that manifested the propagation of pathologies and criminality in a threatening and visceral manner. This criminalization of the working classes through the pretense of hygiene led to their thorough vilification, which, in turn, justified the elaboration of socio-political strategies of control by the ruling class.

These beliefs were omnipresent in literary productions of the time, even in publications that claimed to be leftist. This was notably the case in Marie-Louise Gagneur’s novels, which focused primarily on the poor living conditions of working-class women. In Les Réprouvées, published in 1867, the narrator favors the depiction of social groups perceived as inherently disgusting rather than actual sociological analysis of the causes of poverty:

Anyone who hasn’t wandered these narrow, mountainous streets in the evening, from which undefinable miasmas emanate, would be unable to form an idea of what misery is like in a big city. As in all agglomerations of miserable lives, there abound ragged stalls and open-air cabarets, where you can observe frightening figures: degenerate men, lost girls, convicts, lazy workers. The sight of all this filthy world, even more morally degraded than physically, in the midst of which reigns misery, ignorance, laziness, that trinity of evil, seizes you with painful pity, and you cannot believe that you are in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the most progressive city in the world and the most proud of its civilization.⁵²

Poverty is expressed in olfactory terms by the phrase “indefinable miasmas” to evoke the uncleanliness associated with the lower classes, explicitly condemned for their immorality: “degenerate men,” “lost girls,” “convicts” and “lazy workers.” While miasmatic malodor was initially an epidemiological concept, it became a socio-political descriptor even after it fell out of the realm of epistemological credibility. Despite the author’s socialist commitments, the narration passes categorical judgment on the morality of certain social groups based on bourgeois values: cleanliness, work, respectability. Miasma rhetoric sorts the poor into “good” and “bad” on the basis of arbitrary ethical criteria formulated by the most privileged classes. Sociological interpretation is abandoned in favor of a direct condemnation of the working classes as being primarily responsible for their own misery, since they have allowed themselves to be corrupted by “misery, ignorance, laziness, that trinity of evil.” In Gagneur’s prose, the spectacle of misery does not elicit compassion (even if she mentions “painful pity”) but rather a misguided sense of national shame, as malodorous poverty is considered a stain on the pride of “the most progressive city in the world and the most proud of its civilization.” This civilizational disgrace is to be corrected using the principles prescribed by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in his Extinction of Pauperism (1844), which Gagneur quotes in the exergue of Le Calvaire des Femmes.⁵³ For Bonaparte and Gagneur, the working classes “are now without organization and without ties, without rights and without a future; we must give them rights and a future, and raise them in their own good opinion by promoting association, education, and good order.”⁵⁴ In the face of the workers’ inherent malodor, incontinence, alcoholism and laziness, “association, education, and good order” are needed to prevent any revolt harmful to national prosperity and social harmony. It is not a matter of eliminating poverty but of tampering it sufficiently to reduce the risk of sedition represented by the working classes.⁵⁵ The miasmatic threat represented by the working classes appears, in the end, as an avatar of long-held revolutionary anxieties, while the fear of popular uprising justifies the use of preemptive violence to counter all attempts at balancing the hierarchy of power.

Given the way the working classes were portrayed as direct vectors of epidemiological, moral and political danger that must be neutralized through strict hygienic measures, the collective management of atmospheric odors exemplified broader patterns of class conflict. Literary and historical texts of the second half of the nineteenth century tended to express a need for the olfactory, sanitary and even social “purification” of malodorous and unsanitary housing. In 1888, the hygienist Rochard draws an unsettling parallel between malodorous uncleanliness, epidemic outbreaks and rampant crime, all of which, in his view, originated in the same lower-class spaces:

Such cours des miracles are a stain on a city like Paris, but I must add that they are very rare. In this respect, as in that of street cleanliness, our capital has nothing to fear from comparison with others, and most provincial cities are still far inferior to it. All have similar cesspools, inhabited by a poor, dirty and often suspicious population. This is where the police make their most frequent arrests, and where all epidemics begin. They are ready-made breeding grounds for contagious diseases, a breeding ground that only needs to be sown with their germs, in order to multiply them and spread them over the whole city. To prevent their spread, their haunts need to be destroyed; but hygiene is not sufficiently armed for this, and has long been calling for a reform in legislation.⁵⁶

Rochard’s urban “cesspools” refer to several Parisian working-class housing communities: Jeanne d’Arc, the Kroumirs, Clos-Macquart, the Biffins and Hôtel Macon. The sanitation of workers’ housing is presented as a matter of both international and national policy. The cleanliness of a city, the absence of malodor and, by extension, of poor people, were essential to keep up with other European states, particularly England, an age-old enemy and main colonial competitor, but also Germany, at a time when post-1871 revanchism was omnipresent in France. It was also a matter of guaranteeing the safety of the middle and upper classes by isolating this “poor, unclean and often suspicious population,” usually deemed responsible for most instances of epidemies or public uproar. This dehumanized, vilified representation of the inhabitants of insalubrious working-class housing communities required a drastic solution: the destruction of these “haunts” of evil, whether architectural, viral or human. As Marc Renneville points out, Rochard was perceived as a scientific authority and a true campaigner for hygiene as a political instrument for improving society.⁵⁷ The purification of these “haunts” of disease and criminality became implicitly justified by a certain notion of the common good: preventing the spread of sanitary and moral threats to the other social classes condoned a violent biopolitical ideology, not unrelated to the rise of eugenics during the second half of the century.⁵⁸

In this context, the hygienic purification of working-class urban areas mirrors a disturbing project of social purification through the violent demographic regulation of the lower classes and their menacing miasma. In nineteenth-century France, neo-Malthusian discourses were largely devoted to the demographic regulation of the working classes, in line with eugenics and social Darwinism. Virginie De Luca Barrusse has shown how poverty was usually blamed onto the lack of sexual restraint from working-class couples, forced to feed numerous children; despite the vilification and criminalization of most contraceptive devices and techniques, large working-class families are portrayed as parasites whose debauchery endangered the nation.⁵⁹ Working class couples were expected to reproduce in moderation: to produce enough new workers to fulfill the need for industrial growth, but not so much as to suggest immorality and, implicitly, to create such an overwhelmingly threat that it would become unmanageable in case of civil unrest. This was made particularly evident in one of Zola’s most famous novels, Money, first published in 1891. Zola focuses on the brutal speculator Saccard, who had an illegitimate child, Victor. The young boy grew up in the Parisian underworld, exposed from an early age to poverty and violence. Victor’s character, who inherited his father’s violent instincts, embodies, to the point of caricature, the moral threat posed by letting the poor yield to their immoral nature. Zola’s descriptions of a slum named Cité de Naples, where young Victor (aged 12 at the time of the plot) lives, are thus particularly informative regarding the collective beliefs of the time surrounding hygiene, poverty and immorality:

[T] here was neither pit nor cesspool; it was an ever-growing dunghill, poisoning the air; and fortunately it was cold weather, for on warm sunny days it generated pestilence. […] Families of eight and ten persons were huddled in these charnel-houses, often without even a bed, men, women, and children in a heap, rotting each other like decayed fruit, abandoned from early childhood to instinctive lust by the most monstrous of promiscuities. Accordingly bands of brats, emaciated, puny, eaten up by hereditary scrofula and syphilis, continually filled the court-yard, poor creatures growing on this dunghill like worm-eaten mushrooms, begotten in a chance embrace, never precisely knowing their fathers. When an epidemic of typhoid fever or small-pox arose, it swept half the City into the cemetery at one stroke.⁶⁰

The inhabitants of the Cité, those “poor creatures growing on this dunghill like worm-eaten mushrooms,” are dehumanized through the fungal metaphor. As fungi and other molds reproduce via airborne spores, their very birth is akin to a process of miasmatic emanation, by imitation of the “pestilence” “generated” from the surrounding “dunghill.” Here, the narrator plays on the polysemy of the noun “pestilence,” which simultaneously evokes the plague itself and the pestilential odor with which it is associated. The fungal metaphor also embodies the repulsive mores of the Cité’s inhabitants. In Zola’s fiction, promiscuity is both a source of sanitary degradation, as “men, women, and children [sleep] in a heap, rotting each other like decayed fruit,” and of moral corruption, as it encourages pedocriminal and incestuous practices. Despite being a fictional account, Zola’s depiction of the correlation between insalubrity and immorality amongst the lower classes was corroborated by the observations of leading hygienists of time. Rochard thus notes that, in the “foul cesspool” of lower-class housing, “morality and decency are unknown:” “common-law unions triumph, and are often associated with incest.”⁶¹ As such, literary sources provide precious insight into collective beliefs of novelists, of course, but also those of scientists and decision-makers responsible for urban and environmental policies of the time.⁶² The extremely degraded living conditions of the inhabitants of the Cité de Naples provide a shocking illustration of the health and moral consequences of atmospheric neglect and atavistic degeneration. In the context of Zola’s particular attention to the notion of heredity, repugnant misery and moral corruption appear, in this example, as congenital characteristics as tenacious as the “hereditary scrofula and syphilis” of the residents of the Cité de Naples. As the degraded ecosystem of the Cité fosters olfactory pollution, moral indecency and sanitary threats, epidemic infections are represented as purifying mechanisms of self-regulation: “When an epidemic of typhoid fever or smallpox arose, it swept half the City into the cemetery at one stroke.” The particularly high epidemic mortality rate in the Cité appears to be nothing but a drastic, cyclical population control mechanism through unregulated sanitary neglect. In view of the Cité’s overpopulation and the volume of description given to the perverse effects of promiscuity, miasmatic contamination curbs the threatening demographic overflow that its residents represent. While this is mostly interpretation of miasmatic literary imagery, the novel’s narrative itself validates the idea first formulated by Louis Chevalier that “labouring classes” are “dangerous classes:”⁶³ Victor, once removed from the slum and integrated into bourgeois society, is placed into an educational institution, from which he escapes after raping a young aristocratic girl. Although Zola tends to be associated with (rather ambivalent)⁶⁴ natalist stances, in Money, he portrays olfactory and atmospheric violence as serving a socially purifying function. The cultural imagination of miasma unambiguously linked sanitary corruption with moral corruption. Miasmatic representations of violence conjured up the specter of a monstrous misalliance between the classes that would compromise the moral and physical purity of the elite. Despite all scientific evidence in favor of germ theory, French culture’s enduring belief in the danger of miasma fed into prejudiced and paternalist depictions of poverty and justified the exclusion and criminalization of the poor.

Conclusion

In nineteenth-century France, olfactory perceptions provided phenomenological and epistemological criteria for the enforcement of spatial segregation according to class. Against the epistemological backdrop of the ever-surviving miasma theory, the olfactory consideration of urban spaces in nineteenth-century France outlines how atmospheres can be vectors of structural and acute violence against socio-economic minorities through unmitigated industrial development, governmental negligence, as well as hygienic and moral stigmatization. By crossing historical and literary sources, the analysis has shown how the paradoxical survival of miasma theory specific to French olfactory culture portrays malodor as inherently threatening. Moreover, through the lens of social hygiene,⁶⁴ uncleanliness came to be regarded as a marker of lower-class immorality while simultaneously carrying the threat of ethical and epidemiological contagion. Enforcing strict olfactory control over the lower classes through spatial segregation and hygienic discipline was thought to avoid the spread of poverty and immorality to the rest of society. Deodorization becomes the nation’s purifying mission.

Beyond the scope of this article and the developing scholarly interest in olfactory beliefs and practices associated with socio-economic inequalities, I believe that forms of olfactory political violence would benefit from being framed from an intersectional perspective. For instance, the cross-study of olfactory culture, social injustice and racial violence has been particularly fruitful regarding North America and England, notably through the work of Mark Smith, William Tullett, Daniela Babilon and Andrew Kettler, among many others.⁶⁶ Indeed, olfactory forms of atmospheric violence are not issues solely specific to nineteenth-century French socio-economic violence. These elements suggest that scholarly enquiry into the importance of olfactory experiences and representations in our political lives is bound to soar, as previous works on smell and war, in France and North America, suggested.⁶⁷