The Paris Salon To A Million Selfies — How Europe Learned To Smile

Until the Enlightenment, smiling and showing teeth was not fashionable — or socially acceptable — in a Europe where dental health had not yet become widespread. But then the perception of smiles changed, shifting from a serious demeanor to an embrace of open expressions.

13
December
2024

It was certainly what visitors expected from the Salons held year after year in Paris — to showcase the latest and the best in art: That a marvelous painting would emerge, that the newest societal trends would be on display and that, occasionally, a great scandal would explode.

At the 1787 Salon, Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun created both that great scandal and a major societal change. Her self-portrait — in which she appears with her daughter Julie – showed her smiling at the viewer, a smile that even revealed her teeth.

Today, smiling at the camera is almost taken for granted. Although how much we smile and at whom varies across cultures. Take, for example, all those reels of Americans sharing their surprise at the fact that no one smiles back in Europe. Smiling is assumed to be the default facial expression to use for memory pictures. We smile in family reunion photos, graduation pictures, or even in our ID photos, resigned to the knowledge that we might not look our best. And, of course, we smile in the hundreds of selfies we take throughout the year. A serious pose in a vacation photo would make viewers to wonder what was wrong with us.

But smiling for posterity is a fairly recent phenomenon, something that, as historian Colin Jones explains in The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris, experienced a moment of success, peak, and disappearance during the Enlightenment in Europe. It was in the enlightened world that Europe learned to smile, although the French Revolution and the world that followed put an end to that trend. Thus, Vigée-LeBrun was capturing a social revolution while also creating her swan song.

Of course, it is not that nobody smiled before or that the smile was unknown. What changed, as Jones explains, is how the gesture was socially perceived, and also who could smile and where. This was closely connected to social changes in people’s views and their place in the world (and the philosophy of the Enlightenment), but also to something as mundane as the evolution of dentistry in 18th-century Paris.

Dentistry as performance

Until the 18th century, dentistry was more performance material than a proper science. Teeth hurt, decayed and had to be removed, but those who did it were not necessarily medical experts — whatever that meant at that time.

Dentists back then almost turned tooth extractions into circus shows and were accompanied by eye-catching elements (animals, for example) that captured the interest of the public. «One such individual was known for extracting a tooth with one hand while firing a pistol into the air with the other, all while having a bag over his head», the historian writes.

Dentistry started being considered a scientific discipline

The situation changed during Enlightenment-era Paris, as dentistry started being considered a scientific discipline and great advances were made in the treatment of dental problems.

Dentists wrote treatises using scientific language and, although they continued to use marketing tactics to reach the mass market (such as publishing guides on dental health or selling cleaning and aesthetic products), they settled as a serious, medical profession. Progress was also made in areas such as the creation of dentures and implants.

Versailles protocol

Meanwhile, the whole vision of smiling was also changing. If we look at the grand portraits of the upper class from previous centuries, we will see that it was customary to present oneself to the world with a serious expression.

The historian gives as an example one of the most famous portraits of French king Louis XIV. The monarch does not smile and the artist even captured the shape of his mouth marked by the absence of quite a few teeth (the king’s dental health was terrible). This serious expression was what you would expect of a ruler and the absence of a smile implied gravitas and a dignified air.

A face «at rest» was even associated with a «calm» soul. People avoided smiling and under no circumstances (in art as in social gatherings) showed their teeth. Smiling with your teeth showing was not «decent» and was considered «plebeian». In paintings, only the lower class or those who had lost their mind were shown to smile openly, the expert points out.

The idea began to take hold that the smile is a window to the true nature of the person

Furthermore, the court of Versailles’ protocol implied maintaining a serious expression. First, because the protocol imposed by Louis XIV — which his descendants later maintained — was inflexible and abhorred smiling. Second, because people of the court could not actually afford it either: to maintain the standards of courtly beauty and their absolute paleness, they needed to smear their faces with a white paste that, if they smiled, would crack.

In short, people did not smile in public – not even for the sake of memory – to hide terrible teeth and because it was customary.

Things were different in enlightened Paris, where, recalls the historian, «natural beauty» was increasingly sought after and where the idea began to take hold that the smile is a window to the true nature of the person. The clash of ideas between the court and the community of enlightened thinkers went as far as the smile.

Cultivating emotions

At the same time, sensibilities had changed. The 18th century was the era of the so-called comédie larmoyante – a play written to make you cry – and in novels, key characters smiled – and in their smile, they conveyed the essence of their humanity. In turn, the public and the readers wanted to smile like Rousseau’s Julie. A growing cult of emotions appeared as a sincere way of showing oneself and, with it, the smile changed. «The smile has really changed. And this new smile has teeth», writes Jones.

While the court of Versailles was still hiding under heavy make-up, in Paris people tried to show a natural look, with rosy cheeks and white teeth. Everyone, men and women, smiled. Then the smile – and its teeth – made its way from the streets to art.

The French Revolution and its political context put a halt to the emergence of the smile, which seemed futile considering the pressingly serious matters that had to be dealt with. Europe did not stop smiling, it is true, but, as Jones points out, its open smiles disappeared from public representations. And while a painting of Queen Victoria smiling and showing her teeth does exist, it was created for her husband’s eyes only.

In art, the absence of a smile became again key to presenting oneself to the world as someone of importance, which then transferred to photography. The golden age of Parisian dentistry ended with the beginning of a new century (in the 19th century, Americans became the good dentists) and teeth lost their shine.

Smiling openly would not return until the 20th century — and in some contexts, such as public images of the political class, not until well into the 20th century — when cinema and its stars reintroduced the full-toothed smile as something desirable.


This content is part of a collaboration agreement of ‘WorldCrunch’, with the magazine ‘Ethic’. Read the original at this link.

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