The emergence of dental science and a body of proficient dentists came more slowly in other countries, allowing France to develop an international hegemony in this domain. When Austrian empress Maria Theresa wanted the teeth of her daughter (the future queen Marie-Antoinette) straightened, she summoned a French dentist. When George Washington had toothache troubles on campaign in the War of Independence, he sent for an expatriate French dentist to lend succor. When the salon conversationalist, the Abbé Galiani, was finding that the progressive loss of his teeth was making it difficult for his Neapolitan friends to understand what on earth he was saying, he sent for a Paris-made set of dentures to restore his articulacy. His dentures were, he stated, his “parliament”: they restored a voice to the dentally disenfranchised.

Within France, better provision for the care of teeth and smiles was registered in a buoyant market for mouth-care products of every description. Newspaper advertisements and handbills proclaimed the virtues of every kind of commodity that promoted good teeth and a healthy mouth: tooth-files, toothpicks, tongue-scrapers, tooth-powders and dentifrices, tooth-whitening agents, lipsticks, mouth deodorants and the like. The toothbrush—and Paris-made brushes were recognized across Europe as the very best—became the center of what was to become a daily morning ritual. So, for some, did artificial dentures, another energetically marketed commodity.

One of the most famous of the new breed of dentists was Nicolas Dubois de Chémant. A Paris surgeon by training, Dubois had an epiphanic moment in 1788, as he reeled with horror after an evening spent in the company of a society lady with artificial teeth and very strong halitosis. Dubois hit on the idea of creating porcelain teeth rather than using the smelly and perishable human and animal teeth hitherto employed in dentures. Using the hard-paste porcelain that was only just coming into use in France, he launched a series of manufacturing trials for “mineral dentures,” even drawing on the expertise of workers at the top-of-the-range porcelain factory at Sèvres to create a product that was comfortable, natural-looking, and resistant to surface cracking. By 1789, he had invented what became known as his “Incorruptible Teeth,” and had had them approved by the most prestigious academies and learned societies.

There was an enthusiastic launch amongst France’s social elite for a product that put the French smile at the disposal even of those who had lost all their teeth. Yet Dubois de Chémant was soon following many of his aristocratic clients into emigration. In 1793, he settled in Soho, London, home to a solid phalanx of political émigrés from Revolutionary France. In 1797, he even became a naturalized Englishman, switched his paste-supplier from Sèvres to Wedgwood, and peddled his wares to an upper-class English clientele as well as to fellow Frenchmen.

Sales of the new “mineral, incorruptible teeth” were not at all bad. Dubois de Chémant’s advertising material in 1797 boasted of having sold three thousand sets of dentures; by 1816, the figure would be twelve thousand. Yet, in England, retailing the French smile—especially an artificial version of it—was fraught with problems. After all, these were years in which the English were honing their sense of national identity on blatant undercurrents of Francophobia. The wearers of Dubois’s new contraptions had to put up with a considerable degree of mockery, as exemplified in Thomas Rowlandson’s famous 1811 engraving, “A French Dentist Shewing a Specimen of his Artificial Teeth and False Palates.” Under the heading “Mineral Teeth,” we read, “Monsieur de Charmant from Paris”—not much of a disguise for Dubois de Chémant—“engages to affix from one tooth to a whole set without pain. Monsieur Dubois can also affix an artificial palate or a glass eye. He also distils.” The French smile was ridiculous because the mouth gaped open, but also because it revealed the ridiculous French contraption of porcelain dentures in the mouths of English individuals who had been duped by a quack—and who should have known better anyway than to attempt the French smile.

The English gentleman on the right of Rowlandson’s engraving, caught admiring the French (porcelain) smile, showed teeth in the kind of state that made the appeal of porcelain dentures understandable. Teeth were bad; but dental caries appear to have been no worse in France than elsewhere in western Europe—indeed French teeth may have been better than those of the English, whose per capita sugar consumption seems to have been exceptionally high. The fact that scientific dentistry evolved in France before England and elsewhere showed that explanations for the phenomenon are more social and cultural than biological.

Part of the explanation for “Why France First?” lies in the buoyant world of French medicine and surgery from which scientific dentistry had evolved. But there was a demand as well as a supply side to the phenomenon. The French in the eighteenth century seem to have prided themselves on white teeth. The cornucopian profusion of mouth-care commodities on offer is unimaginable without a strong demand from within French society. The notion that the good-hearted smile was a national characteristic of the French also seems linked to changes going on in the French economy. A proto-consumer revolution, no less, was in train, with individuals even well down the social scale dressing, primping, and presenting themselves in ways more receptive to fashion and exchange. A new body was emergent, more soigné and cared for, more self-aware, more individualistic in appearance, and yet also more attuned to emergent codes of politeness and to the dictates of fashion. The prizing of a healthy and preferably beautiful mouth appears to have been an offshoot of these overarching developments. To a considerable extent the new smile was only possible in the context of a new body.