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Whatsapp Marie Louise Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun's self-portrait.

Polite French society once considered smiling an expression of madness or naivety, with few people keen to bare their terrible teeth. Amruta Slee investigates how smiles came into fashion and how dentists emerged to look after them.

It was the painting that shocked a nation; in 1786 a self-portrait of a young mother with her child appeared in the Louvre. At first glance it looked innocuous; the woman in the painting, Marie Antoinette's favourite artist Elisabeth-Louise Vigee Le Brun, is shown holding her child and gazing out at the viewer. She's also smiling—a smile that showed at least five of her small, white teeth.

If you smile at someone, they smile back at you, and you tend to feel reinforced in your smile, so it becomes almost a contagion, a wildfire that can go through society.

Reaction was swift. 'An affectation which artists, art-lovers and persons of taste have been united in condemning,' huffed an anonymous commentator about the smile. 'This affectation is particularly out of place in a mother.'

Why the outrage? As Colin Jones details in his book, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris, there weren't a lot of reasons to grin in public in the years leading up to 1786. Teeth were rotten, breath was bad, and mouths were often black, hellish cavities. Toothaches and other dental problems were treated either through bizarre cures like a poultice of hare's breath and honey, by superstition—holding a shovel over your head—or simply by praying for divine intervention. If really desperate you could turn to the travelling showmen who used teeth-pulling as part of their public entertainment: lancing teeth with swords, or pulling out a loose denture while riding a horse with a paper bag over their heads.

In art, an open-mouthed smile or laughter was an expression of madness or naivety, Jones says. It was 'a sign of folly ... a sign that you were drunk or in the grip of extreme emotions' like anger or ecstasy. In real life, too, it was distinctly low-rent to smile. The fashion for haughtiness was set, as were most fashions, by the court at Versailles, by a king who was naturally dour—but who also had terrible teeth.

Louis XIV loved sweets and consumed sugar with gusto. In 1685, by the time he turned 47, his mouth had paid the price. He assigned the task of removing his decayed teeth to an over-zealous puller who took out not just the molars but a large part of the royal upper jaw. Eating and drinking was now a fraught exercise—liquids spouted through Louis's nostrils—and to make things worse the wound became infected.

Here, the king showed why he was king. He agreed to have the wound cauterised using a red-hot iron. 'Treat me like a peasant,' he told his surgeons, signalling that when it came to mouths, everyone was on the same level.

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Whatsapp A foppish dentist on stage extracting a tooth from a patient who is being restrained by a man dressed as Pierrot.

One hundred years later, the king of the day and his courtiers were no more inclined to smile, except disdainfully at the less fortunate. However, fashions were changing, reflecting a political change. The court no longer had the power it once had. A new middle class was on the rise in Paris and they set out to differentiate themselves through the books they read and the society they formed. They were literally a chattering class, eager to discuss the ideas of the Enlightenment, to engage in intellectual debate, and most importantly to embrace a new sense of fraternity and optimism. All this involved opening one's mouth—to talk and to smile—not mockingly like the aristocrats, but in friendship and empathy.

'The new type of society that was coming in—more urban centred, more capitalistic, but also by the end of the century more democratic, more egalitarian, less deferential to the royal court—offered a place in which the smile had a sense, had a meaning,' Jones says.

'One of the things which psychologists tell us ... is that the smile is quite contagious. If you smile at someone, they smile back at you, and you tend to feel reinforced in your smile, so it becomes almost a contagion, a wildfire that can go through society.'

Fortunately, France was also at the vanguard of a new profession: dentistry. Celebrity dentists like Pierre Fauchard had proper clinics and a vast array of new steel implements as well as a multitude of mouth fresheners, brushes, scrapers and false teeth. Not all of their advice was good—Fauchard suggested using urine as a mouthwash—but French teeth reaped the benefits of this dental attention. Parisians were renowned for their gaiety and ready wit.

In one sense then, the painting of Vigee Le Brun, though it marked a societal change, was late to the smile revolution, which was in full swing by 1786. Two years later, the real revolution was launched against the ancien régime. But then a strange thing happened; the smile switched political sides.

'The smile of sensibility had been all about moderation,' Jones writes, 'but now moderation was becoming a dirty word. In the revolutionary lexicon a "moderate" was a false friend of the people ... increasingly under suspicion.' In fact, the only ones smiling during the Terror were the aristocrats who chose to mount the scaffold and show their disdain for the insults hurled at them. The smile once again became a sign of hauteur and contempt.

For a brief time France was the centre of the grin, but in the years following the revolution, dentists lost their clientele, people assumed stiff upper lips, portraiture went back to its stern visage and the smile moved on—to the USA. There, it would stay, becoming both a national characteristic and an advertisement for the pursuit of happiness.

The Smile Revolution Listen to Late Night Live's interview with Colin Jones.

Subscribe to Late Night Live in iTunes or your podcasting app.

