Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France

By Kari Weil

From the recent spate of equine deaths on racetracks to protests demanding the removal of mounted Confederate soldier statues to the success and appeal of War Horse, there is no question that horses still play a role in our lives—though fewer and fewer of us actually interact with them. In Precarious Partners, Kari Weil takes readers back to a time in France when horses were an inescapable part of daily life. This was a time when horse ownership became an attainable dream not just for soldiers but also for middle-class children; when natural historians argued about animal intelligence; when the prevalence of horse beatings led to the first animal protection laws; and when the combined magnificence and abuse of these animals inspired artists, writers, and riders alike.
 
Weil traces the evolving partnerships established between French citizens and their horses through this era. She considers the newly designed “races” of workhorses who carried men from the battlefield to the hippodrome, lugged heavy loads through the boulevards, or paraded women riders, amazones, in the parks or circus halls—as well as those unfortunate horses who found their fate on a dinner plate. Moving between literature, painting, natural philosophy, popular cartoons, sports manuals, and tracts of public hygiene, Precarious Partners traces the changing social, political, and emotional relations with these charismatic creatures who straddled conceptions of pet and livestock in nineteenth-century France.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226686400

Kari Weil

Kari Weil is University Professor of Letters at Wesleyan University. She is the co-editor of a special issue of Hypatia entitled “Animal Others” (Gruen & Weil, 2012) and author of Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now (Columbia University Press, 2012). Her book Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France: Mobility, Magnetism, Meat is forthcoming.

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PRECARIOUS PARTNERS

ANIMAL LIVES

Jane C. Desmond, Series Editor; Barbara J. King, Associate Editor for Science; Kim Marra, Associate Editor

BOOKS IN THE SERIES

Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life

by Jane C. Desmond

Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist’s Ethical Journey

by John P. Gluck

The Great Cat and Dog Massacre: The Real Story of World War Two’s Unknown Tragedy

by Hilda Kean

Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas

by Radhika Govindrajan

Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel

by Ivan Kreilkamp

Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity

by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld

PRECARIOUS PARTNERS

Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France

KARI WEIL

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68623-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68637-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68640-0 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226686400.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Weil, Kari, author.

Title: Precarious partners : horses and their humans in nineteenth-century France / Kari Weil.

Other titles: Animal lives (University of Chicago Press)

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Series: Animal lives | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019031493 | ISBN 9780226686233 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226686370 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226686400 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Horses—France—History—19th century. | Horses—Social aspects—France. | Human-animal relationships—France—History—19th century. | Animals and civilization—France.

Classification: LCC SF284.F7 W45 2020 | DDC 636.10944—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031493

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In memory of Holly

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction: The Most Beautiful Conquest of Man?

1.  Heads or Tails? Painting History with a Horse

2.  Putting the Horse before Descartes: Sensibility and the War on Pity

3.  Making Horsework Visible: Domestication and Labor from Buffon to Bonheur

4.  Let Them Eat Horse

5.  Purebreds and Amazons: Race, Gender, and Species from the Second Empire to the Third Republic

6.  The Man on Horseback: From Military Might to Circus Sports

7.  Animal Magnetism, Affective Influence, and Moral Dressage

Afterword

Plates

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

PREFACE

I started work on this book over twenty years ago. It grew out of research for my first book, which dealt with notions of androgyny and representations of changing or ambiguous gender in French, German, and British literary works of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I was struck by French women who were described as cross-dressing in order to work with horses and ride astride—much to the shock of their contemporaries. Horses, I understood, offered one perspective into the massive changes in gender relations, but also in class and race relations, that were taking place during the nineteenth century. Or that was how my more established colleagues encouraged me to see the value of my research. But for me there was more in it. As a rider and lifelong lover of horses, I was also interested in them for their own sake. I wanted to understand the kinds of relations people had with horses, whether on the ground or in the saddle. I feared, however, that studying animals in this way not only was unconventional but also risked being dismissed as sentimental and unworthy of an academic. The field of animal studies did not yet exist. Its emergence and growth over the past fifteen years or so have had an enormous influence on this work, not only by making me believe in the importance and relevance of my topic, but also by bringing me to consider emerging debates about animal agency and consciousness, about the politics and ethics surrounding companion species, and about the significance of our joint bonds—then and now.¹ Indeed, I had hoped to catch some glimpse or insight into what might have been a horse’s own point of view two centuries ago, but in this effort I was stymied by a dearth of source materials, by fear of my own projections, and by my ignorance of how to locate the traces of that viewpoint other than in the effects reported by a horse’s human.

When I first presented some of my work at an animal studies conference (not the French and comparative literature conferences I had mostly attended), another presenter, a political philosopher, asked how I could in good conscience ride horses. Isn’t it comparable to slaveholding, he asked, the horse’s bit another kind of shackles? I understood where the question was coming from, having familiarized myself with animal abolitionist arguments, but I felt unprepared to answer. I could have said I believed some horses (not all) like being ridden and enjoy the partnership they experience with a rider. Riding is also one way we humans can get to know the personality and individuality of a particular horse (and vice versa). At the same time, a statement of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s came to mind. It is neither for slaves nor for tamed horses to reason about freedom, for they know only their broken state. The untamed steed bristles its mane, stamps the ground with its hoof, and struggles impetuously at the sight of the bit.² Although horses or other domestic animals may not choose it, I believe that some form of training (or education) can give them a means of communicating with humans and in some instances may protect them from far worse fates like slaughter. This, of course, is not always the case, but as I have argued elsewhere, if abolitionism in the animal rights movement means simply allowing all domestic animals to perish, we can and must find better alternatives.³

Sometime after that conference I put aside my horse book to pursue different and often more theoretical questions raised by my readings and collaborations in animal studies. This pursuit was aided by my move from French departments to programs that promoted more interdisciplinary study, first at the California College of Art and then at Wesleyan University. In my classes and my research for my previous book, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?, I turned to twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, art, and theory that zeroed in on knotty issues of animal ethics but also looked deeply into problems of language and representation and the dangers of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. When I returned to research on horses in nineteenth-century France, these issues presented themselves in new and often unforeseen ways, even as my focus was contained within a more specific historical and geographical context that was largely absent from Thinking Animals. Nevertheless, as I was finishing the manuscript I was surprised to find how relevant many of the issues continue to be.

To be sure, horses are no longer central to daily life as they were in the nineteenth century, but the contest over who or what they are and who and what they and their image serve continues to be waged in ways that reflect ongoing social, sexual, political, and ethical issues. Just last summer the University of Wyoming released its new marketing campaign with the slogan the world needs more cowboys. Faculty protested because of the cowboy’s white, macho image, and Native Americans on campus joined in, saying that for them ‘cowboys’ holds a negative connotation.⁴ Race was also at issue last summer, when the town of Charlottesville, Virginia, witnessed one of the largest protests in its history in reaction to the potential removal of the statue of a man on horseback, Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s top general.⁵ Those who favored removal saw the statue as a monument to white supremacy. Those who opposed removal accused the other side of wanting to erase history—a history, we can assume, of white men riding high on their horses to rule over those able (or authorized) to move only on foot. In the aftermath of several such protests, Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate from Alabama, rode his horse to the voting booth in a clear attempt to prove that the good old southern cowboy of yesteryear was alive and well. Moore’s Senate run was foiled not only because of his racism, but also because he sexually assaulted underage girls. Social media turned this into satire as Moore’s horse, Sassy, claimed #MeToo on her own Twitter feed.

Although he is no horseman himself, President Trump’s character and legal standing have been visibly shaken by a young equestrienne and porn star known as Stormy Daniels, with whom he allegedly had a sexual encounter. As Daniels continues to contest a restraining order that forbids her to speak publicly about the affair, she also takes pride in her growing visibility and especially her appearance in X-rated films with her new Irish stud.⁶ In this, she may remind us of the strong-willed and crafty nineteenth-century actress Adah Menken, who became famous for riding onstage in a sheer costume and attracting the gaze of a line of suitors. Adah was a new breed of woman rider who contributed to the slow demise of the European image of the man on horseback, one that depended on associations not only of gender, but also of aristocracy and hence of race. Adah was American, barely middle class, and Jewish.

The popularity of equestriennes like Stormy and Adah, however, has done little to soften the association of horse ownership with the upper classes, if not with the dangerous carelessness attributed to excessive privilege. In our previous presidential election, stories circulated about a certain stunningly elegant $100,000 dressage mare owned by Mitt Romney’s wife, the potential first lady. Connecting her and her husband with the blue-blooded sport often associated with kings, the mare furthered what comedian Stephen Colbert called Romney’s privileged princeling image.⁷ More troubling was the news that the mare was to be ridden in the Olympics by a trainer who had been sued for fraud after selling a horse without disclosing its severe foot problem. Stunning elegance was a cover for sleazy abuse.

Government attention to animal abuse dates back to the nineteenth century, but government agencies in the United States today seem to be doing their best to obscure their responsibility for the animals in their care. Under the Trump administration, the Department of Agriculture has removed reports of abuse from its website. Wild horses in particular are viewed much like immigrants who have overrun, if not infested, American land and need to be controlled. In April the Bureau of Land Management released its plan for the management of wild horses, which can include not only removing them from the range but also killing up to 100,000 of them or selling them for slaughter.⁸ Largely because of their symbolic value (and for reasons that were debated in nineteenth-century France), Americans have traditionally resisted slaughtering horses for food, but this has not stopped the government from lifting restrictions preventing the sale of American mustangs to horsemeat dealers who sell to Canada and Mexico.⁹ Although Americans won’t eat horsemeat, we believe it’s good enough for our neighbors.

On stage and in films, audiences have been introduced to the noble horse as comrade and companion, brave if also suffering. Of the three deaths in Joe Wright’s 2012 film version of Anna Karenina, only that of the horse features a drawn-out shot of a body writhing in pain. The other two deaths are instantaneous. In Nick Stafford’s magnificent stage adaption of War Horse, where life-size, Deborah Butterfield–style puppets perform with the elegance and sensitivity of the real thing, and in Steven Spielberg’s epic film of the same title, the focus is less on the systematic wrongs of the horse world than on the wrongs that have resulted from the entanglement of horse life and human life. We send horses to do our bidding, riding them into violent combat where they are often left to die alone on the battlefield. War Horse is also the story of a boy’s love for his horse and of whatever might be the horse’s equivalent of love for the boy. Our media and our society have surely traveled a long distance from the Cartesian tradition of the animal as a machine that feels no pain and cannot suffer because it has no consciousness. Horses make news or entertainment because they do suffer, and it is their suffering that is meant to move readers and viewers to sympathize, if not to prevent their abuse. Similar campaigns to raise awareness of the abuses inflicted on horses, not only on the battlefield but also on the street, led to the establishment of the first SPCAs and to anticruelty laws in England, France, and the United States. But just as the Romney family was criticized for giving its horse better health care than many Americans could afford, in the nineteenth century the cause of animal protection would stir class envy and provoke animosity toward the horsey set, who were said to treat their animals better than their workers.

Then as now, horses reveal our intimate, if conflicted, relationships with other animals, including other humans. For some, horses inspire an even greater need to prove our mastery and power and conceal our animal inadequacies. For others, horses remind us of our shared vulnerability and suffering—our need for compassion, to be sure, but also our need for the joyful exuberance we can share with another creature. This is a learned joy, one that develops along with restrictions on freedom for horse and human alike. It entails what we might regard as ethical obligations: I won’t try to teach you something you won’t like, but you mustn’t buck me off. Moreover, because the riding relationship depends on the very senses of touch and feel that have been most disparaged by humanist prejudice, it can challenge the grounds of the human-animal hierarchy and reveal our shortcomings, both physical and intellectual. The bit is evidence of our human dependence on a prosthetic to communicate and to control. We should be grateful to horses for accepting it and our shortcomings.

Is riding merely a form of domination? It certainly can be, but as I hope these essays make clear, it can be much more. Most important, riding is a becoming with, a way to know another, particular animal and to make oneself vulnerable to being known in return. It is a way that both horse and rider become something and someone new and discover a new joy in partnership.

INTRODUCTION

The Most Beautiful Conquest of Man?

In the middle of the eighteenth century natural historian Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, declared the horse the most beautiful conquest man has ever made.¹ By the nineteenth century this description had become so classic and proverbial that it was impossible to pronounce the word horse without immediately inciting, vocally and mentally, the inevitable response of ‘the most beautiful conquest.’ Or so claimed Albert Cler, the contemporary chronicler of the horse world.² Though the phrase is often understood and translated as "the most noble conquest," readers would note a certain irony in Cler’s words, which come from his 1842 satirical look at the French horsey set, The Comedy on Horseback: Fads and Follies of the Equestrian World. With chapters on the Jockey Club, the races, and the latest mode in carriages, not to mention the new Sunday riders, Cler’s book presents a not so subtle mockery of the nineteenth-century equestrian world, which for him had lost its prerevolutionary associations with grace and nobility. Nostalgic for the aristocratic equestrian sphere and the studied training that had once prepared horses and men together for war, Cler describes the contemporary horseman as a boorish, bourgeois man of fashion who has turned the horse into a moneymaking spectacle for an increasingly crass consumer.

Not everyone agreed with Cler’s perspective. Some twenty years later Thomas Couture, painter and teacher of such luminaries as Édouard Manet, offers a very different picture of the public promenade on horseback, one he claims could equal the merit portraits of the greatest masters, even as it would have a completely new physiognomy.

On this public promenade, I see a cavalier accompanying a young girl: they are very distinguished. . . . Look at the pretty costume d’amazone, how it chastely outlines the shape of the upper body. . . . This thoroughbred horse, how he seems proud to carry his mistress. The cavalier’s outfit is elegant and simple. . . . I can’t help comparing what I see to the portraits left by our masters . . . but I would not hesitate to show my preference for what I see here to admire.³

Édouard Manet agreed with Couture, and that very year he included the woman rider or amazon in the middle of his painting of the Universal Exhibition. Indeed, many artists and writers of the time would make men and women on horseback the subject of their paintings and writings, although the new physiognomy Couture mentions would be ambiguous in its implications and change greatly during the century.

Horses, I argue in the chapters that follow, came to represent the social and cultural changes taking place during the century following the Revolution. As boundaries between classes and genders became increasingly fluid, the omnipresent horse could represent both what was lost and what was gained. Indeed, men of all classes were confronted with a new and sometimes threatening relationship between women and horses, one hinted at in Couture’s reference to the horse’s pride in carrying his mistress. Writers and painters turned to horses to illuminate these changes and offer their varied reactions to them. But horses were more than symbolic objects. They were partners and agents in these transformations: prideful, perhaps, but certainly feeling and revealing the effects of change to those who would take time to look at them. Horses in the countryside and in the city, in private and in public life were everyday evidence against Descartes’s notion of animals as machines, undermining the supposedly clear boundaries between human and nonhuman. Horses were sensitive, feeling creatures—all the more apparently when they were seen as victims of the very progress they made possible. As their labor (and eventually meat) would be regarded as essential for the growth of French industry and culture, so would their misery become increasingly evident. But as the suffering of horses seemed comparable to that of the workers who most depended on them for their livelihood, there arose a competition for redress, for justice. Over the course of the century workers would achieve solidarity and make their demands heard, but who would or could speak for the horse?

The question hovers over the very birth of the Republic, when we find horses connected to the expression of new political and moral sentiments that link animal suffering to the suffering of workers and also, as historian Pierre Serna demonstrates, to women’s agency and rights of ownership. This becomes evident in a scene reported in La décade, the quasi-official journal of the Directory from 1798, that offers an aspect and physiognomy of the horse rather different from the glitzy spectacles described by Cler or the elegance pronounced by Couture. The report describes three horses struggling to pull a loaded wagon until one collapses on the road. At that the driver gets down from his seat and begins violently beating the horses before a critical but passive crowd. Only one woman, a vegetable vendor, takes it upon herself to try to stop the driver. She threatens him with a rock, shouting, Go on, beat him, I dare you to beat him, you inhuman monster! While some of the onlookers applaud the woman, one emphatically scolds her, saying she should mind her own business. Since the horse belongs to the driver, this well-dressed man insists, the driver has the right to do what he wishes, even to kill him if that is his pleasure.⁴

The actors in the scene are not the glossy thoroughbreds and social climbers Cler described but members of the working class, humans and horses alike. It is a scene of suffering rather than show, and it takes a woman to stop the abuse. Could there be a silent, unspeakable complicity between the beaten horse and the beating woman? One submissive, the other refusing her submission? asks Serna.⁵ One might remember that early modern marriage manuals compared the obedient wife to a well-broken horse. Not for this woman. Serna notes that the author of the article, who witnessed the scene, was a member of a nascent Republican school of medicine—the veterinary school of Maisons-Alfort—and he questions why it was the woman and not he who intervened. The combination of compassionate witnessing and nonintervention illustrates how the subject of animal suffering or animal sensibility gained traction in conjunction with the idea of a Republic and universal human rights, but it also shows that the path could be conflicted—that the way forward was fraught. Did one have a right to inflict suffering? If so, upon whom and for what cause? How was one to weigh the unspoken, if unspeakable (in human terms), suffering of animals against the rights of workers, whose needs were just beginning to be voiced. How might women finally express their affinity with the beaten horse?

Equestrian culture with its evidence of the continuity . . . of former aristocratic visions, historian Daniel Roche writes, was only one part of the horse world of the nineteenth century. It was also, he adds, one of the theaters for the democratic transformation of such representations and manners of seeing and being seen.⁶ This theater would increasingly include such scenes of abuse and suffering, leading to the rise of legal protections for horses, but also to methods of hiding infractions from public sight or even turning horse slaughter into a new form of spectacle. Cler ends his own book with a chapter on Montfaucon, the Paris slaughter yards that closed in 1842, which he describes as a theater of another sort. Distinctions between breeds or owners mattered little in this final act, and Cler’s contemporary, Théophile Gautier, would paint its colorful repertoire of flesh, blood, and fat into something of a surrealist literary tableau (discussed in more detail in chapter 4). Indeed, one wonders what regimes of emotion or affection allowed for a horse’s companionship, talent, and affection to sink into oblivion or onto the plate.⁷

Moving between literature, painting, natural philosophy, popular cartoons, sport manuals, and tracts of public hygiene, the essays collected here take readers to this era when horses were an inescapable part of daily life, when owning horses became an increasingly realizable dream even for middle-class (bourgeois) boys and girls, and when the lives and deaths of horses were determined by the complex material circumstances and changing personal and political relations of the humans they depended on. Objects of affection for some (most apparently women), for others they were mere tools of social mobility and expression. When Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary dreams of Paris, her hazy vision includes a tableau of men who, their abilities unappreciated beneath their frivolous exteriors, rode their horses to death for the enjoyment of it.⁸

Once regarded as the privilege of the aristocracy, in the nineteenth century riding was increasingly democratized. People wanted more horses in daily life, and at the same time they felt pressure to display the right horse and the correct riding style. Fashion wants everybody to learn to ride, wrote the historian of equitation Étienne Saurel. And the popularity of riding led to a rise in equestrian rhetoric, its sexual, class, and racial inflections influenced both by Anglomania and by colonialist attraction to the traffic in the hot-blooded horses of the Middle East and North Africa.⁹ The novelist Honoré de Balzac frequently noted the attention and prestige an Arabian horse could bring to a man on the move.¹⁰ Although not restricted to men, riding was nevertheless a gendered activity because of its associations with a form of virile mastery and military mobility that was denied to women and because women were required to ride sidesaddle, the position of amazones. Men often compared their horses to their women, whether in number or in terms of breed or reputation.¹¹ Horse breeding itself became of national concern during the century, whether for the army or the racetrack or because it informed eugenic practices. Efforts to improve native breeds by importing purebreds from England or Africa would eventually be implicated in a contemporary race discourse that raised fears over the degeneration of the French race and concerns about how to ensure the potency and moral standing of its progeny. By the end of the century, the herd instinct of humans would be perceived as more threatening to society than its manifestation in any other group of animals. Updating Plato’s charioteer in the Phaedrus, painted and written representations of horses and their riders expressed anxiety about what breeding and education would produce the noble horse and the correctly embodied mind that would allow the charioteer to guide him properly. The ever-present image and reality of the horse, in other words, would bring new pressure to understand the nature of the human and discover the ways both horses and humans might be better bred and better trained.

The contexts for such changes will be the focus of this introduction, but the essays that follow are not meant to constitute a history of equestrian life or of horses in nineteenth-century France. Instead, through close readings of a range of visual and literary works and practical guides, I will attempt to show how our relations with horses became a focus for articulating changing ideas and manifestations of gender, race, and class and changing attitudes toward nonhuman animals more generally. If Paris became the capital of the nineteenth century by virtue of its cultural production and industrial invention, much of this production was assisted by the ever present if mostly unacknowledged strength, intelligence, and compliance of horses. Horses were crucial to humans for their daily chores, their leisure activities, and their self-identities. Many bestowed an image of nobility on their owners or offered a new sense of freedom, and most offered a combination of hard labor and devotion even to those who were reluctant to acknowledge it. And if the swept forelock and soft eyes represented in Théodore Géricault’s Head of a White Horse (plate 1; discussed in chapter 1) are any indication, some horses were there