Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (20 page)

The Chartists were working-class men who agitated for the Charter, a manifesto calling for a popular parliament elected by all adult men. The leader of the most radical faction of Chartists, Feargus O’Connor, was notorious for his scandalously unshorn chin.
38
In 1848, Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary and one of Britain’s leading politicians, damned the Chartists as “whiskered and bearded rioters.”
39
An economic slump in 1847, and news of liberal revolutions in Europe in 1848, had inspired the collection of millions of signatures favoring the Charter. In advance of a mass demonstration planned for London that summer,
100,000 middle-class citizens volunteered as special constables to contain the working-class demonstrators. In the event, the crowds proved smaller than anticipated by either side, partly because of heavy rains. With only about 150,000 protestors, the fearsome O’Connor proved unwilling to confront the army of constables arrayed against him. “The day of the Chartists passed off with most ridiculous quiet, and the government is stronger than ever,” observed the wife of the American ambassador to Britain, Elizabeth Bancroft.
40
Even so, the British remained jittery about both insurrection and scruff. Bancroft noted in her memoirs that anyone promoting democracy too loudly might be packed off at any time, particularly if he had a long beard.

The English government was secure, but King Louis Philippe of France and the kings and princes of Germany proved vulnerable to a new generation of bearded liberals. For a short time in 1848, royal power was humbled in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and other capitals, as loyal forces retreated in the face of street protests. For a time, it seemed a united and democratic Germany would be born. Liberals from all parts of Germany, including an elderly Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, gathered in Frankfurt to form a federal parliament and write a bill of rights and a constitution for a new country. The old dream of the romantic nationalists seemed to have come true. But it was not to be. The parliament was divided and leaderless. The German princes, like their counterparts in Austria and Italy, regained their balance and swept aside the confused forces of revolution.

Beards and revolt also failed in Russia. In the 1840s, Russian “slavophiles” ramped up their criticisms of what they saw as an overly Westernized autocracy and sharpened their rhetoric in support of national traditions, political rights, and self-determination. In symbolic sympathy with the Russian peasantry, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Russian past, these reformers grew full beards. They imagined that they were fending off foreign cultural influence, but they were in fact perfectly channeling the pan-European romantic liberalism of their day. Like Friedrich Jahn’s gymnasts or the partisans of Young France, the slavophiles sought to create the future from the past. Tsar Nicholas could read the signs and concluded, not incorrectly, that any nobleman who wore a beard was challenging his authority. Nicholas himself wore a mustache in the military manner, but beards were out of the question.
He insisted that it was his critics who had fallen under the spell of foreign, liberal ideas, not himself. He would defend Russia by enforcing the ban on Russian beards.

When Nicholas traveled from St. Petersburg in 1849 to make a formal state visit to Moscow, several prominent slavophile noblemen, including Alexei Khomiakov and the brothers Ivan and Constantine Aksakov ostentatiously appeared in public wearing traditional Russian dress and beards. The response was not long in coming. A circular from the Ministry of Interior, issued to provincial marshals of the nobility, announced that “the tsar is displeased that Russian noblemen wear beards” and warned that bearded noblemen would not secure official appointments.
41

In Russia, Britain, France, Italy, and Germany, and indeed in every European city, romantic idealists rejected the shaven order and agitated for individual freedoms and constitutional rights. Conservative romantics likewise reacted against the tyranny of modern commerce and pragmatism. Liberals and conservatives mined the past for images of authentic and heroic manhood with which to shape a new future. In the fervent heat of their imaginations, they called forth a primal manliness to correct the errors of the age. Mustaches and beards seemed to them both historic and heroic, yet in view of the failures of the German patriotic student associations, French insurrectionists, neo-chivalric aristocrats, British Chartists, and Russian slavophiles, and liberal uprisings everywhere, they also carried an air of impracticality and tragedy.

The decisive failure of the revolutions that broke out in Berlin, Vienna, Rome, and other important cities in 1848; the collapse of Chartism in England; and the defeat of republicanism in France, with the creation of a new Napoleonic empire in 1852, crushed the forces of romantic liberalism. It would seem that shaven decorum was more secure than ever. In fact, the opposite was the case. When respectable men no longer feared hairy radicals, they no longer feared hair and were free to avail themselves its possibilities. It was as though a dam had burst. Pent-up aspirations to grow facial hair were suddenly let loose. Beards lost their political meaning and became instead tools to restore notions of patriarchy and manly dignity in a turbulent industrial age.

The spirit of any age, said the celebrated German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, takes shape in the design of everyday things like buildings, furniture, ornaments, clothing, and the “the manner in which the hair and beard are cut.”
1
In 1851, when he published these remarks, Schopenhauer observed a new spirit in a trend toward beards. The sixty-three-year-old didn’t like it one bit. “The beard,” he complained, “being a half-mask, should be forbidden by the police. It is moreover, as a sexual symbol in the middle of the face, obscene: that is why it pleases women.”

Besides insulting women, the great philosopher gave voice to a fading early nineteenth-century mindset in which facial hair symbolized rebelliousness. In the latter half of the century these political stereotypes were thrown aside, and beards became respectable and widespread. Men no longer grew out their hair to declare their political allegiances but instead to assert their individual and collective rights as men. It was not a matter of class or nation. All levels of European and American society were swept up in the new beard movement. Some prominent men were leaders in the new style, while others were slow off the mark. Abraham Lincoln was famous for his beard, but he was actually a hesitant latecomer to the trend, persuaded only after a very young supporter urged him to keep up with the times.

Abraham Lincoln was, for most observers, a surprising choice as the Republican nominee for president in 1860. He was not an accomplished statesman with a distinguished record but a former two-term congressman little known outside his home state of Illinois. He did have several things going for him, however: he was a political moderate with thoughtful charm and homespun humor that engendered trust, and he had an inspiring way with words. He certainly could not rely on good looks, a shortcoming he made light of in his speeches. In a debate during his unsuccessful senate campaign two years earlier, his opponent, Stephen Douglas, had accused Lincoln of being untrustworthy and two-faced. Lincoln quickly retorted, “If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?”
2
This willingness to make fun of himself did not prevent his opponents from mocking his ugliness and linking it to his backwoods origins and unpolished manners. One newspaper declared that “Lincoln is the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms and hatchet-face ever strung upon a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly.”
3
Even some Republicans wondered if he was really the right man to lead America through its greatest crisis.

Famous as Lincoln is today, few are aware that he won the general election without any traveling or speeches. In those days it was the custom of presidential candidates to stay at home and maintain a dignified silence through the fall campaign season, leaving it to surrogates and supporters to make their case. Lincoln’s photograph did circulate widely, however, and unfortunately for him, the camera did not lie. Though Lincoln was not vain, he did worry that his looks might hinder him in establishing the necessary personal authority to lead the country. This worry must have been on his mind when he received a surprising letter from an eleven-year-old supporter named Grace Bedell. Grace told Lincoln that her father had brought home the candidate’s picture, asked if he had any daughters her age who might respond to her, then pressed on to her reason for writing:

Lincoln was impressed by the girl’s forthright suggestion. In his own hand he responded:

The Republican candidate made no promise to follow Grace’s suggestion, clearly uncertain about the impression a change of style would make. As everyone knows, however, he changed his mind after the election, deciding that his elevation to leadership of the nation justified a modest makeover.

Lincoln did not choose his new look capriciously. Not all beards were alike. Lincoln did not choose to wear a full beard, though that was the prevailing style, opting instead for a trimmed beard without the mustache. This was a popular choice among American clergy at this time. One observer at the 1864 general conference of the Methodist Church in Philadelphia noted that almost all clergymen wore such facial hair.
6
By contrast, virtually every officer in both armies of the Civil War wore a full beard or large mustache. Of Lincoln’s generals, Ulysses Grant, for example, wore a full beard; George McClellan, a prominent mustache; and it was Ambrose Burnside’s great whisker-mustache combination that put “sideburns” in the American lexicon. These contrasts illustrated the great divide between civilian and military styles of facial hair. As noted earlier, mustaches had become the signature of military dash and derring-do, and European nations had begun to require them for their officers. Lincoln deliberately chose a less aggressive look. Though he was not a pacifist like the Amish and Mennonite men who also shunned the mustache as a sign of violence, Lincoln’s clean lip nevertheless offered a quiet protest against the strife and bloodshed of his times.
7

In February 1861, the president-elect made his way by train to Washington from his home in Springfield, stopping to address crowds along the way. When Lincoln arrived in Westfield, New York, Grace Bedell’s hometown, he delivered his usual brief address but concluded with a request: “I have a correspondent in this place, a little girl whose name is Grace Bedell, and I would like to see her.”
8
Grace was too far back to hear Lincoln, but she was escorted to the railcar, where Lincoln stepped down, saying, “You see I have let these whiskers grow for you,
Grace.” He warmly shook her hand, kissed her, and was on his way. Lincoln had an eleven-year-old girl to thank for catching him up with the times. His tardiness was due partly to the habitual conservatism of a lawyer, partly to his lack of vanity. Lincoln may have paid little heed to the beard bandwagon during the previous decade, but even he could not escape the enthusiasm of his age for natural manliness.

By the time Lincoln headed to Washington, the newest beard movement was already more than a decade old. The critical point in this turn toward hair had come in 1848, when the fires of revolution raged through Europe. Louis Napoleon, the bearded nephew of the great conqueror, was in the thick of it.

In most ways Louis Napoleon was not very much like his famous uncle. At age thirty, the original Napoleon, already a conquering general, took the reins of government in Paris and began his quest to dominate Europe. The nephew, by contrast, spent most of his first forty years either in exile or in prison. The great emperor had made his mark with boundless energy and quickness of mind, whereas his nephew-pretender was both slower of wit and softer around the edges. In spite of these contrasts, both shared a sense of destiny—the idea that history revolved around them—and though the younger Napoleon could not claim any great conquests, he did manage a clever escape from prison that demonstrated at least some creativity and acting skills. In this caper, Louis managed to make good use of his signature beard.

In 1840, after a second failed attempt to rally units of the French army to overthrow the government, Louis was sentenced by King Louis Philippe to a long term of imprisonment in a castle in northern France. It took a while, but after six years, the prisoner with the famous name finally found his chance. Renovations of the castle buildings brought crews of workmen into the prison grounds and an idea into Napoleon’s mind. What followed was an adventure worthy of Hollywood, complete with disguises, fast talking, and quick thinking.
9

At 6:30 on a May morning, the plot was put into action. Napoleon’s loyal valet, Charles Thélin, who had been allowed by the castle commandant
to make regular visits, diverted the work crew from Napoleon’s rooms by inviting them to have a glass of wine on the floor below. In the meantime, the prisoner prepared his disguise. He donned a workman’s outfit, shaved off his Bonapartist mustache and beard, smudged his face with dirt, and stuck a smoking pipe between his teeth. As a final touch, he pilfered a shelf from the castle library to carry. For good luck, he even thought to select the shelf labeled “N.” At this point, Thélin quietly slipped away from his guests and, taking care to tether Napoleon’s small dog, distracted the guards at the building doorway with tales of an ill and bed-ridden Napoleon, as their charge, the shelf obstructing his face, walked nonchalantly by.

So far so good, but at this point the escapee’s pipe fell and shattered on the pavement, drawing glances from workmen and guards in the courtyard. Napoleon calmly and slowly picked up the pieces, trying to look every bit the poor laborer who could not afford to abandon his broken pipe. Napoleon’s co-conspirators later surmised that some of the guards must have recognized his stout shape hunched over in the courtyard but let him pass in a tacit show of support.
10

The political prisoner reached the front gate, still shouldering his board, and ordered it opened. Without much thought the gatekeepers obliged, and the future ruler of France was gone, heading to a secluded rendezvous with followers on his way to freedom in England. Safely out of the French king’s clutches, Louis grew back his wide mustache and pointed chin beard grander than before, and just two years later, when revolution again convulsed France, he grasped a golden opportunity to seize power. The king, his former captor, was overthrown, and a new republic declared. Landing in France to wide acclaim, the new Napoleon relied upon his unsurpassed name recognition to achieve a monumental victory in France’s first-ever presidential election. He thus became the first bearded head of state in Europe since the 1600s, helping to usher in new era in masculine style.

Louis Napoleon deserves a great deal of credit for increasing the respectability of beards. His style was widely imitated in France, particularly after he declared himself emperor of the French in 1851. As represented in Hippolyte Flandrin’s portrait, the new emperor conveyed the swashbuckling dash of a seventeenth-century musketeer. The popular author Guy de Maupassant described the powerful effect of the
emperor’s style on Frenchmen, portraying in one of his stories an ordinary middle-class man, who, “after repeatedly contemplating [Emperor Napoleon], followed the example of a great many of his fellow-citizens: he copied the cut of his Majesty’s beard, of his coat, his style of wearing his hair, his walk, even his mannerisms.”
11
What better way to earn respect than by imitating the dignity of their illustrious ruler? Though widely replicated through Europe, the “imperial” eventually became the stereotyped face of a Frenchman.

In Napoleon, we can observe the military and romantic sources for the beard movement, but there were other, greater factors at work as well. It was really the
failure
of romanticism and revolution, not their success, that finally lifted the social restraints on facial hair. Napoleon himself, though exhibiting a style that was once revolutionary, had
become a safe, conservative solution to the political upheavals in 1848. Other democratic uprisings around Europe that year had collapsed even before Napoleon betrayed the republic and declared himself a monarch. Midcentury economic prosperity also reduced political turmoil. As the threat of bearded youths and workers flying red flags on barricades evaporated, so too did the fear provoked by facial hair. Bearded men like Napoleon became respectable, and upright gentlemen were now at liberty to let their beards grow.

No longer fearful, beards and mustaches were newly available for men hoping to bolster their flagging masculine confidence. For decades, men had experimented with more and more hair, particularly sideburns, but now at midcentury they were ready to make the big move. On cue, brave leaders stepped to the fore to advance the cause. One of the most influential was Albert Smith, who, though little known today, was a famous Victorian stage performer who had just as much influence in Britain as Louis Napoleon had in France.