Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (16 page)

While beard-wearers in central Europe ran for the hills, an even older and prouder tradition of hirsute manliness was facing an all-out attack from one of the most formidable figures in European history, the ferocious six-foot-eight-inch tsar of Russia.

In 1682, when Louis XIV strode the gleaming halls of Versailles at the height of his bewigged power, the vast, if comparatively humbler Russian Empire was ruled by an awkward triumvirate of siblings: Tsar Ivan,
a sickly and slow-witted fourteen-year-old; his tall and hale ten-year-old half-brother and co-tsar, Peter; and as regent over both of them, Ivan’s twenty-four-year-old sister Sophia. As one might imagine, this arrangement was a recipe for political trouble. One set of powerful families stood on Sophia and Ivan’s side, ranged against another group backing Peter. Though Peter was very young, Ivan was visibly weak in mind and body. Intrigue and danger hovered over the Kremlin, and Peter had already witnessed terrible scenes of political violence and revenge, as many of his noble supporters were threatened, exiled, or even killed before his eyes. Only Peter himself was spared, in order to avoid even worse bloodshed.

No wonder the young prince preferred to spend as much time as possible at his retreat outside the city, enjoying the company of foreigners from around Europe who told him stories of the outside world, with its marvelous new technologies and military glories. Peter was especially captivated by dreams of ships, navies, and seagoing commerce, which he quickly recognized to be the secret of national wealth and power. He even learned to speak Dutch because it was the language of Europe’s greatest seafarers. The young tsar thought his own homeland distressingly backward and unsophisticated by contrast, and in desperate need of foreign know-how. He regularly welcomed Dutch, British, Austrian, German, and Polish visitors to his little country court (though not the French and Swedes, who were military and political rivals), plying them for all manner of information and expertise. At the same time, he eagerly copied their foreign styles and manners.
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Even before he became king in his own right, he dreamed of leading Russia into the family of European kingdoms and competing with the great nations on an equal footing. In 1689, while still only seventeen, he made his move and, with the critical support of elite militias and church leaders, ousted Sophia and shoved Ivan aside. The ambitious teenager was now supreme.

Once he had power, Peter faced the daunting task of bending Russia to his will. His two primary weapons were the sword and scissors. With the sword of his military, he defeated adversaries at home and abroad, raising Russia’s stature in the world. With scissors in his own hand, and in those of his minions, he sheared off Russian beards, symbolically severing old Muscovy from its traditional moorings and launching it on
the roiling waters of European modernity. It seems odd that the new tsar would make so much of beards, but in Russia facial hair was not a fashion choice; it was integral to male identity—a feature from time immemorial of both religious faith and masculine honor. Peter pursued an aggressive war on hair precisely because he knew it would help him uproot the spirit of tradition and resistance.

The turning point came in August 1698, when the twenty-six-year-old monarch was on a European tour. Elite units of guardsmen, longtime allies of Ivan and Sophia, deeply resented Peter’s favoritism toward foreigners and foreign ways, as well as pay cuts he had imposed on them. Taking advantage of his absence, they rose up to force him from the throne and put Sophia in his place. The rebels were not wrong about Peter’s un-Russianness. While he was away, the tsar, who never grew the obligatory Russian beard, had ditched Russian robes as well, adopting Western-style pantaloons, stockings, and coats. The rebellious guards, in turn, seemed to Peter to personify the Russia he despised: superstitious, unruly, and bearded. The westernized tsar hurried home to force a showdown.

By the time Peter reached Moscow, the uprising had been crushed, but there was still work to do. When prominent nobles gathered to greet their long-absent lord, Peter declared the advent of a new era by producing a pair of scissors and shearing off the beards of his leading courtiers right then and there.
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A few days later, at a banquet honoring the Orthodox New Year, he sent a court jester around the hall shaving any who had not yet conformed. According to one observer, “It was of evil omen to make show of reluctance as the razor approached the chin, and was to be forthwith punished with a boxing of the ears. Between mirth and the wine cup, many were admonished by this insane ridicule to abandon the olden guise.”
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With his cutting command, Peter drew a line between the new Russia and the old, and handed his opponents yet another grievance against him. Conservatives were outraged by Peter’s neglect of Orthodox Christian customs in favor of what they deemed corrupting foreign ones, particularly tobacco smoking and shaving.
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Though he had defeated them in the field, Peter knew that the guardsmen and their traditionalist sympathizers would continue to stir trouble. He arrested and tortured thousands who had opposed him, eventually hanging or
beheading over twelve hundred people in the autumn of 1698. Hundreds of corpses hung from the walls of the city and the Kremlin in grisly testimony to the tsar’s ruthlessness in tearing Russia from its old ways.

To prevent Russians from backsliding, he planned a national tax on beards, but war with Sweden delayed its implementation. In 1705, however, he was ready to move forward, and a decree went out that men of all ranks, other than priests and peasants, were to shave or pay a special tax. Most would be charged thirty rubles, a very serious fine, while nobles, officers, and wealthy tradesmen would pay twice as much. Merchants of the highest ranks would be charged a hundred rubles.
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Those who insisted on keeping their beards paid the tax and were required to wear a medal emblazoned with a picture of a beard, with the words “money paid” etched underneath. The success of this tactic was evident in the fact that little tax was actually collected. Men preferred to keep their money rather than their hair.

Even if it was nominally their choice, the loss of a beard was very distressing for Russian men. John Perry, one of several English shipwrights hired by Peter to bring foreign know-how to Russia, witnessed this for himself. When the order to shave arrived at the shipyards, workmen whom razors had never touched marched forlornly to the barbers. When one gloomy carpenter returned to work, Perry joked that he had suddenly become a young man and teasingly asked what he had done with his hair. To Perry’s great surprise, the carpenter reached into his coat and showed it to him, carefully wrapped in a cloth. The downcast workman said he intended keep it safe at home and to have it placed in his coffin when he died, so “he might be able to give an account of it to St. Nicholas when he came to the other World.”
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Tsar Peter and the Russian Orthodox church were now locked in a struggle for the soul of Russia, and beards became the visible sign of their confrontation. The carpenter’s tale was just one manifestation of this crisis of Russian manliness, religion, and identity. Even now, the battle continues. The resurgence of Russian Orthodox faith after the fall of communism has revived in some conservative quarters a theological passion for beards and revived criticisms of secular, clean-shaved modernism. In 2009, a book by a twenty-first-century Old Believer named R. Atorin raised the banner of Orthodox beardedness, denouncing
shaving as a sin.
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It was this sort of theological commitment that made Peter’s war on beards so intense and so important.

According to Atorin, the fathers of the Russian church had, since the Middle Ages, taught that wearing a beard was an important sign of obedience to God. The creator, it was argued, made men in his image, and that image has material as well as spiritual aspects. To preserve the harmony of body and soul, “the appearance of a human being needs to match the makeup of his soul.” A man obeys God by conforming himself intellectually, morally, and physically to this godly image. If he
does not follow God’s will in the physical sense, he is liable to fall short intellectually and morally as well. Atorin summarizes the implications of this thinking: “A man, when committing the sin of beard-shaving . . . tries to remake his appearance according to his own subjective discretion, which does not agree with God’s order.”

From the Middle Ages, Russian prelates had indeed insisted on beards as a sign of obedience and orthodoxy, and also as a mark of distinction from Roman Catholic Christians, who, as we know, chose shaving as a ensign of spiritual devotion. In about 1460, the archbishop of Rostov reprimanded a nobleman for “abandoning the image of God” by shaving. A church council meeting in Moscow in 1551, responding to complaints that men were beginning to imitate Westerners in their clothing and in shaving and cutting their hair short, warned believers to refrain from these foreign and un-Orthodox practices.
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In the following century, there were sharp battles over reforming the liturgy and rituals to bring the Russian church into conformity with supposedly more authentic Greek practices. In the 1660s, a minority of “Old Believers,” objecting to these “foreign” reforms, broke away from the official church. The tsars backed the reforms, and the Old Believers became disaffected from the government as well. The split did not yet involve clothing or facial hair, as all elements of the Russian church continued the beard tradition up to Peter’s day. Again in the 1690s, the Patriarch Adrian, head of the Russian church, issued warnings that members should not imitate Western Christians who, by shaving, made themselves look like apes and monkeys.
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The church also condemned the dirty Western habit of smoking tobacco.

When he abandoned traditional dress and ordered men to shave, then, Peter deliberately contravened the church’s definitions of masculinity and social order. He desperately needed to find allies within the church, and he enlisted the bishops of Rostov and Pskov to write theological defenses of the new rules. The bishop of Rostov published his opinion that beards were an old but unnecessary custom, and that ancient and medieval arguments for them were no longer relevant. The arguments against shaving, he pointed out, were founded on the Old Testament, especially Leviticus, and not on the New Testament, which superseded it. Moreover, it was neither practical nor necessary to enforce beards in modern times.
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The Old Believers, who already rejected the mainstream authorities, denounced these arguments and held fast to their beards as well as their treasured Russian liturgies and customs. Peter eventually chose to isolate them by positively requiring them to wear beards, clearly identifying them as discredited nonconformists. Peter did not need to eliminate all beards, so long as most of his subjects were modern, shaved men.

After the defeat of beards in central Europe and finally Russia, it was a rare and scandalous thing for a gentleman to neglect soap and razor. It was very daring of Jean Jacques Rousseau, a celebrated though unconventional man of letters, to appear at court with a beard.

It happened in 1752, at what Rousseau later described as a critical point in his life. He was forty years old and highly regarded for his musical compositions. His reputation was such that some powerful friends had arranged a command performance of his new opera,
Le Devin du Village
(The Village Soothsayer), at the Chateau of Fontainebleau before King XV and his court. On this splendid occasion, Rousseau displayed his characteristic mix of nervousness and defiance. He naturally hoped that the court would be impressed by him and his work, but he also demonstrated a perverse willingness to ignore the niceties of good manners. “I was on that day,” he reported in his autobiography, “in the same careless undress as usual: with a long beard [
grande barbe
], and a wig badly combed.”
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“Long” in this case meant something like a week’s growth. Any length of scruff would have been bad manners at the French court. Convinced, however, that “this want of decency was an act of courage,” Rousseau entered the theater in which the royal family would soon arrive.

Conducted to a prominent box, and surrounded by elegant women, the composer began to worry about his appearance and steeled himself with defiant thoughts. His beard was not in itself objectionable, he quietly reasoned, for it was granted by nature and would at many times in history have been considered an ornament rather than a disgrace. Luckily for Rousseau, neither his appearance nor his music caused serious offense. The king was delighted by his opera and even offered him
the high honor of a lifelong pension. This unexpected twist of fate was a recurring theme in Rousseau’s career. He had defied proper decorum and been rewarded handsomely.

There were more turns of fortune to come. Rousseau declined the king’s offer of financial security out of the same contradictory motives of fear and courage that had inspired his bearded appearance at the opera. On the one hand, he felt unprepared for the delicacies and pitfalls of courtly society and was terrified of making a fool of himself when presented as a royal pensioner at court. On the other, he risked losing his independence of thought and action. Even so, his close friends were flummoxed. Denis Diderot, the editor of the great
Encyclopedia
and a leading luminary of the age, berated his friend for neglecting the financial well-being of his lover, Thérèse Levasseur, and her aged mother. The pleas of the great thinker, however, were unable to sway Rousseau from his rough-hewn path.

Rousseau’s cheeky display was daring and uncommon, running against, not only courtly decorum, but the widespread association of masculine virtue with refinement of look and deportment. European gentlemen from Spain to Russia followed French and English style trends, albeit not without some grousing about foreign and feminized fashions. It was generally a matter of how far refinement should go. Large wigs, frilly clothing, and shiny accessories might seem excessive to some, but a shaved face was never really questioned (Rousseau notwithstanding) as an appropriate manifestation of gentility. Indeed, the availability of cheap, high-quality steel razors by the middle of the century gave rise to enthusiastic marketing of shaving implements, as well as the manly virtues of shaving, to an ever wider audience of consumers. More men could afford to shave themselves more often and more comfortably. This aspect of gentility, at least, was more accessible and convenient than ever before.
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Although shaving was never contradicted in any practical sense, Rousseau was not alone in at least contemplating the alternative. The smooth-faced thinkers of the Enlightenment, particularly those in France, were intrigued by the history and theory of beards, if for no other reason than that it presented a portal into times and thinking utterly unlike their own. As he sat in his splendid theater box, Rousseau was mindful that his scruff had both natural and historical justification.
He may have brought to mind recent scholarly references to beard history in such well-regarded works as Furetiere’s
Universal Dictionary
and Calmet’s historical and critical dictionary of the Bible. More were yet to come. Diderot’s
Encyclopedia
would include, a few years later, a brief entry on beard history, and virtually every decade for the next fifty years witnessed another major work on the subject from a variety of authors.
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In 1759, a learned Italian named Giuseppe Vannetti published a study of what he called
Barbalogia
, or “beardology.” This work marked a transition from the theological speculations of seventeenth-century writers like Olmo, Van Helmont, and Bulwer to the more naturalistic analysis of the eighteenth century. Vannetti, for example, dismissed Van Helmont’s theory of Adam’s pre-apple beardlessness by appealing to common sense.
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As for beards themselves, Vannetti was agnostic. Styles had always changed, he argued, and they always would. The custom of shaving prevailed in his day simply because Italians imitated foreign, that is to say, French, styles.
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In 1774, the erudite abbot Augustin Fangé produced a volume entitled
Mémoires Pour Servir a l’Histoire de la Barbe de l’Homme
(Studies on the History of Man’s Beard). This was the first analysis of the subject from an entirely Enlightenment perspective, exhibiting a thoroughly systematic and skeptical approach. Fangé enumerated several reasons that facial hair had changed over time and place, including climate, religion, group identity, and social emulation. He knew that the real significance of his subject was in the way hairstyles connected with social ideas and, to his credit, refused to accept the premise, popular with beard apologists, that facial hair served to demonstrate male superiority. “Nothing,” he asserted, “is more uncertain than the uses of the beard.”
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He even cast doubt on the notion that men were unique in their beardedness. Women too had beards, he noted, even if theirs differed in quality and quantity. Of course, there had also been notable examples of women with extensive facial and body hair. He surmised from this that men and women were more alike than most people claimed.
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Fangé did agree, however, that “the author of nature” had seen fit to use hair to distinguish men from women, and that the beard seemed to be an “ornament of virility.” But he was unwilling to go beyond that.

Fangé’s dispassionate study might well have remained the final
statement on this subject for a long time, had it not been followed by decades of profound social and political ferment. In the 1780s, Frenchmen in particular were dissatisfied with matters as they were, and a new generation prepared the way for revolution in their fervor for political justice and social equity. Jacques Dulaure was one of this generation, and his examination of beard history was not so much a scholarly survey of past customs as a vision of a new social order.