   
Louise Robbins on pampered animals
Louise Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots;
Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris
(Baltimore: JHU Press, 2002)
...Orest's other
reviews
Just who was it who did the drawing of the noble peasant that Douglas Gordon
owned and which had been created for or inspired by Rousseau's Divin du
village? Was it Greuze? I forget, but the point is that not only were
perceptions of social stereotypes and groups changing, these changes can
only rarely be characterized as "elite" or "popular." With a change of clothes,
this particular "noble" peasant could well have passed as a brother of Louis
XV.
Bob Isherwood, in Farces and Fantasies, sought to show that a sense
of wonder, joy, amusement, etc. came over virtually every onlooker as they
watched jugglers perform or monkeys cavort about. To be sure, courtly cultured
individuals and non-courtly cultured individuals gestured differently toward
the juggler, held their heads differently, etc., and perhaps one retained
laughter more than the other as the high-rope walker fell; but the hierarchies
and the nuances might not fall into two distinct modes. Wolfram Fischer
demonstrated that hierarchies prevailed on the factory floor, not individual
workers and employers. Indeed, there were (and are) layers of hierarchy,
except, perhaps, where there are distinct categories in addition to hierarchy
— e.g., to be or not to be a cadre in the SNCF! Cadre
here resembles fonctionnaire, a break-point between hierarchies.
Louise Robbins' beautiful, indeed wonderful book, Elephant Slaves and
Pampered Parrots; Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore:
JHU Press, 2002) distinguishes between locally domestic animals and imported,
exotic ones — the latter being her subject. She scarcely revisits what
Sir Keith Thomas observed about the hierarchies in the animal kingdom (though
the lion was both exotic and noble), because she is seeking to discern other
features of natural and social-cultural history. And she is highly successful.
Buffon's presence looms over the work, and thus the limitations and strengths
of understanding animals (and humans) in eighteenth- century Paris is
considerably advanced. There are chapters on the transport of animals, the
royal menagerie, fairs, fights, the Oiseleur's Guild, parrots, animals in
print, and elephant slaves. The general framework turns on whether or not
animals suffered in captivity — as the eighteenth- century understood
slavery and liberty and living in "nature." Perhaps the chapter on the Oiseleurs
is the single most original and satisfying, for the precision and hitherto
unknown facts that only notarial archives can provide.
Dr. Robbins is not afraid to tackle difficult questions, the changing
fashionableness of the ménagerie (p. 47) being an example (so general
as to be not quite convincing); but it is in the general exploration of "liberty"
for animals and birds, and the sense of "enslavement" that by analogy slips
to some people, that in rich detail seems to be the almost "structural" relation
pervading the work. The examples of young women feeling imprisoned by their
families and realizing that their caged birds are in the same state (p. 134)
are remarkable. Louis XIII released the birds in the royal ménagerie
after his guards had assassinated Concini; he did not wish to have them
in prison now that he himself was free.
The familial power relations and even erotic projections by males (Diderot
on a Greuze painting, p. 142) grounded on relations with animals (Fragonard's
young woman in bed with a dog) are both a continuity (Dutch genre painting:
the empty cage, the broken pitcher) and evidence of enhanced sensibility.
Dressing up pets, exotic or otherwise, revealed (reveals!) some of the deeper
impulses to possess and extend the self that may be primordial, in Geertz's
sense of the term. One has only to think of fables to suggest the continuities
— from the natural to the social. In Panat in the 1970s, a retired peasant
named Ludovic Lacombe insisted on having some baby chicks around, not to
raise them and eat them, but to be able to caress them.
And animals were, and indeed still are the victims. Did the harsh slave owner
also brutalize his horses and pets? This relation between human behavior
and cruelty in general is certainly articulated in the eighteenth century
in ways still not entirely linked to class; but class certainly was perceived
more then, than it was in Montaigne's sixteenth century. The scientific racism
of the nineteenth century invariably associated animals — exotic ones
included — and non-caucasian peoples, as a way of categorizing both.
Dr. Robbins' study of attitudes toward elephants brings together all the
themes in the book. Thought to be the most intelligent of animals, and also
the most "human," the well-trained elephant is part of the "downstairs" of
Western elite culture. A slave servant who likes to please, a hard worker
and companion, the elephant is perceived in incredibly stereotypical terms.
There seems to have been little attention to differences (African versus
Indian, for example), or close observation of their actual behavior. The
engraving showing them copulating in what is sometimes called the "missionary
position" is a remarkable example of some artist's view of what it is to
be a human, projected on elephants. While the greater possibility of ferocity
in the males was noted, there seemed no reason not to consider them as royal
subjects (p. 98).
I have no criticisms of this learned, engaging book. True, the ideas about
curiosity and the exotic might have been developed a bit more. Did the decline
of cabinets occur in the same way as the decline of
ménageries? Antoine Schnapper's work, and Krystof Pomian's,
come to mind; but the author has accomplished much and cannot be expected
to have done more. The bourgeois royalism of Babar is scarcely apparent here.
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