L’INFINIMENT PETIT AND MONSTROUS SOCIAL ANXIETIES:

ENVISIONING DISEASE IN FIN DE SIÈCLE CULTURE

THROUGH THE EYES OF ODILON REDON
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Abstract

This essay explores the visual representation of infectious disease in fin de siècle Europe.

Prior to the advancement of microbiology, diseases such as cholera were conflated with factors

intrinsic to the diseased individual and society: moral impropriety and adverse living conditions

of the urbanized city. With the advent of the germ theory of disease, the social understanding of

pathogenesis began to shift. French artist Odilon Redon embraced the use of humanized features

and ambiguity in his noir lithographs and charcoal drawings. In doing so, Redon created discrete

entities of life – causes of illness external to one’s being. Through the comparison of the modes

of visual representation, this essay illustrates the dialogue between society and the medical

sciences, a relationship still of importance in our present day.

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i. Introduction

Post-war trauma, social instability, epidemic diseases, and scientific discourses

characterized the end of the nineteenth century in France; it was an era fraught with social

distress. The extensive preoccupation with infectious disease and physiognomic pathology in the

literary and visual arts reflected the social anxieties of the time:

No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal – the
redness and the horror of blood… The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon
the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the
sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the
disease, were the incidents of half an hour.1

Here, the visceral visuality of blood and bodily decline resulting from disease is deeply entwined

in the motif of social exclusion. The description reflects an inability to discern and address the

true cause of ailment; powerlessness over the instantaneous onset of death serves as a further

source of trepidation. With the emergence of Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease in 1857,

social understandings of the contagion began to shift – and with the shift brought about a

different mode of visualizing pathogens. Using cholera as a case study, this essay will first

explore the manner by which epidemic-associated social anxieties drove the desire to conflate

disease with the body, morality, and the inorganic circumstances of an urbanizing society in pre-

Pasteurian visual culture. I will then consider the works of Odilon Redon, a French artist who

contrasted this phenomenon through his differing choice of media, inclusion of humanized

features, and embrace of ambiguity. Through his noirs, Redon ultimately isolated the pathogenic

agent from its misconceived social causes, and consequently engendered social anxiety that was

external to an individual’s being.

1. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death” (Philadelphia: Graham's Magazine, 1842),
257-259.

2. Antonis A. Kousoulis, “Etymology of Cholera,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 18, no. 3 (2012),
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ii. Cholera and Pre-Pasteurian Europe

Cholera, with the etymology of the Greek term cholē or “bile” and cholēdra or “gutter,”

was historically understood as an intrinsic imbalance in body humours that brought about the

vulgar expulsion of fluids.2 Images such as Young Venetian Woman, Aged 23, Depicted Before

and After Contracting Cholera (fig. 1) exemplify the pre-Pasteurian understanding of the

“choleric” physiognomy. In the French sociocultural context, the notable physician Philippe

Hecquet had purportedly popularized the idea of the “moral/mental contagion” in 1733.3 The

term disquietingly premised that human character as well as mental illness could be transmitted

through physical contact.4 Along with the theory of the miasma – which identified noxious air as

the etiological cause of infections – the concepts of morality and disease were conflated as one.

Moral and mental decline were read through physical pathology, and reciprocally, physical

pathology was read as moral and mental decline as a result of the shared infectious properties.

Thereby, in Young Venetian Woman, the woman’s pristinely white countenance pre-infection not

only indicated good health but also signified moral purity.5 Accordingly, the blue-grey lustre of

the sunken, ghoulish face post-infection not only represented the medical conditions of

hypoxemia and dehydration; it was also implicit of moral impropriety. Deranged strands of hair

that frame the face further augment the embodiment of deterioration in an individual’s

appearance. Contemporaneous descriptors of cholera indeed drew upon visualizations of such

confronting, psychotic characteristics: “The physiognomy of the cholera patient is very striking…

2. Antonis A. Kousoulis, “Etymology of Cholera,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 18, no. 3 (2012),
540.

3. Peta Mitchell, Contagious Metaphor (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 1.

4. Ibid, 1.

5. Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker, Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies (London and
New York: Routledge, 2001), 61-62.
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The upper lip is drawn up exposing the upper teeth… The eyelids are neither quite closed nor
6
quite open…” In light of these nineteenth-century sociocultural praxis, disease was

fundamentally inseparable from the diseased, and the latter consequently personified social

anxieties through their physiognomies.

Cholera struck France in the devastating epidemics of 1832 and 1849.7 The epidemics

extended the stigmatization of physical characteristics into the societal context; anxieties

regarding urbanization and poverty were pervasive. Street names such as rue de la Mortellerie

became synonymous with the French word mort for “death.”8 A common theme that emerged

among the “personal letters and diaries of bourgeois Parisians described the horrifying spectacle

of close relatives turning into living corpses and of bodies piling up in the streets. Few failed to

remark upon what one historian has called ‘the inability of the city to absorb its dead.’”9 Implicit

in the overcrowding of the dead with the living is the rapidity at which cholera claimed its hosts.

Within five hours after the presentation of symptoms, the diseased became bedridden and on the

fringe of death.10 The fast progression of the disease inevitably echoed the accelerated pace of

modern life – and inescapably – the social anxieties associated with modernity. The etching

Cholera in Paris (fig. 2) appositely reflects this apprehension of the urbanized disease. Naked

bodies, unclear of having reached the state of death, indecorously writhe within one another and

sweep across the Parisian skyline in a turbulent, frothing manner. Heaping figures evoke imagery

6. Adolph Lippe, “Cholera” (Homeopathic Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1865), 12-13.

7. Catherine Jean Kudlick, Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1996), 176.

8. Ibid, 2.

9. Ibid, 3.

10. Vincent J. Knapp, Disease and Its Impact on Modern European History (Lewiston, NY, USA:
Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), 122.
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of the overcrowded streets of nineteenth-century reality, where one was confronted with bodily

discharges and polluted haze.11 Beyond the immediate affect reified by the subject, there is yet a

formal consonance attained from juxtaposing the quiet, desolate cityscape and the babel above.

The preposition in the title of Cholera “in” Paris connotes the idea of a perceptible niche for

which diseases reside within society. Epidemiological studies of cholera further the conception of

this paradox. While cholera cases primarily peaked among the poor, the well-off were

indiscriminately affected during the cholera epidemics. 12 Louis-René Villermé, a French

physician-sociologist, concluded from these observations that “Society itself… had become an

etiological agent.” 13 Whether associated with environmental or nutritional causes, the pre-

Pasteurian society and the urbanized way of life were tantamount to the contagion itself, a

concept that is analogous to the aforementioned conflation of the body and disease.

British hygienists had already begun to pursue public health measures before the French

hygienists; their successful efforts were later indebted to John Snow’s studies on the origins of

cholera in London.14 The hygienists’ actions support the understanding that disease was not

necessarily intrinsic to the state of being, but rather an entity that could be addressed medically.

Nevertheless, satirical illustrations arose in light of their cause. A London Board of Health

Hunting after Cases like Cholera (fig. 3) shows a group of well-dressed yet behaviourally

animalistic health officials sniffing around for cholera. “Positively we must find something; it

11. Charles Henri Lecouturier wrote in1849: “one is reluctant to venture into this vast maze, in
which a million beings jostle one another, where the air, vitiated by unhealthy effluvia, rising in a
poisonous cloud, almost obscures the sun.” Quoted in: David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease:
Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

12. Kudlick, Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris, 15.

13. William Coleman, Death Is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early
Industrial France (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 179.

14. Richard Barnett, The Sick Rose, or, Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration (London:
Thames & Hudson, 2014), 130-135.
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won’t do to lose our Twenty guineas a day,” asserts one figure in the lithograph. The satire

ridiculed not only the half-hearted and futile efforts of the health officials to find the cause of

cholera – which, arguably, is evident in the visual language of the lithograph to a contemporary

viewer – but also their urgency to discern an agent apart from the filth of the London streets.

Ultimately, the case study of cholera in Europe brings forward the prevailing thought that disease

was intrinsic to morality as well as the framework of society; it was a worldview that was in

accordance with the pre-microbial understanding of disease.

iii. Odilon Redon, noirs, and the Pasteurian Revolution

While artists continued to draw upon themes that surrounded the intrinsic nature of

disease, Redon began to explore a cause that was extrinsic to the state of being. Noirs was an

epithet he had given his black and white lithographs and charcoal drawings, citing the expressive

quality of the monochrome.15

[The medium] offered me a better means of expression, remained with me. This lacklustre
material, which has no inherent beauty, was a great help with my explorations of
chiaroscuro and the invisible. It is a medium deprecated and neglected by artists. It should
be said, however, that the charcoal leaves no room for lightness; it is full of gravity and
one can only use it successfully in the same spirit. Nothing that does not stimulate the
mind can produce worthwhile results in charcoal. It is on the verge of something
unpleasant, something ugly.16

Arthur Symons, a writer of the same period, agreed with Redon’s intentions without reservation.

Symons deemed Redon “a creator of nightmares…[and that] he begets upon horror and mystery a

new a strange kind of beauty, which astonishes, which terrifies.”17 Although Redon’s noirs were

not universally admired, “monstrosities” was a significant term his contemporaries recurrently

used to denote his subjects. And All Manner of Frightful Creatures Arise (fig. 4) epitomizes the

15. Margret Stuffmann, Max Hollein, and Markus Bernauer, Odilon Redon: As in a Dream
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007), 43.

16. Italics added. Ibid, 43.

17. Arthur Symons, Colour Studies in Paris (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1918), 253.
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idea of the indiscernible creature as a monstrosity – an entity of life in itself. The

anthropomorphic creature is isolated in a shadowy space and consequently departs from the

conflated forms of representation in art (figs. 1-2). Just a few years prior to Redon’s noirs,

Pasteur championed the germ theory of disease that argued for microbes as the independent,

organic cause of disease. Redon had closely followed Pasteur’s work in microbiology and

eventually sent him a set of prints that were in turn praised by the scientist.18 This mutual

exchange shows a direct link between Redon’s representations and the interpretation that his

creatures are animated beings distinct from pathological physiognomy, personal amorality, and

the urbanized society. Notably, Redon’s use of the transfer lithography technique mimicked the

autonomous replication of microbes; it had given him the “power of multiplication” that was so

feared in the spread of disease.19

Redon exploited social anxieties associated with the newly-discovered monstrosities of

disease by embracing ambiguity in his works. In Germination (fig. 5), faces with obscure

expressions emerge from an indeterminate space. The contrast between light and dark of the page

oscillate the viewer’s vision between seeing and unseeing, respectively. Must there not be an

Invisible World? (fig. 6) similarly captures the dichotomy of the visible and the invisible. The

two lithographs complement one another through both their forms and names: the former

suggests the birth of contagions, while the latter introduces the realm of the unseen in which

contagions dwell. Although the titles range from one-word to sentence-long descriptors, both are

arguably never fully explicit in their function. Redon himself vocally rejected straightforward

18. Barbara Larson, “Odilon Redon and the Pasteurian Revolution: Health, Illness, and Le Monde
Invisible,” Science in Context 17, no. 4 (2004): 503-24.

19. Quotation only; Stephen Eisenman, The Temptation of Saint Redon: Biography, Ideology, and
Style in the Noirs of Odilon Redon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 88.
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labels, and instead utilized them only as “‘la clé d’ouverture’ (the key to open [artworks]).”20 The

deliberate concealment of meaning contrasts with the clear depiction of disease in Young

Venetian Woman, and thereby contradicts the social desire to read pathology into physical form.

Ambiguity necessitates uncertainty, and uncertainty predicates an unpredictability that brought

about a new source of anxiety regarding pathogenesis. Redon’s departure from a confined,

conventional mode of representation led to a novel exploration of the subjective experience.

A compelling reflection of societal apprehension by Redon’s noirs is found in his

preoccupation with postwar insecurities. The Franco-Prussian War raged from 1870 to 1871 and

concluded with a crippling defeat for the French.21 Having the idea of an “invading” pathogen –

as personified through Redon’s anthropomorphic forms – was analogous to the invading troops

that brought forward prevalent ideas of national decline and degeneration. “We have been struck

by the invisible scourges,” John Tyndall writes, “we have fallen into ambushes...”22 Another

echoes: “the danger of the microbe await[s] us… this unknown enemy.”23 Many other writers of

the period used similar language to describe the germinal cause for disease, illustrating the

prevalence of this metaphor and hence the prevalence of the associated anxieties. The subtitle of

Redon’s charcoal drawing Phantom (fig. 7) illustrates the foreign invasion of one’s body: “This

is what we are breathing, microscopic animal and vegetal matter in the air.”24 The image itself is

20. Stuffmann, Hollein, and Bernauer, As in a Dream, 87.

21. Rachel Chrastil, Organizing for War: France, 1870-1914 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2010), 1.

22. Italics added; as quoted in: Barbara Larson, The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and
the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2005), 86.

23. Italics added; as quoted in: Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1988), 35.

24. Larson, “Odilon Redon and the Pasteurian Revolution,” 506.

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of a disturbing filament studded with one eye, swarming into the viewer’s dimensional space.

The powerlessness over invisible, extrinsic, and especially such primordial forms of life severely

subverts man’s status in the world as understood from the Eurocentric worldview. Art historian

Barbara Larson further argues that Darwinian ideas of the survival of the fittest and natural

selection only augmented the theory of degeneration and the condemned fate of humankind.25

The autonomy of pathogenic form could likewise be read as the power to transcend social

boundaries and infect an individual of any social class.26 While epidemiological studies from pre-

Pasteurian times have hinted at the fundamentally indiscriminate nature of the contagion, the

effect becomes more pronounced when illustrated here by Redon. Indeed, at the exhibition of

Redon’s noirs, “many visitors became hostile.” 27 It was a reaction that perhaps attested to both

the public’s conservative understanding of art and, more importantly, the deep psychological

fears the noirs extracted through their unique disposition.

iv. Conclusion

The fin de siècle culture of France was layered in discourses concerning the cause of

disease. Through a nuanced exploration of pre-Pasteurian artwork and Redon’s Pasteurian noirs,

I have argued that the social anxieties of the two eras were fundamentally distinct: the former

resulting from intrinsic factors and the latter extrinsic. Redon, in careful consideration of literary,

scientific, and social themes, included humanized features and motifs of ambiguity in his

representation of pathogenic agents. The artist’s choice of media and subject matter inescapably

illustrated a new source of social anxiety that paved the way into the twentieth century.

25. Larson, The Dark Side of Nature, 32.

26. Ibid, 89-90.

27. Ted Gott, The Enchanted Stone: The Graphic Worlds of Odilon Redon (Melbourne: National
Gallery of Victoria, 1990), 73.
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Bibliography

Barnes, David S. The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995.

Barnett, Richard. The Sick Rose, or, Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration. London: Thames &
Hudson, 2014.

Bashford, Alison, and Claire Hooker. Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies. Routledge Studies in
the Social History of Medicine. London; New York: Routledge, 2001.

Chrastil, Rachel. Organizing for War: France, 1870-1914. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2010.

Coleman, William. Death Is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial
France. Wisconsin Publications in the History of Science and Medicine. Madison, Wis.:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.

Eisenman, Stephen. The Temptation of Saint Redon: Biography, Ideology, and Style in the Noirs of Odilon
Redon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Gott, Ted. The Enchanted Stone: The Graphic Worlds of Odilon Redon. Melbourne: National Gallery of
Victoria, 1990.

Knapp, Vincent J. Disease and Its Impact on Modern European History. Studies in Health & Human
Services. Lewiston, NY, USA: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989.

Kousoulis, Antonis A. “Etymology of Cholera.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 18, no. 3 (2012): 540.

Kudlick, Catherine Jean. Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris: A Cultural History. Studies on the History
of Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Larson, Barbara. “Odilon Redon and the Pasteurian Revolution: Health, Illness, and Le Monde Invisible.”
Science in Context 17, no. 4 (2004): 503-24.

——. The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon.
Refiguring Modernism. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005.

Latour, Bruno. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Lippe, Adolph. “Cholera.” Homeopathic Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1865.

Mitchell, Peta. Contagious Metaphor. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Masque of the Red Death. Philadelphia: Graham's Magazine, 1842.

Stuffmann, Margret, Max Hollein, and Markus Bernauer. Odilon Redon: As in a Dream. Ostfildern: Hatje
Cantz, 2007.

Symons, Arthur. Colour Studies in Paris. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1918.
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Figures

Figure 1. Young Venetian Woman, Aged 23, Depicted Before and After Contracting Cholera.
Artist unknown. c. 1831.
Coloured stipple engraving. Dimensions unidentified.
Wellcome Library Collection, London, England.
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Figure 2. Cholera in Paris.

François-Nicolas Chifflart. 1865.
Etching with drypoint on laid paper. 22.7 × 31.3 cm (image); 23.9 × 31.9 cm (sheet).
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA.
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Figure 3. A London Board of Health Hunting After Cases Like Cholera.

Robert Seymour. 1832.
Coloured lithograph. 15 × 20 cm.
Wellcome Library Collection, London, England.
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Figure 4. And All Manner of Frightful Creatures Arise.

Odilon Redon. 1888. Plate VIII from The Temptation of Saint Anthony.
Lithograph on chine appliqué. 31.4 × 22.6 cm (image); 43.3 × 31.4 cm (sheet).
The Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago, USA.
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Figure 5. Germination.
Odilon Redon. 1879. Plate II from In the Dream (Dans le rêve).
Lithograph on chine appliqué. 27.1 × 19.5 cm (image); 53.2 × 37 cm (sheet).
Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA.
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Figure 6. Must there not be an Invisible World?

Odilon Redon. 1887. Plate VI from Edmond Picard's The Jurer (Le Juré).
Lithograph in black on thin cream Japanese paper. 22.2 × 16.9 cm (image); 32.1 × 24.6 cm (sheet).
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA.
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Figure 7. Phantom.
Odilon Redon.1885.
Charcoal on paper. Dimensions unidentified.
Housing institution unknown. Photo: Larson, “Odilon Redon and the Pasteurian Revolution,” 507.