Seeing and Knowing

This chapter elaborates one of the first true medical fads to sweep the literary scene of post-revolutionary France: physiognomy, or as its practitioners called it, the art and science of seeing. With this term, the chapter shows how one could divine a person's thoughts, intentions, and inner character by studying comportment, gestures, and other physical ticks, especially those made by the human face. The chapter explains how historians have identified physiognomy as a critical link in the story of European racism. It captures ongoing concerns within physiognomic discourse, then describes why physiognomic writings swept such a wide breadth of French intellectual life after the Reign of Terror. The chapter explores the factors why physiognomy appealed to many different political, social, and intellectual figures in the post-revolutionary period. It highlights physiognomy's defining features: its ideological and philosophical malleability, then argues that physiognomy fit into the growing world of medical writing, genres, and subcultures in the post-revolutionary years.