The Colours of Our Memories - Michel Pastoureau 2012
Sunbathing through the years
On Tastes and Colours
As a child I used to spend the long summer vacation in a seaside resort on the north coast of Brittany: Le Val-André. The beach, which was one of the finest in Western France, seemed immense to me and constituted a vast and inexhaustible playground for my friends and myself. There was no danger anywhere and we were allowed to do whatever we liked, whether on the beach, in the water or on the rocks. However, one activity that most of the children were allowed to engage in for as long as they liked was forbidden to two of us: those two were not allowed to lie on a towel and timidly acquire a sun-tan. Their grandmother, a stern woman always clad in grey, considered that to do so was dangerous, ridiculous and even (I perfectly recall the expression she used) ’of an insane vulgarity’. For her, sunbathing was an abomination. Not just the possession of a sun-tan but, even more, the acquiring of it. Adjectives would fail her when it came to qualifying this grotesque, degrading, obscene and immoral activity.
As I grew older, I realized that, contrary to what I had long believed, the opinion of this intransigent grandmother was shared by others, not all of them elderly, and even that, as the years passed, in our corner of the beach, at the foot of the Piégu cliff, the number of opponents to sunbathing was increasing. Several of my playmates who used to be free to lie motionless in the sunshine now no longer were. To be sure, good taste required that we did not remain as white as aspirins (at this time, in Brittany, the expression used was ’as white as cotton-wool’), but now it was enough to be just lightly tanned. Why this change in behaviour, on this beach, between the mid-fifties and the early sixties? Were people here better and earlier informed of the dangers of exposure to the sun? Did our little community include a few enlightened doctors who, well before the press took up the cry, had already pointed out the risks that one ran by doing too much sunbathing? No, not at all! The problem was one not of health but of social mores, social class, even snobbishness. But this was something that I did not realize until later, at the end of my adolescence, when I noticed that this part of the beach was frequented only by well-to-do families, while more modest ones, devoted to sunbathing, occupied the other end. Later still, much later, when, having become a historian, I began to take an interest in the history of colours, I discovered that what had happened on that beach of my childhood did not constitute an isolated case but, on the contrary, stemmed from a more general and long-standing phenomenon. Repeatedly, down through the decades and the centuries, there have been changes in polite society’s attitude to the sun, the outdoors and skin-colours.
At this point, let us consider a little history.
Under the Ancien Régime and in the first half of the nineteenth century, still, in not only France but the whole of Western Europe, those who belonged to the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie felt obliged to have the palest and smoothest skin possible, in order to distinguish themselves from the peasants. The skin of the latter, who worked outdoors in the sun, was copper-coloured or rubicund and, in some cases, mottled with blotches: terrible! The possession of smooth, white skin and ’blue blood’, that is to say veins visible beneath one’s pale, almost transparent skin, was a ’must’. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, values changed. When ’polite society’ took to frequenting the seaside and then, a little later, also the mountains, good taste dictated the display of a sun-tanned complexion and skin darkened by the rays of the sun. It was a matter of distinguishing oneself no longer from the peasants imprisoned in the countryside, but from the increasingly numerous workers; these lived in towns, worked indoors and so had white skin, a wan complexion and pale or greyish faces: appalling! It was above all imperative not to look like a worker, a creature far worse than a simple peasant. These new values and the quest for the sunshine that accompanied them increased in strength as the decades passed. They seem to have peaked between 1920 and 1960: the period when sunbathing was fashionable and one had to have a tan.
However, this did not last. From the mid-sixties onward, when seaside holidays and winter sports spread to the middle and even lower classes, that same ’polite society’ progressively turned its back on sunbathing because it had become within the means of everyone, or almost everyone. Those on ’paid holidays’, in particular, strove hard to acquire a tan: so distasteful, if not positively grotesque! What was truly chic now was not to have a tan, particularly if one had just returned from the seaside. Later, this attitude, which had started as a scornful snobbishness, gradually gained ground. But this time it was for reasons of health. The increase in cases of skin-cancer and illness caused by prolonged exposure to the sun caused sunbathing to lose ground, mainly among the middle classes. The possession of a suntan was no longer valued — quite the contrary. The balance has tilted in the opposite direction, as it often has in the history of value-systems. But for how long?
Today only social upstarts, starlets and a few ’celebrities’ continue to sunbathe. But they hardly ever do so on a beach, lying in the sun. Instead, they lie in a studio, motionless beneath an artificial sun-lamp. This is obviously pretty ridiculous, even — to quote the grandmother of my two playmates — ’immoral and of an insane vulgarity’.