This paper will examine how a political need to re-stabilize the nation’s physical and moral health gave rise to new practices and spaces of hygiene in early 19th century Paris. In the era following a series of military defeats that culminated in Napoleon’s fall at Waterloo, concerns over racial degeneration prompted new medical thought on the body. As argued by hygienists and scientists of the period, doctors had failed to consider that human beings, like animals, could be bred to modify and refine their physical condition. The study of hygiene should thus extend beyond the preservation of health and prevention of illness to concern itself with the improvement and perfection of the human body.

These developments in medical thought came to have a significant impact on the Parisian built environment. In promoting exercise and fitness, these ideas on l’hygiène physique called for the creation of new kinds of spaces devoted to the body. The early 19th century swimming school was one of the sites where this emerging medical knowledge was put into practice. During the first decades of the 19th century, the number of these floating swimming pool barges along the Seine more than doubled, as the healthful benefits of physical activity were expounded upon. As spaces dedicated to exercise, bathing, and recreation, these venues allowed ideas of fitness, cleanliness, and pleasure to conflate. In this paper, I will explore how institutions such as the Ecole Deligny on the Quai d’Orsay and the Ecole de Henri IV on the Pont Neuf gave form to medical theories, transforming both the Parisian urban landscape and 19th century physical culture.

This paper thus situates the prescriptions that were put in place to reform the physical body in the early 19th century at the epistemological juncture of science, politics, and space. By examining the hygienic theories informing the creation, use, and growing popularity of early 19th century swimming institutions, I will demonstrate the ways in which medical knowledge at work could impact not only practices and ideas, but material environments as well.