This paper examines the pivotal role of the mask – both as a face-covering accessory and a rhetorical figure – in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and its historical legacy in contemporary French society. It explores how Enlightenment thinkers, influenced by prevalent masking practices, used the metaphor of the mask – or what I call the ‘figurative mask’ – to navigate the moral, social, and cultural transformations of the period. It also shows how the revolutionaries wielded the metaphor of the mask as a weapon in factional conflicts and power struggles as the French Revolution radicalised. The paper argues that the often-overlooked historical significance of the mask in France is deeply intertwined with the fears and anxieties surrounding face coverings and the concealed face in contemporary France, as exemplified by the 2011 ban on face coverings and the fake letter, attributed to Madame de Sévigné, that surfaced on the Internet during the COVID-19 pandemic.
AgulhonM (1979) Marianne au combat: l’imagerie et la symbolique républicaine de 1789 à 1880. Paris: Flammarion.
2.
AndressD (2005) The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution. London: Little Brown.
3.
BauerN (2022) Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-century France. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
4.
CampbellPRKaiserTELintonM (eds) (2007) Conspiracy in the French Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
5.
ClaironDeLatudeCJHL (1798) Mémoires d’Hyppolite Clairon, et réflexions sur l’art dramatique. Paris: Chez F. Buisson.
6.
ClarkHC (1994) La Rochefoucauld and the Language of Unmasking in Seventeenth-century France. Geneva: Droz.
7.
CrowstonCH (2013) Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
8.
De BachaumontLP (1777) Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la république des lettres en France depuis 1762 jusqu’à nos jours, vol. 1. London: Chez John Adamson.
9.
De La GorceJ (2002) Jean-Baptiste Lully. Paris: Fayard.
10.
DenbyDJ (1994) Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11.
DesmoulinsC (1792) Jean-Pierre Brissot démasqué.
12.
DiderotD (1748) Les bijoux indiscrets, vol. 2.
13.
DiderotD (1830) Paradoxe sur le Comédien. Paris: Auguste Sautelet et Cie.
14.
DorlinE (2010) Le grand strip-tease: féminisme, nationalisme et burqa en France. In: MbembeAVergèsFBernaultF, et al. (eds) Ruptures postcoloniales: Les nouveaux visages de la société française. Paris: La Découverte, pp.429–42.
15.
DuclosCP (1751) Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle. Paris: Chez Prault fils.
16.
DuclosCP (1764) Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle. Paris: Chez Prault and Chez Durand.
17.
DuclosCP (1776 [1741]) Les confessions du comte de ***. 8th edn.London and Paris: Chez Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais.
18.
GoodmanD (1994) The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
19.
GoringP (2004) The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
20.
HancockC (2008) Spatialities of the secular: geographies of the Veil in France and Turkey. European Journal of Women’s Studies15(3): 165–79.
21.
HancockC (2015) ‘The Republic is lived with an uncovered face’ (and a skirt): (un)dressing French citizens. Gender, Place & Culture22(7): 1023–40.
22.
HardySP (2012) Mes loisirs ou Journal d’événemens tels qu’ils parviennent à ma connoissance (1753–1789) (eds. BastienPJuraticSRocheD), vol. 2. Paris: Hermann.
23.
HuangJ (2024a) Masks and masking practices in old regime France and the French revolution. PhD Thesis. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL.
24.
HuangJ (2024b) Crafting faces and navigating the politics of royal spectacle: a mask maker in seventeenth-century Paris. The Journal of the Western Society for French History50: 5411.
25.
HuntL (2004 [1984]) Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Twentieth Anniversary Edition). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
26.
JohnsonJH (2001) Versailles, meet Les Halles: masks, carnival, and the French revolution. Representations73(1): 89–116.
27.
JonesJM (2004) Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
28.
LacroixS (ed.) (1902) Actes de la Commune de Paris pendant la Révolution (2ème série), vol. 2. Paris: L. Cerf and Charles Noblet.
29.
LeichmanJM (2015) What they talked about when they talked about acting: Clairon via Diderot and Talma. Eighteenth-Century Studies48(4): 417–36.
LiltiA (2015) The World of the Salons: Sociability and Worldliness in Eighteenth-Century Paris (trans. LGCochrane). New York: Oxford University Press.
32.
LintonM (2013) Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
33.
LintonMHarderM (2015) ‘Come and Dine’: the dangers of conspicuous consumption in French revolutionary politics, 1789–95. European History Quarterly45(4): 615–37.
34.
MartinJC (2017) La Terreur: Vérité et légendes. Paris: Perrin.
35.
MeninM (2022) Thinking about Tears: Crying and Weeping in Long Eighteenth-century France. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
36.
MousnierRE (1984) The Institutions of France Under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598–1789 (trans. AGoldhammer). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
37.
NorderaM (2007) Ballet de Cour. In: KantM (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ballet. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp.19–31.
38.
RavelJ (1994) Actress to activist: Mlle Clairon in the public sphere of the 1760s. Theater Survey35(1): 73–86.
39.
RiskinJ (2002) Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
40.
RosenbaumS (2014) The LACMA Recueil des modes. In: NorbergKRosenbaumS (eds) Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV: Interpreting the Art of Elegance. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, pp.187–99.
41.
ScottJW (2007) The Politics of the Veil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
42.
SemmensRT (2004) The Bals Publics at the Paris Opéra in the Eighteenth Century. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press.
43.
ShelbyJA (2014) Un/veiling women’s bodies: secularism and sexuality in full-face Veil prohibitions in France and Québec. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses43(2): 439–66.
44.
StarobinskiJ (1988) Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction (trans. AGoldhammer). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
45.
TackettT (2015) The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
46.
Van SantAJ (1993) Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
47.
VilaAC (1998) Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-century France. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
48.
WallonH (1880) Histoire du tribunal révolutionnaire de Paris, vol. 1. Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie.
49.
WickbergD (2007) What is the history of sensibilities? On cultural histories, old and new. The American Historical Review112(3): 661–84.
50.
ZaretskyR (2019) Catherine & Diderot: The Empress, the Philosopher, and the Fate of the Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
