Eric T Jennings. Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. xi + 271 pp. $21.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-3822-2.

Reviewed by Stephen Harp (Department of History, University of Akron)
Published on H-Travel (July, 2007)

Imperial Waters

In his first book, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain's National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe and Indochina (2001), Eric Jennings considered the political dynamics of collaborationist Vichy government in three French colonies. Here Jennings moves on to consider Vichy as a model and cultural anchor of French colonial hydrotherapy from the 1830s to the 1960s. In a sense, here he is examining the "other Vichy," largely forgotten by historians as well as the public since the Second World War, and reintegrating it into French imperial history.

Jennings sets the stage by tracing the notions of acclimatization and climatology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In an interesting yet concise chapter, he lays out the fundamental shift from the eighteenth-century notion that Europeans could and should acclimatize to new environs to the late nineteenth-century assumption that they neither should nor could do any such thing. New "fears of racial degeneration brought acclimatization increasingly under attack" (p. 22). By the late nineteenth century, the new field of mesology ("the study of how milieux influenced their inhabitants" [p. 27]) maintained that Europeans in the tropics would most certainly face that much-dreaded "degeneracy" in the absence of periodic escapes to highland spas and resorts, or more costly and less frequent leaves back in Europe. Though Jennings does not cite the work of David Barnes (1996) on the nineteenth-century obsession with germs, he finds a similar pattern of an uneven shift from environmental to microbial and parasitical understandings of disease within modern science. Jennings carefully shows that despite Ronald Ross's connection of mosquitoes with malaria as well as Louis Pasteur's discovery of microbes, many French health professionals continued to believe that "climate was to blame for European fragility in the colonies" (p. 33). Well into the twentieth century a good many French doctors thought that regular stays at hillstations and hydromineral spas might preserve colonials' health in the empire. As Jennings insists, there is no surprise that the heyday of the French empire coincided with that of hydrotherapy, both within France, particularly at Vichy, and in the colonies themselves.

In a chapter on colonial hydrotherapy, Jennings deepens the analysis by exploring both spa practices and the medical science justifying them. As in the case of naturisme, which also rested on homeopathic assumptions about how the body might self-regulate and thus heal itself, hydrotherapy was to restore a certain balance to the colonial body. Of course each French bathing town had waters that were good for specific ills, but Vichy in particular was good for the seemingly omnipresent French liver ailments, with malaria seen as the most acute of them. Since "French medicine resisted the regular prescribing of quinine as a prophylactic until 1945" (p. 59), French colonials flocked to spas to improve their health and prolong their lives by protecting their livers. And it was above all to Vichy that the other colonial spas were compared.

Jennings then focuses on a series of case studies of ten springs on Guadaloupe, the waters of Cilaos and Salazie Hell-Bourg on Réunion, that of Anstirabe on Madagascar, and of Korbous in Tunisia. With attention to the particularities of each locale, Jennings nevertheless pulls together common themes. In each case, a local spring or bath was known to and used by locals or slaves before the French "discovered" them. Along with French colonials came French science to study the mineral qualities of each spring, and French officials and entrepreneurs "modernized" the spas, contrasting their mise en valeur with the unsystematic usage by (often "dirty") locals. Those in charge of the baths worked to attract French officials and settlers but also other European colonials. In each case, the spas were compared to those in France, particularly Vichy, making them bits of France away from France. Colonial officers and administrators (and until 1911 missionaries) had regular taxpayer-funded leaves to France, but between those leaves, colonials visited colonial spas. Settlers paid their own way, and were thus probably even more likely to seek out local hillstation spas. French spa owners quickly segregated Europeans from indigenous users, assumptions about class further distinguished some Europeans from others, and segregation by gender was the norm. In each of the case studies, Jennings also traces late twentieth-century developments, a strategy that places earlier French practices in relief.

Jennings concludes by examining Vichy itself as a colonial spa for the French, other Europeans, and--most interestingly--indigenous elites who also traveled to Vichy to take the waters. Vichy became a veritable weigh station for European colonials about to depart for the colonies, on leave, and "recovering" their health after returning. It brought together colonials from the military, administration, settler communities, and missions on the one hand, and colonials from different parts of the empire on the other. For Europeans, the model of protection against degeneracy remained the norm, though it was subverted by the presence of indigenous bathers (who would either have already been considered degenerate as "lesser races" or would have needed no such protection afforded by Vichy, given their "natural" place in the colonies). As in the case studies, Jennings understands these ironies and walks the reader through their complexities rather than attempting to generalize or oversimplify. In the end, it is hard not to accept Jennings' contention that even though it was located in the metropole, Vichy was the colonial spa, even if its colonial past has since been overshadowed by its role as symbol of French collaboration during the Second World War.

The book has two fundamental strengths. First, Jennings uses new archival material largely unknown to historians of France. Careful work in the archives of Guadaloupe, Réunion, and Madagascar is complemented by work in Norwegian missionary archives, municipal archives in Vichy, and in the usual national and colonial French archives in Paris and Aix-en-Provence. The wide range of primary source materials allows Jennings to narrate and to analyze an aspect of imperial history hitherto ignored, or even imagined, by many of us. And in the process he nicely brings together historiographies of empire and of metropolitan French spas, uniting histories of colonies and the metropole in a way reminiscent of Alice Conklin's Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (1997).

A second strength is the essentially comparative nature of the work. Despite its obvious advantages of putting unique historical circumstances into different contexts, comparative history can often feel like a study of apples versus oranges. Here Jennings manages to do a series of individual case studies that not only show differences among the colonial spas but also reveal continuities in French assumptions about hydrotherapy, mesology, medicine, and race across the empire and in the metropole.

In a book this interesting, readers often begin to wonder what else they might learn. I would like to have heard more about those taking the waters, particularly what bathers said about the segregation of the baths, and how they dressed at the baths. Jennings notes that a lobbyist for individual private baths at Dolé-les-Bains was concerned about the low barrier separating women's and men's sections there, since "'not all men are Adonises, and not all women are Phryneas--many people, for obvious reasons, prefer not to show themselves in tight bathing outfits'" (p. 88). This seems to imply that bathers wore costumes not only in the communal baths at Dolé but also within individual ones elsewhere. Did bathers really wear swimwear at the baths, even in individual compartments, throughout the period in question? How did communal bathing practices change with the arrival of the Europeans? How did indigenous bathers dress in comparison with Europeans? How did Europeans' dress distance them from the "primitive natives"? Interwar and post-World War II French nudists made much of the early development of nude bathing (on beaches) among European elites in the colonies, and in the metropole naturistes played with images of a natural, more "primitive" state to which they could temporarily return by stripping off their clothes. Was dress more important in colonial spas, serving as increased protection against degeneration, than in the metropole? Of course, my wish list of questions is out of place here, except to the extent that it reveals the interest that a good book generates in related issues. Given Jennings' considerable skill in using the sources he does have, I strongly suspect his sources simply did not support more of an investigation of norms of clothing and attendant assumptions about gender, race, and "civilization" on the part of those taking the waters.

Both the author and Duke University Press deserve much credit for a well-written volume remarkably free of grammatical and typographical errors. Although the map of France has an erroneous notation of scale, the book is mostly bereft of the kinds of errors that increasingly seem common, even at university presses. With its fascinating content, the clarity of Jennings' prose, and the affordable paperback format, this book deserves to be adopted for use in upper-division undergraduate as well as graduate courses in French history, imperial history, and the history of travel and tourism.

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Citation: Stephen Harp. Review of Jennings, Eric T, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas. H-Travel, H-Net Reviews. July, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13362

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