60. Woman’s shoes. Louis XV period. Jacquemart Collection, International Shoe Museum, Romans.
61. Man’s shoe buckle and its original case. 18th century.
The return to greater simplicity and to straight lines preferred during Louis XVI’s reign had its counterpart in footwear. For example, the buckle on men’s shoes assumed greater prominence and women’s heels became shorter. Additionally, women’s heels were sheathed in white leather, while their shoe buckles were usually superceded by an ornament made of gathered fabric called a bouillonné, which was placed on the shoe’s upper and matched the dress.
Shoemakers had stopped making shoes differentiated for the left and right foot during the Renaissance, but the practice made a limited comeback at the end of 18th century. By the second half of the 19th century it would become a standard manufacturing technique as shoemaking was industrialized.
In the years before the French Revolution, shoemakers managed thriving shops. The writer Sébastien Mercier records that, “in their black outfit and powdered wig, they look like Clerks of the Court.” But when the Revolution came, shoemakers sympathized with the spirit of the new era: seventy-seven shoemakers participated in the storming of the Bastille.
In Arras, Robespierre drafted the shoe repairmen’s official grievances, while in Vierzon, an appointee to the Public Safety Committee wrote to representative Laplance in September 1793 that he had replaced the court “made up of old wigged heads” and appointed a shoemaker to it. When the revolutionary Saint Just saw that ten thousand soldiers in the Rhine army were going barefoot, he ordered the city of Strasbourg to remove the shoes of ten thousand aristocrats with instructions to deliver the shoes to the soldiers before ten o’clock the next morning. To avoid the guillotine, everything reminiscent of aristocratic luxury had to be eliminated, making way for a simpler, but still elegant style. Even shoes sported a revolutionary cockade, the symbol of the new patriotic religion. Men dared not wear fine shoes with buckles out of fear of being labeled an aristocrat, although Robespierre himself risked wearing them. The masses generally wore clogs.
It was at this time that Antoine Simon was working as an obscure shoemaker on the rue des Cordeliers in Paris. A Jacobin and later a member of the Paris Commune, he was chosen by the Convention to look after the young dauphin in the Temple after the child was separated from his mother, Queen Marie-Antoinette, on July 3, 1793. Himself an illiterate, the new tutor to the Capet son had orders to make the child forget his social status. And with the help of his wife, the shoemaker succeeded in transforming the child into a perfect little sans-culotte, teaching his nine-year-old pupil a repertoire of invectives against God, his family, and the aristocracy, as well as revolutionary songs, such as “ça ira, ça ira” and “la Carmagnole.”
Unlike the tormenter he is often depicted as, the coarse, uneducated shoemaker grew fond of little Louis XVII, as did Madame Simon. To amuse the child, Simon bought him a dog named Caster, followed by birds that he set up in a large aviary with seventeen bars where the child raised pigeons, a fact affirmed by the Temple’s own accounts, which record the purchase of feed for the young Capet’s pigeon. But in January 1794, by order of the Committee for Public Safety, Simon was relieved of his duties. It was against his will and against the will of the child, who begged the shoemaker to take him away and teach him how to make shoes. Alas, Simon the shoemaker was guillotined after 9 thermidor (the fall of Robespierre on July 27, 1794).
From 1795 to 1799, footwear under the Directory began to evolve into the early neo-classical style favored by Napoleon I. The light, flat, and pointed new style, for both men and women, confirmed the end of the former regime’s heel. The most elegant and striking women of this period, known as les merveilleuses, wore sandals equipped with ribbons which they wore intertwined around their legs.
62. Embroided mules. France, early 18th century.
63. Woman’s shoe. England, 18th century. International Shoe Museum, Romans.
64. Carved, lacquered and painted wooden clogs. Louis XVI period, France, 18th century. International Shoe Museum, Romans.
65. Plates from Diderot and Alembert’s Encyclodedia.
66. Woman’s mule. France, around 1789. Guillen Collection, International Shoe Museum, Romans.
67. Cruikshank. “Shoeing Asses”. International Shoe Museum, Romans.
68. Emperor’s boots. Private collection.
69. Flat court shoes of Napoleon I for his coronation in 1804. Lost during World War II.
19th century
19th-century women wore woolen ankle boots, but were especially known for their ballet shoes of fine glazed leather, satin, or silk. Ballet shoes fit a woman’s foot closely like a glove and were held by ribbons crossed around the ankle. Very fragile, these ephemeral shoes scarcely lasted the duration of one ball.
An 1809 inventory of the wardrobe of Empress Josephine (1763–1814) listed seven hundred and eighty-five pairs of ballerinas made by the shoemaker Lalement. Dancing took place frequently during the Empire period, at court and elsewhere, during interludes between battles.
As for men’s footwear, knee pants and silk stockings reintroduced by Napoleon showed off Empire-style escarpins, flat pumps made of patent leather and decorated with a buckle. The military-style boot was standard footwear for soldiers; it could be short or tall, with or without cuffs.
The Emperor, a shrewd strategist declared: “A well-equipped soldier requires three things: a good rifle, a military coat, and good shoes.” Yet Napoleonic military shoes could be the subjects of humor, as in this story from the memoirs of an officer in the Great Army: “One day I went with General P… into an uninhabited house; it was pouring down and our clothes were soaking wet, so we lit a fire and warmed ourselves.
– Sit down, the General said to me.
– Why?
– I want to take your boots off.
– You’re kidding me!
– No, I am not. Give me your foot.
– General, I can’t allow it.
– Your boots are soaked and your feet are in water. You’re going to catch cold.
– But I can take them off myself.
– I want to take them off for you.
Against my wishes, the General would remove my boots, to my extreme astonishment. When he was finished: Now my turn, he said. One good turn deserves another. Take off my boots.
– I’d be delighted.
– It was in order to get you to do this that I acted as I did
During the Restoration and the reign of Louis-Philippe, men wore boots and escarpins made of black leather. Only soft half boots were allowed to be beige, tawny, or brown.
The British dandy George Brummell (1778–1840), better known as Beau Brummell, wore laced ankle boots with narrow pants. Nicknamed the “fashion king,” his clothes become a standard of elegance that knew no boundaries. The Prince of Wales and King Georges IV of England (1762–1830) were among his admirers.
Women also wore flat ankle boots made of cloth and laced on the side. A taste for satin and silk escarpins tied with ribbons lasted until 1830.
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