"Waste Not, Want Not: Excrement and Economy in Nineteenth-Century France," Representations 96 (Fall...

73

D A N A S I M M O N S

Waste Not, Want Not:Excrement and Economyin Nineteenth-Century France

Despondent and exiled , French socialist Pierre Leroux wan-dered through the streets of London in the early 1850s. ‘‘What a stupid city!’’ heremarked, ‘‘one only needs to see this swarm of poor people to understand whatwealth [lies in] a city’s manure.’’ Leroux believed he held knowledge that could endLondon’s pullulating poverty forever. ‘‘I went to buy an old iron mortar,’’ he re-counts. ‘‘Then I went to collect sand from the banks of the Thames at the VauxhallBridge.’’ Leroux ground the sand with ashes and pieces of brick into a fine ‘‘mineral-vegetable powder.’’ ‘‘I mixed this powder with my urine and my excrement. . . .The excremental material that a man produces in one day is enough to createtwenty-five pounds of vegetable soil.’’ Leroux planted seeds in this unortho-dox material, beans that grew, blossomed, and bore abundant fruit even out ofseason. Thereby, Leroux wrote, ‘‘I had demonstrated that MAN IS THE RE-PRODUCER OF HIS OWN SUBSISTENCE.’’ ‘‘Every one of these unfortunatepeople . . . could live by his own manure.’’1

Leroux hoped to turn excrement into life, waste into subsistence. He sought toend social misery by the wondrous operation of nature. In place of wage work,Leroux imagined a perpetual recycling process. Humans consume food and createwaste, which in turn produces more food. This vision absolved the poor man of theneed to labor; nature’s cycle alone would provide for each person’s needs. Produc-tion and consumption were collapsed in a single precept: ‘‘MAKE BREAD WITHHUMAN EXCREMENT.’’2

Despite its eccentricity, Pierre Leroux’s agricultural technique was not theproduct of a lone crackpot. On the contrary, these words were written in the wakeof the great guano decade. The odiferous excreta of Peruvian seabirds already hadstruck European travelers by their power to fertilize local fields. In 1840 and 1841,a group of Peruvian entrepreneurs with English connections shipped nearly eightthousand tons of the stuff to Southampton.3 And thus began a commercial sensa-tion. Agriculturalists in Europe and the United States all rallied around the miracu-

abstract In mid-nineteenth-century France, the science of animal nutrition morphed into a Roman-tic political program. Scientists and socialists formulated a kind of industrial physiocracy that sought toreplace wage work and finance capital with an unimpeded flow of excrement. / Re p r e s e n tat i o n s 96.Fall 2006 � 2006 The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN 1533–855X, pages 73–98. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent to the University of California Press at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

74 Re p r e s e ntat i on s

lous properties of this particular excrement.4 The French Royal Agricultural Soci-ety gave samples of ‘‘a new fertilizer known by the term guano’’ in 1841 to thecelebrated chemists Eugene Chevreul and Anselme Payen, who marveled at its highnitrogen content.5 There followed a mass outpouring of popular publications onfertilizer selection and use, which reflected the rapid expansion of a new market.6

The United States in the years 1844–51 imported sixty-six thousand tons of guanofor a total wholesale value of 2.9 million dollars.7 The French market was no lessactive: in Nantes alone, fertilizer sales of all sorts in the decade 1850–60 totaledalmost forty million francs.8

The salience of secretions in nineteenth-century France was both practical andideological. Animal dung transformed agriculture in France and across Europeover the course of a century. In this period, farm animals counted less for theirlabor power—for which human workers could always compensate—than for theirconstant supply of manure, which served to fertilize ever-intensifying crop rota-tions. The rising yields of the first agricultural revolution sprouted from the manurethat rained upon new artificial prairies.

Fertilization mattered greatly in France, whose population and economy stilllived largely on farm production. In the 1840s and 1850s the guano craze inspiredentrepreneurs to capitalize on efficacious substances from seaweed to ash. Dungand its substitutes promised to multiply France’s national wealth; bolster Frenchcommerce in its rivalry with the English; and enrich a flood of inventors, investors,and landholders along its path. In this period manure was an economic and politi-cal commodity.

French chemists in this same period invented a cosmology of nature as the greatrecycler. French scientists of nutrition explicitly eliminated work as a variable fromtheir experiments and theories. The dichotomy between work and waste, so welldescribed in the context of English and German industrial science, did not hold inmidcentury France. Instead of maximizing work, French animal chemists soughtto produce a different kind of output: excrement. These scientists employed theterm ‘‘production’’ to signify not factory work but urine and manure. Animal emis-sions represented one end of an ever-renewing cycle. By its products, the body ren-dered nature’s materials in altered form, to be reprocessed in the atmosphere andreturned to the food chain.

Drawing upon physiocratic ideas, these men located the national wealth aboveall in agriculture. For them only nature could produce real value, in the form ofhuman subsistence. Yet unlike the eighteenth-century physiocrats, the thinkers de-scribed here were actively committed to industry. All claimed connections to thelaunching pads of industrial takeoff, the French engineering and mining schools.They turned an engineer’s eye on their country’s most valuable production process:the inputs and outputs of digestion. Economic value would rise not from force, exer-tion, and labor, but from the efficient extraction and recycling of nature’s material.

75Waste Not, Want Not: Excrement and Economy

The result was a kind of industrial physiocracy that sought to replace wage workand finance capital with an unimpeded flow of excrement.

I show here that their circulus model of homeostasis, with manure at its core,spread from chemistry to a broader political audience. The scientific vision of con-sumption and excretion offered material for the critique of wage labor. Led by Le-roux, some socialists seized upon this model as an escape from capitalist exploita-tion and the monetary economy.

In mid-nineteenth-century France, the science of animal nutrition morphedinto a Romantic anticapitalist political program. I argue that both incorporatedeconomic exchange within the animal body. Both sought to produce human subsis-tence without mechanical labor.9 Manure offered the key to total and perpetualautarky and a scientific solution to the plagues of poverty and inequality. Even thevenerable Victor Hugo promoted Leroux’s vision in a chapter of Les Miserables.10

Human manure promised a means to feed the poor without the aid of urban facto-ries. Excrement emerged in this period as the center point of a brand of Frenchanticapitalism.

Bodily Transactions

In the early 1840s chemists Jean-Baptiste Dumas and Jean-BaptisteBoussingault developed a holistic theory of circulation between animals, plants,and the atmosphere. They described the exchange of life-giving material in eco-nomic terms: the air carries substances between plants and animals that ‘‘organize’’and consume them. Manure provided the link between these phases of economicactivity. Bodily wastes literally bound consumption and production into a singlemovement of ingestion, absorption, excretion. In the simple act of feeding, animalsproduced the material for their next meal. Herein lay the key to a natural processthat provided sustenance without human labor.

In this sense, French sciences of nutrition offered a starkly alternative vision tocontemporary sciences of work. Norton Wise, in the final installment of his serieson ‘‘Work and Waste,’’ draws parallels between Scottish mechanical science and apolitical economy grounded in the principle of optimization. Nutrition science innineteenth-century Britain served to manage ‘‘fuel for labor,’’ to maximize workand minimize unproductive waste. Glasgow’s industrial elite drew upon nutritionexperiments in order to calculate a quantitative basis for poor aid and wage rates.In this context, ‘‘waste’’ referred not to excrement but to the loss of usable nutrientsdue to inefficient food processing.11 Wise and Crosbie Smith suggest that Britishindustrialists’ obsession with optimization forms the context for William Thomsonand James Joule’s new approach to mechanics.12

In Germany, Justus von Liebig and Hermann von Helmholtz applied a work/


waste paradigm to muscle activity and bodily nourishment. Liebig’s chemicalanalysis of foodstuffs led him to theorize animal work as a loss of muscle mass, whichis constantly replaced as new proteins enter the body. He interpreted nutrition asa process of expenditure and repair. Thomas Kuhn rephrased Liebig’s scientificquestion as, ‘‘how much work for how much fuel?’’13 By juxtaposing Liebig’s re-search and Joule’s work on the mechanical equivalent of heat, Kuhn inserted Ger-man nutrition science into the history of thermodynamics.

The legacy of French animal chemistry, by contrast, was a model of nutritionthat referred not to mechanical work but to bodily maintenance and natural cycles.Boussingault’s research on animal feed, undertaken between roughly 1839 and1850, discounted force, energy, and movement as variables in favor of passive ab-sorption and return. His German contemporaries set their instruments to measuremuscle exertion, drawing upon mechanical metaphors. Boussingault, on the otherhand, analyzed not muscle but excrement. He and his colleagues assigned nature,not industry, the task of creating and distributing human subsistence. They tooka century-old bio-economic model, first proposed by the French physiocrats, andtranslated it into nineteenth-century scientific language.

A century earlier, in the pre-Revolutionary decades, the physiocrats formulateda critique of industry and commerce. Dr. Francois Quesnay and his tableau eco-nomique inspired a generation of reformist administrators. Physiocrats consideredindustry and artisanal work as ‘‘sterile’’ activities, to which they opposed virtuouswork, the extraction of natural resources. Agriculture alone created value; industryand commerce served only to alter and distribute nature’s product. ‘‘Agriculture isthe only human labor with which the Heavens cooperate . . . and which is a perpet-ual creation,’’ wrote Dupont de Nemours in 1764. ‘‘We strictly owe the net productto the soil, to Providence, and to the beneficence of the Creator, to his rain that beatsdown and changes it to gold.’’14 Nature was the source of all wealth, production, andmovement. To live, and to accumulate value, meant to extract and use up Na-ture’s goodness.

For Dumas, and Boussingault too, nature alone produced all things. Only theearth was capable of storing wealth and strengthening the country’s prosperity.Like the physiocrats, the chemists believed that goodness could only be drawn fromnature; it could not be created by man. Nature, they believed, was designed to pro-duce, accumulate, and distribute goods in the most efficient and profitable manner.Wealth emerged more from the farm than from the factory. In this nineteenth-century physiocracy, dung lay at the center of all earthly exchange.

Yet these bourgeois scientists differed hugely from the physiocrats in their atti-tude toward industry. Indeed, all of them had strong and personal interest in therapid spread of railroads, factories, and steam engines that characterized 1840sFrance.15 Dumas taught for a time at the Ecole Polytechnique, the famous trainingground for the country’s technocratic elite. Indeed, Pierre Leroux would have beentaught by some of the chemists’ older colleagues, as he was accepted into the Poly-


technique in the 1810s. Dumas was one of three founders, in 1828, of the EcoleCentrale des Arts et Manufactures, which was dedicated to training civil engineersfor industry. He served for thirty-six years as president of the Society for the Encour-agement of National Industry, a ‘‘patriotic and liberal institution,’’ in Dumas’swords, which sought to develop both industry and agriculture.16 Boussingault, forhis part, participated in one of the first cohorts to graduate from the new Ecole desMines, which assimilated mining knowledge to a broader technical program andsoon became a premier school for engineers.17 Unlike the physiocrats, with theiraristocratic aversion to manufacture and commerce, these men were committedto industrialization. Their allegiance to industry coexisted with their enthusiasmfor agriculture.

Dumas and Boussingault recast physiocracy in engineering terms. Like thephysiocrats, the chemists believed that the most important kind of work, the mostproductive of value, was that of extraction. They distinguished extractive work, thedrawing out of nature’s goodness, from mere transformation. The first kind of worktook place in mines and on agricultural fields; the second in the factory. In Dumasand Boussingault’s model of nature, we find no force, no energy, impulsion, oracting-on, no creation, fabrication, or manipulation. In their stead we see extrac-tion, processing, conversion, circulation, and recycling. Plants, to them, were thegreat transformers; animals simply gathered nature’s goodness in the form of food,then consumed and excreted it. Man withdrew the stuff of life and resubmitted thatsame material into nature’s great circulation. In this industrial physiocracy, thebody was the greatest, most efficient machine.

Boussingault, gentleman farmer and agricultural chemist, set the terms of thenineteenth-century science of nutrition in France. He made his scientific reputationduring a decade of scientific exploration in South America under the tutelage ofAlexander von Humboldt. Thanks to his American reports he earned election tothe Academie des Sciences in 1839. Boussingault’s encounter with guano depositsoff the Peruvian coast foreshadowed years of experimentation on nitrogen fixationin plants. To his good fortune, on his return to France this son of a Parisian grocerwed into a wealthy landowning Alsatian family. He inherited a large farm and apetroleum mine by marriage, which provided him with material for a life of re-search and, judging from his portly profile, plenty of subsistence.18

Boussingault’s science and politics melded agrarianism and a mild republican-ism. In political matters, Boussingault resembled his Parisian colleague FrancoisArago more than he did a typical rural landowner. In April 1848 he successfullyjoined Louis Blanc’s socialist ticket in elections for the Constituent Assembly ofthe new Second Republic. But once elected, Boussingault rapidly transferred hisallegiance to the moderate republicans. He did not approve of Blanc’s credo of a‘‘right to work’’ and even voted in August to try Blanc for treason.19

Boussingault recounts that in 1840 drought hit Alsace and most of France, forc-


ing farmers to seek alternative sources of feed for their livestock. ‘‘At this time,’’ herecalls, ‘‘we were obliged to replace a large portion of the hay [typically] consumedin our stables with potatoes; and, using [elementary chemical] analysis as the basisfor [measuring] this substitution, we obtained quite advantageous pecuniary re-sults, while conserving the health and vigor of our teams.’’20 This experience con-firmed his passion for chemical analysis as a means to maximize crop yield andminimize the quantity and cost of animal feed.

The chemist viewed nutrition as a process of absorption and return. He soughtto establish a physiological steady state wherein the body assimilated nature’s mate-rial and restored this same stuff to its source. ‘‘An animal subjected to the mainte-nance ration,’’ Boussingault wrote, ‘‘renders, in the various products resulting fromits vital action, a quantity of organic material precisely equal and similar to theamount that it collects in its food.’’21 He invoked a chemical balance in the style ofhis model and predecessor, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. Boussingault used inputand output equations not to describe combustion and heat like Lavoisier, but todemonstrate an equilibrium between ingestion and excretion. ‘‘It is fairly certainthat . . . one should find in [an animal’s] excretions, secretions and the products ofits respiratory organs, the totality of all elementary matter contained in the foods[that the animal] consumed.’’22 The chemist designed experiments to prove thisequilibrium, which met with limited success. He sought to establish a dietary re-gimen that minimized input (feed or food aid) and maximized production ofexcrement.

Ideally, no loss occurs in this system. The only reference to unproductive waste,or pertes, in Boussingault’s oeuvre refers to material that ‘‘escapes in the act of perspi-ration and respiration.’’ The chemist undertook a series of experiments designedto demonstrate that this ‘‘loss of animal production’’ represented only a minisculequantity and that valuable nitrogen could not escape through that pathway.

Boussingault published his studies in a two-volume work entitled Rural Economyin Its Relations with Chemistry, Physics, and Meteorology. The title and format of thebook made reference to a long-standing genre of popular publications outlining thestate of agricultural science. As his account of drought and cost-cutting implies, theauthor did not make idle use of the term ‘‘rural economy.’’ He sought to apply themethods of organic chemistry to the efficient upkeep of his own farm animals. Ina section devoted to the ‘‘Maintenance of Animals,’’ Boussingault proposed thatfarmers measure the sufficiency of their animal feed with respect to the weight oftheir livestock. A constant weight would indicate that the proper balance of nutri-ents had been achieved. The chemist recognized that animals engaged in heavywork would require a greater amount of food.

His interest, however, was not in determining the proportion of food necessaryfor specific quantities of work. Rather, Boussingault sought to obtain a level of equi-librium in his animals’ bodies using the lowest possible amount of feed. ‘‘We cansee that animal feed consumed in a maintenance diet provides the maximum


amount of manure,’’ he declared, ‘‘since in terms of fertilizing agents, the elemen-tary composition of dejecta is not perceptibly different from the elementary compo-sition of foodstuff.’’23

Boussingault designed his experimental setup in order to isolate a single vari-able, the manufacture of valuable excrement. He began his work with arguably themost productive of domesticated beings in that arena: the cow. He isolated a fewcows in stable stalls and ‘‘rearranged the floor to allow one to gather excrementsand urine without loss.’’ Every day, he reported, ‘‘24 hours’ worth of products areweighed and measured; then we store them in a cave.’’24 He undertook a similaranalysis of cow’s milk, another precious secretion, in order to determine a cost-effective feed that would produce a maximum of fatty cream.25 Boussingault treatedthe animal body as a scale upon which to measure nature’s equilibrium. Each ofhis feed and respiration experiments resulted in a balance-sheet accounting for in-put and output.

Over the course of his research Boussingault explicitly eliminated work as avariable in his nutrition equation. In an attempt to narrow his field of analysis toexcretion alone, our intrepid farmer shifted scale and chose to analyze a small tur-tledove, specifically because this animal ‘‘flew very little.’’26 He installed the dovein a birdcage with a glass bottom, in order to collect the animal’s droppings. Bous-singault reported with contentment that the bird ‘‘rationed itself ’’ by consuming auniformly small amount of feed every day.

The turtledove experiment was designed to establish whether exhaled air con-tained more nitrogen than inhaled air. Did the ambient air carry off valuable nitro-gen that could otherwise be captured in animal excretions? ‘‘It is of an extremeimportance,’’ wrote Boussingault, ‘‘to determine whether a portion of the feed con-sumed [by animals] is actually lost from animal production and from manure.’’27

Boussingault employed classic eudiometric methods to determine the ratio ofnitrogen in the input and output of the bird’s respiration process. He placed hisbird in a bell jar with tubes for air pulled into and out of the jar by a water pump.A block of sulfur measured air humidity, and potassium and sulfuric acid absorbedthe carbonic acid, which the chemist then measured by weight. He concluded, con-tra Liebig, that animals do not release nitrogen from foodstuffs into the air, and thusvalue was preserved within the solid bodily products.

For Boussingault, ‘‘to conserve is to produce’’; to store up valuable animal de-jections was exactly the same as to create abundant foodstuffs.28 The farmer-chemist dedicated much research to the proper storage of manure in order to ensureno useful matter would escape the farmer’s possession. Production, consumption,and distribution were all tied together in livestock farming. ‘‘Farm animals do notcreate fertilizer, but rather restore the fertilizing principles that they receive in theirfeed. . . . Livestock are not producers, but consumers, dissipaters of manure.’’29 InBoussingault’s farming practice, as well as in his chemical research, work gave wayto the balanced circulation of food and manure.


Steam and Respiration:Henri-Victor Regnault

Given the minor role accorded to work in French animal chemistry, onemay be surprised to find Boussingault’s research program taken up by the country’sleading proponent of thermodynamics. Henri-Victor Regnault is best known forhis careful measurements of the specific heat of gases and his research on heatless(adiabatic) compression. From 1843 through the 1860s, he earned his livelihood asmember of a state commission charged with establishing scientific standards forsteam engines.30 Because of his work on heatless compression, Kuhn lists him asa predecessor in the development of thermodynamic heat conversion measures.31

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, served early in his student years as an assistant inRegnault’s lab.32 Regnault’s scientific views found a wider audience than most: heauthored a best-selling chemical textbook that became the leading reference workfor both French and German students of the field.33

Alongside his study of mechanics and heat, Regnault undertook several projectsin organic and physiological chemistry. Georges Canguilhem identifies Regnaultas a contributor to the energetic view of nutrition.34 Regnault maintained a closepersonal correspondence with Liebig and sympathized during the latter man’s longbattle with Dumas.35 Yet in his own physiological studies, Regnault did not take uphis friend’s model of nutrition and respiration as work and repair. Instead, his ani-mal research program ignored mechanical work in favor of absorption and waste.

In collaboration with agronomist Jules Reiset, Regnault greatly expandedBoussingault’s turtledove experiment. His experience with gas measurement quali-fied Regnault to bring a new degree of precision to the study of animal respiration.The two scientists constructed a respiration chamber that permitted prolongedenclosure without suffocation. In so doing, they integrated Boussingault’s mainte-nance model into the very design of their apparatus. Their animal subject was com-pletely static; all movement took place in digestion and respiration. Their instru-ments measured the input of atmospheric air into a large bell jar containing a dog,rabbit, or lizard. A further apparatus measured the composition of respired air exit-ing the animal chamber.

Regnault’s report on ‘‘the respiration of different classes of animals’’ calculatedthe respiratory quotient for various animals on a range of diets. The study con-cluded that among animals of comparable size, the content of diet had a greatereffect on respiration than the differences between types of animal. In each experi-ment, he recorded the input/output ratios of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Thesetup did not measure either heat loss or work. The animals’ level of activity re-mained unnoted. For Reiset, as for Boussingault, animals were static passagewaysfor air and nutrients.

Regnault’s German and English counterparts enlarged and adapted this exper-imental setup. There, however, the emphasis lay solidly on energy and heat loss.


For Carl Voit and Max Pettenkoffer, constructors of a human-sized respirationchamber, the gaseous products of respiration served as an index for the energy con-tained in different foodstuffs. Edward Frankland demonstrated that the energyvalue of each type of foodstuff—carbohydrate, protein, and fat—could be mea-sured by the gases produced during combustion.36 Only then did the respirationchamber take on its historical character as a site of heat and energy measurementin the new science of nutrition.

Regnault anticipated the form but not the content of this shift to energetics. Inthe 1860s he wrote what became one of the most popular physiological textbooksin Europe. Like his experiments, Regnault’s account of physiological chemistrycompletely neglected work. The book describes chemical analyses of bodily organs,muscles, and fluids, and it describes the physiology of respiration and nutrition.It contains formulae for brain composition, blood oxidation, and digestive bile; itdabbles in agronomic questions such as the chemistry of cheese making. Few ani-mal topics receive a more detailed account than urine. Regnault elaborated on thechemical products of a dozen analyses of urea and its components. Heat and workremained markedly absent.37 Even for this proselytizer of thermodynamic theory,animals produced waste, not work.

The Political Economy of Excrement

Jean-Baptiste Dumas, senior to Boussingault and of greater scientific re-nown, served as the younger man’s godfather at the Academy of Sciences. Likehis protege, Dumas came from a modest background—in his case, a provincialpharmacy apprenticeship—and a well-connected marriage greatly improved hiscircumstances. Through the good offices of his mentor, chemist Louis Jacques The-nard, and his father-in-law, industrialist Alexandre Brogniart, Dumas rose quicklythrough the Parisian scientific and social ranks. He clearly lacked any of Boussin-gault’s adventurous spirit or republican passion. After two unsuccessful runs Dumasfollowed his younger colleague into the Legislative Assembly in 1849, then serveda brief stint as Louis Napoleon’s Minister of Agriculture and Commerce. He satwith the monarchists, held a Bonapartist portfolio, and ran the Conseil de Parisuntil the Commune interrupted business as usual.38 He uncomfortably straddledthree revolutions—1830, 1848, and 1871—and held popular democracy in dis-taste. Dumas took few risks in a political career that lasted through the whole Sec-ond Empire. His ‘‘political ideas—order and religion—were of a most reassuringconformism.’’39

If Dumas positioned himself squarely with the conservatives, he worried, likemany republicans, about the effects of rapid social change and the disruptive threatof an impoverished class. In an ambitious Essay on Chemical Statics, first published in1842, he summarized his and Boussingault’s findings and pointed to their political


consequences. ‘‘The considerations elaborated in this essay,’’ he boasted, ‘‘can beused immediately and profitably in studies of the most serious questions of politicaleconomy.’’ Dumas promised a scientific treatise ‘‘rich with serious and fertile socialconsequences,’’ most particularly ‘‘concerning the very serious question of the dietof the poorer classes.’’40 Given the context, we may assume that Dumas thought ofthe poor primarily as a subgroup of the animal kingdom.

In this book and his course at the Paris Ecole de Medecine, Dumas developeda chemical cosmology, a theory of a recycling universe. ‘‘The mysterious circle oforganic life on the surface of the globe’’ involved a constant absorption and releaseof elemental material.41 Dumas imagined an earth in eternal circulation, its lifesustained by the efficient use and reuse of food and waste. No loss could slow orinterrupt this cycle. Nature ‘‘reproduce[s] the same phenomena again and againover the immensity of centuries.’’42

Here political and biological economies merged seamlessly. Dumas’s unifiedtheory of organic life resembled nothing more than a physiocratic model of politicaleconomy. Dumas took the physiocratic world of circulating natural wealth andbrought it into the nineteenth century. Here nature created and distributed noteconomic value but the chemical elements of organic life. Human industry had noplace in Dumas’s model. Animals and humans served as mere way-stations in na-ture’s vast movement. ‘‘In the mineral world [nature minerale], nothing is lost andnothing is created; it is the same in the organic world [nature organique].’’43 Essentiallife-giving materials cycled through Dumas’s cosmology like a perpetual motionmachine.

Air was the source of all movement in Dumas’s natural system. Air in the atmo-sphere absorbed, mixed and transported all the basic elements of life in a globalcycle. What left the air always returned in altered form, to be carried forth onceagain. Air constantly redistributed the elements—hydrogen, carbon, ammonia,and nitrogen—to all earthly beings. ‘‘What some [beings] give to the air, otherstake out again, such that . . . one should say that with respect to their truly organicelements, plants and animals are derived from air, are nothing more than con-densed air. . . . Plants and animals thus come from air and return to it.’’44 By thisreckoning living beings merely borrowed essential material from the atmosphere,which soon gathered it back up again.

For Dumas, atmospheric air absorbed and circulated all of nature’s stuff. Hemeasured the chemical composition of air in several sites around Paris, and foundthat its carbon content varied from place to place. No further evidence, he thought,was necessary to ‘‘prove that plants remove carbonic acid [from the air] and ani-mals give it back; is this not proof, in a word, of an equilibrium of elements in theair due to the inverse effects that animals and plants have on it?’’45 Air formed themedium for a continuous movement of material.

Plants were the industrious, active builders in Dumas’s cosmology. They servedas transformers of material and artisans of life. ‘‘The vegetable kingdom is the great


laboratory of organic life; therein, at the expense of air, all plant and animal mate-rials are formed.’’46 Plants concentrated the carbon, hydrogen, ammonia, and ni-trogen radicals floating in the air and turned them into food. With these elements,Dumas claimed, plants ‘‘fashion organic or organizable materials, which they thengive up to animals.’’47 Organization and life were synonymous in mid-nineteenth-century France. One could recognize living matter by its organized construction.The stuff of life, for biologists in this period, was identified by a ‘‘movement ofcontinual composition and decomposition.’’48 Dumas took these two essential func-tions and applied the principle of the division of labor. Plants composed and fash-ioned organic material; animals used and decomposed it.

Animals—here a group in which the ‘‘poorer classes’’ were prominent—func-tioned as ‘‘intermediaries’’ in this system.49 The nutritive elements in plant stuffflowed through animal bodies. These burnt up or decomposed that material, thenejected it in altered form back into nature. The chemist claimed that ‘‘an animaldoes not create organic matter; it only assimilates or expends matter through com-bustion. . . . Indeed, digestion is a simple function of absorption.’’50 Dumas, like hiseighteenth-century predecessor Hermann Boerhaave, saw animal ingestion as thesimple transit of foodstuff through the body.51 Animal excretions, as Boussingaulthad sought to demonstrate, were exactly equivalent to their ingestions. Humansand other animals neither produced material nor used it up.

As did so many of his contemporaries, Dumas compared animals to ‘‘a steamtrain’s engine.’’52 ‘‘Veritable combustion apparatuses,’’ animals ‘‘reproduce car-bonic acid, water, ammonia acid and nitrogen acid, and return them to the air.’’53

Like engines, animals processed and burnt fuel; yet Dumas showed no interest intheir mechanical output. He did not pause to consider movement or energy. Hisattention began and ended with the processing of fuel, that stuff of life garneredfrom industrious plants. Animals absorbed foods, burnt them, and passed the samestuff back into the atmosphere. And thereby the basic elements reappeared in airfor plants to collect and transform.

Physical exertion and mechanical work were relegated to the sidelines in thismodel, in favor of a metaphor of absorption and return. Here animals do not con-vert fuel into force. They rather borrow nature’s material, as from a library, to re-turn it in a new form.

Man is a different kind of [autrement ] marvelous machine in nature’s economy; he ejectsinto nature all the products that serve to reconstitute the fuel that he has consumed. Wewill see . . . that a man’s output of ammonia serves to replenish all the carbonic acid thatthe man himself has consumed. . . . It is easy to deduce that a human population returns tothe earth all the products that this population has borrowed from it.54

In this eternally efficient world, air became plants, plants became animals andanimals rendered organic building blocks to the air. ‘‘The material contained todayin a green carpet that covers the prairie, tomorrow will become part of the animals


that it feeds; a few days later, perhaps it will pass through our own [human] organi-zation, which will return the material to new plants, which later will reproduce anew vegetation.’’55 Animals, and humans in particular, served as passageways forthe stuff of life, which constantly circulated between air and plants.

Dumas particularly worried about urine, ‘‘an ammonia emission which returns[stuff ] to the earth or the air.’’56 When urea and accompanying ferments mix withwater in the air, they turn into ammonia ready for absorption by plants. This am-monia carried the azote (nitrogen) necessary for vegetation’s growth and quality.Alongside the minerals contained in dung, urine carried the key to the cycle of life.Given this recycling of azote from urine through the air, ‘‘one could easily deducethat a human population returns all the efficacious products that it borrows fromthe earth.’’ Dumas concluded that ‘‘the task of agriculture should be to recreate[refaire], via the carbonic acid in the air, the wheat that men eat.’’57

Dumas raised an alarm against the uncontrolled dissemination of urine andmanure into the atmosphere. Unbeknownst to most, these valuable resources wereescaping productive use. Ammonia is a volatile product, he warned, and tended todissipate rapidly if not corralled by human effort. ‘‘Poorly understood [agricultural]practices’’ risked a grave loss of this valuable capital. ‘‘One must remember thateach kilogram of evaporated ammonia is equivalent to a loss of sixty kilograms ofwheat, and that with one kilogram of urine one can make one kilogram of flour.’’58

France lamentably did not recognize this equation between waste and produc-tion. Chastised one fictional ‘‘Chinese tourist’’ in a pamphlet for manure: ‘‘A hecto-liter of fecal matter makes a hectoliter of wheat. The French send their hectoliter of[fecal] matter into the water, and prefer to purchase grain from foreigners. Humanmanure is a ready-made, inexhaustible fertilizer. The French let it be lost, and sendships to Peru to get bird droppings for which they pay their weight in gold.’’59 In-stead of investing in the circulus, the French expended artificial money for foreignfood and fertilizer.

East Asian farmers appeared far ahead of Europeans in their agricultural econ-omy. A chemist influenced by Dumas: ‘‘everyone knows how the Chinese todayscrupulously collect excremental substances, liquid and solid, in order to use themin agriculture.’’60 A travelogue recorded how ‘‘the Chinese regard manure as anobject of such importance, that a multitude of the elderly, women and children . . .are always busy looking for wastes in the streets, on large throughways and at theedges of canals and rivers. After bird droppings, farmers most prefer human excre-ment.’’61 European travelers to Japan were also struck by the elaborate care withwhich residents gathered, cured, and distributed bodily wastes across their fields.Lacking farm animals to fertilize a barren soil, Japanese turned night soil into acommodity reputed to draw a significant income for its sellers.62 Waste appearedas valuable as subsistence itself. ‘‘In China,’’ wrote an observer, ‘‘they feed peoplein order to have their excrement.’’63

Given the technical superiority of Asian farmers and the economic stakes in-


volved, preservation of urine appeared to be a project of national importance. Du-mas dedicated much of his public life to the management of manure. As Ministerof Agriculture and Commerce, he took measures to preserve natural resources fromforests to mines and fertilizers. Later, when named senator and president of theParisian Municipal Council, he turned his attention directly to questions of urbansanitation.64 Dumas promoted a water-based sewer project based on Edwin Chad-wick’s design for London. Chadwick, too, became fascinated by the economic effi-ciency of sewage recycling in the mid-1840s.65 Chadwick and English sanitarianssought to isolate sewage as a medical problem from questions of poverty and mal-nutrition.66 For Dumas, by contrast, excrement presented a solution to socialinequality.

Manure was critical to the French national economy. ‘‘The urine that decom-poses in Paris,’’ Dumas warned, ‘‘could come back to us from China in the formof tea. The farmer must employ all possible means to fix ammonia in the localitythat produces it.’’ The stakes involved in retaining excrement at home were vast:‘‘to make cheap ammonia is to . . . increase the means of existence of humanityitself.’’67 Although Dumas failed to convince most Frenchmen of the wealth lyingin their privies, some read his warnings raptly.

Excrement and Capital

‘‘Consult the scientists,’’ enjoined Romantic printer Pierre Leroux,‘‘who will tell you that man’s excremental fertilizer is the most fertile that exists.’’68

Nothing in Leroux’s biography suggests a likely interest in manure. Born in theParisian suburb of Bercy to a family of artisans, he was a bright student and gainedentry to the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique. The death of his father forced him towithdraw, however, and he began a printing career to support his family. Lerouxfirst gained a political education as a foreman in Panckoucke’s press shop, and apolitical platform as a protege of the Saint-Simonians. He became editor of thegroup’s journal Le Globe, wherein he published his early writings. In 1831 he brokewith Prosper Enfantin and two years later cofounded the Encyclopedie nouvelle. Ler-oux’s later political and theological tracts, including a translation of Goethe’sWerther, famously led to a friendship and collaboration with George Sand.69 Thetwo published a workers’ newspaper, the Revue independante, whose radical ideas in-fluenced a wide constituency in the years leading up to the 1848 revolution.70

Leroux lived in a largely industrial world. He experienced the wageworker’sdaily condition for years, until Sand’s patronage allowed him to dedicate himselfto politics. The Saint-Simonians, whose journal Leroux edited, drew much of theirmembership from a ‘‘technocratic’’ world of engineers, entrepreneurs, and theEcole Polytechnique. They celebrated industry and its potential to refashion theearth. Like Dumas, they saw continuity between industry and agriculture. Henri


Saint-Simon called upon bankers and industrialists to fund a great public worksprogram aimed at improving irrigation and farming output.71 Later Saint-Simonians dreamed of global engineering projects on the scale of the Suez Canal,which might perfect earthly circulation between East and West. Though Lerouxsevered ties with the group, he maintained its technical approach to social prob-lems, its mystical attachment to earthworks, and its desire to use engineering fornoncapitalist ends. Unlike Dumas and the Saint-Simonians, however, Lerouxwished to displace factory work altogether.

Leroux, Parisian artisan and Romantic socialist, sought salvation in manure.Despite his highly urban existence, in the early 1840s he developed an obsessionwith plants, subsistence, and the cycle of life. He adhered to Dumas’s theory ofnatural circulation not out of any scientific or farming experience, evidently, but outof philosophical conviction. Leroux subscribed to the chemists’ fertilizing cosmosbecause these men shared two fundamental premises: a recycling nature and abodily economy that did not require labor.

Leroux sketched his first reflections on fertilizer within three years followingthe publication of his best-known treatise, De l’Humanite (1839).72 From this per-spective, Leroux was positioned to give Dumas a very particular reading. Thechemist’s model of a recycling nature must have appeared as a confirmation of hisown theory of metempsychosis. Dumas’s description of animal particles flowinginto the atmosphere resonated with Leroux’s already-formed metaphysics.

The two texts, though apparently unrelated, follow a parallel logic. In hispolitical-philosophical tract, Leroux developed a utopian vision of human unity.The text sidelined questions of class struggle. Instead Leroux sought ‘‘solidarity’’through a constant flow between the individual and the collective. He imaginedthat all beings would fuse into an indistinguishable whole. Individuals would losetheir singular character and flow into a unified ‘‘humanity.’’ Nature ‘‘tied’’ man ‘‘toan incessant communication with his fellow creatures and with the universe. Whathe calls life does not belong entirely to him and is not in him exclusively; it is inhim and outside of him.’’73 ‘‘To live is to die in one form in order to be reborn inanother form,’’74 proclaimed De l’Humanite. Like Dumas and his cycle of matter,Leroux envisioned the individual and humanity in constant movement.

Dumas’s model of natural circulation offered a material and economic counter-part to Leroux’s spiritual vision. ‘‘A large part of putrefied animal matter is spreaddaily into the atmosphere in gaseous form,’’ wrote Leroux in his article on ‘‘Fertil-izer’’ for the Encyclopedie nouvelle, published in 1843. ‘‘The atmosphere, that greatreservoir of plant food!’’ Dumas’s Essai de chimie statique, published one year earlier,resonates clearly in this text. For Leroux, too, air gathered and distributed ‘‘all theanimal kingdom’s emanations, . . . the product of a billion men’s putrefaction.’’75

Just as Leroux’s individual souls merged into a collective spirit, the human bodyoffered its own stuff as the basis for its and the nation’s food supply. The air deliveredman’s excretions to plants, which formed the bedrock of his diet. Leroux later sum-


marized the process thus: ‘‘man modifies nature, and with his own substance createsproducts that become man’s food and satisfy his needs.’’76 Matter, like life itself, didnot belong to any single body. It flowed seamlessly between men and the earth.The body formed the centerpiece of life’s perpetual circulation between individualsand nature.

In 1843, Leroux gathered a small band of family and associates near a ruraltown in the Creuse. In Boussac they set up a communal printing ‘‘colony.’’ WroteLeroux, ‘‘We spent four years in a desert, on an arid mountain, in order to demon-strate that political economy could have a different outcome than the eternal prole-tariat.’’77 Residents operated a press that published Leroux’s voluminous politicaltracts. The commune did not live on paper alone, however: they grew their ownvegetables using an unusual agricultural technique. Following the theological-scientific principle of the circulus, colonists gathered their daily secretions and recy-cled an admixture of human waste as garden fertilizer. In this manner Lerouxsought to prove the dictum that ‘‘Malthus’s law is false; there is a natural circula-tion [cercle] anterior and superior to economists’ circulation and, by way of nature,every man is the producer—and even, precisely, the reproducer—of his own con-sumption.’’78

Here the economy of excrement became clear. Whereas Dumas and Boussin-gault simply eliminated work as a variable in their equations, Leroux made thislacuna explicit. In the absence of social demands and labor exploitation, he argued,the human body would suffice for its own satisfaction. One’s secretions were pre-cisely enough to produce one’s own needs. ‘‘Man is by his very organization thereproducer of his own subsistence.’’79 The compulsion to work therefore derivednot from any natural principle, but rather from the constraints of capital. Lerouxtook the chemists’ industrial physiocracy and turned it against capitalist wage labor.The human body, that perfect and complete machine in nature, would replace theenslaved and emaciated body of the factory worker.

Leroux sought to make class conflict moot by eliminating the labor imperative.Man could, he promised, once again enjoy ‘‘the Garden spoken about by all theancient theologians, this Paradise, this Eden, where man’s subsistence [was] com-pletely ensured by the Creator.’’80 Only wage labor prevented well-being on earth.Capital itself was ‘‘the cause of a lack of subsistence’’;81 with its supercession wouldcome a return to paradise. Science pointed the way forward. ‘‘Today the socialquestion appears as a problem of material wealth, . . . [and this is because] humanscience is very close to finding a solution.’’82 The key to Eden, as we may guess, layin bodily secretions.

In this utopia without wage labor or class, workers still needed means to providefor their needs. Nature delivered exactly what individuals needed, in proportion toand in the very process of their consumption. This ‘‘true, natural’’ economy pre-ceded and overrode all social demands, needs, and organizations. The solution toclass conflict, therefore, lay not in the industrial workshop but in the cycle of life


itself. ‘‘When you penetrate to the very foundation of your means of production,’’Leroux concluded, ‘‘industry refers you to agriculture, and that sends you back toyour manure.’’83

Excrement formed the bond that unified production and consumption. In na-ture, the two poles of economic exchange fused into one identical movement.Eating and excreting constituted a single, contiguous act. ‘‘If I consume,’’ wroteLeroux, ‘‘I produce.’’84 Here labor and subsistence no longer existed as autonomousactivities. Subsistence was at once consumption and work. Supply and demandwere always equal because they flowed from the same material. This ‘‘natural cir-cle’’ preceded social relations. Bodily economy trumped political economy.

Nature has established a circulus between production and consumption. . . . With seeds, air,earth, water, and manure, we produce foodstuff to nourish ourselves; as we feed ourselveswe convert them into gas and manure that produce other [foodstuffs]: this is what we callconsumption. Consumption is the goal of production, but also its cause.85

In the same motion, man used up nature’s material and sent it back in alteredform. The conservation of matter took on a strange new cast in this efficient physiol-ogy. All that we eat, we excrete and eat again. For Leroux this equation offered analternative to political economists’ notions of labor, population, and wealth.

With the circulus Leroux directed a physiocratic attack against the labor theoryof value. Nature’s fecundity, not human manipulation, produced all value in hismodel. Leroux echoed the chemists’ view of man’s place in nature. Air and watermove materials; plants organize them into nutrients. Humans simply extract andprocess nature’s stuff. Nothing emerged from labor alone. ‘‘We create nothing, wedestroy nothing; we operate changes.’’86

Physiocratic theories of value contained an implicit critique of wage labor. Ifhuman production did not create any wealth, then people working in factories andworkshops served only as drains on earthly resources. Like the physiocrats, Lerouxconsidered entrepreneurs, industry, and commerce as parasites. ‘‘What if,’’ he askedrhetorically, ‘‘Capital, which turns production into the monopoly of a few people,actually prevented production!’’87 Wage work, he argued, sapped workers’ strengthand only profited capitalists. Labor did not create value. On the contrary, it evenblocked the circulation of real, natural value.

Leroux’s physiocratic critique of labor clashed with notions then gaining cur-rency among economists, physicists, and engineers. Whereas Leroux drew his ideasabout work from chemistry and physiology, many of his contemporaries fixed theirattention on water mills and steam engines. Physicists and engineers developedcomplex models to measure the productivity of machines. To them ‘‘work’’ was amechanical equation: force times distance.88 Political economists defined labor interms of bodily expenditure and psychological pain. English and German writersdistinguished between ‘‘labor,’’ meaning bodily expense, and ‘‘work,’’ which signi-fied all types of production.89 French physicists and economists used the term travail


to signify both senses of the word. Leroux, by contrast, made a clear distinctionbetween exploitative, superfluous travail and natural bodily production.

His views on labor also differed wildly from those of other radical thinkers. Inthe years leading up to the 1848 revolution, popular slogans demanded a ‘‘right towork.’’ Many thinkers of the time, notably the Ricardian socialists, enlisted the la-bor theory of value as an argument for higher pay. Pierre Proudhon likewiseclaimed all products of labor for the workers themselves.90 Leroux chose a differentpath. Instead of seeking, like Proudhon, to socialize production, Leroux rejectedthe labor theory altogether. When Boussac elected Leroux in 1848 to the SecondRepublic’s Constituent Assembly, he ferociously defended a law limiting the work-day to ten hours. Although he aligned himself loyally with the Montagnards in theAssembly, he did not share in Louis Blanc’s enthusiasm for the ‘‘right to work.’’Work, Leroux argued there, was ‘‘homicide.’’91

The social question and class conflict could be resolved immediately, if one wereto apply the circulus principle. Chemists had discovered the solution to misery innature itself. But ‘‘the economists are unaware of it or draw no consequences fromit, as they are busy with the prosperity of capital and the rights of man.’’92 Lerouxdecided to rectify this slight in a series of articles, first published in his Revue sociale,then as a bound collection. The book’s title indicates its aim: Malthus and the Econo-mists, Or, Will There Always Be Poor People? 93 Therein he refuted Malthus’s pessimis-tic projections for agricultural growth and population increase. Poverty and hunger,Leroux repeated, resulted from a social cause: capital excluded workers from thebounteous natural economy. ‘‘[Man] is chased out of the natural circulus, in thename of what the economists call the circulation of wealth, and Malthus replies,‘The earth is occupied!’ ’’94 But capital itself was the very cause of a lack of sub-sistence.95

Like many of Malthus’s Romantic critics, Leroux shared more of the Englishparson’s worldview than he cared to admit.96 Both men placed bodily sustenanceat the center of economic relations. Leroux shared Malthus’s dismay that pricesand wages obscured more fundamental relationships between the body, population,and food supply.97 But Malthus viewed subsistence as pure consumption, a danger-ous drain on nature’s resources. Population pressures and the terror of positivechecks were due to an ever-quickening rate of consumption. The sexual passionstimulated a growing population and a demand that nature could not hope to sup-ply. Leroux rejected the dire consequences of Malthus’s arithmetic and geometricratios. Instead Leroux recast subsistence as a producer of wealth, in the process ofextraction and excretion. When we eat, he argued, we recreate our own food.

Malthus’s population science thus served only to justify the abduction of work-ers’ subsistence by capital. Leroux defined human need as precisely that whichcould be supplied by nature. All social demand for labor, therefore, stemmed fromfalse and excessive needs. One sole force caused workers to draw sweat: financecapital. Money lay at the source of all excess and exploitation. Silver, banknotes,


and gold were the weapons of the privileged classes, the material that soaked upthe ‘‘sweat of workers.’’ ‘‘Inequality and luxury have introduced needs that aredamaging . . . to the men who are exploited to satisfy them.’’98 Wage labor and thecreation of a proletarian class represented nothing less than slavery.99 Money, Le-roux claimed, was the cause of a horrific and unnatural subjugation, the laborimperative.

There was no place for finance capital in nature’s circulus, and Leroux soughtto displace it with a new form. Excrement offered more than an alternative to indus-trial production and social consumption. Manure also promised to substitute formoney.100 ‘‘A well-fertilized and fattened soil is not only the nursing mother of na-tions; it is also their SAVINGS BANK. It is a Savings Bank that cannot be touchedby theft or fraud, and lies out of reach of the whims and abuses of a tyrannicalgovernment.’’101 Leroux’s antifinancial fertilizer bank functioned as a perpetualproducer of capital. Accounts in the currency of soil and excrement could only evergrow larger. ‘‘MANURE CAPITAL constitutes a nation’s most precious patrimonyand inheritance, and offers the best guarantee of a lasting independence.’’102 Themetaphor appears to have stuck. Twenty years later a Liming Almanac, full of practi-cal farming advice, declared that manure was more solid than money and that‘‘The Soil is a Coin Purse.’’103

Leroux wished to displace finance capital with a natural, bodily ‘‘capital.’’ Fi-nance capital was an evil force, a murderous slave master. If Leroux depicted na-ture’s capital with the image of an excreting body, he created a diabolical mirrorimage of its opposite, finance. Finance, for Leroux, was embodied by the Jew. Onefinal element is therefore necessary for a historical understanding of his excremen-tal economy: anti-Semitism.104

The central chapter in Leroux’s Malthus, or the Economists is entitled ‘‘Jews, theKings of Today.’’ It begins with a short genealogy of banking and paper money,which he calls an ‘‘invention of the Jews.’’ Then follows a somber sketch of the‘‘current world’’ designed to contrast with the paradise that awaits he who followsthe circulus. Leroux blamed ‘‘the Jewish spirit, the spirit of avarice and greed’’ forinflicting violence on the laboring class. While capitalists hoarded the wealth ofhumanity, workers received only enough to survive, or died. Banks, for which heheld both Jews and the English accountable, fulfilled the same function as violentsubjugation in the feudal era. Banks were ‘‘the arsenal of our times.’’ Money, hewrote, kills just as surely as iron and steel.105 Just as ‘‘life’’ and ‘‘humanity’’ corre-sponded to natural bodily circulation, so Leroux equated Jews, money, and death.

Leroux adopted the title ‘‘Kings of Today’’ in a tacit homage to the leadingleft-wing anti-Semitic thinker of his day, the Fourierist Adolphe Toussenel.106 LikeToussenel and Charles Fourier before him, Leroux equated Jews with exploitativecapital, criminal usury, and moral degeneration. This view stood in contrast to


that of the Saint-Simonians, who identified industrial capital as a progressive andconstructive element. On the other hand, Leroux did not heed Toussenel’s call fordestruction of the Jews. His anti-Semitism expressed a moral critique of capitalism.‘‘Leroux sought to identify Christianity with the revolutionary tradition,’’107 andthe ‘‘Jewish spirit’’ with counterrevolution. As historian Edmund Silberner ob-serves, Leroux considered that the entire society had absorbed the Jewish spirit ofgain. Only a thorough and complete social transformation would purge the worldof its misery.108

In ‘‘Jews, the Kings of Today,’’ Leroux’s natural recycling body found its anti-pode, the corrupt and bloated Jewish body. Humanity met its ‘‘GRAN NEMICO,. . . enemy, adversary, that is one who only exists as a negation, a contradiction ofthe one who exists truly and for himself.’’109 As we have seen, Leroux incarnatedhis utopia in the natural body. Conversely, he embodied capital in the figure of theJewish speculator. The latter he described in intricate detail. The Jew appears hereas a synecdoche of capital.

The world today is an old man with a big head and a big stomach. . . . He hugs bags of goldand wallets full of banknotes in his arms, like a vulture in an aviary. These are his idols, andhe presses them against his heart with an unspeakable voluptuousness. . . . Entirely given tohis passion, he is bizarrely contorted like an epileptic; all of his movements are directed atgrabbing and holding as much gold as possible. He twists and contorts . . . his legs spreadto catch his prey, his neck stretches out and his head turns around to the same end. Hearches his back so that his chest forms as large a sack or receptacle as possible. . . . Onewould say that he . . . is desperate not to be able to gorge himself with cash. . . . He is teemingwith gold; there is a wart on his face, and that wart is a piece of gold. . . . I would say thathe is Shakespeare’s Shylock in person. . . . The old man’s face has a kind of power, whichmakes him look like Satan.110

The Jewish body of capital presents an antithesis of the body in nature. Thenatural body releases its own substance, all that it ingests, into the atmosphere,which sends it back in a virtuous and sustaining form. From this excreting body,substance circulates between the individual and the collective, being and nature,finite and infinite. The Jew, conversely, distorts his own body in order to hoardmore matter. He constantly strives to expand his own private corporeal empire. Hisbody turned into a ‘‘sack,’’ he ‘‘gorges himself.’’ He retains matter within himself,even as it pops out in the form of malevolent warts. The grotesqueness of this figurecomes above all from the ill effects of a kind of constipation.

In these two figures, we see Leroux’s vision of the corporeal economy. The con-stipated capitalist stood against the excreting man of nature. ‘‘Natural’’ processesof production and consumption opposed unnatural, grotesque, and unhealthy ac-cumulation. The hoarding Jew appeared as a deadly threat to nature’s integrityand human unity. ‘‘The Jewish spirit’’ had to be eliminated in order to return to acollective, harmonious ‘‘humanity.’’111


The world changes quickly, and it will change again. Because it is alterable, we will notalways see today’s ugly face. The world will . . . cease to look like the Jew Shylock, and Ihope to see it reborn with the divine features of the Nazarene who was crucified by theJews, and who they crucify still with their arbitrage and their capital.112

Pierre Leroux proposed a simple solution to the ills of early industrial capital-ism, class violence, labor exploitation, social inequality, and poverty. He would sub-stitute the natural body for the financial speculator, replace money with excrement.The ‘‘Jewish spirit’’ would disappear in favor of an undifferentiated humanity. Cap-ital circulation would seamlessly give way to a more concrete alternative. Wagelabor, forced exertion, and social demands would cede to a simple, automatic bodilyprocess. Work became digestion.

Excrement functioned in this system exactly like capital. It mediated produc-tion and consumption. It acted as a value equivalent, an index of output. It accumu-lated and gained value over time. The essential difference, compared to money, wasthat the entire economic process took place within the interface between the humanbody and the natural atmosphere. ‘‘In Nature,’’ wrote Leroux, ‘‘there is no unpro-ductive consumption.’’113 Social relations no longer played any role in production,consumption, or distribution. Manure, unlike money, was not tainted by socialmediation.

This opposition reveals the logic of a social theory based on manure. Leroux’sManichean physiology is an example of the ‘‘biologization of capital.’’114 Leroux,like Dumas and Boussingault, internalized economic functions within the body.These operations were made purely corporeal, separate from compulsion, will, ordesire. Given this premise, the solution to social ills thereby appeared as the simplereplacement of one kind of body for another. Constipation and hoarding—the Jew-ish body, in Leroux’s case—would give way to natural circulation. In this way, op-position to finance capital turned into a chemical-physiological program.

All three of the main characters in this story were elected to the National As-sembly, each in a different faction, within a year of the 1848 revolution. Each wasimbued in theory and practice, applied science and politics, writing and activity.Boussingault addressed his work to rational farmers, Dumas to medical studentsand state administrators, and Leroux to ‘‘Humanity.’’ Despite their diametricallyopposed political allegiances, they shared a fundamentally similar view of socialand economic processes. Each rejected the social effects of capital and labor. Eachturned to manure as an answer to the social question.

These authors dreamt of a return to nature from a seemingly irreparable socialchaos. They sought to establish a harmonious and simple natural cycle betweenliving beings and their atmosphere. To that end they got rid of work. In place offorce, mechanics, and energy, these men offered an economy of circulation andperfectly efficient conversion. This economy contained capitalism without capital,work without labor, and industry without factories. In lieu of industrial labor, they


made air the prime mover and plants into construction workers. Animals and hu-mans served as simple recycling machines. Men needed only to extract and use thenatural bounty around them. Production was in subsistence, not labor. Circulationwas atmospheric, not financial. It was the digestive system, not muscles or ma-chines, that was the principal source of action. Division of labor took place not inthe workshop but between animals and plants. Finally, Leroux made money disap-pear and replaced it with manure.

In the midst of the 1848 revolution, when these men came to political promi-nence on social hopes raised by their circulus, the ground began to shift beneaththeir feet. Wage labor irrefutably held center stage in the social conflicts of thatperiod. The ‘‘right to work,’’ not the ‘‘right to subsistence,’’ was the rallying call.No discussion of poverty and exploitation could credibly avoid the wage question.Scientific preoccupations echoed social conditions, as energetics came to dominatesciences of the body. Work and fatigue, not digestive inputs and outputs, were theequations to be solved. French industrial takeoff and the expansion of finance capi-tal further mooted any visions of agricultural autonomy. Perhaps only the Romanticanarchists of the late nineteenth century, men like Elisee Reclus and Peter Kropot-kin, maintained Leroux’s dream of a life in natural autarky. With Dumas, Boussin-gault, and Leroux, physiocracy breathed its last gasp.

The circulus represented a bio-economic solution to the ills of wage labor. Inthis world, human waste held the highest value. Manure offered an alternative tofinance capital, on the one hand, and the ‘‘right to work,’’ on the other. In short,these men imagined an industrial physiocracy and an economy of excrement.

No t e s

This article was written with the support of the Max Planck Institute for the Historyof Science, Berlin. I especially thank Ursula Klein and Hans-Joerg Rheinberger fortheir counsel and generosity. I have also benefited from incisive readings and sugges-tions by John Tresch, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Myles Jackson, Emmanuel Saadia,Robert Richards, and the members of the University of Chicago Fishbein Center andfrom the great wisdom of Jan E. Goldstein. Thanks also to the editors of Representationsfor their challenging and stimulating remarks.

1. Pierre Leroux, La Greve de Samarez (Paris, 1863), 1:308–9. Unless otherwise noted, alltranslations are my own.

2. Ibid., 308.3. Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion

(New York, 1994), 5.4. Ibid., 8.5. Ministere de l’Agriculture et du Commerce, Serie de Documens sur des essais de Guano

employe comme engrais (Paris, 1843), 22.


6. A sample of such popular publications would include the following: Jean-JacquesCaron, Allocution a la Societe des sciences naturelles, par M. l’abbe Caron, le jour de son instal-lation au fauteuil de president. . . . Notice sur le guano . . . (Versailles, 1844); Du Guano duPerou et de son emploi, s’adresser . . . chez J.-B. Bocquet-Goerg (Paris, 1852); Du Guano et deson emploi (Havre, 1845); Instruction simplifiee pour s’assurer de la sincerite des engrais ditsartificiels: noir de raffinerie, guano, poudrette . . . redigee et distribuee aux cultivateurs de la Gi-ronde par le professeur d’agriculture de Bordeaux . . . (Bordeaux, 1853); A.-H. de Monnieres,Histoire, analyse et effets du guano du Perou (Paris, 1845); Eugene-Joseph-Armand Neveu-Derotrie, Notice sur le guano (Nantes, 1845).

7. Skaggs, Great Guano Rush, 9.8. E.-L. Chabrier, Petit Traite theorique et pratique pour la preparation, l’emploi et le commerce

des engrais (Morlaix, 1875), 242. Citing Adolphe Bobierre, ‘‘Rapport a M. le Conseillerd’Etat, Prefet de la Loire-Inferieure.’’

9. Christopher Hamlin’s fascinating work on Victorian sanitation science, moral pathol-ogies of decay, and the ‘‘recycling imperative’’ suggests that a parallel story might betold in Great Britain. Hamlin cites English agricultural chemist James F. W. Johnston,who appears to have borrowed from Dumas’s theory of natural circulation (describedlater in this essay) in an 1853 publication. Clergyman and reformer Charles Kingsley,perhaps inspired by Pierre Leroux, celebrated sewage in the 1850s as a solution topoverty and an answer to Malthus. This article does not deal with urban sewage treat-ment or sewage farming, subjects wonderfully treated by Hamlin and Donald Reid.See Chistopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain,1800–1854, ed. Charles Rosenberg (Cambridge, 1998), esp. 401–4. Donald Reid,Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). Fora synthetic view of waste and economy, see Catherine Gallagher, ‘‘The Bio-Economicsof Our Mutual Friend,’’ in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher,Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

10. Jean-Pierre Lacassagne, ‘‘Victor Hugo, Pierre Leroux et le circulus,’’ Bulletin de la Fa-culte des Lettres de Strasbourg 48, no. 7 (1970).

11. Norton Wise, ‘‘Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural Philosophy inNineteenth-Century Britain,’’ History of Science 28, no. 81 (1990): 224.

12. Norton Wise and Crosbie Smith, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin(Cambridge, 1989).

13. Thomas S. Kuhn, ‘‘Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discov-ery,’’ in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison,1962), 334.

14. H. S. Banzhaf, ‘‘Productive Nature and the Net Product: Quesnay’s Economies Ani-mal and Political,’’ History of Political Economy 32, no. 3 (2000): 519. Citing Dupontde Nemours, De l’exportation et de l’importation des grains (1764).

15. David H. Pinkney, Decisive Years in France, 1840–1847 (Princeton, 1986), 23–36.16. Marcel Chaigneau, Jean-Baptiste Dumas: Sa vie, son oeuvre, 1800–1884 (Paris, 1984),

186.17. Ernest Kahane, Boussingault entre Lavoisier et Pasteur (Argueil, 1988), 34–37.18. Ibid.19. ‘‘Boussingault,’’ in Dictionnaire des parlementaires francais depuis le 1er mai 1789 jusqu’au

1er mai 1889, ed. Adolphe Robert (Paris, 1889).20. Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, Economie rurale consideree dans ses rapports avec la chimie, la

physique et la meteorologie, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1851), 2:298.21. Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, ‘‘Analyses comparees des alimens consommes et des pro-


duits rendus par une vache laitiere; recherches entreprises dans le but d’examiner siles animaux herbivores empruntent de l’azote a l’atmosphere,’’ Annales de chimie et dephysique 72 (1839): 114.

22. Ibid.: 113–44.23. Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, La Fosse a Fumier. Lecon professee au Conservatoire Imperial

des Arts et Metiers (Paris, 1858), 24.24. Boussingault, ‘‘Analyses comparees des alimens,’’ 118.25. Jean-Baptiste Boussingault and Louis Frederic Le Bel, ‘‘Recherches sur l’influence de

la nourriture des vaches, sur la quantite et la constitution chimique du lait,’’ Annalesde chimie et de physique 71 (1839).

26. Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, ‘‘Analyses comparees de l’aliment consomme et des excre-ments rendus par une tourterelle, entreprises pour rechercher s’il y a exhalation d’a-zote pendant la respiration des granivores,’’ Annales de chimie et de physique 3rd series,no. 11 (1844): 434.

27. Ibid. Emphasis mine.28. Boussingault, La Fosse a Fumier. Lecon professee au Conservatoire Imperial des Arts et Me-

tiers, 1.29. Ibid., 25.30. Matthias Dorries, ‘‘Easy Transit: Crossing Boundaries Between Physics and Chemis-

try in Nineteenth-Century France,’’ in Making Space for Science, ed. Crosbie Smith andJohn Agar (New York, 1998), 254. Thanks to Myles Jackson for pointing me towardRegnault’s involvement in thermodynamics.

31. Kuhn, ‘‘Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery,’’ 335.32. Mary Jo Nye, Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800–1940

(New York, 1996), 95.33. Dorries, ‘‘Easy Transit,’’ 255, and Alan J. Rocke, ‘‘Organic Analysis in Comparative

Perspective: Liebig, Dumas, and Berzelius, 1811–1837,’’ in Instruments and Experimen-tation in the History of Chemistry, ed. Frederick L. Holmes and Trevor H. Levere (Cam-bridge, Mass., 2000), 309.

34. Georges Canguilhem, ‘‘La Constitution de la physiologie comme science,’’ in Etudesd’histoire et de philosophie des sciences (Paris, 1994), 260.

35. Dorries, ‘‘Easy Transit,’’ 257.36. William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Trans-

formation, ed. George Basalla and William Coleman (New York, 1971), 139.37. Henri-Victor Regnault, Cours elementaire de chimie: a l’usage des facultes, des etablisse-

ments d’enseignement secondaire, des ecoles normales et des ecoles industrielles, vol. 4 (Paris,1865).

38. ‘‘Dumas ( Jean-Baptiste),’’ in Dictionnaire des parlementaires francais, ed. Adolphe Robert(Paris, 1891).

39. Alan J. Rocke, Nationalizing Science: Adolphe Wurtz and the Battle for French Chemistry(Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 139. Citing Jean Jacques. See also Chaigneau, Jean-Baptiste Dumas: Sa vie, son oeuvre, 1800–1884.

40. Jean-Baptiste Dumas and Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, Essai de statique chimique des etresorganises. Lecon professee par M. J. Dumas le 20 aout 1841 pour la cloture de son cours a l’Ecolede Medecine, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1844). Unnumbered page.

41. Ibid., 7.42. Ibid.43. Jean-Baptiste Dumas, ‘‘Statique chimique,’’ in Traite de chimie appliquee aux arts (Paris,

1844), 417–18.


44. Dumas and Boussingault, Essai de statique chimique, 6.45. Ibid., 16. 46. Ibid., 6. 47. Ibid.48. Henri Milne Edwards, ‘‘Organisation,’’ in Dictionnaire classique d’histoire naturelle, ed.

Bory de Saint-Vincent (Paris, 1827), 334. Edwards was a close collaborator of Du-mas’s. On ‘‘life as organization,’’ see Canguilhem, ‘‘La Constitution de la physiologiecomme science.’’

49. Dumas and Boussingault, Essai de statique chimique, 42.50. Ibid., 40. Dumas’s recycling machine resembled that of eighteenth-century chemist

and pharmacist Antoine Baume, who viewed nature as a ‘‘vast chemical laboratory’’of composition and decomposition. Baume was perhaps also the source of Dumas’sascription of generative properties to plants but not to animals. Thanks to UrsulaKlein for contributing this important link in the history of chemical thought.

51. On Hermann Boerhaave see Barbara Orland, ‘‘Milk: The Stuff of Practical Experi-ences. A Case Study in Eighteenth-Century Animal Chemistry’’ (unpublished paper,2004), 17.

52. Dumas and Boussingault, Essai de statique chimique, 42.53. Ibid., 6.54. Dumas, ‘‘Statique chimique,’’ 424, 26.55. Ibid., 418.56. Dumas and Boussingault, Essai de statique chimique, 38.57. Dumas, ‘‘Statique chimique,’’ 426. Of course, Dumas noted, men tend to eat animals

as much as vegetables. As a result, herbivores act as ‘‘intermediaries between men andplants.’’ The ‘‘problem of agriculture,’’ therefore, ‘‘is to extract azote [nitrogen] fromthe air for the benefit of herbivores that give us their meat, and for the benefit of fertil-izers that procure wheat for us.’’

58. Dumas, ‘‘Statique chimique,’’ 715.59. Almanach du Chaulage et des engrais humains naturels dits chaux animalisee, chaux supersaturee

d’urine, urines imputrescibles. Salubrite et fertilite par l’utilisation d’une richesse jusqu’a ce jour nonconservee (Leipzig, 1865), 4:102.

60. Victor Pothier, Du Guano humain, ou reformes urgentes reclamees par l’hygiene et l’agriculture(Paris, 1856), 5. Pothier was Dumas’s student at the Ecole Centrale des Arts etManufactures.

61. Ibid. Citing Antoine Caillot, Curiosites naturelles, historiques et morales de l’Empire de laChine (1818).

62. Alan Macfarlane, The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan, and the Malthusian Trap (Ox-ford, 1997), 154–65.

63. Pothier, Du Guano humain, 18. Citing Schwertz.64. Chaigneau, Jean-Baptiste Dumas: Sa vie, son oeuvre, 1800–1884, 210–11.65. S. E. Finer, The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London, 1952), 222. Chadwick

claimed to have had the inspiration for sewage recycling on the occasion of a visit toan Edinburgh suburb in 1845. Given the dates involved, however, one might wonderwhether French literature on the subject did not also contribute to his plans.

66. Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick, 90.67. Dumas, ‘‘Statique chimique,’’ 426.68. Pierre Leroux, Malthus et les economistes, ou y aura-t-il toujours des pauvres? (Boussac, 1849),

217–19.69. ‘‘Leroux (Pierre-Henri),’’ in Dictionnaire des parlementaires francais depuis le 1er mai 1789

jusqu’au 1er mai 1889, ed. Adolphe Robert (Paris, 1891), 117. See also Armelle Le Bras-Chopard, De l’Egalite dans la difference: le socialisme de Pierre Leroux (Paris, 1986).


70. Maurice Agulhon, 1848, ou l’apprentissage de la Republique, Nouvelle histoire de la Francecontemporaine (Paris, 1973), 21.

71. Robert Carlisle, ‘‘The Birth of Technocracy: Science, Society, and Saint-Simonians,’’Journal of the History of Ideas 35, no. 3 (1974): 449.

72. I am indebted to Lynn Sharp’s and Warren Breckman’s discussions of Leroux andother French Romantic visions. See Lynn Sharp, ‘‘Metempsychosis and Social Re-form: The Individual and the Collective in Romantic Socialism,’’ French Historical Stud-ies 24, no. 2 (2004): 368. Warren Breckman, ‘‘Politics in a Symbolic Key: Pierre Ler-oux, Romantic Socialism, and the Schelling Affair,’’ Modern Intellectual History 2, no.1 (2005).

73. Ibid., 71. Citing Pierre Leroux, De l’humanite, de son principe et de son avenir, ou se trouveexposee la vraie definition de la religion et ou l’on explique le sens, la suite et l’enchainement du mo-saısme et du christianisme (Paris, 1840), 129.

74. Sharp, ‘‘Metempsychosis and Social Reform,’’ 368. Citing Leroux, De l’humanite, 246.75. Pierre Leroux, ‘‘Engrais,’’ in Encyclopedie nouvelle, ou dictionnaire philosophique, scientifique,

litteraire et industriel (Geneva, 1991), 803.76. Leroux, Malthus et les economistes, 57. This work was originally printed in a series of

articles, beginning with Pierre Leroux, ‘‘Science. De la recherche des biens materiels,ou de l’individualisme et du socialisme,’’ Revue Sociale, ou Solution pacifique du probleme duproletariat 1, no. 2 (1845).

77. Leroux, La Greve de Samarez, 299. For a discussion of the Boussac colony and Leroux’scirculus theory see Claude Harmel, ‘‘Pierre Leroux et le circulus. L’engrais humain,solution de la question sociale,’’ Les Cahiers d’histoire sociale, no. 14 (2000).

78. Leroux, La Greve de Samarez, 299.79. Pierre Leroux, ‘‘De la recherche des biens materiels (Quatrieme article) L’Humanite

et le capital,’’ Revue Sociale, ou Solution pacifique du probleme du proletariat 1, no. 6 (1846): 87.Armelle Le Bras-Chopard has contested the idea (which he attributes to DominiqueLaporte) that Leroux’s utopian vision did not require work. He cites passages thatechoed Charles Fourier’s theory of work as pleasure. However, Leroux unequivocallyobjected to industrial wage labor. Le Bras-Chopard, De l’Egalite dans la difference: le socia-lisme de Pierre Leroux, 308.

80. Pierre Leroux, ‘‘De la recherche des biens materiels, ou de l’individualisme et du socia-lisme. (Deuxieme article) Les Juifs rois de l’Epoque,’’ Revue Sociale, ou Solution pacifiquedu probleme du proletariat 1, no. 4 (1846): 55.

81. Leroux, Malthus et les economistes, 182.82. Leroux, ‘‘Science. De la recherche des biens materiels, ou de l’individualisme et du

socialisme,’’ 19.83. Leroux, ‘‘L’Humanite et le capital,’’ 87.84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid.87. Leroux, Malthus et les economistes, 182.88. Francois Vatin, Le Travail, economie et physique 1780–1830, ed. Francoise Balibar, et al.

(Paris, 1993).89. Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and

the Victorian Novel (Princeton, 2006), 24, 58.90. Pierre.-J. Proudhon, ‘‘Qu’est-ce que la Propriete?’’ in Oeuvres Completes (Paris, 1926).91. ‘‘Leroux (Pierre-Henri),’’ in Dictionnaire des parlementaires francais depuis le 1er mai 1789

jusqu’au 1er mai 1889, ed. Adolphe Robert (Paris, 1891), 117.92. Leroux, ‘‘L’Humanite et le capital,’’ 88.93. Leroux, Malthus et les economistes. Dominique Laporte deserves high credit for having


brought this work to light a generation ago in a provocative and insightful essay: Do-minique Laporte, Histoire de la merde (prologue), 2nd ed. (Paris, 1993).

94. Leroux, ‘‘L’Humanite et le capital,’’ 88.95. Leroux, Malthus et les economistes, 182.96. Gallagher, ‘‘Bio-Economics of Our Mutual Friend,’’ 346–51.97. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Donald Winch (Cam-

bridge, 1992), 27–28.98. Leroux, Malthus et les economistes, 57.99. Leroux, ‘‘Les Juifs rois de l’Epoque,’’ 50.

100. Catherine Gallagher has remarked perceptively on a similar equivalence betweenbodily waste and money in mid-Victorian England. Gallagher, ‘‘Bio-Economics ofOur Mutual Friend.’’ See also Catherine Gallagher, ‘‘The Body Versus the Social Bodyin the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew,’’ Representations 14 (Spring1986).

101. Leroux, ‘‘Engrais,’’ 808.102. Ibid.103. Almanach du Chaulage, 75.104. Strangely, to my knowledge no contemporary historian of Leroux’s oeuvre has dealt

with his profound anti-Semitism. Even analyses of the circulus leave aside this centralelement of the theory.

105. Leroux, ‘‘Les Juifs rois de l’Epoque,’’ 50–51.106. Thanks to Jan E. Goldstein for pointing out this link.107. Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830–1852 (Prince-

ton, 1984), 39.108. Edmund Silberner, Sozialisten zur Judenfrage: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Sozialismus vom

Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts bis 1914 (Berlin, 1962), 45–55. See also Marc Crapez, L’Anti-semitisme de gauche au XIXe siecle (Paris, 2002).

109. Leroux, Malthus et les economistes, 23n.110. Leroux, ‘‘Les Juifs rois de l’Epoque,’’ 51.111. On Romantic anticapitalism as a ‘‘quest for what has been lost,’’ see Robert Sayre

and Michael Lowy, ‘‘Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism,’’ New German Critique(1984): 57.

112. Leroux, ‘‘Les Juifs rois de l’Epoque,’’ 51.113. Ibid., 55.114. Moishe Postone, ‘‘The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth Century,’’ in

Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, ed. Moishe Postone andEric Santner (Chicago, 2003), 93.

"Waste Not, Want Not: Excrement and Economy in Nineteenth-Century France," Representations 96 (Fall...

Documents

Transcript of "Waste Not, Want Not: Excrement and Economy in Nineteenth-Century France," Representations 96 (Fall...