Exposing Sexual Contagion: Fournier’s Syphilography and Picasso’s Syphilitic Bodies

“Everything is syphilis!” exclaimed Joris-Karl Huysmans in 1883. That year when Alfred Fournier published his research on latent syphilis, increasingly transmitted by illicit sex and resurging across four hereditary generations, almost every kind of malformation and abnormality became attributed to it. “A danger permanently menaces public health”, warned Fournier. “This danger resides in the disease that one could call the modern plague and which is none other than syphilis.” Since the Wasserman blood test able to identify syphilitic infection was not developed until 1906 and since hygiene regimes proved relatively ineffective in containing it, there was a dire need to illuminate its signs and to instill syphilophobia. To expose the public to this “modern plague” and to terrify them with its consequences, Fournier developed syphilography.
Drawings, black and white photography, Méheux’s coloured photography alongside coloured plates, light projections, lithograph posters and leaflets were all commissioned by Fournier, alongside lifelike wax moulages from Jules Baretta for the Musée de Saint-Louis. In being able to ignite shock, Baretta’s lifelike waxworks and Méheux’s watercoloured photographs accentuating syphilitic corrosions in all their gory detail were hailed as “effroyable réalisme”: “Frightening realism” able to arouse syphilophobia. A new hyperregulatory regime for prostitution was introduced plus a rigid code of sexual hygiene confining all sexual activity to marriage. “If humanity manages this return to innocence and the golden age,” declared Fournier, “the days of syphilis shall be numbered.”
Conterminously, when venereally infected prostitutes and their children were incarcerated under Fournier’s hyperregulationism at the prison Hôpital Saint-Lazare, Pablo Picasso began sketching their syphilitic bodies with those of their heredo-syphilitic progeny. Once the Maisons de tolérance were threatened with neoregulation and their French colonial prostitutes infected with syphilis, Picasso also began canvassing their bodies in different stages of syphilitic infection. While his brutal disfigurations appear not necessarily inconsistent with the explicit detail of Fournier’s wax models and coloured syphilographics to inspire, in Fournier’s words, “a salutary terror”, the accusatory gaze of Picasso’s indigenous syphilitic African prostitutes, contests their identification as the source of “the venereal peril”. By focusing upon this dialectical visual culture, this paper shall explore how Picasso’s cultural contextualization of the colonial victims of France’s “syphilizing mission” illuminates how Fournier’s syphilographic medical humanities operated as an intimidating decontextualizing strategy of dissuasion and sexual repression disavowing the roles played by France’s “civilizing mission” in fertilizing this “modern plague”.