Tattoos, Identity, and The Disturbing Fate of ‘Monsieur Bonheur’

When Gemma Angel met Monsieur Bonheur, she wasn’t fairly certain what to anticipate. Angel, pursuing her doctorate on the College School London on the time, was finding out a set of lots of of preserved items of tattooed pores and skin from European troopers, and he or she was no stranger to the unconventional and the macabre. However her first glimpse of Bonheur, in a non-public assortment in London in 2010, nonetheless managed to shock.

“Bonheur was in his library, coated up, simply leaning in opposition to the wall,” Angel says. “And it was type of a shock, but additionally fascinating.”

Angel had come to see the largely full, tattooed pores and skin of a nineteenth century Frenchman, which had been preserved, filled with horsehair, and nailed to a board. The stays, acquired some 20 years in the past from an vintage vendor in Paris, are presently within the possession of a person who has requested to stay nameless. That particular person, and a handful of researchers granted entry to check the unidentified Frenchman, name him “Monsieur Bonheur”—French for “happiness”—after one in every of his most distinguished tattoos.

When she first noticed the stays, Angel was writing her dissertation on a set of tattooed pores and skin fragments held by the Wellcome Assortment in London. The specimens date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a time when criminologists sought connections between bodily traits, reminiscent of tattoos, and delinquent habits. She says Bonheur is completely different, each for the near-completeness of his stays and their presentation. Whereas there isn’t a documentation to assist the declare, the story accompanying Bonheur from Paris to London is that he was a convicted prison who, after his execution, was displayed on the courthouse door as a warning to would-be wrongdoers.

“He’s positively not nicely preserved, and he’s not introduced within the context of a scientific assortment,” says Angel, now on the College of Leicester, the place she studies the history and anthropology of the European tattoo. “Bonheur speaks to one thing a lot darker, actually.”

“It could be that this general ‘preparation’ represents one thing much like what had been known as ‘sideshow mummies’ within the U.S. in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century,” stated College of Bournemouth organic anthropologist Martin Smith, lead writer of a recent paper on Bonheur in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, in feedback to New Scientist. He added: “Unclaimed, embalmed our bodies from establishments and funeral administrators had been exhibited for revenue, generally with an ‘thrilling’ (however unverified) story hooked up to them.”

The true story of the person who would develop into Bonheur stays unknown, although clues could also be gleaned from the greater than 50 tattoos he accrued over the course of his life. Photographs of women and men intermingle with natural world throughout his legs, arms, and chest. Scenes of violence and sweetness sit facet by facet: sword and daggers, the moon and stars. Symbols of nationalities combine freely, with a Gallic rooster strutting close to a Celtic cross and a Venezuelan flag. Their variety may encourage an imagined lifetime of journey: Maybe the person was a soldier or sailor, calling at far-flung ports.

However what we are able to say in regards to the man with confidence is way more restricted. Fundamental bodily traits verify he was male; language and different components of his tattoos point out he was in all probability a Frenchman, who died close to the top of the nineteenth century. His explanation for dying is unknown. An incision working down the size of his chest is according to an post-mortem, which suggests somebody with a point of medical data might have been concerned with the physique’s preparation. A lot of the pores and skin from the anterior, or entrance of his physique, was eliminated in a number of massive sections. Then, the stays had been primarily taxidermied, says John Troyer, writer of Applied sciences of the Human Corpse. Troyer, the director of the Centre for Demise and Society on the College of Tub, was not concerned within the latest analysis however is aware of the paper.

The best way Bonheur’s stays had been preserved signifies the motive was not scientific. “A taxidermied specimen, like a totally tattooed physique, turns into about visible spectacle,” Troyer says. “And actually about narrative and fewer about any type of scientific examine.”

“It speaks to one thing fairly macabre, really. There’s a type of morbid fascination with the concept of exemplary punishment,” Angel says.

Few individuals immediately related to Bonheur had been prepared to be interviewed on report, together with the person in possession of the stays. Smith and his co-authors both declined to remark immediately for this piece or couldn’t be reached, regardless of a number of makes an attempt. That reticence isn’t unusual on the subject of human stays beforehand handled as specimens or spectacles. “A number of pure historical past museums have these collections of tattoos,” Troyer says. “They usually simply don’t know what to do with them.”

Matt Lodder, a senior lecturer in artwork historical past and director of American research on the College of Essex, has had individuals inform him about stays allegedly of their private collections, and is conscious of one other particular person, tattooed and preserved equally to Bonheur, stored out of public sight in an Edinburgh museum.

Many such stays date to the nineteenth century, a time of fascination with amassing “curiosities,” and few moral restrictions. “It was a Wild West, actually,” Lodder says. “There have been these docs who simply thought stuff was fascinating, whether or not it was a tattoo or a bizarre ailment. They’d simply kind of hack it off and maintain it in a jar.”

As we speak, human stays in museum collections pose tough questions. It’s typically unattainable to know their provenance, or whether or not they had been collected ethically. Stays in personal collections, reminiscent of Bonheur, current extra challenges, Lodder says.

Troyer agrees, including that Bonheur has worth as a cautionary reminder of a time when collectors thought little of taking and preserving human stays, with out consent from, or regard for, the person.

Within the case of Bonheur, his tattoos might have performed a job in why his stays had been chosen to be preserved and presumably displayed. Whereas tattooing is a worldwide custom that dates again greater than 5,000 years, European attitudes towards it have swung backwards and forwards dramatically during the last millennium.

Many medieval Christian pilgrims who traveled from Europe to Jerusalem would get tattoos at their vacation spot to commemorate their journey. One store nonetheless in enterprise in Jerusalem at present, Razzouk Ink, traces its history back 700 years. As networks of world commerce—in addition to colonization and battle—grew, many European vacationers had been uncovered to cultures by which tattoos signified deep group connections, standing, or different core features of a person’s id. European sailors, troopers, retailers, and others started returning residence with tattoos that had private that means for them.

“The issues persons are tattooing on their our bodies are the issues they really feel most bluntly about,” Lodder says. “It’s the issues they love, the issues they hate.”

By the nineteenth century, even many rich Europeans, together with royalty, sported tattoos. King Frederick IX of Denmark, for instance, had a lot of tattoos from his time within the army. In 1881, whereas visiting Japan, Prince George of Wales—the long run King George V of England—wrote of getting a dragon tattooed on one arm and a tiger on the opposite, an occasion corroborated within the diary of his tutor, John Dalton.

As tattoos grew extra widespread throughout this era, nonetheless, some Europeans started to affiliate them with immorality and criminality, says Angel. The concept, rooted in racism and classism, seems to have grown out of a want to maintain “respectable” Europeans separate from cultures they seen as inferior or degenerate.

Early twentieth century French criminologist Alexandre Lacassagne carried out in depth analysis on tattooed criminals, searching for connections between prison habits and features of a tattoo reminiscent of theme or location on the physique. He didn’t succeed. His work, nonetheless, left a set of preserved tattoos for present-day researchers to check—although his deal with tattooed criminals additionally created a blind spot, says Lodder. “For those who’re a traditional particular person, your tattoos simply aren’t recorded for historical past,” he says.

Whether or not Bonheur was a prison stays unsure, however Smith and colleagues’ latest analysis, utilizing a spread of various imaging strategies, has revealed new particulars about his dozens of tattoos, a lot of which had been seen solely by infrared or multispectral mild. The researchers had been additionally capable of date the wood body across the stays to between 1846 and 1876.

Of his tattoos, an anchor, together with the phrases “Vive La Flotte” (“lengthy stay the fleet”), may imply Bonheur was a sailor. Different pictures additionally recommend a person well-traveled, together with the Venezuelan flag and figures dressed as French troopers in North African colonies. Some tattoos indicate love or heartache, such because the portrait of a lady with the title “Flourine” beside it.

A couple of of the tattoos recommend darker durations in Bonheur’s life. One proclaims “Mort aux Commissaires,” or “dying to commissioners.” One other tattoo depicts a person chained to a pillar with the date 1883. A chook soars close by, bearing in its beak the phrase liberté. “Most of the preserved samples of tattooed pores and skin collected in France and elsewhere in the course of the nineteenth century had been taken from convicts who had died in jail,” Smith informed New Scientist. The dated tattoo “may very well be interpreted as…depicting a prisoner both sentenced, or maybe due for launch, in 1883.”

However to start to sketch a narrative for Bonheur based mostly solely on his tattoos is to maneuver past the realm of proof and into hypothesis. Like drawing constellations by linking stars within the evening sky, this sort of narrative imposition affords a wealth of potentialities and little or no arduous reality.

Nonetheless, his distinctive tattoos may sooner or later assist determine who Bonheur was. If he actually had served within the army or achieved time in jail, data of these occasions mentioning his tattoos may nonetheless exist, says Lodder. “I might hazard a guess that somebody who’s aware of nineteenth century French criminological data may in all probability discover this man,” he says.

Angel says that discovering extra in regards to the circumstances round Bonheur’s preservation would probably additionally assist craft a greater biography for him. “I’d prefer to know extra about the place this artifact got here from, who put it collectively,” she says.

For now, nonetheless, we’re left with a set of clues, and extra questions than solutions in regards to the lifetime of the person who, in dying, turned Monsieur Bonheur.