Do the names of perfumes bear witness to a return to religion?

In history, you have to know how to keep the big sentences full of meaning: “I want a woman’s perfume with a woman’s scent”, Coco Chanel would have said in 1921 about N° 5. Until now, this sentence made me think irresistibly of this well-known injunction of Deuteronomy: “You shall not cook a kid in its mother’s milk”. This risky, psychoanalytically interesting comparison sheds some light when I open a “History of prejudices”, published these days at the Arènes. Forty historians, and not the worst, have come together to deconstruct received ideas such as “The Chinese are cunning” (spoiler: it’s wrong) or “Big people lack willpower” (spoiler: that’s also wrong).

One of these prejudices catches the eye. “Women wearing perfume are dangerous.” I had never thought of it, but yes, it is obvious. 19th century literature^e is full of “cocottes”, women with intoxicating perfumes and loose morals, and all you have to do is set foot in a Sephora or a Marionnaud* to realize that sin and perfume are pretty good friends. Here are some names found on the bottles: “La petite robe noire”, “Black opium”, “Flowerbomb”, “Scandal”, “Poison” (there is also “Angel” and “Chance”, but we seek here to validate our prejudices about the history of prejudices). One will also think of the smells of violets in Zola’s “Nana” or this manual of good manners dating from 1878, da