Abstract
Physical and moral regeneration was one of the great aspirations of the French Revolution. Revolutionaries fashioned new cultural practices to emphasize collective rebirth and the individual citizen's own break with a degenerate past. Often associated with radical politics, this article emphasizes regeneration's conservative manifestations after the Reign of Terror and the Thermidorean reaction of 1794. Against the backdrop of revolutionary transformations in medical theory and practice, doctors and surgeons sought to bring new biomedical knowledge upon previous regenerative projects, arguing that unrestrained biological passions had enervated the polity and caused social disaggregation. By studying domestic hygiene and the 'limited sensibility' of living matter, practitioners hoped they could reverse the Jacobin excess and popular upheaval through physical and moral education. These doctors claimed that recent clinical discoveries showed that human nature was less malleable than earlier revolutionaries had believed. Therefore, greater elements of emotional and corporal self-control, taught by practitioners and internalized within the family, could heal civil society and encourage social improvement. This bio-medical programme of regeneration radiated out across three levels, moving from elite clinical theorists to a kind of 'literary underground' of medical practice: a hygienic regimen aimed at controlling limited amounts of vital energy in the human body; a 'physical and moral' rehabilitation of women to anchor them in the domestic sphere; and reproductive strategies to breed new generations of rejuvenated citizens. In their efforts to incorporate republican hygienic sensibilities within traditional law and custom, doctors helped efface revolutionary memory and contributed to the paternalistic family law of the Civil Code in 1804. [PERIODICAL ABSTRACT]