It is probably true that the upper classes may have not been physically dirty, but I bet they smelled to high heaven. For the majority of history, personal cleanliness was not only not a priority, it was considered unhealthy to bathe.
So there were many perfumes and things used to mask the smell of yourself and other people, otherwise, people just got used to the smell of body odor, feces, and urine.
Think of all the bad breath. It must have just been regarded as normal.
I don’t give a crap what anyone says-one of the great underappreciated parts of modern life is not having your nasal senses constantly assaulted. Having been places where that isn’t always the case, I sure appreciate is almost as much as hot running water, which is completely underappreciated by us and taken for granted!
I watched a documentary about Versailles some time ago, and the the conditions the French kings lived in was just horrid. No personal hygiene like we have today, perfume on top of perfume on top of perfume.
Sanitation was almost nonexistent- people would relieve themselves wherever they happened to be if they couldn’t make it outside and the royal staff would have to clean it up- I’m surprised it doesn’t still reek hundreds of years later.
When I first traveled in Europe in the 60s, oh, my, how the Parisian French stunk! If you stayed in a small hotel, chances are you had to use coins to operate not only toilet stalls, but also the unreliably warm (not hot) showers (this also in Germany and Italy).
Not only the body odor and lack of deodorants, and women not shaving their armpits, but also the widespread use of unfiltered Gaulois cigarettes totally reeked. It was putrid. Add the outdoor rusting iron urinals, and when none was available, men peeing in public against any upright surface like dogs—we Amurrican college girls were appalled.
People out in the countryside were a lot cleaner, even farmers.
The scent of death, the rotting Japanese corpses and the mountains of unburied feces on Pelialu in the Pacific is said to have driven men mad. The island is hard coral in its entirety which made digging impossible so the Japanese dead just laid there where they fell until long after the fighting was done. In the hot Sun. The blo fly population exploded and that as well, drove men over the edge.