That century represented the triumph of all the forces that banned public nakedness everywhere and altogether.

If, as Pudor insists, nakedness is aristocratic and the slavery of clothes a plebeian characteristic imposed on the lower classes by an upper class who reserved to themselves the privilege of physical culture, we may perhaps connect this with the outburst of democratic plebeianism which, as Nietzsche pointed out, reached its climax in the nineteenth century.

It is in any case certainly interesting to observe that by this time the movement had entirely changed its character.

It had become general, but at the same time its foundation had been undermined.
It had largely lost its religious and moral character, and instead was regarded as a matter of convention.

The nineteenth century man who encountered the spectacle of white limbs flashing in the sunlight no longer felt like the mediaeval ascetic that he was risking the salvation of his immortal soul or even courting the depravation of his morals; he merely felt that it was "indecent" or, in extreme cases, "disgusting." That is to say he regarded the matter as simply a question of conventional etiquette, at the worst, of taste, of aesthetics.