On the afternoon of July 14, 1789, as his subjects stormed Paris’s prison, the Bastille, igniting the French Revolution, Louis XVI, ensconced 25 kilometres away in the palace of Versailles and ignorant of the events that would lead to his downfall as well as that of his family and the entire leisured class of France, updated his diary, summarizing the day in a single word—“Rien” (Nothing).
To be fair to Louis, “Nothing” didn’t mean the day was without incident, but rather that he had not hunted, and therefore killed no animal. In a culture that took pride in doing no work and pursuing only pleasure, hunting was one of the few activities in which the nobility could honorably indulge.
Long after the whole of France was swept by intimations of revolt, Louis believed it was just a short-lived protest by radicals about the high price of bread. In July 1788, hailstorms had destroyed almost the entire harvest. In the winter that followed, canals and rivers froze, paralyzing the traffic in grain and cutting off supplies to the mills that ground it to flour. Grain stored for too long in damp conditions often spoiled. Any flour made from this wheat appeared yellow, smelled bad and could carry the poisonous fungus ergot that caused Saint Anthony’s Fire, a severe burning sensation in the limbs. Most of it was used to make alcohol.
In the summer of 1787, a two-kilo loaf of bread cost eight sous. Following the failed harvest of 1788, the price rose to 12, and by February 1789 reached 15. At a time when a family of four needed two loaves a day to survive, the average working man was paid only about 30 sous a day. To stretch their supplies, bakers adulterated wheat flour with other grains, such as millet, and even added sawdust. Barefoot, mobs of Parisians walked to Versailles and gathered at the gates, demanding the king release grain from the royal granaries.
According to legend, Marie Antoinette asked a servant why they were shouting.
“They have no bread, your highness.”
All this fuss because they had no toast for breakfast? “In that case,” the queen is supposed to have said, “why not eat brioche?” (Somewhere between cake and bread, brioche was part of the royal petit déjeuner.) An Italian princess actually made this remark two generations before. Nor was it the sort of thing Marie Antoinette would have said. Being Austrian, she had a more cosmopolitan view of European cuisine than most French people.
Marie Antoinette was indirectly responsible for introducing the potato into France. Known since Columbus brought it back from the New World three centuries before, it was shunned as inedible because of its association with the earth until its champion, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, persuaded the king and queen to take an interest. Marie Antoinette planted some at Versailles, and wore their white flowers in her hair. Encouraged by this patronage, Parmentier hosted a dinner that used potatoes in 20 different dishes. He also planted fields of potatoes in the Bois de Boulogne, ostentatiously placing guards so that people, thinking the plants and tubers valuable, would steal them. When the wheat harvest failed in 1787, the peasants ironically had potatoes on which to fall back, and thus survived to depose Louis and Marie Antoinette two years later.
Antoine-Augustin Parmentier presenting a potato plant to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Le Petit Journal,, 1901
Seeing no quick solution to the nation’s problems, Louis’s advisers urged him to flee. After dragging his feet until June 1791, Louis set out for Belgium, where he’d been told a force of loyal troops waited at the town of Montmédy, ready to lead a counterrevolution. The attempted escape was monumentally inept. Disguised unconvincingly as conventional ladies and gentlemen, the royal family and a retinue of courtiers set out in a caravan of carriages. Even then, they might have succeeded had Louis not insisted on using the most lavish of the regal coaches, so heavy that, on the first day, they only got as far as Varennes, 200 kilometers from Paris.
There, an alert innkeeper recognized the king, who was placed under house arrest by the local prosecutor, Jean-Baptiste Sauce. When he didn’t return immediately to Paris, stories circulated that the famously greedy monarch was not so much Sauce’s prisoner as his guest. According to gossip, the king took a liking to the local cheese, and even toasted M. Sauce with his own burgundy. Each new report, true or false, further eroded the respect in which Louis was held. On the gates of the Tuileries Palace, his Paris residence, someone who knew his tastes in meat hung a sign announcing “Lost Pig” and offering a reward for its return.
The king under arrest, and by the hand of a man named, of all things, Sauce, was a gift to the feuilletonistes, whose insulting reports and satirical cartoons were peddled by the bouquinistes along the Seine. One anonymous lithograph, The Glutton, or Big Birds Fly Slowly, showed the royal family resting at Varennes. Ignoring framed pictures on the wall of the fall of the Bastille that show he’s in a revolutionary stronghold, Louis tears into a chicken with his bare hands. Prosecutor Sauce, drawn with the narrow face and pointed nose of the leading revolutionary, Maximilien de Robespierre, tries to serve an arrest warrant. “I don’t give a fuck about all that,” says Louis. “Let me eat in peace.” Across the room, Marie Antoinette, admiring herself in the mirror—she was notoriously vain—says, “My dear Louis, you’ve already eaten two turkeys and drunk ten bottles of wine, when you know we are going to have dinner at Montmédy.”
The Glutton, or Big Birds Fly Slowly, anonymous lithograph
Taken back to Paris under guard, the royal family was imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace. Their flight changed public attitudes to the king, who, in trying to escape, showed he would never accept the changes demanded by the revolution. Within two years, he and his wife, along with thousands of men, women and children, would die on the guillotine.