Primates were among the few classes of animals spared in the Paris zoo massacre in 1870. Following the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, the theory of evolution was gaining acceptance, and some people feared that eating them verged on cannibalism. Not that cannibalism was entirely unknown in European society. The bodies of slaves captured and crucified during the Spartacist revolt in the first century BC were sold for sausage meat. In the 19th century, British companies paid to excavate old battlefields for the bones of common soldiers who’d been buried anonymously where they fell. These were processed into gelatin and glue, or ground up for animal fodder and fertilizer.
During the siege of 1870–1871, cannibalism was occasionally mentioned as, potentially, the greatest challenge to a chef. As one comic suggested, “Au sauce Madère/On mangera son Grandpère” (With a sauce of Madeira/We’ll eat his grandfather). One and a half centuries later, the Surrealists, who celebrated all forms of misbehavior, also flirted with the idea, evoking it peripherally in the title of their favorite word game Cadavres Exquis (Exquisite Corpses), in which players added phrases to a sentence without knowing what had been written before. The game took its name from an early success, “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau” (The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine).
In 1936, as the Spanish Civil war set faction against faction in a violent settling of old scores, Salvador Dalí painted Autumnal Cannibalism, “showing a couple, isolated at a table in an otherwise featureless landscape, politely devouring one another with knife and fork. A similar scene appears in the film L’Âge d’or (The Golden Age), for which Dalí collaborated with Luis Buñuel. To the accompaniment of the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, actor Gaston Modot gnaws at the hand of co-star Lya Lys. Buñuel tried to achieve the effect by having the actor slobber over an already mutilated hand, but at best it approximates Dalí’s vision. When he published his wildly unlikely cookbook Les Dîners de Gala in 1973, Dalí collected seafood and egg recipes under the heading Les Cannibalismes de l’automne (The Cannibalisms of Autumn).
Some women enjoyed offering themselves for devouring, at least in imagination. Cora Pearl, a grande horizontale of the belle époque, entertained her admirers in style at her Château de Beauséjour on the Loire. This included having herself, nude except for a few sprigs of parsley, carried in to dinner on a large platter supported on the shoulders of four servants, with the exhortation that the diners “cut into” this tasty dish. In 1959 in Berne, Switzerland, Meret Oppenheim staged a “fertility feast,” the pièce de résistance a naked girl supine amid fruits, nuts and other symbols of fecundity. Under protest, she substituted a dummy, but not before news of the event reached André Breton, who invited her to restage it for the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris.
Shortly after, Georges Bardawil wrote the novel Aimez-vous les femmes? (Do You Like Women?), the story of a cannibal cult in modern Paris that uses a vegetarian restaurant as a cover for its anthropophagus activities. In 1964, it was adapted into a film starring Sophie Daumier, who posed memorably naked on a large dish, garnished with discreetly arranged pieces of fruit. British director Peter Greenaway may have had this film in mind in 1989 when he made The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. A woman whose gangster husband has murdered her lover persuades the chef at his favorite restaurant to roast the body and serve it to her husband, who is forced to sample it at gunpoint. In his Oscar-winning script for the 1965 film Darling, Frederic Raphael wrote a scene, never used, in which the protagonist, model Diana Scott (Julie Christie), meets with a consortium of executives who are launching her as a corporate entity. After the deal is signed, they ritually consume her in an effigy made of ice cream.
Scene from Aimez-vous les femmes?
In Paris literary circles, the name most associated with cannibalism was that of globe-trotting American author William Seabrook. An enthusiast for remote places, Seabrook had lived in Africa and among the voodoo priests of Haiti, the subject of his pioneering 1929 study The Magic Island. Moving to Paris, Seabrook pursued an interest in sadomasochism, keeping naked women chained around his house and commissioning Man Ray to photograph them.
In 1930, Seabrook published Jungle Ways, a description of his time spent in West Africa living with a cannibal tribe, the Guere. When he expressed interest to his tribal friends in the taste of human flesh, they served him a spicy stew, which, they informed him, straight-faced, contained portions of a slain enemy. Never entirely sure he wasn’t the victim of a practical joke, Seabrook determined to find out for sure. Exploiting the elastic morality of bohemian Paris, he acquired a portion of human flesh from a friend in the Sorbonne medical school. Handing it to his cook, he asked her to prepare it in a number of ways, hoping one would resemble what he had eaten in Africa. The results, though not unpalatable, were inconclusive. “The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal,” he wrote, “a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.”
Visitors to the Louvre are seldom aware that Théodore Géricault’s overpowering Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa), five meters by seven, records an incident of cannibalism. In 1816, the frigate Méduse ran aground off the coast of Senegal. Believing they could easily reach land, the passengers built a raft and squeezed 147 on board for what they assumed would be a brief voyage. Instead, the raft was carried out to sea. Passing boats failed to spot it for 13 days, by which time only 15 were left alive, having survived by eating the dead.
Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa), Théodore Géricault, 1818–19, Musée du Louvre
Based on the memories of two survivors, and using live models, wax figures and corpses from the morgue, Géricault recreated the incident in his studio. Exhibited at the salon of 1819, the painting caused a sensation. Critics who felt art should educate and uplift were dismissive. “The goal of painting is to speak to the soul and the eyes,” said one, “not to repel.” Others believed Géricault had captured the survival instincts that lurked just below the surface of civilized society. As one put it, “Our whole society is aboard the raft of the Méduse.”