In the 1928 U.S. presidential election, the Republican Herbert Hoover trounced New York’s Democratic governor Al Smith, who suffered the twin liabilities of being Catholic and anti-Prohibition at a time when both characteristics were highly unpopular. While much of the campaign revolved around these sorts of religious and moral questions, the plight of the common person was, as always, an inescapable political issue. Hoover’s campaign promised voters “a chicken in every pot and a car in every backyard.” But we all know what happened next: the stock market crash, the Great Depression, soup lines, world war, et cetera, and so on. Small wonder that today, American politicians invoke the phrase “chicken in every pot” mockingly, as an example of the kind of people-pleasing campaign promise that has no hope of ever being achieved.
In France, the phrase has a completely different connotation, because the first Frenchman to offer this promise to his people was the hugely popular King Henry IV. In fact, from his very birth, Henry was surrounded by anecdotes and legends related to food, and these helped transform him from an unpopular royal heir to the most loved king in French history.
Henry was born in 1553 in Navarre, a small kingdom straddling the French and Spanish sides of the Pyrenees. He was known for most of his adult life as Henry of Navarre, and indeed, this is how we met him in the previous chapter, as the royal cousin who wed Catherine de’ Medici’s daughter Margaret on the eve of the Saint Bartholomew Day’s Massacre. When he was born, he was distant in the royal succession line of the Valois dynasty, as Catherine already had three living sons.
According to legend, Henry was raised simply among the common people of Navarre. (In truth, he also spent a good chunk of his childhood with his cousins in the royal nursery in Paris.) When he was born, his grandfather subjected him to a bit of medieval-style vaccination by rubbing his lips with garlic. He maintained a lifelong love for garlic in his food, which was unusual among nobles at the time because garlic, despite its medicinal qualities, was seen as a poor man’s spice. But Henry exploited this food taboo cleverly to cement his reputation as a common man of the people, ingesting garlic in enormous quantities. One of his mistresses is alleged to have told him: “Sire, you are fortunate to be the king, otherwise we couldn’t bear to stand next to you—you stink like a carcass.”
At his baptism, Henry’s lips were brushed with a bit of wine, most likely the sweet, white Jurançon wine from the region, which he also had a great liking for as an adult. Several centuries later, the poet Colette recalled: “When I was a teenager, I met a passionate prince, imperious, treacherous as all great seducers are: the Jurançon.”1 While ostensibly celebrating the flavors of this fine wine, it is also a clear reference to Henry, who developed a gargantuan appetite for women, having a true artichoke heart. He eventually fathered eighteen children by seven different women. His constant affairs and seductions brought him an endless supply of political and military problems—for example, invading unimportant locales to please the father of a current mistress. But none of this detracted from his popularity.
Henry’s relationship to the ruling Valois family came through his father, Antoine de Bourbon, while his claim to Navarre came from his mother, Jeanne d’Albret. As the Wars of Religion began to roil France in the 1560s, Navarre became a Protestant stronghold, and Henry a rising Huguenot leader. He became king of Navarre when his mother died in 1572, and in August of that year wed Margaret in Paris. In the massacre of Huguenots that followed, his life was spared by his cousin, King Charles IX. But Henry was forced to convert to Catholicism, and he was kept under house arrest for several years. This imprisonment continued when Charles died and his younger brother became King Henry III.
Henry III was not popular. He was Catherine’s favorite son, but he ignored much of her sensible advice and presided over a decadent court filled with frivolous young men (referred to as Henry’s mignons, or “cuties”) who engaged in constant dueling. He was often unwell, and he shunned wine for this reason, but he still hosted extravagant dinners that scandalized nobles and commoners alike. He was intelligent and not incapable, but he was widely seen as lazy and dissolute. He refused his mother’s entreaties to court Queen Elizabeth I of England (she was “too old”) and instead married the beautiful Louise of Lorraine, but they failed to produce an heir.
Henry III’s unpopularity meant that Catholics—even his own younger brother, Francis—began to join the Huguenots in rebelling against his rule, and his reign was fraught with sedition and conflict. The situation became even more volatile when Francis died and Henry still had no children, for now the next in line to the French throne was Henry of Navarre, who had escaped house arrest, renounced his forced conversion, and was once again leader of the Protestant forces. The leading Catholic nobles, headed by the Guise family, threw all of their political, military, and spiritual resources into preventing Henry from attaining the crown. For a time there was even the ludicrously named War of the Three Henrys, fought by the armies of King Henry III, Henry of Navarre, and Henry, Duke of Guise. Eventually King Henry III turned against the Guises and reconciled with his cousin, naming him as heir. In July 1589, these two Henrys joined their forces in an effort to reclaim Paris from the Guises’ Catholic League. But one evening, a Catholic friar entered King Henry’s encampment, claiming to have an important message. Instead, he stabbed the king, and Henry died the next day—the first French king to be assassinated. Thus ended the Valois dynasty, after more than 250 years of rule.
Henry of Navarre was now King Henry IV, the first king of the Bourbon dynasty, but it took several more years of warfare before he could sit on his throne. In 1593, he converted to Catholicism once again, which removed the main driver of resistance against him, and he reclaimed Paris the following year. (The sincerity of his conversion cannot be known, but he is famously said to have declared: “Paris is worth a mass.”) He continued to fight rebels funded by Spain for several years. Finally, in 1598, Henry signed the Edict of Nantes, which ended the French Wars of Religion. Catholicism was declared the official state religion, but important religious and political freedoms were granted to the Huguenots.
Henry IV began to rebuild his country, devastated after so many years of civil war, and he relied on his own personal popularity to restore the kind of strong personal monarchy that had benefited France in the past. He consciously strove to present himself as completely different from the last Valois kings—whereas they were weak, effete, and haughty, Henry was a rugged man of the people, who ate garlic and guzzled wine like a peasant. The previous kings had cared nothing for the common man, but Henry IV promised the French people un poule au pot le dimanche (a chicken in the pot every Sunday). It was a colloquial way of saying that he intended to restore peace and prosperity to the peasantry, with poule au pot effectively standing in for the people’s basic needs. Today, poule au pot can be a traditional Sunday dinner in France—a whole chicken stewed with vegetables and herbs (and garlic!) for several hours—but truthfully it is not something that people eat very often these days, even if they feel rather affectionate toward it in theory.
Like Charlemagne, Henry IV understood that the backbone of the French economy was agriculture—or, as his minister Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully, put it, in an expression that all French people know, “Plowing and grazing are the two breasts from which France is fed.”2 He relied on the advice of Olivier de Serres, the father of French agronomy, who suggested growing new crops such as maize, and also mulberries, to help develop a French silk industry. Serres’s wide-ranging agricultural innovations, publicized in his landmark study Le théâtre d’agriculture (1600), helped significantly improve productivity, and within a decade French agriculture had returned to its prewar production levels. Unfortunately, as in modern times, the French people did not literally get a chicken in every pot on Sundays, but certainly their overall well-being improved.
Henry also improved commerce and trade by embarking on major infrastructure projects (like draining marshes and building roads) and signing new international treaties. He eliminated the national debt, a feat that future kings usually failed to replicate. He promoted the development of luxury products like glassware, tapestries, and silk, and France began to develop the reputation for high-end goods that it continues to enjoy to this day. He reorganized the army and refortified France’s borders, and he supported French expeditions to the New World. Above all, he sustained a period of relative peace throughout the first decade of the seventeenth century, which allowed France’s natural advantages in agriculture and industry to be profitably exploited once again.
Henry must have hoped that renewed prosperity would help diminish the schism between Catholics and Protestants that had proven so destructive in his lifetime, but in the end, he was no match for the religious fervor that continued to plague France. Despite his general popularity, he was subjected to numerous assassination attempts during his reign, and in 1610 one of them finally succeeded. While the king’s carriage was stopped on rue de la Ferronnerie, in Paris’s Les Halles quarter, a Catholic fanatic named François Ravaillac jumped in and stabbed Henry to death. (A plaque still marks the spot today.) It was never determined whether Ravaillac was a lone assassin or in league with other conspirators, and he was eventually drawn and quartered for his crime.
Regardless of Henry’s failure to literally put a chicken in every pot, he remains known today as le bon roi (the good king), the one who was close to his people, understood the countryside, and was not another out-of-touch Parisian noble. It is a lesson not forgotten by French politicians today, as they invariably try to reaffirm how close they are to la France profonde. This is why every year the French president traipses through the Salon International de l’Agriculture, the enormous agricultural trade fair that dominates Paris every February, with mixed results: Jacques Chirac was a master of the political art of tâter le cul des vaches (caressing the cows’ asses), but Nicolas Sarkozy struggled mightily in his attempts to appear folksy.3 Sarkozy, already unpopular for his refusal to drink wine, provoked the French electorate even further by banning the after-dinner cheese course at the Élysée Palace, apparently for health reasons. (He was not reelected.) Meanwhile, Henry IV’s predilection for gluttony found an echo in the infamous last meal of President François Mitterrand before his death: several dozen oysters, foie gras, capon, and two tiny songbirds called ortolan, eaten whole (a normally illegal practice). The much less popular François Hollande, on the other hand, was most often associated with Flanby, a wobbly caramel custard.
France in 1603, during the reign of King Henry IV. From the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, New York Public Library. “Gallia.” New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Today, the far-right Front National tries to position itself as the true voice of the French countryside and frequently uses food to promote its narrow-minded ideas of what it means to be “authentically French.” Nothing could be further from the legacy of tolerance that Henry IV tried to establish. “Those who follow their consciences are of my religion, and I am of the religion of those who are brave and good,” the good king said, four centuries ago.4 Unfortunately for France, her wars of religion were not quite yet concluded.