An Enlightened Approach to Food
Nothing is more insipid than early fruits and vegetables.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau1
After eight years of the Régence, Louis XV came to power in 1723, at the tender age of thirteen. He would sit on the throne for more than fifty years, presiding over a gradual decline of French power and prosperity. He tried to emulate his great-grandfather’s autocratic rule, but this Louis was no Sun King. He was not particularly bright, nor forceful, nor ambitious. France spiraled into disorder while the king indulged in a life of languor and vice, with the court reen-sconced in the decadent environs of Versailles. The king was a profligate spender and notorious for his many mistresses and his predatory pursuit of women. Whispers of a royal “harem” of young beauties swirled scandalously about the court for years.
In the spring of 1744, Louis was encouraged by one of his young mistresses to take a more active role in the plodding War of the Austrian Succession, another French attempt (this time, allied with Prussia) to cripple their Hapsburg foes. While preparing to invade the Austrian Netherlands, he fell ill for some months in the city of Metz, of some kind of unspecified fever. This may have been the only time Louis XV was truly popular among his subjects, as the French people prayed fervently for his recovery. Thousands of candles were lit at Notre-Dame for Louis “le Bien Aimé” (the Well Loved). Louis vowed that should he survive, he would build a new church dedicated to Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris. He eventually recovered and commissioned the church to be built on a hill overlooking the Seine, in the Latin Quarter of Paris. By the time the fabulously ornate church was completed in 1790, the French Revolution had dimmed enthusiasm for religious projects. The building instead became the magisterial Panthéon, a secular mausoleum dedicated to the most transcendent citizens of the Republic.
Among those buried in the Panthéon is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a giant of the Enlightenment whose radical political philosophy enormously influenced the American and French revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century. Relatively less attention has been given to his unorthodox ideas about food and the human diet, which also epitomized the broad challenge to dogma and authority that characterized eighteenth-century France.
Rousseau believed that early man had been born free, in a “state of nature,” but over time had become corrupted and enslaved by the social conventions that arose with the progress of civilization, and especially with the emergence of private property. One manifestation of this fall from innocence was the eating of meat, an unnatural practice that symbolized man’s abandonment of harmony with nature for a world of cruelty and competition. He wrote: “All savages are cruel, and it is not their morals which cause them to be so. This cruelty comes from their food. They go to war as to the hunt and treat men like bears . . . Great villains harden themselves to murder by drinking blood.”2
Unlike most people at that time, who saw the ever-increasing diversity and sumptuousness of food as a sign of the progress of civilization, Rousseau disapproved of complicated and luxurious foods. They transformed the act of eating from one of survival to one of prestige, and they provided yet more evidence of man’s increasing detachment from nature. And Rousseau was particularly appalled by the “new vegetables” so painstakingly produced at Versailles: “It takes effort—and not taste—to disturb the order of nature, to wring from it involuntary produce which it gives reluctantly and with its curse.”3
Clearly, if eating meat, fancy foods, and unnaturally early vegetables took mankind away from the benevolent state of nature, harmony might be encouraged by avoiding such foods and adhering to a simple diet of bread, eggs, dairy, fruit, and conventional vegetables, which is exactly what Rousseau advocated. He was particularly fond of omelettes, and apparently considered himself something of a specialist in preparing them.
Rousseau enjoyed wine, but not to excess. Interestingly, while he saw drunkenness as a failing, he did not assume it was worse than many other vices; an honest drunk was worth more than a duplicitous sober person. He wrote, “In countries of bad character, plots, treasons, adultery, one fears the state of indiscretion when one can show his heart without thinking about it. Everywhere, people that loathe drunkenness the most are those that have the strongest interest to avoid it.”4 He described three categories of wine. Vin du cru was the regular vin de pays enjoyed by ordinary people, those who embraced good food without pretension. This was the best wine, of course, the most natural and authentic. Vins fins was the luxury wine of the elites, and vin frelaté was the adulterated wine sold by unscrupulous innkeepers.5
While Rousseau was an extreme voice, his devotion to authenticity over artificiality was shared by a number of other thinkers at that time.6 The famous Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, for example, revealed its bias toward authenticity in its entry for “Cuisine,” noting that there existed “about a hundred different ways to disfigure the foods that nature gives us, which thereby lose their good quality and become, if one can say so, pleasing poisons that destroy tempers and shorten lives.”7 Gradually, more and more people came to see the virtue of simplicity and tradition. The kind of rustic cuisine long scorned by tastemakers became seen as thrifty and virtuous, contributing to a more moral lifestyle. Moderation in diet was increasingly seen as vital for good physical health, too, as scientific understanding of the human body progressed. Fresh food, prepared simply, was appealing after so many years of elaborate, heavy dishes. New cookbooks appeared to help the bourgeois classes adapt aristocratic recipes to their own capabilities.
Even Louis XV, hardly a progressive thinker, favored a more natural and intimate style of dining than his predecessor. He enjoyed having meals at a round table in a small salle à manger, or dedicated dining room, a concept just then becoming popular among the aristocracy. He even cooked for himself sometimes, and a number of his courtiers were keen gastronomes. Louis’s most notable mistresses, Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, plied the king with his favorite foods, creating or inspiring a number of dishes (filets de sole à la Pompadour, for example, features Madame’s beloved truffles; crème de chou fleur à la Dubarry is a creamy cauliflower soup, as pale as its namesake’s skin).
Louis gradually spent less and less time at Versailles, preferring the conviviality of Paris. But this did not limit his carousing and spending, and the royal debts piled higher and higher. The luxurious tastes of Madame du Barry also cost the crown millions of livres (she would eventually be sent to the guillotine, in 1793, during the Reign of Terror). Louis also engendered serious diplomatic and military reversals for France, embarking on a disastrous alliance with Austria and losing French dominions in Canada and India to the British following the Seven Years’ War. By the end of his reign, French power had substantially evaporated, and popular dissatisfaction with the monarchy was evident everywhere—in provincial assemblies, among philosophers and writers and artists, in the cafés of Paris. In his final years, the king did not dare appear in public.
Louis XV died of smallpox in 1774. Only three candles were lit in Notre-Dame for the previously Well Loved, a sign of how far he had fallen from favor.8 So great was the popular hostility to the monarchy that only a truly splendid king could have snatched it from its looming fate. Instead, Louis’s grandson assumed the crown as King Louis XVI, the last king of the ancien régime.