All of the many regimes that followed the storming of the Bastille—three republics, three monarchies, and two empires from 1789 to 1870—relied on culinary practices to further their own ends. All of them operated from the urban center of Paris and its definition of country. In this domain as in so many others, it was the bourgeoisie that legislated in the name of France, and it legislated from Paris. Hence the culinary pantheon could stand nowhere else. Like any other cuisine with claims to a national audience, French cuisine negotiates the shifting space between the center and its peripheries, between the capital and the provinces, between the ties to geographical place and those, no less real, to an inclusive cultural space. As the culinary pantheon makes abundantly clear, French cuisine conveyed, promoted, and inspired Frenchness—no small contribution in a country where regional divisions ran deep enough to compromise a fledgling national unity more than once over the century.
Rhetoric notwithstanding, neither the revolution of 1789 that overthrew the monarchy nor the new century of Napoleonic conquest and nation building wiped the slate of cultural legacy clean. Indeed, the purposeful melding of antithetical traditions with contemporary concerns constitutes one of the enduring paradoxes of French society. The new century only strengthened the centralizing forces inherited from the Ancien Régime. “Since 1789,” a critic on the Far Right groused in 1870 as Paris was besieged by the Prussians, “there has always been a king of France, and only one: Paris.” Others greeted this Paris-centric society with joy. It was, after all, the immense concentration of cultural institutions as well as economic assets in this city that led Walter Benjamin to his celebrated characterization of Paris as the Capital of the nineteenth century.
And one great resource of this kingdom, as Paris à table impresses upon us again and again, was the range of public dining it offered the wealthy and (relatively) impecunious alike. Although restaurants first appeared in Paris in the late eighteenth century, they did not dominate public space until the nineteenth, when they became one of the most visible and distinctive of modern urban institutions. In contrast with the Ancien Régime, which coupled cuisine and class, nineteenth-century France tied cuisine to country. It urbanized and then nationalized the haute cuisine once sustained by the court and the aristocracy. It translated largely class-oriented culinary practices into a national culinary code.
The elites that supported the haute cuisine of the new century shifted as well. Most of them were new to their entitlement, which originated more from wealth than from birth. (Until the Second Republic in 1848, postrevolutionary regimes restricted the right to vote to men of a given tax bracket.) Consequently, the ostensibly apolitical nature of French cuisine was a great advantage in promoting national goals over partisan interests. Culinary practices served political objectives all the more effectively in that the fellowship of the table seemingly transcended political divisions to draw groups together.
In connections that are more than incidental, the French language took a similar path from the old regime to the new. The fetishizing of the French language has its parallel in the adoration of French cuisine; both presumed not simply excellence but also superiority and order. The cuisine of France, like its national language, is greater than the sum of its parts. Each illustrates the relationship between language and speech, between grammar and rhetoric, between code and usage, between collectivity and creator. During the Ancien Régime the use of the French language characterized a specific group—the king and court, the administration and elites more generally—and a particular place—Paris. The events that followed upon 1789 turned that language into the language of the Revolution, loosening the connections to place by extending the collective identification beyond elites and beyond Paris. Of course, the “frenchification” of France required a century.
It began with the dismissal of the many other languages spoken in French territory as dialect or patois, neither of which had any place in the new and, it was hoped, unified country. How to decide? In the oft-cited definition of the great twentieth-century linguist Ferdinand Brunot, a language has an army and a navy. So it was with French cuisine. It could call upon an external, incontrovertible authority. As the great chef Auguste Escoffier would observe with pride, it could call on a cadre of missionaries to spread the culinary good news. French cuisine was, he boasted, one of the most effective forms of diplomacy.
The Spectacular French Cuisine and Its History
