A Bite-Sized History of France by Stéphane Henaut

Author:Stéphane Henaut
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620972526
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2018-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Camille Desmoulins incites the crowd to revolution at the Café du Foy on July 12, 1789, with the legendary appeal, “Aux armes, citoyens!” (“To arms, citizens!”). A statue of Desmoulins leaping upon his café chair was raised in the spot on the centenary of the revolution but removed and melted down by the Vichy regime in 1942. From the French Revolution Digital Archive, a collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Unattributed. Camillus Desmoulins predigt Aufruhr in dem Palais Royal: den 12 Jul. 1789, produced in Germany between 1794 and 1820.

We tend to think of the French Revolution as a unitary event, but it was really a series of political uproars that extended over many years. In this earliest phase, those advocating the transformation of France into a constitutional monarchy won out, while the more radical voices clamoring for a republic were forced to wait a few more years. In August 1789, the National Assembly formally abolished all feudal rights and structures, which were seen as the underlying basis for social inequalities, and announced the Declaration of the Rights of Man, an astounding manifestation of liberal Enlightenment ideals.

The cafés continued to house political intrigue in the following years, even as some of their most ardent patrons went to the guillotine: Desmoulins and Danton were consigned to death in April 1794 by Robespierre, who followed himself a few months later. The French politician Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy noted that even as the cafés became more moderate in the postrevolutionary era, “one does not govern against the cafés. The revolution took place because they were for the revolution; Napoleon reigned because they were for glory.” Small wonder he defined them as “one of the branches of legislative power in the free nations.”4

The revolution also generated a sea change in the capital’s restaurants. With the fall of the Bastille and the ugly public mood surrounding it, many wealthy nobles decided (probably correctly) that emigration might be a safe course of action. As they fled, they left behind their household staff, including their chefs, many of whom were talented and ingenious cooks. A number of these unemployed chefs decided to open their own restaurants, in which anybody with sufficient funds could dine in style.

Restaurants had existed before the revolution, but they were a fairly new invention and suffered from competition with the various food guilds that had existed since the Middle Ages. Every type of food business had its guild, and each guild had its privileges. It was not possible, for example, to go to a single purveyor for a wide range of meat. Traiteurs served cooked meat dishes and stews, while rôtisseurs sold roasted meat, and charcutiers served cured pork products like ham, rillettes, and sausages (for raw meat, a trip to the butcher or poulterer was required). Bar owners and wine sellers could sell drinks but they were not allowed to sell food. Prior to the revolution, restaurants—from the French restaurer, “to restore”—were limited to selling restorative bouillons, which were technically distinct from the meaty stews that only traiteurs could serve.

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