Daily Life During the French Revolution (22 page)

It was also a fact that France needed to increase its
population, since the number of young men in particular was declining as they
marched off to become cannon fodder. Banners carried by processions of
patriotic women through the streets of Paris declared: “Citizens, give children
to the
Patrie!
Their happiness is assured!”

In the late 1790s and early 1800s, as the political mood
shifted toward the right, the courts once again tightened the boundaries around
families, curtailing, for example, revolutionary promises to illegitimate
children, who now lost the right of inheritance. Under Napoleon, divorce was
more difficult to obtain, especially for women. A husband could sue for divorce
from an adulterous wife, but a wife could seek divorce against the husband’s
wishes only if he maintained a mistress in the family house. In 1816, under the
restoration monarchy, divorce was abolished altogether.

FOOD

Comparing English food to French, Arthur Young found to his
surprise the best roast beef not at home in England but in Paris. He also spoke
about the astonishing variety given to any dish by French cooks through their
rich sauces, which gave vegetables a flavor lacking in boiled English greens.
In France, at least four dishes were presented at meals (for every one dish in
England), and a modest or small French table was incomparably better than its
English equivalent. In addition, in France, every dinner included dessert,
large or small, even if it consisted only of an apple or a bunch of grapes. No
meal was complete without it.

Describing the dining process in high society, Young said
that a servant stood beside the chair when the wine was served and added to it
the desired amount of water. A separate glass was set out for each variety of
drink. As for table linen, he considered the French linen cleaner than the
English. To dine without a napkin (serviette) would be bizarre to a Frenchman,
but in England, at an upper-class table, this item would often be missing.

By the mid-eighteenth century, a small meal, the
déjeuner,
consisting of at least
café au lait
or plain milk and bread or rolls
and butter had spread across all classes. Workers and others whose days began
early had their
déjeuner
(breaking the overnight fast) about nine in the
morning. More substantial meals at this hour included cheese and fruit and, on
occasion, meat. It seems likely that they took something lighter and earlier,
and this became known as the “little breakfast” or
le petit déjeuner.

In 1799, Madame de Genlis wrote a phrasebook for
upper-class travelers in which she gave the names for quite a large variety of
foods consumed at breakfast, including drinks (tea, chocolate, coffee), butter,
breads (wheat, milk, black rye), eggs, cream, sugar (powdered, lump, sugar
candy), salt (coarse or fine), pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, mustard, anchovies,
capers, chopped herbs, radishes, cheese (soft, cream, gruyère, gloucester,
dutch, or parmesan), artichokes, sausages, ham, bacon, cold meats (veal,
mutton) for sandwiches, fruits (lemons, oranges), biscuits, cakes, jams, almond
milk, oysters, wine, beer, pastries, and so on.

Chocolate had been introduced into France in the previous
century, brought to Europe from the Americas by the Spaniards. By the beginning
of the eighteenth century, it was being regularly served at Versailles, and
courtiers might be invited to
chocolat du régent
(breakfast of chocolate
with the king). Marie-Antoinette usually had a light breakfast consisting of
café
au lait
or chocolate, along with a special kind of Viennese bread. Another
drink taken at breakfast was
bavaroise,
a mixture of tea and maidenhair
syrup; however, tea (introduced in France in the mid-seventeenth century) was
never popular and was generally considered a remedy for indigestion.

By far the most popular drink for all classes and in all
households was coffee, after 1750 almost always taken to start the day. It was
to be found not only in coffee shops but also in markets, and it was sold on
the streets. Cafes sprang up in Paris and became the place for fashionable men
to meet, as well as refuges for poor people, who used them as shelters. In
1782, Mercier wrote:

There
are men, who arrive at the café at ten in the morning and do not leave until
eleven at night [the compulsory closing time, supervised by the police]; they
dine on a cup of coffee with milk, and sup on Bavarian cream [a mixture of
syrup, sugar, milk, and sometimes tea].

In the provinces, coffee was not so welcome. In Limoges,
for example, coffee was drunk as a medicine. Equivalent to coffee houses were
chocolate houses that served chocolate with vanilla, sugar, and cinnamon. By
midcentury, this drink was added to the breakfast, although wine and brandy
were still consumed at the same time by many workers.

The
Aristocracy

In 1788, as cookbooks began to appear, a gourmet made a
list of France’s best gastronomic foods. It included turkey with truffles from
the Périgord,
pâté de foie gras
from Toulouse, partridge pâtés from
Nérac, fresh tunny
pâtés
from Toulon, skylarks from Pézénas, woodcock
from the Dombes, capons from the Cux, hams from Bayonne, and cooked tongue from
Vierzon.

A typical dinner for members of the royal family and the
elite class before the revolution comprised a first course (
entré
e) of
one or more soups and plates of roasted or stewed meat, served along with
similar dishes of poultry or seafood. The second (main) course contained the
largest dishes of meat and poultry, accompanied by various vegetables and
salad, and this was followed by the third course, comprising cheese, fruit,
pastries, and often
pâtés.

When the royal family was confined in Paris under guard,
members were permitted to take with them 12 servants, including a head cook and
his assistant, a scullion, a turnspit, a steward and his assistant, a boy, a
keeper of the plate, and 3 waiters. While imprisoned, the royals enjoyed a
breakfast that included coffee, chocolate, thick cream, cold syrup, barley
water, butter, fruit, rolls, loaves, powdered and lump sugar, and salt.

For dinner there were three soups and three courses
consisting (on non-fast days) of four entrees of meat, two roasts, and one side
dish. For dessert there were pears, other fruit, jam, butter, sugar, oil,
champagne, rolls, and wines from Bordeaux, Malvoise, and Madeira. Whatever they
left was eaten by the servants. Supper again comprised three soups and three
courses consisting of two roasts and four or five side dishes. On fast days,
supper was composed of four nonmeat entrées. Dessert was the same as for dinner
except that there was also coffee.

By 1793, affluent Parisians were eating dinner around three
or four o’clock. It included soup, lamb or cold beef, beet salad, fish (such as
sole or skate), turnips, potatoes, and, on occasion, a ham omelet. Dessert
included fruit (such as apples or pears) or cherries in brandy, cheese, and
jam.

Rural Practices

The diet of the peasants had little in common with that of
the wealthy. Even though many people raised animals, these were used mostly for
milk, cheese, and wool; the peasants and farmers could not afford to eat them,
and they were not permitted to kill any game animals as these were reserved for
the aristocrats. Hence, before the revolution, the poor ate practically no
meat. Instead, a kind of gruel made from boiled grain formed the center of
their diet, especially in winter. Some eggs, fruit, or vegetables were consumed
at home, but the best produce was taken to be sold in the markets. Encouraged
by the government, people began eating more potatoes, one of the principal
healthy food items of the rural population. Whereas grain was threatened with
destruction in wartime and from natural causes such as hail, causing great
hardship, the potato, growing below ground, was not exposed to such
devastation, and by 1787 it had become a staple food for country people.

Prices

A bourgeois wife of a future deputy to the
Convention from the Drôme area kept an account book. For a dinner in honor of
Robespierre in early 1793, she recorded her purchases, along with the prices
for that day. A laborer’s daily wage at the time would barely pay for two
loaves of bread.

During the five years between 1790 and
1795, rampant inflation left many people begging, seeking charity, and
starving.

After 1795, prices continued to rise at a
rapid rate doubling, tripling, and more.

Bread

Parisians believed they had the right to
cheap, good bread, and throughout the eighteenth century the greatest concern
of wage earners, small businessmen, artisans, and housewives was the
availability of bread at a reasonable cost. Concerns about bread appeared in
all correspondence of the period and whenever prices threatened to rise, there
was much disquiet and agitation, sometimes leading to violence.

To a large extent, farmers’ fields
determined the diet of the rural population, since the staple, bread, had to be
made from whatever grains were grown locally. If it was wheat, then whether the
wheat was hard or soft, large- or small-grained, gray or yellowish in color,
and even if it had begun to sprout just before the harvest, locals simply
worked with whatever they had. And if instead they grew rye, or rye and wheat mixed
(a common combination), or barley, that was what they used to make their bread.

Once the wheat and rye were harvested, they were sent to
the miller, who returned it in the form of white grain flour. Breads were
divided into categories based on the degree to which the bran and the germ had
been sifted out of the flour. The coarser the bread, the bigger the loaf; the
whiter the bread, the smaller the loaf. Wafers and pastries were made with the
finest white flour, created in a labor-intensive process.

In some places, such as Brittany and Normandy, flour ground
from buckwheat, known as
blé noir
(black wheat), was also made into a
cheaper and inferior bread that was usually eaten by the poor. Another source
of flour was the chestnut; this was used to make biscuits.

Watkin Tench, a British naval prisoner of war, in a letter
sent from Quimper, Brittany, on April 4, 1795, describes the local bread as
being gritty and of poor quality. It tasted of small sandy particles, a result
of both the softness of the grindstones and the grain’s being insufficiently
washed after being trodden out by the oxen. (Thrashing was not employed in this
region.)

A poor man’s bread was also made of barley and rye and,
sometimes, of oats and millet. Rice did not perform as well in France as in
other countries. It was eaten by the wealthy on occasion, cooked in milk, and
sometimes it was imported from places such as Egypt to feed the poor. Hospitals
often supplied rice to their inmates, and the military found rye useful at
times to feed the troops. In Paris, food distributed to the poor by the church
often contained rice mixed with mashed-up carrots, pumpkin, and turnips boiled
in water. Cheap bread made of rice and mixed with millet was also distributed
to the needy.

After the great hailstorm that destroyed much of the
harvest around the Paris basin in July 1788 and the concomitant bad weather in
large areas of the country that resulted in bad harvests, most of the
population of France would have been happy with a crust of bread. In this
period of brutal and widespread famine, the marquis de Ferrières-Marsay
mentions in a letter to his wife a light repast he had on April 26, 1789 as:
“six courses, more like hors d’oeuvres than anything, and including black
puddings, sausages, pâtés, a couple of joints of meat, two roast fowls, four
kinds of sweet, two mixed salads.” Not everyone went hungry!

During the periodic shortages of bread, French women had an
alternate source of nutritious food in the mushroom. They grew them in cellars
with a little sand and horse manure and in abandoned quarries around the
cities. Asparagus also was a food of value and vitamins—the tips mixed with egg
yolks and truffles were a delicacy. Some people believed in the aphrodisiac
properties of asparagus.

The diet of the peasant was generally poor in vitamins and
protein. Travelers reported that farm families in the high Pyrenees lived
almost exclusively on a thin porridge of milk, barley, or oats. Sheep were too
precious to eat, as in other regions. In Brittany, cider, rye bread, hard
cheese, curds, and whey were staples of the diet. In Anjou, white bread, fresh
butter and jam, wine, and even liqueurs were a daily source of nourishment.

Drink

The sources of water were rivers, streams, and wells. In
Paris, water from the Seine, supposed to be healthy, was distributed and sold
by about 20,000 water carriers throughout the city. The carriers delivered two
buckets of water, even to the top floors of buildings, for two sous a load. It
was a miserable wage and very hard work. Most Parisians, it can be assumed,
drank unclean water, and foreigners loathed its taste. It was said that it was
still better than that from the wells found along the left bank. There was also
celery water, fennel water, divine water, coffee water, and a bewildering host
of others. The various flavored waters came mostly from Montpellier. By the
time of the revolution, however, for those who could pay the price, purified
water was available thanks to a process established by the Perrier brothers.

Although the practice of distilling spirits goes back a
long way, the making of alcohol from grain and the production of brandy,
discovered in the sixteenth century, were well entrenched in French drinking
habits by the eighteenth. For many years, brandy was used as medicine to treat
plague, gout, and other ailments, but eighteenth-century Paris imbibed an array
of alcoholic concoctions—some fruit based, some composed of sugar, and rum
called “Barbados” waters. Brandy was made from plums, pears, apples, and
cherries and was produced wherever these could be grown.

Much brandy was made in the south, as was cognac, which
came from the area around the town of that name. What had been once a luxury
and a medicine became an everyday amenity. Liqueurs such as anisette (from
anis) and absinthe were popular. Calvados, made in Normandy from apples, was
enjoyed as a regional drink. Beer was not as popular as wine, which was the favored
drink and was often watered down.

Eating Out

With the coming of the revolution, chefs who had previously
worked in aristocratic houses now found themselves unemployed, and, while some
of them chose to go into exile, some entered the service of the Parisian
bourgeoisie; others opened restaurants. The redeployment of these master chefs
contributed to the spread of
grande cuisine.

Up to the eighteenth century, the word “restaurant” had
signified a curative bouillon “restorant,” or something that would strengthen
and restore a person. Before that time, the only choice had been between the
not-very-pleasant taverns (where more was drunk than eaten) and the purchase of
food that had been prepared by a professional caterer.

The first person to actually use the name “restaurant” as
we know it was a M. Boulanger, among whose clients was Diderot. From this time
on, restaurants began to multiply; establishments included the
Frères
Provençaux
(who introduced regional cuisine to Paris in 1782),
le Grand
Véfour,
in 1788, and
Véry,
in 1790. For the client, the introduction
of restaurants was advantageous: the menu was at a fixed price, the food was
good, and you could eat at your own pace in company of your choosing. At that
time it was possible to dine in a fairly good restaurant for less than 30 sous.
Less expensive places served soup, boiled beef, an
entrée,
and a small
glass of wine for about 10 sous.

Inns might offer a
table d
’
hôte,
cramming
together a lot of hungry people at the same table, When the meal was ready, the
guests dug in, arguing and grabbing the choicest bits of food. Such crowded and
low-quality places were frequented mainly by impecunious students, artists, and
traveling merchants.

The
Napoleonic Eras

When Napoleon came to power, in spite of not being a
gourmand,
he kept at his table all the splendor necessary to affirm his power in the
eyes of French or foreign dignitaries. In fact, eating for him was an obligation,
to be accomplished with utmost haste. Talleyrand, who was responsible for
diplomacy under Napoleon, employed one of the most talented chefs of the
period, Antonin Carêm, a perfectionist who codified French cuisine and even
studied architecture and engraving in order to improve his layer cakes.

To meet the nation’s military needs, France under Napoleon
saw the development of new industries. For instance, because of the English
continental blockade, cane sugar from the Caribbean was replaced by beet sugar
that could be processed at home. Also, wishing to give his soldiers food that
would last and remain edible in faraway battlefields, Napoleon organized a
competition in 1795 to find a solution to this problem; the winner was Nicolas
Appert, who invented the process of conserving food by heating it in a sealed
jar. Subsequently named official supplier to the army and benefactor of humanity,
Appert saw his canning invention copied with great commercial success in
England and America.