Révolution and Food

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity Voltaire Fête Nationale Française, (known as Bastille Day) is France’s ‘National Day’, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, which was a major event in the French Revolution. The occasion was first celebrated as the Fête de la Fédération, (Unity of the French People) and was held on 14th of July 1790, it was attended by over a quarter of a million Parisians, and the feasting went on for four whole days. The French Revolution completely changed the social and political structure of France. It put an end to the monarchy, to feudalism, and it took political power away from the Catholic church. It brought new ideas to the people of Europe including liberty and freedom for the common person. It abolished slavery and recognized the rights of women. Whilst the revolution ended with the rise of Napoleon, the ideas and reforms that it gave rise to continue to influence governments right up to this very day. The Stain of Voltaire’s Ink François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), known as Voltaire, was a writer, philosopher, poet, dramatist, historian and polemicist of the French Enlightenment. He is regarded as one of the key agitators for change that fomented unrest against the ruling classes. Voltaire had believed that through sound thought and good reason man separated himself from all other living creatures and he held in great disdain matters of faith and the corruption of power from the ruling classes. He used his pen as an epee and he wielded it with all the precision of a master swordsman in a fencing match or, as a surgeon with a lancet, performing open heart surgery. His reasoning was his artillery; his wit, his bon mots and his put downs were legendary, often humorous, he dissected his opposition, taunted them, toyed with them. Voltaire’s particular cruelty was not to merely turn the tide of popular opinion against his opponents but, to have the people laugh at them with disdain, to humiliate them and in doing so, annihilate them. He once wrote that to hold a pen was to be at war. Few targets could ever remove the stain of Voltaire’s ink. Voltaire was not a man of mercy, yet some would say that Voltaire had good reason to terrorize the ruling classes of France in the early 1700’s. Born into a middle class family of little importance and a young writer struggling to make his name as a man of letters, Francois Marie Arouet as he was then known was beginning to gain a reputation as a bit of an upstart; a petty pot-stirrer amongst a court society used to considering it their privilege to do and get away with whatever they damn well pleased. The young Arouet was an idealist who believed that rulers should be enlightened souls who protected the people’s rights and when he saw injustice he lashed out; his pen was indeed very sharp, soon he began to deeply offend and to gather serious enemies. Voltaire was actually jailed for many a short spell in the Bastille for offending the nobility, the final straw came after he had traded insults with the aristocratic Guy Auguste de Rohan-Chabot known as the chevalier de Rohan and the comte de Chabot. The Chevalier organized for Voltaire to be beaten in the street like a peasant whilst he watched from the comfort of his carriage, leaving the young writer busted up and bleeding in the gutter. Voltaire was said to be incandescent with rage and began to prepare for a duel to the death, the Rohan family meanwhile, obtained a ‘lettre de cachet’ from King Louis XV and used this warrant to force Voltaire back into the Bastille and then into exile in Great Britain. Francois Marie Arouet would relish his time in England and appreciate the philosophical and scientific breakthroughs taking place during this pre-industrial revolution period, a time of philosophical and scientific enlightenment in England. He returned to France, changed his name to Voltaire, still angry, still an agitator, but now very much an enlightened one, few would ever again attempt to humiliate him. Voltaire would spend three years in exile before returning to Paris, he then made a series of very sound business partnerships that would ultimately see him gain serious wealth. In 1733 he met and fell deeply in love with Emilie du Chatelet, (1706 – 1749) a woman twelve-years his junior but, with her own formidable intellect and determined, individual disposition. They would spend the next sixteen years together and form one of the great romantic and intellectually influential love affairs in all history. Emilie du Chatelet was indeed a remarkable woman and one who made several great contributions to science, she had a profound influence on Voltaire, his thinking and his writing. She was regarded as the first and only women of science and mathematics during her time in France, she published a novel criticizing Locke, which emphasized the need for knowledge to be empirical and verified through experience. She published a paper on heat and light, predicting what is today known as infrared radiation. She wrote a paper titled ‘Lessons in Physics’ in which she attempted to reconcile complex ideas from some of the leading thinkers of the time. She translated Sir Isaac Newton’s ‘Principia Mathematica’ into French and then conducted experiments that were based on Gottfried Leibnitz’s theories on kinetic energy and velocity, counter to Newton’s theory. She published a critical analysis of the bible and she also translated the extraordinary poem by Bernard Manderville, (1679 – 1733) ‘The Fable of the Bees’ into French: The poem was published in 1705, the book in 1714. The poem suggests such key principles of economic thought, as the division of labour and the “invisible hand”, seventy years before these concepts were elucidated by Adam Smith. Two centuries later, the noted economist John Maynard … Read more