Eating the Enlightenment Food and the Sciences in Paris,

1670 1760 - 1st Edition

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 au x m â n e s d e m o n p è r e
m a r t i n c h a r l e s s pa ry ( 1 9 3 9 – 2 0 0 8 )

qui aurait été content de recevoir une dédicace en français

 contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1. Intestinal Struggles 17

2. From Curiosi to Consumers 51

3. The Place of Coffee 96

4. Distilling Learning 146

5. The Philosophical Palate 195

6. Rules of Regimen 243

Conclusion 290

Bibliography 301

Index 355
 i l l u s t r at i o n s

Fig. 1.1. Jacques Vaucanson, Le Mécanisme du Fluteur Automate.

Frontispiece 44
Fig. 2.1. World map of French coffee trade routes, 1670–1730 56
Fig. 2.2. Philippe Sylvestre Dufour, De l’Vsage du Caphe du Thé et du
Chocolate. The Turkish coffee drinker 63
Fig. 2.3. Antoine de la Roque sketched by Antoine Watteau 74
Fig. 2.4. [Jean de La Roque,] Voyage de l’Arabie Heureuse. A branch of the
coffee tree 78
Fig. 2.5. Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences. A branch of the coffee
tree according to Antoine de Jussieu’s botanical system 79
Fig. 2.6. Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal, Histoire philosophique et
politique des établissements & du commerce des Européens dans les
deux Indes. Coffee being unloaded in Marseille harbor 89
Fig. 2.7. “Le Café du Bel Air ou les Gourmets du pont au Change en
jouissance.” Coffee consumption caricatured 90
Fig. 3.1. Nicolas Larmessin, “Habit de Caffetier,” a grotesque representation
of the coffee-seller’s trade 111
Fig. 3.2. Chevalier de M[ailly], Les Entretiens des Cafés de Paris.
Frontispiece 114
Fig. 3.3. [François Gacon,] Les Fables de M.r Houdart de La Motte Traduittes
en Vers François. Title page 126
Fig. 4.1. Jacques-François Demachy, L’Art du distillateur liquoriste. Café
interior 152
Fig. 4.2. Jacques-François Demachy, L’Art du distillateur liquoriste. The
liquorist’s laboratory 167
Fig. 4.3. Antoine Baumé, Elémens de pharmacie. Distillatory apparatus 169

ix
x illustr ations

Fig. 4.4. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie. Plate
of a large-scale brandy distillery 181
Fig. 5.1. Marin, Les Dons de Comus. Frontispiece 200
Fig. 5.2. Almanach utile et agréable de la Loterie de l’École Royale Militaire,
pour l’année 1760. Plate showing the female cook 203
Fig. 5.3. N.C., Les Femmes sçavantes ou Bibliotheque des Dames.
Frontispiece 206
Fig. 5.4. “Etablissement de la nouvelle Philosophie. Notre Berceau fut un
Caffé.” Satirical print of the philosophes 215
Fig. 5.5. Abbe Polycarpe Poncelet, Chimie du goût et de l’odorat. The scale of
flavors 224
 ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

F or useful interventions, interesting conversations, insightful observa-

tions, extensive or intensive commentaries, or just moral support, I am
especially grateful to Guy Attewell, Vincent Barras, Maxine Berg, Melissa
Calaresu, Kyri Claflin, Lucia Dacome, Raine Daston, James Delbourgo,
Anne Janowitz, Nick Jardine, Colin Jones, Ursula Klein, Micheline Louis-
Courvoisier, Jenny Mander, Sévérine Pilloud, Daniel Roche, Anne Secord,
Daniela Sechel, Rebecca Spang, Stéphane Vandamme, Paul White, and Eliza-
beth Williams. I am of course indebted to many more friends and family
members who for reasons of space cannot be named individually here, plus
the audiences at many seminars and conferences. All translations from the
French are my own, except where stated.
My thanks must also go to my colleagues at various institutions: the
Eighteenth-Century Studies Centre at the University of Warwick; Abtei-
lung II of the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin; the
sadly missed Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at Univer-
sity College London; the Department of History and Philosophy of Science
and the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge.
This project has been slow to come to fruition. Its development coin-
cided with the first appearance of electronic databases, search engines, and
digitized media, which facilitated its wide-ranging exploration of primary
materials. All those unsung heroes of digitization deserve thanks, too, as do
the staff of libraries and archives in different parts of Europe. Without them,
this book would not have been possible.
Last, but not least, many thanks to Karen Darling at Chicago and her
team for bringing the book into the public domain.

xi
 introduction

L ike many major European capitals in the eighteenth century, Paris was
a city of people fascinated with new knowledge. Visitors remarked on
the fact that even servant girls were to be seen reading in the streets, while
whole areas of the city were devoted to bookshops, cabinets of curiosities,
and scientific demonstrations. Libraries, cabinets, and scientific devices in-
creasingly filled the houses of literate families.1 This book takes one par-
ticular aspect of everyday life, namely eating, to explore some of the ways
in which that increasingly public culture of knowledge made a difference to
the daily life of literate Parisians between 1675 and 1760. My argument in
Eating the Enlightenment is that by attending to the history of an everyday
activity such as eating, we are able to understand both “science” and “En-
lightenment” in new ways.2
The history of food in eighteenth-century Paris is intimately bound up
with the history of knowledge, and with the formation of a public space
where political critique, consumption, and commerce took place, mediated
by print. The classic account of the Enlightenment by Peter Gay modeled
knowledge in terms of free-floating quasi-autonomous ideas hatched in the
minds of great men, and transmission as a matter of influences operating
upon a largely passive and undifferentiated public.3 In recent years, histori-
ans of the book, together with historians and sociologists of science, have
come to present knowledge very differently: as transaction, appropriation,

1. Bensaude-Vincent and Blondel 2007; Lynn 2006; Sutton 1995; Kennedy 1989, 38; Roche
1987, 206–9; Laissus 1986.
2. Broman 1998 makes an eloquent plea for such an endeavor, although the history of eat-
ing is perhaps not the subject he had in mind.
3. Gay 1966–69; see also, more recently, Israel 2006, 2001.

1
2 introduction

and negotiation, and so as something that is provisional and consensual.4

Historians of science have attended to natural knowledge as the outcome
of locally reliable practices and meanings; in the words of Charles Withers,
“Rather than treat the Enlightenment as a corpus of self-contained ideas
circulating without reference to their local sites of social making, it is pos-
sible to consider it as situated and multiple practices, concerned in different
places and in different ways with different conceptions of practical reason,
natural philosophy, and so on.”5
To take such an approach is to break radically with the program of char-
acterizing “the” Enlightenment as a movement typified by set political, so-
cial, and epistemological goals, with a named and familiar population of prac-
titioners. Instead, it is to assume that in a culture like eighteenth-century
Paris, where many consumers laid claim to knowledge of one sort or an-
other about food and its effects on the body, the exact content of the cate-
gory “enlightenment” was a work in progress, accomplished through a vari-
ety of encounters, only some of which involved famous philosophes such as
Voltaire, Rousseau, or Diderot, who now constitute the “big names” of En-
lightenment historiography. Laying claim to enlightenment involved self-
fashioning, writing, publishing, reading, and, as this book will demonstrate,
eating. My title, Eating the Enlightenment, thus alludes to a controversy
over what, if anything, enlightenment still means for historians in the wake
of that turn toward the local. Laurence Brockliss, calling on historians to
attend to the Republic of Letters instead, questions how useful “the En-
lightenment” can be as an analytical category; as he notes, “there is no pan-
European consensus as to the movement’s origin, content and membership.”
In this book, “enlightenment” is not treated as a movement or community
amenable to prosopography. My own use of the term should be understood
as an English gloss upon the French word “lumières,” as used, for example,
by Daniel Roche.6 As Diego Venturino shows, the expression “siècle des
lumières” as a name for an eighteenth-century intellectual movement only
came into general use in the mid-twentieth century. Eighteenth-century
authors deployed the metaphor of light, “lumières,” to comment on the
state of learning of their day, rather than to define one particular knowl-
edge project or learned community. To say that an individual possessed lu-

4. E.g., Fish 1980; Holub 2003; Suleiman and Crosman 1980; Chartier 1987a; Johns 1998;
Secord 2000.
5. Withers 2007, 64–65; see also Ophir and Shapin 1991. On practice, see, e.g., Latour
1987; Pickering 1992, 1995; Lynch 1993; Buchwald 1995; Golinski 1998; Schatzki and Knorr
Cetina 2001.
6. Brockliss 2002, 8; Roche 1988.
 introduction 3

mières did not imply membership of a coherent intellectual movement,

but rather indicated that that person had publicly acknowledged expertise
in some domain of knowledge. Enlightenment here—rather than “the” En-
lightenment—was thus a state to which individuals might aspire, or which
they might cultivate. Such a definition has heuristic value for historians in
that it allows for a broad range of claimants to lumières to be included in
a study of early modern learning. The reasons for the success or failure of
particular enlightened self-presentations can be scrutinized on their own
terms, freeing historians from the need to adjudicate about the legitimacy of
past pretensions to a learned or expert state. Thus, while agreeing in broad
terms with Brockliss’s critique, I find the term “enlightenment” too useful
to abandon; its use ought at the least to direct our attention to the fact that
new conditions of scholarship arising in the eighteenth century would open
up new routes for laying claim to a state of learning, as well as facilitat-
ing new critiques of older scholarly personae. Most prominent among these
new conditions was the rise of a world of public commentary, enshrined in
a flourishing print culture.7
The expression “siècle philosophe” was also used by eighteenth-century
authors of their own time, as in Denis Diderot’s article “Encyclopédie” in
the eponymous work. Yet to fall back upon a category of “philosophes” on
which to ground “the” Enlightenment as a cohesive social group or body of
ideas offers no solution to the teleological double-bind afflicting Enlighten-
ment historiography, for the appelation “philosophe” was equally contested
and fluid. In practice, it could denote quite incompatible sets of values; in
the words of Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger, and Ian Hunter, “disputes
over philosophical problems quickly become disputes over what is to count
as philosophy and what it is to be a philosopher.”8 To take the definition of
rationality as something that was always already settled is to privilege the
winners’ interpretation of what counted as enlightenment and who could
lay claim to it. Rationality and learning were attributed states, an outcome
as much as a cause of past disputes. Indeed, those disputes were precisely
what created something that could retrospectively be designated as “the”
Enlightenment. So one central aim of this book is to investigate the public

7. Venturino 2002, esp. 59–76; Mah 2003, introduction. Here I distance my approach mark-
edly from recent essentialist revivals of “the” Enlightenment such as O’Brien 2011; Robert-
son 2005.
8. Condren, Gaukroger, and Hunter 2006, 8. See also Sutton 1995; Bury 1996, 199–203; Yeo
2006, 257; Darnton 1996, 1979; Badinter 1999–2007; Brockliss 2002, introduction; Brewer 2002.
By the 1760s the title of “philosophe” was synonymous with “atheist” for many commentators;
see, e.g., Pekacz 1999, 111–12.
4 introduction

domain as a space in which definitions of reason and enlightenment were

crafted, appropriated, and applied (or denied) to others. Only thus, I sug-
gest, can we understand enlightenment as process, instead of constructing
“the Enlightenment” in purely retrospective terms, as a movement whose
content, membership, and goals were unproblematically agreed upon by all.
I am concerned to ask how, in a competitive public world of learning and
letters, the status of knowledgeable expert could be successfully forged by
individuals.
It is this public construction of knowledgeable expertise that Eating the
Enlightenment examines, in this case through the lens of contemporary de-
bates over eating, food, and cuisine. How did learned individuals lay claim
to a state of enlightenment themselves, or else challenge the claims of
others to be learned? The question of what it meant to live a rational life, as
well as the nature of the relationship between mind and body, loomed large
in writings on cuisine, diet, and health. There is a peculiar irony in writing
the history of eighteenth-century knowledge as a biography of disembod-
ied ideas, which is that many philosophes in early eighteenth-century Paris
understood mental function as a product of the operations of a material
substance, spirit. In the English language, the word “mind” does not con-
note the material; both the French “esprit” and the German “Geist,” on the
other hand, have multiple meanings, embracing the alimentary, the physi-
ological, and the mental. The literal overlap between these meanings in late
seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century iatrochemistry is a starting point
of this book, where the word “esprit” appears by turns as a measure of po-
liteness, a material substance, and a term for mind and its characteristics.9
Among a polite readership, the operations of mind and body continued to
be regarded as intimately linked, even after iatrochemical models of physi-
ology gave way to understandings of bodily function in terms of the move-
ment of solids and fluids, and mental function ceased to be seen as driven
by a unique material substance. A new model of mental function, developed
by John Locke and widely taken up by French authors during the eighteenth
century, rested upon the claim that the acquisition of knowledge was it-
self a habit, that is to say, a physical transformation of the structure of the
brain by reiterated mental actions. This enduring proximity between body
and mind, matter and spirit, is one reason why so many eighteenth-century
savants and philosophes, seeking to illuminate the role played by the mate-

9. Although King (1978, 124) warns against rigid categorization under the rubrics of iatro-
chemistry and iatromechanism, there were salient differences between chemical and mechani-
cal accounts of digestion in early eighteenth-century France; see chap. 1.
 introduction 5

rial world and bodily appetites in the operations of reason, interested them-
selves in the nature, composition, production, consumption, effects, and
political or social significance of food.10
Despite this widespread interest, it was not self-evident to all Parisian
authors that scholarship should embrace food, taste, and cuisine. On the
contrary, attempts to do so were compromised throughout the period cov-
ered by this book. To take food too seriously, or to be involved in its produc-
tion, was potentially to endanger both learned and polite self-presentations.
On several levels, discussions of eating and cuisine were thus the crucible
for controversies over the nature of mind and its relationship with body.
Concerns about the formation of habits also extended to the political man-
agement of consuming publics. Certain foods previously reserved to the
city’s rich households, like coffee and sugar, were increasingly consumed
even by the poorer ones on a daily basis. This spread of luxury consumption
to large sections of the city’s population over the course of the century pro-
voked much comment from contemporaries, partly because such changes
signaled an unprecedented transformation in everyday life, partly because of
the social dynamic underlying that transformation, in which even servants
and the poor now had a legitimate claim to luxury and exotic consumption.
The city, at the hub of an increasingly global food commerce, thus became
the focus of debates about how best to accommodate such changes in indi-
vidual appetites and what their significance was for the nation as a whole.
The controversies that food provoked could not be so lightly dismissed,
therefore. Efforts to extend the domain of reason to encompass food and ap-
petite took place in a highly public arena, they were not uncontested, and
they were understood to be political enterprises. The social significance of
changing habits and the consequences and proper regulation of appetites
were central questions in attempts to define the relationship between in-
dividual action and political truth. Alimentary authors wrote their advice
books on the premise that they would thereby contribute to making eating
choices more rational, and so improve the physical and moral condition
of the nation as a whole. One reason for doing so was that the exercise of
unbridled appetites threatened any project for universal enlightenment. In
this sense Eating the Enlightenment addresses Habermas’s celebrated thesis
concerning the transformation of the public sphere in the eighteenth cen-
tury. Habermas’s work, which addressed the unprecedented development of
print culture, commerce, consumption, and political engagement character-

10. Shapin and Lawrence 1998; Chisick 1984; Williams 1994; Staum 1980, chap. 2;
Johns 1996.
6 introduction

izing eighteenth-century public life, was taken up by Anglophone historians

at the end of the 1980s to underpin arguments both about the formation of a
modern political public and about the rise of consumer culture. Like Haber-
mas, I suggest that the answer to the central question of “when and under
what conditions the arguments of mixed companies could become authori-
tative bases for political action” needs to be sought in the relationships
among print, commerce, sociability, civility, and consumption in the eigh-
teenth century.11 However, in my account of those relationships, I proceed
more along the lines of Bruno Latour’s critique of Habermas, concerning
myself with “the fabric of science-society tangles.” For, as I hope this book
will demonstrate, the entanglement of knowledge and society was a central
condition of the production of successful knowledge-claims about food.12
This brings me to two major historical developments that have shaped
this study: first, the move toward understanding enlightenment in terms of
the production and circulation of written materials. Eating the Enlighten-
ment approaches polite philosophy and the literate public primarily through
the expanding world of writing and reading in eighteenth-century Paris. An
extensive periodical and satirical literature, as well as personal memoirs,
diaries, and letters, constitute its main resources, and this literature has
governed the selection of authors who wrote, sometimes extensively, on
food and its significance for knowledge between 1670 and 1760. In my ac-
count, enlightenment is firmly tied to the material and mundane problems
of the learned life in eighteenth-century Paris. The attention paid by Darn-
ton and other historians to book history in recent decades has done much
to free eighteenth-century French history from the teleological trap of im-
plying that certain individuals were somehow predestined to participate
in “the” Enlightenment, and that the circumstances of that participation
need no explanation. In Parisian literary life, all authors, whether famous,
obscure, or infamous, confronted the uncertainties of politics, patronage,
publishing, and the pursuit of renown.13 Eating the Enlightenment investi-
gates the hazards and predicaments of the learned and authorial life, depict-
ing gens de lettres as agents, rather than members, of a state of enlighten-
ment. It was a consciousness of the dependency of this project upon printed
sources that also led me to limit its focus to those who had direct access to
print—in other words, to those who were literate—rather than consider-
ing food history as a problem most relevant to the poorest sections of so-

11. Calhoun 1992, 1; Habermas 1989; Furet 1988; Baker 1990; Baker 1987; Melton 2001.
12. Latour 1992, 290.
13. Particularly Darnton 1982, 1984a, 1995, 1996; Chartier 1989; and Roche 1988.