Eating the Enlightenment

Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760

E. C. Spary

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226768885
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Eating the Enlightenment offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France. Embracing a wide range of authors and scientific or medical practitioners—from physicians and poets to philosophes and playwrights—E. C. Spary demonstrates how public discussions of eating and drinking were used to articulate concerns about the state of civilization versus that of nature, about the effects of consumption upon the identities of individuals and nations, and about the proper form and practice of scholarship. En route, Spary devotes extensive attention to the manufacture, trade, and eating of foods, focusing upon coffee and liqueurs in particular, and also considers controversies over specific issues such as the chemistry of digestion and the nature of alcohol. Familiar figures such as Fontenelle, Diderot, and Rousseau appear alongside little-known individuals from the margins of the world of letters: the draughts-playing café owner Charles Manoury, the "Turkish envoy" Soliman Aga, and the natural philosopher Jacques Gautier d'Agoty. Equally entertaining and enlightening, Eating the Enlightenment will be an original contribution to discussions of the dissemination of knowledge and the nature of scientific authority.

CHAPTER ONE

Intestinal Struggles

The starting point of this inquiry into the relations between food and knowledge in eighteenth-century Paris is the stomach. In recent years, the turn toward cultural history has encouraged attention to the stomach’s dominant position in the medical advice offered to men of letters.¹ Yet models of the digestion and of the physiological purpose and action of the stomach also contributed to bigger debates over the relationship between the conduct of individual bodies and the state of society as a whole. French physicians and their clients regarded the stomach as a somatic locus where digestive, moral, and even political upsets manifested themselves and through which appetite was expressed. This intense focus led to some bizarre narrative formulations by the middle years of the eighteenth century, in which individual eaters were metonymically supplanted, as it were, by their own stomachs:

I dare say no sort of foodstuff exists which some of these difficult stomachs do not desire [appeter] & digest by preference & to the exclusion of all others. Most peculiar oddities have been observed in this respect, & even contradictions of a sort: one such stomach, for example, digests melon & ham very well, but will not digest peach & salt beef, even though there is undoubtedly more analogy between ham & salt beef, than between melon & ham, &c.²

In general parlance, “the” digestion was understood less as a physiological or anatomical system than as a single self-contained corporeal event. A healthy body mastered foods in the stomach and produced a “praiseworthy chyle.” In the opposite eventuality, often caused by overeating, the body failed to overcome its foods and an indigestion was the result. A badly concocted chyle full of partially assimilated nutritive principles could penetrate the body, affecting and altering the humors and the constitution. A failed digestive event gave rise to a range of disagreeable and sometimes even fatal side effects:

Whenever one has a clear head, a fresh body, & a sound & merry mind after the meal, it is proof that one has not eaten too much: on the contrary, when one’s body is heavy, one’s mind incapable of application after the meal, and one suffers acid, putrid, foetid burps smelling of rotten eggs, when one experiences a swelling & sensation of fullness in the stomach, feelings of faintness, hiccups, vomiting, yawns, burning, & sweat on the face or chest, lastly when one’s tongue is thick, one’s mouth bad, one’s head heavy, & one has a desire to spit, especially on waking in the night, it is a certain proof that one has committed excesses in drinking or eating.³

Both in moral and in physical terms, foods could overpower the eater. Both enduring illnesses and sudden deaths, such as that of the archbishop of Toulouse in April 1758, were explicitly attributed to indigestion.⁴

If the characteristic of a healthy body in the eighteenth century was the ability to extract the maximum nutriment from foods consumed, so, by extension, the mark of a good digestion was minimal defecation. The physician Arnulphe d’Aumont claimed that the healthy individual would produce feces infrequently and in small quantities: “this is proof that the food is being properly digested, & that it’s attenuated to such an extent that little coarse matter remains to produce excrement; the superfluous part which enters the blood dissipates insensibly.” For enlightened Parisians, constipation was the sign of a robust temperament: “There are people in very good health who empty their bowels no more than once a week; conversely, the weaker one’s temperament, the more fecal matter one produces & the more liquid it is.” Digestibility would remain a salient characteristic of foods throughout the century in political debates over the food supply between consumers and administrators, and to tar a new food with the brush of indigestibility was an easy way to undermine its reputation in the eyes of consumers and rulers alike. In fact, in cultural, political, physiological, and etiological terms, the stomach and digestion were understood very differently in the eighteenth century from the way they are understood today, and this was particularly true for the category of individuals who worked with their minds and pens to produce the writings and knowledge-claims historically associated with Enlightenment.⁵

But how did the body’s mechanism for the extraction and processing of nourishment become a politically significant topic in eighteenth-century Paris? A key controversy between rival medical sects, beginning in the 1710s, offers an example of the politics of knowledge about food and its effects on the body. My approach is prompted by extensive work on the body as a site of production and reproduction of social and political truth, as well as the site of lived experience: the liminal space between the inner and outer worlds.⁶ Yet much writing on the history of the body and nutrition as scientific subjects in eighteenth-century France has addressed bodily function only within the terms sanctioned by physiology texts: as part of a history of ideas rather than lifestyles. Within this literature, generation and sensibility have consistently attracted most interest, while digestion and the assimilation of food within the body have commanded comparatively little attention.⁷ Eighteenth-century authors regarded digestion as a key bodily function. Digestion, appetite, and diet were of interest precisely because of their relevance for daily life, and models of their function and purpose frequently featured in prescriptive programs for individual self-conduct. Such advice seemed especially necessary in light of the sweeping changes in Parisian food habits from the late seventeenth century onward, in particular the increased consumption of exotic foods.

In the first instance, then, attention to digestion allows the production of natural knowledge to be firmly situated within the domains of the body and of everyday life. Second, controversy over such issues rehearsed contemporary conflicts about the relative power of doctors, cooks, and eaters, an issue that will be reprised in subsequent chapters. Appeals to medical and scientific authority could legitimate proposals for the reform of society through dietary change, as for example in calls to abolish or restrict luxury consumption. Establishing the healthy diet thus meant working out the proper relationship between, and respective authority of, rival forms of knowledge. Digestion and indigestion were also relevant to disputes over materialistic philosophy and medical theory. Debates over digestion went right to the heart of contemporary matter theory, touching on issues ranging from theological orthodoxy—explaining the mechanism by which the body and blood of Christ, consumed at the Eucharist, entered and transformed the communicant’s own body—to philosophical heterodoxy—could digestive phenomena demonstrate that matter possessed innate vital powers? It seems anomalous, therefore, that the extensive history of materialism in the Enlightenment is effectively an immaterial history; many of the disciplinary domains within which matter was actively being discussed in the period, such as chemistry or medicine, have barely registered in it.⁸ Digestion and assimilation infringed philosophically problematic boundaries, after all: between living and nonliving matter, between self and other, between organized and brute, between inside and outside. The French anthropologist Claude Fischler suggests that for omnivorous humans eating is a source of anxiety precisely because it is a liminal act in this sense. By incorporating the external world into themselves, eaters constantly face the risk of perversion by the eater of the eaten. Many decisions about diet, he argues, are driven by the concern to avoid polluting the self or transforming one’s identity through the inevitable act of consumption. Although Fischler’s primary concern was with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his model also has relevance for the earlier period. Throughout the eighteenth century, digestion featured in discussions about the formation of individual character and conduct, and their relevance for the physical and moral condition of society as a whole. Digestion was thus a major area where medicine, philosophy, and theology intersected with the political praxis of daily life and the management of bodies. It provided personal experiences by which the truth-claims of philosophy and medicine could be judged to stand or fall.⁹

Accounting for digestion thus allows some of the links between individual responsibility and collective action to be explicated. More than other bodily functions, digestion and assimilation reveal the social porosity of accounts of the animal economy. The disputes addressed in this chapter exemplify in miniature the conjuncture of social and political critique, challenges to traditional authority, and appeal to natural knowledge that are often taken to typify enlightened self-understandings. But they also represent recent interest among historians of science in the moral geography of knowledge and the historical fate of knowledge-claims. Debates over digestion thus provide a useful starting point for an inquiry into the way in which medical and scientific authority over the workings of the body related to everyday practices on the one hand, and controversies over knowledge and credibility on the other.

TRITURATION AS A WAY OF LIFE

For much of the eighteenth century, there was little dispute over either the anatomical structure of the digestive organs or the fact that food transformed into chyle in the stomach and then passed via the lacteal ducts to the bloodstream. However, there was scant agreement about the phenomena of digestion and absorption. Chemical explanations predominated in accounts of digestion produced at the start of the eighteenth century, such as the Dictionnaire des Aliments (Dictionary of Foods) written by Louis Lémery, a leading food analyst and the son of one of Paris’s most prominent chemists, who had achieved social advancement by qualifying to practice medicine in Paris. Lémery, along with other iatrochemists such as the Montpellier physician Antoine Deidier, postulated the existence of multiple ferments in the body, controlling the various stages of digestion in the stomach, intestines, and bloodstream. Ferments were either acid or alkaline in nature, with active particles that penetrated and separated out the constituent elements of foodstuffs, allowing the finest particles to be freed of the earthy matter surrounding them and absorbed into the lacteal ducts. This was a process often called “elaboration.” Ferments derived from the writings of Van Helmont and Sylvius and had been made fashionable by another Montpellier physician, Pierre Chirac, newly relocated to Paris.¹⁰

Iatrochemists explained all health and disease in terms of good or bad ferments within the bodily fluids. Such views had only lately penetrated the most respected and ancient of Parisian scientific and medical institutions, including the medical faculty, and as early as 1709 they faced a new threat when a dispute over the mechanism of digestion broke out in the pages of the Mémoires de Trévoux. This leading Jesuit newspaper regularly reviewed books on medicine and the natural sciences, but in previous reviews of physiology books, including Lémery and Deidier’s own, digestion had had a low profile.¹¹ The controversy related to a theologically contentious matter: the customary right of Parisian physicians to confer individual dispensations upon their clients, freeing them from the legal requirement to fast during Lent on health grounds. Among the principal Lenten dietary restrictions was a ban on the consumption of meat and eggs. Medical and theological treatises on the healthiness or otherwise of lean foods such as fish, beans, and other meat surrogates poured from the presses. The relative authority of religious and natural laws was at stake in debates over issues such as whether fish-flavored meat, or quadrupeds with an aquatic lifestyle, could count as fish and thereby fulfill the Lenten prescriptions. Authors also reflected in general upon the health effects of abstinence, whether from meat or from food in general, whether among the clergy or in high life. In 1700 the Paris physician Barthélemy Linand had argued against Lenten dispensations on moral as well as medical grounds. Corporeal delicacy, a coveted attribute of polite eaters, was, he insisted, no adequate reason to claim dispensation, since polite consumers manufactured their own physical weakness by, wittingly or unwittingly, indulging in excess and ruining their health.¹²

The appeal to health, therefore, could be countered by presenting changing consumption habits in the modern city as a reversible evil. The solution, Linand argued, was for Catholics to exert more self-discipline: the earliest Christians had had no need of such rules, but “nowadays when the laxity of Christians is so great, one is obliged to Mr Linand for removing the vain pretexts which they use to avoid the painful duties that Religion imposes on them,” as a reviewer noted. Linand also advised the delicate and valetudinarian to exercise Lenten fasting outside of the legally required period, “so that the body might accustom itself little by little to this sort of nourishment.”¹³

The debate over Lenten dispensations in part concerned the opposition between two different ways of life that the well-to-do medical client might embrace: the fashionable, civilized lifestyle of pleasure, refinement, and novelty on the one hand; and on the other, a devotional lifestyle that favored the cultivation of the soul, rejected the pleasures of the body, and treated the proliferation of wealth and luxury with suspicion. During the early years of the century, different medical explanations for digestion mapped onto these distinct programs for the future of French society. In 1709 Philippe Hecquet, a doctor of the Paris medical faculty, published his Traité des dispenses du Carême (Treatise on Lenten Dispensations), which proclaimed the moral bankruptcy of Lenten dispensations. This widely read book was rebutted the following year in an anonymous work, in fact written by Hecquet’s faculty colleague and bitter enemy Nicolas Andry de Boisregard.¹⁴ There were many parallels between the two men. Andry was just three years Hecquet’s senior. Both were probably near contemporaries at the Collège des Grassins in Paris, both obtained their first medical degrees from Reims, and both entered the Paris medical faculty within a short time of one another. Both men would serve as the dean of the Paris medical faculty, Hecquet in 1712 and Andry in 1724.

Where they differed radically, however, was in their religious convictions. Before entering the Paris faculty, Hecquet had worked for a few years as the physician to the famous Jansenist religious foundation at Port-Royal-des-Champs. Here he acquired lifelong Jansenist convictions and adopted a highly visible pious lifestyle of abstinence, fasting, and self-denial. Due to ill health, however, Hecquet’s association with Port-Royal was short-lived. He soon returned to Paris, entering the circle of the king’s premier physician, Guy-Crescent Fagon, and acquiring a degree from the Paris medical faculty in 1697. This was one of only two ways in which a physician like Hecquet or Andry, holding a medical degree from a provincial university, could legitimately practice in the metropolis, the other being to obtain a royal privilege. Hecquet was soon honored with the title of Doctor Regent of the faculty. When the dispute commenced in 1709, he had recently been appointed personal physician to the Condé family, and was soon to obtain the post of physician to the Charité hospital.¹⁵ By contrast, Andry’s religious views were closer to the Molinism exhibited by many of the Mémoires de Trévoux reviewers. Both Molinism and Jansenism had originally developed as responses to the Reformation, but while the former minimized the effects of the Fall and stressed the residual goodness of human nature, the latter treated human nature as fundamentally corrupt, to be redeemed only by an unremitting labor of good works and self-denial. These oppositions would structure the form taken by the dispute over digestion, especially in the Mémoires de Trévoux, whose Jesuit editors opposed Hecquet’s Jansenist heterodoxy.¹⁶

A major part of the service early modern physicians offered their clienteles was the prescription of suitable diets for therapeutic or prophylactic purposes.¹⁷ Hecquet’s plan to make medicine a road map for acting out and reforming the relationship between the body and faith was evident in the dietetic rules he laid down in his Traité des dispenses du Carême and other books. His most controversial claim was that lean foods were healthier than fat foods and also more virtuous, since they were the foods originally ordained to man by God at the Creation “in those innocent times, when man, still in his natural state, had not yet corrupted himself . . . [and] had not learnt to live in order to eat, but rather to eat in order to live.” Above all, Hecquet criticized the consumption of meat as contrary to human virtue and health. “Dishes of raw vegetables, against which the world, & even savants, have allowed themselves to become so prejudiced, were formerly the ordinary nourishment of men.” Other peoples had thrived for centuries on a vegetarian diet, the source of “the best part of the happiness of the golden age,” and the diet of classical heroes, legislators, and philosophers. “Man ...