MEAT AND THE SOCIAL HIERARCHY IN XVIII CENTURY PARIS.

The importance of red meat—the primary good of the butcher trade—grew for Parisians as the city itself expanded. Over 40,000 steer and over twice that number of sheep were needed to provision Paris in 1637 (pop. 412,000). As the city’s population surpassed a half-million by the beginning of the eighteenth century, cattle traders and farmers supplied anywhere from 150,000 to 200,000 head of cattle (including cows and veal) and 300,000 to 400,000 sheep. Paris rivaled London not only in its size and in its concentration of urban elites, merchants, and artisans, but also as the land of beef eaters, consuming on average 60 kilograms (132 pounds) of beef and mutton per year. Paris, like London, was the country’s center for consumption, a magnet that drew skilled and unskilled labor and raw and finished goods. A network of local and regional markets developed to make the capital relatively rich in fresh meat.

On a busy Christmas Eve, one of the great feasting days of the year, a young governess named Jeanne Marseille sent the housemaid to shop for meat at Master Butcher Drieux’s stall. The governess worked for the Non family in the Saint Eustache parish, a bourgeois household that had been a regular client of butcher Drieux over a year-and-a-half. Upon the maid’s return from the Quinze-Vingt butchery, Jeanne discovered that the meat Drieux supplied was not only rotten, but of the poorest cut. In her report to the police, she claimed the quality of the food “did not at all agree with the house of Monsieur Non.” As the most senior servant responsible for the household provisions, Jeanne took it upon herself to return to butcher Drieux’s stall and to demand a better portion. Drieux met her pleas for better service with fierce indignation as her rejection of his goods threatened the butcher’s honor and reputation as a guild master.
Drieux let his temper fly, calling Jeanne a slut and a whore, finally accusing her of “serving her master” in a less than respectable way. His diatribe struck at the notion of civility that a domestic of elevated stature such as Jeanne would expect. Seeking to restore her honor, she left the butchery immediately and filed a formal complaint with the local police commissaire.
Jeanne’s encounter at the meat market remains an isolated case with no further evidence of whether or not the police pursued this complaint against Drieux. While ordinances forbade butchers from accosting shoppers at market, and on occasion, even fined unruly merchants who “publicly insulted their clients,” one can only imagine how many other less respectable (and less influential) shoppers succumbed to the caprices of master butchers and their journeymen. The Parisians who shopped at the meat markets negotiated for the upper and lower cuts that followed a taxonomy of prestige.
In contrast to the previous chapter’s view of how the market for meat was regulated and idealized, this chapter examines the workings of the market for meat in terms of merchant strategies and consumer preferences. How were the particular needs and desires of Parisians met in a market culture where the quantity and quality of consumption demonstrated one’s social position? Contrary to what we might think about the “bazaar economy” of early modern market exchange, butchers held a great degree of sway over the distribution of meat, acting as powerful mediators between a limited supply and a carnivorous public. Guild members pledged yearly to provide meat that was “good, trustworthy, and marketable,” an oath that held to the dictates of the public good. Yet these same food-providers, with their independently run shops, depended upon a loyal clientele to keep their businesses solvent. Their job consisted of transforming livestock into a number of marketable goods consistently and reliably.
As merchants, they worked to build relationships with customers that would sustain their businesses throughout the season and from year to year. Many butchers did this quite successfully. Merchant Butcher Pierre Barré (perhaps one of the most prominent butchers in Paris) managed a business that at the time of his death in 1738 distributed more than 6,700 pounds of meat a week from two locations on the rue Saint-Honoré and the rue Saint-Martin. Barré reserved the majority of their business for wealthy clients who contracted with him seasonally. From his own stockyards outside of Paris, he supplied beef, mutton, and veal to large households and other retail butchers (as well as hides, tallow, and tripe to other dealers) and sold the remainders in stalls run by lesser master butchers or journeymen.
Hence, this division of labor contributed to a segmented market, much of which was contracted outside the public markets, which precluded some shoppers from finding what they wanted at the market stalls. Moreover, the differentiation in the meat market corresponded not only to price and availability, but also to socially distinct food regimes, where a status-conscious servant would know enough not to serve a lesser grade meat as it was not in keeping with the dignity of her master. Not only the quantity of meat consumed, but the quality of meat from noble game to bourgeois beef corresponded to the social hierarchy.
Many varieties and types of meat fed all levels of urban society, a fact that made Paris exceptionally well provisioned. Visitors to eighteenth-century Paris remarked on the richness of Parisians’ diet. The countryman fresh to the town could only point out with disdain the stark differences: “If you saw how indulgent and gluttonous they are at their master’s table, in comparison to our own! Everyone there consumes as much meat as three of us; it is as if the city lives only for eating...” Although newcomers to Paris saw abundance, these ways of eating were by no means uniform nor democratic.
Even though elites claimed that meat was ubiquitous and a subsistence good, it would be facile to assume a populist notion of meat eating, or that beef (butcher’s meat par excellence) became the standard of living for all Parisians. Likewise, the historian’s claim of ‘miserabilism,’ that all under-privileged Parisians lived on bread and water simply because the vast majority of the meat supply served elite households, misses the variable aspects of meat as a consumable and the power it held as a marker of social identity.
For in as much as the meat trade operated under rules of a moral economy where regulations aimed to hold butchers to a just price and to serve the public good, the distribution of meat followed implicit rules and cultural norms that structured exchange as well as were structured by it. As we shall see, the attitudes and values toward meat eating directed the circuit in which meat came to both wealthy and poor, both noble and common, households in varying degrees to one another.
Historians of gastronomy have shown how increasing numbers of preparations that included beef, veal, and mutton in the culinary literature suggest a growing preference for the more readily available butcher’s meat over the more noble (and rare) game. Likewise, the demand for refinement in cuisine encouraged diversity in meat preparation along with more efficient modes of meat distribution for a wide population of meat eaters.
The greatest consumers of meat, the wealthy and powerful of Paris, favored smaller servings of select cuts of beef and veal leaving a great number of lesser cuts and variety meats (such as kidney, liver, and tripe) for popular consumption. By the eighteenth-century, the burgeoning Paris population included the magistrates of the Paris Parlement and other important dignitaries in the royal courts and municipal offices along with the thousands of transients, all of whom depended upon the city’s provisions to feed them. Meat met the demands of a large number of consumers, not only with rich appetites, but also those with a taste for opulence and power. In this way, both royal policies of provisioning and changing tastes for “bourgeois beef” brought regular supplies at a more or less consistent price to meat eaters throughout the year.
Until recently, our knowledge of eighteenth-century food habits have focused on the elite, because the details of their private lives exist in diaries and letters. Such intimate information is almost impossible to locate for the majority of the illiterate populous of Old Regime Paris. Few sources exist that would allow a historian access to such details on consumption. The one exception is Daniel Roche, who through a serial study of the probate records of eighteenth-century Parisian artisans and domestics, has come forward with a powerful argument for changing food habits and increasing meat consumption among laborers based upon material evidence (frying pans) left behind in urban households.
Roche concludes the growing popularity of such equipment in over 80 percent of the inventories suggests a change from infrequent to more frequent meat eating. In this case, the working poor chose quick-fried trimmings called cracklings and tripe to replace the slow, simmering stews known as pot au feu. This evidence suggests not only a shift in tastes, but also in the demand for cheap, fresh meats that could be prepared simply. The fact that such modest households would invest in a basic piece of kitchen equipment to fry meats and prepare quick sautés also suggests this cuisine’s importance in everyday food preparation. Most importantly, it undermines the claim that the people of Paris did not eat meat.

The Noble Carnivore

While the working poor of Paris may have “indulged” in variety meats, it was the privileged and the wealthy who tipped the scales of meat eating. Their appetite for luxury fostered heavy consumption of roasted joints and sides of beef, which was guaranteed to impress their guests. This extravagant lifestyle formed the ideology of nobility and structured the hierarchies of Old Regime society. As George Duby remarks, “To be noble is to be profligate, it is an obligation to show—to be condemned under threat of déchéance—to luxury and to spending.” From the cattle cults of the first Germanic tribes, meat provided an essential ingredient for celebratory feasts.
Livestock and game remained part of the seignorial dues that the well-landed nobility collected to fill their tables throughout the early modern period. At court, nobles gathered at tables to feast on five courses, each with ten to twenty dishes of various fish, fowl, red meats, and other game set before them, beef being the reserve meat of everyday fare. Many of these foods also took center stage in the extravagant displays of largesse in which the rich, merchant classes engaged. Parisian elites who regularly feasted on large roasts represented a highly skewed cross-section of the population. The corpulent bon vivants who proudly sported their “bellies of gold” set out to prove their stature through physical means, proudly porting their paunch with a gold watch chain. Conspicuous consumption illustrated the capacity of elites to maintain their political status as much as it became a form of self-expression.
The appetite of gourmands did not simply reside in excess but also in a developed appreciation of the culinary arts that included the finer cuts of meat. Nowhere were social skills more important than at the dinner table. What a host served his guests at meals was a political choice that could potentially confer great esteem. As Veblen affirms: “In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The power and wealth must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence.” His or her offerings denoted a place in the social order as much as they entailed the reciprocal obligations from others. Similarly, table manners came to be the expression of the cultivated man and could be used to impress and influence others.
In well-staffed households, domestic servants skilled in carving and light butchering prepared pieces of meat for each meal. The best-laid tables stopped serving large joints that sat prodigiously as the meal’s centerpiece. Instead, cooks prepared meats in smaller servings cooked rare, aiming for a kind of delicacy and restraint. As Louis-Sebastien Mercier remarked in 1783: "In the last century, they used to serve huge pieces of meat, and pile them up in pyramids. These little dishes, costing ten times as much as one of those big ones, were not yet known. Delicate eating has been known for only a half a century. The delicious cuisine of the reign of Louis XV was unknown even to Louis XIV."
Roasts continued to remain popular and though less impressive in size still provided an opportunity to demonstrate the social graces of a good carver. Even as late as 1808, Grimod de la Reyniere (1758–1837) author of the eight-volume Almanach des gourmands, continued to publish handbooks on table-side meat cutting techniques. Grimod’s early nineteenth-century publication, Manuel des Amphytryons, contains “a treatise on the dissection of meats at the table, the nomenclature of the latest menus for every season, and the elements of a polite gourmand.”
In it, Grimod extols the virtues of what he sees as an important, although recently forgotten, social skill (something he calls an art) that is “indispensable for every master of the house jealous to prove that he was not born yesterday.” The author adds “the elements having been lost in the revolutionary torment, we have tried to bring them back to life.” His desire to see society return to pleasures and indulgences of the noble feast hearkened to an earlier civilization (the Old Regime) where one cultivated the rules of social etiquette as a way of life. Grimod, in his nostalgia for a bygone era, desired to restore an element of French heritage he recognized as the essential instruction for any man of taste. Indeed, he promoted the social transformation that cast the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie into the forefront of culinary consumption.
The art of carving, once a display of a noble stature, became for Grimod a way for a man to show his knowledge of good manners and, as the head of the household, to exercise a masculine form of conviviality. Grimod’s motive was to revive the practice of noble manners after nearly twenty years of warfare that radically changed the social structure of France. While making the skill of meat carving one of the social graces for men of all households to learn, he perpetuates a broadly conceived social value.

By Sydney Watts in the book 'MEAT MATTERS' Butchers, Politics, and Market Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris, University of Rochester Press, U.S.A, 2006, p.27-31. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.