Epicurus in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Thought
How was the celebration of pleasure, so central to the French Enlightenment’s Epicurean tradition, changed by the cultural and political upheavals of the French Revolution and its imperial aftermath? Why was it that, in March of 1800, Paris’s Préfet de police would announce his intention to respect what he called the “freedom of pleasures” due all citizens? This study looks at how the catastrophes of the Terror (white as well as red) followed by the rise and fall of an empire gave birth to a new form of Epicurean materialism. Displacing the eighteenth-century model of libertinage and its algebra of a sexual seduction promising protection from passion’s illusions, the shared pleasures of the well-appointed table made possible by an emerging consumer society brought into focus the possibility of a new economy of pleasures shared, exchanged, and multiplied. Works as different as a popular comedy by René de Chazet, a didactic poem by Joseph Berchoux, and the vastly popular gastronomical manuals of Grimod de La Reynière all contributed to this reconfiguration of the Epicurean paradigm around the newly elaborate rituals of the shared meal. The gustatory pleasures shared by hosts and their guests became the foundation of a conviviality presided over by the social contract of a politesse gourmande. Rehabilitating the senses and their pleasures, this nineteenth-century Epicureanism of the table sought to achieve a new civility capable of moving beyond the tragedies of history.