American conservatives haven’t always seen eye-to-eye with the French. When President Charles de Gaulle led France out of NATO, we weren’t exactly thrilled. When the “Axis of Weasels” didn’t back the invasion of Iraq, we responded with freedom fries (still available on the menu of Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar and Grill).
While relations have thawed of late, especially after the Paris terrorist attacks and the forceful French response — Rick Perry recently called France “our oldest ally” and Ted Cruz wrote an op-ed praising “liberty, equality, and fraternity” — there is one particular area where conservatives remain surprisingly hostile: French cuisine.
There are numerous examples. In one high-profile snub, presidential candidate Mike Huckabee titled his book, “God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy” and littered the text with derogatory references to crêpes and caviar. Notice the anti-apéritif slur hidden in the common insult “RINO-cocktail party-Potomac-fever-squish.” Just the other day, Republican consultant Dave Carney described those who enjoy “wine after work and some brie” as being somehow distant from the average American. And National Review’s Jonah Goldberg did once write an article with the title “Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys from Hell.”
This is a real shame, because not only is French cuisine a better export than “liberté, egalité, fraternité,” its origins are more conservative than most Republicans realize. Nowhere are these conservative values more evident than in the work of the two founding fathers of food writing, Frenchmen Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière. Historian Giles MacDonagh is the author of the pair’s only English-language biographies: The Judge and His Stomach and A Palate in Revolution. And MacDonagh’s biographies reveal that the founders of gastronomy would, if they were alive today, absolutely wreck the curve of the Heritage Action scorecards.
Not only is French cuisine a better export than “liberté, egalité, fraternité,” its origins are more conservative than most Republicans realize.
Jean Anthelm Brillat-Savarin was the mayor of the provincial town of Belley during the last days of l’ancien régime. He lived through the upheavals of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s empire to write The Physiology of Taste, a treatise on food that has never been out of print since it was first published in 1825. In fact, the popular Food Network TV show Iron Chef has reintroduced his aphorism “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are” to millions of viewers. I prefer his 14th rule: “A dinner that does not end in cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.” Rule No. 15? “We can learn to be cooks, but we must be born knowing how to roast.”
But Brillat-Savarin was good for more than bon mots. He represented his town in the Estates General (the political body summoned at the height of the pre-Revolution crisis) where he took a line quite in keeping with today’s conservative politics — the radical Jacobins eventually denounced him as a “fat bourgeois.” (The Left apparently has a long history of body-shaming their political opponents.)
He sparred with Robespierre and with the Abbé Sieyès over the latter’s proposal to redistrict France into geometrically perfect units regardless of traditional provincial borders — a proposal which Edmund Burke lambasted in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. While the hard Left pushed radical egalitarianism, Brillat-Savarin gave this rejoinder:
Liberty has a daughter called Equality, and she is her constant companion and principal support. But don’t imagine that by equality is meant the perfectly equal distribution of property, wealth, physical and moral qualities; such equality is not to be found in nature. The Author of all that exists was content to share out his gifts in unequal portions, and all of us carry at birth the germ of passions and virtues which will ultimately result in different quantities of strength or weakness, obscurity or glory, unhappiness or prosperity. True equality is the equality of rights and duties.
In addition, while American conservatives often have nightmares about a national confiscation of the arms of the citizenry, Brillat-Savarin actually lived through this scenario in France — and resisted. The mayor refused to surrender his three rifles, pistol, sabre, and gunpowder stock to the authorities. It’s clear that Brillat-Savarin would be just the man to unite the fractured Republican field — he was even a strict constitutional originalist who argued for the importance of original intent when interpreting the law — if only he hadn’t died 190 years ago.
#share#He would have no better running mate than Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière. An aristocrat with a club foot, Grimod was known to stroll through the streets of Paris wearing a mechanical hat, so he could show respect to passing ladies without using his arms. And the Frenchman once challenged a man to a duel for insulting his wig — he won by shooting his opponent through the eye socket.
Sadly, the Terror robbed this promising young man of his family and estates. Saved from the guillotine by an error on his birth certificate, Grimod spent the rest of his years writing theatrical criticism and presiding over dining clubs. At some literary gatherings he would consume 17 cups of coffee in one sitting. His seminal work, the Almanach des Gourmands, lists a recipe for the salmis of the Benedictine Dom Claudon of the Abbey of Haute-Seille. It comes with a warning to use a fork, for “if your fingers were to come into contact with this sauce, you might easily eat them too.”
His culinary panache dovetailed with his hatred of the Revolution. In addition to “destroying religion and property,” Grimod lamented that the revolt of “those execrable philosophes” had sunk his chances of finding “the odd pheasant which has escaped from the clutches of revolutionary justice.”
Ben Carson is a vegetarian; Speaker Paul Ryan, despite his support for mental-health reform, openly supports something called a “P90X Insanity Routine”; Jeb Bush’s flirtation with a branch of dark magic called the Paleo Diet once made him leave a plate full of bacon and pancakes untouched — while breakfasting with veterans, no less. How can conservatives win hearts and minds if they surrender their stomachs?
By giving men like Brillat-Savarin and Grimod de la Reynière a proper place in the conservative canon, Republicans could support our French allies — and they might even save the soul of the party.
Enough with freedom fries: There is still time for the right 2016 candidate to arise who, in the words of Brillat-Savarin, “can munch pleasurably at a partridge wing au supreme and then top it off, little finger quirked, with a glass of Lafitte or Clos Vougeot.”