Consuming Faith : Religious Dietary Law and the Market for Meat in Eighteenth-Century Paris.

Abstract

This essay focuses on the changing relationship between popular religious practice and state authority in eighteenth-century France. Police records that monitored the preparation and sale of cooked meat during Lent, Fridays and other days of abstinence articulated the state's aims in enforcing Catholic dietary law, and noted public cooks' rationale for violating that law. Public cooks' observance of Lent reveals a transformed definition of morality during this period, moving from a base in Catholic religion to one in which natural law theory sustained social ideals. Through this reconceptualization of the moral foundation of the market, the French state and people renegotiated the foundations of French national identity.