Restorative Meals. Naturalism, Markets, and France’s Regeneration 1872-85

Abstract

In the 1870s and 1880s, French artists such as Narcisse Chaillou and Victor Gilbert filled national Salons with paintings of Paris’s overflowing food stalls, patriotic butchers, and modern markets. With subjects ranging from bourgeois decorum in brimming fish stalls to ennobled rat sellers, these canvases served as stark contrasts to the memories of food shortages and profiteering that undermined republican values and amplified class discord during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) and the Paris Commune (1871). As memories of these culinary privations continued to destabilize the national psyche in the next decade, Gilbert’s and Chaillou’s food paintings transcended the specificity of their gastronomic subjects and participated in a broader discussion of national identity. Leveraging long-established beliefs that the glory of Parisian dining testified to the nation’s elevated civilization, the artists presented a renewed France where culinary pride and stability attested to the nation’s fortitude, social harmony, and republican character.