Triompher en Festins: Un Historie de France en Vingt Repas

In France, the formal banquet has long been politics by other means. From royal encounters in the thirteenth century to modern state occasions, what was served, to whom, in what setting and at what scale were never incidental choices. French cultural journalist Jonathan Siksou builds his history of France around twenty such documented meals, using each as a lens onto the broader political and cultural moment it was designed to serve.

The chapter-by-chapter reconstruction of specific occasions gives the book both its structure and its pleasure: the setting, the participants, the menu, and the work the meal was meant to do. Siksou moves across the full span of French history without losing the particularity of individual occasions, and his attention to culinary detail helps inspire imagination. What gets served at a state banquet turns out to be as legible as any diplomatic document.

From Saint Louis's 1254 reception of Henry III of England, through Henri IV and Marie de Medici's 1600 wedding banquet and Carême's grand ball at the Odeon in 1816, to the meal served at Paul Bocuse's 1975 induction into the Legion of Honor, this is an accessible survey of seven centuries of French dining spectacle.

Paperback. Color and black-and-white photographic insert. In French.