France on a Plate

he decides to have one last party -

Refined, rarefied and elite.

Top of the bill is the two ounce,

ready to serve...piping hot.

They then place the exquisite

with its head dangling from

munching on the tiny lungs,

They say that as your teeth sink into the ortolan's fragile flesh,

the salt air of the Mediterranean,

Eating the bird is a symbolic act,

very soul of France itself.

It's impossible to imagine a British Prime Minister in the same position,

with the same relish as Mitterrand brought to this final meal.

In eating this transgressive feast,

this bizarre banquet challenges

that food is a mere commodity.

and what that tells us about their identity and culture.

But first, you might want to know what happened to Mitterrand.

but two of the tiny ortolan birds.

a journalist, and now a professor.

than anywhere else in Europe.

But the France of the 21st century, with its Americanised golf buggies,

Built for Louis XIV, the palace was intended as a show piece,

to prove to the world, the supreme

The gardens, lights, and mirrors,

this is the nearest to heaven you will ever see on Earth.

It is surely one of the most

to human vanity ever created.

after an emblem on a shield he wore parading around Paris.

he really thought he was a god

cracked his whip and declared,

would become the great nation it had always deserved to be.

France would be the new Rome,

the new cultural and religious

the Italian influences bought in

Catherine de Medici were out.

replaced by a robust French style,

To help him in his endeavour, he installed in his kitchen

Francois Pierre de La Varenne

he was also the author of a seminal

called Le Cuisinier Francois.

turned into a ritual communion

between the Sun King and his scoff.

pheasant, partridge, salad, mutton with gravy and garlic,

It would often last through the evening and into the next day.

to be overawed by the king's

this is the first time in history,

that food had been linked to power

and the French state itself.

And this man eats like a god."

became so much a part of legend

who in April 1671, was ordered to organise a meal for the Sun King

and 2,000 of his closest friends.

to keep up, he had after all,

if sickly, Chantilly cream.

In the sumptuous 2001 film Vatel, the chef is played brilliantly

by Gerard Depardieu who is seen overseeing the mighty feast.

with fish as the headline course.

Catholics eat fish on Friday.

But fish was a risky choice,

as it had to come from over 100 miles away in Boulogne.

And if the weather turned nasty there would be no fishing -

waits for the fish to arrive,

the suspense is unbearable.

When he is told that there have

with a Gallic shrug of indifference

elite in Paris and Versailles

in the rest of the country,

the dish of the day had not changed

In this, the French weren't

in their attempts to experiment

with their diet with anything they could find, even rats like these.

in France, the poor made bread

out of the bones of the corpses

a respectable bourgeoisie roasted the carcasses of her children.

She did this over five days.

everybody knew that the court, under the successive reigns of Louis XIV,

as if it was going out of fashion.

The target of the accumulated

with her extravagant banquets

Marie Antoinette is provocatively played here by Kirsten Dunst.

It is the perfect incarnation

who, when told that the French populace had no bread to eat,

Marie Antoinette's famous remark has

cruelty of the aristocracy.

But there is more going on here

does to make a loaf of bread.

that was about to engulf France

no-one wanted to hear common sense

a poor, silly, foreign queen.

But the anger at the inequality

and a vast seething underclass

The whole world knows the tale

the storming of the Bastille,

the victory of the sans-culottes,

and one that has fuelled many

the victory of the bourgeoisie

from the wreckage of the Revolution

possession, total political power.

bakers, merchants and lawyers.

there had only been a handful

the long French tradition of dining

One of the grandest restaurants around was here at Le Grand Vefour.

Politicians and philosophers mixed

the triumph of French civilisation

with all the ruthless finesse

So, there you go. Vol-au-vent, a revolution in puff pastry.

One of the restaurants clients

was a young Corsican freedom fighter

an almost untranslatable word

that Napoleon was gastronome.

He was bored silly by food.

Like a kid who can't wait to get

But even though he was the very

Napoleon understood the political and cultural significance of food.

he instructed his foreign minister

and grand gourmet Talleyrand,

Talleyrand on a mission, purchased the magisterial Chateau de Valencay,

on the Loire with 1.6 million francs of government money.

He bought with him his own secret weapon, Marie-Antoine Careme,

to talk to one of his disciples

achievement was to convince

other nations of the inherent superiority of French cuisine.

All good dinner party hosts

know that nothing seduces more effectively than a good meal.

Napoleon took this to new heights

when he charged his chief diplomat Talleyrand and his cook Careme

to conquer Europe in culinary terms

So, at the Congress of Vienna,

to secure more French votes,

rations he may have been saved

that was to be his undoing.

But his untimely death in 1821

did little to stop, the now time

of mixing food and politics.

Having turned Paris into the city we know today, with its cafes,

boulevards and public squares,

the building of a vast food market

in the centre of the capital.

Les Halles, as it was known,

was to be a showcase of the very best food in the known world.

A beautiful structure filled with fruit, vegetables, cheese, meat

and wine from all over France,

to the working and drinking

This was truly the Democratic

you can a sense of Les Halles

Which is, in fact now, the largest

Massive aisles are set apart for fish, vegetables and here, meat.

"and alley ways always leading to

The people here had their own slang

It was a semi-criminal underworld

stretching from North Africa

known as the "queen of the world".

abruptly and without warning.

Germany, the old rival to the East

had long coveted the disputed French territory of Alsace-Lorraine.

In 1870, the Germans deliberately

and really quite dim Napoleon into declaring war on Germany.

He had walked quite blindly

The German armies mobilized

in the winter of 1870 - 1871,

On the 25 of December 1870, one restaurant created a menu that

and his furry friends on the ark.

For starters there was butter,

Then there was camel roasted

bear ribs and pepper sauce.

Wolf legs with venison and antelope

Don't fancy that... and I am

how about the kangaroo stew?

the zoo menu was off limits.

Haute cuisine, safari style

Instead, they had to do with

and the ever adaptable rat.

Butchers at the time were known

plumper and smelling of ale than

Following a prolonged siege,

losing the provinces of both Alsace

and Lorraine, the French found a silver lining on the food front,

The first beer pump was installed

Frederic Bofinger in his brand new

19th century ideal modernity.

By the 1890's the convulsions of the recent past seemed a world away,

as Parisians threw themselves

as the capital of pleasure.

The 1890s city was also attracting

a euphemism for specifically

On the 22nd of September 1900,

were summoned to celebrate the anniversary of the first republic.

But the aim of the banquet was not just to feed the great and good

to make a public spectacle of it.

of Louis XIV some 300 years earlier,

literally "la gloire" on a plate.

The catering company behind this epic blow out, is still

with us today, and commanded

What this banquet was all about

More to the point it celebrated

held dear to their hearts -

civic democracy and fine cooking.

What better and unbeatable emblem

But the banquet was only part of Loubet's grandiose initiative

the Grand and Petit Palais,

and the Gare du Lyon were all built.

From the outside, the station evokes the belle epoque fairly discreetly.

This is a place that began life

as the Gare du Lyon station buffet

but there is nothing modest or humble about what's on offer now.

The restaurant, Le Train Bleu,

of French self-belief optimism

It's about food, romance, gravy and glory all rolled into one.

No room for understatement here.

France was now a very rich country

In this temple of gastronomy

are not random images of foreign places to distract the traveller

the world of French civilisation.

in search of new and exquisite

fertile ground that had produced it.

The end of the 19th century

the Frenchman's personal chariot

which allowed him to set out and discover his native land anew.

On the new little routes national -

it was possible to set off from Paris in your new-fangled automobile

your way through the country

armed with a useful new guide

With this one historic publication,

and food were brought together and, in the now well-established

French democratic tradition,

The figure we know in English

The phrase comes from the Latin

"Now is the time to drink"..

one early guide for motorists

advised the new knights of the road to take brandy or Belgian beer

on the new routes national.

The best place to eat on the route, and arguably in all of France

made rich by the silk trade.

was the capital of the world,

of anti-Parisian ideas in food

delicious food in the world

The staple diet is ears, feet,

It's not a place where the phrase "Meat is Murder" holds much sway.

found that Lyonnais delicacies needed a little explanation

a sausage made out of pig's stomach,

"Is like politics," he said, "It needs to smell of shit."

the tastes of Lyon's delicacies are perhaps a little unsettling

but the Frenchman has always

of apparently challenging dishes

I've dined with French people who have quaked with terror

with an Anglo-Saxon-style curry

but, for the French, the wilder

But this detail of history seems

The ensuing war of independence

brought terrorism to the streets

fanatics challenged the might

gave Algeria its independence

in 1962, France was faced with

Both communities flocked to Marseilles, Lyon and Paris,

often finding life here tougher than what they'd left behind.

In a modest attempt to remember

they bought to these cities, the smells and tastes of their cuisine.

One of their greatest exponents

without question, delicious

has a political significance.

Gruyere is supposed to be the mark

Actually nobody knows why this is

and, to my mind, always leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

The Right was the dominant force

but what separated President George Pompidou from de Gaulle

In the 1970s, the country was undergoing a cultural revolution,

everything new and futuristic.

even infected architecture.

AS IF FROM FUNNELS: The architectural style of the Pompidou centre,

surely the ugliest building in Paris, is a perfect example

of the perverse and arrogant belief that newness for its own sake

is what explains the fashion

a minimalist technique perfected by the super-chef Paul Bocuse.

Actually, it's all just an exquisite form of culinary showing off,

about this culinary minimalism

that had gripped the French

But essentially it was a fad

covering over the brutal truth

stale and, well, a bit worn out

The unthinkable was happening.

French food or bouffe had gone bad.

bad foreign food, then it meant

the noxious stuff the French housewives bought in supermarkets.

"that old France was dead or dying

Even President Francois Mitterrand,

an absolute ruler in the mould of Louis XIV, could do little

to halt the tectonic shifts

Anglo-American world in politics,

the nail in the coffin came with

Paris and then the whole of France

and its plucky Belgian cousin Quick.

But you could also argue that the

as shown in Quentin Tarantino's

You know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese in Paris?

quarter pounder and cheese?

what the fuck quarter pounder is.

They call is a royale with cheese.

Royale with cheese?! That's right. What do they call a Big Mac?

but they call it Le Big Mac.

FRENCH ACCENT: Le Big Mac?!

What do they call a whopper? I don't know I didn't go in to a Burger King.

What Tarantino is picking up on

has become assimilated into French

This restaurant may look like a normal McDonald's from the outside,

but inside, it's a different world.

For one thing you could also have

a petit express, I don't know,

a pain au raisin, or a croissant.

Today France is the most profitable McDonald's market outside America.

Meanwhile, traditional bistros and brasseries are closing down

with a frightening rapidity.

A crisis that was keenly felt even

like the three-Michelin-starred

Fusion food has replaced nouvelle cuisine as the fad of the day.

Its modern, its multicultural,

You could also say that this fusion

applies to the current president - Nicolas Sarkozy - a man on a mission

and sees any future French success

by hard-headed pragmatists,

where cooking takes second place

dazzling the great heads of Europe

anti-Mitterrand - he doesn't drink,

the very opposite of what Mitterrand

power, glory and the great food

But don't worry I am not going to throw myself off the Eiffel Tower

the country I first came to.

This is a nation on its way

business in the globalised world.

You can see this everywhere,

And, most of all, you see it

of the quality of French cuisine.

There's literally no time to eat well in the fast-moving

The story of French cuisine

was available to everybody.

to the Franco-Prussian war,

to the Algerian war of Independence,