TLS: Flesh out

by David Coward

TLS 06.09.2006

CONSUMABLE METAPHORS. Attitudes towards animals and vegetarianism in nineteenth-century France. By Ceri Crossley. 322pp. Peter Lang. Paperback, Pounds 37 (US $62.95). 3 03910 190 0

In the beginning, God set man above the beasts of the field. He made him king of creation and supplied animals for his use and pleasure. Much much later, Darwin showed that actually we are all in this thing together. Meanwhile, legend, bestiaries and fables exploited the belief that humans can acquire a better sense of their own nature by reference to the world of animals. In due course, materialist philosophers caught up with them and concluded that mankind should be more modest about its place in the scheme of things. We are animals too and whatever superiority we may have imposes fraternal obligations. It was one of the many problems the Enlightenment bequeathed to the nineteenth century.
After 1800, the great chefs who had once served the now fallen French nobility began to practise their arts in public. They invented the restaurant and, competing for custom, devised endlessly delicious ways of putting protein with blood in it on a plate. In so doing, they presented French animal-lovers with an enduring moral dilemma and made life difficult for campaigning vegetarians.
Yet as Ceri Crossley shows, with scholarly objectivity and much good humour, concern for animals and their welfare rose throughout the century. Consumable Metaphors is a fascinating report on the "animal question" as a reflection of nineteenth-century France's changing view of the world.
From the start, it was assumed that we are what we eat. Meat means self and aggression while vegetables signify altruism and sweet reason. Carnivores argued that if God or nature wished us to be vegetarian, we would not have canines and such meat-friendly intestines. Zoophiles, appalled by human arrogance and the horrors of animal husbandry and the abattoir, derived a general principle from dietary issues which could be applied to many areas of personal and collective life. The meat-versus-vegetarianism debate reflected the same tension as those that existed between progress and conservatism, male and female, cynicism and belief, war and peace. Human psychology was not improved by the blood of animals: are not butchers notoriously insensitive? And since boys who pull wings off flies almost invariably grow into husbands who beat their wives, teaching the young to be kind to our four-legged friends should be a primary aim of education.
Meat-eating was equally the enemy of religion: Jesus, who ended animal sacrifice by making the eucharist vegetarian, ate no flesh and his message, consequently, was one of love and peace. History itself demonstrates that all progress is attributable to the vegetarian branch of humanity and all destructive phenomena - wars, persecutions and oppressions -are the work of meat-eaters. Not that the meat-eaters have always had it entirely their own way. By 1789, aristocratic carnivores had been so weakened by consuming the animals they hunted that they were easy prey for impoverished and therefore meat-free Republicans who, alas, quickly caught the carnivorous habit:
how else to explain the bloodlust that was the Terror? In political terms, the taste for meat explains the appetite of Capital for the sweat of Labour, the oppression of women by men, and the exploitation of colonial peoples by imperial powers.
The debate was carried on at varying levels of sense and eccentricity by famous names (Lamartine, Michelet) and minor enthusiasts for whom Crossley clearly has a certain affection, like Jean-Antoine Gleizes, "the greatest vegetarian philosopher" of the age, or the militant novelist Rachilde, who liberated laboratory mice and once stuck a hatpin in a vivisectionist to demonstrate that needles hurt. But he is less patient with Alphonse Toussenel, "hunter and gastronome", anti-Semite, proto-fascist and a crank who wanted "bad" animals (tigers, snakes and the like) to be exterminated. Between them they founded societies for promoting animal welfare and new diets, and they fought the ideological battle across a range of issues:
the domestication of animals, vivisection, vegetarianism, cruel sports, animal psychology and, increasingly, science, which, by 1900, explained the chemistry of digestion but also promoted the benefits of zootherapy, a treatment involving the strapping of a suitable animal to any diseased limb.
After 1870, the vegetarian lobby made the political dimension of the debate explicit. The tensions between Church and State, between conservatism and republicanism, were not so much effects of history, class and greed but a function of diet. Yet even deeper concerns were mobilized. Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War had created an obsession with French national decline and degeneracy, of which our maltreatment of animals was one instance. Did helpless sheep and cows bring out the dark side of our nature? Were civilization and our vaunted humanity precarious delusions? The vegetarian lobby promised physical, moral and spiritual salvation.
In the event, the ethics of animal welfare remained low on the agenda and over time the less earnest attitude to diet based on the mouth-watering marvels of French cuisine has prevailed. But whether the role of a lamb is to gambol in a field or brown in an oven, Crossley's chronicle of the forgotten pioneers of vegetarianism provides much food for thought.