« La chère et la chair » : gastronomie et prostitution dans les grands restaurants des boulevards au xixe siècle

Abstract

With the concentration of the first restaurants in the Palais-Royal, Parisian gastronomy has been associated from the beginning with other sensual pleasures of the French capital. From the time of the July Monarchy, the sociability and leisure of « Tout-Paris » and the « demi-monde », associated with social representations of gastronomy and restaurants, contributed to the ever growing eroticization of the “restaurants des boulevards” and other private dining rooms. During the Second Empire, those “restaurants des boulevards” replaced Palais-Royal’s “historic” establishments, becoming the Mecca of French cooking and at the same time vital places for literary, artistic and demi-mondaine Parisian lifestyle. From the Third Republic to the First World War, those establishments capitalized on the “Eros of good food” to become places of not only culinary pleasure and gastronomic tourism but also of prostitution and sexual tourism.

Keywords

• prostitution
• history
• gastronomy
• erotiscism
• leisure