Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ ɑ̃tɛlm bʁija savaʁɛ̃]; 2 April 1755 – 2 February 1826) was a French lawyer and politician, who, as the author of Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste), became celebrated for his culinary reminiscences and reflections on the craft and science of cookery and the art of eating.
Rising to modest eminence in the last years of France's Ancien Régime, Brillat-Savarin had to escape into exile when the Reign of Terror began in 1793. He spent nearly three years in the United States, teaching French and playing the violin to support himself, before returning to France when it became safe to do so, resuming his career as a lawyer, and rising to the top of the French judiciary.
The Physiology of Taste was the product of many years' writing in the author's spare time. Published weeks before his death in 1826, the work established him alongside Grimod de La Reynière as one of the founders of the genre of the gastronomic essay.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was born on 2 April 1755 in the small cathedral city of Belley, Ain, 80 kilometres (50 miles) east of Lyon and a similar distance south of Bourg-en-Bresse. Belley was the principal city of the region of Bugey, which had been absorbed into France under the 1601 Treaty of Lyon.
Brillat-Savarin was descended on both sides from families of lawyers; his father, Marc-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, was a leading lawyer in the city; his mother, Claudine-Aurore née Récamier, was the daughter of Belley's Notary Royal. Jean Anthelme was the eldest of the couple's eight children; of his two brothers, Xavier followed into the legal profession and Frédéric became an army officer.
In the household and region in which Brillat-Savarin grew up, good food was taken seriously; his relative and fellow lawyer Lucien Tendret wrote:
Brillat-Savarin learned from friends and acquaintances of his parents many unusual things about food, including a three-day method of cooking spinach, how to eat small game birds like ortolans, and how to prepare chocolate for drinking. His formal education proceeded along more conventional lines: he entered the Collège de Belley in 1764 or 1765. Although founded as a religious institution and with many of its staff in holy orders, the college was secular in outlook; theology was not in the curriculum and the library contained works on agriculture and science as well as books by La Rochefoucauld, Montesquieu, Rabelais, Voltaire and Rousseau. As a schoolboy, Brillat-Savarin took up the violin; he loved playing it, and although destined for the law he hankered for a while after a career as a violinist.
In the spring of 1774 Brillat-Savarin enrolled at the University of Dijon. His main study was law, but he undertook some extracurricular studies in medicine and attended lectures in chemistry by Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, who became a friend and helpful counsellor.
After graduating in 1778 Brillat-Savarin returned to Belley and practised law, making his first court appearance in September. He made good progress in his profession, and in 1781 he was appointed as a magistrate in the local civil court – lieutenant civil du bailliage. As he became more eminent locally he became involved with seeking action to alleviate the deprivations of the poor caused by years of financial crisis and poor harvests. In 1787 he first visited the royal residence, the Château de Versailles; his purpose may have been to seek help for the poor of his region, but he left no details of his mission.
Riots broke out in Grenoble in June 1788 in protest against the abolition of traditional and supposedly guaranteed local freedoms, and it became clear that effective government had so seriously collapsed that Louis XVI would have to summon a meeting of the Estates General, the closest approximation in Ancien Régime France to a national parliament; it had not met since 1614, and in the words of the historian Karen Diane Haywood it "generally met only in dire situations when the king and his ministers had no other choice".
When the King summoned the Estates General in 1789 Brillat-Savarin was elected to represent the Third Estate of Belley. In a biographical sketch Anne Drayton observes "there was nothing of the revolutionary in his make-up", and when the Estates General reformed as the National Constituent Assembly he made speeches opposing the division of France into eighty-three administrative departments, the introduction of trial by jury and the abolition of capital punishment.
At the end of his term of office in September 1791 Brillat-Savarin returned home as president of the civil tribunal of the new department of Ain, but as politics in Paris became increasingly radical, with the abolition of the monarchy, he was persona non grata with the new regime, and was dismissed from his post for royalist sympathies. Such was his popularity among his fellow citizens that in December 1792 he was elected mayor of Belley. For nearly a year he strove to protect his city from the excesses of the revolution, but when the Reign of Terror began in September 1793 he felt increasingly at risk of arrest and execution.
On 10 or 11 December he fled from France to Switzerland, where he took up residence in Lausanne. He later stayed with relations in Moudon, from whom he learnt his celebrated and later controversial recipe for fondue. He was joined by a fellow exile, Jean-Antoine de Rostaing, whose father, the Marquis Just-Antoine de Rostaing, had fought with the French forces in the American War of Independence. Rostaing suggested sailing to the United States; Brillat-Savarin agreed. They made their way to Rotterdam, where they took ship for an eighty-day voyage to Manhattan, disembarking on 30 September 1794.
Brillat-Savarin remained in the US for nearly two years, supporting himself by giving French and violin lessons. His biographer Giles MacDonogh observes, "He awarded himself the title of Professeur, by which he jocularly referred to himself to the end of his days". He also played first violin in America's only professional orchestra, at the John Street Theatre, New York. He later had fond memories of his time in America:
While staying with a friend in Hartford, Connecticut he shot a wild turkey and brought it back to the kitchen: he wrote of the roast bird that it was, "charming to behold, pleasing to smell, and delicious to taste". One of his favourite memories of his American stay was an evening at Little's Tavern in New York when he and two other French émigrés beat two Englishmen in a competitive drinking bout, in which they all consumed large quantities of claret, port, Madeira and punch.
Rostaing grew tired of life in the US and returned to France in May 1795. Without him Brillat-Savarin was deprived of the closest friend of his years of exile. He continued to amuse himself with, among other diversions, what a biographer calls "undoubtedly numerous" encounters with the opposite sex; Brillat-Savarin commented, "being able to speak the language and flirt with women, I was able to reap the richest rewards". He hoped, nonetheless, to return to France, not least because he was running short of funds, and he sailed for home, arriving at the end of August 1796. By this time the political scene in France was no longer dominated by extremists: Robespierre and his allies from the Reign of Terror had fallen and France was ruled by the more moderate Directory. Brillat-Savarin persuaded the authorities that the legal penalties imposed on émigrés should be rescinded in his case.
Through the influence of Rostaing, Brillat-Savarin was appointed as secretary to the staff of General Charles-Pierre Augereau, who led the French army fighting on the Rhine. Drayton comments that by this time Brillat-Savarin had obviously acquired a certain reputation as a gourmet, "for he was promptly put in charge of catering for the general staff, a task which he performed to the delighted satisfaction of his fellow officers".
After the end of the Rhine campaign the Directory appointed him as President of the Criminal Court of the Ain Department, based in Bourg-en-Bresse, in 1798, and then State Prosecutor for the Department of Seine-et-Oise, based in Versailles. After Napoleon Bonaparte engineered the fall of the Directory and establishment of the Consulate in 1799, Brillat-Savarin was appointed as a judge in the Tribunal de cassation, the supreme court of appeal, which sat in Paris. He was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1804, and in 1808 Napoleon made him a Chevalier de l'Empire.