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Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France pp 90–111Cite as

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Gastronomy and the Diagnosis of Anorexia in Fin-de-Siècle France

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Part of the book series: Genders and Sexualities in History ((GSX))

Abstract

Students of European cultural history have long characterized the late nineteenth century and the years leading up to the Great War as a period of pronounced public and private anxieties. In the late 1950s the American historian H. Stuart Hughes chronicled the ‘social disorder, economic crisis, and institutional malfunctioning’ that helped to effect an ‘intellectual revolution’ against the era’s ‘self-satisfied cult of material progress’ and the optimistic positivism on which it rested. No historian has done more than Robert A. Nye to extend this insight to France, the nation that had long enjoyed cultural dominance over its neighbors but that, with the currents of the fin de siècle, entered a period of broad-spectrum cultural anxieties. Nye traced the pessimism and fearfulness of the era to the wrenching shock of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and meticulously traced French fears of national degeneration and decline. Chief among Nye’s contributions is his demonstration of the leading role played by physicians and biological scientists in diagnosing the nation’s cultural pathologies with the help of what he called a ‘medical model of cultural crisis.’2 Prominent among the physicians and life scientists who turned their sights on France’s cultural maladies were the diagnosticians of mental pathology, the ‘alienists,’ who, from the moment when ‘mental medicine’ first emerged amid the turmoil of the French Revolution, had claimed special understanding of intellectual, emotional, and behavioral aberration.

Everything which is eaten is the food of power.

(Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power1)

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Notes

  1. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Continuum, 1978 [1960]), p. 219.

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  17. Habermas proposes that the disease itself has remained constant since the late nineteenth century and that seeming disparities in its prevalence should be attributed to‘differences in national currents in medical thinking’; for an opposing view that draws attention to the ‘great confusion and disagreement about the nomenclature and associated views on cause and therapy’ in early French investigations, see Walter Vandereycken and Ron Van Deth, From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: the History of Self-Starvation ( New York: New York University Press, 1994 ), p. 170.

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  34. Sollier’s two male cases, both seen in overworked professionals (one a lawyer and one a physician), represented an adaptation of new terminology to gastric ills once thought especially to afflict ‘hommes de lettres’; see on this theme, Anne C. Vila, ‘The Philosophe’s Stomach: Hedonism, Hypochondria, and the Intellectual in Enlightenment France,’ in Cultures of the Abdomen: Diet, Digestion, and Fat in the Modern World, ed. Christopher E. Forth and Ana Carden-Coyne ( New York: Palgrave, 2005 ), pp. 89–104.

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  1. Elizabeth A. Williams
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Kansas, USA

    Christopher E. Forth (Howard Professor of Humanities & Western Civilization) (Howard Professor of Humanities & Western Civilization)

  2. University of Southern California, USA

    Elinor Accampo (Professor of History) (Professor of History)

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© 2010 Elizabeth A. Williams

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Williams, E.A. (2010). Gastronomy and the Diagnosis of Anorexia in Fin-de-Siècle France. In: Forth, C.E., Accampo, E. (eds) Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246843_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246843_5

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-30645-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-230-24684-3

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