February 18, 1900 was a most inopportune moment for the New York Times to expose “the deplorable state of the kitchens of Parisian hotels and restaurants.” The opening of the World's Fair was barely two months away, and its organizers counted on millions of visitors, many hailing from abroad, to recuperate the tremendous investment in an event meant to celebrate the achievements of the nineteenth century. Attractions were myriad, but French gastronomy played a crucial role in drawing tourists to Paris. These travelers had to rely on commercial outlays to feed themselves while strolling through the city and the 530-acre exhibition site. The newspaper's report was all the more ominous as “many of the revelations are unprintable.” If all the news was not fit to print, the disclosures nevertheless listed some of the appalling circumstances in Parisian restaurant kitchens: their basement location and exiguity, the absence of sewers and proper garbage disposal, the lack of air, and temperatures rising as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit (and higher). Occupational hazards accounted for the high mortality among cooks, which was double that of the adult population in the city. Surely the health of workers was a serious public concern. But the compound effect of flawed architecture and reckless insalubrity touched an altogether more sensitive issue. Dirt and heat tended to “react disadvantageously on the food prepared.” The suggestion that a filthy environment sullied the dishes during their preparation boded ill for the Parisian World's Fair. The damage, however, went far beyond. The diffusion of information about the prevailing conditions in Parisian restaurant kitchens dealt a blow to the glorious reputation of French cuisine.Footnote 1 The global broadcast about the despicable settings of culinary production in Paris was a threat to the French self-understanding as the world's gastronomic beacon. Legislators and administrators were pushed on a path to modify institutional setups and social regulations in order to improve restaurant hygiene.
Descriptions of backstage kitchen settings had occasionally filtered into the public before 1900. The short-lived experience of political freedom in 1848 allowed the trade of cooks and pastry makers, which claimed more than ten thousand workers in Paris, to expose their excruciating working conditions in small, 120° F-hot kitchens. They described these spaces as “genuine graves of living men” and the catalysts of incapacitating illnesses.Footnote 2 But it was the legalization of professional organizations in 1884 (the so-called loi Waldeck-Rousseau named after the Minister of the Interior) that provided access to the political system. It offered the newly founded cooks' union, known as the Chambre syndicale ouvrière des cuisiniers, the opportunity to turn workplace conditions and their improvement into a lasting battleground.
The focus on the prevention of workplace risks distinguished the cooks’ activism from campaigns centered on toxicological dangers. The cooks’ mobilization was not about “particular ailments,” such as phosphorus necrosis (also known as phossy jaw) and saturnism, for which victims requested retroactive reparation, as Christopher Sellers and Joseph Menning write in a historiographical review on industrial hazards.Footnote 3 Rather, their collective actions aimed to assess the entire workspace and the immediate as well as long-term dangers it represented in the lives of cooks. In doing so they pursued the modification of the legal principles regulating workplace safety. Their history rescues the overlooked facet of grassroots mobilization in the construction of French social protection.Footnote 4
The reform of kitchen hygiene in Paris around 1900 engages three strands of historiography whose combination Alain Cottereau suggested in order to retrieve workers’ ways of defending their health: workplace experience, workers’ politics, and the elaboration of labor legislation.Footnote 5 The records of the cooks’ decades-long struggles yield a better understanding of the processes by which social movements find the means and the language, first, to translate shop floor risks into claims for their prevention and, second, to address prophylactic propositions to the state as a regulatory authority. In other words, this is the story of a sustained, twenty-year campaign of claim making.Footnote 6 Persistence and strategic savvy paid off. On July 11, 1903, elected officials included all blue- and white-collar workplaces unaffected by machinery in the second, encompassing law on workplace hygiene and safety. They responded to the combined and protracted pressure of cooks and allied hygienists for an ecological and ergonomic perception of health risks on the job. The law and its administrative regulations now defined rules of ventilation, lighting, cleanliness, drainage and sanitary equipment in restaurant kitchens, shops, offices, and warehouses.Footnote 7
The retrieval of cooks’ experience in restaurant kitchens around 1900 represents something like the return of the repressed. According to Rebecca Spang, the restaurant's overall purpose was to aestheticize the eating experience and to remove out of sight the potentially disturbing production area of the meals they served.Footnote 8 While there is some research on waiters and tipping, working conditions in restaurants are an underexposed subject in historical research. The more glamorous aspects—celebrity chefs from Carême to Escoffier—have caught historians’ analytical gaze.Footnote 9 Cooks have also remained in the shadow of better-researched trades whose historiographical prominence rests on technology,Footnote 10 gender,Footnote 11 and the roots of militancy (or the absence thereof).Footnote 12 The struggle of the cooks’ union echoes with all these issues. They worried about the effects of gas ranges and refrigeration on their dishes: Just like the bakers, they tended to resist mechanical novelty, arguing that it had a negative effect on product quality.Footnote 13 They wrestled with the place of women in professional kitchens as, contrary to recent historiography, women could, and did, run kitchens of working-class restaurants and hospitals: The 1896 census of Paris lists 3,285 male and 1,979 female chefs, and 9,597 male and 4,512 female cooks in business, although women were absent from luxurious establishments.Footnote 14 But the mainspring of the cooks’ activist turn resided with traditional nomenclatures that relegated their occupation to the realm of domestic service. Their activity thus lay beyond the purview of republican labor legislation. Health and hygiene combined to fuel the cooks’ activism.
The legally enforced protection of personnel at their workstation was a mainstay of the cooks’ political activities throughout this period. Their reluctance to engage in militant shop floor activity did not reflect a lack of political punch or denote public disinterest. Resistance first and foremost took the form of leaving grueling workplaces. Restaurant kitchens were well-known for the high turnover of their staff.Footnote 15 Cooks led their struggle for legal protection off the job. It was their persistent, lawful contentiousness that succeeded in having overhauled the restrictive 1893 law on industrial safety and hygiene. The cooks and their union marched through—and helped shape—republican institutions to obtain the state's provisioning for the health and safety of the entire labor force. In short, the cooks’ long battle calls into question an interpretation that construes workers’ struggles for physical well-being on the job as either narrowly restricted to single crafts, distinct toxicological substances, or specific regions, or as subsequent to the prior adoption of labor laws in the 1890s.Footnote 16
The Chambre syndicale's political activism contributed to substantial changes in working conditions far outside restaurants in the wake of the 1903 law. However, disappointment with the law's protracted implementation radicalized the union. The “militants of the saucepan” were late in coming to direct-action, shop floor syndicalism. But the new ideological orientation acted as the catalyst for a sustained strike in May 1907. The strategic about-turn of the Chambre syndicale adds nuance to analyses of unions’ influence on collective protest in France. It shows an organization switching to, and then recoiling from, more radical stances. For a brief moment, the cooks’ moderate political outlook gave way to an activist agenda under the influence of a more pugnacious leadership.Footnote 17
The chronicle of the cooks on the job and in the public arena is an antidote to the tendency of narrating state- and institution-building as the history of providential individuals with big ideas. The construction of the welfare state often appears as an intellectual enterprise whose origins lie with thinkers masterminding blueprints for social democracy.Footnote 18 According to Sanford Elwitt and Judith Stone, the resolve to bring the French proletariat into the political system and tie it to civil society motivated many philanthropic and legislative operations.Footnote 19 It amounted to, in André Gueslin's reading, a paternalistic project to protect man against himself.Footnote 20 The master plot of the introduction of social insurance to compensate for accidents on the job has a similar ring to it. Enlightened elites imposed the idea of the mutualization of risks on a society where the notion of individual responsibility for misfortunes activated traditional forms of solidarity (family, mutual aid societies, and so on).Footnote 21 The top-down approach (as Elwitt described his method) received criticism for overestimating the centrality of the working-class to the construction of welfare institutions as the benefits accrued more significantly to country dwellers and families in general.Footnote 22 On a comparative level of social histories, the view from the underground restaurant kitchen in Paris complements histories that construe early welfare policies as an instrument to weaken social democracy (as in Germany),Footnote 23 or as an encounter between local societies and central authority (as in most European countries),Footnote 24 and its protagonists as technocratic philanthropists,Footnote 25 civil servants,Footnote 26 or hesitant, dubious or hostile workers.Footnote 27
Parisian cooks turn this narrative on its head. Rather than theorizing about measures to take and then to implement, they gathered information—and strength—from their hands-on experience in the kitchen. They listed propositions to improve their working conditions before legislators had even thought about the values and principles to shape laws on workplace safety in 1893. They worked closely with physicians and initiated on-site inspections, first by hygienists and later by labor inspectors. They kept pressuring authorities. Their union contended with employers. They deployed a wide repertoire of collective actions (meetings, demonstrations, letter-writing, petitions, lobbying, a strike …). They learned to articulate their particular concern for workplace hygiene through issues that interested more people. They turned restaurant kitchens into a matter of public health by way of customers’ protection from food poisoning. And they related their cause to the reputation of French cuisine. Gastronomy was a major asset of the tourist business as well as an important component of the country's image of itself. Its preservation mattered to politicians and businessmen. When the National Assembly adopted a revised version of the June 12, 1893 law concerning the safety and hygiene of workers in industrial sites of every description (except mines, benefitting from a special legal regime),Footnote 28 the regulation then covered roughly 530,000 worksites, up from somewhere around 322,000 in 1902. It included restaurant kitchens as well as bakeries, butcher stalls, shops of pastry cooks, wine cellars, offices, and sales floors.Footnote 29
Cooks and Workplace Hygiene Before 1884
An avant-la-lettre ecological diagnostic of health and safety linked work conditions to artisans’ illnesses. According to Arlette Farge, eighteenth-century physicians, royal administrators, and entrepreneurs itemized the lack of air, the presence of dust and dirt, and the exposure to high temperatures, but also tools and machinery as causes of professional impairments and accidents. They recommended better aeration and regular cleaning to preserve the labor force. It was apparently possible to glimpse suggestions of fewer working hours, outdoor exercise, and ergonomic indications on body positions to improve and extend the lives of an astonishing array of craftsmen (bakers, candlemakers, gilders, glassmakers, hatters, hosiers, watchmakers), working women (laundresses, wool carders, spinners), and children (operating machinery in textile shops).Footnote 30 There was the occasional remark on the health concerns of cooks.Footnote 31 French interest in job-related diseases thus preceded the belated 1777 translation of Bernadino Ramazzini's Essai sur les maladies des artisans but applied the same encompassing etiology.Footnote 32 Cooks did not figure among the fifty-two occupations reviewed by the Italian doctor (though their exposure to noxious vapors was mentioned).Footnote 33 It is evidence of the change in their professional situation that the second, largely expanded French translation published in 1822 carried an entry on the ailments lurking in the kitchen. Its inventory of the occupational hazards in over 200 jobs provided a list of the threats to the health of cooks. They were both chronic and acute: phlebectasis due to the long hours in upright position, burns and headaches induced by heat and fumes, and slow poisoning through copper utensils.Footnote 34
The institutionalization of the restaurant in the early 1800s increased the number of cooks. They now prepared meals for a varying clientele in public places rather than for aristocrats and the bourgeoisie in private homes. However, the development left unchanged their legal status modeled on the employment conditions of domestics. In the mid-1820s, the British travel writer Edward Planta counted about 1,700 cafés and restaurants that served cold and hot lunch and dinner in Paris.Footnote 35 Panckouke's dictionary of medical sciences caught both the up- and the downside of this development. It noted that cooking, “carried to a high point in France (so that it provides the cooks to gourmet Europe), is a source of pleasures beyond words for our gastronomes; it turns Paris into the center of good food, just as it is for the arts and good taste; but it entails great inconveniences for the practicing artists.”Footnote 36 The rise to the culinary pinnacle and the continued growth of the restaurant trade increased the number of cooks so much so that, in the words of an 1869 health manual, “they are now too important a class to society to ignore the ills to which the exercise of their art exposes them.”Footnote 37 The description of the plights of the kitchen staff remained. In the eyes of mostly medical observers, circumstances and procedures appeared to combine with a certain casualness among cooks to account for job hazards. Physical exiguity and high temperatures spawned a suffocating atmosphere leading to headaches and the occasional stroke.Footnote 38 Constant exposure to hot kitchen appliances, pots and pans, and the handling of knives and other utensils led to burns and cuts. Variations on the theme mentioned varicose veins, hernias, painful abscesses, chaps infecting hands, and inflamed eyes.Footnote 39
Propositions of remedies were few. Devices to propel the circulation of the kitchen air seemed obvious … and expensive. Much advice came couched in terms of individual responsibility. Cooks were encouraged to forgo alcohol so as to increase concentration and prevent accidents, to wear gaiters or tight stockings to ward off bad limbs, and to take regular promenades in fresh air to clear their heads and lungs. But the fact of the matter was that “it is not easy to preserve the cooks from the inconveniences of their craft.”Footnote 40 The recommendation to take leisurely strolls was unrealistic in an era when work-days lasted over twelve hours and off-days amounted to uncompensated unemployment and hence a loss of income. More importantly, the preventative focus on occupational hazards incurred by the operatives in the kitchen ignored the concern with all-around cleanliness and its effect on the quality of restaurant food.
The connection between hygiene and culinary accomplishment did not appear in medical commentary. It turned up elsewhere. The restaurant's backstage occasionally happened to emerge among the more irreverent tourist guides. Planta's New Picture of Paris, published in 1827, advised against places that charged less than thirty sous for a meal. “The almost ochre-coloured table-cloth; the rusty fork, the prongs of which are half filled up with dirt; the rough-handled, worn-out and black knife; the greasy plate, the yet greasier waiter, and a complication of villainous odours, will render it impossible for him [the Englishman] to eat one morsel.”Footnote 41 The idea that a descent into the kitchen would spoil the appetite of more than one regular customer occurred here and there. An 1849 campaign for not eating out during the workday because of the low quality and high price of the menus offered “a glance at the interior of most kitchens of prix-fixe restaurants.” Kitchens were “veritable cesspits, narrow, in general dark, with a humid and slippery floor, smoky walls, stagnating debris in corners, a murky atmosphere saturated by the emanations of a poached fish, a simmering casserole, and the nauseating stench exuding from the tub of muddy water through which a kitchen boy shifts the dirty dishes.” It was an atmosphere to provoke disgust but also to affect the cooks’ health and the quality of the dishes. The author held that only determined action could overcome such drawbacks.Footnote 42
The cooks of Paris sought the regulatory hand of the state. In a study of food workers in Paris during the early 1860s, the journalist Pierre Vinçard related their frequent entreaties to “speak out about the kitchens where we suffocate, the diseases that the milieu inflicts on us; do mention the long and harsh periods of unemployment, our premature aging—all those miseries, so numerous and yet too little known.” The cooks described their bodies’ wear and the signs of their exhaustion—pallor, rheumatism, gastrointestinal inflammation, and high incidence of tuberculosis—as a result of their occupational circumstances.Footnote 43 Whenever they had the opportunity to make a public statement in an era when only friendly (or mutual) societies were legal, cooks took a stand on the conditions of restaurant kitchens.Footnote 44 In 1883 the Union universelle des cuisiniers, pâtissiers, confiseurs exhorted public authorities to focus attention on the salubrity of restaurant kitchens and pastry shops.Footnote 45 The Fraternité des cuisiniers de Paris “signal[ed] the insalubrious state of the kitchens in public establishments, very often ghastly and pestilential, that contribute to the early death of many a young person. They call on the city of Paris to carry out painstaking and frequent inspections of public cuisines.”Footnote 46 When confronted with workers’ diagnosis of the state of kitchens in food businesses, the old-school publication Art culinaire, run by conservative gastronomic critics as well as chefs sympathetic to the labor movement, threw its weight behind reform.Footnote 47
By the early 1880s information about the state of the restaurant kitchens in Paris was available to whoever was curious enough to look for it. The scientific and tourist press easily yielded examples. A guide to Paris restaurants published in view of the International Exposition of 1867 alerted its readers to the minuscule cellar kitchens where the heat rose to the “hellish” temperature of 140° F.Footnote 48 A handbook on elementary hygiene mentioned the disgust provoked by the fumes and stenches escaping through the basement windows of restaurant kitchens.Footnote 49 Physician Louis Reuss affirmed, in 1883, that “in restaurants, cafés, hotels, and unfortunately in the best known eating places where one expects to find sustained attention to sanitary comfort, the kitchens are generally in a deplorable condition.”Footnote 50 Nonetheless, when looking back from 1890, assemblyman Dr. Albert Deschamps remarked upon the almost commonplace comparison of restaurant kitchens to Dante's hell and “that it has been so for many years, and yet no one gave much thought to improve the hygienic fate of these martyrs of the saucepan.” The spark to proceed to regulatory intervention ignited, he concluded, “only after the cooks’ union had deposited, on the table of the municipal council of Paris, a petition that detailed their grievances concerning the conditions in the majority of Parisian restaurant kitchens.”Footnote 51 After the legalization of professional organizations in 1884, the newly founded Chambre syndicale ouvrière des cuisiniers carried out three accomplishments: it formalized diffuse knowledge on culinary hygiene, it identified the cooks’ sickening workplaces as a social problem beyond its recognition as a question of occupational health, and it translated that concern into a political issue.
Union Campaigning and the Hygienist Momentum
Practical expertise, moderate politics and an alliance with medical authorities characterized the cooks’ campaign for the legal regulation of their workplace. When winds turned and the prospect of unionization became realistic by 1883, the cooks’ “cercle de la fraternité” discussed the arising possibility to defend workers’ rights more forcefully. The steering committee considered hygiene to be “the most urgent issue” facing the craft members (the other two subjects were holidays and labor market rules).Footnote 52 The first public opportunity to expose their demands as a labor organization came in 1884. An official board inquired into the causes and effects of a five-year economic downturn. It listened to testimony from workers. The union delegation promoted workplace hygiene as a public responsibility because “a part of public health depends on food handled [in restaurants].”Footnote 53 Soon enough, the union published a weekly journal, Le Progrès des cuisiniers, “a powerful instrument of propaganda” in the words of the movement's first historian and government official Isidore Finance.Footnote 54 Its very first page sported an article in favor of one day off from work per month to relieve the fateful consequences of kitchen conditions on the health of the staff. Oxygen, the argument went, helped workers’ health, and in turn increased their productivity. It offered the solution to unemployment as one cook's day of rest was another's day of work (and revenue).Footnote 55
The union's managing committee pursued “an indispensable reform” but insisted that it did not mean to “turn everything upside down, far from it.”Footnote 56 The cooks believed in the republican order. Their goal was to move its institutions into crafting sanitary laws. An early plea stated that “industrial hygiene belongs to the jurisdiction of the so-called, government-paid commission of hygiene. Its members avoid doing what they ought to, and when they penetrate into our kitchens, they shake the owner's hand, take a look at a few pots and pans to see whether they have been recently plated with tin. Then they leave convinced of having saved the lives of the restaurant's clients. Sometimes in spite of themselves, an unintended utterance (oh, it's very hot down here). And that is that.”Footnote 57 The mainstream press widely and positively reported on the meeting's appeal that the Municipal Council of Paris look into restaurant hygiene and come up with specific rules to improve it.Footnote 58
The media effect was immediate. Parisian residents called upon the hitherto inattentive commission of hygiene to scrutinize food businesses. The commissioners responsible for the first and second arrondissement testified that restaurants were “particularly plentiful in its precinct, emphasizing the extreme unhealthfuless of their kitchens; they are usually situated beneath street level and below the sewers, next to the water closets and urinals, with no light other than gas lights, keeping the used water in tubs throughout the night. These kitchens are often the filthiest place in the house.”Footnote 59 The focus on restaurant clients now showed in guidebooks on hygiene. The first edition of Jules Arnould's Nouveaux éléments d'hygiène, published in 1881 before the union's public campaign to improve working conditions, made no mention of restaurants. Eight years later, the second edition brought up kitchen hygiene as an interest not only to cooks but also to restaurant clients. It listed technical solutions to get rid of insalubrity.Footnote 60 Union assemblies weighed political strategies to get a hearing with authorities.Footnote 61 The link between working conditions, kitchen hygiene, and customers’ health emerged as an argument from these deliberations.Footnote 62
The cooks’ union, 1,400 strong by 1888, continued to fight for their rights “peacefully,” as one congress report made a point to emphasize.Footnote 63 Congress followed union congress, encouraging the cooks’ lawful campaign for healthier kitchen conditions.Footnote 64 In their march through Parisian institutions and attempts to contribute to the construction of legal bodies that would enforce rules in favor of a safer workplace (the Commission on Insalubrious Housing, the Superior Council of Labor), the Chambre syndicale ouvrière des cuisiniers relied on the support of two physicians: Doctors Regeard and Calendreau. They had examined the prospective members of the cooks’ mutual aid society since the mid-1870s. When the municipal council of Paris accepted the union's request to inquire into the conditions in restaurant kitchens, its investigators solicited their expert testimony.Footnote 65 They detailed the professional illnesses among cooks. They also provided statistics on the incidence of these afflictions, sick days, and premature deaths (calculated at more than double the ratio of the adult population aged twenty to fifty years between 1883 and 1886).Footnote 66 Their eyewitness accounts corroborated the cooks’ claims concerning the occupational stress in commercial kitchens. They incited the commission—composed of physicians, municipal deputies, and a union representative—to inspect restaurants. The diagnosis confirmed the shortcomings already highlighted in the workers’ grievances. Items included excessive heat, lack of space, insufficient ventilation, and stagnation of used waters and other liquids, as well as defective cold storage. The commissioners carried their assignment beyond the harrowing description of the restaurant kitchen environment. They culled concrete regulatory measures from the cooks’ earlier propositions and pushed their discussion onto the agenda of the municipal council. They clinched the point in favor of legal guidelines concerning kitchen dimensions, lighting, waste water evacuation, and ventilation by linking the cooks’ working conditions with their consequences for the restaurants’ clients and public health. “The interest of the workers, the interest of the consumers, and the interest of public hygiene are in absolute unison,”Footnote 67 they wrote. The move toward an encompassing understanding of workplace hygiene helped the contention that anything to improve the sanitary conditions of meal production would increase consumer safety. The argument informed future discussions.
Lobbying continued at the grassroots and the leadership level. Rank-and-file members sent letters on the issue of kitchen insalubrity to the union, as well as to newspapers.Footnote 68 They seized the opportunity of a general assessment of working conditions by the newly founded labor exchange (Bourse du Travail) to reaffirm their attachment to official supervision of restaurant hygiene, the shortening of the cooks’ work day, and the introduction of vacation days.Footnote 69 Journeymen cooks mentioned the very same demands when the French National Assembly conducted a survey on working hours in 1890. “Nota bene,” wrote one among them, “it would be suitable that the Commission on Insalubrious Housing passed through the kitchens that lack air and windows and where pernicious odors might provoke illnesses.” Another man put it more starkly when mentioning the need for “improved sanitation in kitchens because they are all disgusting.”Footnote 70 Still, it was the political recognition of the union's struggle—the Municipal Council of Paris had already provided a small financial subsidy to help the Chambre syndicale in 1886Footnote 71—that sustained its confidence. Organizing, agitating, and campaigning had yielded success quite quickly. Optimism prevailed. The Minister of Commerce and Industry, Edouard Lockroy, had excited the unions with his promise to work on a general law on industrial hygiene in 1887.Footnote 72 This context led the cooks’ leadership to think that it was only a matter of time before the wrongs were to be righted.Footnote 73
Yet all the support from medical experts, the ear from local and national politicians, and even more media attention did not guarantee the implementation of hygienic regulation in restaurant kitchens. The World's Fair of 1889 passed, and cooks toiled in temperatures as high as in “African silos” and dropped, according to one report, like cut corn.Footnote 74 In 1890 the respected Annales d'hygiène publique published a detailed companion article to the earlier report by the Housing Commission. It intimated that only ignorance of the circumstances in which commercial food was produced kept clients coming to eat in restaurants. Its conclusion was straightforward: “the kitchen is the great danger for the cooks.”Footnote 75 The head of the municipal commission of hygiene, Dr. Deschamps, presented a summary report and suggested remedies for the deplorable state of restaurant kitchens in March 1890. Recommendations included a minimum amount of space per worker, the chimney evacuation of smoke and fumes, draining of used dishwater through sewage pipes (with siphons), the regular disposal of garbage in containers, and accessible toilets away from the kitchen.Footnote 76 The newly created, enterprising Labor Office undertook a study of restaurant workers and their environments. Its head, the seasoned social investigator Pierre du Marroussem, established that cooks were overworked, kitchen hygiene was shocking, and cooking facilities were appalling.Footnote 77
The four authoritative assessments reverberated in the press. Articles indulged readers with some muckraking details on the little equivalents of imperial Rome's cloaca maxima in many a Parisian neighborhood,Footnote 78 on sewage flowing back into kitchens,Footnote 79 or cooks urinating into tin cans because lavatories were located across the dining hall.Footnote 80 Reporting was so dense, it traveled to Great Britain where a well-informed piece on Parisian restaurant salubrity carried the headline “Pity the Poor Cooks.”Footnote 81 Issues of kitchen hygiene abroad prompted foreign interest in the sanitary conditions of Parisian restaurants eliciting Schadenfreude and envy of the city where eating “is regarded as a fine art.”Footnote 82 Whatever the motivation for spreading the news about Paris kitchen hygiene, it was bad publicity for the City of Light.
Disenchantment followed the union's high hopes. The supposed urgency proved fleeting. The Municipal Council of Paris aborted a discussion on restaurant hygiene in 1892.Footnote 83 Dr. Deschamps made no secret of the reason why he thought the process had stalled. Most restaurant kitchens, grand and modest, needed improvements. Little wonder that resistance brewed among the owners and their powerful association, the Syndicat des restaurateurs et limonadiers. As a consequence, “any attempt to implement regulatory prescriptions would founder on the opposition of municipal deputies. They implore the Commission of Hygiene to create a legal exception for their neighborhood as they fear for their popularity.”Footnote 84 The union press shared the suspicion.Footnote 85 The leader of its political adversary was the formidable Alphonse Marguery, a selfmade millionaire restaurant owner. His nickname “Père Marguery” barely concealed the fact that “he was a power in Paris. He practically controlled the Halles or general market and La Villette or wholesale meat market. He could make or unmake Deputies and Senators and dictated to Paris Councilmen.”Footnote 86 Marguery welcomed the administration's contribution to the workers’ effort at improving kitchen conditions. But he declined to commit his organization to any reform. Indeed, he deflected attention toward the alcoholism supposedly prevalent among cooks. In 1890 his association's journal printed the one single article on kitchen insalubrity in its thirty-year run from 1884 to 1913.Footnote 87 In 1894, the first congress of the national umbrella organization of food businesses, also presided by Marguery, spent no time on the issue of workplace safety and security.Footnote 88 In effect, Marguery seemed to have convinced the Seine department's prefect to shelve any proposal.Footnote 89 The Progrès des cuisiniers recognized in 1892 that more than six years of campaigning, petitioning, mobilizing public health experts, and educating the public had not succeeded in advancing the cause of kitchen hygiene and safety.Footnote 90 Two years later, police surveillance reported that organized labor in the food business was “going down the drain… the cooks’ union is in complete disintegration.”Footnote 91
Gastronomic Reputation
The “threat to the age-old and justified reputation of the French culinary art”Footnote 92 assured, however, that the issue of hygiene in restaurant kitchens remained on the public agenda. The police underestimated the groundswell of mobilization that the cooks’ union had initiated. They also misjudged the public and media pressure built up since the start of the campaign. After all, an 1896 union request to improve sanitary conditions led the Paris Municipal Council to press the French Parliament into extending the right of cooks to labor inspection.Footnote 93 To make sure the call got a hearing on the national level, the Fédération des cuisiniers-pâtissiers-confiseurs de France et des Colonies addressed a petition to the National Assembly in January 1898.Footnote 94 The close scheduling was no coincidence. The union leadership orchestrated a comprehensive campaign on hygiene in restaurant kitchens, which it had decided to launch in October 1896. The lobbying effort espoused a precise calendar. It aimed to make restaurant salubrity a salient issue at the World's Fair of 1900.Footnote 95 The Municipal Council clearly understood this goal. Its own missive to the National Assembly adopted the same language.Footnote 96 It welcomed a union delegation in late 1898 to “contribute to the specifications regulating kitchen architecture at the Exposition universelle of 1900 so as to assure correct hygiene and thus, to avoid the errors of 1889.”Footnote 97 The New York Times article of February 1900 was not a fluke; it was an upshot of the union's concerted organizational effort.
The movement had gathered momentum in late 1897 as the prestigious Société française d'hygiène contacted the Cooks’ Union to take up their cause.Footnote 98 A commission of four physicians and two scientists investigated the “sanitary conditions of work in the food business.” They descended into restaurant kitchens (“steamrooms”), read the reports written by the Commission of Insalubrious Housing (“painting kitchen conditions in dark hues… confirming the deplorable situation”); talked to restaurant owners (“the spirit of compromise and conciliation does not reside in the employers’ camp”), journeymen cooks (“some deplorable habits notwithstanding, there is proof that their complaints are justified”) and the physicians that treated their afflictions (“paint a sad picture of the cooks’ professional existence”); delved into municipal statistics on health and death (“heightened morbidity and high degree of lethality”); and analyzed the chemical composition of samples of used dishwater (“never entirely renewed throughout the year”). Their conclusion left no doubt about the sanitary imperative in view of the “regrettable state of things.” Workers who prepared food for public consumption deserved legal protection via state-sanctioned safety standards. But then the commission clinched another point: “The health and safety of consumers would equally benefit from a reform of the working environment in the food business.”Footnote 99 It was a pronunciamiento that was heard around the world. The Lancet of London espoused the cause of sanitary development “for the sake of the poor people chiefly concerned and also in the interests of the immense number of visitors to Paris, of which British subjects form no small part.”Footnote 100 In turn, the weekly Thibodaux Sentinel in Louisiana, the Dundee Evening Telegraph in Scotland, and the Geelong Advertiser in Australia related the findings and propositions of the Société française d'hygiène. All sustained its call that “remedial measures for a radical reform of the crying evil should be forthwith devised.”Footnote 101 The message seemed clear. French gastronomy had a problem. Its reliance on superficial appearance rather than substantial quality had it standing on clay feet.
Union organizers had long since insisted on the discrepancy between “the French culinary art that earns widespread praise” and “the wholesomeness and hygienic conditions in which this world-renowned know-how is put into practice.”Footnote 102 The diffusion of knowledge about the “the illnesses and deaths fatally caused by the bad construction of our Parisian kitchens” was paramount to union efforts before the opening of the World's Fair. Such information was, a general assembly protocol noted, “in the interest of the workers and the consumers.”Footnote 103 The petitioning campaign aimed at foregrounding the hitherto dissimulated area of culinary production.
Long before George Orwell described Parisian waiters moving almost effortlessly between the kitchen and the restaurant changing demeanor and language (which Erving Goffman used to illustrate the demands different social spaces make on the presentation of self, the backstage being the regressive region filled with negligence and profanity, the frontstage its clean, civilized, stylish flip side),Footnote 104 the French cooks’ union waged its battle for air, light, and space on the link between the off- and the on-stage. More precisely, its plea for exemplarity in the kitchen aspired to lift the veil on what erstwhile cook Pierre Hamp called “the underside of the establishment's opulence.” It meant to expose the fragility of France's gastronomic reputation.Footnote 105 Right in time for the World's Fair, a guide to Paris dining did ring the alarm when noting that “there are old restaurants à prix fixe in the Palais Royal, which supply extraordinary meals for prices varying from 1 franc 15 to 3 francs; but I believe that no one who had once visited the kitchens of these establishments could swallow their food any more, unless driven to do so by the direst necessity.”Footnote 106 Clarke's Pocket Paris (1900) suggested that restaurant clients avoid being seated in “the neighborhood of the kitchen-door.”Footnote 107
There was some irony in the campaign's achievement. On the practical side and in the short run, its objective failed. The kitchens built for the Exposition universelle in 1900 were “insalubrious and dangerous.”Footnote 108 The devotion to the cause—from informal advice to the participation in official construction commissions—had “the Chambre syndicale believe, in their naivete and the candor of their proletarian conscience, to have been heard and understood, that, even in the absence of humanitarianism, our leaders would have the self-esteem [amour propre] to show the cosmopolitan crowds healthy, aerated kitchens where the world's best cooks accomplished tasks in accordance with their reputation and the reputation of the world's culinary capital. Hélas, all was illusion.”Footnote 109 Even the conservative Art culinaire conceded that, “as always, the kitchen has been relegated to the area where nothing else could be put, so that atrocious temperatures turn some among them into veritable hells.”Footnote 110 Official reports emphasized the well-intended recommendations but omitted to mention their limited impact.Footnote 111
The cooks lost the battle of the World's Fair, but they won a political and longer-term victory. They captured the public imagination. Art culinaire, a stalwart in the defense of France's gastronomic reputation, elevated cleanliness on the agenda of necessary improvements.Footnote 112 After prompting from the Commission on Insalubrious Housing, the Municipal Council of Paris once again invited national authorities to institute a hygienic control of kitchens where food was prepared for public consumption.Footnote 113 The advisory Conseil supérieur du travail followed suit in June 1901. It urged legislators to include employment in small food businesses within the reach of labor legislation.Footnote 114 All these interventions aimed at changing the cook's legal status. Hitherto assimilated to domestic life and hence beyond labor protection, the cooks promoted a taxonomy that put them squarely in the category of workers whom the law was to protect from harm. The aim was quite literally to come up for air. The union's general assembly of 1901 proclaimed that “this means the application, to all food businesses, of the laws of 1892 on the protection of women in industries, of the law of 1893 on industrial safety and hygiene, the law of 1850 on on-site housing of workers and the more recent law [of 1898] on industrial accidents. In one word, if yesterday, we were pariahs, outlaws really, tomorrow, we will be recognized as workers and benefit from legal protection.”Footnote 115 The law was to recognize the cooks’ right to health.
Politics
The political climate helped. Pressure from the fringes on the Left and the Right during the Dreyfus Affair had led moderate politicians to form a government under Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau in June 1899. Its aim was to strengthen the Republic. Alexandre Millerand, the first socialist minister, set out to reform labor relations.Footnote 116 He appointed an investigative committee to review labor regulations and assess labor conditions in offices, shops and stores, as well as in “small food industries.” In spring 1901, the chairman of the cooks’ union Jules Barafort presided over part of their inquiry into the food sector. The committee reconstructed the paper trail on restaurant hygiene. They invited witnesses. Cooks reiterated that “the cleanliness is deplorable, the heat unbearable … When a restaurant is built in Paris, the first thought and attention goes to the eating rooms, usually luxurious; the last, dirtiest place is reserved for the kitchen.” Pork butchers and pastry makers backed the cause of hygiene although no alliance linked them to the cooks’ union. Marguery represented restaurant owners. He restated their “interest in the best possible conditions in kitchens which,” he added, “would be easier to implement with an official invitation of the Conseil supérieur du travail.”Footnote 117 Labor inspectors, who had to control work sites with a negative impact on their neighborhoods, bemoaned the combined neglect of workers and public health.Footnote 118 The committee concluded that it was high time to limit working hours and authorize vacation days for cooks, to overhaul the exploitative apprenticeship model, and to tackle the health issues originating with the working environment. Minister Millerand deemed the proceedings so important that he ordered their publication. They received a favorable welcome. The proposed change was positive for the workers and for society. “An insalubrious or dirty kitchen endangers the health of the people who work in it, and it jeopardizes the health of clients and consumers,” Senator Paul Strauss, an important figure among reformers and an influential legislator, wrote in a newspaper editorial.Footnote 119
The tone was thus set for the adoption of a new law on hygiene and safety in the workplace. Cooks were expecting it to be passed.Footnote 120 On the opposite side of the political spectrum, the Paris Chamber of Commerce was forced to adjust to the upsurge in favor of hygienic rules in the restaurant business. It approved the proposed law on the basis of a report written by none other than Alphonse Marguery. His assessment emphasized the importance of hygiene in the hospitality industry. With a knack for the disingenuous expression but well aware that the cooks’ union had succeeded in uniting public opinion and legislators behind the proposition, he affirmed that “food businesses are, in general, and certainly in Paris, of a meticulous cleanliness. That quality is, for every cooking professional, the best advertisement.”Footnote 121 Legislative committees had worked on the text. They checked out foreign legislation and found laws on hygiene and security in industries from Austria to Romania and New Zealand, various rules on working hours per day and Sundays off across the globe, and specific directives on hygiene in bakeries in England, New York, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. Working conditions and workers’ health commanded widespread international attention. Minister Millerand urged Parliament to accept a reform that was well under way abroad and that would not result in a competitive economic disadvantage for France.Footnote 122 The committees’ reports went back over the history of the cooks’ mobilization. They highlighted the increasing support for the regulation of working conditions in the food business, beginning with hygienists, advisory committees, and provincial and Parisian legislators, and ending with the Parisian Chamber of Commerce.Footnote 123 The proposal was so convincing that both rapporteurs, Senator Strauss and Assemblyman Lucien Cornet, shepherded it without incident through the legislative process. Both chambers approved it without discussion.Footnote 124 It was an “incontestable victory … a victory for the legislative path” to progress, the union weekly Progrès culinaire exclaimed even before the French president had signed the bill into law.Footnote 125 Le Radical branded it “a victory for labor.” It highlighted the sustained struggle of these “outlaws … who kept up their fight” to obtain legal protection.Footnote 126
Winner's Curse
The 1903 adoption of the law on hygiene and safety in the workplace was the climax of the cooks’ movement. Their decades-long campaign had defined kitchen hygiene as a social problem. The hitherto obscured link of restaurant insalubrity with consumption and culinary reputation helped the union to transform their particular demand into a public-health issue. With support from physicians who marshaled scientific data, the cooks proposed practical measures to prevent health risks in kitchens. These solutions kept the focus firmly on the overall, ecological aspect of the workplace. They included architectural adjustments, safety standards, shorter working days, and a weekly day-off to breathe fresh air. A mélange of philanthropy, concern for consumer protection, and worry about France's renown as the pinnacle of gastronomy helped move the requests through the legislative process. In doing so, the law provided a building block for the French welfare state.Footnote 127 It mandated public authorities to intervene in labor relations and work settings so as to prevent diseases and accidents. The cooks had campaigned to conquer social rights. They had succeeded. The Republic now recognized all wage-earners’ entitlement to health. At this point, the cooks saw the law as an instrument of emancipation.
The executive decrees to implement the new law took a broad technical approach to the workplace. They stipulated that the space per kitchen worker measure 10 m3 (or 353 cubic feet), sinks include a drain to remove used water, waterproof floors be swept at least once a day before or after work, garbage be removed daily in airtight containers, movable frames (rather than grids) secure windows, sufficient ventilation keep temperatures sufferable, and lighting provide a bright workspace. Posters were to announce these regulations on the shopfloor. Labor inspectors were to monitor the observance of the new rules scheduled to reach full force within three years after the adoption of the law.Footnote 128
These norms and their associated sanctions constituted legal progress. They were a tall order, too. Their full effect would take decades to materialize. Checking sanitation standards meant recruiting and training more labor inspectors. Building or renovating kitchens required proficient architects receptive, according to L'Art culinaire of 1910, to the advice of chefs on the allocation of sufficient space for each work station. Construction work was a long-term enterprise. In the meantime, many kitchens still “deserved to be called holes, caves, out-and-out dungeons where kitchen utensils, appliances and cooks pile up pell-mell.”Footnote 129 The wait was to prove anticlimactic. Workers pleaded with authorities to enforce the law so as to reduce stress, combat illness, and guarantee quality. In early 1906, the socialist newspaper L'Action considered “the continued neglect of hygiene close to barbarian recklessness.”Footnote 130
The sluggish implementation of legal principles exacerbated tensions within the cooks’ movement over the best way to achieve results. Millerand's reforms and their slow effects had left many workers disappointed. The social movement's most radical proponents took over the leadership of the Confédération Générale du Travail. It spurned parliamentary democracy as a cover-up for workers’ oppression and relied on shopfloor “direct action” to improve working standards.Footnote 131 These were the halcyon days of strikes in the food sector, and at the Chambre syndicale ouvrière des cuisiniers the supporters of shopfloor “direct action” wrested the union leadership from the champions of the political approach.Footnote 132 Moderate opponents of collective action joined the Union fraternelle et syndicale des cuisiniers du département de Seine, a mix between friendly society and professional organization. When it came to job conditions, the disagreement between the two groups was tactical. The Union fraternelle’s program also lamented the “awful conditions of hygiene in a great number of Parisian kitchens.” But it relied on lobbying with the Ministry of Labor rather than shopfloor activism to improve legal controls.Footnote 133
The change in union governance prompted a strategic about-face.Footnote 134 Cooks had long preferred to leave individual jobs rather than to go on strike.Footnote 135 Now the Chambre syndicale ouvrière turned to collective walk-outs to enforce the shopfloor rules.Footnote 136 Police intelligence spelled out the mood change among Parisian cooks. “The cooks are partisans of partial strikes and ready to leave restaurant after restaurant at lunch,” a police brief noted in late March 1907.Footnote 137 In April 1907, an extensive surveillance report explained that the feeling of desertion by the public authorities fueled the cooks’ discontent and pushed them toward the strike movement.Footnote 138 The press, too, registered the exasperation among kitchen personnel.Footnote 139 L'Action portrayed workers tired of seeing “the continued, unpunished trampling of sanitary regulations.”Footnote 140 Cooks resented the lack of respect for the 1903 law on hygiene and safety.
Workers in the food business went on strike from mid-April through the beginning of May 1907. Their general and uniting objective was to obtain the enforcement of the law of July 13, 1906, that granted a weekly day of rest.Footnote 141 Cooks joined belatedly. Part of the delay came from their habitual restraint. Even on strike, union members called themselves reformists and reluctant protestors.Footnote 142 They never gave over to the illusion of a general strike. When their movement started on April 27, they targeted well-known businesses on the grands boulevards and the Left Bank. The union took longer to decide but then its members joined in greater numbers. By May 4, half of the four thousand restaurant cooks of Paris were said to be on strike (the number and proportion seemed lower for kitchen aids). The mobilization touched 106 restaurants. Their names—Café Riche, Café de la Paix, Châteaubriand, Hôtel Métropole, Hôtel Moderne, Ledoyen, Lucas, Pavillon d'Armenonville, Weber, even Marguery—added up to an impressive list of prestigious places. All of them figured in Baedeker's travel guide to Paris.Footnote 143 The daily Gil Blas considered the walk-out by cooks a most severe blow to the hospitality industry.Footnote 144 Their claims resonated in the press. The Manchester Courier reported on underground kitchens, weak gas lighting, lack of air, even cockroaches; in short, “thoroughly unhealthy conditions” that the cooks wished to change.Footnote 145 Parisian newspapers, too, itemized sanitary measures garnered from the strikers’ propositions (the police collected a sample).Footnote 146 The strategy worked. Many employers signed contracts with their staff to coordinate days off. The Minister of Labor and Social Security, René Viviani, promised the union to watch over the strict application of social laws. After two weeks on strike, the Chambre syndicale enjoined the cooks to go back to work on May 12, 1907.Footnote 147
Promises, of course, only bind those who believe in them. Hygiene in the restaurant kitchen did not get better overnight. Inspections by the Bureau of Labor affected improvements in individual establishments. They had no immediate impact on general working conditions. Disillusion deepened among the cooks. By November 1907, their union participated in a general meeting whose rallying cry was “Legislative lies, criminal lawmakers.” The point was to take stock of all unsettled issues: the eight-hour workday, the weekly day off, living wages, and hygienic conditions in the workplace.Footnote 148 The food workers’ national congress remarked a year later that “everywhere laws, decrees and regulations on hygiene, already insufficient, are completely ignored by employers and this, with the guilty toleration of the powers that be. In the name of all the workers in the food businesses, victims of this complicity between employers and government, the Congress protests and notes the bluff and the hideous hypocrisy of the official discourses and declarations.”Footnote 149 In the meantime, the Paris cooks’ union meant to increase pressure on the government by transforming kitchen hygiene into an international issue. It raised the issue on the agenda of the Berlin International Conference of Hotel and Restaurant Employees.Footnote 150
Conclusion
The outrage did not translate into a new surge of activism in Paris. The radical idiom should not conceal the cooks’ return to business as usual. Direct-action unions had fought for higher wages and shorter working days with the result, as Gerald Friedman has argued, of “alienating needed allies outside the working class.”Footnote 151 Cooks shared the goals of the 1907 strike but did not run into problems in the political sphere. Other unions, according to Les Temps nouveaux, had failed to find sympathy with the public at large. Not so for the cooks: They signed conventions with specific employers.Footnote 152 More importantly, they had succeeded in turning their particular struggle for hygiene and security on the shopfloor into a general problem that had, in 1903, persuaded politicians to elaborate the Law on Hygiene and Security in the workplace. And consumer safety and gastronomic reputation made sure that kitchen cleanliness remained in the public eye. Newspapers reported. Public authorities cared. The strike was hardly over when Minister Viviani ordered a comprehensive inquiry into Paris restaurant kitchens on account of reports concerning “the bad conditions of hygiene in the food business.” The point was to generate a road map for improvements so as to reassure customers of their meals’ integrity and cooks of the state's concern for their physical well-being.Footnote 153 The issue emerged in the United States and England. There, as in France, the public focus zoomed in on consumer safety. It was the unions’ job to make sure that the cooks’ health stayed on the agenda.Footnote 154
