Summary: Fernand Braudel’s book offers a vivid exploration of the harsh realities of pre-industrial life, from deadly wildlife encounters and frequent famines to the widespread use of primitive table manners. Braudel delves into the grim aspects of daily existence, highlighting the pervasive dangers and struggles that defined life before modern advancements. His work paints a stark picture of a world where survival was precarious, and comfort was a rare and costly luxury.
The French historian Fernand Braudel’s ambitious book, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, paints a sweeping and vivid picture of many aspects of life in the past, from the shocking frequency of deadly wildlife encounters and famines to plagues and violence.
“There is a drawing which shows Maximilian of Austria at a table, in about 1513: he is putting his hand into a dish. Two centuries or so later, the Princess Palatine tells how Louis XIV, when he allowed his children to sit up to table for the first time, forbade them to eat differently from him, and in particular to eat with a fork as an over-zealous tutor had taught them.” Even the Queen of France from 1615 to 1643, “Anne of Austria ate her meat with her fingers all her life. And so did the Court of Vienna until at least 1651.”
“The individual fork dates from about the sixteenth century. . . . We know that Montaigne did not use a fork, since he accuses himself of eating too quickly so that ‘I sometimes bite my fingers in my haste.’”
How the table settings in various artists’ depictions of The Last Supper (a frequent subject in Western art) changed over time is revealing: “no fork appears before 1600 and almost no spoons either.”
“The use of a spoon did not become widespread until the sixteenth century, and the custom of providing knives dates from the same time—before that the guests brought along their own. Individual glasses for each guest also appeared at about this time. Courtesy formerly dictated that one emptied the glass and passed it on to one’s neighbour, who did the same.” Even individual plates are relatively recent; previously, a single dish was brought out on a wooden board and “each selected the morsel he wanted and picked it up with his fingers.”
The state of table manners is hinted at in an Austrian ordinance from 1624 instructing young officers on how to behave when dining with an archduke, which specifies: “not to arrive half drunk, not to drink after every mouthful, … not to lick the fingers, not to spit in the plate, not to wipe the nose on the tablecloth, not to gulp drink like animals.” Separate dining rooms were rare until the 16th century, and then only among the rich.
Pepper was a rare luxury. Among 15th-century explorers, “as dear as pepper” was a common expression (“dear” being used in the sense meaning “expensive”).
Salt was consumed in unhealthily large quantities in a desperate attempt to improve the taste of the masses’ monotonous and unappetizing diets. “In the Europe of insipid farinaceous gruels consumption of salt was large . . . twenty grams daily per person,” far exceeding the present-day figure.” To put that into perspective, the US Food and Drug Administration’s nutritional guidelines currently recommend limiting salt consumption to 2.3 grams per person per day; on average, Americans eat about 3.4 grams of salt per day, overshooting recommendations but still lagging far behind what was typical in the preindustrial world. Outside of Europe, too, the impoverished majority turned to salt out of desperation to enliven their similarly bland, unvaried staple foods. As an Indian writer put it, “When the palate revolts against the insipidness of rice boiled with no other ingredients, we dream of fat, salt and spices.”
“Famine recurred so insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into man’s biological regime and built into his daily life. Dearth and penury were continual, and familiar. . . . Two consecutive bad harvests spelt disaster.”
“Any national calculation shows a sad story. France, by any standards a privileged country, is reckoned to have experienced 10 general famines during the tenth century: 26 in the eleventh; 2 in the twelfth; 4 in the fourteenth; 7 in the fifteenth; 13 in the sixteenth; 11 in the seventeenth and 16 in the eighteenth. . . . [Much] the same could be said of any country in Europe.” Braudel relates that a third of Finland’s population is estimated to have died of starvation during a famine from 1696 to 1697. “Florence . . . experienced 111 years when people went hungry, and only sixteen ‘very good’ harvests between 1371 and 1791.” “Near Blois in 1662, a witness reported that [due to famine] the poor were on a diet of ‘cabbage stumps with bran soaked in cod broth.’” A decade earlier, in 1652, a chronicler noted, “the people of Lorraine and other surrounding lands are reduced to such extremities that, like animals, they eat the grass in the meadows.” In 1694 near Meulan, famine again made it so that “large numbers of people lived on grass like animals.” In 1674–76, in southeastern France, people were reportedly reduced to eating “acorns and roots.”
Beyond Europe, famine was also frequent and severe. “In 1555, and again in 1596, violent famine throughout north-west India, resulted in scenes of cannibalism, according to contemporary chroniclers. There was another terrible famine, almost everywhere in India, in 1630–31. A Dutch merchant has left us an appalling description of it: ‘Men abandoned towns and villages and wandered helplessly: It was easy to recognize their condition: eyes sunk deep in the head, lips pale and covered with slime, the skin hard, with the bones showing through, the belly nothing but a pouch hanging down empty. . . . One would cry and howl for hunger, while another lay stretched on the ground dying in misery.’” The famine caused “collective suicides. . . . Then came the stage when the starving split open the stomachs of the dead or dying and ‘drew at the entrails to fill their own bellies’. ‘Many hundred thousands of men died of hunger, so that the whole country was covered with corpses lying unburied, which caused such a stench that the whole air was filled and infected with it . . . in the village of Susuntra . . . human flesh was sold in open market.”
Some Europeans also resorted to cannibalism in times of famine; in 1662 in Burgundy, contemporary accounts say that “famine this year has put an end to over ten thousand families . . . and forced a third of the inhabitants, even in the good towns, to eat wild plants. . . . Some people ate human flesh.”
Even in good times, peasants often subsisted on “gruels, sops and bread” that barely provided any nutritional value. “Bread was almost always hard and mouldy.” “Bread was sometimes bread in name alone.” By some estimates, “no more than 4% of the European population ate white bread. Even at the beginning of the eighteenth century, half the rural population fed on non-bread-making cereals and rye, and a lot of bran was left in the mixture of grains that went to make bread for the poor. Wheaten bread and white bread . . . remained a luxury for a long time.” It was only between 1750 and 1850 that white bread became more widely available.
In some societies, meat was so scarce as to be the preserve of the wealthy. “‘One has to be a very great lord in Sumatra,’ said one seventeenth-century traveller, ‘to have a boiled or roast chicken, which moreover has to last for the whole day.’” Today, meanwhile, one can purchase a whole rotisserie chicken from Costco for $4.99 and casually gorge on what was once a delicacy.
Nutritional deficiencies harmed human health and may have even prevented children from reaching their intellectual potential. “The Dictionnaire de Trévoux (1771) says quite bluntly: ‘The peasants are usually so stupid because they only live on coarse foods.’”
Water was also often scarce. “Whole towns—and very wealthy ones at that—were poorly supplied with water.” One example was Venice. “When no rain fell for weeks on end, the cisterns ran dry; this happened when [the 19th-century French writer] Stendhal was staying in the city. If there was a storm they were tainted with salt water.” “In 1770, Thames water ‘which is not good’ was carried to all the houses in London … but this was not what we would usually think of as running water: it was ‘distributed regularly three times a week, according to the amount consumed per household.”
Even when water was supplied, it was often tainted. The use of lead, a powerful toxin, in piping “is recorded in England in 1236.” Exposure to lead in drinking water is now known to cause many negative health effects, including debilitating lifelong brain damage and stunted growth in children, anemia and cardiovascular problems in adults, and in pregnant women, a heightened risk of miscarriage. In Paris, the main water source was the thick sludge of the Seine: “It was supposed to bear boats well, being muddy and therefore heavy, as a Portuguese envoy reported in 1641—not that this quality would recommend itself to drinkers.” Indeed, the water source doubled as a dumping site for toxic waste. “‘A number of dyers pour their dye three times a week into the branch of the river which washes the Pelletier quay and between the two bridges,’ said an eye witness (1771). ‘The arch which forms the Gêvres quai is a seat of pestilence. All that part of the town drinks infected waters.’”
Such poor diets and tainted water made people more vulnerable to every illness. “The undernourished, unprotected population could offer little resistance to [epidemics, hence] the Tuscan proverb [says] ‘The best remedy against malaria is a well filled pot.’ Undernourishment, on all the evidence, is a ‘multiplying’ factor in the spread of diseases.”
“To mention only smallpox: in 1775, when inoculation was beginning to be discussed, a medical book considered it ‘the most general of all diseases’; ninety-five in every hundred people were affected; one in seven died.” In 1780, a mysterious illness dubbed “purple fever” is said to have killed so many hundreds of Parisians that “the gravediggers’ arms were falling off.” Influenza struck often as well. “In 1588, it laid low (but did not kill) the entire population of Venice, to the point where the Grand Council was empty.” A mysterious “sweating sickness” plagued England from 1486 to 1551, with five major outbreaks, also striking Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland: “The victims had fits of shivering and sweated profusely and were often dead within hours.” Even the rich could not escape the ravages of disease. “Tuberculosis was also an old scourge of Europe: Francis II (tubercular meningitis), Charles IX (pulmonary tuberculosis) and Louis XIII (intestinal tuberculosis) all fell victim to it (1560, 1574, 1643).”
Even royalty received atrociously ineffective and occasionally deadly medical care. The itinerant physician Arnaud de Villeneuve (c. 1240–c. 1313) claimed, “brandy, aqua vitae, accomplished the miracle of preserving youth, dissipated superfluous body fluids, revived the heart, cured colic, drops: paralysis, quartan ague, calmed toothache and gave protection against plague. But his miracle cure brought Charles the Bad, of execrable memory, to a terrible end (1387); doctors had enveloped him in a brandy-soaked sheet sewn up with large stitches for greater efficiency so that it fitted rightly round the patient. A servant held a candle up close to try to break one of the threads, and sheet and invalid went up in flames.”
Outbreaks of deadly disease caused not only deaths but social discord among survivors. Braduel quotes the English diarist Samuel Pepys in 1665 calling the bubonic plague “the plague making us cruel, as doggs, one to another.” Braudel quotes Daniel Defoe’s account of the 1664 plague of London, saying that the dead were thrown “for the most part on to a cart like common dung.” The outbreaks were frequent. “Plague occurred in Amsterdam every year from 1622 to 1628 (the toll: 35,000 dead). It struck Paris in 1612, 1619, 1631, 1638, 1662, 1668 (the last).” Those who did survive the poverty, famines, and plagues of the past were often prematurely aged. In 1754, Braudel quotes one author as noting that “the peasants in France . . . begin to decline before they are forty.”
“The poor in the towns and countryside of the West lived in a state of almost complete deprivation. Their furniture consisted of next to nothing, at least before the eighteenth century, when a rudimentary luxury began to spread (chairs, where before people had been content with benches, woollen mattresses, feather beds) … But before the eighteenth century, … inventories mention only a few old clothes, a stool, a table, a bench, the planks of a bed, sacks filled with straw. Official reports for Burgundy between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries are full of references to people [sleeping] on straw with no bed or furniture’ who were only separated ‘from the pigs by a with a screen.’”
“Travellers’ tales are full of savage beasts. One seventeenth-century account describes tigers prowling round Asian villages and towns, and swimming out into the Ganges delta to surprise fisherman asleep in their boats.”
“No one feels safe after nightfall, not even inside a house. One man went out of his hut in a small town near [Guangzhou], where the Jesuit father [Adriano] de Las Cortes and his fellow sufferers were imprisoned (1626), and was carried off by a tiger.”
“The whole of Europe, from the Urals to the Straits of Gibraltar, was the domain of wolves, and bears roamed in all its mountains. The omnipresence of wolves and the attention they aroused make wolf-hunting an index of the health of the countryside, and even of the towns, and of the character of the year gone by. A lapse in vigilance, an economic setback, a rough winter, and they multiplied. In 1420, packs entered Paris through a breach in the ramparts or unguarded gates. They were there again in September 1438, attacking people this time outside the town, between Montmartre and the Saint-Antoine gate. In 1640, wolves entered Besançon by crossing the Doubs near the mills of the town and ‘ate children along the roads.’”
“There was an example of this in Gevaudan ‘where the ravages of the wolves made people believe in the existence of an unnatural monster.’” A creature so lethal that it has become the stuff of legends, nicknamed the Beast of Gévaudan, terrorized France between 1764 and 1767, allegedly killing over 100 victims and maiming many more. The tragic loss of life even prompted King Louis XV to send troops to hunt the predator. Some scholars think the infamous maneater may have been a hyena or lion escaped from a menagerie based on conflicting descriptions of its appearance from the period, but details from the autopsy report after the animal was finally slain by a hunter suggest it was a canine, probably an unusually large wolf or wolf-dog hybrid that developed a marked taste for human flesh.
Knowing firsthand how deadly wolves could be, the French even considered using wolves as a form of biological warfare against the English. “In fact the Députés du Commerce were discussing in 1783 a proposal made several years earlier, to ‘introduce into England a sufficient number of wolves to destroy the greater part of the population.’”
And that is only a small taste of the past from Braudel’s lengthy tome.
