Post-Revolution to Belle Époque

In the post-Revolutionary era, the production and marketing of sweets (as was the case for many luxury trades) carried on strangely unaffected and simultaneously transformed. The newly rich enjoyed spending publicly with “see and be seen” bravura. This resulted in more glamorously appointed patisseries, cafés, and shops as well as inventiveness fueled by the need to captivate a fickle audience. Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière (1858–1837) documented this phenomenon in the world’s first food journal, which debuted in Paris in 1803.