In 1806, the Parisian gastronome Grimod de la Reynière launched a new periodical, the Journal des Gourmands et des Belles in post-revolutionary France. From the first issue, it set out to provide readers with advice on food, fashion, and theatrical life, all in one publication. Almost entirely forgotten today, the Journal was perhaps the first of its kind in France to bring together such a full range of what we would now call lifestyle content. Early nineteenth-century language aside, it resembles the all-encompassing Instagram accounts of some of today’s influencers. Its author was already famous for the Almanach des Gourmands (1803-1812), the founding text of gastronomic criticism and the first restaurant guide in history.

Such influential figures were not, of course, without precedent. While conduct manuals, culinary guides, and trade gazettes had been prescribing behaviour and etiquette long before the French Revolution in 1789, the real change that ensued after the French people’s uprising was not so much the existence of such style guidance but the nature, volume, and, above all, the urgency of the advice that became widely available. While these works from the Ancien Régime addressed readers who already knew where they stood in society and needed to perform in a certain manner in order to secure a certain standing on the social ladder, post-revolutionary guides appealed to readers whose social status was uncertain or newly acquired. The question people asked themselves at that time shifted from how do I behave well in society? to how do I belong?

The unexpected trajectories of post-revolutionary lifestyle ‘influencers’ and the content they provided reflect the social, professional and even physical mobility (caused by exile, return or displacement) of the era that resulted from the Revolution, compared to the rigidity of the Ancien Régime. Grimod de la Reynière himself had been a lawyer turned theatre critic........

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