Paris, once the crucible of revolutionary fervour, now finds itself convulsed by a scandal that would make even Robespierre raise an eyebrow. The news of lavish banquets thrown by the Macron administration has sent the radical left into paroxysms of outrage, even as the cost-of-living crisis gnaws at the marrow of French society. But let us pause before we join the chorus of indignation. For this is not a simple tale of elite gluttony versus proletarian want. It is a study in hypocrisy, a mirror held up to the very nature of political theatre.
The banquets themselves, replete with foie gras and fine Bordeaux, are undeniably tone-deaf. At a time when millions are tightening their belts, shelling out public funds on saffron-infused gastronomy is a provocation. Yet the howls from the left ring hollow. These are the same voices who cheered the state-sponsored feasts of the revolutionary calendar, who lionised the festivals of the Supreme Being where bread was distributed to the masses. The Jacobins knew that bread and circuses were not just for tyrants: they were tools of legitimacy. Macron’s sin is not the banquet, but the loss of the art of political symbolism.
The radical left’s outrage is a symptom of a deeper intellectual decadence. They have learned to perform outrage better than to propose a coherent alternative. The cost-of-living crisis is real, but the answer is not to ban foie gras. It is to build a system that produces abundance without decadence, a feat the Victorian industrialists managed with grim determination. They understood that the fault line of society is not between the banqueters and the hungry, but between the productive and the parasitic.
Let us also recall that the French left has a long tradition of selective morality. The same figures who decry bourgeois indulgences are silent when their own allies host cocktail fundraisers in the 16th arrondissement. The outrage machine is a convenient rhetorical device, a way to avoid the hard work of economic reform.
What we are witnessing is not a crisis of inequality, but a crisis of meaning. The left has lost its historical narrative. It no longer dreams of a new society, but only of policing the optics of the old one. The banquets are not the problem. The problem is that France, like the rest of the West, has forgotten how to distinguish between the healthy appetite of a dynamic market and the gluttony of a rent-seeking elite. The real scandal is not that a few politicians ate well, but that a nation that once led the world in thought has been reduced to squabbling over canapés.
In the end, this banquet brouhaha will blow over. The cost-of-living crisis will not. But the left will find another target, another symbol to vilify, while the structural rot continues. That is the tragedy of our age: we choose our battles with the shallow courage of a Twitter mob, not the deep wisdom of a Pericles. France, awake. The barbarians are not at the gate. They are at the table, and they are eating your future.
