How did dictators behave in the private sphere, especially during meals?

Did they eat alone?

Did they indulge themselves with refined dishes?

The journalist Christian Roudaut, who devotes a book to the subject, tried to answer these questions at the microphone of Laurent Mariotte in the program "La Table des bons vivant" on Europe 1.

INTERVIEW

There is no doubt about their political regime, but what about the diets of the greatest dictators in history?

This is the question that the journalist Christian Roudaut asked himself in his book,

À la table des tyrans

.

We often say that we are what we eat, is it the same for the latter?

The journalist delivers some answers in Laurent Mariotte's program on Europe 1,

La Table des bons vivant

. 

Table height

"Observing tyrants at table height reveals the grotesque and absurdity of their regime," explains Christian Roudaut.

"Indeed, we quickly realize that the dictators' plate reflects their thirst for absolute power but also their anxieties often rooted in childhood."

A cause and effect link that shows the paradoxes of these characters.

>> Find La Table des bons vivant in podcast and in replay here

"One of the paradoxes that I also wanted to highlight is that for these dictators nothing is too good, nothing is too good. They are certainly not finicky, refined, but nevertheless, they never have a problem feeding themselves.On the other hand, the decisions they may have taken during their grim mandates have led to death and starvation, and sometimes voluntarily as with Stalin, to death. tens of millions of people. " 

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The art of putting on a show

With the work of Christian Roudaut, we also discover that for these men, meals were not moments of sharing and communion but the means of once again giving themselves a spectacle, like yet another platform to convey their ideas. . "This is particularly true for Hitler," explains Christian Roudaut. "First of all, you have to know that his guests or relatives had to wait until he decides to eat before they can sit down to eat. He didn't like anything. He could be satisfied with a simple oatmeal porridge. . He had a diet more vegetarian than carnivorous but above all he had a sweet tooth, so often there was a black forest. "