September 1996 | Volume 47, Issue 5 A CENTURY AGO you’d eat
steak and lobster when you couldn’t afford chicken. Today it can
cost less than the potatoes you serve with. What happened in the
years between was an extraordinary marriage of technology and
the market. King Henri IV of France was a great king. He was
also, perhaps, the world’s first real politician—for in the
course of his ten-year battle to secure the French throne for
the Bourbon dynasty he began deliberately enlisting public
opinion and even invented the political slogan to help him do
so. Instinctively knowing the shortest route to his people’s
hearts, he told them, “I want there to be no peasant in my
kingdom so poor that he is unable to have a chicken in his pot
every Sunday.” Henri IV’s choice of chicken to symbolize
prosperity was no accident, for it had always been a dish
reserved, because of its cost, for special occasions like Sunday
dinner, holidays, and celebrations. And for fully three hundred
years after Henri’s time, nothing happene