BOOK REVIEW / A life at full belt: 'Brillat-Savarin: The Judge and his Stomach' - Giles MacDonogh: John Murray, 25 pounds

IN MORE senses than one, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin lived a very full life. At different times, he was a lawyer, a landowner, the mayor of his provincial town, a violinist in a New York theatre orchestra, and a Paris judge. In politics, he was a moderate supporter of the French Revolution, then had to flee from the guillotine during the Terror, returned as an ardent and prosperous Bonapartist, and finally came to comfortable terms with the restored Bourbon monarchy. He was also a writer of unusual versatility, producing pornographic stories, tracts on political economy and judicial reform, and the first great gastronomic classic, La Physiologie du gout.

Above all, he was a great survivor: of countless career changes, of the interminable vicissitudes of French politics, and of a life devoted to remorseless and unrepentant self-indulgence. Moreover, in producing La Physiologie (usually translated as The Philosopher in the Kitchen), he assured himself a fame he had never known in life. First published in 1825, scarcely three months before he died, the book has never been out of print since. Now, in this brief and affectionate biography, Giles MacDonogh seeks to bring alive the man and his milieu.

Brillat-Savarin was born in the appropriately named town of Belley, in the region of Bugey, east of Lyons, in 1755. He was the descendant of a long line of provincial lawyers and landowners, and himself became a successful local attorney. In 1789, he was elected to represent the Bugey region at the Estates-General at Versailles, and three years later he became Mayor of Belley. But as a moderate, or Girondin, he soon fell foul of the more extreme Jacobins, and was forced to flee, first to Switzerland, then to the United States, where he taught French, played the violin in America's only professional orchestra, and shot and savoured wild turkey in New England.

Brillat-Savarin returned to France in the autumn of 1796, served briefly and unhappily in the army, and then became successively president of the criminal court in Bourg, state prosecutor in Versailles, and a member of the bench of the Tribunal de cassation in Paris. Every September, he returned to his native province, where he stayed for two months, shooting, eating, womanising and renewing his local contacts. It was a lucky if unexceptionable life, which straddled the provincial and metropolitan worlds, and mingled obscurity with influence in roughly equal proportions. 'In all he did,' MacDonogh correctly notes, Brillat- Savarin was 'the perfect measure of his troubled times.'

Never more so than when it came to eating. The closing decades of the ancien regime and the era of the French Revolution saw the birth of the modern restaurant, as good food and good wine ceased to be the monopoly of the court and the nobility, and became instead the preserve of the new bourgeoisie. Brillat-Savarin loved food and wine, and in La Physiologie produced the perfect manual for those middle- class men and women who wanted to know how to enjoy their meals. For this was no ordinary cookbook: rather, it was a discussion of the nature of eating in its widest sense, memorably interspersed with autobiographical interludes and broader reflections on the meaning of existence.

As an account of Brillat-Savarin's life and times, this book is competent enough. But it fails to bring alive the remarkable personality of its subject, and the sensual side of his existence - whether food or wine or women - gets inadequate attention. Most disappointingly, the Physiologie itself is dealt with in a few, almost cursory pages. Since Brillat-Savarin lived a full life with, at all times, a full stomach, this slim biography does less than justice to his unusual achievements.