September 5, 2023 • 24 mins
You've probably heard that France takes its bread seriously -- but did you know France had specific laws governing the lives of bakers? For centuries the country regulated how and when bakers could close or take vacation. Although this may sound amusing now, in the past it was a deadly serious issue. So what happened? In today's classic episode, let's revisit the events that lead to the French government being so frightfully concerned about bakers taking time off.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh, special announcement this week, folks. We are taking a
little holiday and we are going to day.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
We're gonna celebrate.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
We're gonna do a little classic episode here. We just
had such a good time.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
With us if we took a holiday. Uh yeah, something someerie. Yeah.
This episays about French.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Bread, Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio Bonjou. Welcome
(00:53):
to the show. My name is Ben and I just
might be addicted to carbs.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Jamappelle Noel and I've been trying to go a little
lighter on the carbs lately, but I am a big
fan of a good baguet. Yes, agreed.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
And here in the US we have a little bit
more leeway with the definition of what a baguet is.
And despite how important carbs might be to knowl to
myself and to our super producer Casey Pegram, in France,
it turns out they're much more important.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Crucial, big time. That's why for two centuries there was
a law on the books in Paris that basically established
a continuous, free flowing access to bread. And this was
most important during the summer months when a lot of
Parisians take vacations and it's a big deal. Paris can
(01:50):
feel like a ghost town during July and August. And
this law was established because the last time that France
ran out of bread, well you know there there were
riots in the streets and people got decapitated and hanged.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yes, there were rains of terrors that were related in
a way to bread. And for anyone who's interested in
the role that food can play in social revolution, we
promise you it's a real thing. You're not crazy. Butter
had a role to play in an earlier episode.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
It's true, and bread's always been a pretty important staple
of the French diet. In fact, according to the Smithsonian,
the average worker during the eighteenth century spent half, that is,
half of their wages on bread because not only was
it delicious and you know something you could put a
(02:44):
nice piece of brion, I mean, it was how they
got their sustenance more than anything else.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Right, It's true. You know, we have to consider in
ages past people didn't often have the same concept toward
food or toward neutral trition that you would find to
be more common today. For example, a lot of times
today people eat for pleasure rather than mandatory survival. And
if bread wasn't available for a lot of people, it
(03:12):
could mean that they might starve. This was so important
that in Napoleonic times police were even in charge of
grain inspection and quality controls, sort of an FDA, but
oriented entirely toward bread, and when there was a wheat shortage,
things went crazy very quickly.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Yeah, it's true. Like you know how in the United
States we refer to the president as the commander in
chief because he's in charge of the military for all
intents and purposes. Well, in France during this time, the
king was referred to as Boulangers du roem or prime
baker of the Kingdom. That was kind of a pretty
serious job, and in fact, there were these Napoleonic codes
(03:54):
that were established for everything from how to proof the
doe to make the bread, to the ratio of the ingredients.
This is all very, very very important, and it not
only was important because of it its place as a
staple food, but it was a cultural thing as well,
and they took their bread making very very seriously.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Yes, absolutely, it is not an exaggeration to say that
all hell broke loose if something went wrong with the
bread supply. In seventeen seventy five, there was a wheat
shortage and grain prices skyrocketed, and to make things more complicated,
the new king at the time, Louis the sixteenth, decided
to allow a free market of grain within the country,
(04:39):
and this led to speculation flower merchants, who were already
kind of a distrusted segment of society along with bakers,
held back grain supplies.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
I read somewhere that certain flower merchants, to kind of
control prices, would cut their flour with everything from like
chalk to even bone meal sawdust as well.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Right, And this sounds, maybe on the offset, a bit silly, right,
Maybe it sounds like too much of a nanny state
to have laws controlling bread, But it is incredibly important.
There hadn't been a famine in France for decades before
this occurred, but all of a sudden, the poorest people
in the country were unable to buy flour for bread,
(05:23):
and they rioted.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, and this, what was referred to as the Flower War,
is considered by most historians as being the precursor to
the French Revolution that took place fourteen years later. And actually,
you know what I think now, it'd be a good
time to introduce a new segment. We've been kicking around.
You see, our super producer, Casey Pegram is also our
(05:47):
resident Franco file and so we are going to have
a segment with Casey that I would affectionately like to
refer to as Casey on the Case or thus baked Casey.
We're still kicking it around. Casey Pegrim, Welcome to this show,
my friend.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Hello, thanks guys.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So Casey, we sort of bury the lead. Just to
touch in this story, we talked a little bit about
how these days during the summer months, Paris kind of
clears out a little bit. And you go to Paris
about once a year, would you say that's pretty accurate.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Oh yeah, they call le graand Viscantes the big vacation.
And yeah, Paris in July and August gets extremely hot.
Many many places are not air conditioned. Climatize and that's
actually a point of advertisement. If like a movie theater
has air conditioning, they will put that like saw clematize
(06:40):
and it's sort of like even if you don't care
what the movie is, just go in there and chill
out for a couple hours. So yeah, Paris basically empties
out and just becomes like the domain of tourists for
a couple months.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
And when we were researching this episode off air, we
really wanted to lean on your abilities as a Francophone
to tell us a little bit about the laws that
we're kicking around. That it is true, right, Nola, and
I haven't been just making stuff up for the past
(07:12):
few minutes.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
No, it's real. So you guys had talked about the
Flower War, correct, And that's kind of the precursor to
this event that happens in October of seventeen eighty nine,
where this poor, poor baker, Denise Francois, who was confronted
by an angry mob that basically thought he was hoarding bread,
(07:34):
possibly just to drive the price up or potentially to
keep it on reserve for royalty and military people things
like that.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
This was a big deal, especially consider what had happened
during the Flower War, where they thought the king was
hoarding the flower so that the people who relied on
it for their daily sustenance could not get what they
needed to make their daily brand right.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
So this is kind of just a continuation of those tensions,
and as we see an angry crowd confronted this baker
and his bakery demanded that he come out, brought him
to what was then called a Place de Greve, which
today in modern times is known as Lotel de Ville.
It's the city hall. Essentially, if you've ever been to Paris,
(08:19):
you've probably walked by this place. It's kind of a landmark.
It's very central, it's right by the seind and it's
a cool building. But they brought him to this public
square basically summarily executed him. They hung him and they
decapitated him, and they paraded his head on a pike
around town. They brought it to other bakers to kind
of intimidate them.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
Apparently they waited on a scale at one point at
one of the bakeryes and.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Like a baker's scale.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Wow. Why the baker though, that seems like such misplaced anger.
I mean, this need is trying to like feed his family.
Was he considered part of the aristocracy. Was he looked
at as being an enemy of the people of peasants?
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Well, he would have in relatively middle class and controlling
access to a resource that everyone needs. What's interesting to me, too,
is that we don't have any solid proof for whether
he was actually doing something wrong.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Most of what I read said that in retrospect, this
was a totally innocent guy that just got caught up
in like an angry mob that was looking for somebody
to blame for the problems that were going on. So
what happened next, Well, so after this guy was killed,
the National Assembly meets and they basically decide that they're
(09:32):
going to declare martial law and that they are going
to ban all public gatherings, any kind of public protests.
There will be a red flag that signals the presence
of martial law. So you'd be given three chances to disperse.
You could take from your group, you could select six
people to kind of represent your grievances and whatever solution
(09:55):
you're kind of angling for. Everybody else is supposed to
disperse peacefully. There'd be a second warning and a third warning.
If after that third warning you're still there, you're still
protesting whatever, they are authorized to use armed force against
you and basically kill an entire crowd if they decide
to stick around.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
So this is in the thick of the French Revolution, right,
I mean, this is like.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
This is coming a couple weeks after the March on Versailles, Yes,
which is what brought the king back to Paris and
kind of returned rule of the country to Paris where
it had been displaced to Versailles.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Let me meet cake, right, right, So that was even
that catchphrase is tied to this whole idea of bread
being such a crucial component of everyday life, and the
fact that Marie Antoinette was so clueless and insulated that
she would just say, oh, it's fine, they can eat cake,
right because they have that surely, right.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Isn't that the joke kind of a little bit out
of touch? Yeah, very much.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
And there's an interesting tale within that within that too
about the folklore versus the fact of that. But you're
absolutely right that was allegedly, or according to the legend,
in response to them saying, you know, the people have
no bread.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
No, but I saw it in a film, so okay,
it was a Sophia Coppola film, so death, that's definitely
exactly how it went down. S Is she the one
who did Dracula? She was in Godfather three? Okay, right,
remember it's on the stairs.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
No, no spoilers, right right, Godfathers take Manhattan, right.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
That's the one. But no this is really just because
then this is ultimately correct me if I'm wrong, casey,
because you are in fact on the case. This is
what led to this decree in seventeen ninety from Louis
the sixteenth that put this system in place, because okay,
so they weathered the grain shortage, they got through that,
but now it was like, what happens if the bakery's.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Close if everybody takes the grand vacation at the same time.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
You did say, though, that didn't really become a cultural
thing until a little bit more in the twenty first century,
the idea of that particular time for a vacation.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
But even still right, so the seventeen eighty nine or
seventeen ninety ruling has to do with basically empowering authorities
to make sure that bread stays in regular supply so
that people don't have a reason to riot. When it
gets into the twentieth century and you start getting things
like guaranteed vacation time for workers, and this kind of
(12:24):
culminates in the cultural tradition of the Grand vascants, where
people take as much as like six weeks off consecutive
during the summer. Everybody leaves Paris and goes to like
the coast of France. Then it became an issue because
if everybody left at the same time, if everybody decides
to take off July, you're probably not going to be
able to get like a decent big at in Paris
for that month. And that's you know, they view that
(12:48):
as a pretty serious problem.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
So what happens to the consumers? Whatever will we do right?
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Exactly? So it was then decided that these Boulanges bakers
would have to coordinate with their local authorities when they
wanted to take time off, and you know, it would
have to coordinate from all the other bakeries in the area,
such that you'd never found like a neighborhood that just
didn't have a bakery open. So someone have to go
(13:15):
in July, someone have to go in August.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
And it was half and half correct.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
Right, And it almost became like the these two groups
almost identified like I'm a july In, I'm an Augustian.
It's very strange.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
So this wouldn't be on the case with Casey if
we didn't hear a little sample of your dolcit French tones.
So could you give us a little reading from this
this ordinance casey.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
So sure. This is article number six of the Law
of October twenty first, seventeen eighty nine against gatherings or
martial law. In other words, so here we go, the
three warnings.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
The little poetry music in the back, some kind.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
Of dramatic accompaniment foot par person attulpedos dela parlis officier
municipopland trois mason tonquie mont don les domicile. So they
will be warned in a high voice by the municipal officers,
or one among them, three warnings to return peacefully into
(14:18):
your home trois masioni ton quiet don la demasil three
warnings to return peacefully to your home la premier exp
The first warning will be expressed in these terms. A
vill done calalois marc cartus criminal. So notice will be
(14:39):
given that martial law has been proclaimed, that all gatherings
are criminal. Fur We're going to shoot cab solatier good
citizens go home alision. So on the second and third warning.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Cliban.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
So on the second and third warnings, they're gonna skip
the preambole and just say we're gonna shoot good citizens,
go homefier municipal. So the municipal officer will announce whether
it's the first, second, or third warning, and if you're
not out by the third warning, all bets are off,
(15:20):
you're probably gonna get shot.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Beautiful, I mean terrifying the beautiful performance, Casey. And this
has been on the Case with Casey, you know what.
I am a big fan of that segment. Noel, don't
you think that added some context?
Speaker 2 (15:36):
It added some real umami to this episode, I think.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
And there's more to the story, because you see it
turns out this law isn't just something that happened and
then disappeared. It has been, as we said at the
top of the show, on the books for centuries, and
it's been periodically revised, rewritten, reworked, as Casey mentioned, with
(15:59):
the emergence of workers.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Rights totally and because you know, you don't really see
a whole lot of huge, large scale famines happening in
Europe these days, so it was relaxed in nineteen ninety five,
and we mentioned this briefly during Casey on the Case,
but half of the bakeries in Paris were able to
shut down during the month of July as long as
the other half stayed open, and then bakers were actually
(16:24):
required to post notices in their windows of where a
customer could could get a croissant or a bag at
within walking distance because it was all about this community
neighborhood vibe. You know, you had to be able to
walk there. It was very much part of day to day.
You could not be expected to, you know, hop a
(16:45):
taxi to another part of town.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
My word, the very idea, the very idea. This is
a really cool detail to me because I like it.
It seems humanizing. It's not enough just to tell the authorities, hey,
I'm going to be gone in July. You got to
support your pee too totally.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
And it feels like we've gotten away from it being
there being concern over riots and it being much more
about maintaining that fresh baked bread culture that has sustained
in France throughout the generations.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
And you will hopefully be as thankful as we are
to note that the consequences for this are no longer
you know, life.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Threatening, absolutely not. In fact, even when they were still
on the books, you if you didn't get permission you
decided to do what you wanted, you could get a
fine which was a minimum of eve eleven euros a day,
which is around thirteen American dollars back in I think
two thousand and five, or about twenty dollars in twenty
(17:47):
seventeen bucks.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
And the story continued. In twenty fifteen, the French government
eased some of the remaining restrictions on baker's holidays as
part of a larger effort to streamline their notoriously sluggish bureaucracy.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
I mean, can you imagine having a law on the
books for two hundred years? Can you imagine what other weird,
little esoteric legal nuggets remained on the books. Probably stuff
about spitting in public. I don't know, beret quotas I
would imagine. I hope it'll get in trouble for that one.
But it's true.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
When this relaxation occurred in twenty fifteen, a lot of
local Parisians feared that would be a bay Get crisis,
and to some degree they did experience one. Because the
government no longer coordinated baker holidays for the industry, bakers
had a tough time knowing when they should leave. The
(18:43):
ones that stayed open ran out of bread quickly, and
some were worried that their quality was suffering because there
was such an increase in demand.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Because literally, for the first time since the revolution, bakers
could go on vacation whenever they wanted, like normies, which
is the Baker word for us exactly. So yeah, I
saw an article in the Daily Mail with some great
quotes of kind of like the scoop of how this
is playing out today in the streets of Paris. There's
(19:13):
a quote from Lynn Siegel, who is a Parisian resident,
that goes as such, I went out to get a
baguette a few days ago, and the two closest boulangeries
to me were both closed for the first time ever.
Then the next day a woman on the street stopped
me asking where the closest open one was. Only the
bad ones stayed open, only the bad one bad ones.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
And this we should paint a picture of why this
is so important even now for something to be called
traditional homemade bread, only four ingredients legally can be used
flower water, salt, and yeast. Seventy percent of bread is
still produced in Boulangeris, those local bakeries rather than industrial
(19:58):
warehouse factories. You know, while worries of a bread shortage
have you know, fallen a little bit in the years
since the regulations loosened, there are new worries on the horizon.
It appears people are eating fewer and fewer bagettes.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Yeah, it's true. Per capita consumption of bagettes has fallen
by more than eighty percent since nineteen hundred, and at
that time, the average person in France ate more than
three of them a day.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
That's a lot, isn't that?
Speaker 2 (20:33):
These are big man right?
Speaker 1 (20:35):
And today it's as of twenty seventeen, it's down to
about a half a loaf a day. So analysts will
attribute the drop to multiple factors, including maybe this preference
for a lower carb diet or concerns about gluten consumption,
while some bakers say it's because the bread just doesn't
taste as good as it did back in the you know,
(20:57):
the good old days of the pre revolutionary frame.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Yeah. In that Daily Mail article, there's another quote from
a Parisian artist named Anthony Stephenson who talks about being
pretty bummed out that because of the scarcity of high
quality bread, he's now having to buy what he refers
to as quote those strange half cooked mini baguettes from
my local supermarket and putting them in the oven. So
that is not cool for mister Stephenson, and I actually
(21:22):
found an article in the New York Times. The headline
is a baker's crusade rescuing the famed French bou lingerie.
Because of this decrease in bread consumption, there is a
sense that that culture, that history of artisanal baking, is
being lost. So a man by the name of Pascal Rigio,
a French businessman, has decided to try to save the
(21:47):
fledgling French authentic French boulingerie by coming up with a
model that allows scaling of these businesses while also using
higher quality ingredients. And in order to do that, he
is and to shrink each store, making it where you
only have to have one person to run it and
buying ingredients centrally. That allows the shops to enhance the
(22:09):
quality and also increase bargaining power. And it limits the
number of products sold, so you might have a store
that only sells bagettes as opposed to a diversified bakery
where you have all kinds of other pastries.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
So this isn't a big warehouse plan. This sounds like
a community of what would be smaller stores that are
in keeping with French tradition. This could help trigger a resurgence, right,
because we saw the numbers of these traditional bakeries dropping
over the past few decades.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
That's right. Looks like in twenty fifteen there were twenty
eight thousand of these authentic bakeries, and that's down from
thirty seven thousand, eight hundred just twenty years earlier. And
that is from a twenty fourteen report on bread in
France from euro Monitor by Alexander Gorenson.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
And on this we will end our exploration of bread
war and revolution in France. However, if you feel like
the story should continue, we would like to cordially invite
you to France's annual bread festival, usually held in May.
(23:20):
This gives you enough time, hopefully to schedule your plans,
and of course we want pictures if you happen to
go to the bread festival, and let us know if
you have lived in France or, like Casey, spent a
great deal of time there. We'd like to hear what
your favorite bakeries are. We'd like to hear your impressions
(23:42):
of where bakers stand in French society today. I'm very
interested in that because over just the course of this episode,
we saw baker's being unfairly characterized as villains and then
as models of the working class, as masters of their
So what are they today in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
You can write to us at ridiculous at HowStuffWorks dot com.
You can drop us a note on Facebook or Ridiculous
History there too. I think we have a Twitter now.
You can tweet at us at Ridiculous History, or you
can check out our Instagram pages also Ridiculous History, and.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Of course, most importantly, let us know if you have
suggestions for an episode who should cover in the future.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
So please join us for more gaffs and laughs on
the next episode of Ridiculous History. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Oh, special announcement this week, folks. We are taking a
little holiday and we are going to day.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
We're gonna celebrate.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
We're gonna do a little classic episode here. We just
had such a good time.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
With us if we took a holiday. Uh yeah, something someerie. Yeah.
This episays about French.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Bread, Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio Bonjou. Welcome
(00:53):
to the show. My name is Ben and I just
might be addicted to carbs.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Jamappelle Noel and I've been trying to go a little
lighter on the carbs lately, but I am a big
fan of a good baguet. Yes, agreed.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
And here in the US we have a little bit
more leeway with the definition of what a baguet is.
And despite how important carbs might be to knowl to
myself and to our super producer Casey Pegram, in France,
it turns out they're much more important.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Crucial, big time. That's why for two centuries there was
a law on the books in Paris that basically established
a continuous, free flowing access to bread. And this was
most important during the summer months when a lot of
Parisians take vacations and it's a big deal. Paris can
(01:50):
feel like a ghost town during July and August. And
this law was established because the last time that France
ran out of bread, well you know there there were
riots in the streets and people got decapitated and hanged.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yes, there were rains of terrors that were related in
a way to bread. And for anyone who's interested in
the role that food can play in social revolution, we
promise you it's a real thing. You're not crazy. Butter
had a role to play in an earlier episode.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
It's true, and bread's always been a pretty important staple
of the French diet. In fact, according to the Smithsonian,
the average worker during the eighteenth century spent half, that is,
half of their wages on bread because not only was
it delicious and you know something you could put a
(02:44):
nice piece of brion, I mean, it was how they
got their sustenance more than anything else.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Right, It's true. You know, we have to consider in
ages past people didn't often have the same concept toward
food or toward neutral trition that you would find to
be more common today. For example, a lot of times
today people eat for pleasure rather than mandatory survival. And
if bread wasn't available for a lot of people, it
(03:12):
could mean that they might starve. This was so important
that in Napoleonic times police were even in charge of
grain inspection and quality controls, sort of an FDA, but
oriented entirely toward bread, and when there was a wheat shortage,
things went crazy very quickly.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Yeah, it's true. Like you know how in the United
States we refer to the president as the commander in
chief because he's in charge of the military for all
intents and purposes. Well, in France during this time, the
king was referred to as Boulangers du roem or prime
baker of the Kingdom. That was kind of a pretty
serious job, and in fact, there were these Napoleonic codes
(03:54):
that were established for everything from how to proof the
doe to make the bread, to the ratio of the ingredients.
This is all very, very very important, and it not
only was important because of it its place as a
staple food, but it was a cultural thing as well,
and they took their bread making very very seriously.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Yes, absolutely, it is not an exaggeration to say that
all hell broke loose if something went wrong with the
bread supply. In seventeen seventy five, there was a wheat
shortage and grain prices skyrocketed, and to make things more complicated,
the new king at the time, Louis the sixteenth, decided
to allow a free market of grain within the country,
(04:39):
and this led to speculation flower merchants, who were already
kind of a distrusted segment of society along with bakers,
held back grain supplies.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
I read somewhere that certain flower merchants, to kind of
control prices, would cut their flour with everything from like
chalk to even bone meal sawdust as well.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Right, And this sounds, maybe on the offset, a bit silly, right,
Maybe it sounds like too much of a nanny state
to have laws controlling bread, But it is incredibly important.
There hadn't been a famine in France for decades before
this occurred, but all of a sudden, the poorest people
in the country were unable to buy flour for bread,
(05:23):
and they rioted.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, and this, what was referred to as the Flower War,
is considered by most historians as being the precursor to
the French Revolution that took place fourteen years later. And actually,
you know what I think now, it'd be a good
time to introduce a new segment. We've been kicking around.
You see, our super producer, Casey Pegram is also our
(05:47):
resident Franco file and so we are going to have
a segment with Casey that I would affectionately like to
refer to as Casey on the Case or thus baked Casey.
We're still kicking it around. Casey Pegrim, Welcome to this show,
my friend.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Hello, thanks guys.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So Casey, we sort of bury the lead. Just to
touch in this story, we talked a little bit about
how these days during the summer months, Paris kind of
clears out a little bit. And you go to Paris
about once a year, would you say that's pretty accurate.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Oh yeah, they call le graand Viscantes the big vacation.
And yeah, Paris in July and August gets extremely hot.
Many many places are not air conditioned. Climatize and that's
actually a point of advertisement. If like a movie theater
has air conditioning, they will put that like saw clematize
(06:40):
and it's sort of like even if you don't care
what the movie is, just go in there and chill
out for a couple hours. So yeah, Paris basically empties
out and just becomes like the domain of tourists for
a couple months.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
And when we were researching this episode off air, we
really wanted to lean on your abilities as a Francophone
to tell us a little bit about the laws that
we're kicking around. That it is true, right, Nola, and
I haven't been just making stuff up for the past
(07:12):
few minutes.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
No, it's real. So you guys had talked about the
Flower War, correct, And that's kind of the precursor to
this event that happens in October of seventeen eighty nine,
where this poor, poor baker, Denise Francois, who was confronted
by an angry mob that basically thought he was hoarding bread,
(07:34):
possibly just to drive the price up or potentially to
keep it on reserve for royalty and military people things
like that.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
This was a big deal, especially consider what had happened
during the Flower War, where they thought the king was
hoarding the flower so that the people who relied on
it for their daily sustenance could not get what they
needed to make their daily brand right.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
So this is kind of just a continuation of those tensions,
and as we see an angry crowd confronted this baker
and his bakery demanded that he come out, brought him
to what was then called a Place de Greve, which
today in modern times is known as Lotel de Ville.
It's the city hall. Essentially, if you've ever been to Paris,
(08:19):
you've probably walked by this place. It's kind of a landmark.
It's very central, it's right by the seind and it's
a cool building. But they brought him to this public
square basically summarily executed him. They hung him and they
decapitated him, and they paraded his head on a pike
around town. They brought it to other bakers to kind
of intimidate them.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
Apparently they waited on a scale at one point at
one of the bakeryes and.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Like a baker's scale.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Wow. Why the baker though, that seems like such misplaced anger.
I mean, this need is trying to like feed his family.
Was he considered part of the aristocracy. Was he looked
at as being an enemy of the people of peasants?
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Well, he would have in relatively middle class and controlling
access to a resource that everyone needs. What's interesting to me, too,
is that we don't have any solid proof for whether
he was actually doing something wrong.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Most of what I read said that in retrospect, this
was a totally innocent guy that just got caught up
in like an angry mob that was looking for somebody
to blame for the problems that were going on. So
what happened next, Well, so after this guy was killed,
the National Assembly meets and they basically decide that they're
(09:32):
going to declare martial law and that they are going
to ban all public gatherings, any kind of public protests.
There will be a red flag that signals the presence
of martial law. So you'd be given three chances to disperse.
You could take from your group, you could select six
people to kind of represent your grievances and whatever solution
(09:55):
you're kind of angling for. Everybody else is supposed to
disperse peacefully. There'd be a second warning and a third warning.
If after that third warning you're still there, you're still
protesting whatever, they are authorized to use armed force against
you and basically kill an entire crowd if they decide
to stick around.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
So this is in the thick of the French Revolution, right,
I mean, this is like.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
This is coming a couple weeks after the March on Versailles, Yes,
which is what brought the king back to Paris and
kind of returned rule of the country to Paris where
it had been displaced to Versailles.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Let me meet cake, right, right, So that was even
that catchphrase is tied to this whole idea of bread
being such a crucial component of everyday life, and the
fact that Marie Antoinette was so clueless and insulated that
she would just say, oh, it's fine, they can eat cake,
right because they have that surely, right.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Isn't that the joke kind of a little bit out
of touch? Yeah, very much.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
And there's an interesting tale within that within that too
about the folklore versus the fact of that. But you're
absolutely right that was allegedly, or according to the legend,
in response to them saying, you know, the people have
no bread.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
No, but I saw it in a film, so okay,
it was a Sophia Coppola film, so death, that's definitely
exactly how it went down. S Is she the one
who did Dracula? She was in Godfather three? Okay, right,
remember it's on the stairs.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
No, no spoilers, right right, Godfathers take Manhattan, right.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
That's the one. But no this is really just because
then this is ultimately correct me if I'm wrong, casey,
because you are in fact on the case. This is
what led to this decree in seventeen ninety from Louis
the sixteenth that put this system in place, because okay,
so they weathered the grain shortage, they got through that,
but now it was like, what happens if the bakery's.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Close if everybody takes the grand vacation at the same time.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
You did say, though, that didn't really become a cultural
thing until a little bit more in the twenty first century,
the idea of that particular time for a vacation.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
But even still right, so the seventeen eighty nine or
seventeen ninety ruling has to do with basically empowering authorities
to make sure that bread stays in regular supply so
that people don't have a reason to riot. When it
gets into the twentieth century and you start getting things
like guaranteed vacation time for workers, and this kind of
(12:24):
culminates in the cultural tradition of the Grand vascants, where
people take as much as like six weeks off consecutive
during the summer. Everybody leaves Paris and goes to like
the coast of France. Then it became an issue because
if everybody left at the same time, if everybody decides
to take off July, you're probably not going to be
able to get like a decent big at in Paris
for that month. And that's you know, they view that
(12:48):
as a pretty serious problem.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
So what happens to the consumers? Whatever will we do right?
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Exactly? So it was then decided that these Boulanges bakers
would have to coordinate with their local authorities when they
wanted to take time off, and you know, it would
have to coordinate from all the other bakeries in the area,
such that you'd never found like a neighborhood that just
didn't have a bakery open. So someone have to go
(13:15):
in July, someone have to go in August.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
And it was half and half correct.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
Right, And it almost became like the these two groups
almost identified like I'm a july In, I'm an Augustian.
It's very strange.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
So this wouldn't be on the case with Casey if
we didn't hear a little sample of your dolcit French tones.
So could you give us a little reading from this
this ordinance casey.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
So sure. This is article number six of the Law
of October twenty first, seventeen eighty nine against gatherings or
martial law. In other words, so here we go, the
three warnings.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
The little poetry music in the back, some kind.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
Of dramatic accompaniment foot par person attulpedos dela parlis officier
municipopland trois mason tonquie mont don les domicile. So they
will be warned in a high voice by the municipal officers,
or one among them, three warnings to return peacefully into
(14:18):
your home trois masioni ton quiet don la demasil three
warnings to return peacefully to your home la premier exp
The first warning will be expressed in these terms. A
vill done calalois marc cartus criminal. So notice will be
(14:39):
given that martial law has been proclaimed, that all gatherings
are criminal. Fur We're going to shoot cab solatier good
citizens go home alision. So on the second and third warning.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Cliban.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
So on the second and third warnings, they're gonna skip
the preambole and just say we're gonna shoot good citizens,
go homefier municipal. So the municipal officer will announce whether
it's the first, second, or third warning, and if you're
not out by the third warning, all bets are off,
(15:20):
you're probably gonna get shot.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Beautiful, I mean terrifying the beautiful performance, Casey. And this
has been on the Case with Casey, you know what.
I am a big fan of that segment. Noel, don't
you think that added some context?
Speaker 2 (15:36):
It added some real umami to this episode, I think.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
And there's more to the story, because you see it
turns out this law isn't just something that happened and
then disappeared. It has been, as we said at the
top of the show, on the books for centuries, and
it's been periodically revised, rewritten, reworked, as Casey mentioned, with
(15:59):
the emergence of workers.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Rights totally and because you know, you don't really see
a whole lot of huge, large scale famines happening in
Europe these days, so it was relaxed in nineteen ninety five,
and we mentioned this briefly during Casey on the Case,
but half of the bakeries in Paris were able to
shut down during the month of July as long as
the other half stayed open, and then bakers were actually
(16:24):
required to post notices in their windows of where a
customer could could get a croissant or a bag at
within walking distance because it was all about this community
neighborhood vibe. You know, you had to be able to
walk there. It was very much part of day to day.
You could not be expected to, you know, hop a
(16:45):
taxi to another part of town.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
My word, the very idea, the very idea. This is
a really cool detail to me because I like it.
It seems humanizing. It's not enough just to tell the authorities, hey,
I'm going to be gone in July. You got to
support your pee too totally.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
And it feels like we've gotten away from it being
there being concern over riots and it being much more
about maintaining that fresh baked bread culture that has sustained
in France throughout the generations.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
And you will hopefully be as thankful as we are
to note that the consequences for this are no longer
you know, life.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Threatening, absolutely not. In fact, even when they were still
on the books, you if you didn't get permission you
decided to do what you wanted, you could get a
fine which was a minimum of eve eleven euros a day,
which is around thirteen American dollars back in I think
two thousand and five, or about twenty dollars in twenty
(17:47):
seventeen bucks.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
And the story continued. In twenty fifteen, the French government
eased some of the remaining restrictions on baker's holidays as
part of a larger effort to streamline their notoriously sluggish bureaucracy.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
I mean, can you imagine having a law on the
books for two hundred years? Can you imagine what other weird,
little esoteric legal nuggets remained on the books. Probably stuff
about spitting in public. I don't know, beret quotas I
would imagine. I hope it'll get in trouble for that one.
But it's true.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
When this relaxation occurred in twenty fifteen, a lot of
local Parisians feared that would be a bay Get crisis,
and to some degree they did experience one. Because the
government no longer coordinated baker holidays for the industry, bakers
had a tough time knowing when they should leave. The
(18:43):
ones that stayed open ran out of bread quickly, and
some were worried that their quality was suffering because there
was such an increase in demand.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Because literally, for the first time since the revolution, bakers
could go on vacation whenever they wanted, like normies, which
is the Baker word for us exactly. So yeah, I
saw an article in the Daily Mail with some great
quotes of kind of like the scoop of how this
is playing out today in the streets of Paris. There's
(19:13):
a quote from Lynn Siegel, who is a Parisian resident,
that goes as such, I went out to get a
baguette a few days ago, and the two closest boulangeries
to me were both closed for the first time ever.
Then the next day a woman on the street stopped
me asking where the closest open one was. Only the
bad ones stayed open, only the bad one bad ones.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
And this we should paint a picture of why this
is so important even now for something to be called
traditional homemade bread, only four ingredients legally can be used
flower water, salt, and yeast. Seventy percent of bread is
still produced in Boulangeris, those local bakeries rather than industrial
(19:58):
warehouse factories. You know, while worries of a bread shortage
have you know, fallen a little bit in the years
since the regulations loosened, there are new worries on the horizon.
It appears people are eating fewer and fewer bagettes.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Yeah, it's true. Per capita consumption of bagettes has fallen
by more than eighty percent since nineteen hundred, and at
that time, the average person in France ate more than
three of them a day.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
That's a lot, isn't that?
Speaker 2 (20:33):
These are big man right?
Speaker 1 (20:35):
And today it's as of twenty seventeen, it's down to
about a half a loaf a day. So analysts will
attribute the drop to multiple factors, including maybe this preference
for a lower carb diet or concerns about gluten consumption,
while some bakers say it's because the bread just doesn't
taste as good as it did back in the you know,
(20:57):
the good old days of the pre revolutionary frame.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Yeah. In that Daily Mail article, there's another quote from
a Parisian artist named Anthony Stephenson who talks about being
pretty bummed out that because of the scarcity of high
quality bread, he's now having to buy what he refers
to as quote those strange half cooked mini baguettes from
my local supermarket and putting them in the oven. So
that is not cool for mister Stephenson, and I actually
(21:22):
found an article in the New York Times. The headline
is a baker's crusade rescuing the famed French bou lingerie.
Because of this decrease in bread consumption, there is a
sense that that culture, that history of artisanal baking, is
being lost. So a man by the name of Pascal Rigio,
a French businessman, has decided to try to save the
(21:47):
fledgling French authentic French boulingerie by coming up with a
model that allows scaling of these businesses while also using
higher quality ingredients. And in order to do that, he
is and to shrink each store, making it where you
only have to have one person to run it and
buying ingredients centrally. That allows the shops to enhance the
(22:09):
quality and also increase bargaining power. And it limits the
number of products sold, so you might have a store
that only sells bagettes as opposed to a diversified bakery
where you have all kinds of other pastries.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
So this isn't a big warehouse plan. This sounds like
a community of what would be smaller stores that are
in keeping with French tradition. This could help trigger a resurgence, right,
because we saw the numbers of these traditional bakeries dropping
over the past few decades.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
That's right. Looks like in twenty fifteen there were twenty
eight thousand of these authentic bakeries, and that's down from
thirty seven thousand, eight hundred just twenty years earlier. And
that is from a twenty fourteen report on bread in
France from euro Monitor by Alexander Gorenson.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
And on this we will end our exploration of bread
war and revolution in France. However, if you feel like
the story should continue, we would like to cordially invite
you to France's annual bread festival, usually held in May.
(23:20):
This gives you enough time, hopefully to schedule your plans,
and of course we want pictures if you happen to
go to the bread festival, and let us know if
you have lived in France or, like Casey, spent a
great deal of time there. We'd like to hear what
your favorite bakeries are. We'd like to hear your impressions
(23:42):
of where bakers stand in French society today. I'm very
interested in that because over just the course of this episode,
we saw baker's being unfairly characterized as villains and then
as models of the working class, as masters of their
So what are they today in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
You can write to us at ridiculous at HowStuffWorks dot com.
You can drop us a note on Facebook or Ridiculous
History there too. I think we have a Twitter now.
You can tweet at us at Ridiculous History, or you
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Speaker 1 (24:21):
Of course, most importantly, let us know if you have
suggestions for an episode who should cover in the future.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
So please join us for more gaffs and laughs on
the next episode of Ridiculous History. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
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