When visiting France, you may sometimes catch yourself wondering if you have accidentally traveled several decades back in time. Maybe it’s the long lines at the local bakery or the vegetable shop, or the fact that hardly anything is open on Sundays. Or perhaps it’s the feeling you get walking through the shopping district of any town of a decent size, where in addition to the usual national and global chains, you’ll find small shops obsessively devoted to one particular item—mirrors, for example, or accordions, or typewriters (typewriters!). It all harkens back to an earlier era of consumerism, fast disappearing in many parts of the world—and even in France, where enormous hypermarchés sprout in ever-greater numbers throughout the countryside.
One of our favorite little shops in Nantes, on a street of old cafés and boutiques, sells honey. Only honey. Dozens of kinds of honey, with rows of sun-kissed golden jars nestled up to honeys of the darkest and thickest brown, and every shade in between. It was a bit of a shock at first—who knew bees were so multitalented? A whole new world opened up, one in which we could purchase honey by region, by flower type, by medicinal potency.
As it turns out, humans have been in thrall to honey’s heavenly taste since the dawn of civilization. Some of the earliest cave paintings in Europe depict brave hunter-gatherers fighting off bees in order to collect honeycombs. The ancient Greeks thought it was the food of the gods; Alexander the Great was said to have been embalmed in it. Mixed with water and left to ferment, honey produces mead, perhaps the world’s first alcoholic drink, created independently in different societies around the globe. From classical times through the Middle Ages, honey was added to many dishes, as a general preference for sweet-tasting meals endured until the Renaissance era. Even meat and fish dishes, which we tend to associate with savory flavors today, were routinely sweetened. As sugar was not available to most Europeans throughout this era—it was still slowly wending its way westward from its ancestral home in Asia—honey was the sweetener of choice. It was also celebrated for its medicinal qualities, particularly as a salve for burns, wounds, and sore throats.
One of the first things one learns, after falling into the obsessive world of honey, is that, much like wine, it is captive to its terroir: the unique characteristics of the natural environment in which it is produced.1 Each type of honey takes on a particular flavor, fragrance, and color, depending on the flowers and pollen that its bee producers have imbibed. As with wine, the French have developed very specific labeling practices to explain the origins of their endless varieties of honey (miel) and to prevent fraudulent claims from cheap substitutes. Miel de lavande, for example, is a protected trade name for the golden lavender honey of Provence. Miel de sarrasin is a buckwheat honey of the darkest brown, long a specialty of Brittany, where it is used to great effect in Breton gingerbread and mead. The ancient Romans considered the honey of Narbonne, redolent with rosemary, the best honey in the world. If you want to really surrender to the French obsession with honey, you can track down obscure varieties produced by bees that visit the flowers of one specific sand dune on the Atlantic coast, such as the sublime miel des dunes available on Île d’Oléron.
While beekeeping and honeymaking have been practiced in France since the time of the Gauls, it was not until the eighth century that it became a more organized and respected profession. Before then, people hunted for natural beehives in the woods, or attached different kinds of man-made hives to their dwellings, whatever suited their fancy. But one Frankish ruler changed all that, setting French honey on the delicious path it treads today.
Charlemagne, the grandson of Charles Martel, was crowned king of the Franks in 768. He became one of the most powerful heads of state in history, controlling the largest landmass in western Europe since the Roman Empire. He is regularly referred to as the father of Europe, with both Germans and French claiming his heritage. Less well known is his contribution to French agriculture and, thus, to the foundations of French gastronomy.
Charlemagne’s father, Pepin III (“Pepin the Short”), had succeeded Charles Martel as mayor of the palace, holding the reins of power alongside the weak Merovingian king Childeric III. Pepin took the bold leap of ending the Merovingian dynasty. He asked Pope Zacharias to intercede in his favor, and the pope declared that “whoever holds the real power should wear the crown.” Pepin deposed Childeric, shipped him off to a monastery, and was crowned king of the Franks. He was succeeded by his son, Charles, whose glorious reign as Charlemagne lent its name to this new dynasty, the Carolingian, whose kings would preside over France for the next two centuries.
At that time, agriculture was responsible for the vast majority of economic and social activity in the Frankish lands, and so when Charlemagne came to power and began organizing his kingdom, he rightfully focused on farming and food. He believed that a more efficient and fair system of agriculture would revive the economy and provide stability for his kingdom. His wide-ranging reforms are evident in a document known as the Capitulare de villis, a collection of edicts on the management of the royal estates. The ultimate goal, according to the document, was that the estates “shall serve our purposes entirely and not those of other men,” and that “all our people shall be well looked after, and not be reduced to penury by anyone.”2 Detailed instructions were given on how to manage farmland, fish stocks, and forests and how to care for vineyards and animal herds. Stewards were reminded to always have enough wine on hand and to grow and stockpile enough food to ward off famine. Surprisingly, given modern perceptions of the “dark ages,” food hygiene rules were prominent, even though it would be another thousand years before anyone knew what bacteria or germs were. Sites of food and wine production should be kept especially clean, as should those workers who handled food with their hands. Wine grapes should not be crushed with bare feet.
The edicts also dictated what should be grown in the gardens of the royal estates—sixty-eight types of plants and foods in all, many of them with known medicinal properties, such as garlic. This established a template for the medieval garden, and thus played a pivotal role in spreading the cultivation of garlic throughout the Frankish realm. You can still see what a Carolingian garden looked like if you visit Melle, a small, ancient town in the Poitou-Charentes region. One of France’s Petites Cités de Caractère (Small Cities of Character), Melle also hosts three impressive Romanesque churches and Europe’s largest publicly accessible silver mine, which once produced currency for the Carolingian kings.
And then there were the bees. Charlemagne decreed that each royal estate should keep bees, thus expanding organized honey production in his realm. Two-thirds of the honey crop should be given over to the crown as taxes. This bee tax, or abeillage, endured even after Charlemagne’s reign and became a key obligation of vassals during the feudal era. Beekeeping became tightly controlled; it was illegal to keep your own hive and not pay dues to your lord. There were even beekeeping officials to monitor hives and prevent honey poaching. (Though one wonders how thorough they were: there is a French proverb, after all, that avers, “He is a very bad manager of honey who leaves nothing to lick off his fingers.”) While this was all most unfortunate for the population, denied unrestricted access to their beloved honey, it did help spur a more organized, innovative, and respected beekeeping profession.
Overall, Charlemagne established one of the most efficient and productive regimes since the fall of the Roman Empire. He ordered that each estate should have ironworkers, carpenters, shoemakers, soap makers, and so on. He valued education and scientific learning, although he did not know how to read and write himself, and established schools in bishoprics and monasteries. (For many years, in fact, French schoolchildren were told to appreciate Charlemagne as the “inventor” of schools, though it is not clear whether this in fact endeared the great leader to generations of bored youth.) Charlemagne attracted scholars from all over Europe to his capital in Aachen, where he built a magnificent palace, chapel, and school. No one since the Roman ages had done so much to promote knowledge: old manuscripts were perused and copied, and knowledge and science were viewed favorably. Many refer to this era as the Carolingian Renaissance, a small preview of the much greater transformation that would arrive six centuries later.
As the Frankish kingdom grew ever more powerful, it became a more attractive ally to the papacy. At that time, the pope controlled an army and levied taxes; as the political and spiritual leader of the Church, he could wage war against his rivals or excommunicate them. But the popes often needed the protection of more powerful rulers, and Charlemagne twice came to their rescue, helping them stay in power. His military campaigns also brought Christianity to previously pagan lands. Having proved such an excellent defender of the faith, he was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III in 800. This is often seen as the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire, a political entity that would play a central role in European affairs for the next thousand years. By the end of his reign, Charlemagne had extended the Frankish dominions to cover most of western Europe.
In the end, Charlemagne reigns in the French imaginary as the founder of Europe, the inventor of school, and a powerful warrior-king. His role in the proliferation of French honeymaking may not be as well known, but it was hardly less important for the generations of beekeepers who followed his reign. Today, honey remains a beloved ingredient in French cuisine, and there are still tens of thousands of honey producers throughout France, employing time-honored techniques and the kind of devotion that Charlemagne would no doubt have approved of.
But as in much of the rest of the world, France has seen a dramatic decline in its bee populations. In the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of bee colonies disappeared, and French honey production declined precipitously from more than thirty thousand tons per year in the early 1990s to only ten thousand tons in 2014.3 While there are multiple causes of this, beekeepers argue that pesticides are a primary culprit. After twenty years of relentless campaigning, they finally won a landmark victory in 2016, when the French National Assembly banned the class of pesticides long thought to be the worst offender.
Another sizable threat to French apiculture will be harder to address. A third of French beekeepers are over the age of sixty, and very few young people are entering the trade. Increasingly, beekeeping is a side project, not a primary occupation. With these trends, we may see French honey production continue to decline even if all the other dangers are resolved—and this time, there will be no Charlemagne in place to decree a hive on every estate.