England’s White Cliffs of Dover, immortalized in story and song, have overshadowed their equally impressive counterpart on the far side of the Channel: the Alabaster Coast of France. Soaring white cliffs tower above pebble beaches for nearly one hundred miles along the Normandy shore between Le Havre and Le Tréport. Nestled among them, in the small port of Fécamp, is the fantastical Palais Bénédictine, a neo-Gothic palace built more than a century ago by the aptly named Alexandre Le Grand. It is here that Bénédictine, an herbal liqueur supposedly based on an old monastic recipe that includes spices from around the world, is produced.
How did this small town in Normandy come to produce such an exotic and widely sourced liqueur? It includes, after all, angelica from Scandinavia, nutmeg from Indonesia, cinnamon from Ceylon, and vanilla from Madagascar. Well, as so often in France, there is the legend and then there is the slightly more mundane version of the story. For both, we’ll need to return to the ninth century and see what became of the Franks after Charlemagne.
At the time of Charlemagne’s death in 814, the Franks were foolishly persisting with their tradition of sharing the kingdom among the monarch’s sons. Inheritances create enough problems in normal circumstances—just imagine the problems that arise when your inheritance is most of western Europe. Fortunately, Charlemagne had only one surviving son, Louis the Pious. Unfortunately, Louis had three sons, and even before his death they came to blows.
In 843, the three brothers signed the Treaty of Verdun, which more or less established the foundations for the modern states of France and Germany. Charles the Bald received the western part of the Carolingian Empire and became the king of France. Louis the German received the lands east of the Rhine River (hence his nickname). Lothar received a long but thin stretch of territory known as Francia Media, running from Belgium and the Netherlands through eastern France and western Germany, and down into Switzerland and Italy. If this bit of Europe sounds familiar, it may be because France and Germany (and plenty of other people) went on to fight over these lands for the next thousand years or so. So while the Treaty of Verdun helped settle a family feud, it inadvertently proved to be the seed for countless wars to come.
The war between the three brothers was highly destructive, killing tens of thousands of people, including many members of the ruling elite. This left the new French kingdom utterly unprepared for the next threat on the horizon: Viking invaders from the north.
The peoples of modern-day Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were then generally known as Norsemen, but the more adventurous sort who raided and invaded other European lands were often called Vikings in the Anglo-Saxon world. (The Franks tended to refer to them as Danes or Northmen.) The communities they terrorized saw them as primitive, violent barbarians, but they were also traders and explorers who over the next five centuries established settlements from Newfoundland to Russia, and from Scotland to Sicily.
The Vikings’ European debut took place in England in 793, when they sacked the monastery of Lindisfarne and killed many of its monks. The Norsemen were not Christian, and they saw monasteries and churches not as sacred sites but as great targets for plunder, as they were usually relatively wealthy and not well defended.
At first the Vikings only attacked coastal towns in Britain, but soon they began to raid the French coast as well. The Franks were completely ill-equipped to deal with the threat. By the time news of a raid arrived, the Vikings were long gone. As time went by, the Vikings became more daring and their numbers more impressive. They sacked Rouen in 841, Nantes in 843, and Paris in 845. Charles the Bald, unable to defend Paris, only managed to repel the Vikings by paying an enormous tribute of 7,000 livres (equivalent to 7,000 pounds of silver). It was the first danegeld, or ransom, that a French king paid to the Norsemen—a useful practice in the short term, but it may have helped encourage more raids in the long run.
The Norsemen began to establish permanent bases to facilitate the plundering of cities further inland. France’s impressive array of rivers, so helpful to commerce and travel in times of peace, now only helped the invaders to push ever farther into the Frankish heartland. But they remained essentially raiders, determined to acquire loot, ransoms, and slaves for the then-bustling European slave trade. They were not interested in occupying and settling the Frankish lands they raided, and so while their attacks were enormously disruptive, they did not obliterate the evolving political and cultural order of the Carolingian era.
The French had a serious leadership problem, which can best be summed up in the nicknames of the Carolingian kings at that time. Charles the Bald was succeeded by kings like Louis the Stammerer, Charles the Fat, and Charles the Simple. Yet slowly, the Franks reacted to the Viking threat and began to put up some defenses. They built fortified bridges on the rivers, and the fortifications of towns like Paris (which at the time consisted only of Île de la Cité, an island in the Seine River) were strengthened.
But in 885, the largest Viking force ever assembled in France, perhaps thirty thousand men, laid siege to Paris. Eudes, the Count of Paris, and his fellow citizens knew that assistance from King Charles the Fat, whose court was in Alsace, would take a while to arrive. They nevertheless refused to pay a ransom, and hoped that they could hold out for long enough. Attacks on the city repeatedly failed, and after a while, many of the Vikings decided to look for easier targets. Finally, after nearly a year, the king arrived with his army, but even though his men outnumbered the Vikings, he decided to let them depart. He even encouraged them to plunder the lands of Burgundy, which were currently in rebellion against him.
The Parisians and the French were horrified at the behavior of their king, and in 887, Charles the Fat was deposed by his nobles. They elected Eudes, the hero of Paris, to be the new king of France, the first non-Carolingian king since Childeric III to rule France. And while after his death the Carolingians managed to reclaim the throne, a precedent had been set.
Meanwhile, the Viking chieftain Rollo the Walker had gone off to pillage Burgundy with the French king’s blessing. (He was given the nickname because he was so large, his horse could not carry him.) He then made another failed attempt to sack Paris, as well as the city of Chartres. King Charles the Simple, the Carolingian king who succeeded Eudes, finally made Rollo a surprising offer: if Rollo converted to Catholicism and paid homage to Charles, accepting him as his king, then Charles would give Rouen and the lands surrounding it to the Norsemen. In a way, Charles the Simple had found the simplest solution. Paying ransoms to the Vikings was expensive and counterproductive. While it was occasionally possible to defeat the Norsemen, they always came back. So why not let the Norsemen have the coastal lands upstream of Paris and let them worry about how to defend the place? Rollo accepted the deal. The name Norsemen became contracted to Norman, and the land they occupied became known as Normandy. Rollo was rechristened Robert, the first Duke of Normandy.
The Normans gradually integrated into French society—speaking French, and adopting French names and customs. They not only converted to Catholicism but, in a nice turn of events, actively aided monasteries and abbeys. This included the abbey at Fécamp, originally destroyed in Viking raids but restored as a Benedictine abbey by the Norman dukes. The first dukes of Normandy actually had their primary residence at Fécamp until the thirteenth century.
While Normandy today is a land rich in food and liquor, this cannot be attributed to the Norsemen who gave the region its name. Sadly, the Vikings did not bring a lot of exciting new food products to France. A notable exception is the plant angelica, which the Vikings brought to Normandy from Scandinavia. It was known to have various medicinal properties, and it is also one of the main ingredients in Bénédictine.
Bénédictine’s other ingredients, with their origins in Asia and Africa, can perhaps be explained by considering what the Norman traders got up to after their acquisition of northern France. In the eleventh century, some highly ambitious Normans defeated the Arab rulers of Sicily and established a kingdom there that became an important site of cross-cultural gastronomic exchange. The Normans were also active participants in the Crusades, which helped expand the spice trade between Europe and Asia. In the sixteenth century, King Henry II gave the towns of Rouen and Marseille a monopoly on importing spices into France, and Norman sailors were among the first to defy the Portuguese de facto monopoly on the spice trade in Africa and Asia.
So it is not surprising that, according to legend, an Italian monk and alchemist named Dom Bernardo Vincelli, who was staying in the abbey of Fécamp, created the original Bénédictine liqueur in the sixteenth century from herbs and spices that he foraged locally. If any place in France could claim that all those ingredients were “local,” it was indeed Normandy. The legend claims that the Fécamp monks continued to make Vincelli’s herbal liqueur for several centuries until the French Revolution swept away all the nation’s monasteries. The last monk to flee Fécamp left some precious medieval manuscripts in the hands of a local family, which seventy years later counted among its members a wine merchant named Alexandre Le Grand. He stumbled across a manuscript by Vincelli, which included his liqueur recipe, and started reproducing it under the name Bénédictine.
From the beginning, Le Grand used a very effective marketing strategy, employing well-known Belle Époque artists like Alphonse Mucha to create beautiful and distinctive advertising posters. He also marketed Bénédictine heavily abroad; today, about 75 percent of Bénédictine production is exported, with about 40 percent going to the United States alone.1 To this day, the legend of Dom Vincelli is a bit doubtful—but it sounds true enough, and Le Grand made the most of it. He wanted to establish a liqueur empire, and for that he needed to build a castle—the Palais Bénédictine in Fécamp, a worthy seat of production for this noble liqueur. Today, the glory of Bénédictine is preserved at the palace’s museum, where the story of this singular liqueur and its twenty-seven ingredients is explained.
Le Grand’s granddaughter, Simone “Simca” Beck, grew up in the family business. During World War II, when her husband was a prisoner of war, she cycled around rural Normandy exchanging bottles of black market Bénédictine for food to send to him. After the war, she moved to Paris and studied cooking, and fate brought her together with an intriguing American woman named Julia Child. The two women hit it off at once, and Simca brought Julia into her circle of gastronomic devotees. They later co-authored the classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Simca devised a number of recipes that included her family’s Bénédictine, its orangey sweetness making it ideal for glazing meats and adding to baked goods.
Throughout French history, the Normans proved to be some of the most adventurous and independent-minded subjects of the crown and the republic. Few things symbolize this reputation more than the purported origins of Bénédictine, which—whether true or not—reflect the region’s self-identity as a land whose sailors brought the world to its doorstep.
Many of the early Bénédictine posters were produced by renowned artists and have become collectors’ items. This poster was produced in 1907 by Leonetto Cappiello, known as the father of modern advertising for his contributions to the transformation of commercial art at the turn of the century. One of his innovative trademarks can be seen here: the depiction of a bold color figure against a dark backdrop. The extravagant building shown here is the Palais Bénédictine in Fécamp. Leonetto Cappiello, “Bénédictine” (1907). From the digital collection of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon.