On the west coast of France, in the south of Brittany, stands the medieval town of Guérande. With its imposing fifteenth-century ramparts, old cobblestone streets, granite houses, and numerous crêperies, it is truly a lovely town to wander about. One would never guess that it used to be the epicenter of a vast criminal enterprise, its signature crop craved by kings and peasants alike.
Fleur de sel, the “white gold of Guérande,” may sound like a particularly elegant narcotic, but it’s actually a legendary sea salt revered by gastronomes around the world. You may get a hint of its addictive properties during a stroll through the town, as you discover abundant opportunities to purchase it from market vendors and small shops. Pungent arrays of herb-and-salt mixes, guaranteed to transform even simple home-cooked dishes, are nearly irresistible. Even the strongest will in the world cannot hold out against the lure of salted caramel sauce drizzled over crêpes or ice cream.
But fleur de sel is not just any salt, as quickly becomes evident if you drive out from the town center to the salt marshes of Guérande, where the oldest saltworks date back to Roman times. Much as soil creates a unique terroir for wine, cheese, and honey, different seas lend their flavors to the salt collected from them. The Brittany coast is considered by many to produce the finest sea salt in the world, and today salt workers, or paludiers, harvest their crop over an area of nearly eight square miles, collecting fourteen thousand tons of salt per year.1 A small percentage of this is the superlative fleur de sel, delicate crystals carefully collected from the surface of the seawater (often by women, who are thought to have a more tender touch for this work). But most of the salt produced here is known as gros sel de Guérande, a very appealing unrefined salt that is raked from the pools as the seawater evaporates; it imparts lovely sea flavors to one’s cooking. (Fleur de sel, on the other hand, is best used as a final flourish over a dish, as it melts quickly under prolonged heat and its lovely flavors are lost.)
A paludier at work in the Guérande salt marshes. © Maxironwas (Dreamstime Photos).
Naturally, with such a global reputation, sea salt plays a big role in the local economy. Less obvious, however, is the fact that the salt of Guérande, like many other highly addictive products, has a rich history of smugglers, insurgents, and rebellion attached to it.
Today, salt lies at the margins of everyday gastronomy, its presence cheaply acquired and taken for granted. But for much of human history, and throughout the world, salt was an essential product. In the days before canning, refrigeration, and artificial preservatives, salt was one of the few ways of preserving food for long periods, via curing or pickling. It was crucial for making cheese and helped bread rise faster and keep longer. Usually, salt was inexpensive, compared to spices, and thus was one of the few options for improving the flavor of meals for ordinary people. Like other food products, salt could be used as a currency for paying taxes or salaries—in fact, the word salary derives from the Latin salarium, the money given to Roman legionnaires to buy their salt rations. Salt has been used in religious rituals around the world for thousands of years, thanks to the symbolism of its purifying and preserving attributes; it was no coincidence that Jesus called his disciples “the salt of the earth,” a phrase we still use today to describe someone honest and incorruptible.2
Salt is found naturally throughout the world: in salt mines, saline springs, and, of course, in seawater. Throughout history, human civilizations have devised clever ways of extracting salt from the earth and seas, and early settlements often congregated around sources of salt. France is fortunate to have ample salt resources, with its long coastlines providing a ready source for sea salt, in addition to its many inland salt mines and salt springs.
The importance of salt thus made it a key ingredient in one of the most pivotal developments of the medieval era: the expansion of trade networks throughout Europe and the growth of wealthy trading towns. Patterns of local self-sufficiency, so dominant in the early Middle Ages, succumbed to this great era of commercial and urban expansion. Now, towns might specialize in the production of certain goods—wines or leather goods, say—and use the profits from their sale to buy food and other essential goods from other locales. In this way, Guérande grew rich in the Middle Ages, its merchant ships bringing sea salt to other ports in France, England, the Netherlands, and the Hanseatic towns.
Eventually, the French kings realized that the salt market might supply them with funds for their interminable wars against rival powers, which at the time included everyone from the English and the Flemish to the Knights Templar. A new salt tax, called the gabelle, was introduced in the late thirteenth century by Philip the Fair, the Iron King. It later became permanent under Charles V (Charles the Wise) during the Hundred Years’ War. Charles needed the money to ransom his father, who had been captured by the English, and to put down a rebellion by Charles the Bad, the king of Navarre. (The justifications for new taxes used to be so much more interesting.)
The gabelle became one of the most hated taxes in the kingdom, especially as the nobility and the clergy usually managed, through various dispensations, to avoid paying it (some things never change). Salt was taxed heavily—but not in the same way across the country. Brittany, which included Guérande, was completely exempt from the tax, a privilege bestowed upon the region when it was formally integrated with France in 1532. In other areas, such as Paris and most of northern and central France, salt was taxed very heavily. The price of salt could multiply by twenty just by crossing the borders out of Brittany.
Things got even worse when Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the French finance minister under Louis XIV, made the salt trade a complete state monopoly: now salt could only be bought from specific royal storehouses, which meant people had to travel, sometimes quite far, to purchase this essential commodity. They were also forced to buy a minimum amount every year, which made it a form of unavoidable direct taxation.
All of this naturally created a massive black market in salt. The rewards were potentially enormous: one successful trip, carrying salt from nontaxed to taxed areas, would bring a person the equivalent of three months’ income. In 1784, the former finance minister, Jacques Necker, noted the absurd disparities in the price of a minot (about 107 pounds) of salt across regions: from 31 sous in Brittany to 591 in Anjou and 611 in Berry.3 So it is not surprising that, by some estimates, half the people in Breton border areas were directly or indirectly living off the proceeds of salt smuggling, or that people in border towns like Vitré bought ten times as much as residents on the other side of the border.4 While many smugglers operated on their own, or with the assistance of cleverly trained dogs or children, some salt smugglers were highly organized. The penalties for salt smuggling were among the harshest imposed by the regime; long prison sentences or even a lifetime in thrall as a galley slave awaited those unlucky enough to be caught. Children were not exempted, and they made up a good portion of those serving time in prison for salt crimes.
Obviously these smugglers were a threat to the regime, not only because of the financial loss, but also because no state likes to have armed bands roaming the countryside. A special security force known as the gabelous was formed in the seventeenth century to curtail salt smuggling. But the gabelous were poorly paid and often either in league with the smugglers or incompetent and violent, and they were usually loathed by the local population.
It is no exaggeration to say that the gabelle, with its punishing and unfairly applied rates, helped foment rebellion and revolution. Periodic peasant rebellions from the fifteenth century onward specifically targeted the gabelle, but they were usually put down by the regime with much force and destruction. In the Estates General assembly of 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, all three estates representing French society agreed that the gabelle should be abolished—and a year later, following the end of the ancien régime, it was.
The gabelle (salt tax) was not imposed equally across France, and thus generated a robust black market. Paris and north-central France (the dark-shaded areas on this map) had the highest salt prices, twice as much as prices in the south of France and twenty times those in Brittany and the southwest. From Élisée Reclus, L’Homme et la terre, vol. III (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905), 591.
This made most people very happy, but it left both the smugglers and the gabelous without work. Many of them still had their weapons, however, and this is why many smugglers and royal tax collectors ended up fighting together in the counterrevolutionary movements that plagued the new regime during the 1790s. One of the most famous of these smugglers turned insurgents was Jean Chouan, who had previously served time in His Majesty’s prisons for killing a salt tax collector. After the revolution, in his newfound unemployment, he used the peasants’ discontent with forced army conscription to start a rebellion in the west of France, known to history as the Chouannerie uprising. Ultimately unsuccessful, it has achieved cultural posterity by inspiring Honoré de Balzac’s first book published under his own name, Les Chouans.
In the end, Napoleon reestablished the gabelle—after all, he had interminable wars of his own to finance—and it was only officially abolished in 1945. But Guérande still trades and thrives, with or without the gabelle, thanks to the enduring desire for its white gold. Every year, from June to September, the harvest produces increasingly large piles of salt, destined for tables around the world. Working without the aid of machines or chemicals, the salt workers use roughly the same techniques as their ancestors did centuries in the past. Despite the tumultuous impact of repression, revolution, and war, and the innovations that have obscured salt’s historic centrality, the sea salt of Guérande has maintained a niche in global gastronomy that seems unlikely to fade.