The Cheese of Emperors and Mad Kings
One of the jewels of French gastronomy, Roquefort is matured in mountain caves around the tiny village of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in the remote south of France, on the vast and timeless limestone plateau known as the Causse du Larzac. This strong and salty blue cheese, the second most popular cheese in France (after Comté), may be more than two thousand years old. According to the local legend of its creation, a lovestruck shepherd abandoned his lunchtime meal of cheese and bread in a mountain cave one day in order to chase after a pretty maiden. When he returned sometime later, he found the bread and cheese had turned moldy and blue. In a further demonstration of impulsiveness, he ate a bit of the cheese and found it to be delicious, and thus the unique caves of the Combalou Rock became home to a world-renowned cheesemaking industry. Today, only cheese aged in these caves can be legitimately called Roquefort.
From the start, Roquefort enjoyed the favor of the elite. According to another folktale, Julius Caesar himself was a big fan of the cheese, which he discovered after conquering Gaul around 50 B.C.E. Another legend claims that Charlemagne encountered Roquefort—or, at least, a blue cheese that sounds very much like Roquefort—while stopping over at a bishop’s residence in the south of France on his way back from fighting in Spain. It was a day of fasting, and as the bishop could not give the emperor a proper feast with meat, he gave him some of the prized local cheese. It was very moldy, which must have been a discouraging sight to Charlemagne, but being a good guest he said nothing and started picking out the blue moldy parts. The bishop protested, “No, you’ve got it all wrong—you are throwing away the best bits!” Having already conquered much of Europe, Charlemagne could not let a small chunk of cheese defeat him, and so he ate all of it and loved it so much that he ordered the bishop to send him wagonloads of that cheese every year.
But perhaps the most important royal figure in the history of Roquefort was the colorful King Charles VI, also known as Charles le Fou, or Charles the Mad. His reputation for madness derived not from his love of Roquefort—no one in France is considered crazy for eating moldy cheese, after all—but from his erratic behavior during the height of the Hundred Years’ War, which picked up again once the ravages of the Black Death receded.
The unfortunate King John II (John the Good), who died in English captivity after signing a treaty giving away a third of France, was succeeded by his son Charles V (Charles the Wise). Over the next fifteen years, France gained the upper hand in the war, taking advantage of clever new tactics and leadership to reclaim most of the territory it had yielded. But in 1380, Charles the Wise died and was succeeded by his eleven-year-old son, Charles VI. His reign as Charles the Mad would last more than forty years, during which France was nearly torn apart by civil war and English military victories.
The first signs of Charles’s madness appeared in 1392, when he was marching to war against the rebellious Bretons. A crazed man on the side of the road told him not to ride any farther, because he had traitors in his midst. It must have affected the king quite strongly, because later that day he suddenly turned on his own soldiers and friends, shouting, “Attack the traitors, they want to hand me to my enemies!” Before he could be restrained, he had killed four people. This was the first of the forty-four bouts of madness that he would suffer in his lifetime.
Each bout lasted between three and nine months, leading to the modern medical conjecture that he suffered from schizophrenia. He would suddenly not remember his family or who he was. He might howl like a wolf or insist that he was made of glass.1 Eventually, the madness would fade and sanity would return for a few months. But inevitably, Charles would succumb to his illness yet again.
Naturally, this created a huge problem in terms of running the country and waging the war against the English (luckily, there were long periods of truce). It became clear that Charles would have to rule mainly as a figurehead. But then who should hold the real reins of power? For the next fifteen years, the powerful dukes of Burgundy and Orléans vied for control of the crown, and their struggle finally erupted in civil war in 1407. The Duke of Burgundy eventually allied himself with Henry V, the king of England and archenemy of France.
Henry V is most famous today, of course, for his miraculous victory at Agincourt in 1415, and for the marvelous Saint Crispin’s Day speech that Shakespeare later created on his behalf (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . .”). After defeating the French forces at Agincourt, he reconquered Normandy, while the Burgundians wrested control of Paris. The heir to the throne, the dauphin, who was allied to the Orléans faction, fled Paris and set up a rival court at Bourges, in central France. His political authority and territorial control were limited, and the victorious Burgundians derisively called him the “king of Bourges.”
This disparagement bit even deeper when the dauphin was officially disinherited by his father in 1420, after the king agreed to the Treaty of Troyes with the English. Charles’s daughter Catherine married Henry V, and he became the French king’s son-in-law and new heir. It was the high point of English success in the Hundred Years’ War: they and their Burgundian allies now held half of France and were in line to inherit the French throne when the mad king died. But in the end, things did not quite turn out as expected. Henry V died a few months before Charles VI, in 1422, setting in motion a new battle for the French crown. The dauphin, with a little help from a lady named Joan, would eventually become the king of much more than Bourges. But we will come to their story in the next chapter.
In the end, Charles the Mad’s reign was a complete disaster for France. But the mad king did do one incredibly sane thing during his reign: in 1411, he granted the inhabitants of Roquefort the sole right to mature their particular cheese, in what is seen as the earliest historical effort at an AOC-style geographical delimitation. Through the following centuries, French monarchs renewed the royal protection of the cheese. Anyone producing a similar blue cheese ran the risk of royal sanction should they try to pass it off as Roquefort.
Nevertheless, by the nineteenth century, Roquefort producers grew increasingly worried about counterfeit products undermining their cheese’s reputation. In the postrevolutionary era, royal proclamations no longer offered much protection. And once railways and refrigeration allowed cheeses to travel further distances and be enjoyed by more people, it became clear to local producers that if others could make an ordinary blue cheese and give it the legendary Roquefort label, they were doomed. So they were overjoyed when, in 1925, Roquefort became the first cheese to receive an AOC, dictating how and where it can be made. The AOC controls not just the location and means of production, but things like the breed of sheep whose milk is used and where they can graze. Any cheese that does not meet these strict criteria cannot be called Roquefort.
And yet the reputation of Roquefort is so exalted that many cannot help but attach it to any generic blue cheese product. Many Americans will have encountered the option of “Roquefort dressing” or “Roquefort sauce” when dining out, for example, but such concoctions are often made with a domestic Roquefort substitute. One should always look closely when buying Roquefort, to be sure the small print does not in fact clarify it to be “Roquefort-style.”
Even more distressing is the way in which Roquefort has at times been caught up in diplomatic squabbles. Infuriated by European bans on American beef containing hormones, the United States has at times retaliated by leveling punishing tariffs on Roquefort. In 2009, in the closing days of the George W. Bush administration—not the happiest of times for Franco-American relations—an astonishing 300 percent import tax was imposed on Roquefort, making it all but unavailable in the United States. This was soon reversed, but another hurdle arose in 2014, when the FDA effectively banned Roquefort and a number of other French cheeses, claiming they contained potentially harmful levels of bacteria (a ghastly notion, easily repudiated by the millions of French people who have survived their encounters with these dangerous cheeses). New inspection regimes allowed Roquefort to trickle into the United States once again, but it remains a very expensive product. When one considers how far the love of moldy blue cheese has spread, from its tiny homeland deep inside a remote French mountain to the tables of the world, it seems altogether despicable—downright mad—that anyone should try to interfere with the consumption of this king of cheeses.