The Basque people have dwelt in the shade of the Pyrenees Mountains for centuries, long before their region was sliced and swallowed by the kingdoms of France and Spain. Much of the French Basque region (Pays Basque) is rural, with agricultural traditions dating to the far reaches of local memory. The delicious Ossau-Iraty cheese, for example, has been made by local shepherds from mountain-grazing sheep for hundreds of years. Every fall, the famous chili pepper known as piment d’ Espelette—the only spice to have received a French AOC—is harvested and hung to dry throughout the small village of Espelette, before being ground into a paprika widely used in Basque cooking. This ambience of tradition can have the occasional dark side: the renowned French chef Alain Ducasse was famously chased out of the Basque countryside in 2007 after his new luxury resort was greeted with several bomb attacks, apparently by extremists displeased with the exploitation of the Basque region by distant French elites.
A few miles inland from the glamorous resort of Biarritz lies the French Basque capital city of Bayonne, an ancient port on the Adour River estuary that runs into the Bay of Biscay. There are many reasons to visit Bayonne today: its charming and colorful tall houses lining the riverside and medieval streets, the surfeit of fresh seafood and locally produced Bayonne ham, perhaps even the annual bullfighting tournament. But probably the most delicious reason to visit Bayonne becomes clear each year during the Feast of the Ascension, when the city celebrates Les Journées du Chocolat (the Chocolate Days). For as it happens, Bayonne is home to one of the oldest artisanal chocolate-making traditions in Europe, and it attracts flocks of sweet-toothed pilgrims today. It is a story that begins with not one but two epochal conquests of the early modern era.
Given the French love for chocolate—evident in everything from the workaday pain au chocolat to the decadent and ephemeral chocolate soufflé—you might be forgiven for thinking that chocolate has ancient roots here. But in fact, chocolate is a relatively new addition to French gastronomy, part of what we now call the Columbian Exchange: the massive ecological transfer of crops, animals, and diseases between the Old World and the New World in the years following Columbus’s fateful first voyage to the Caribbean in 1492. Two hundred million years after the continents of Europe, Africa, and the Americas physically drifted apart, human ingenuity and rapacity managed to link their ecosystems and societies together again. It was one of the most earth-shattering transformations in human history: communication and exchange finally extended around the globe, entire populations were wiped out or enslaved, and European colonialism propelled its states to world dominance. It was an era of unrivaled discovery and profit, as well as unimaginable suffering and destruction.
The first century of European colonization was driven largely by the desire to find new trade routes, either eastward or westward, to the spice-producing regions of South Asia and the Far East. New shipping routes around the African continent helped Spain, Portugal, England, and Holland amass immense fortunes. Initially, their ships only added to the existing spice trade, accommodating the increasing demand in Europe, but over time these nations began to forcefully colonize the spice lands and control production as well as trade. It was a pivotal shift in the world economy, overturning centuries of East-West trade patterns. But the French did not play a major role in the global spice trade during the 1500s, as they were too consumed by religious wars and European conflicts to engage in significant globe-trotting, and when they did begin to establish permanent colonies, it was in spice-poor locales like Canada.1
Westward sea voyages brought the Europeans not to the Spice Islands, as they had hoped, but to the American continent, an encounter that generated a profound and lasting impact on their respective societies and gastronomies. Without this continental exchange, Italy would not know tomatoes, nor Ireland potatoes; the Americas would be free of wheat, sugar, and oranges. (Indeed, Espelette would not know its famous piment.) The pace at which new foods from the Americas were adopted in Europe was varied, with somewhat familiar crops (like corn) and animals (like turkeys) being quickly adopted, while others, like the potato, took far longer to make any deep impression. The stranger the food, the longer it took to catch on. So it is perhaps not surprising that chocolate, which really had no equivalent, took more than a century to find favor.
Chocolate is derived from the pods of the cacao tree, indigenous to the Yucatán Peninsula and enjoyed by Mesoamerican civilizations for centuries before the arrival of European ships. It was ingested only as a drink, and usually heavily spiced. When Hernán Cortés and the Spanish conquistadores invaded the Yucátan in 1519, the Aztec emperor Montezuma decided on a diplomatic approach, and invited Cortés and his entourage for an extended stay in Tenochtitlan, his capital city. Thus the Spanish first encountered the bitter and spicy taste of chocolate, which they did not initially enjoy, although they noted its invigorating properties. Soon enough, diplomatic niceties failed, and the Spanish set about destroying the powerful Aztec civilization and plundering its wealth. Their superior weaponry and alliances with Aztec rivals led to victory within two years, and in the following decades, European microbes killed off 50 to 80 percent of the local population. In 1523, Cortés became the first governor of the colony of New Spain, and the Spanish systematically and ruthlessly brought much of Central and South America under their rule.
In the ensuing decades, Spanish colonists in Mexico tinkered with the native chocolate drink and found that adding sugar and vanilla (another local ingredient) made it much more pleasing to the European palate.2 By 1600, chocolate had become a profitable trade good, and it soon conquered the hearts of the Spanish nobility (it was far too expensive for anyone but the wealthy classes to enjoy on a regular basis). Chocolate became so popular in Spain that it inspired Honoré de Balzac (who was more of a coffee addict) to later ask: “Who knows if the abuse of chocolate is not somehow responsible for the debasement of the Spanish nation, which, at the moment of the discovery of chocolate, was about to start a new Roman Empire?”3 Indeed, after colonizing huge swathes of the world in the sixteenth century, Spain eventually was overtaken in the imperial race by the British, Dutch, and French.
It took a while longer for chocolate to make an impression in France. Its initial introduction, in fact, was the result of another sort of conquest: the Reconquista of Spain. The Islamic state of Al-Andalus, one of Europe’s strongest and most enlightened states during the “dark ages,” began to fragment and fall victim to Christian invaders in the eleventh century. By the mid-thirteenth century, Granada was the last remaining Islamic emirate on the Iberian Peninsula. In 1492, the same year that Columbus wandered ashore in America, his royal patrons King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella finally conquered Granada and “reclaimed” Spain for Christianity. In a diabolical encore, they expelled the entire Jewish population of Spain, numbering hundreds of thousands of people. As the fearsome Spanish Inquisition scoured the Iberian Peninsula, the neighboring kingdom of Portugal gradually banished its Jewish population as well. These Sephardic Jewish communities scattered around the known world, but many of them relocated just over the Pyrenees into southwestern France, where they continued to play an important role in the trade of products from the New World.
Most notably, a number of Portuguese Jews resettled in Bayonne and introduced the art of chocolate making. In the Saint-Esprit neighborhood, which became the Sephardic Jewish quarter of Bayonne, they imported cacao beans from the Americas and then roasted, ground, and mixed them with spices, vanilla, and sugar, creating a divine chocolate drink. For a century, chocolate making was one of the most prominent livelihoods for Bayonne’s Jews, but eventually the secrets of their craft became more widely known, and they were banned from the chocolate business by the city’s Christian leadership in 1691. Despite these frequent discriminatory measures, Bayonne’s Jewish community maintained an important role in trade and commerce, contributing significantly to local prosperity for several centuries, before being all but destroyed during the Holocaust in the twentieth century.
The chocolate-making tradition is well preserved in Bayonne in places like its Basque Museum, or at l’Atelier du Chocolat, a working chocolate factory and shop in Saint-Esprit. The city’s tourist office offers chocolate-themed tours. Wander the medieval quarter in the shadow of Bayonne’s Gothic Cathedral of Saint Mary, and you’ll find a number of artisanal chocolatiers still using traditional recipes; ask for a chocolat mousseux, a frothy hot drink of South American cocoa, milk from local Basque dairies, and vanilla or cinnamon (it may ruin ordinary hot chocolate for you forever, but it’s well worth it). And, of course, the annual Chocolate Days are a fabulous opportunity to watch local chocolatiers practice their craft in the streets, and to sample endless varieties of what many consider to be the finest artisanal chocolate made in France.
This sort of chocolate indulgence would probably seem bizarre to a sixteenth-century French person, who would have been accustomed to chocolate only in drink form and, originally, as a medicinal treatment sold in pharmacies. It was very good for the stomach and digestion, warmed the chest, and gave a good boost of energy (so much so that it was considered an aphrodisiac). On the negative side, however, it was alleged to induce gossip and to cause insomnia, irritability, and hyperactivity. In 1644, the Medical Faculty of Paris recommended not drinking chocolate more than twice a day.
But during the seventeenth century, the French nobility began to appreciate chocolate as a pleasurable and fashionable indulgence, especially after both Louis XIII and Louis XIV married Spanish princesses. Queen Anne and Queen Maria Theresa both brought their love of chocolate to court, cementing its popularity. Louis XIV was not personally fond of it, complaining that it did not fill the stomach, but it was during his reign that the first French cacao plantations were built, in France’s new Caribbean colonies. His successor, Louis XV, was a great fan of chocolate and liked to prepare his chocolate drink himself in his private apartments.
The Catholic Church was left rather perplexed about what to do about this new food. Priests and nuns were among the earliest and fiercest admirers of chocolate, thanks to the extensive European missionary operations in the new Spanish empire. But chocolate was thought to arouse the passions, which seemed inappropriate for Christ’s servants. There was also a decades-long debate about whether one could drink chocolate on fast days. Ultimately, the Church recognized the futility of trying to ban such a popular product and went along with the old principle of liquidum non frangit jejunum (liquid does not break the fast). Because chocolate was only taken as a drink in Europe at that time, it could be imbibed without offending God.4
Until the nineteenth century, chocolate remained a luxury product, but new industrial production methods and the introduction of cacao to West African colonies helped reduce the price of chocolate and rendered it accessible to a wider audience. And once solid forms of chocolate were perfected, rendering it eatable as well as drinkable, the era of cheap chocolate for the masses could really take off (luckily for the vast labor force propelling the Industrial Revolution). In the mid-1800s, the chocolate bar was invented—a dark chocolate version in England, a milk chocolate one in Switzerland—and eventually most people were eating rather than drinking chocolate. Today, the average French person eats more than fifteen pounds of chocolate each year—only about half as much as the Swiss and Germans, but still more than just about every other country on the planet.5
It is possible that most French people are not aware that modern-day chocolate is the product of horrific colonial and genocidal practices. There is perhaps a bit more awareness, however, of the current controversies surrounding the chocolate trade, thanks to a sustained activist campaign highlighting the exploitative production of cacao in West Africa. More than 60 percent of the world’s cacao is now grown in just two countries, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. Many cacao farmers earn less than $1 per day, and it is estimated that more than 2 million children labor on cacao farms, some trafficked from neighboring countries.6 Essentially, chocolate is cheap because its labor costs are kept so artificially low, so activists argue it should actually cost much more. Since the 1980s, the fair-trade movement has tried to reduce exploitation in the cacao industry, but disagreements over what exactly constitutes fair-trade chocolate have made progress difficult.
It is a horrible irony that something so sweet and joyful has such a long, terrible legacy, but as we have seen, the history of food is often intimately connected with the worst social ills of any era. War and conquest have always shaped the human diet, and the gastronomic demands of the upper classes have consistently led to exploitation and violence. The natural antidepressant qualities of chocolate may not serve as a remedy in this regard, but one can only hope that the ever-increasing support for fairly traded chocolate will soon bring this melancholy history to a definitive close.