It would be natural to assume that the recent invention and popularity of the Cronut—a croissant-donut hybrid—would send the average French person into an apoplectic rage. “Zut alors!” you can imagine Jacques saying. “How dare anyone disfigure our perfect morning pastry!” But by and large, the French seem more bemused than repulsed by the Cronut. As all kinds of croissant mutations spread around the world, the French simply shrug their shoulders and pop out to the local boulangerie for a croissant ordinaire (the stereotypical crescent, made with margarine) or even more sublime croissant au beurre (usually a straighter shape, made with butter). To add even a swipe of jam or butter to a freshly baked croissant seems superfluous, let alone sugar, ham, cheese, or anything else. You may, however, dunk your croissant in coffee without shame.
The croissant may be one of the most iconic French foods of all time, and yet it is fairly well established today that its origins are not very French at all. Its most likely ancestor is the kipfel, a crescent-shaped pastry made in Austria. According to well-traveled legend, the first chapter in its journey to fame commenced in 1683, with the Ottoman siege of Vienna. Early rising Viennese bakers foiled an Ottoman attempt to tunnel under the city’s walls, allowing the defenders to hold out until Polish king Jan Sobieski arrived to drive back the invaders. To celebrate their role in saving the city, the bakers created a crescent-shaped pastry, a gloating reference to a favored symbol of the defeated Ottomans.
Naturally, the truth is somewhat less tidy than the legend. The kipfel actually dates back to the thirteenth century, and it was more of a dense roll than a fluffy pastry. Some versions of the tale place the pastry’s origins in earlier sieges of Vienna, during the sixteenth century, or in an entirely different Ottoman siege of Budapest. And an implicit assumption in all the legend’s iterations is that the French would share the Austrian Hapsburgs’ enthusiasm for a pastry celebrating victory over the fearsome Turks. Yet in fact, France enjoyed a 250-year alliance with the Ottoman Empire and was less than thrilled when the Turks failed to capture Vienna, the capital of France’s most noxious European rival. Louis XIV had not only refused to send aid to the beleaguered city but reputedly had encouraged Ottoman grand vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha to attack Vienna in the first place.
The Franco-Ottoman alliance was controversial from the start. The Ottoman Empire had been encroaching upon mainland Europe since the late fourteenth century, gradually acquiring more territory in Greece and the Balkans while also extending its control over much of the Middle East. It was a multiethnic empire noted for its religious tolerance; when the Wars of Religion began to tear Europe asunder, many Protestant exiles found sanctuary in Ottoman lands. New Ottoman cities in Europe, such as Sarajevo, hosted Muslim, Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish communities. But the sultans were devout Muslims, and however tolerant their religious rule, the expansion of their Islamic empire into Christian Europe sent shockwaves throughout a population that still possessed strong religious identities and worldviews.
So when King Francis I signed a treaty of alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent in 1536, it might have made perfect sense from a Machiavellian perspective—the Ottomans were seizing ever more territory from his Hapsburg rivals, advancing well into Hungary—but it was seen as a shocking betrayal of the Christian European cause. Nevertheless, the alliance endured for more than two centuries, with the two powers cooperating in military campaigns against shared European rivals and enjoying favorable trade arrangements. The relationship allowed French scientists and linguists to visit Ottoman lands and greatly expand their knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, botany, and Eastern languages. And a remarkable cultural exchange occurred, as Turkish art, architecture, music, and literature became fashionable in French circles. The trend for “Turquerie” gradually spread throughout Europe, especially after the Ottoman defeat at Vienna, commonly seen as the turning point in their European fortunes (over the following two centuries, they lost all the European territories they had conquered before 1683). As the perception of the Ottoman Empire as a military threat diminished, it came to be seen more as a source of exotic objects and strange practices, selectively appropriated by European elites eager to show off their worldliness and self-perceived superiority. Such patterns of European engagement with Eastern cultures—commonly grouped by critics within the concept of Orientalism—grew and expanded over the following centuries.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the enduring legacies of the Franco-Turkish alliance can be found in the realm of gastronomy. In 1669, the new Ottoman ambassador, Suleiman Aga, presented himself to Louis XIV at Versailles and inadvertently offended the Sun King by wearing a plain set of clothes and refusing to bow before him. He was thus packed off to Paris, where, undeterred, he set about winning over the nobility—particularly, the female members of the aristocracy—with extravagant displays of hospitality and wealth. Most notably, he served the still somewhat exotic beverage of coffee to his noble visitors, and evidently acquired a fair amount of intelligence on French political affairs from his caffeinated and overstimulated guests. Coffee gradually became fashionable in Paris, especially with the creation of the first cafés later in the century, although it did not really conquer Versailles until the time of Louis XV, when the royal mistress, Madame du Barry, imposed her taste for coffee upon the court.
This mutually beneficial alliance came to an end in 1798, when Napoleon invaded Egypt, then part of the Ottoman Empire. It is not clear whether, at this point, some version of the kipfel had been popularized in France. Another set of legends claims that Marie Antoinette, homesick for her native Vienna after becoming queen of France in 1774, introduced a crescent-shaped pastry to the French court. But there is little historical evidence to support this tale.
In fact, many historians today believe that the true origins of the croissant lie in a Viennese bakery established in Paris in 1838 by a former Austrian army officer named August Zang. At the time, French bakeries did not actually enjoy a stellar reputation, and Zang found their bland bread and pastry offerings disheartening. He opened his Boulangerie Viennoise on rue de Richelieu and attracted hordes of Parisians with his delightfully buttery, sweet Austrian pastries, which came to be known in France as viennoiserie. His kipfel proved to be particularly popular, and when it began to be made with puff pastry around the turn of the century, the modern croissant was born. Some unknown baker eventually had the idea of wrapping the same pastry dough around a chunk of dark chocolate, and thus the pain au chocolat joined the croissant in the pantheon of French breakfast treats.
Today, the Sunday morning trip to the boulangerie for freshly baked croissants is a common French ritual. They really must be eaten fresh—if you were to suggest picking up some croissants the night before so you can sleep in, you would be met with looks of incomprehension or horror. Yet there is an ongoing controversy over croissants today, as it turns out that more than half of the croissants sold at French bakeries are industrially made and then reheated from frozen rather than baked on site.1 (Boulangeries can get away with this outrage because the law requires them to bake only their own bread, not pastries.) More and more often, croissants are made with margarine instead of butter. And in other European countries, the American trend of using croissants for sandwich bread continues to grow.
So the superficially simple tale of the croissant, that beloved French cliché, turns out to be a bit more complicated than it first appears. It still has a more straightforward story than the pain au chocolat, which has virtually no origin legend at all, and which the residents of southwestern France insist on calling a chocolatine. Recently, the pain au chocolat became caught up in political controversy when the right-wing politician Jean-François Copé claimed that a French schoolchild had a pain au chocolat snatched from his hands by a street gang enforcing the Ramadan fast—an anecdote that, while probably apocryphal, served as a transparent metaphor for right-wing narratives of the threat posed by Islam and immigration.2 The French boulangerie might seem like it should offer a warm and cozy escape from social and political ferment, but as it turns out, all sorts of anxieties and agitation can be manifested in humble baked goods.