There is no lack of remembrance of World War I in France, where much of the war was fought and where more than 1.3 million French soldiers lost their lives. It was the first mass industrial war of the twentieth century, and the introduction of machine guns, modern artillery, tanks, and eventually airpower led to far greater casualties than had ever been seen before. Indeed, the Western Front generated such an unprecedented level of carnage that contemporary observers believed the conflict would be “the war to end all wars,” and a number of haunting memorials reflect the horrific battles that occurred there. Perhaps the most symbolic of these for the French is the Battle of Verdun, which more than any other event represents both the heroism and the futility of the war from a modern French perspective. More than 800,000 French and German soldiers were killed, wounded, or went missing during more than three hundred days of fighting at Verdun, in one of the longest and deadliest battles in human history. These horrors are movingly captured in a collection of museums and monuments around the former battlefield.
Remembrance of this terrible war is not limited to large battlefield memorials but endures in the heart of virtually every French town and village, however small. In traveling through the French countryside, it becomes impossible to miss the poignant sculptures anchoring the town squares, carved with the names of local boys who never returned from the trenches. Even in tiny hamlets, the list can be surprisingly long. Twenty percent of France’s population, amounting to more than 8 million men, was mobilized during the war, and more than 70 percent of these men were killed, wounded, or presumed dead. It is therefore not surprising that the war touched almost every community in France, even those far from the front lines.
This near-universal involvement of French communities in the war had some unexpected consequences for French gastronomy. Most notably, it was thanks to the Western Front that French soldiers, and then the French people, and then the entire world came to know and love one of the quintessential French cheeses: the intense yet comforting Camembert. It was merely one of a number of regional Normandy cheeses prior to 1914, albeit with a reasonable following in Paris as well. But it was during the war years that Camembert became a national treasure, one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal era.
Memorial to those lost in World War I from the town of Cancale, Brittany. Similar memorials can be found in nearly every small town and village in France, which lost nearly 1.3 million men in the war. Photograph by authors, 2017.
No one anticipated this vast universe of suffering when the war began in the summer of 1914, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria triggered a diplomatic crisis among Europe’s great powers that escalated into all-out war. It was a conflict long in the making, as great power rivalry in the Balkans, an escalating naval arms race, and imperial competition gradually undermined the European balance of power. Tension and distrust had grown to the point where the killing of one nobleman could serve as a catalyst for continental war. France entered the war in alliance with Russia and Great Britain, forming the Triple Entente against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers). Additional countries, including the United States and Italy, later joined the Entente, and became more widely known as the Allied Powers.
Throughout Europe, politicians and populations alike believed the war would be short and decisive. In France, the mood was more of resignation than enthusiasm, although the possibility of reclaiming Alsace and Lorraine helped make the general mobilization a bit more palatable. One might have expected the socialists and communists, at least, to oppose the war, reluctant to fight their fellow workers in Germany on behalf of French bourgeois capitalism. But even on the left, defeat to militaristic Germany appeared a worse fate than temporary alliance with capitalism, and opposition was limited. One of the few exceptions was Jean Jaurès, a leading socialist who frantically tried to persuade politicians of the folly of this war. His efforts were in vain, and he was assassinated in the Café du Croissant in Paris by a French nationalist.
As France quickly became more nationalist and anti-German, food became an easy way to express this new mood. Bars, brasseries, and shops that had even a hint of German association were attacked by mobs (anything along the lines of Brasserie de Munich could expect major trouble). Alsatians who had relocated to France but still spoke with a German accent were looked at with suspicion. Léon Daudet and the archnationalist Action Française accused a range of food businesses with supposed links to Germany of acting as a sort of fifth column inside France. After the German invasion of Belgium, the café viennois (coffee topped with whipped cream and chocolate) was rebaptized as café liégeois, after Liège. The name has stuck and now liégeois is generally used to order that drink.1
The Germans marched through neutral Belgium relatively quickly and then invaded France in late August 1914. It initially appeared their maneuver would be successful, as they closed upon Paris, but a French counteroffensive drove them back. By December 1914, the lines of the Western Front had more or less stabilized, snaking through the northeastern French countryside. Over the next four years, the Allies and Germany would all launch offensives that killed hundreds of thousands of men yet failed to significantly shift the battle lines. The war gradually spread beyond the confines of Europe: to the Atlantic, where submarine warfare eventually drew the United States into the conflict; to the Middle East, where the Arab Revolt helped finally topple the Ottoman Empire; and to Africa, where the colonial powers fought each other and fended off local rebellions. On the Eastern Front, the Russian Revolution in 1917 led to the country’s withdrawal from the war and the eventual establishment of the Soviet Union.
These momentous events reshaped the world order, but for the average French infantryman (or poilu), the war took place within a very limited sphere of action, in the trenches and forward positions of the Western Front. Much has been written over the years about the horrors of trench life, and while it is true that the average soldier spent much less time within the trenches than is commonly assumed, their nightmarish qualities continue to resonate in the popular imagination. There were so many ways to die: if you stayed in your trench, you might be blown up by enemy shells; if your unit was ordered to attack, you might be shot a few steps into no-man’s-land. Chemical weapons made their terrible debut, with the most common acquiring the name “mustard gas” due to its smell. Diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia stalked those who survived the perils of battle.
These dangers would have been fearsome enough on a full stomach, but this was not always the case for the poilus. True to stereotype, their rations mostly consisted of bread, wine, and cheese. Their wine rations increased as the war went on, from a bottle every three days in 1914 to nearly a bottle a day in 1916. Very rarely, they might be given a stronger type of grain alcohol known as gnôle, but this was not actually appreciated very much, as the men usually assumed it meant a new offensive on the morrow. More substantial meals, including meat, potatoes, and beans, were sometimes available, although rarely hot by the time they arrived at the trenches. The meat was sometimes canned, and of dubious quality, and was nicknamed “monkey meat.”2 Food production in France fell by a third during the war, with so many young men at the front, and the civilian population throughout France had to endure shortages and rationing as well. Nevertheless, soldiers sometimes received packages of food from family and shared them with their fellow trench mates, who hailed from all over France. Thus the foods of Brittany, Savoy, Normandy, Provence, and many other regions found new fans, as soldiers held their little potluck dinners on the dreary front.
But it was the inclusion of cheese in the daily rations that eventually had one of the most long-ranging impacts on French gastronomy. At the beginning of the war, the French army bought massive supplies of Gruyère, and later Cantal: hard mountain cheeses with long shelf lives that could be transported and eaten easily. But these cheeses soon faced new rivals, as other producers saw the serious amount of money and marketing that inclusion in the rations could bring and began lobbying the army for contracts as well. Among the most persuasive were the Normandy producers of Camembert.
According to legend, Marie Harel “invented” Camembert in 1791, on the advice of a priest who had fled the anticlerical purges of the French Revolution and was hiding on her farm. The priest came from the region where Brie is produced and suggested to Marie that she make her Livarot cheese, a traditional round cheese from Normandy, using similar techniques. Unfortunately for this narrative, accounts of a cheese called Camembert predate Marie’s birth, so at best she merely improved upon an existing product. But it is true that she passed her methods down to her children, who founded one of the largest Camembert companies in Normandy.
With the outbreak of World War I, Camembert producers adopted a hearty patriotism and festooned the distinctive wooden Camembert boxes with French flags, the French cockerel, and images depicting a victorious France. But the producers were not satisfied with propaganda efforts alone and became determined to acquire an army contract to provide Camembert in the soldiers’ rations. After several years of lobbying, and offering the cheese at very competitive prices, they succeeded. Camembert became the daily cheese of the French soldier, most of whom had never encountered it before. By 1918, the army was requesting 1 million Camemberts each month, a quantity producers struggled to supply.3
For the poilus, their daily morsels of Camembert came to represent something much more than mere food. Its strong, earthy flavors were a reminder of the rural France that most of them called home. Pierre Boisard, author of a popular history of Camembert, has suggested that the startling white and round Camembert, combined with the deep red of the daily wine ration, reminded the overwhelmingly Catholic soldiers of the Eucharist and wine offered at mass, “a patriotic equivalent to the Catholic rite of communion.”4 Its creamy, comforting texture became associated with the calm moments when rations could be eaten. Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister at the end of the war, reportedly called Camembert the “friend of man, in difficult hours.”5
The poilus who survived the war returned to their home regions with a newfound taste for this strong northern cheese. This should have been a gold mine for the Normandy producers of Camembert, but in those days before AOC protection, there was nothing to stop cheesemakers from other regions from labeling their own products as Camembert. Soon, new Camembert cheeses were appearing all over France, and they were eagerly snapped up by a newly appreciative population. The French government officially declared Camembert a generic term, one that anyone in the world can use. Only Camembert de Normandie, a raw unpasteurized cheese made of milk from Normandy cows, has ever received an AOC, in 1983.
And so, just as France would eventually win the war but lose the peace, the original producers of Camembert won the hearts of the French nation but lost the chance to be the sole financial victors from it. It may have been some consolation to the descendants of Marie Harel that she continued to receive adulation from a grateful clientele around the world, as evidenced by the arrival in the town of Camembert of an American doctor named Joseph Knirim, in 1926. He was convinced that Camembert had cured his digestive disorder, a notion that Normandy cheesemakers would probably have agreed with (the virtues of bacteria-laden, unpasteurized cheeses are practically gospel in Normandy). He was so grateful that he sponsored the raising of a statue of Madame Harel in nearby Vimoutiers, which the local residents gladly accepted. At a time when the provenance of Camembert had become so diffused, it was helpful to have a small reminder of its origins.
Unfortunately, during World War II, Vimoutiers was heavily bombed by the Allies, decapitating the statue. After the war, the chairman of Borden, one of the largest cheese producers in the United States, offered to replace the statue, and company employees raised $2,000 to pay for it. The residents of Vimoutiers gladly accepted, and it appeared a happy ending to the sad tale was imminent. But when it came time to unveil the statue, the residents of Vimoutiers erupted in anger at the proposed sign to be attached:
THIS STATUE WAS THE GIFT OF THE BORDEN OHIO CAMEMBERT FACTORY.
Sacre bleu! Were the creators of Camembert supposed to accept that the Americans were not only producing Camembert on an industrial scale, but flaunting this fact in its very birthplace? To make matters worse, the United States had recently banned the importation of raw-milk Normandy Camembert. So there was a mighty uproar, but eventually things were smoothed over and the new statue was erected, without the offending sign. The new text read: THIS STATUE IS OFFERED BY 400 MEN AND WOMEN MAKING CHEESE IN VAN WERT OHIO USA. A copy of the Marie Harel statue was later erected in Van Wert as well.
World War I had enormous consequences for nearly every aspect of French society, many of them much more noticeable and important than the elevation of one cheese from Normandy. But it is hard to overstate how beloved Camembert is among the French people, or the extent to which it has come to symbolize French gastronomy in such a short space of time.