“Bread, Peace, and Liberty”: The Socialist Baguette
One cannot overstate the importance of a good boulangerie to a French person. This became evident during our relocation from London (not exactly known for its bakeries) to Nantes, when Stéphane decided there was no point viewing flats more than a ten-minute walk from a boulangerie. “What is the point of moving back to France if you can’t get a fresh baguette in your own neighborhood?” he asked, quite reasonably. Luckily, we found a flat one block away from one of the best boulangeries in town. Early in the morning and at lunchtime, the queue for fresh bread and simple sandwiches stretched around the corner. We learned to pop in during quiet times, when the ladies behind the counter would have time to coo over our toddler and slip him a chouquette, a small pastry fluff studded with pearl sugar.
Our boulangerie produced excellent baguettes, which was fortunate as we slipped into the French habit of buying one daily. So we were understandably dismayed, a few months after our arrival, to visit the boulangerie one day and find it would be closed for three weeks. There was no bankruptcy, no massive oven fire, no disaster of any kind. It was simply time for the employees to take their annual holiday, a somewhat mystifying turn of events for those unaccustomed to the sanctity of the French summer vacation.
French labor laws guaranteeing limited working hours and ample paid holidays have achieved almost mythical status in other countries, generating a stereotype of a French worker who barely works at all. In truth, this is highly exaggerated. It is more difficult these days to obtain the permanent contracts that include generous leave policies, and companies can skirt some working regulations by offering overtime. Most full-time employees work close to forty hours per week, and French productivity levels remain high relative to other developed economies. So the stereotype of the lazy French worker is well overdue for retirement.
That said, it is true that compared to the United States, French workers enjoy a much better work-life balance thanks to limitations on their working hours. A French proverb argues that Si de beaucoup travailler on devenait riche, les ânes auraient le bât doré (If working hard made one rich, donkeys would be covered in gold), and the French belief that working too many hours is deleterious to one’s health and happiness is well known. What may be less well known, however, is that the same labor laws that improved life so markedly for the French worker also helped bring about the relatively recent popularity of the baguette—and also help explain why so many French people have to make do without their local boulangerie each summer.
We have already seen the intimate relationship French people have with their daily bread, and today the bread most associated with the French is certainly the baguette (which in French means “stick” or “wand”). The classic baguette ordinaire has, by law, only four ingredients: flour, yeast, water, and salt. Many prefer the more rustic baguette tradition or baguette campagne, distinguished by their pointier ends. A proper baguette does not stay fresh for more than a day, which is why French people have made a habit of the daily trip to the boulangerie or, if they are lucky, having their baguettes delivered to their door. (In the countryside, the baker himself might make deliveries, and in the cities a host of new food delivery services have emerged in recent years.) It is customary to serve some slices with lunch and dinner, and not just to be slathered with butter or cheese. A chunk of baguette is the ideal implement to saucer your plate after eating—in other words, to mop up any delicious remnants of sauce or dressing (note: not to be done in formal settings, unless you wish to look like a barbarian).
The baguette is such a routine part of life in France that it is somewhat shocking to discover that its popularity stems only from the 1920s. Prior to that, a variety of long, thin breads existed, but they were not overly popular, and they were not yet called baguettes. In the nineteenth century, the steam oven arrived in France, apparently brought by August Zang, the inventor of the croissant. This oven allowed bread to be baked with a crisp exterior and soft interior, and it eventually became the typical means of producing baguettes. Wheat also became cheaper and more readily available in the nineteenth century, thanks to a series of agricultural innovations and new import markets, and so ordinary citizens were finally able to partake of the noble white bread on a regular basis.
Working in a bakery has always been a tough and physically demanding job, with long and irregular hours. French bakers had to start working in the middle of the night in order to have fresh bread ready at opening time. Many bakery owners had no compunction about making their employees work seven days a week, even the apprentices, who were as young as twelve or thirteen. Bakers were called the “white miners,” because they shared the same appalling work conditions as coal miners but were left coated in white flour rather than dark coal dust.
During the Paris Commune of 1871, the radical city government created a new law which forbade bakery employees from working before five a.m. This particular law disappeared along with the Commune, but in the early twentieth century, trade unions actively campaigned to outlaw nighttime work. A law was eventually passed in 1919 that outlawed employing people in bakeries between ten p.m. and five a.m., although it was not universally followed. But it is commonly believed that this law is responsible for the rise of the baguette, which could be produced more quickly than traditional breads, thus allowing bakers to comply with the new law but still offer fresh bread in the mornings.
In truth, there were probably other factors at work in the sudden popularity of the baguette, but it is not surprising that most French people believe this story given that the interwar years are usually associated with a number of progressive reforms. These were tumultuous years for France, which had been left victorious yet severely weakened following the end of World War I. Its finances were shattered, and they were further crippled by the worldwide depression of the 1930s; its population was battered by wartime deaths, injuries, and deprivations. Conditions were ripe for the spread of authoritarian ideologies on both the right and the left, with the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany emerging during this era as influential models for disaffected factions within France. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, control of the government shifted back and forth, from right to center to left, as the leading parties struggled to address the severe challenges facing the nation.
Some of the earliest social reforms were enacted under conservative governments, such as those between 1928 and 1932 that established a social insurance system for employees (which covered periods of illness, for example) and paid allowances to families. But an even greater momentum for change occurred with the electoral victory of the left-wing coalition known as the Popular Front in 1936. Its agenda was to fight “against misery, war, and fascism and in favor of bread, peace, and liberty.” Its victory encouraged a wave of strikes throughout the country, as optimistic workers saw an opportunity to negotiate better pay and working conditions. Even the famous cafés and restaurants of Paris were affected by striking cooks and waiters. One can understand why from George Orwell’s classic Down and Out in Paris and London, which describes his time working as a plongeur (dishwasher) in the Hôtel X near the Place de la Concorde:
The hours were from seven in the morning till two in the afternoon, and from five in the evening till nine—eleven hours; but it was a fourteen-hour day when I washed up for the dining-room. By the ordinary standards of a Paris plongeur, these are exceptionally short hours . . . Our cafeterie was a murky cellar measuring twenty feet by seven by eight high, and so crowded with coffee-urns, breadcutters and the like that one could hardly move without banging against something. It was lighted by one dim electric bulb, and four or five gas-fires that sent out a fierce red breath. There was a thermometer there, and the temperature never fell below 110 degrees Fahrenheit—it neared 130 at some times of the day . . . The food we were given was no more than eatable, but the patron was not mean about drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a plongeur is not given two litres he will steal three.1
The Popular Front government negotiated with the trade unions, and the resulting accord raised salaries by up to 15 percent. A series of reforms reduced the workweek to forty hours, gave workers fifteen days paid annual leave, and enshrined the right to strike without retaliation. The impetus for such reforms was not purely altruistic: it was hoped that reducing working hours would boost the employment rate, for example. In the end, they did not do very much to improve economic conditions, but they were very popular among the working classes.
The socialist experiment was short-lived, as the Popular Front was increasingly assailed on all sides. Its own communist cadres objected to its decision not to intervene on behalf of the Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War; centrists grew frustrated with the lack of economic progress. Right-wing nationalists accused the government of weakening the country, and far-right fascists hurled anti-Semitic invective against Léon Blum, the first Jewish and the first Socialist prime minister of France. By 1938, the Popular Front’s brief moment in the sun was over. A new government was formed under former prime minister Édouard Daladier, leader of the Radical Party (which, despite its name, was really more of a centrist party). The forty-hour workweek was rescinded, but paid holidays endured, and family allowances were increased even further. This program of social reform was interrupted, however, by the outbreak of World War II the following year.
Paid holidays and baguettes both survived the war, and so today French people continue to queue for their daily bread, except for the few weeks each year when their boulangerie workers drive off into the sun. Modern-day Paris has not forgotten the lessons of 1789, however, and by law boulangeries are only allowed to close in July and August, and they are corralled into two groups that alternate holiday periods, thus ensuring that there is never a complete bread blackout in the capital.
While baguettes remain the most popular reason to visit a boulangerie, today many French people buy them at supermarkets and chain bakeries, which sell industrial versions made with frozen dough. This has led to a sharp decrease in the number of independent boulangeries operating in France, down from more than 37,000 in the 1990s to about 28,000 in 2015.2 There is also a never-ending commentary on the “baguette crisis,” encompassing both complaints about the quality of the modern baguette and concerns over diminishing bread consumption. Younger generations tend to see bread as optional rather than a staple, and new fast-food options have replaced the traditional lunchtime jambon beurre (ham-and-butter baguette sandwich).
But even as worries about the baguette and the boulangerie mount, French baked goods have become increasingly popular in overseas markets, especially in Asia. The South Korean bakery chains Paris Baguette and Tous Les Jours, for example, have hundreds of outlets worldwide supplying Asian-accented French baked goods (such as a croque-monsieur served on fluffy Japanese milk bread). There is also a big push within France to train a new generation of bakers, to ensure the survival of France’s bread traditions. So the future is not wholly pessimistic for the baguette. Its peak popularity may have receded, but it has secured a spot in the hearts of the French people, one that is unlikely to disappear altogether.