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"Like its subject matter, this book is a delicious and irresistible labor of love. Steven Laurence Kaplan has distilled his vast knowledge of France and French bread into a delightfully readable story that is also a brilliant, illuminating model of how to write contemporary social history."--David A. Bell, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University

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GOOD BREAD IS BACK

Duke University Press

Contents

Introduction........................................................................11. Good Bread: Practices and Discourses.............................................132. Bread: The Double Crisis.........................................................633. White Bread: A Western Story.....................................................1004. The Enemy........................................................................1225. Bakeries and the State...........................................................1626. Bound to Quarrel, Condemned to Get Along: Millers and Bakers.....................2127. Rue Monge Rivals and Other Mavericks.............................................258Conclusion..........................................................................304Acknowledgments.....................................................................325Notes...............................................................................327Glossary............................................................................359Index...............................................................................363

Chapter One

Let us go into the narrow, oppressive space of an eighteenth-century baking room. In Paris, this probably means heading down into an ill-ventilated basement, lit by the few candles grudgingly granted by the owner's wife, who kept the accounts. Even though the conditions may have already been less difficult in her day, George Sand did not find the expression "dark dungeon" too strong. The work was hard and often mind-numbing. Someone had to prepare wood for the fire, then light it, draw water, handle bags of flour weighing nearly 150 kilos, then knead 100 kilos or more with his hands and sometimes his feet. The baker's boy responsible for the kneading was called le geindre, the groaner, because of the sounds he made while he worked: "A kind of painful cry," Sand called it, "you'd think you were witnessing the final scene of a murder." From the worker's standpoint, this "forced labor" came under the heading of criminal behavior: "Night, a time of rest, is a time of torture for us," bakers' "boys"-journeymen-complained in 1715, and the refrain was echoed throughout the nineteenth century by others protesting this "nocturnal slavery," this morally and physically destructive "captivity."

In the mid-eighteenth century, bakers' assistants working for Mistress Lapareill began their day at 11:30 P.M.; those working for Masters Marreux and Barr started at midnight. Another master worked with his compagnons, or journeymen, almost without interruption from 8:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. Constantly on the job, obliged to stop the bread making process and start it up again, tormented by a powerful need to rest that they could satisfy only sporadically, the assistants usually slept in the bakeries, as did journeyman Martin Macadrez, who went to bed at 7:00 a.m. "above the oven." This was the hellish rhythm of a society that lived on bread, that could not get along without it for a moment.

The air in the bakery was heavy, sometimes thick with flour dust and sometimes suffocatingly humid. When the oven was in use, the heat was overwhelming. Apprentices worked in rough underclothing (often made of old flour sacks) and dripped with sweat, enriching (or infecting) the dough. Before baking began, especially in winter, the bakery was damp and freezing cold. The environment was as unhealthy as the work was exhausting. Louis-Sbastien Mercier, a chronicler of eighteenth-century Parisian ways, was struck by the contrast between butchers' boys, who were sturdy, ruddy fellows, and bakers' boys, who could be seen in shop doorways looking wretched, haggard, and pale, like flour-drenched scarecrows. The baking room was usually cluttered with tools, work surfaces, and supplies. There was just enough room to maneuver and carry out the simplest operations. Sometimes the workers could barely stand upright.

Let us visit the bakery of Master Briquelot, on Rue Saint-Martin, around 1730, in a house he rented for the tidy sum of 850 pounds per year. This was a tiny, dilapidated, windowless room made smaller still by ad hoc repairs. The ceiling had had to be reinforced by an improvised trellis made of planks and poles: "As the plank is very low," a police officer noted, "it is very hard to work without bumping one's head; the workers have to limit their movements and bend over in order to knead."

Today, a baker's work is only rarely a "prison," and bakers do not die as Master Philibert Rouget did in the middle of the night, "worn out" at the age of forty. Still, while it is no longer "hell," now as then the bakery is located behind the shop or in the basement, although a growing number of enterprising craftsmen have installed part of their workspace in the shop itself in order to create both a sense of transparency and a theatrical atmosphere. But many bakers still remain flour-coated cave dwellers, working in the sort of underground baking room that Antoine-Augustin Parmentier deplored at the end of the eighteenth century, a space so narrow that you can hardly manipulate the paddle, so hot that the dough melts as it rises, so dark that you can't see much of anything, so suffocating that you can hardly breathe. Room for storing flour is still a problem, although today's bakers no longer need a place to bolt and mix, for these tasks are now done by millers. Certain eighteenth-century master bakers already practiced some of the sophisticated channeling systems in use today for stocking flour and bringing it to the kneading trough. No baker can get along without a kneading trough and an oven. Today's versions are mechanized and modernized, but they remain recognizable as kneading troughs and ovens. The dividing machines, shaping machines, resting compartments, and refrigeration units would be more astonishing to workers of the Old Regime. But paddles, wicker trays, canvas carpets, spatulas, pastrycutters, knives, and brushes belong to bakeries of all eras.

Definitions

Defining bread is a concern for modern specialists, not for consumers, who let themselves be guided by their practical sense of things. In the eighteenth century, even for experts, the problem was not how to define bread but how to make it properly. Foreign travelers and local commentators all praised Parisian bread as the best in the world. But the scientists who were beginning to be interested in this staple asserted, to the great displeasure of bakers, that "their art [was] still in the cradle." While a self-taught but imaginative practitioner such as Csar Bucquet instinctively felt that "a Baker would have to be really inept if he couldn't make good bread with good ingredients," Parmentier, as a laboratory scientist, deplored the cruel want of an "enlightened work force," which counted for "infinitely more than the quality of the raw materials used." It fell to men of science to teach bakers to make bread. "Making bread from wheat is a chemical operation that has to be explained by chemists; blind routines denature the process," Mercier notes. The "popular errors" and "blind routines" that Parmentier and Cadet de Vaux, his collaborator in the creation of a school for bakers, intended to stamp out were no less than "trade secrets passed along...