Speaker 1: Bon joul, Welcome to the show. My name is Ben,
Speaker 1: and I just might be addicted to carbs mapel noel
Speaker 1: and I've been trying to go a little lighter on
Speaker 1: the carbs lately, but I am a big fan of
Speaker 1: a good baguette. Yes, agreed. And here in the US
Speaker 1: we have a little bit more leeway with the definition
Speaker 1: of what a bighette is. And despite how important carbs
Speaker 1: might be to knowl to myself and to our super producer,
Speaker 1: Casey Pegram, in France, it turns out they're much more important, crucial,
Speaker 1: big time. That's why for two centuries there was a
Speaker 1: law on the books in Paris that basically established a continuous,
Speaker 1: free flowing access to bread. And this was most important
Speaker 1: during the summer months when a lot of Parisians take vacations.
Speaker 1: Um and it's a big deal. The you know, Paris
Speaker 1: can feel like a ghost town during July and August.
Speaker 1: And this law was established because the last time that
Speaker 1: France or out of bread, well you know there there
Speaker 1: there was there were riots in the streets and people
Speaker 1: got decapitated and hanged. Yes, there were rains of terrors
Speaker 1: that were related in a way to bread. And for
Speaker 1: anyone who's interested in the role that food can play
Speaker 1: in social revolution. We promise you it's a real thing.
Speaker 1: You're not crazy. Butter had a rule to play in
Speaker 1: an earlier episode. That's true, and bread has always been
Speaker 1: a pretty important staple of the French diet. In fact,
Speaker 1: according to the Smithsonian UH, the average worker during the
Speaker 1: eighteenth century spent half, that is, half of their wages
Speaker 1: on bread because not only was it delicious and you
Speaker 1: know something you could put a nice piece of brion,
Speaker 1: I mean, it was how they got their sustenance more
Speaker 1: than anything else. Right, It's true. You know, we have
Speaker 1: to consider in ages past people didn't often have the
Speaker 1: same UH concept toward food or toward nutrition that you
Speaker 1: would find to be more common today. For example, a
Speaker 1: lot of times today people eat for pleasure rather than
Speaker 1: mandatory survival, and if bread wasn't available for a lot
Speaker 1: of people, it could mean that they might starve. This
Speaker 1: was so important that in Napoleonic times police were even
Speaker 1: in charge of grain inspection and quality controls sort of
Speaker 1: an f d A, but oriented entirely toward bread. And
Speaker 1: when there was a wheat shortage, things went crazy very quickly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's true. Like you know how in the United States
Speaker 1: we referred to the president as the commander in chief
Speaker 1: because he's in charge of the military for all intents
Speaker 1: and purposes. Well, in France during this time, the king
Speaker 1: was referred to as Boulanger de realm, or prime baker
Speaker 1: of the Kingdom. That was kind of a pretty pretty
Speaker 1: serious job, and in fact, there were these Napoleonic codes
Speaker 1: that were established for everything from how to proof the
Speaker 1: dough to make the bread, to the ratio of the ingredients. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is all very very very important. And it not
Speaker 1: only was the important because of it its place as
Speaker 1: a staple food, but it was a cultural thing as well,
Speaker 1: and they took their bread making very very seriously. Yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: which is not an exaggeration to say that all hell
Speaker 1: broke loose if something went wrong with the bread supply.
Speaker 1: In seventeen seventy five there was a weak shortage and
Speaker 1: green prices skyrocketed, and to me things more complicated. The
Speaker 1: new king at the time, Louis the sixte decided to
Speaker 1: allow a free market of grain within the country, and
Speaker 1: this led to speculation. Flower merchants, who are already kind
Speaker 1: of a distrusted segment of society along with Baker's held
Speaker 1: back grain supplies. And I read somewhere that certain flower merchants,
Speaker 1: to um kind of control prices, would cut their flower
Speaker 1: with everything from like chalk to even bone meal and
Speaker 1: sawdust as well. Right, And this sounds maybe on the offset,
Speaker 1: a bit silly, Right, Maybe it sounds like too much
Speaker 1: of a nanny state to have laws controlling bread, but
Speaker 1: it is incredibly important. There hadn't been a famine in
Speaker 1: France for decades before this occurred, but all the sudden,
Speaker 1: the poorest people in the country were unable to buy
Speaker 1: flower for bread, and they rioted. Yeah, and this what
Speaker 1: was referred to as the Flower War, is considered by
Speaker 1: most historian this is being the precursor to the French
Speaker 1: Revolution that took place fourteen years later. Um. And actually,
Speaker 1: you know, I think now would be a good time
Speaker 1: to introduce a new segment we've been kicking around. You see,
Speaker 1: our our super producer, Casey Pegram, is also our resident Francophile. UM.
Speaker 1: And so we are going to have a segment with
Speaker 1: Casey that I would affectionately like to refer to as
Speaker 1: Casey on the Case. For thus spake Casey. We're still
Speaker 1: kicking it around, true, Casey Pegram, welcome to the show,
Speaker 1: my friend. Hello, thanks guys. So, Casey, we we sort
Speaker 1: of bury the lead just to touch in this story. Um,
Speaker 1: we talked a little bit about how these days during
Speaker 1: the summer months, Paris kind of clears out a little bit.
Speaker 1: And you go to Paris about once a year. Would
Speaker 1: you say that's pretty accurate? Oh yeah, they call Le
Speaker 1: Grand Descants the big vacation And yeah, Paris in July
Speaker 1: and August gets extremely hot. Many many places are not
Speaker 1: air condition climatiz um and that's actually a point of advertisement.
Speaker 1: If like a movie theater has air conditioning, they will
Speaker 1: put that like saw climatize and it's sort of like
Speaker 1: even if you don't care what the movie is, just
Speaker 1: go in there and chill out for a couple of hours.
Speaker 1: So yeah, Paris basically empties out and just becomes like
Speaker 1: the domain of tourists for a couple of months. And
Speaker 1: when we were researching this episode off air, we really
Speaker 1: wanted to lean on your abilities as a Francophone to
Speaker 1: tell us a little bit about the the laws that
Speaker 1: we're kicking around. That it is true, right, Nolan, I
Speaker 1: haven't been just making stuff up for the past few minutes. No,
Speaker 1: it's it's real. So you guys have talked about the
Speaker 1: Flower War, correct, and that's kind of the precursor to
Speaker 1: this event that happens in October of seventy nine where
Speaker 1: this poor, poor baker, Denis Francois, who was confronted by
Speaker 1: an angry mob that basically thought he was hoarding bread um,
Speaker 1: possibly just to drive the price up or potentially to
Speaker 1: keep it on reserve for royalty and military people things
Speaker 1: like that. This is a big deal, especially consider what
Speaker 1: had happened during the Flower War, where they thought the
Speaker 1: king was hoarding the flower so that the people who
Speaker 1: were relied on it for their daily sustenance could not
Speaker 1: get what they needed to make their daily brand right.
Speaker 1: So this is kind of just a continuation of those, uh,
Speaker 1: those tensions. And as we see, an angry crowd confronted
Speaker 1: this bakers bakery um, demanded that he come out, brought
Speaker 1: him to what was then called Plus de grev which
Speaker 1: today in modern times is known as lottel le Ville.
Speaker 1: It's the city Hall. Essentially, if you've ever been to Paris,
Speaker 1: you've probably walked by this place. It's kind of a landmark.
Speaker 1: It's very central, it's right by the Seine, and it's
Speaker 1: a cool building. But they brought him to this public
Speaker 1: square basically summarily executed him. They hung him and they
Speaker 1: decapitated him, and they paraded his head on a pike
Speaker 1: around town. They brought it to other bakers to kind
Speaker 1: of intimidate them. Apparently they waited on a scale at
Speaker 1: one point of one of the vickers and uh and
Speaker 1: like a baker's scale. Yeah, exactly exactly why the baker, though,
Speaker 1: that seems like such misplaced anger. I mean, this need
Speaker 1: is trying to like feed his family. Was he considered
Speaker 1: part of the aristocracy. Was he looked at as being
Speaker 1: an enemy of the people of peasants? Well, he would
Speaker 1: have been, you know, relatively middle class and controlling access
Speaker 1: to a resource that everyone needs. What's interesting to me, too,
Speaker 1: is that we don't have any solid proof or whether
Speaker 1: he was actually doing something wrong. Most of what I
Speaker 1: read said that in retrospect, this was a totally innocent
Speaker 1: guy that just got caught up in like an angry
Speaker 1: mob that was looking for somebody to blame for the
Speaker 1: problems that we're going on. So what happened next, Well,
Speaker 1: so after this guy was killed, the National Assembly meets
Speaker 1: and they basically decide that they're going to declare martial
Speaker 1: law and that they are going to ban all public gatherings,
Speaker 1: any kind of public protests. There will be a red
Speaker 1: flag that signals the presence of martial law. So you'd
Speaker 1: be given three chances to disperse. You could take from
Speaker 1: your group, you could select six people um to kind
Speaker 1: of represent your grievances and whatever solution you're kind of
Speaker 1: angling for. Everybody else's supposed to disperse peacefully. There'll be
Speaker 1: a second warning and a third warning. If after that
Speaker 1: third warning you're still there, you're still protesting whatever, they
Speaker 1: are authorized to use armed force against you and basically
Speaker 1: kill an entire crowd if they if they decided to
Speaker 1: stick around. So this is in the thick of the
Speaker 1: French Revolution. This is coming a couple of weeks after
Speaker 1: the March on Versailles, which is what brought the king
Speaker 1: back to Paris and kind of returned rule of the
Speaker 1: country to Paris where it had been displaced to Versailles.
Speaker 1: Let me right, So that was even even that catchphrase
Speaker 1: is tied to this whole idea of bread being such
Speaker 1: a crucial component of everyday life, and the fact that
Speaker 1: Marie Antoinette was so clueless and insulated that she would
Speaker 1: just say it's fine that they can eat cake, right
Speaker 1: because they have that surely right. Isn't that a joke?
Speaker 1: Kind of a little bit out of touch. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: there's a there's an interesting tale within that, uh, within
Speaker 1: that too, about the folklore versus the fact of that.
Speaker 1: But you're absolutely right that it was allegedly or according
Speaker 1: to the legend in response to them saying, you know,
Speaker 1: the people have no bread. No, but I saw it
Speaker 1: in in a film, so it was Sofia Coppola film.
Speaker 1: So that's definitely exactly how I went down. She's the
Speaker 1: one who did Dracula. She was she was in Godfather three. Okay,
Speaker 1: remember on the Stairs. No spoilers, right right, Godfathers take Manhattan, right,
Speaker 1: that's the one. But no, this is really just because
Speaker 1: then this is ultimately correct me if I'm wrong, Casey,
Speaker 1: because you are in fact on the case. Um. This
Speaker 1: is what led to this decree in seventeen nine from
Speaker 1: Louis the sixteenth that put this system in place. Because okay,
Speaker 1: so they weathered the grain shortage, they got through that.
Speaker 1: But now it was like, what happens if if the
Speaker 1: bakery is closed if everybody takes the grand vacation at
Speaker 1: the same time. You did say, though, that didn't really
Speaker 1: become a cultural thing until a little bit more into
Speaker 1: the twenty century, that the idea of that particular time
Speaker 1: for vacation. But even still right, so the seventeen nine
Speaker 1: or seventeen ninety ruling has to do with basically empowering
Speaker 1: authorities to make sure that bread stays in regular supply
Speaker 1: so that people don't have a reason to riot. When
Speaker 1: it gets into the twentieth century and you start getting
Speaker 1: things like guaranteed vacation time for workers, and this kind
Speaker 1: of culminates in the cultural tradition of the grand viscance,
Speaker 1: where people take as much as like six weeks off
Speaker 1: consecutive during the summer. Everybody leaves Paris and goes to
Speaker 1: like the coast of France. Then it became an issue
Speaker 1: because if everybody left at the same time, if everybody
Speaker 1: decides to take off July, you're probably not going to
Speaker 1: be able to get like a decent bigette in Paris
Speaker 1: for that month. And that's you know, they view that
Speaker 1: as a pretty serious problem. So what happens to the consumers? What?
Speaker 1: Whatever will we do? Right? Exactly? So it was then
Speaker 1: decided that these Boulanger's bakers would have to coordinate with
Speaker 1: their local authorities when they wanted to take time off,
Speaker 1: and you know, it would have to coordinate from all
Speaker 1: the other bakeries in the areas, such that you never
Speaker 1: found like a neighborhood that just didn't have a bakery open.
Speaker 1: So someone have to go in July, someone have to
Speaker 1: go in August. And it was half and half correct,
Speaker 1: and it it almost became like these two groups almost
Speaker 1: identified like I'm a july In, I'm in Augustian. It's
Speaker 1: very strange. So this wouldn't be on the case with
Speaker 1: Casey if we didn't hear a little sample of your
Speaker 1: dulcet French tones. So could you give us a little
Speaker 1: reading from this this ordinance, Casey? So sure, this is
Speaker 1: article number six of the law of October seventy nine
Speaker 1: against gatherings or martial law. In other words, so here
Speaker 1: we go, the three warnings. The little poetry music in
Speaker 1: the back, some kind of dramatic accompanimentilitids Mason decil to do.
Speaker 1: So they will be warned in a high voice by
Speaker 1: the municipal officers or one among them. Three warnings to
Speaker 1: return peacefully into your home Passion decil Tony de Massilla.
Speaker 1: Three warnings to return peacefully to your home La premier exn.
Speaker 1: The first warning will be expressed in these terms. NAIs
Speaker 1: Marciel could choose Saint Criminelle. So notice we'll be given
Speaker 1: that martial law has been proclaimed that all gatherings are criminal.
Speaker 1: We're going to shoot Claisbon, Citoyne, Saltier. Good citizens go home,
Speaker 1: Aladisium Atras Marcion. So on the second and third warning, Stilibanna,
Speaker 1: So on the second and third warnings, they're gonna skip
Speaker 1: the preamble and just say we're gonna shoot good citizens,
Speaker 1: go home. Municipal second. So the municipal officer will announce
Speaker 1: whether it's the first, second or third warning. And if
Speaker 1: you're not out by the third warning, all bets are off,
Speaker 1: you're probably gonna get shot. Beautiful, I mean terrified, beautiful performance.
Speaker 1: And this has been on the case with Casey. You
Speaker 1: know what, I am a big fan of that segment.
Speaker 1: Old don't you think that added some context? It added
Speaker 1: some real new mommy to this episode, I think, and
Speaker 1: there's more to the story, because you see, it turns
Speaker 1: out this law isn't just something that happened and then disappeared.
Speaker 1: It has been, as we said at the top of
Speaker 1: the show, on the books for centuries, and it's been
Speaker 1: periodically revised, rewritten, reworked, as Casey mentioned, with the emergence
Speaker 1: of workers rights totally and because you know, you don't
Speaker 1: really see a whole lot of huge, large scale famines
Speaker 1: happening in Europe these days, so it was relaxed. Uh in,
Speaker 1: And we mentioned this briefly during Casey on the case,
Speaker 1: but half of the bakers in Paris were able to
Speaker 1: shut down during the month July as long as the
Speaker 1: other half stayed open. And then bakers were actually required
Speaker 1: to post notices in their windows of where a customer
Speaker 1: could could get a croissant or a bag at within
Speaker 1: walking distance because it was all about this community, neighborhood vibe,
Speaker 1: you know, it was it was you had to be
Speaker 1: able to walk there. It was very much part of
Speaker 1: day to day. You could not be expected to, you know,
Speaker 1: hop a taxi to another part of town. My word,
Speaker 1: the very idea, the very idea. This is a really
Speaker 1: cool detail to me. Because I like it. It seems humanizing.
Speaker 1: It's not enough just to tell the authorities, hey, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be gone in July. You got to support your
Speaker 1: people too totally. And it feels like it we've gotten
Speaker 1: away from it being, uh, they're being concern over riots
Speaker 1: and it being much more about maintaining that fresh baked
Speaker 1: bread culture that has sustained in France throughout the generations.
Speaker 1: And you will hopefully be as thankful as we are
Speaker 1: to note that the consequences for this are no longer
Speaker 1: you know, life threatening, absolutely not. In fact, even when
Speaker 1: they were still on the books, you if you didn't
Speaker 1: get permission, you decided to do what you wanted. Um,
Speaker 1: you could get a fine um which was a minimum
Speaker 1: of believe eleven euros a day, which is around thirteen
Speaker 1: American dollars back in I think two thousand five, or
Speaker 1: about twenty dollars um in bucks. And the story continued
Speaker 1: in the French government eased some of the remaining restrictions
Speaker 1: on Baker's holidays as part of a larger effort to
Speaker 1: streamline their notoriously sluggish bureaucracy. I mean, can you imagine
Speaker 1: having a law on the books for two hundred years.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine what other weird, little esoteric legal nuggets
Speaker 1: remained on the books, Probably stuff about spitting in public.
Speaker 1: I don't know berat quotas I would imagine. I hope
Speaker 1: I don't get in trouble for that one. But it's true.
Speaker 1: When this relaxation occurred in a lot of local Parisians
Speaker 1: feared there would be a by getty, and to some
Speaker 1: degree they did experience one. Because the government no longer
Speaker 1: coordinated Baker holidays for the industry, Baker's had a tough
Speaker 1: time knowing when they should leave. The ones that stayed
Speaker 1: open ran out of bread quickly, and some were worried
Speaker 1: that their quality was suffering because there was such an
Speaker 1: increase in demand. Because literally, for the first time since
Speaker 1: the revolution, Baker's could go on vacation whenever they wanted,
Speaker 1: like normis, which is the Baker word for us exactly.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I saw an article in the Daily Mail
Speaker 1: UM with some great quotes of kind of like the
Speaker 1: scoop of how this is playing out today in the
Speaker 1: streets of Paris. There's a quote from Lynn Segel, who
Speaker 1: was a Parisian resident, UM that goes as such, I
Speaker 1: went out to get a baguette a few days ago,
Speaker 1: and the too closest boulangerie's to me were both closed
Speaker 1: for the first time ever. Then the next day a
Speaker 1: woman on the street stopped me asking where the closest
Speaker 1: open one was. Only the bad ones stayed open, only
Speaker 1: the bad one. And this we we should paint a
Speaker 1: picture of why this is so important. Even now for
Speaker 1: something to be called traditional homemade bread, only four ingredients
Speaker 1: legally can be used flower, water, salt and yeast. Seventy
Speaker 1: of bread is still produced in Bolingeris those those local
Speaker 1: bakeries rather than industrial warehouse factories. You know. Uh. While
Speaker 1: worries of a bread shortage have you know, fallen a
Speaker 1: little bit in the years since the regulations loosened, there
Speaker 1: are new worries on the horizon. It appears people are
Speaker 1: eating fewer and fewer baguettes. Yeah, it's true. Um per
Speaker 1: capita consumption of bagatts has fallen by more than eighty
Speaker 1: p since n um and at that time the average
Speaker 1: person in France ate more than three three of them
Speaker 1: a day. That's a lot, isn't it. These are big
Speaker 1: man right And today it's as of seen, it's down
Speaker 1: to about a half a loaf a day, so analysts
Speaker 1: will attribute the drop to multiple factors, including maybe this
Speaker 1: preference for lower carb diet or concerns about gluten consumption,
Speaker 1: while some bakers say it's because the bread just doesn't
Speaker 1: taste as good as it did back in the you know,
Speaker 1: the good old days of the pre revolutionary friends. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that Daily Mail article, there's another quote from a
Speaker 1: Parisian artist named Anthony Stephenson who talks about being pretty
Speaker 1: bummed out that because of the scarcity of high quality bread,
Speaker 1: he's now having to buy what he refers to as
Speaker 1: quote those strange half cooked mini baguettes from my local
Speaker 1: supermarket and putting them in the oven. So that is
Speaker 1: not cool, uh for Mr Stephenson. And I actually found
Speaker 1: an article in the New York Times. The headline is
Speaker 1: a baker's crusade rescuing the famed French boulangerie. Because of
Speaker 1: this decrease in bread consumption, there is a sense that
Speaker 1: that culture, that history of artisanal baking, is being lost.
Speaker 1: So a man by the name of Pascal Regio, a
Speaker 1: French businessman, has decided to try to save the fledgling
Speaker 1: French authentic French boulingerie by coming up with a model
Speaker 1: that allows scaling of these businesses while also using higher
Speaker 1: quality ingredients. And in order to do that, he is
Speaker 1: going to shrink each store, making it where you only
Speaker 1: have to have one person to run it and buying
Speaker 1: ingredients centrally. That allows the shops to enhance the quality
Speaker 1: um and also increase bargaining power. And it limits the
Speaker 1: number of products sold, so you might have a store
Speaker 1: that only sells baguettes as opposed to diversified like bakery
Speaker 1: where you have all kinds of other pastries. So this
Speaker 1: isn't a big warehouse plan. This sounds like a community
Speaker 1: of what would be smaller stores that are in keeping
Speaker 1: with French tradition. This could help trigger a resurgence, right
Speaker 1: because we saw the numbers of these traditional bakeries dropping
Speaker 1: over the past few decades. That's right. Looks like there
Speaker 1: were twenty eight thousand of these authentic bakeries and that's
Speaker 1: down from thirty seven thousand, eight hundred just twenty years earlier.
Speaker 1: And that is from a report on bread and France
Speaker 1: from Euromonitor by Alexander Gornson. And on this note we
Speaker 1: will end our exploration of bread war and revolution in France. However,
Speaker 1: if you feel like the story should continue, we would
Speaker 1: like to cordially invite you to France's annual bread Festival,
Speaker 1: usually held in May. This gives you enough time, hopefully
Speaker 1: to schedule your plans, and of course we want pictures
Speaker 1: if you happen to go to the bread Festival, and
Speaker 1: let us know if you have lived in France or,
Speaker 1: like Casey, spent a great deal of time there. We'd
Speaker 1: like to hear what your favorite bakeries are. We'd like
Speaker 1: to hear your impressions of uh, where bakers stand in
Speaker 1: French society today. I'm very interested in that because over
Speaker 1: just the course of this episode we saw baker's being
Speaker 1: unfairly characterized as villains and then as models of the
Speaker 1: working class, as masters of their craft. So what are
Speaker 1: they today? You can write to us at Ridiculous at
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. You can drop us a
Speaker 1: note on Facebook or Ridiculous History there too. I think
Speaker 1: we have a Twitter now. You can tweet at us
Speaker 1: at Ridiculous History or um. You can check out our
Speaker 1: Instagram pages also Ridiculous History, and of course, most importantly,
Speaker 1: let us know if you have suggestions for an episode
Speaker 1: we should cover in the future, so please join us
Speaker 1: for more gaffs, laughs on the next episode of Ridiculous History.