FRANCE: The Battle of Bread

‘Tis a long day, a day without bread.—French Proverb

Though gourmets the world over relish it, no one can get quite as passionate about French bread as the French. For them, the long, crusty loaf called a baguette is not only a gustatory delight and a dietary necessity but a supercharged political commodity as well. On the dark day in 1789 when a mob of hungry women marched twelve miles through the mud to Versailles to haul King Louis XVI off to his doom, their war cry was “Bread! Bread!” and their fury was fed by Marie Antoinette’s fateful “Let them eat cake.” Last week, to the dismay of Socialist Premier Guy Mollet and his government, the same angry cry for bread reverberated through France.

The trouble began months ago when France’s 63,000 neighborhood bakers decided that the 45 francs (about 14¢) the government allowed them to charge for a pound of bread did not give them enough profit. The bakers asked for an increase of one franc a pound in the ceiling price. The best they could get out of the government was a compromise offer to lower flour taxes and thereby increase the profit margin by about half a franc per pound.

From Creep to Sprint. The Mollet government had compelling reasons for its refusal to increase the price of bread. One of France’s gravest problems is the creeping inflation which in the last year has increased the housewife’s food bills by 30%. A rise in the price of bread, the government feared, would be just the psychological spark required to set off a universal demand for wage increases that would change creeping inflation into a wild sprint.

The bakers were unimpressed by any such general considerations, and last week, all over France, they banged down their shutters and went on strike. The government retaliated vigorously. In some provincial towns the strike caved in under government threats to draft bakers into the army. In Paris gendarmes “requisitioned” nearly one-third of the city’s 4,200 bakeries, ordering the owners to fire up their ovens or face a year in jail and a $3,500 fine.

Despite these measures millions of Frenchmen found themselves without baguettes. In desperation some turned to their grocery stores, distastefully buying packages of biscotte, square slices of Zwieback. Others resorted to stronger action. In Paris irate customers heaved bricks through bakeshop windows. In the town of Cauterets in the Pyrenees Mayor Charles Fourtine, despondent over the insults hurled at him by angry citizens who felt that it was up to him to keep the town adequately supplied with bread, climbed a power pylon and killed himself by grasping a 100,000-volt high-tension wire.

Cool Bakers, Hot Ovens. With their backs to their cash registers, most of the embattled bakers at first stood fast under the combined assaults of the government, their customers and the press. A day after the beginning of the Paris strike, the president of the Bakers Syndicate called a meeting of his colleagues and proposed that they all turn out a small amount of bread for distribution by the police. From the audience a baker snouted back, “Let ’em eat biscotte.” By week’s end, however, the bakers cooled down and their ovens began heating up again. Calling off the strike in Paris, the Bakers Syndicate explained: “We think that the Parisian population, which perhaps can endure a temporary annoyance, should not suffer a persistent lack of bread.”