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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 423-426



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When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity. By Kolleen M. Guy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pp. xi+245. $39.95.
Camembert: A National Myth. By Pierre Boisard, trans. Richard Miller. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. 267. $29.95.

To most Americans it would seem frivolous or even incomprehensible to base significant portions of their national identity on mere victuals. To the French, however, food has always had social, political, and even spiritual connotations that far transcend questions of mere nutrition. In addition, the French have a compelling economic interest in projecting the image of an alluring gastronomic distinctiveness. Both these books concern the struggle to define and redefine the French national identity in terms of renowned regional products of the French soil. [End Page 423]

Kolleen Guy, who teaches at the University of Texas, San Antonio, has written a readable and ambitious work of solid historical scholarship in which she seeks to demonstrate through the example of champagne how the regions of France used local agricultural products to maintain their separate identities against the forces of a centralizing and culturally homogenizing state. Pierre Boisard, assistant to the director of the Centre d'E´tude de l'Emploi (Center for the Study of Employment), has written an equally readable, though somewhat quirky, book, a curious mixture of historical scholarship and nostalgic lament. His object is to trace the long rise of Camembert to the preeminent national cheese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its precipitate decline in the years following World War II into what he considers a vapid, sterile, robotically fabricated shadow of its former glory.

Even with their obvious thematic parallels, the two books have widely differing approaches. While fully appreciative of its essential importance, Guy does not dally much over the technological context of her subject. It is sufficient to note that modern champagne was the product of several technical advances made in rapid succession during the early nineteenth century—most notably the discovery by a local pharmacist that allowed vintners to control the amount of gas generated during bottle fermentation and thus radically reduce the number of bottles (often more than half) that had previously been lost to bursting. Champagne went from a rare, aristocratic luxury to a middle-class pleasure, albeit one usually reserved only for special occasions.

To most of the wine growers (vignerons) of the Champagne region these technical developments at first meant little. The vast majority were peasant smallholders who could not possibly have afforded the capital costs of making sparkling wines, and they continued to produce still (that is, unsparkling), mostly ordinary wines for the regional markets. The great champagne merchants (négociants) of Reims and E´pernay controlled the production of and the increasingly international market for sparkling wines. Many négociants (Bollinger, Heidsieck, Krug) had German origins; they built great châteaux, married into the aristocracy, and practiced conservative politics. Responding to the increased demand for champagne, the producers, who by and large held only modest vine holdings, persuaded large numbers of the vignerons to abandon their presses, stop making their traditional wines, and sell grapes directly to them. In the expanding market of the Second Empire and early Third Republic, this system generally worked well, enriching the region and many of its inhabitants.

Guy's focus, however, is on the often difficult years after about 1885, culminating in the destructive riots of 1911. The phylloxera epidemic and an uneven economy played important roles in the increasing tensions between négociants and vignerons, but the crux of the matter had to do with the numerous vintners within France and without who were fabricating [End Page 424] sparkling wines and "fraudulently" labeling them champagne. The champenois wanted to establish a firm, governmentally sanctioned protection for the champagne designation. The matter was not, however, a simple one. What was champagne? A method of wine making? Wine made only of certain grapes or...

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