When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity (review)
- When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity
Guy's study of the Champagne region of France is an important contribution to historians' increasingly complex vision of the processes by which the disparate local communities and regions of Europe were incorporated into the larger national communities that dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Guy argues that during the course of the nineteenth century, representations of the French nation became intertwined in French discourses about the wine industry, making it "difficult to invoke the one without eliciting the other" (4). Thus, struggles to define what was champagne went hand in hand with the process of defining what it meant to be French. Improvements in transport, production, and marketing made fine champagne an inextricable part of celebrations across the western world, and the Champagne region of France contributed significantly to the French combination of national and regional identity that found expression in a legal system that protected the uniqueness of agricultural products.
Guy's book describes the history of this process during the nineteenth and early twentieth century in Champagne, a time marked by conflict, tension, and violence. She begins by describing the process that made champagne a necessary component of bourgeois life, a sign of social distinction and fraternal solidarity among the elite. New production techniques allowed a growing number of négociants in the Marne, Aube, and Aisne departments of France to profit from the demand that this new demand generated. Yet, many vignerons in the regions ceased producing wine themselves, becoming increasingly dependent on the négociants to provide a market for their grapes. The process came to a [End Page 648] head during the early decades of the Third Republic, when phylloxera struck the Champagne vineyards. Vignerons sold their land to négociants, becoming landless laborers working for such large champagne families as Cliquot, Moen, and Ruinart.
This situation occurred in other wine regions of France. The particular twist of the Champagne example derives from its closeness to the German border, and the presence of a number of German families among the négociants who increasingly controlled the production of champagne and, in turn, the livelihoods of the vignerons of the region. It allowed the theme of national identity to enter into the discussions of the 1890s and thereafter about protection of the champagne label, regional identity, and economic interest. Guy details the development of different organizations representing the interests of the négociants and the vignerons in the aftermath of the phylloxera crisis, the disputes over the protection of the Champagne label against "falsified" wines, and the delimitation of the Champagne region itself. As the economic condition of the vignerons declined during the first decade of the twentieth century, the French National Assembly was unable to pass legislation that would effectively protect Champagne wine from the use of wine produced outside the Marne. The ultimate result was a vignerons' revolt in 1911, in which vineyard workers destroyed wine in bottles and barrels, damaged equipment, and forced the military occupation of the region by the French army. Although an air of class struggle pervades this conflict, Guy emphasizes the importance of champagne as a part of French national identity.
Guy's book is a strong contribution to our understanding of the processes by which French national identity was constructed. Her account provides insights into the ways in which nationalist movements, such as Paul Dérouledè's Ligue des patriots, operated at the regional level—another case in point being the 1911 revolt, led by Emile Michel-Lacacheur. The difficulties met by the French Socialist Party in the same revolt point out the difficulties met by Jaurèsian socialism in speaking to the needs of the Champenois vignerons. In showing how products such as champagne "became an important aspect of "Frenchness" (192), she also provides more evidence—if any were needed—for the view that peasants assumed their French national identity not through a simplistic process of cultural colonization but through their own initiative...
