La Revolution sardiniere: Pecheurs et conserveurs en Bretagne sud au XIXe siecle (review)

Breton sardines (Alosa Pilchardus) improve in taste while aging in tins, like French wines in bottles. This tinned sardine is a local product, the result of very seasonal inshore fishing, and it is an important element of world and French food culture. Since the nineteenth century, it has engendered a literature that is now invigorated by growing interest in the maritime heritage of Brittany and the assertion of regional identity.

In La Révolution sardinière, Xavier Dubois studies the changes in the "sardine business" on the southern coast of Brittany (department of Morbihan) between Lorient and Etel, Auray, and Quiberon, including Belle-Île en Mer and Groix Island. In so doing, he extends Dominique Robin's work on the sardine business during the ancien régime, Pêcheurs bretons sous l'Ancien régime: L'exploitation de la sardine sur la côte atlantique. Dubois describes the vertical integration of this sector into the local, national, and international economy as well as in the industrialization of a rural and outlying region of France.

We first hear about "the world of the press" inherited from the eighteenth century when sardines au vert were merely salted and pressed into barrels. The "revolution of appertisation" between 1820 and 1840 led to the creation of a large number of factories that were to change the littoral between 1840 and 1860 and introduce industrial jobs. The "sardine crises" that occurred from the 1880s on imposed painful changes on the population living on the coast that were partly the result of the growing scarcity of fish and overproduction, but more so of the local producers' stubbornness: "A small world reluctant to open up to the rest of France" (pp. 79–80). Even so, Brittany remained the world's leading producer of sardines during this period.

The word "revolution" in the title, even though intended to call to mind the notion of "industrial revolution," essentially applies to appertisation. This process, invented by the Parisian confectioner Nicolas Appert (1749–1841) in 1810, entailed the first complete sterilization of food and its preservation in tins. But tinned sardines were marketed only sporadically. Dubois shows that the main advantage of appertisation was to enable factories to spread out all along the littoral and follow the migration of fish. And despite "the revolution of appertisation," the people who controlled the sardine business did not adopt any technical improvements in watercraft or fishing devices. They kept the workforce in complete dependence on natural resources, as with any rural economy. Since ship owners had a monopoly on an efficient manufacturing process, they did not consider modernizing the modest shallops used for sardine fishing. Trawling and offshore fishing for larger fish were belated factors in the modernization of technology, mainly in the port of Lorient. Changes initiated at the beginning of the eighteenth century were not completed until around 1880.

To gratify historians of technology, Dubois could have included chapters on packaging and the reception of machines by factory owners and workers. But to have written such chapters, access to private records would have been essential and the author would have needed to probe business history much more fully than he has done here. Still, this is a valuable book for two reasons: it links elements of maritime history and industrial history, and it focuses our attention on an important aspect of the French food industry.