When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity (review)

Champagne originates from a "culture of vine" having its roots in Marne, a region of northwestern France, since the eighteenth century. Guy's book examines the historical relationships among champagne, social distinction, and French national identity since the French Revolution to the present, focusing especially on the period from the mid-nineteenth century to 1911. According to Guy, both champagne and French winemaking entered a new era in the nineteenth century, when the size of the market grew, driven by exports and the introduction of large-scale production techniques. Beside these traditional economic factors, Guy describes the broad cultural factors that accompanied this process of development, emphasizing the role of the increasing dependence of the nation-state on the opinions of ever broader elements of the population.

It was in fact in the context of this new national consciousness that the French began to "construct" the definition of champagne within their national culture. Guy concentrates her attention on the late nineteenth century, when France coped with the dramatic enlargement of consumption and with the rise of new social groups searching for new ways to express their identity. She finds that champagne was central to this process. Used to delineate social boundaries in France, champagne consumption became a basic ritual for membership within new social groups. At the international level, these same traditions, rituals, and images accompanied the growing reputation of the French way of life and consumption for the bourgeois, making champagne a symbolic commodity worldwide. By the eve of the World War I, Guy writes, champagne was no less than a "Citoyen du Mond entier."

Being a regional product, but promoted as a national good in advertising and marketing, champagne gave the groups that controlled its production a singular importance within the nation: vine growers (vignerons) and merchant-manufacturers (négotiants) of the department of the Marne were able to profit from their own interests as well as those of the nation. On the other hand, the success of the sparkling wine pushed imitators, both in France and abroad, in producing champagne, resulting in a decade of crises (between 1900 and 1911) that involved fraudulent production and falling prices. This, in turn, led to a bloody revolt of peasants in 1911 that lasted nine months.

These events raised a number of issues about the use of regional appellations, the counterfeiting or imitating of brand names, and the delimitations of wine regions. The national response was to create new forms of protectionism. Champagne was the first legally recognized appellation d'origine in 1908, and, in the following one hundred years, this early protection became more and more stringent. Since 1945 vignerons and négotians have jointly monitored the industry through the Comité interprofessionel du vin de Champagne, which is controlled by the various professional groups within the industry. Today, champagne production is regulated by an obligation to conform to certain industry production standards as part of French law.

According to Guy, the champagne story demonstrates not that the building of French identity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was a process of colonization of the rural world by Paris, but that regional wine communities were pivotal in manufacturing a common culture in which local traditions became national and local regions became national territory—sometimes working in agreement with the state, sometimes in opposition to it.