Hands off our baguettes, you half-baked Anglo-Saxons

The truth is that baguettes are like wine: all differ depending on the baker, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

8:14PM BST 22 Aug 2013

The dreaded Anglo-Saxons are French-bashing again – and this time, they’re after our very bread. Stirred from their mid-August torpor, Libération and Le Figaro are shocked, shocked that The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and even, I’m ashamed to say, The Daily Telegraph have mistaken a perfectly reasonable campaign to encourage people to keep buying bread, of the kind that the Milk Marketing Board puts on for dairy products at regular intervals, for an admission of nothing less than the death of the proper French baguette. Cue a denunciation of the “deplorable trend in the Anglo-Saxon media to disparage France on just any old pretext”, which “seems to have intensified in recent months”.

The charges are these. French people buy far less bread than 50 years ago, because they’re richer and more diet-conscious. Even when they do, they have the gall to fork out for the wrong kind. These Anglo-Saxon “experts” tell us that une baguette pas trop cuite – as I regularly request from my excellent bakery on rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré – is in fact a travesty of what your proper crusty baguette should be like. It’s not been baked enough. It’s white, doughy, soggy, tasteless. It is, as Monty Python would say, an ex-baguette.

To which I answer: “Piffle!” The truth is that baguettes are like wine: all differ depending on the baker. You patronise the one whose product you like best. And the sheer gall of trying to compare any kind of French baguette – not least the heavenly petits pains served in Michelin-rosetted restaurants such as Ducasse or Arpège – to the terrifying, sickly hued, sugared-up, watered-down, plastic-wrapped, rubber-like objects that pass for bread in Britain or America makes my temper rise like Poilâne sourdough.

Even the figures implying an inexorable decline in the baguette consumption are as cherrypicked as a political party broadcast’s. Yes, the number of bakeries has gone down from 54,000 in 1950 to 32,000 today. But the number of bakers has risen slightly, to 160,000. This isn’t attrition: it’s consolidation.

I know this because of a recent report by the French senate on l’industrie boulangère. It exists because the state of our bread is a national matter, and has been for a very long time. We French apply to breadmaking the perfectionism the Japanese put into cars.

From the first price controls and regulations as to what constitutes lawful bread – passed under Charlemagne at the very beginning of the ninth century – to the bread shortages that sparked the French Revolution, “bread” in our wheat-growing country has really meant “food”. That’s why it was so devastating when Marie-Antoinette was falsely accused of quipping: “If they don’t have bread, let them eat cake.” When the king and his family were forced from Versailles to Paris in July 1789, the mob’s joyous cry was: “We have brought back the baker, his wife and the baker’s boy.”

For a millennium, the price of bread was decreed by law – one only lifted in 1978. The Confédération Nationale de la Boulangerie-Pâtisserie Française is happy to tell you that a day’s work at the minimum wage will enable you to buy 65 baguettes today, as opposed to 10 in 1950. (In 1800, it got you 16: Napoleon wanted to keep the price low.)

To this day, Parisian bakeries, like pharmacies, are obliged to keep to a holiday rota, so that even in the midst of August, at least one stays open per quartier (one fourth of an arrondissement). Bread is still seen as a vital staple, necessary if not to survival, then at least to the French way of life. And its quality, if anything, has risen, with regular competitions such as Best Baguette in Paris, won this year by the Tunisian-born patron of a Montparnasse bakery. We’re not expecting to crown an American or Brit any time soon.
I wonder why that is?

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013

I'll admit it, the French don't get Brüno

Sacha Baron Cohen's latest caricature is just a big bully, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

Something tells me that we French are going to have a problem with Brüno, the Sacha Baron Cohen alter ego who is threatening to do for Austria what Borat did for Kazakhstan. On the other side of the Atlantic, one effete Euro-metrosexual may look like any other, as he prances around pranking rednecks and Paula Abdul alike. But we’re not buying it.

Italian fashion, we can accept. British fashion, even – just look at the swell job we gave John Galliano at Dior. But a gay Austrian fashion reporter? To the Parisian, Austrian fashion doesn’t extend beyond field-green loden coats, anything with edelweiss flowers embroidered on it, and those voluminous silk curtains with puffball sleeves that women wear at the Salzburg Festival. Similarly, the idea of a gay Austrian doesn’t so much bring up the catwalk as the late Jörg Haider, the neo-Nazi politician. (Bet he went for leather instead of hot pants, though.)



The problem is that while stereotyping other countries, then happily slagging them off, is a sport enjoyed by all, there’s surprisingly little overlap between nations. The English think of Americans as bullying, simplistic colonials, over-fed and over here, given to murdering the language with their excessively loud voices. The French mutter darkly about a Yankee masterplan to destroy Gallic culture, secretly hatched by Disney, Google and the CIA. Many Islamists see blasphemous, licentious heathens: Sayyid Qutb, the leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, spent a year at a Bible Belt college in the Forties and came back horrified by the innocent community dances held in church halls.

Such caricatures, of course, tell us as much about those who hold them as their target. When Brüno camped it up last week on the Champs-Elysées, cracking jokes about Carla Bruni’s love life, he was acting like a typical Brit – only you, it seems, are unable to accept the fact that a 40-year-old woman is comfortable with having had lovers. Of course, we’re just as bad: no amount of Michelin rosettes for the likes of Gordon Ramsay will erase our view of the British as a nation bred on over-cooked meat served with improbable jams and peas hard enough to be used for grapeshot, washed down with warm beer or gallons of nut-brown tea.

In French eyes, the British manage to have sex crimes but no sex lives (replaced by hotwater bottles from Boots); you are simultaneously perfidious and worship "le fair play"; you have the raunchiest tabloids and the most Victorian assumptions about how politicians should behave in private; as with the ducks you so like to shoot, your males are better dressed than your females; and, of course, you poisoned Napoleon.

As Baron Cohen proved with Borat, such stereotypes lend themselves to being exploited. While the British are suspicious of French men, expecting a suspiciously natty, chain-smoking poseur, always ready with a flowery compliment or Brussels directive, you paint us Frenchwomen in a more flattering light. We are Basil Fawlty’s unattainable charmer, Madame Peignoir, or Juliette Binoche in Damage: thinner, better dressers, always hostesses, never housewives.

Baron Cohen’s problem as we see it is that he is a typical product of a public-school, Oxbridge education, and of Britain’s unique tolerance for shock tactics. You laud him as an example of cuttingedge Jewish humour; to us, he has much more in common with Monty Python or the Christmas panto. Like Borat, Brüno uses the methods of the school bully, as much behind the camera as in front of it – those who complain, like the Kazakh foreign minister or poor Paula Abdul, are dripping wet, can’t-take-a-joke spoilsports.

Or perhaps that’s just my own prejudices showing.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009