A loaf of bread is a lovely thing, as well as being a set social relations so intricate and dense that it appears as a social fact. The claim, for example, that “all revolutions are about the price of bread” may be vulgar, but it’s historically pressing nonetheless; in pre-Revolutionary France, one recalls, the average peasant family spent between one half and two-thirds of its total income on bread. One recalls as well the powerful and complex phrase “to break bread with,” which intimates simple communalism but carries just the historical force of a blood oath, an extension of the kinship bond to a visitor.
Around here, the bread prohibitions are considerable -- but then, France is a bread culture pure and simple. In other places, the social fact congeals in whatever form of basic food survival predominates, hence the ladenness of, say, pasta culture in Italy. In Paris, bread is king; the bakers’ syndicat has a grand building on the same lovely and exclusive river island that has been home to Japanese princes, Charles Baudelaire, and Brian Ferry.
The most authoritative convention is the price, fixed by the government (just as the state sets the cost of tortillas in Mexico): 80 centimes for a baguette, a bargain even with the Euro running at over $1.20 (one loses it back on the billiards: two Euro for a game in a bar). The social rules are by definition more subtle, if no less prevalent. For example, it’s considered rather rude to eat one’s bread (and, by extension, food in general) while on the street; the partial exception extended to laborers on break. And even workers are allowed this only so far as they are evidently in the midst of working; one doesn’t see a laborer munching a ficelle on the way home.
So though one sees many people carrying bread down the street, if they’re eating it as they go, they’re probably foreigners -- or perhaps latter-day bohemians who’ve opted to thumb their noses at social graces. What one doesn’t see is people carrying their baguettes home on the metro: a parallel regulation.
These are matters of etiquette, but what are they for? Like most matters of etiquette, they exist (as noted above) to display and regulate the borders of social class; those who do not eat bread in public are precisely those who are enfranchised. The exceptions, as usual, indicate exactly the quality of the prohibition. The working classes, like children, are forgiven impoliteness as part of the social contract disenfranchising them; bohemians, one is supposed to imagine, have voided the social contract by choice (though how to tell the bohemian from the vagabond?)
In return, this set of social relations assures the survival and presence of a multitude of local bakeries (and, in general, local aggregations of such small merchants); it’s very hard to walk four blocks without seeing one, even on chic or busy throughfares. In short, the bread prohibitions are arranged in every regard to celebrate, circumscribe, and buttress the petit bourgeoisie; no wonder the phrase, even in English, is French. By the way, one can’t spell “disenfranchise” without “France."
Posted by jane at August 11, 2004 07:52 AM | TrackBackAfter reading this, I had to call Julianne to discuss. Last year, during a 19 hour layover, she and I ate on a tall street curb about a half mile from the Eiffel. It was bastille Day and hardly anyone was out, but the people that were out, crystal cartoon daggers shot out their French eye-holes at us. We could not figure out what part of the equation was the offence. Was it the laying of the orange peel on the ground? Does it look like we are littering? Is Bastille Day a day of fasting? Can you see my underwear? Do we look American? Now we know. Now we know next time to peel the oranges in private.
Posted by: Mini Unicorn Pal at August 12, 2004 11:02 AMAbout not munching in the street: etiquette calls for the baguette on the table to be served whole, as evidence that it is today-fresh. (This is not true of the batard or the pain de campagne because of the class issues mentioned – hence the rounder shape). Only in restaurant is the bread tolerated as pre-cut. According to protocol, a baguette should only be torn (“rompre”) , never cut – something to do with the corpus Christi I’m sure.
Posted by: mr at August 13, 2004 07:07 AMOur French colleague's addition is useful, though it's sort of posed as a contrary explanation, when it is nothing of the sort. That is, it's always "etiquette calls for..."; the question remains, Why exactly does etiquette call for that? The expressed rules of etiquette function exactly to obscure the deep social imperatives; one isn't surprised that children aren't explicitly told "one doesn't eat one's baguette in public so as to produce and indicate class boundaries." To take the classic and extreme case, the inc3st taboo isn't expressed "inc3st* is forbidden because of the necessity of exogamous mating for formation and propagation of the tribe" -- that's rather the social need which is at once being repressed and served by the vagaries of "etiquette."
The deployment of etiquette to solidify social hierarchy is, it goes almost without saying, a French speciality on par with cheese; the courtly hours of Versailles were regulated by nothing else. The British, on the other hand, just revel in their own repression; it has become an end in itself.
* check it out: this computer in Antwerp won't let me post with the word inc3st in the entry!
Posted by: wallace at August 14, 2004 05:25 AM...welllll, i think there's a tiny thing you left out/you are too intent on seeing just economic fascism : eating is social in france. people eat together, and leisurely. to eat independently, in a hurry, on the fly (american-ly) is *anti-social,*.shows disdain for the company of others, no matter the class of your friends and family. (eating alone isn't even perceived as rude however, as asking a waiter to bring the check with your salad, not ordering an entree, and then ignoring your dinner partner by talking on the phone--all perfectly acceptable in say, westwood.) the workers can eat alone on lunchbreak because they can't be expected to socialize, as maybe their friends work across town (and the french aren't insta-buddies with everyone, the way americans are. they take years and years to get to know each other well enough to break bread.) french workers of all classes who live near enough to home go there to eat lunch.
anyhow, when you are eating the mini-baguettes, it is acceptable to bite off the top as you are walking home--and only the top--to make sure it's fresh. once i was very very hungry and the bread was so good...i was guiltily munching past the top...a young frenchman admonished me angrily, "bon appetit!" i think this underscores the anti-social aspect of the eating-in-the-street crime, as bon appetit is what he would have said to me were i his guest. the admionishment did not have a class-inflected flavor (nothing like what you get for smoking in suburban california these days.) i think the rule is that one must eat with others, socially at a formal meal, unless one is unable. (and children are not just merely "unsocialized" viz etiquette: anyone who has ever cared for a child, ahem, knows that they need to eat smaller amounts more frequently than adults--that they are physically incapable of adhering to our meal/time system when they are small.)
and you left out the "to-go food" exceptions, too: it is perfectly alright to score some sorbet on the ile st. louis or a falafel on the rue de rosiers and eat it in the street..(.i am not sure why they objected to oranges, however...) and then there are picnics...