1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  And the part of its (agri)culture of which it is proudest, and which brings it the best combination of cash and prestige from abroad, is champagne. Or Champagne with a capital C, because it is of course a proper name.

  In fact, France cares so much about Champagne that it had a clause protecting the name inserted into the Treaty of Versailles, the peace agreement that marked the official end of the First World War. Yes, a whole generation of young Frenchmen lay mangled in the mud, several hundred thousand civilians had been killed, a barely credible 10 per cent of the French population had been wounded in the fighting, and France still found time to worry about wine labels.

  Their concern arose from the fact that during the war the area around Reims had suffered terribly from bombardments and trench-digging, and Champagne production had understandably fallen. It is, after all, quite difficult to harvest grapes while you are being mortar-bombed. France was therefore afraid that other sparkling wines, from America, Italy, Spain or even Germany, might step into the gap in the market. Consequently, Article 275 (out of 440) of the Treaty of Versailles states that ‘Germany undertakes … to respect any law … in force in any Allied or Associated State … defining or regulating the right to any regional appellation in respect of wine or spirits produced in the State’ and that ‘the importation, exportation, manufacture, distribution, sale or offering for sale of products or articles bearing regional appellations inconsistent with such law or order shall be prohibited by the German Government and repressed.’

  In essence, this meant that, yes, world peace was important, but only as important as the exclusive right to call France’s sparkling wine Champagne.

  As a result, it is against international law to prefix the brand name with a national adjective like ‘English’ or ‘Spanish’. And it is practically a human-rights abuse to use the words ‘Champagne’ and ‘elderflower’ in the same sentence. Only America has stood up to Champagne’s official regulatory board, Le Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne (CIVC). The US government insists that wine made in California using the same types of grape and the same methods may be marketed as ‘Californian Champagne’ – a stand that is possible because although America signed the Treaty of Versailles, it never ratified it. (No fools, those Americans.)

  Still, one might say, the French winemakers are entirely justified in protecting their unique product. After all, it was invented by a French monk called Dom Pérignon in 1668, right?

  Wrong.

  Sorry, France, but Champagne is English in all but name.

  A man of some Merret

  The French version of the Champagne story has a partially sighted Benedictine monk, Pierre (aka Dom – an honorary title derived from the Latin dominus or master) Pérignon, a native of the Champagne district, becoming the accountant and cellar master at the abbey of Hautvillers near Épernay in 1668, and developing the Champagne we know today by perfecting the fermentation process and turning still wine into fizz.

  Dom Pérignon, the French monk who supposedly ‘invented’ Champagne, suffers an attack of premature excorkulation. In fact, he wanted to reduce the sparkliness of his region’s wines.

  In reality, though, he spent much of his career at the monastery doing everything he could to make Champagne less bubbly, because the bottles at his winery kept exploding. Wines bottled in the autumn would go to sleep, as it were, during the winter, only for their yeasts to come out of hibernation in spring and turn the wine cellars into an early version of French underground weapons testing.

  Dom Pérignon therefore set about trying to make the wine purer, to prevent excess fermentation. He had his grapes picked early in the morning, when it was cool, decreed that damaged grapes should be thrown away, and developed a gentler way of pressing the fruit so that the juice from the flesh of the grape would not interact too much with the skin. In this way, he was able to make a white wine from red grapes, which gave the abbey’s finances a real boost – red grapes were much less susceptible to bad weather, while white wines sold for better prices.

  The abbey was now producing purer wines and making higher profits, but still had to cure the explosion problem, which was actually getting worse – when Dom P. (if one may be so familiar with the legendary monk) began sealing his bottles efficiently with corks instead of wooden pegs, it only caused the wine to burst out of the bottom of the bottle.

  It is often said that when Dom Pérignon first took a gulp of fizzy Champagne, he exclaimed, ‘I am tasting the stars!’ But that was just an advertising slogan invented in the nineteenth century, and in fact he is more likely to have groaned something about the ‘bubbles de merde’.

  A short distance to the north, however, there were some people who were perfectly happy with exploding Champagne, and who had been happy even before Dom Pérignon started to purify it. Well, they weren’t so keen on the actual explosions, which they tried to remedy, but they loved the joyful bubbliness of the wine.

  They were the English.

  It was just after the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London. Britain had recently got rid of Cromwell and his Puritans, who had forbidden dancing, music, theatre and anything in life that might make people giggle, and had inherited Charles II, the King who had recently emerged from something as close as a monarch can get to poverty. All in all, the Brits were game for a bit of fun. They had taken French bubbly to their hearts and were so relieved that it was legal to enjoy themselves again that they had probably invented games like Stick a Champagne Bottle up Each Nostril and Jump.

  Wine from the Champagne region had first been made popular in England in the early 1660s by a French soldier, writer and bon vivant called Charles de Saint-Évremond, who had been forced to seek exile in London after getting into trouble in Paris for criticizing the all-powerful Cardinal Mazarin. The wine that Saint-Évremond imported from France in barrels was meant to be still, but frothed a lot in the large containers, and had a tendency to explode when bottled. This, however, ceased to be a problem for English wine merchants when glass production was industrialized thanks to the development of coal-fired furnaces in Newcastle. Suddenly, it was possible to make much thicker and more resistant bottles than any being turned out in France, and Londoners could have fun with the controlled pop of a Champagne cork instead of diving for cover under the table.

  In case French readers feel tempted to contest all this, there is documentary proof in an article presented to the Royal Society in 1662 by a scientist called Christopher Merret.* He was born in Gloucestershire in either 1614 or 1615 (the Champagne seems to have clouded his memory), studied at Oxford (a notorious training ground for heavy drinkers), and in 1661 translated and expanded an Italian treatise on bottle manufacture. It seems to be this that drew his attention to the question of exploding Champagne, because the following year he published a paper entitled ‘Some Observations Concerning the Ordering of Wines’. In this, he tried to explain why wine became bubbly, and identified the second fermentation in the bottle as the main cause. He also described adding sugar or molasses to wine to bring on this second fermentation deliberately. Sparkliness was a positive thing, Merret said, and could be produced in any wine, particularly now that England was making bottles that were capable of holding in the bubbles. Thus, while Dom Pérignon was trying to do away with the fizz, the Brits wanted more.

  And these days, they’re not the only ones; modern Champagne-makers use Merret’s method, and add doses of sugar to give their wine its characteristic sparkle, a technique they call méthode champenoise, although strictly speaking, if one respects the concept of a discovery belonging to the person who first publishes a scientific paper on a subject, it should surely be called the Merret Method, or méthode merretoise. After all, if you don’t respect that concept, what is to stop me claiming credit for the theory of relativity? (Apart from the fact that I don’t understand it, of course.)

  Sparkling English wit

  Champagne (or ‘Champaigne’ as contemporary Brits spelled it, continuing the art
of misspelling French place names they had begun so honourably with Agincourt and Calais) was celebrated in seventeenth-century British literature. The Irish dramatist George Farquhar, for example, an exile in London after he almost killed an actor while using a real sword in a stage fight, sings its praises in his 1698 play Love and a Bottle.

  ‘Champaigne,’ one character says, ‘a fine liquor which all your great Beaux drink to make ’em witty.’ Another describes the ‘witty wine’ in words that capture all its sparkle: ‘How it puns and quibbles in the glass!’

  It was this popularity amongst British socialites that made the French wonder what all the fuss was about, and convinced King Louis XIV to adopt Champagne as his wine of choice, making it de rigueur amongst the French some time after London’s witty beaux had started the fashion – and, of course, only once it had become safe for the Sun King to drink thanks to the sturdy English bottles being imported into France.

  Meanwhile, Dom Pérignon was perfecting his winemaking techniques, and invented the method of stocking Champagne bottles with their necks pointing diagonally downwards so that sediment collects near the cork and can be removed more easily. But this again was to stop his bottles exploding rather than to generate more fizz.

  And so there we have it. Champagne is a wine that owes its sparkle to a technique identified by an English scientist, its marketability to English bottle-making technology, and its popularity to the fun-loving dandies of seventeenth-century London.

  Naturally, the French can lay claim to the regional name, because Champagne is undeniably in France, but in all fairness one could argue (if one really wanted to annoy the French) that the drink should be called Champagne à l’anglaise, ‘English-style Champagne’, to distinguish it from the flat, bubble-free wine that Dom Pérignon wanted to produce. One could even write to Moët & Chandon and suggest that they change the name of their Dom Pérignon brand to Merret. Less fancy-sounding, perhaps, but more accurate.

  Of course, given that they’re protected by the Treaty of Versailles, EU regulations and (probably) a little-known clause in the Declaration of Human Rights, the French can shrug off such suggestions. But for historical reasons, there really is no reason why they should object to labels marked ‘American Champagne’ or ‘English Champagne’. If it’s quality they’re worried about, then they can stop worrying right away – sparkling wines produced in the USA have been highly respected for a long time, and now English-made bubbly is on the rise, too.

  This improvement in the English product is apparently due to the onset of global warming, which is causing ideal Champagne-producing conditions to shift north from France towards vineyards with similar soil on the other side of the Channel. It’s a delicious historical irony – all the big industrial nations that signed the Treaty of Versailles (including France) are polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and returning Champagne to its true spiritual home, England.

  Santé!

  * Merret, whose name is sometimes spelled Merrett, was a friend of Samuel Pepys and got drunk with the diarist on 22 January 1666. Whether it was on Champagne, Pepys doesn’t say.

  10

  Eclipsing the Sun King

  Louis XIV called himself le Roi Soleil, ‘the Sun King’, to make it blindingly clear to his people that he was the source of life itself in France. A democrat he was not.

  Louis also referred to himself as Jupiter, the king of Roman deities, god of the sky and guardian of law and order on Earth, though this was mainly to convince his male courtiers that it was OK for him to sleep with their wives. ‘There is no shame in sharing with Jupiter,’ he would say as he escorted away a duke’s young bride for a royal rogering.

  Louis XIV still holds the record for the longest-reigning European monarch ever – seventy-two years – surpassing Queen Elizabeth II and even Queen Victoria. And although the modern French may not admit to being monarchists, they revere him almost as much as Joan of Arc, Napoleon and Johnny Hallyday.

  However, as we saw in Chapter 8, the Sun King’s supposed omnipotence did not make him infallible. And it was precisely Louis’s belief in his God-given powers that would lead him to underestimate two great leaders who, before the end of his reign in 1715, were able to secure Britain’s place at the heart of world power – that is, in direct opposition to France.

  And it was all to do with his intestines …

  King Louis XIV (1638–1715) thought of himself as a god, but his taste in clothes was not exactly divine.

  The daily life of a god

  For Louis XIV, sleeping with his courtiers’ wives was just one way of flaunting his divine power. In fact, his whole lifestyle was geared to proving his magnificence. Every day at court followed a rigid pattern determined by the King – like the sun, it was said, one always knew where he was. More importantly, the courtiers therefore knew where they had to be.

  In 1682 Louis moved the court to his father’s old chateau at Versailles, 16 kilometres southwest of the Louvre, even though a massive renovation scheme was only half finished. There were still around 20,000 workmen laying out the gardens, building new wings on the palace and decorating the interior.

  Louis had his reasons for forcing the French aristocratic establishment to uproot itself from Paris. There, rival factions had their strongholds, and intrigue and rebellion were possible. In this isolated chateau in the middle of a forest, the nobles were either at court or they were not – there was no half-measure. And, given that Louis was the dispenser of all power within France, they had better be there if they wanted money or influence.

  Soon, a whole new town grew up around the palace as the courtiers built houses, either for themselves, if they were not important enough to be invited to reside chez Louis, or for their servants, who were forbidden to live at the palace.

  At eight thirty every morning, the Sun King would rise, awoken with a mug of tea or broth to perform the levée, or getting-up ceremony. And quite a performance it was, conducted in the presence of the petites entrées, the small group of people who were permitted to see the King in his nightshirt. These were usually his doctors, his valets and the porte-chaise d’affaires – the ‘carrier of the business chair’. No, he wasn’t an office furniture remover; he was the man who brought in the commode. This officer of the court, who had paid a small fortune to acquire the hereditary job for his family, arrived carrying a highly decorated Portaloo, on which Louis would sit while his barber straightened his morning wig (less high-rise than the afternoon and evening one) and then, on alternate days, shaved him. Meanwhile, Louis would do his affaires – his business – and the doctors would examine the results for signs of ill health.

  Once the ceremony was over and the royal backside had been wiped with a cotton swab, the King was ready to receive the select group of courtiers – males only – who were allowed to watch him being dressed. This honour was granted to about a hundred of them, and the crowds in the bedchamber were so dense that pickpocketing of watches and purses was not uncommon. It was very expensive to live at Versailles, and impoverished aristocrats were not above supplementing their incomes with a dip of their manicured fingers.

  At ten o’clock, Louis attended a thirty-minute Mass, which often included new choral music written for him by France’s most gifted composers. On his way to and from the chapel, the King would touch sick people who had been allowed to enter the palace to take advantage of the divine monarch’s self-declared healing powers.

  Later, after two hours or so conferring with his ministers and hearing petitions from people who had managed to talk, bribe or sleep their way into an audience, Louis had lunch. Starting at one o’clock sharp, he would eat alone, usually facing a window with a view of his gardens. That is to say, he was eating alone, but he was watched by a huge crowd of people as he consumed an immense meal that might consist of a whole pheasant, a whole duck, a joint of mutton and slices of ham, accompanied by salads, pastries and fruit. As with his levée, the Sun King’s chewing and guzzling was deemed a fascinatin
g ceremony that the courtiers were privileged to attend.

  At 2 p.m., the King’s afternoon entertainment would begin. This varied slightly, and might include a walk in the park with a group of ladies, shooting in the grounds of Versailles, or hunting on horseback in the forest. With Louis at large, courtiers had a great opportunity to attract his attention and obtain a royal favour – an invitation to the levée, for example, a post in one of the King’s ministries, promotion in the army, or a grant to improve their chateau.

  People were noticed because of their fine clothes (courtiers would change outfits several times a day), by making some witty remark as the King passed (a juicy tidbit of gossip about one of his enemies, for example), or simply by being a beautiful woman.

  One thing that no courtier could do, though, was break the strict rules attached to these activities. When the monarch rode, for example, no one could stop or dismount unless he did. And Louis was possessed with that dangerous combination: a cruel sense of humour and a large bladder. He could ride for hours after lunch without peeing, unlike most of his courtiers. It was the ultimate in control freakery – Louis’s lackeys were forced to wet themselves rather than breach royal protocol.

  Starting at 6 p.m., a soirée d’appartement began, and Louis would stroll ‘casually’ through his apartments, stopping to chat to courtiers as they gambled at cards, played billiards, danced, or just conversed. Everyone was, of course, obliged to be having a wonderful time, and it is easy to imagine the bets rising extravagantly, the trick shots getting more daring and the jokes growing louder and more rehearsed as His Sunniness approached.

  At 10 p.m. dinner, or souper, was served. It was a less lonely affair than lunch, attended by several hundred courtiers and servants, all of them standing except the royal family, who were seated at table to eat, and the duchesses, who were allowed to watch while squatting on stools. Again, there were strict rules – Louis hated to be distracted while eating, so everyone was required to be silent as he and the family members in attendance took their pick of the forty-odd dishes on offer. The food was brought to table by a procession of servants who would march through the palace from the kitchens, and anyone seeing the caravan on its way to the King had to bow or curtsey to the lucky dishes that were about to disappear into the divine entrails.