The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question: 1700-1775.

By Steven Laurence Kaplan (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. xviii plus 761pp.).

A public scapegoat in times of dearth, the baker was at all times a unique personification of issues surrounding food and subsistence in old regime France. Steven Kaplan's most recent book skillfully examines the bakers of Paris in their ordinary dealings with Parisians and with police. The sustenance of Paris was, as Kaplan points out here and elsewhere, a central issue in both political and popular discourse. Bread and the people who fashioned it were at the heart of the issue. This book will be of interest to a broad range of scholars who are interested in the structures of everyday life, whether it be the history of work, social relations, policing or the role of food in a subsistence-driven society. Encyclopedic in scope, Kaplan goes to the heart of those conflicts and contradictions that gave character to bakers' lives, their relationships with the authorities and with their customers.

The baker's life was based on a cultural construction of bread as the fundamental unit of subsistence. Kaplan prefaces his discussion of bakers and their work with an understanding that bread held immense cultural value for Parisians. For understanding bakers, the meaning of bread raises fascinating questions as to the relationship between a cultural icon and the producers of this icon. Bakers could not exist without the need for bread and the demand for bread, especially for white, wheaten bread, and relied on the eucharistic belief that bread (whether by sacred or scientific reasoning) was the purest and most perfect form of nourishment. In conjunction with a seeming ecumenical message that all Parisians had a right to this most perfect loaf, this belief placed bakers in a position of supplying nutritional salvation to the population of Paris. Kaplan examined the writings by critics, reformers and observers of eighteenth-century Paris. All of these sources affirm that rich and poor alike adhered to this doctrine. Though the poor were unlikely to eat the fancy luxury breads, they also scorned the dark loaves that contained barley or rye in addition to wheat. The public maintained that soft, white bread was a necessity of life. For this reason, the police carefully regulated the bread trade in markets and in breadshops and the consumers insisted on their right to bread on credit and at a "just price."

The bakers themselves seem far removed from the eucharistic associations of bread. Few greater contrasts can be imagined than between the image of bread as quasi-liturgical and the grueling lifestyle forced upon the producers of bread. The vast majority of Kaplan's sources for unearthing the bakers' everyday lives are police records. These sources demonstrate the petty squabbles and minor squimishes between master bakers, between master baker and non-guild baker, between master and journeyman or apprentice, between customer and baker, and between the baker and the police. The author is keenly aware that the disputes were only a part of the baker's life and that the ordinary lives of the bakers can only be deciphered through implicit suggestions occurring in these disputes. Where possible, Kaplan utilizes notarial sources and literary works as well as police records. The research is thorough and there can be no doubt that the picture presented is as clear as possible given the enormous difficulties in reconstructing the lives of individuals in pre-modern Paris.

The structures of work and the patterns of life worked together poorly for bakers. Apprentices and journeymen were forced into a nocturnal existence that made family life a near impossibility. The physical labor involved was arduous. As with many other trades, there was no guarantee of succeeding to master. These perpetual journeymen had a limited degree of control over their lives and a difficult lifestyle. Those who were fortunate enough to advance to master, traded the heavy labor and unattractive working hours for the responsibility of business affairs. Despite contemporary claims that bakers were avaricious brutes who cheated the public and grew rich at its expense, Kaplan found that the vast majority of bakers were of middling wealth and regularly faced the threat of business failure in times of shortage or when they were unable to collect their debts.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Kaplan's book is its implications for understanding identity formation in the face of contradictory public perceptions. Bakers lived with a dual identity. The police, Kaplan argues, viewed bakers as "amphibious beings who worked to gratify their self-interest but at the same time were public servants." (p. 577) The baker was at once a greedy businessperson and also the purveyor of a needed (sacred) good. Kaplan places the police between the bakers and the people, claiming that the baker followed a code of good business practices for the sake of keeping the bakery afloat while the consumers of bread all but ignored the baker's economic needs and saw the supply of bread as a moral question of the right to subsistence. Yet, it is unlikely that either the bakers or the public saw the bakers' two bodies as dichotomized. The public recognized that bread and baker were connected; customers were fiercely loyal to their bakers, bread was marked with the baker's insignia, and the bakeshop was a neighborhood focal point attracting its customers on an everyday basis. In this light, bakers were indeed public servants, or, to carry the eucharistic model further, a gastronomical priesthood. Bakers benefited from this image as it provided demand for their services even as it threatened their freedoms as businesspeople. The bakers, and especially the bakers' wives and servants, dealt intimately and regularly with the public. Though their interests were bound up with the financial interests of the bakeshop, they knew their customers' ideas about bread and at least some of their pride of occupation may well have come from their awareness that they served a public function and that they were, in fact, the hub of the neighborhood.

Sherri Klassen York University