French Bread-Makers Have No Time to Loaf

While this Breton city sleeps, Thierry Bouvier is wide awake, making fragrant, mouthwatering magic.

From the 36-year-old baker’s skillful hands and imagination come 100 or so kinds of breads, pastries, croissants, brioches, cakes, tarts and other items, cooked over scented flames of oak and beech or painstakingly assembled in a “pastry laboratory.”

“For the Japanese, it’s rice; for us French, it’s bread,” the affable Bouvier says. “Bread is a value that remains, while a lot of other values have been vanishing.”

But, it turns out, not even bread is a certainty anymore in late 20th century France. Many bakers who, like Bouvier, own and operate neighborhood bakeries fret that they are an endangered species, threatened by market forces and the economies of scale that supermarket chains and other industrial-size competitors can achieve.

And, though the long, golden and crunchy loaf known as the baguette is a ubiquitous icon of French life, the fact is that the French today are eating far less bread than their parents and grandparents did.

The status of France’s pain quotidien--daily bread--is such a weighty matter that the country’s leaders have gotten involved. Government regulations came into effect this year that regulate what sort of a business can advertise itself as a boulangerie, or bakery.

And when President Jacques Chirac in Paris received a delegation of bakers and pastry chefs bearing a galette des rois, or Twelfth Night cake that symbolizes the gifts of the Magi to the newborn Christ, he assured them of his “total” support.

Bread prepared and baked on an industrial scale, Chirac said disapprovingly, tastes “like anything one wishes except bread, or even a Christian food.”

But in a nation with nearly 13% unemployment and a stagnating economy, flavor is less important than price for many people. Between January and September of last year, an industry survey has shown, supermarkets and other big bakers boosted their share of the market from 28% to 33%.

In the meantime, bread consumption has declined. In the years after World War I, the average man, woman and child in France consumed nearly 1 1/2 pounds a day. By 1995, after decades of improving nutrition steadily decreased the dominance of bread in people’s diets, the intake had plummeted to about 5 1/2 ounces a day.

Alarmed at the downward spiral and the increasingly fierce competition from mass producers, independent bakers, toting their loaves, took to French streets to demonstrate last spring.

Now, government regulations have reserved the name boulangerie for those establishments that select their own flour, knead and ferment their own dough and bake it on the premises. That shuts out producers such as supermarket chains, where loaves are baked from batches of frozen dough made elsewhere.

Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the government minister in charge of small and medium businesses, estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 retail outlets will have to take down their signs.

The government, which is led by Chirac’s ally, Prime Minister Alain Juppe, also said it will be watching for stores that undermine independent bakers by selling bread at “abnormally low” prices. A baguette, functionaries at the Ministry of Commerce calculated, should retail for no less than 1 1/2 francs, or about 27 cents.

France’s independent bakers cheered the new rules. “When you turn out 25,000 baguettes an hour, it can only be a cheapened product of mediocre quality,” said Jean Cabut, president of the National Confederation of Bakeries.

But whether the consumer will notice much change is doubtful.

At Carrefour, a nationwide chain of giant stores selling everything from Camembert cheese to VCRs, officials said they will simply exchange their signs that say Boulangerie for new ones reading Boulanger, or baker, a term not affected by the regulations.

Bouvier, himself the son of a baker, was skeptical that the government’s actions will do much good. “It’s not the label that sells things. It’s quality,” he said.

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For the past eight years, at the bakery that he and his wife, Regine, 40, own and operate in a well-to-do neighborhood of Rennes, the administrative center of Brittany, the two entrepreneurial Bretons have been striving to combine tradition and innovation. They make bread over a wood fire in the old-fashioned way but market it with contemporary flair.

“I not only have to be a baker, I have to be a communicator, an advisor, a manager,” Bouvier said recently as his workshop filled with the delicious aroma of freshly baked loaves. “You not only have to know how to make it but also how to sell it.”

To woo and keep customers, Bouvier takes the time to advise them on which baked goods to serve with cheese or game and hands out a 16-page brochure heralding his most recent creations, such as bread with figs.

To counter the drop in bread consumption, the shop on the Place de la Rotonde, like many bakeries, sells quiches, pizzas and sandwiches at lunchtime.

Despite the accent on tradition, modern technology has simplified some tasks. A mechanical kneader can massage more than 200 pounds of dough at once. Automated fermentation chambers, which keep dough cool until the yeast is supposed to start fermenting, help Bouvier plan his sleeping schedule.

It is a laborious life all the same. On weekdays, Bouvier starts work at 2:30 a.m., directing a six-member staff of bakers, helpers and an apprentice. On Saturdays, his day begins two hours earlier. His wife tends the register. When they have a spare half an hour, they try to spend it with their three children.

Every day, the shop serves 700 to 900 customers. It is held up by the local bakers’ association as a model among the 500 independent bakeries in Rennes and the surrounding Ille-et-Vilaine department, where 800,000 people live.

Bouvier has two years of university education, spent six months at bakery school in Paris and four years as an apprentice, and has the highest of the three diplomas awarded to bakers in France. He devotes two weeks a year to workshops and classes.

“Each of us has a place; let each fight with his own arms,” he said of his bigger competitors. “The industrial baker has price. We have quality, service, selection, freshness, convenience.”

And, in Bouvier’s case, a contagious passion for his craft that a supermarket chain or large-scale manufacturer cannot match. When he speaks of bread, he evokes its ancient and symbolic role in Christianity, the history and tradition of France, the joys of the table, the moment when the dough begins to rise and seems to come alive.

“We give pleasure to people,” Bouvier said of France’s 35,000 bakeries. “No less a pleasure than they would get from going to the movies.”