Martin & Marseille

Whenever you see a (German) caricature of a Frenchman (say, a picture where you can see several different nations and the illustrator wants to make it clear that it is showing normal people instead of celebrities), he'll be likely to carry a baguette. This long, white piece of bread really is a symbol for France, and completely justified.

I'm not just talking about eating habits, here. Having lived here for a while, I've really got the impression that the baguette is an integral part of French culture.

First of all, let's clarify what we're actually talking about. If you go to a German bakery and order a baguette, you'll get also get a long white piece of bread, but that's not the same. A good French baguette is more crunchy on the outside, nice and fluffy in the inside and it doesn't have any nutritional value whatsoever. Often enough, they're just freshly made and still warm.
Getting a baguette, especially in the mornings has a cultural significance equally important as getting fresh rolls has in Germany. Every morning, you can see small armies of French people walking to the next boulangerie and back with one or several baguettes, which are impossible to carry without displaying them. If you're feeling peckish, you can get a nice croissant too, but that's another (yummy) story.

So, imagine you've got a baguette and start eating it. As mentioned before, a French baguette barely qualifies as food and you end up eating more of what you put on the baguette (most likely cheese, of which there's an excellent choice here, and butter, probably salted). So, having a lunch that consists mainly of baguette and cheese is hardly a lunch, it's more like nibbling. That's typical: while a typical German meal is made of a few basic ingredients (e.g. meat or potatoes) and designed to be eaten up and to make you big and strong, a French meal is more like fiddling around with loads of bits of food. So you'd usually have a baguette with something else.

The story isn't finished, here. Here, there's only one place to buy a baguette, and that's your local boulangerie. And a boulangerie is basically a place that sells baguettes. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but my that's my impression: you can get croissants, pains au chocolat, pieces of pizza, other sorts of bread... but the number of sold baguettes is way bigger than of all the other stuff. I've actually gone in and ordered 'One, please' and got one baguette without further inquiry. So, in a boulangerie they chuck some flour and water together and sell it for around 65cents. There's so many bakeries around - so how do they make money?

Ah... another interesting cultural thing! As I said, thinking about baguettes can get quite fascinating (well, I find it fascinating). First of all, that last question doesn't seem to crop up in France. It's a typical German question, I believe. That's probably why we Germans are world champions in rationalising, which is such a nice word for finding means to fire people by replacing them by efficient machinery. The biggest European baking company, by the way, is Kamps, founded in Germany. They have huge bread factories and have optimised the distribution to all the Kamps shops - because Germans have this urge to re-organise and optimise processes. The French love their boulangerie, and that's why it's usually an artisanale - they make their own bread.

You could probably go further and further into French culture and always find parallels and connections to baguette. But then, you'd have to be German to actually bother.