By 11 February the new measures had passed into law – the crisis had greatly accelerated the normally sluggish French legislative process. By 12 February the troops were being withdrawn and the local papers carried headlines on the new era: ‘after the crisis’. But they reckoned without two forces: the Aubois and the fraudulent merchants. The Aubois had been excluded by the new legislation, but, for reasons which remain unclear, a handful of parishes in the Aisne near Soissons had been included. The Aubois were naturally furious that this ‘purée d’haricots’ (literally ‘bean soup’) had been included while their wines had been excluded. On 16 March the prime minister had told the Marnais that ‘the definition has been carried out and well carried out’. That naturally triggered off mass demonstrations in the Aube and singing of the ‘Hymne des vignerons’ popularly known as the ‘Internationale des vignerons’. By 27 March the red flag was being hoisted at Bar-sur-Aube.
In the Marne the fraudsters had formed their own Syndicat de défense to protect the interests of the negociants en vins de champagne, and started their own paper – La Champagne Commerciale – which openly used the Aubois’ demands as a front for their activities. This disinformation sheet also spread the story that unemployment in Epernay would greatly increase if the regulations were adhered to. The vignerons made it clear that if the Aubois won their case through the use of force they would have to follow suit. The troops started to return. On 6 April the next cask of petrol was thrown onto the flames. The parliament’s agriculture committee, headed by a notable defender of the vignerons’ interests, Clementel, proposed that the Aube should be included in the new appellation of Champagne viticole.
There was mass rejoicing in the Aube, but the ‘Clementel compromise’ obviously increased the tension in the Marne. The fraudsters were looking for police protection; the Mayor of Epernay gave up, handing over his powers to the sub-prefect. Meanwhile the national government, headed by an obscure and short-lived prime minister, Munis, was overwhelmed. He called in the deputies from the Marne, reassured them, and launched a commission of enquiry. Clementel’s commission had proposed a separate appellation, ‘Champagne de l’Aube’. But this was altered to a request for a new definition, bringing within the appellation the whole of the ancienne province de Champagne which of course included the Aube.
The last straw came on 10 April when the National Assembly passed a despairing motion requesting the government to eliminate all ‘territorial definitions which sow dissension among the French people’. When the vignerons’ representatives returned from Paris they set up headquarters in the Café du Soleil at Epernay and prepared for battle. Their leader, Emile Michel-Lecacheur, was an unlikely figure, a staunch nationalist and reserve officer, whom no one could accuse of radicalism.
If Epernay was the headquarters of the competing forces, the front line appeared to be at Damery. The tocsin was rung, warning shots loosed off, the town council resigned en masse, the crowd assembled. Lagache, one of the vignerons’ leaders, called on the crowd to follow him. They refused, knowing this was his usual tactic to reduce their fervour. ‘At Cumières,’ they told him, ‘you will have to deal with troops immediately. Here there are three houses to sack.’ At Dizy, too, a notorious local fraudster had his premises smashed. But it was at Aÿ later that night that the vignerons first clashed with the troops.
Aÿ was desperately unlucky. The centre of the agitation had previously been in the outlying villages, while the main targets for the vignerons’ anger were in Epernay. Aÿ was stranded in the middle: it was important enough to justify defending but not enough troops could be spared to prevent the vignerons from assembling en masse. Later that night a squadron of dragoons charged the vignerons. A number were injured, none, luckily, killed. But the vignerons returned and sacked a couple more cellars.
The clash sparked off folk-memories in the army. Four years previously it had been called in to suppress, far more bloodily, a widespread revolt by growers in the Midi, and it was by no means anxious to repeat the performance – especially as the troops were mostly conscripts, often from winegrowing regions.33 Their orders, derived from the instructions issued after the disturbances four years previously, counselled merely ‘patience and energy’, whatever that was supposed to mean.
On 12 April Aÿ was increasingly tense. The dragoons’ behaviour had shocked even the bourgeoisie, who counselled the officers: ‘let them alone, they know where they are going’. But the crowd, reinforced by growers from up to forty other villages, grew steadily more restless. By 1 p.m. a solid column of 1,500 men started off for Epernay, an hour’s march away, with 500 more ready to join them at Dizy, just across the river from Epernay. This was what the authorities feared. The dragoons tried to charge. But the main road, the grandiosely named Boulevard du Nord, was an ideal spot for an ambush. It was – and is – almost a canyon, its walls formed by the premises of numerous merchants. The vignerons, secure behind the walls, hurled (full) bottles and stones at the troops. But the officer in charge refused to fire. There were, he explained, women and children in the crowds. This was ironic, for when he appealed to the crowd to disperse some of the men wavered and were only dissuaded by their more militant womenfolk.
The authorities, obsessed with the need to defend Epernay at all costs, refused to send reinforcements. The crowd got completely out of hand, and a drunken mob broke the basic rule which had previously ensured the popularity of the uprising: instead of confining their assaults to firms whose activities were notorious, they pillaged two innocent firms, Ayala and Bissinger (though even then they spared Bollinger). Local opinion was jolted into realizing that the troubles had got out of hand. Meanwhile the justices of the peace were peaceably holding their normal sessions at the mairie under the protection of the vignerons.
Order was finally restored by troops from Epernay, although hundreds of vignerons had infiltrated the town. In the afternoon the dragoons charged through the town, harassing and menacing the crowds with their swords and pursuing them along the pavements. But, largely thanks to Michel-Lecacheur, the vignerons remained calm. There were other disturbances: and, for the first and only time, the vignerons attacked the vines. They burnt the stakes supporting the vines of one particular house whose headquarters in Epernay were too strongly guarded to attack directly.
After that all was anticlimax, combined with an element of farce. On 13 April a group of vignerons confronted one notorious fraudster, saying, simply: ‘It’s the revolution, get out’. He agreed not to distribute any wine until the end of the year, and they went with him to the mairie to make the agreement official. Meanwhile some of the crowd returned to his premises, and were readmitted by his wife, clearly the realistic member of the family. They carefully broke the offending casks and bottles, leaving the premises intact. The rules of the war, so spectacularly broken the previous day, were now being observed again.
The aftermath was also an anticlimax. Although the troops remained around for much of the summer and the Champenois could claim that they had endured military occupation, the damage turned out to be more spectacular than important, a few thousand hectolitres of (cheap) wine, tens of thousands of bottles, and F150,000 worth of vines and stakes. Some of the firms (including Deutz & Geldermann) were privately insured. The other firms were ruined: because of the war they did not receive any compensation until after 1918, and then only in francs so devalued that they were almost worthless.
Many of the protestors were arrested – they were easy to identify because the manager of the Pathé Cinema at Epernay, who produced his own local newsreels, had filmed the riots. Severe sentences were handed out to those caught on the spot, but the leaders were not tried until four months later in the relative calm of a courtroom at Douai, 240 kilometres away. Although Michel-Lecacheur was triumphantly acquitted after a number of leading merchants had testified to the sturdiness of his character, other leaders were given a few, unjustified, months in prison. The vignerons themselves blamed the riots at Aÿ on outside agitators �
�� and indeed the leading anarchist paper, L’Observateur, had postponed one issue in February because the whole staff had left Paris to agitate in the vineyards. Yet these outside influences, even Bolo, were merely a good excuse to explain the unforgivable breach of the unwritten rules that terrible afternoon in Aÿ.
But it was not all farce. Three people had died: a butcher from Aÿ, his kidneys bruised in a police charge, died from his wounds; and before the trial two of the accused hanged themselves in their cells, providing mute, miserable, but conclusive proof that the demonstrators were simple law-abiding folk driven to desperation by strain and poverty and deeply ashamed that they should be treated as common criminals.
By June 1911, a mere couple of months after the riots, a compromise had been reached, although it did not reach the statute books until 1919. The appellation would be confined to the Marne – and the few parishes of the Aisne which had so infuriated the Aubois. They would have their own appellation, but it would be separate and obviously inferior. The Conseil d’Etat suggested two names, ‘Champagne deuxième zone’ or ‘Basse Champagne’, and the former was duly adopted. The next year the secretary of the growers’ organization, the SGV (Syndicat General des Vignerons), declared that ‘the future and the prosperity of Champagne is to be found in syndicats and cooperatives’.
TRUE PATERNALISM
Despite the tensions between growers and merchants, relations between the workers and their employers were surprisingly good. For the bigger firms pursued a policy of enlightened paternalism, most fully formalized at Moët. In the 1870s Vizetelly had described how:
A medical man attached to the establishment gives gratuitous advice to all those employed, and a chemist distributes drugs and medicines without charge. While suffering from illness the men receive half-pay, but should they be laid up by an accident met with in the course of their work full salary is invariably awarded to them. As may be supposed, so vast an establishment as this is not without a provision for those past work, and all the old hands receive liberal pensions from the firm upon retiring.
The two firms most notable for this paternalism – which echoed the social concerns being addressed by the Catholic church at the time – were Clicquot under Bertrand de Mun and at Moët where Victor Auban-Moët had financed a new hospital, a tradition emphasized later by Robert-Jean de Vogüé. Charles Perrier, who had become the mayor of Epernay, financed a number of good works including an orphanage for young girls and a kiosk for music in the public gardens. Other gestures included the construction of housing for the workers, and at least one chapel.
This kind of enlightened paternalism lasted longest at Pommery & Greno, a reflection of the aristocratic attitudes of the Polignacs. A militant trades unionist reminisced nostalgically about the Christmas festivities laid on by the Polignacs well into the 1950s and 1960s, complete with Christmas trees and presents for all the families involved. In the 1960s, while the Polignacs were still playing a squirearchical role, Catherine Taittinger,34 was building up the facilities for young children in Reims so effectively that even a communist mayor dared not remove her (even though he was a bitter political enemy of her husband’s family). ‘Fifty years ago,’ she says, ‘I would have organized fetes to buy milk for the children. Now I am involved in social management.’
The Polignacs earned their place in the history of Champagne as social rather than commercial figures. The archetype was Madame Pommery’s grandson Melchior, Marquis de Polignac. Following the early deaths of his father and his uncle, Madame Pommery’s only son Louis, he took over in 1907 as a young man and presided over the firm’s fortunes for over forty years. Two years after he took over he organized the world’s first important air show, ‘la Grande Semaine d’Aviation de la Champagne’ at which Bleriot reached a speed of 45 m.p.h. and Farman kept his plane aloft for just over three hours. (Not to be outdone, Ruinart offered a prize for flying the Channel.) Polignac’s contribution to healing the wounds left by the riots of 1911 was to hand over 32 hectares of the Butte Saint-Nicaise as a public park. The family also built a chateau, Les Crayères, in the park, which for decades now has housed one of Reims’ best restaurants. Polignac was a member of France’s Olympic Committee and in 1912, following a disastrous French performance in the Olympic Games that year, he added magnificent sports facilities to his earlier gift.
In the wider world the marriage of Madame Pommery’s daughter to a Polignac had set a final seal on the social acceptability of the winemakers. Indeed, the ‘Champagne girls’ were major social catches in Paris in the last quarter of the century. Madame Odette Pol Roger remembered how, ‘in my youth the smart champagnes in Paris were Pommery and Clicquot. I set about getting Pol Roger in there.’ In her seventies she still telephoned at least one friend to congratulate her on her daughter’s engagement and, incidentally, to ensure that the champagne served at the wedding would be Pol Roger.
WAR – IN THE CELLARS
The interlude of peace was short-lived. The outbreak of war in 1914 marked the start of forty terrible years. The figures tell the story. In 1913 the Champenois sold nearly 40 million bottles, a figure not reached again until 1956. In 1914, as so often before, the Germans invaded through the Marne valley. Reims was occupied for ten days before the tide was turned in one of France’s most heroic victories, the First Battle of the Marne. The fighting left Reims Cathedral battered by German shells – a warning of the new ferociousness of twentieth-century warfare. Miraculously, unbelievably, the harvesters managed to crawl out and gather a crop under the shells, a feat they repeated throughout the war. ‘Both vintages,’ wrote Patrick Forbes of 1914 and 1915, ‘were blessed by heaven; both are still drunk on very special occasions in the Champagne district today; both may be said to have the blood of France running through them.’ Tasting the still-delicious 1914 vintage, as I was once lucky enough to do, was naturally a deeply moving experience.
Forbes was not exaggerating. For four years the front line stretched along the foot of the Montagne de Reims – and within the city Pommery’s cellars projected into no-man’s land. For over a thousand days the Remois endured bombardments so regular that the authorities soon stopped reporting them. As time went on the main activities of the city were transferred to the cellars, resulting in an amazingly well organized underground life.
SHELTERS
The merchants’ cellars in Reims, a mere two kilometres from the German lines, were deep enough to be bomb-proof and, when warmed with electric or fuel stoves, proved by no means uncomfortable to live in. At first the refugees thought that their stay would be short but it proved to be a matter of up to four years. Eventually, even whole regiments of the army were lodged underground, as witness the carving of a Zouave – a North African serving in the French army – in the Jacquinot cellars.
The whole of the city took refuge, including butchers and other shopkeepers as well as six cows to provide milk for the children. People slept on mattresses beside the stacks of bottles, and as holes had been cut in the chalk walls between the cellars breadwinners could go to work, children to school, the sick to hospital, worshippers to church services – both Protestant and Catholic – like the early Christians worshipping in the catacombs of Rome, without once setting foot above ground.
Concerts frequently took place underground; once a whole opera was performed in Roederer’s cellars. There was little illness, even when the pumps were out of action and it became impossible to drain the cellars; in fact, many people were so content underground that they did not come up for months at a time, in certain cases for as long as two years.
When the great couturier Paul Poiret was caught above ground by shell-fire he threw himself ‘into a hole which led to a gallery which in turn led to a corridor then to a cave which was the cave of Clicquot. I found forty stout Frenchmen at table among hams, bottles of champagne and candelabra.’ Greeted by M Werle he was very drunk by 5 p.m. when the bombardment stopped.
In Epernay Maurice Pol Roger, the mayor throughout the war, stood
out as a beacon of solidity. He had always behaved more like a British squire than a French businessman, exuding a marvellously breezy confidence, and claiming that he confined his business activities to ‘between saying my morning prayers and the time I go to shoot’. He had already recovered from one bitter blow in 1900 when his cellars had subsided, tipping five hundred casks of wine and over a million bottles into the bowels of the earth. In 1914, in the absence of French authority, he printed his own money. During the few days the Germans occupied the town he firmly stood up to them – even though at one point they threatened to burn the town and shoot him. After the war a memorial to him was signed by every citizen who had stayed in the town.
When the inhabitants of Reims emerged from the cellars at the end of the war they found, in the words of Bertrand de Mun of Clicquot, ‘that there were only ruins, there was neither housing nor cellars, some of the cellars were flooded, equipment had either been dispersed or had simply vanished, and when a few brave souls did venture back on their own, they could not even find a roof over their heads.’ But Reims was rebuilt surprisingly quickly.
The structure of the champagne business had scarcely been disturbed by the war, although companies with German names had obviously had their problems. Deutz went so far as to put ‘French brand’ on its bottles and emphasized that its owners were French officers on active service. Mumm, who had retained his German citizenship, was interned in Brittany, and his firm was requisitioned by the government. After the war it was sold to a financial group led, for the next fifty years, by René Lalou who soon became an outstanding figure in the trade.
PEACE WITHOUT PROSPERITY
Peace brought with it another problem – a worldwide wave of anti-alcohol sentiment. Even before the war the Syndicat was complaining that ‘for some years our trade has encountered new and unexpected enemies: teetotallers and drinkers of water’. As early as 1910, when Finland was still a Grand Duchy within the Tsarist Empire, the Finnish Diet had voted in a law forbidding the import of any alcoholic beverages. There was worse to come. A number of countries, including Finland, discouraged drinking by restricting sales of alcohol to state monopolies. In 1920 the United States went completely dry, to be followed by much of Canada. It did not help much when Bertrand de Mun became the president of the newly formed international – but ineffective – League of the Opponents of Prohibition.
The Story of Champagne Page 12