For centuries, French literature has portrayed Paris as a magnet for heroes like D’Artagnan, who travels to the capital in search of adventure in The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas’s masterpiece.
Provincial life, on the other hand, has seemed to offer little other than the frustration endured by Emma Bovary, the bored housewife who is the heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s 19th-century novel, Madame Bovary.
Now, the French national narrative is being turned on its head by corporations seeking a public relations makeover by claiming to be rooted in the French countryside, according to a report.
The report, published by the Jean-Jaurès Foundation and the Terram Institute, two influential think tanks, accuses US fast food chains and online giants, as well as French retailers, of “terroir-washing” – an attempt to divest themselves of the stigma of globalisation by pretending to be attached to ancestral French lands and customs.
The report says they are exploiting the notion that terroirs are bastions of authenticity and sanity in an era buffeted by the sort of global madness that has gripped Paris.
The 64-page document written by Raphaël LLorca points out that the concept of terroir is so quintessentially French that there is no word for it in other languages. According to Unesco, it refers to an area whose products have “distinctive characteristics” resulting from “collective knowledge” and “applied practices”.
LLorca said the terroir had become an omnipresent marketing tool for companies such as Burger King, Airbnb, Netflix and the Carrefour supermarket chain after they spotted a deep yearning in public opinion for a return to an “eternal France” symbolised by small villages built around churches and serving local food.
However, LLorca said the advertising executives responsible for the campaigns, who were mostly cosmopolitan urbanites, were shutting the country in a conservative and restrictive vision of itself.
He said that “foreign brands, notably American, have developed a method of terroir marketing, producing often deformed and stereotypical representations of French territories. This raises the question of narrative sovereignty: who has the power to say who we are?”.
The report highlights Burger King’s French outlets, which sell hamburgers topped with protected designation of origin cheeses. There is an Auvergne burger, with Cantal or Fourme d’Ambert, for instance.
The move enables the clain to shed its reputation for providing “bad food [since] the flavours of the terroir are perceived as guarantees of quality”, the report says. “But it’s not because you introduce Fourme d’Ambert in a hamburger that you are from the Auvergne,” LLorca added.
The initiatives are sometimes controversial. Last year, Burger King launched a Basque burger, with cheese from the Pyrenees, chorizo and Espelette pepper sauce. Paxkal lndo, the chairman of the Basque Country Development Council in France, denounced the move as “intolerable”, adding: “We have no desire for people to associate the Basque Country with fast food.” He sought legal advice but was told that he had no power to prevent Burger King’s advertising campaign.
Airbnb is another group trying to capitalise on France’s go-local trend. In a move designed to shield itself against accusations of mass tourism, the platform has been trying to show that it is a pillar of small villages, which would attract no holidaymakers without it. LLorca said its advertising campaigns in France, featuring hosts in small rural communities, were a “model of terroir-washing”.
Netflix has joined the movement too, signing an agreement with Atout France, the French tourist board, to promote regions, cities and monuments that feature in series such as Emily in Paris.
LLorca said Netflix tended to highlight châteaux and other sites associated with the ancien régime before the 1789 revolution. He said the campaign was “monarchic and bling-bling”.
French firms are the same wavelength. All the country’s main supermarket chains have followed the example of Carrefour, which developed a line of products advertising themselves as regional specialities under the Reflets de France label three decades ago. The label says it “honours French cuisine”, with cider from Normandy, prune cake from Brittany and cod brandade from Nimes.
The report says that such labels perpetuate the fiction that French food remains anchored in local custom. Only 2 per cent of the food sold in supermarkets is of regional origin.