5 - Champagne Capitalism: France’s Adaptation to Britain’s Global Hegemony, 1830–80

Summary

In 1882 Henry Vizetelly asserted that if the taste for the wine of Champagne had spread on a planetary scale, with aficionados from Africa to Japan, nowhere and not even in France had it acquired as prominent a status as in Britain. Indeed, its success ‘in oiling the wheels of social life’ among Britons was such that ‘its eclipse would almost threaten a collapse of our social system’. Not only had it become the ‘obligatory adjunct’ of countless formal public and private occasions, from the inauguration of new railway junctions to the breakfast of every respectable wedding, but ‘the part that Champagne plays in the City’ was fundamental:

The amount of business … transacted by the aid of the wine is incalculable. Bargains in stocks and shares, tea and sugar, cotton and corn, hemp and iron, hides and tallow, broadcloth and shoddy, are clinched by its agency. On the other hand, many a bit of sharp practice has been forgiven, many a hard bargain has been forgotten, many a smouldering resentment has been forgiven for ever, and many an enmity healed and a friendship cemented, over a bottle of Champagne.

Vizetelly, an editor of the Illustrated London News, was only half-guilty of journalistic exaggeration. Nearly nine out of ten (88 per cent) of the 20 million bottles of French champagne purchased in 1880 were sold outside France, and Britain was by far the largest market. Between 1860 and 1880, British sales represented between 50 and 60 per cent of the exports of Moet & Chandon, the leading producer of champagne, and it was in response to the demand of British consumers that the firm, along with its competitors, began to produce the drier types of champagne (sec, brut) that are today the commodity's most common iterations. Champagne was produced in France, and intensive advertising endowed the wine with supposedly French qualities such as a sophisticated joie de vivre and ‘sparkling’ wit, but Britons and other Anglo-Saxons were its chief consumers.

Champagne, this chapter shows, was typical of France's adaptation to nineteenth-century globalisation.