First, Christian Constant created a towering sculpture in solid chocolate, dozens of stylized chocolate bars soaring in a turbulent Michelangelesque column skyward, out of an immense cracked chocolate egg. The Renaissance of Chocolate, he called it.
Next, in early August, he draped the doorposts of his store, along Rue d'Assas in Paris, in black as a sign of mourning.
The symbols reflected the mix of emotions these days among French lovers of chocolate who know their criollo from their gianduja, and relish the difference. The symbolism became ever more complex after the monument to rebirth, softened by Paris' withering heat, slowly leaned, like some Hershey's Tower of Pisa.
ILLUSTRATION: YU SHA
Why mixed emotions? In August, French connoisseurs of chocolate definitively lost a battle against the bureaucrats of the EU and what chocolate lovers view as their assault on chocolate through the pollution of vegetable fats.
"Despite all our picketing and our lobbying," Constant said, perched in the tiny coffee bar next to his store, "the chocolate industrialists cried bravo, and we were in mourning. Chocolate is no longer chocolate."
Effective Aug. 1, according to a EU directive, up to 5 percent of the cocoa butter in chocolate may be replaced by other vegetable fats and still be called chocolate.
The struggle, like all noble causes, was long and arduous. It began in the 1970s, after Britain sought entry into the EU and set as a condition the acceptance by the rest of Europe of a law that would permit the addition of vegetable fat, a customary practice in British chocolate.
For the French, it was an assault on the world's finest cocoa-based products, which for them meant French chocolate.
Indeed, the French love of chocolate is such that it has even become an affair of state of late. This week, the US Department of State spokesman, Richard Boucher, referred disparagingly to four European countries, including France, that met earlier this year for what he described as a little bitty summit to discuss defense policies more independent of the US. Boucher dismissed them as "the chocolate makers."
In France, that is a proud thing to be. Chocolatiers like Constant picketed European institutions in Brussels and Strasbourg. They argued from taste; they argued from global economics. If less chocolate were used, the economies of cocoa-producing countries like Ivory Coast would be ruined. Their efforts, alas, were ultimately undermined by a fifth column: France's own industrial chocolate makers.
Pure chocolate, Constant explained, consists essentially of cocoa, sugar and cocoa butter, which is extracted from cocoa beans and is very expensive.
"Vegetable fats are 10 time cheaper," he said. The big chocolate industrialists, he complained, like Nestle, Kraft Foods, the maker of Toblerone, and Suchard, "employ only one argument: price. You have to make it less expensive."
For their part, the industrialists are treading cautiously. A spokesman for Kraft Foods in France acknowledged it was a bit like genetically modified crops, which the French also detest.
"Even if they're authorized," he told the daily Le Monde, "the public reaction is such that for the moment, no one is going to use them."
For the French, it was an affair of the heart. According to a survey by the Sofres polling group, fully 30 percent of the French acknowledge a "faithful and passionate relationship with chocolate."
One of the faithful, and passionate, is Jean Colaneri, the secretary general of the Club des Croqueurs de Chocolat -- roughly, The Club of Chocolate Munchers -- an exclusive band of French chocolate connoisseurs who meet four times a year, taste new creations from famous chocolatiers and vote approval or disapproval with a show of hands.
"In Europe, in any case, habits of consumption are very different," Colaneri said, apologizing to a visitor that in the summer heat he had no chocolate to offer. "In Scandinavia, Denmark, England, it's a product of daily consumption. In others, France above all, there's a sort of tradition among the producers, it is part of a grand crafts tradition. There are certain specificities, pleasure, conviviality. Who does not like chocolate?"
Before retiring, Colaneri, 77, headed the association of chocolate producers, so he knows both sides of the fence. The Croqueurs, who publish a Zagat-like guide to French chocolatiers (they rank Constant with three of five possible chocolate bars), opposed the new directive, though he offered a compromise: distinguishing chocolate from chocolate products, thus maintaining chocolate's purity while allowing vegetable fats in such chocolate products as the chips in Toll House cookies.
He wonders aloud whether unscrupulous manufacturers might not stop at 5 percent, but add even more vegetable fats. After all, testing methods for fat content are highly unreliable.
"It's like the petroleum industry," he said. "It's complex chemistry.
"Concretely, some say, we're not protected from fraud," he went on. "And I cannot see Nestle or Mars risking fraud." What he fears are cheap imports, say, from Eastern European nations about to enter the EU.
Constant's faithful clients, of course, scoff at the idea of vegetable fats.
"I don't agree at all," said Jean-Marc Godard, 50, cradling a large chocolate cake he had just bought in the shadow of Constant's leaning monument. "Everyone would pay a little more to get real chocolate."
For Constant, it is the start of a slope as slippery perhaps as cocoa butter.
"Now we have evoked the problem of creating a precedent," he said, sadly. "If chocolate, why not 5 percent vegetable fat in butter? Or wine? You could add water, or colorant, and still call it wine."
"The poor European chocolate law," he said. "It's sad, because we're assuring a move toward a more synthetic world, in all domains."
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