Food Fight

Seventy-nine years ago today, a gang of female protestors entered a small grocery store in Nazi-occupied Paris and began yelling and snatching the canned sardines on display. Arms loaded, they ran back outside and tossed the cans to the crowd in the street.

It was a sardine riot.

The Nazis had been starving the Parisians during the Occupation, just to show them who was boss. They denied civilians everything from beans to broccolini, potatoes to pasta, sausages to sardines. 

The sardine riot—an organized street protest against the shortages—resulted in the killings of two policemen and, in time, a wave of reprisals by the Nazi puppets who ran the Vichy government.

The obscure event is recounted by French studies professor Paula Schwartz in Today Sardines Are Not for Sale, new from Oxford University Press.

Schwartz describes the food riot as "banal," a "human interest story consigned to oblivion. 

"Even the human toll of the incident was sadly banal," she writes in the introduction. 

An eyewitness called the riot, "a brief scuffle of no importance."

But the story's banality makes it enchanting. 

There's no Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, FDR or de Gaulle moving history's levers; no great armies storming the beaches or fighting in the forests; just a group of hungry French housewives tossing canned fish.  

"Microhistories" like Schwartz's are among my favorite kind of books. 

Launched in 1983 by Natalie Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre, the microhistory craze goes on unabated. 

The best microhistories I've read have covered a crazy pageant of subjects: rock bands, businesses, hobbies, professions, books, paintings, voyages, meetings, battles, crimes, trials, disasters, animals, cities, and paleontological digs. 

One of my all-time favs, Small Town Talk, examines the history of Woodstock—the town, not the festival; another, Thunderstruck, recounts the invention of the radio. Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life describes the Smithsonian's plunder of a Canadian treasure. 

Microhistories, in William Blake’s words, try to "see the world in a grain of sand." They bring you so close to a subject you feel its breath on your face. Then, they pull back the lens. You get to look at the big questions scientists, psychologists, philosophers and theologians pose. 

Why, for example, do cultural moments always originate in villages? Why do we always credit thieves with history's greatest inventions? Why do we think only the strong survive?

Forty years in the writing, Today Sardines Are Not for Sale examines a 20-minute incident that, in a grain of sand, lets us see how Western Europeans—women, in particular—came to terms with Hitler's invading armies.

Through a 200-page close-up on “the women’s dem­onstration,” you learn what it was like not only to be a Parisian housewife, but a resistance fighter, a collaborator, a grocer, a cop, a spy, a snitch, a jurist, a Commie, a corrupt politician, and a Nazi occupier.

"As a protest action emblematic of its time and of its type, the affair presents an extraordinary opportunity to understand some signal features of everyday life in Paris under German occupation," Schwartz writes in the introduction.

But Schwartz's book, like all microhistories, does more than that.  

Today Sardines Are Not for Sale also asks several big questions. 

Why are most women's contributions throughout history forgotten?

Why is history itself a moving target?

And will Americans have to starve before they stand up to fascism once more?

The book is terrific. 

Try it out.