Fast Food in France
Author(s): Rick Fantasia
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 201-243
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/658098 .
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Fast food in France
RICK FANTASIA
Smith College
There is a vantage point situated at the intersection of economic and
cultural sociology from which we can discern ever more clearly the
material dimensions of culture and the non-material dimensions of
goods. From this increasingly busy intersection, a recent focus on the
consumption process has drawn attention to, among other things, the
ways that consumption is mediated by the images, ideologies, the
desires, the "texts"that are inscribed within them, so that the consumer
often consumes more (or less) than he or she bargained for. Thus, all
industries that produce commodities for mass consumption are essentially "cultural industries" involved in circulating cultural goods as
much as they are in circulating economic goods, whether blue jeans,
motor scooters, or safari gear from the "Banana Republic."' More
pointedly, as Igor Kopytoff has asserted, "...the production of commodities is also a cultural and cognitive process: commodities must be
not only produced materially as things, but also culturally marked as
being a certain kind of thing."2
This perspective would seem to have particular salience when considering commodities that are exported abroad. If indeed the objects of
mass consumption "speak" to consumers above the din of mundane
use value, then in what language do exported goods speak? Do they
speak in a foreign tongue, or in a form of translation, or in the local
vernacular? And if it is true that goods are culturally "marked,"then
what are the images or ideologies, or representations imprinted on
goods when they cross national and national-cultural borders, and how
are these foreign markers "read"by local consumers and producers?
In this article I consider these questions by asking "what kind of thing"
the fast-food phenomenon is in France - a combination that, at first
glance, seems thoroughly oxymoronic in cultural terms. France, above
Theory and Society 24: 201-243, 1995.
? 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
202
perhaps all other nations, is known to take deep cultural pride in its
"patrimoine culinaire," which has been a central part of the national
identity since the early nineteenth century, when Grimod de la Reyniere published the first of his annual Almanach des Gourmands
chronicling the development of French gastronomy, a "way of life" that
was to become enshrined by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in 1825 in his
Physiology of Taste, a book of "meditations" on taste, the senses, the
preparation of meals, the social character of dining, and the philosophy
and aesthetics of food, the table, and the body.3
Fast food, with its suggestion of speed, standardization, and the homogenization of taste, would seem to represent the direct inverse of
French gastronomic practices, and thus the combination of the two has
been the subject of considerable speculation from a variety of perspectives. Some, including both analysts of French society and of American
popular culture, have considered France virtually immune to the
spread of standardized eating practices generally, and fast food in particular.4 Fast food is thought to have a limited appeal in France because, "for many French people there is an association that good food
is French and fast food is American and foreign and bad," as the sociologist Michel Crozier asserted.5
Others, such as Claude Fischler, have seen in fast food, not the
"menace of Americanization" or a threat to traditional French cuisine
but, an essentially benign reflection of the global circulation of culinary
cultures.6 For Fischler, the popularity of hamburgers and Coca Cola in
France is simply a particular manifestation of the same process of
"transcultural fusion" and "alimentary cosmopolitanism" that make
Italian pizza, Mexican tacos, and French croissants popular in the United States. Fischler's view is similar to that put forward by Jack Goody,
for whom the industrialization of food systems and the internationalization of taste is an uneven, but essentially inevitable process.7 For
Fischler, since fast food represents only about 5 percent of the commercial restaurant market in France (in contrast to 35 percent in the
United States) and since French versions of fast food, like "croissanteries," have been successfully exported to the United States and
elsewhere, the notion that American fast food represents a threat to
French culture is considered fanciful.8
But there is a third perspective, one that finds France not immune to
the standardization and "bad taste" of American-style fast food and
other homogenizing influences, but seriously endangered by it, a view
203
that is not assuaged by the fact that fast food is only a small portion of
the French restaurant market, or that French-owned croissant eateries
have found a market in the United States. It is a viewpoint that has
found perhaps its sharpest expression in the creation of the "National
Council of Culinary Arts" in 1989 by the French Ministry of Culture.
Headed by the President of the Chambre syndicale de la haute cuisine
francaise, the council is charged with "protecting the culinary patrimony" in a wide-ranging program that includes an inventory of the
major sites of French culinary heritage, the creation of a national day of
gourmandise, and the formation of a conservatory of culinary heritage,
which will promote research, expositions, and educational activities, as
well as create a museum of French gastronomy.9
Although it was not openly framed as a response to American fast
food, it is well known that Jack Lang, the former Minister of Culture,
was outspoken against what he has viewed as American "cheap commercialism" and the "ravages wrought by its popular culture throughout the world."'0 Indeed, when he was pressured by a journalist to
acknowledge the relation between the formation of the Council and
American fast food, Lang acknowledged, "I'm no fan of hamburgers,"
before going on to explain, more diplomatically, that the educational
efforts of the Council are a defense of the culinary heritage: "Our children will be better armed to savor the wonders of life, especially in this
beautiful country. France has developed the art of living which we all
need to rediscover and safeguard."" This is also the charge of the
Brillat-Savarin Foundation, created in 1986, to "defend the culinary
patrimony" against unidentified, but apparently potent homogenizing
forces as well.12
The defensive reaction advanced by Jack Lang and others would seem
to have a reasonably sound empirical basis, especially in relation to the
view of France as immune to fast food, for during the decade of the
1980s, the fast-food business expanded quite dramatically in France.
The number of fast-food establishments grew from 109 at the beginning of the decade, to 560 in 1982, to 1,629 in 1988, to 2,036 in
1991.13 Although these numbers are proportionately well below the
numbers of fast-food outlets that exist in the United States, and below
the numbers of several other European countries, they do suggest that
fast food is a rapidly growing and increasingly well-established industry
in France.'4 Nor does the defensive reaction seem unreasonable in relation to the argument that American fast food is simply one facet of an
international circulatory system within which France (and the French
204
exporters of fast food croissants) are equally a part. While French fast
food companies exist in the international market, none of them has
even begun to approach the scale of international operations managed
by McDonald's or Burger King, the two largest fast food chains. The
most active internationally of the French companies, La Croissanterie,
currently has fewer than 100 restaurants outside of France, while
Burger King has over 1,200 and McDonald's over 5,000 outside of the
United States.15
This article considers the arguments advanced above, but in somewhat
different terms. The underlying assumption here is that while fast food
has introduced a new way of eating in France, it is a phenomenon that
cannot be properly understood if treated exclusively or primarily as an
issue of foodways. I am less concerned here with the debate over the
relative permeability of the French culinary tradition, than with the
question of "what kind of thing," in cultural terms, fast food has been
for the French. This focus requires attention to both the fast food
industry and fast food consumers, both of whom are simultaneously
producers and consumers of a cultural object. Specifically, I seek to
locate the "place" of fast food in France by examing three separate, but
related matters: a) tracing the development of the fast food industry in
France and estimating its appeal for industry producers; b) situating
fast food and its consumers within French society; and c) considering
fast food outlets as distinctive cultural "places."
Because fast food is identified abroad as a distinctively "American"
commodity, its cultural representations are likely to be strongly suggestive of what is viewed abroad as a distinctly "American"aesthetic, way
of life, or experience. By considering its embodiment in commodities
such as fast food, we are compelled to move toward a general consideration of what is often called "Americanization,"a somewhat nebulous
term denoting the process by which societies develop, or upon which
are imposed, certain cultural and economic traits viewed as characteristically 'American."16 The focus on one industry and its cultural
representations is meant to provide a manageable empirical basis for
isolating and identifying the key elements of what would otherwise
remain a somewhat amorphous cultural and economic phenomenon.
While attempting to give form to the phenomenon of "Americanization," one risks the mistake of minimizing the complexity and contradiction of cultural process by treating the development of fast food in
France as a simple case of the defilement of a "pure" cultural forma-
205
tion. French culture (and all national cultures for what matter) is the
result of several hundred years of cultural change, appropriation,
expansion, and domination.17 What appear to be indigenous foodways
may actually be cultural imports, like the cafe, whose French cultural
identity is relatively recent, having been imported in the seventeenth
century.18Though the notion of "national culture" is problematic and
must therefore be treated somewhat tentatively, the important issue is
whether the identification holds some salience for consumers and producers, those whose actions and conceptions fix imported goods in
their proper cultural "place."19
The industry in France
A range of social factors has contributed to changes in French eating
habits over the past several decades, creating a basis for the fast-food
market. Industry studies and social research identify the following factors as important: 1) the growing number of women in the paid labor
force, currently 46 percent; 2) increases in the spendable income of
adolescents; 3) a weakening of family ties placing less emphasis on
family mealtimes; 4) the expansion of the 'journ6e continue" in the
workplace (the working day without extended meal breaks) creating a
need for both fast food and workplace catering systems; and 5) increased urban traffic congestion, which prevents workers from travelling home and back at midday, forcing workers to take their meals in
the city.20
These factors have not only permitted the growth of a market for
American-style fast food but have contributed to other changes in
French eating habits over the past two decades. They have helped
spawn a large institutional food industry (the establishment of canteens
and cafeterias along highways, in workplaces, schools, and hospitals)
and have contributed to the rapid growth of 'Agro-Alimentaire," a massive joint agricultural and food-processing industry engaged in the
preparation and distribution of frozen and pre-prepared foods.21
Between 1969 and 1972 American chain companies in a variety of service industries (including hotels, commercial cleaning establishments,
tax preparation and employment agencies, and fast food
companies)
began to expand their operations abroad in response to what were perceived as rising labor costs, saturated markets, and increased competition at home.22 As part of this wave of overseas expansion, the
206
McDonald's Corporation introduced its outlets in Paris in 1972, which
is reported by the industry as having been the first such fast food chain
in the country.23American-based companies developed the fast-food
market in Europe generally, and continue to dominate it despite the
entry of many large European-based food companies into the
market.24
The first McDonald's restaurants in France were managed by a local
franchisee who, along with the operation of twelve outlets, also owned
the license to develop the French market as a whole.25 After several
years the company initiated a legal challenge, contending that the franchisee was mismanaging his outlets, and this ended in a successful
lawsuit in 1982 that brought the French franchise back under corporate control.26McDonald's, with the largest number of restaurants of
any single company in France (323), and with a view of France as the
"key to its European strategy,"did not expand beyond those first twelve
outlets until it had won its 1982 lawsuit.27This delay allowed a number
of French companies to move into the market and play a role in establishing the "fastfood formula," setting the stage for the rapid expansion
of the industry in the 1980s.
During the first years of its growth, the fast food industry exhibited the
developmental characteristics of what has been called "organizational
isomorphism."28 Between 1972 and 1976, French entrepreneurs
opened fast food hamburger restaurants closely modelled on the
McDonald's formula. With American-sounding names like FranceQuick, FreeTime, Magic Burger, B'Burger, Manhattan Burger, Katy's
Burger, Love Burger, and Kiss Burger, these businesses not only sold
hamburgers and other American foods produced in assembly-line
fashion, but packaged, displayed, and marketed them as American
goods in restaurants whose designs and internal spatial symbolism borrowed heavily from the American model. With a multi-million dollar
advertising budget, much of it spent on television ads, and with the
financial ability to secure restaurant sites in central locations,
McDonald's has probably been the most visible of all the fast food
companies in France, but there actually have been more French-owned
hamburger outlets in France than McDonald's and Burger King combined (in early 1989 there were a total of 777 fast food hamburger outlets, only 159 of which were owned by the two American firms).29
Beginning in 1976, several French companies began to apply the fast
food formula to traditional French food products, mostly brioche,
207
croissants, sandwiches on baguettes, and pastries. These "viennoiseries," as they are called, are considered fast food outlets because they
conform to the industry's definition of fast food as "packaged foods,
sold at a counter, at relatively low prices, that can be consumed in place
or taken away."30This definition does not include two critical aspects
of the industry: the standardized nature of the business and the chain
structure in which two or more establishments at separate locations
have a common ownership (or a franchise) relationship and in which a
considerable degree of standardization is maintained from company
headquarters.31
Though viennoiseries sell foods that are traditionally French, and have
brand names that retain a French identity (the names of the most
prominent are "La Brioche Doree," "Aubepain," "La Croissanterie,"
"Pomme de Pain," "La Viennoiserie"), they also embody characteristics
in production, marketing, and restaurant design that resemble fast food
hamburger restaurants. France is one of the few European countries to
have responded to the expansion of American fast food by successfully
adapting traditional national foods to the fast food formula, but this is
still a relatively small sector of the industry in France.32For example, of
the fast-food restaurants that are French owned and operated, 48 percent are distinctly American-style hamburger restaurants, while 29
percent are an adaptation of the fast-food "formula"to the production
and sale of traditional French foods.33
In 1982, when the McDonald's Corporation regained control of its
French franchises it began planning for a decade of rapid expansion
within the French market. It grew from 18 outlets in 1984 to 150 in
1991, to well over 300 by 1995.34 This rate of expansion required
substantial investments in real estate and advertising, posing a problem
for the newer and smaller French fast food companies to develop and
to retain a place in the market. Thus, a concentration of the French fast
food industry began in 1983, with the acquisition, merger, or parcelling
of many independent companies with one of the larger corporate
"groups"in the food industry. Over the course of the 1980s these large
groups, relying on the financial resources provided by their basic or
historical position in either food processing, commercial catering, or
hotel chains, moved to diversify by entering (from a horizontal or vertical position, largely through mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures)
various catering markets.35Thus, the growth of the fast food industry in
France has taken place as part of a more general, and continuing
"oligopolisation" of the food processing and catering industry. An
208
editorial in the trade weekly L'Hotellerie pointed out that the requirements of competition, heavy investment, labor intensivity, shrinking
profit margins, and the increasing necessity of international expansion
are factors that now reserve this sector exclusively for the largest industrial groups.36
In contrast to the corporatized nature of the emergence of the fast food
industry in France, the ideology of the small entrepreneur and "democratic capitalism" were central features of the industries' self-definition
as it developed in the United States. Ray Kroc, the founder of
McDonald's, was a heroic symbol in the business press where he was
portrayed (and often portrayed himself) as the personification of the
self-made millionare.37Kroc, who still figures prominently in American
business folklore, was a salesman who had sold paper cups, Florida
real estate, and the six-pronged "Multimixer" milkshake beater, and
who had consequently spent two decades travelling the country and
observing the growth of convenience foods and their production systems. In 1954, he bought the McDonald's name from two brothers who
ran a successful group of roadside hamburger stands in Southern California, with a plan to develop an assembly-line system of inexpensive
hamburger restaurants and to sell franchise rights to those willing to
buy the use of the name, the methods, and the marketing process.
Within four years, Kroc was opening his one hundredth restaurant.
The franchise system of distribution and ownership provided a powerful impetus to the growth of the fast food industry in the United
States.38The "franchise"(whose root is the Old French word francher,
meaning 'to free" from servitude) was a method of distributing merchandise to licensed distributors, which expanded rapidly in the 1950s
as a reaction to the growth of corporate monopoly. In the context of
corporate expansion, the franchise seemed to be "the last frontier of
the independent businessman," and Ray Kroc, with a now-legendary
promotional zeal, sold the franchised drive-in restaurant as "the answer
to an American dream.... We're teaching people how to become successful small businessmen."39 Franchising is a method of achieving
rapid growth and penetration into a market, by relying "on the capital
or borrowing capacity of the franchisee, as well as the franchisee's
knowledge of local markets and real estate situations."40And in the
context of the cold war, by creating the appearance of an opening in an
increasingly corporatized economy for newly "enfranchised" small
entrepreneurs, the franchise also embodied a timely ideological message of individualism, free enterprise, and entrepreneurial capitalism.4'
209
But franchising has not been the predominant method of distribution
for the fast food chains in France. For nine of the largest fast food
chains operating in France in 1990, only "Manhattan Burger" had a
higher percentage of franchised outlets than McDonald's, and this was
on a much smaller base of operations (see Table 1). Generally, as
McDonald's has expanded in the French market, it has sold franchises
to its restaurants in the provinces, while retaining its (by now less risky)
outlets in the Paris region as company-owned enterprises.42
Table 1. Franchising of fast food outlets (1990)
Brand name
No. of franchise units
Total units
%
McDonald's
Quick
La Brioche Doree
Manhattan Burger
Pomme de Pain
105
19
18
10
5
4
4
0
0
150
132
109
13
36
17
22
89
47
70
14.4
16.5
76.9
13.9
23.5
18.2
0
0
Aubepain
Burger King France
* La Croissanterie
* La Viennoiserie
Sources: the data were extracted from 1990 franchising figures for commercial restaurants in Revue Technique des Hotels et Restaurants, "Dossier restauration commerciale,"
No. 496 (March 1991). * The last two listings are drawn from 1988 data published in
Revue Technique Des Hotels Et Restaurants, No. 473 (March 1989).
While the fast food industry in the United States developed in response
to the post-war corporatization of American business, the industry in
France has been shaped in a different context. In the 1970s French
firms, encouraged by the post-war successes of the American fast food
"giants," tended to develop in isomorphic fashion. Within just a few
years, many of them were absorbed into one or another of the larger
commercial restaurant groups, providing them with a stronger financial
structure in which to operate and compete with the now much larger
and more capitalized American fast food firms, particularly
McDonald's. It would be ironic if McDonald's, one of the world's
largest corporations, maintaining centralized control over thousands of
franchise distributors and company-owned restaurants, and known,
above perhaps all else, for a rigidly standardized formula of operations,
were still viewed as an organizational embodiment of democratic capitalism, individualism, and small entrepreneurship that so animated its
early development in the United States. But the growth of the fast food
210
industry in France has not been accompanied by, nor has there been
much of a structural basis for, an equivalent ideological representation,
for early-on it was drawn into the vortex of established industrial
conglomerates.
But this is not to say that fast food has not brought a strong degree of
innovation to the French service sector, for the American companies
and their French adaptors offer something very important: a proven
method of controlling labor and cheapening its cost, as the basis for a
mass restaurant market. Of course, industry accounts of the fast-food
phenomenon rarely mention the hyper-rationalization of labor in their
accounts of "pioneering service innovation." For example, in John F
Love's corporate biography of McDonald's, he points out that as the
company expands abroad, it is "exporting America's well-developed
systems for conveniently serving consumer needs," and that in Europe
it has created a mass restaurant market where "there were virtually no
family restaurants, and thus for the middle class eating out was always a
special occasion."43What he fails to mention is the production process
upon which "mass markets" are based.
As Barbara Garson has shown in her study of the application of computer technology in the workplace, the technological rationality of a
McDonald's outlet is so well-developed that it takes only fifteen minutes to train a new worker, who can then achieve maximum efficiency
in one half-hour, making it "economically feasible to use a kid for one
day and replace him with another kid the next day."44Such routinization is due to a range of innovations designed to minimize human
judgment in the preparation of the product. The food in a McDonald's
outlet is prepared by the use of timing mechanisms, beeping signals,
premeasured quantities, and computers submerged in the cooking oil
that fry foods to uniform specifications. In place of the numbers of the
cash register, the keys are labeled "lge. fries," "big mac," "med coke,"
etc., so that it is not necessary for the cashier to know the actual price
of any item, and machines are programmed to "suggestive sell," so that
dessert items, for example, will light up automatically to remind workers to suggest dessert to the customer who has not ordered it.45And the
overall accounting system for a McDonald's restaurant is computerized, allowing managers "...to determine immediately not only the dollar volume for the store but the amount of each item that was sold at
each register for any given period..." while computerized tracking systems "...monitor all the activity and report with many different statistical breakdowns."46 In essence, the fast-food labor process combines
211
contemporary computer technology with a strong managerial commitment to "Taylorism,"(the systematic separation of the mental from the
manual components of work). This gives management in the service
sector the freedom to deploy labor as flexibly and as cheaply as possible, while providing the means to monitor its productivity effectively.
Although McDonald's has had to co-sign the national labor agreement
that prevails between the fast food industry and the French trade-union
movement (in order for state-subsidized meal coupons to be able to be
redeemed at its restaurants), as the chief of labor relations at
McDonald's has asserted, "unions are inimical to what we stand for and
how we operate" and in the United States McDonald's has maintained
"a powerful union resistance movement.... Of the four hundred serious
organization attempts in the early 1970s, none was successful. As a
result, McDonald's stores today are strictly nonunion shops."47 Although few fast food workers are union members in France, they have
more protection than fast food workers in the United States, since individual union membership is not the sole basis for union protection (a
union-negotiated national agreement is in effect for much of the industry). In France, most of the fast food companies, including McDonald's,
are signatories under the name of the main employer association
S.N.A.R.R. (Syndicat National de lAlimentation et de la Restauration
Rapide) to the national collective agreement on fast-food work, with
three French trade-union groups. The agreement concerns wages and
working conditions and includes much of what would be contained in
the collective bargaining agreement between an individual company
and a union in the United States.48
The difference is that in the United States fast-food workers have no
such contract and relative to their French counterparts, are relatively
unprotected (which partly explains why fast-food workers have won
recent union struggles against McDonald's in France).49 On the other
hand, because union membership and participation is low in France,
particularly in the fast food industry, which relies upon part-time and
student labor, the unions there have much less "clout" than they might
have otherwise in negotiating a strong national agreement.
In Europe, the catering industry overall has tended to depend
upon
unskilled, low paid, female, and part-time labor, according to a study
commissioned by the European Community.50 The study predicted
that the increasing penetration of the fast food industry will serve to
"accelerate the substitution of labour-intensive craft-based food pre-
212
paration by industrialised mass production methods" while "occupational structures will become increasingly characterized by unskilled,
low paid, part-time jobs with high rates of turnover" (p. 49). Indeed,
since the early 1970s, the part-time labor force in France has doubled
and has reached almost a quarter of the female labor force.51
Although there is no conclusive evidence that the French-owned fast
food companies have been able to replicate perfectly the McDonald's
system, the main management guide to opening a fast-food outlet in
France strongly recommends a level of computerization comparable to
that employed by McDonald's.52 Moreover, a study of the labor process at FRANCE QUICK, the second largest hamburger fast food company in France, with half as many outlets as McDonalds, indicates that
the leading French-owned companies have borrowed heavily and successfully from the McDonald's system.53 The study reported virtually
the same hyper-rationalized system of production that others have
documented for McDonald's.
Generally in France, those recruited to work in fast food outlets are
young. In the nineteen fast food restaurants that I visited for this study,
I estimate that about 90 percent of the workers on duty were under 25
years old, with an average age of about 20 years old. The managerial
staff generally seemed older, with an average age of between 30-35
years. These estimates are close to the data provided on the workforce
at FRANCE QUICK, where the average age of the workforce is
reported to be 21 years old and the restaurant managerial staff between
26 and 28 years old.54 Students were favored by management because
they were viewed as being "more available" to work varying hours and
part-time, while the unemployed were less favored because of the view
that "they demand too many hours and then when they find something
better they go." Still, the average length of employment was reported to
be three months at this company.
A reliance on part-time labor is an important element of the fast food
industry that represents a crucial departure from policies practiced in
traditional restaurants and, more generally, in the allocation of labor in
France. According to one informant with forty years of experience in
the industry, the staff in most traditional restaurants works at least a
full-time 39 hour week (sometimes with a several hour break after the
midday meal) while some restaurants, particularly the "grand restaurants" maintain several full-time shifts over the course of a day. With
reference to the deskilling of the restaurant industry represented by fast
213
food, this recently-retired chef/restaurant owner emphasized the extent
to which restaurant work in France has always been viewed as a career
and a profession: "In France, restaurant work is a profession, and not
only for the Chef - the cooks and the servers attend restaurant schools,
work as apprentices, and earn diplomas."
A recruitment flyer obtained at the opening of a new McDonald's
prominently noted who was being recruited: "If you are from 16 to 25
years old," "We are proposing: Part-time employment with hours
adaptable to your availability,"with one of the main benefits listed as
"the possibility of continuing your studies while working." The kind of
"flexibility"that has seen the proportion of part-time labor swell to 25
percent of the labor force in the United States has also been introduced
on a wide scale in France, and the fast food industry has been one
important source of the change.
It has tended to be the French-owned hamburger chains that have used
part-time labor to a much higher degree than other types of Frenchowned fast food chains, suggesting that the "organizational isomorphism," practiced in relation to production systems and marketing
strategies, has also extended to labor allocation.55So hamburgers whose
chains dominate the fast food industry generally, whether or not they are
considered "American things" by the consumers who buy and eat them,
for French industrialists have served as vehicles for developing an
'American-style" labor force and an "American"system of labor control.
The social space of fast food in France
Prior to the boom of the fast food industry in the 1980s, the hamburger
was still largely considered a novelty in France, sold at such fashionable
places as "Le Drugstore" on the Champs-Elys6es, an object of "snob
appeal and well-filled pocketbooks.... the favorite of the smart set,
from Vatican ambassadors to movie stars."56As late as 1979, a restaurant-industry trade magazine could still write that: "Fast food
remains a purely American product, something new, somewhat snobby
and very Parisian, so much so that the last fashion show by Daniel
Hechter included a buffet catered by McDonald's."57 Though hamburgers and high fashion might seen incongruous to Americans, in
France in the 1970s it represented a "taste of the other" as Paul
Moreira put it, somewhat exotic and mildly transgressive, an attempt at
a reverse snobbery in response to what Baudrillard has characterized
214
as the "sickly cultural pathos," and the "fetishism of the cultural heritage" of the old France.58
The perceived American culinary taste for simplicity and informality
were regarded as fashionable because, in part, several decades of
change in French society had promoted "American"styles and methods
of modernization and those whose aspirations or actual social position
were based on those forms embodied the kinds of dispositions that
facilitated their movement in that emerging world.59 Thus Luc Boltanski has described the post-war formation of a "new bourgeoisie" of
professional managers, not bound by the traditional values of the old
families, whose manners were "a mixture of the asceticism of the partisan fighter and easy-going American-style' simplicity."60Less bound
to tradition and the classical bourgeois manners of the "old lions,"
these "young wolves," schooled in the techniques of marketing, advertising, and the needs of a global market, sought to distinguish themselves through a "rhetoric of technocracy and the 'new-bourgeois' lifestyle, associated at work with internationalism - the executive with the
briefcase at the airport and at home with 'light' food, 'modern' furniture
and a passion for films rather than opera."61Boltanski noted that the
style of L'Express, the preferred magazine of "les cadres," was "renowned for its disconcertingly simple lunches, consisting of a sandwich
or an airline-style meal on a tray" (p. 106). This is not to say that it has
been French managers who have been the primary consumers of fast
food, but merely to suggest that the "break" with traditional cultural
practices that took place was bound up with American forms of
modernization generally, and that this allowed for a reframing of traditional bourgeois lifestyles, providing a degree of social legitimacy to
what were considered more "modern"forms of eating practices.
Ironically, just as the French new-bourgeoisie were turning away from
"haute cuisine" as an outmoded symbol of status, in the United States,
the middle and upper classes were increasingly turning to "continental
cuisine" as a mark of distinction: "By the late 1960s, and early
1970s.... from Bangor to San Diego, cities whose finer restaurants had
been endless variations of the steak, lobster, and roast beef theme
began to sprout restaurants called LAuberge'..." restaurants generically
dubbed by Calvin Trillin, "Maison de la Casa House."62
This ability of fast food to embody seemingly varied meanings and to
be used differently in the United States and France during roughly the
same period seems consistent with those theoretical perspectives that
215
view culture as "publicly available symbolic forms" that represent a
"tool kit" of symbols and other cultural components "that are used to
construct strategies of meaning" by social groups.63 Moreover, following Bourdieu, the distinctive uses of cultural practices can be
viewed as methods of positioning in social space, and therefore are
"bound up with the systems of dispositions (habitus) characteristic of
the different classes and class fractions."64
In 1979, just prior to the rapid growth of the fast food industry in
France, the restaurant trade magazine, Neo Restauration published a
series of articles explaining (to its industry readership) the key factors
in success of fast food in the United States. The magazine instructed its
readers that "a good brand image establishes fast food not as 'a restaurant of the poor' but a restaurant like others, just more rapid, cleaner,
and less expensive," while noting somewhat curiously that "the wealthiest states," California, Texas, and Michigan, have the greatest number
of fast food restaurants in the United States.65 But although fast food
has held a certain allure for affluent Parisians, its expansion has depended on a more popular consumption base.
Although I cannot accomplish an elaborate class analysis of fast food
consumption here, industry marketing-studies provide a rough indication of who, in social class terms, have been the consumers of fast food
in France.66In a recent marketing study commissioned by the fast food
employers association, one category groups senior managers, industrialists, and professionals together, and in 1989, this group made up
only 7 percent of the customers in fast food restaurants (see Table 2A).
This suggests that fast food outlets are not a significant attraction for
the bourgeoise, but neither are they inhabited by the proletariat either,
with manual workers ("ouvriers"),who constituted over 40 percent of
the labor force, representing only 2 percent of the fast food consumers
in 1989.
In relation to general food consumption, Bourdieu has noted that "the
boundary marking the break with the popular relation to food runs,
without any doubt, between the manual workers and the clerical and
commercial employees" (see Distinction, p. 180). A similar boundary
evidently extends to fast food as well, for white-collar workers
("employes") who make up 21 percent of the labor force, constituted
the largest portion of fast food customers in 1989 (32 percent). A relation between class position and dispositions toward a taste for fast food
is evident, but it is likely that "space" is a factor as well, as white-
216
Table 2. Profile of fast food consumers (1986 and 1989)
Fast food
overall
% 86/89
Hamburgers
% 86/89
Viennoiserie
% 86/89
professionals (8.7%)
Middle managers, artisans (16.4%)
White-collar employees (21.2%)
Manual workers (42.4%)
* Retired, unemployed
* Students
Farmer/farm laborer
8/7
18/19
30/32
5/2
/8
/32
1/0
9/6
20/20
18/26
7/3
/6
/40
1/0
6/9
16/17
35/39
3/2
/12
/19
0/0
B. Gender
Men
Women
44/49
56/51
60/56
40/44
29/41
71/59
A. Category (% in workforce)
Senior managers, industrialists,
*
Categories employed in 1989 study only.
Sources. Marketing data derived from studies commissioned by SNARR for the 1986
and the 1989 fast food exhibitions, "Salon de la Restauration Rapide," Paris; labor force
data is from "L'Evolution des effectifs Salaries En France Depuis 1954," in Problemes
Economiques, No. 2088 (31 August 1988) pp. 2-7 (no author listed). The percentages
for occupational categories are incomplete because only portions of the labor-force
data are compatible with the categories used in these marketing studies.
collar workers would tend to work in offices, banks, and retail stores in
or near the centers of cities where fast food outlets have been concentrated, whereas manual workers, who have company cafeterias available in the large establishments, some of which are subsidized, would
not. When middle managers (together with self-employed artisans)
who together represent 19 percent of fast food consumers, are added
to the white-collar category, the result is a large urban workforce
accounting for over 50 percent of fast food consumption.
The differences between men and women as consumers have changed
in the past several years, as the data indicate that between 1986 and
1989, 5 percent more men and 5 percent fewer women became consumers of fast food overall, while the gendered character of the two
main types of fast food establishments became somewhat less pronounced (Table 2B). Viennoiseries, which sell traditional French goods
(sweet pastries, croissants, coffee) in chain restaurants that embody
elements of the fast food formula (food sold at a counter, to be taken
out or eaten on the premises, standardized baking processes, high
217
lighting levels, large and brightly-colored menu displays, etc.) had a
female/male clientele ratio of 71/29 in 1986, which was reduced to
59/41 in the 1989 study. One reason why viennoiseries may have been
so clearly "gendered" as women's places, is that traditional cafes, particularly in local neighborhoods, have often been male preserves and,
as industry representatives have suggested, the new viennoiseries
seemed to offer a cleaner, brighter, and safer environment for women.67
Probably the most prominent social characteristic of fast food consumers in France has been their age. Above all else, fast food is an
industry that has relied largely on young adults over the age of 18 years
(the data reported here refer to paying consumers and not to those
consumers, like children, who are brought to the restaurant and whose
meals are paid for by others). In 1986, a marketing study conducted for
the fast food employers association found that 59 percent of all the
paying customers were under the age of 24, and 81 percent were under
34 years of age.68
Although the percentages dropped somewhat by the time of the 1989
study to 50 percent under 24 years and 78 percent under 34 years, fast
food still seems to depend significantly on a youth market (see Table 3).
This is most pronounced in the fast food hamburger restaurants, where
83 percent of customers are under 34 and 57 percent are under 24 (in
contrast to the viennoiseries, where the percentage are 72 and 42,
respectively).
Results of interviews with French adolescents between the ages of 16
and 19, suggest that "McDonald's" and fast food hamburger restauTable 3. Profile of fast food consumers by age level (1989)
Age
% Fast food
overall
% Hamburgers
% Viennoiserie
Less than 18 yrs
18-20 years
21-24 years
25-34 years
35-44 years
45-54 years
Over 55 years
5
18
27
28
12
4
6
7
21
29
26
11
2
4
3
13
26
30
13
7
9
Source: Data contained in fast food marketing survey commissioned for SNARR for
1989 "Salon International de la Restauration Rapide, Paris.
218
rants" are viewed as distinctly 'American" products and that viennoiseries do not have the same kind of cultural appeal. Nine groups of
four or five were each asked to note those commodities (or categories)
that they considered distinctly "American."Only those that the members of each group could agree upon were finally listed, and a final
group of seventeen American "things or commodities" was agreed
upon by all the members of at least one group. So, for example, all the
members of eight out of nine of the groups agreed that "fast-food hamburger places" or "McDonald's" (both terms were employed interchangeably) were specifically "American things or commodities." No
other commodity received as clear an identification as "American,"although "Coca Cola" and "Military and Space Technologies" were
agreed upon by seven out of nine groups (interviews were conducted
two months after the Gulf War ended), and "blue jeans" and "big cars"
were agreed upon by five groups. When queried about their experiences of eating at fast food outlets, no one offered the example of, or
mentioned, viennoiseries as a form of fast food, something that industry marketing studies have discovered as well. For example, in an analysis of "the image of fast food," as part of a larger study of the fast food
market, it was concluded that "the viennoiserie occupies a place apart"
in the mind of consumers and that "in sum, the viennoiserie is not considered the same as the concept of fast food."69
Part of the reason why young adults and white-collar workers frequent
fast food restaurants is that they are inexpensive, relative to traditional
restaurants. The average price of a meal in a fast food hamburger restaurant is between $5-7 (about half the price of a plat du jour in a caf6
or brasserie), while the average meal in a pizzeria is about $15, and the
average cost of a meal in a "good" restaurant (that is, a one "toque"restaurant, not a four "toque" luxury restaurant) was found to cost
between $50-75, with prices differing by region.70 That younger
adolescents are not as highly represented in fast food restaurants as
those over 18 seems largely a function of spendable income, which for
those between 15-18 years, reportedly amounts to an average of $30
per month, but rises substantially to between $200 to $400 per month
for students of 18 to 24 years old, and $400 to $1600 for young
workers.7
In important respects then, the taste for fast food among "fastfoudeurs"
(the industry term for fast food consumers) would seem to reflect,
among those with a limited means to purchase restaurant meals, a certain "taste for the necessary" as Bourdieu has phrased it. But the acqui-
219
sition of a taste for fast food has, as we have seen, been uneven across
those groups, and thus we must continue the investigation toward a
consideration of the cultural aspects of fast food to discover those
aspects that render it "tasteful" to some but not to others. This entails
an analysis of the cultural representations embodied in fast food consumption and the connections between the taste for fast food and the
"taste"for a certain lifestyle.
This is not as farfetched an effort as it may seem, because the marketing strategies of the fast food companies themselves tend to be strongly
bound up with the classification of the consumer population on the
basis of certain conceptions of lifestyle. For example, the industry has
appropriated the term, "decale" to refer to those forward-looking "cultural rebels" whose consumption patterns are in opposition to the
dominant culture (while, "recentre" refers to those with conservative
cultural tastes, or "valeurs stables"). According to an industry explanation, "d6calage" is seen to represent about 20 percent of the population, and refers to young, affluent, urban dwellers who are studying
beyond the "bac" or have recently completed their studies. They are
described as "level-headed and prudent in appearance" though "their
conformity masks a deep psychological marginality.... With their rejection of tradition, and their search for novelty at any price, most of the
new products target the d6cale through a media that strongly resembles
them in style."72
In an industry whose existence depends, to a considerable degree,
upon a population willing to break with traditional habits and conceptions, the marketing strategy oriented toward "youth as d6calage"
demands that the commodity be marketed in a way that is not shy
about transgressing traditional cultural forms. In an interview, the
president of the fast food employer's association noted that as fast food
was introduced in Paris, it was especially "popular among the young as
an expression of rebelliousness" and that "... those Parisians who were
drawn to it on that basis then are now having children and are not
bound to traditional ways ... in the 1980s fast food has made inroads in
the provinces, and here [again] it is the young people who are the main
customers."73
In both fashion and lifestyle, "decalage" is bound up closely to images
of the United States, a place that for many in France and elsewhere is
viewed, both positively and negatively, as an embodiment of the future.
Somewhat ironically, the "fastfoudeurs" of the last two decades repre-
220
sent the generational younger sisters and brothers (and increasingly the
children) of the 1968 generation of revolutionary students and workers
who rebelled in a very real sense against American imperialism, police
repression, bureaucratization, and traditional hierarchy. They are
essentially a generation of apolitical post-1968 cultural "rebels"who, in
the 1970s as fast food began to establish itself in France, were increasingly drawn to American cultural iconography in the form of dress,
music, slang, film, and television. In this period, traditional French
ways were eschewed in favor of James Dean posters, T-shirts and
sneakers, Aretha Franklin, and the "Happy Days" television program,
thus providing an ironic reply to the revolutionary graffitti of May '68:
"Etes-vous des consommateurs ou bien des participants?" [Are you
consumers or participants?].74
When asked why so many young French people dress in American
styles (blue jeans, sneakers, sweat shirts, baseball caps, etc.) the students interviewed responded in terms of cultural texturing: "it is loosefitting, casual clothing"; "it isn't serious clothing"' "the clothing is more
fun, it is very colorful and relaxed";"the clothing is a fantasy."Generally, in discussing American clothing styles, their characterizations centered around the informality, relaxed ("d6contract6")style. In contrast,
they pointed out that the most well-known French styles tend to be
haute couture, such as the creations of designers like Dior, Cardin,
Gauthier, and Kenzo. Such clothing would be much too expensive for
these adolescents, impractical for everyday wear, and viewed as clothing for adults, as they noted: "French fashions are too expensive and
not for young people" and "We prefer something different, something
new, modern, and different, plus French fashions are too expensive."
What is important for our purposes is the extent to which the nature of
the appeal of American clothing styles approximates the taste for fast
food.
The fast food outlet as an "American"place
When considering the cultural differences between American fast food
and traditional French eating practices, the differences in food preparation perhaps come to mind most readily. The basic difference is
not simply the fact that fast food is served rapidly though, for the term
bistrot itself is derived from the Russian word for "fast"(bistroi), while
caf6s, cr&pes stands, and street vendors selling merguez sausages, together represent what could be considered existing forms of French
221
"fast food." The time, the attention to detail, and the knowledge and
appreciation of local culinary traditions that have given food preparation its particularly well-known artisanal character in France are often
thought of as those elements that would mark fast food, whose preparation entails none of these characteristics, as "foreign"to France.
As in all restaurants, the experience of visiting a fast food outlet is a
ritual experience where one finds, as in all rituals, "highly stylized,
repetitive, stereotyped events, occuring in special places, including costumes and set sequences of words and actions."75For the French, the
ritual behavior in a fast food outlet is relatively new, representing a
departure from the formalized rituals governing traditional French
cuisine. Originally published in 1978, Kottack argued that the growth
of American fast food was "likely to be retarded" in France, because
although it might be able to provide a comfortable "sanctuary" to
American tourists when visiting Paris, the French could not "...be
expected to act in a culturally appropriate manner at McDonald's."76
And in an essay on the "cultural decontextualization" experienced by
Dutch patrons in a McDonald's in the Netherlands, Peter Stephenson
observed that "there is a kind of instant emigration that occurs the
moment one walks through the doors, where Dutch rules rather obviously don't apply and where there are few adults around to enforce
any that might."77Stephenson found a loss of cultural "self" evidenced
in such things as the homogenity of the atmosphere ("youth serving
youth"), an "American form of presentation of self" (the "friendliness"
required of counter workers), and the expectation that Dutch people
will queue in front of the counter in an orderly way as Americans do.
My observations in fast food outlets in France are similar to those
made by Stephenson in the Netherlands. Most particularly, in France
too there appears to be much less of a concern for the sort of queue
that would be recognizable in the United States, one that extends
straight back from the counter of the fast food outlet. In July 1991, I
spent several hours at two separate times of day observing and taking
notes at the opening of a McDonald's in a city of 75,000 people in
eastern France. I chose the setting because it was the first and only fast
food restaurant in the city, reasoning that for at least some of the customers, this would be their first encounter with the fast food ritual.78
Indeed, queuing behavior differed substantially from the way the fast
food ritual is practiced in the United States. Customers would tend to
gather all along the counter, with little respect for the integrity of the
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cash registers as line markers. Of course, there is no obvious reason
why anyone would automatically assume that cash registers serve as
anything other than cash registers, as there is nothing that explicitly
indicates that a line should be formed in front of them. Consequently,
the workers at the counter, for whom it was presumably their first active day on the job, spent a good deal of effort trying to herd customers
over to their particular cash register "station."
During the busier of the two periods that I observed, an assistant manager (uniforms are color coded) placed herself about four or five yards
in front of the counter to serve as a "guide,"answering occasional questions from customers and directing traffic to available places at the
counter. The fact that someone was assigned this task suggests that the
company anticipated some initial difficulties for those unfamiliar with
the ritual process, and indeed there were occasional moments of chaos
on the first day of business in this McDonald's restaurant.
One of the most basic aspects of fast food is the nature of "service."The
French are accustomed to going to restaurants to be served, but much
of the fast food process is "self-service," which is a relatively recent
practice in France. Supermarkets, which represent a widely used form
of self-service, only became widespread outside of Paris in the 1970s,
and though they appeared in the 1960s it wasn't until the 1980s that
large numbers of French people began to eat regularly in self-service
cafetarias.79Although self-service might seem a reflexive (and trivial)
set of activities for Americans, to those not used to "participating"in
the service process, and for whom employees and customers are expected to have distinct roles, activity that essentially blurs the role distinction between customer and employee is an activity that "marks"the
setting as different in ways that are not necessarily trivial. One can
imagine that a Parisian cafe might quickly go out of business if it suddenly posted a new policy of self-service, requiring customers to serve
themselves, bus their own cups and glasses, etc. Because fast food is
perceived differently, as new, as American, as modern, it tends to be
treated as a different kind of place.
When groups of French adolescents were asked in interviews which
features of fast food restaurants appealed to them, "self-service"
emerged consistently as a prominent aspect of the experience. Their
comments ranged from: "You can choose your own place to sit"; "you
don't have to wait to be served"; "each person orders directly from the
cook"; and "you simply pay individually, so you don't have to bother
223
dividing up the check among everyone." These adolescent consumers
enjoy the fast food experience because "it is easy," as several of them
noted, and this seems largely because it is a place with few adult interlocutors. There is no maitre d'h6tel to pass, no waiters to engage when
ordering, or while being served, or between each course, or to have to
pay when finished. Although several agreed when one student noted
that in a fast food restaurant he missed the "human contact with the
waiter and with other customers in the restaurant,"for most, the minimal contact with adults was viewed as one of the most positive features
of going to a fast food restaurant.
Most also agreed with the related point that was offered by several respondents, that they enjoyed eating in restaurants where "there are no
rules."While there certainly are "rules"to eating fast food, they are different from the rules governing traditional restaurants. When asked to
elaborate, they often mentioned elements that refer to the lack of normal (adult) expectations that are imposed when eating in a traditional
restaurant: "the tables are not set, they are clear"; and "there are no
utensils and you can eat by hand"; or, "you can take the food in your
hands and eat it just like that" (mimicking eating with two hands).
Eating by hand was characterized as "fun" and "different,"as was the
practice of having "each thing wrapped individually."Also, in contrast
to traditional restaurants, one "can just choose to eat one thing, one
doesn't have to order several courses," and one can eat at any time, for
there are no precise meal times as there are in traditional restaurants.
For these young people, self-service, eating by hand, tables without
place settings, etc. represent an informality that sets the experience
apart from more traditional ways of eating.
Generally, the respondents viewed that fast food outlet as "an informal
place, a place for young people" as one commented. This respite from
the adult world, with its rules and proper manners, is expressed too, in
their comments about what they enjoy about the visual and aural
atmosphere of the fast food outlet, as well as what makes it distinctly
American: "You really feel the American atmosphere - the noise, the
bright colors, the dress of the staff"; and "I like it because you can talk
loud and nobody minds"; and, "It is loud and colorful, it isn't ordered";
"There is more agitation, more noise."
Such characterizations recommend the fast-food outlet as a childlike
world of playfulness, untroubled by the rules governing the adult world
of the traditional restaurant. When McDonald's opened in Paris, the
224
company consciously attempted to market it as a "family restaurant"
because, according the President of the French division of McDonald's,
"Traditionally,children hated stuffy French restaurants as much as the
restaurants hated having the children." This focus was an attempt to
stake out a particular place (niche) in the market for food, rather than
simply a particular fondness for children, for as the President noted,
"When we started positioning ourselves, there was no other restaurant
in France that went after families."80 Although it is possible that
McDonald's has been more successful in attracting families than the
other companies have, general marketing research has shown that only
8 percent of the customers of hamburger outlets tend to visit "in families," while 51 percent visit with friends or co-workers, and 42 percent
visit alone.81 But while they may or may not consume as families, the
point is that the childlike atmosphere of the fast-food outlet (with children's "play areas"; toys, puzzles, and other special promotions for
children; oversized models of cartoon characters, in addition to the
examples mentioned above) is not unconnected to a marketing strategy
that seeks consciously to offer a contrast to "stuffy restaurants."
In its television advertising campaigns, McDonald's is explicit about
representing itself as an embodiment of rebellion against tradition. For
example, an ad running in 1994 consisted of a child's voice reciting
proper table manners ("Don't put your elbows on the table"; "Don't
play with your food"; "Don't eat with your fingers"; "Don't act like a
clown"; "Don't make noise at the table"; etc.), with different images of
people eating in a McDonald's corresponding to each edict (i.e.,
... eating with their elbows on the table; playing with their french fries;
with their hands; joking around; etc.). The child's voice concludes the
ad by announcing "that's how it goes at McDonald's." And in 1993
another ad showed a torpid-looking wedding procession making its
way through a small French village, out of which a young boy (looking
particularly bored) suddenly bolted down a side street, followed by his
father, into a McDonald's where all was bright, lively, and colorful, in
what amounted to a reversal of the Pied Piper story (with the adult
being lured by the child).
Indeed, the adolescents that were inteviewed clearly enjoy the experience of eating in fast food restaurants because of the way the experience differs from that of traditional restaurants. But this does not mean
that they reject all traditional eating places. For example, when asked,
most of them agreed that the fast food restaurant would not (and
should not) take the place of the caf6 in France.82 They maintained a
225
clear distinction between fast food outlets and cafes. Even though they
can buy coffee there, and even though theoretically they could probably stay for as long as they liked in a fast food outlet, as one student
noted, "We go to the caf6 to drink, not to eat, and in a cafe we can sit
and talk for a long time or a short time, and this isn't possible in fast
food places"; and another pointed out that "you just wouldn't linger for
a long time in a fast food restaurant like you would in a caf6" or "a caf6
has another atmosphere, for after meals; you stay there for a long time,
but you don't in fast food restaurants." Although some thought that
"fast food outlets are sometimes used as a cafe, when you have nothing
to do you can go there to spend time," most resisted even considering
them as belonging to the same category of place; that the fast food outlet has an "atmosphere that is just different from the cafe."
Ironically, in adapting the fast food formula in France, to at least a certain degree the industry has narrowed the differences between cafes
and fast food outlets. For example, in a cafe the mobility of chairs
allows for a certain conviviality in social interaction, because places at
the table can be constantly added to accommodate more friends or
acquaintances as they arrive. In the initial period of the industry in
France, the seats in fast food outlets were normally bolted to the floor,
as they are in the United States, limiting the sort of social interaction so
much a part of the traditional cafe. The reasons for the change weren't
mentioned, but the McDonald's marketing manager noted the "freestanding chairs" as one of the only "deviations to the traditional formula" that it had made in the French market, and in the press release
announcing the opening of the first company-owned Paris outlet, the
Company explicitly noted that the new restaurants' 135 seats were
"movable."83Despite this concession from McDonald's, the adolescents interviewed did not seem to be in danger of confusing cafes and
fast food outlets. When queried, all the members of her group of five
readily agreed when one student replied, "No - it's different, the caf6 is
more human - you can feel the presence of people; there's a warmer
atmosphere there, people are not in a hurry,"while someone else then
added, "We know the barman, the waiter, the customers," in reference
to the "human contact" that one student had particularly missed in the
fast food outlet.
Although other factors are important to consumers as well, the atmosphere is perhaps particularly significant in France, where fast food is an
imported commodity, because much of the cultural "language" that is
spoken is spoken through the symbolic characteristics of the internal
226
space, which serve to recommend it as a "different,"as a "genuine,"and
in this case, as an "American"place. This would perhaps explain why a
marketing report on fast food consumers in France found that 32 percent considered "atmosphere" one of the main reasons why they preferred a fast food outlet to a bistrot, caf6, or traditional restaurant,
while an earlier study in the United States reported that less than 2 percent of American fast food consumers found "atmosphere" to be one
of their main reasons for selecting a fast food outlet.84 A prominent
element of the internal atmosphere of a fast food restaurant is the
lighting intensity and for this study the lighting levels were measured in
various types of eating establishments in France (cafes, traditional restaurants, and fast food outlets) as a way of gauging the differences in
atmosphere of fast food outlets and more traditional eating establishments.85The average lighting intensity, measured in "lumens,"for caf6s
and traditional restaurants ranged from 121 to 320 lumens (average of
the lowest and highest intensity), whereas the average range in fast food
outlets was 440 to 1000 lumens (median figures were 110-260 in cafes
and restaurants, and 480-850 in fast food outlets). Thus, in the case of
lighting levels alone, a distinctive internal atmosphere is apparent in
fast food outlets relative to traditional restaurants, bistrots, and cafes.
Lighting in the fast food outlet is accentuated further by the wide,
multi-colored menu board that rests above the counter on which, illuminated from behind, are displayed the products and prices, a visual
symbol unique to the fast food outlet in France.
In contrast to the relatively understated and indirect lighting patterns,
color schemes, and surface textures in traditional eating places, in the
fast food outlet the light from fluorescent lighting panels is reflected by
the shiny, stainless steel surfaces of the counters and by the lightcolored walls, creating an extremely brightly-lit environment, which
along with a strong feeling of "spaciousness" (a point made by many of
those interviewed) marks the fast food outlet as a distinctive "American," and therefore "un-French"place.
The bright, bold colors of the employees' costumes represent an
important feature of what in France is viewed as characteristic of the
American fast food restaurant. When asked in interviews about the
features of fast food outlets that recommend them as "American,"
respondents often mentioned the costumes. As one noted, "It is very
different from what we're used to, with the workers dressed in ridiculous costumes, with a little cap and a name plate on their chest," an
issue that workers reportedly complain about regularly, according to a
227
study of a Parisian fast food outlet.86 From the industry point of view,
the clothing worn by workers is meant to be "the factor par excellence
which will have a direct effect on the clientele" by providing "an indispensible strand of fantasy to suit the appearance of young and active
personnel"; but is also designed to "differentiate the personnel according to their capabilities."87In considering the extent to which this sort
of clothing adds to the distinctive image of the fast food outlet, and
marks it as a different environment, we can perhaps imagine the
response that might be provoked in a traditional cafe or restaurant
were the waiters to be suddenly required to wear brightly-colored,
somewhat absurd costumes. It would likely provoke a strike among the
waiters and open ridicule by customers.
The activities of the employees are as much a part of the visual field in a
fast food outlet as the brightly-colored costumes worn. In traditional
restaurants, food preparation largely takes place "backstage" and the
food is typically only seen at the moment when it is served. In the fast
food outlet the view from in front of the counter allows the customer to
view the motion and activity of workers in moving the food from one
place to another, while the labor performed and the food itself are left
largely invisible to those at the counter. That is, the visual emphasis
rests on the efficiency of the process rather than on the food, which is
essentially only viewed when it is unwrapped.
It perhaps should be noted that this is not entirely true of the french
fries, which are displayed after being scooped into packets by a device
that strictly controls the amount of fries dispensed, while intentionally
creating a "free, overflowing cornucopia look."88 The "fry scoop," a
technology designed to create an illusion of plenty, is perhaps an apt
symbol for the cultural politics of fast food in France, whose success
has been based, in large measure, on the selling of a very un-French
world of brash hyperbole, an unselfconscious promotional style, and
an illusory, but no less real sense of "participation."
The founder of McDonald's understood this when he asserted that
"when you are in this business you are in show business."89In its rituals
and atmosphere, an important element of the fast food appeal in
France has been its "spectacular" elements. Just as it may have seemed
for Americans in the 1950s, fast food in France has embodied important elements of what Robert Venturi and his colleagues termed "a
pleasure zone," or a place where lightness, the quality of being in an
oasis separated from the surrounding environment, a heightened sym-
228
bolism in the internal space, and an ability to engage the visitor in new
forms of role-playing, make for a distinct, and special experience.90
The fast food outlet seems indeed to represent a "pleasure zone," but
one that also has a distinct cultural association as "American."In interviews, adolescents who frequent fast food outlets explained that not
only were they "fed up with formal things and fast food places are
youthful, a change in one's way of life," "relaxing and easy," and "cool,"
but that McDonald's and other fast food places specifically represented
"an American way of life.... hamburgers and coke is a way to live like
an American" and "allow you to feel the American atmosphere," or "it
is an American experience of friendliness."91For many, their first experiences with fast food were tantamount to tourist experiences: "The
first time I went it was like I was visiting the United States, but after that
it became more normal, but it is still interesting."
The design of the fast food restaurant is not a conscious attempt to
recreate an American world, like the social harmony of small-town
America projected by Walt Disney or historical recreations like Colonial Williamsburg.92 It simply is not necessary to attempt to create
anything other than a "genuine"fast food outlet to create "an American
atmosphere," for the basic characteristics (the lighting, the color, the
noise, the sense of space, the informality, the participation) are what is
seen to be representative of an American place and these are the characteristics that, taken together, constitute much of its appeal as foreign,
as playful, as entertainment, and as "la mode."
Although the experience of fast food has been akin to a tourist experience for many French people, particularly as it was being established as
an industry in the 1980s, fast food companies sought to place their
restaurants as close to the spatial and cultural "center" of France as
possible. In France, the "center" has meant Paris, and the fast food
industry was concentrated there in the first years of its rapid take-off.
Thus in 1988, out of the 1,629 outlets in France, 634 (or 35 percent)
were located in the Paris/Ile-de-France region, with the rest spread
through twenty other regions. But fast food has been an urban, not only
a Parisian phenomenon, in France and those regions with large numbers of outlets are regions that tend to include large urban centers.93
So, whereas the natural habitat of the fast food outlet in the United
States has been the suburban periphery, along the "commercial strip,"
in France it has been urban. Only in the last two years have outlets been
located in the urban periphery in large numbers.
229
And within the urban landscape, outlets have not been distributed randomly, but have tended to be concentrated in the city centers. In 1982,
75 percent of the outlets were located in the city centers, and though
they have begun to expand into new enclosed urban and suburban
shopping centers, the city center remains the prime site for companies
that can afford the real-estate costs.94 When it began its expansion in
the French market, McDonald's, reportedly the world's largest owner
of retail real estate, bought some of the most expensive real estate in
Paris for its outlets (on the Champs-Elysees, the rue de Rivoli, the
boulevards St. Michel and St. Germain, etc.) and as it expanded into
the provinces, it located outlets in the historic (and cultural) centers of
cities.95 This was the basis for a recent controversy over the visual
"blight"on the Champs-Elysees caused by the presence of the fast food
outlets, and represented a symbolic struggle over the place occupied by
fast food in both spatial and cultural terms.96
The notion of a "pleasure zone" was used to describe the internal space
of the fast food outlet in France, but promotional hyperbole can mark
the external features as well, particularly as newer outlets are increasingly appearing outside of the city centers. For example, a new
McDonald's outlet was opened in 1991 on the main road leading into a
small city in Eastern France, the first fast food chain in that city. As one
approached by car, one could see from almost one-half mile away the
large McDonald's name sitting atop a pole, perhaps 150 feet in the air.
As one neared the restaurant, a massive brightly-colored clown's head
sat atop the roof of the restaurant (a head of "Ronald McDonald," the
size of a large truck); and the seating area outside of the restaurant was
dominated by bright red and yellow canopies over the tables and a play
area with children climbing on and over the large constructions. Visually, there was little about this vision that would suggest a restaurant in
French terms. Although perhaps more familiar in the United States, in
France such visual hyperbole would have been more readily associated
with an amusement park than a restaurant, and in cultural terms, as the
market was established, it may have been closer to the former than to
the latter.
Conclusion
Perhaps the most basic point that has been advanced in this article is
that "fast food in France" has had less to do with food than it has with
the cultural representations of Americanism embodied within it, a con-
230
sideration motivated by Ulf Hannerz's observation that, with the globalization of cultural processes, "the origin of new cultural items is becoming a core aspect of the meanings they have to us."97 In the case of
fast food, the origin is embodied in a social encasement, and it is this
medium that is the most telling part of the message. But I would
emphasize that this medium is not a disembodied set of cultural meanings, or ideologies, or beliefs, but is closely bound to a set of marketing
practices and social organizational forms that represent the basis for
the global diffusion of fast food. We are thus offered a glimpse of the
ways in which "the imagination has become an organized field of social
practices" within global cultural processes, as Appadurai has signalled.98 Although fast food is a means of marketing such things as
hamburgers, milkshakes, and croissants (foods that are unambiguously
consumed as nourishment), if we were to focus attention on the food
items themselves, particularly as they are exported across borders, we
would tend to miss an important part of the cultural inscription that
marks the fast food phenomenon. But food is also marked in cultural
terms, as the industry has recognized.
By the early 1980s when American companies, particularly McDonald's had decided to expand aggressively overseas, France was
not expected to be any more or less culturally resistant to fast food than
other foreign markets had been. These other markets had included
Japan and other countries in the Far East, where McDonald's had succeeded not only in introducing hamburgers, but had had "an even more
fundamental challenge of establishing beef as a common food."99 On
the other hand, in Germany, McDonald's sought to market the hamburger as a new food item, as "the most revolutionary idea since the
beefsteak."'l0 This was ironic, since the hamburger (originally a Russian food) had actually been brought to Hamburg by German sailors
visiting the Baltic ports, and later (in the early nineteenth century) was
exported by German immigrants who settled in Cincinnati in the United States as a "German" delicacy.101Thus, the hamburger, "originally"
German (via Russia), was "invented,"a second time (in the early 1970s)
not as a traditional German food, but as a "new,""revolutionary,"and
"American"food innovation. By the time it entered the French market
in the 1980s, McDonald's basic policy was not to adapt to foreign cultures, but to change the cultures to fit McDonald's.l02
For the French producers of fast food, who had followed carefully the
growth and profitability of the industry in the United States, fast food
was seen as an innovative and adaptable system that could provide
231
those companies who had the resources to compete with large American firms, with a potentially lucrative expansion of the restaurant
market. For the industrial producers of this new cultural form, the fast
food phenomenon was part of a larger process of restructuring and
diversification within the French commercial restaurant industry that
has seen increasing domination by large industrial food groups. The
changing ownership structures within these groups do not indicate
strong cleavages between the ownership of fast food outlets and traditional restaurants, thus supporting the notion that fast food, both from
the perspective of consumption and production, is only partly a matter
of foodways. For example, Eliance, the restaurant branch of the Elitair
industrial group, owns two "Maxim's"gastronomic restaurants at the
same time that its owns two Aubepain fast-food viennoiseries and has
entered into a joint venture with Burger King to open several outlets;
and Groupe Fabien SAAL owns two Magic Burger outlets, along with
its twelve "higher-scale"restaurants; and in addition to its ownership of
53 fast-food viennoiseries, Groupe Holder owns several bistros and
restaurants.'03
Not only does overlapping ownership indicate that fast food is not
necessarily viewed as a significant threat to traditional restaurants, but
the efforts to "defend the culinary patrimony" against standardization
and homogenization are interlaced with seemingly contradictory interests as well. For example, the president and one of the founders of the
"Fondation Brillat-Savarin" is Gerard Pelisson, who is also co-president of the industrial group, ACCOR, which has owned numerous fast
food outlets, including ten "Bun et Burger" and five "Freetime" hamburger outlets and three "Brioche Dor6e" viennoiseries. Pelisson would
not be expected, as president of the foundation, to go too far in discouraging the fast food market. Moreover, as the son of an industrialist
who studied engineering at MIT and management at the Harvard Business School in the 1950s, and later spent eight years as a manager for
IBM Europe, he would not seem likely to display a militant hostility
toward American commercial culture. And the foundation, whose four
honorary members are some of the most famous chef/restaurant
owners in France (Georges Blanc, Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel until he
died in 1990, and Gaston Len6tre) is supported by the CASINO
group, owner of the several FRANCE QUICK hamburger outlets, as
one of its main corporate benefactors.''4
We cannot conclude, based on this evidence, that there has been no
conflict, symbolic or otherwise, within the commercial restaurant
232
industry over the development of the fast food sector. Indeed, a
struggle to limit the displays of fast food outlets on the Champs-Elysdes
was spearheaded by a committee whose president is chief of a commercial restaurant company with ownership of twenty-four Parisian bistros.
But while the evidence is not powerful either way, the existence of overlapping interests between sectors would seem to suggest either that an
informal accord exists between the culinary establishment and the fast
food sector, or a realization that neither represents a dire threat to the
other because, in market terms, they are sustained by a different consumer population, and in cultural terms, that they are concerned with
fundamentally different activities, a view advanced by the President of
the Academic Culinaire de France (in an interview for this article).
But combined with the analysis of the process of consumption provided earlier, these points would seem to raise questions about the perspective that views fast food as a threat to the culinary patrimony and
that has mounted a defensive response. As I noted earlier, the main
public-policy initiative in response to fast food has been the creation of
the National Council of Culinary Arts by the Ministry of Culture (one
member of which, incidentally, is the secretary-general of the ACCOR
Group). The creation of the council is indicative of what Diana Pinto
labelled the "protectionist and Colbertist reflexes" of Jack Lang's Ministry of Culture to the spread of commercialized American popular
cultural forms in France.105
Although Pinto finds no basis for what she calls Lang's "ridiculously
inflated language assailing the United States, its cultural imperialism
and influence" (p. 223), if the growth of the fast food industry is at all
indicative of the strength of commercial American cultural forms (and
for Lang it was considered emblematic), then in contrast to Pinto, I
would suggest that such attempts to defend the "patrimoine culinaire"
against standardization, homogenization, and routinization, would
seem to have a degree of merit. But if, as I have illustrated, the basis of
the success of fast food has less to do with the taste for food than it
does with conceptions of Americanism and their representation in
American cultural forms generally, then monuments to the culinary
patrimony are not likely to be very effective in influencing cultural
practices.
This is especially so given that the fast food boom took place in a period during which the "language of productivism," the market, and the
entrepreneur-as-hero were cultivated by the governing Socialist Party,
233
for whichJackLangwas a very visible representative.106
Attemptingto
defend traditionalculturalforms against"cheapcommercialism"while
simultaneouslyencouraging"marketforces"as the only logical arbiter
of humanaffairsis a losing game, since "cheapcommercialism"is the
verygoal of mass consumermarkets!
By promoting protectionistreactions to commercialAmerican mass
culture,while preachingthe religionof the market,the FrenchMinistry
of Cultureessentiallyfound itself respondingin ways that echoed the
sorts of traditionalistcriticisms of American culture made by European intellectualsin the interwaryears, such as Luigi Pirandello,who
feared that American mass culturewould defile the more finely cultivated Europeancivilization:'Americanismis swampingus.... In Paris,
wherethereis an historicaland artisticstructure,wherethe evidence of
an indigenous civilizationis present, Americanismis as strident and
jarringas the make-upon the face of an agingfemme du monde."107
Contemporaneously,an alternativecriticismwas advancedby Antonio
Gramsci,who countered the traditionalistsby insistingthat this "new
culture"of Americanism was not simply a vulgar "make-up"or a
disembodiedculturalexpression,but was an "extension"and an "intensification"of an encrusted European capitalism (p. 318). From this
whichwas
perspective,Americanismwas synonymouswith "Fordism,"
both a practiceand a culturalrepresentation,combiningTaylorismand
the mechanizationof the labor process with a utopian conception of
culturalacquisition(in addition to the assemblyline, Henry Ford also
promoted a conception of the life that was to be achieved by mass
production:"Thereshould be leisure,music and poetry - the five day
week, the old-fashioned dance, and the hospitable inn beside the
road").'18For Gramsci, Americanism was constituted by a hyperrationalizationof the labor process, combined with the demeanor of
"cafelife" and "theideology of the Rotary club.""t9In contrastto the
traditionalists(and to the position of the socialist party leadershipin
France throughthe 1980s) Gramsci recognized the inextricablelink
betweenthe forms of Americanmass cultureand the social relationsof
production,a link, in Appadurai'sformulation,between "production
fetishism"and a "fetishismof the consumer"that have helped these
culturalforms attainsuch a prominentplace in Europeanmarketsand
societies. 10
By focusing on the preservationand defense of gastronomicsensibilities, the protectionist response to fast food ignores the wider con-
234
sequences of Americanism. For in addition to the standardization and
homogenization of taste, the fast food industry has also advanced the
computerization, rationalization, and de-skilling of the service-sector
labor process, and has introduced the widespread use of part-time and
student labor, the effects of which on general labor-market practices
may prove substantial in the longer term.
Similarly, by ignoring production and considering fast food as simply
an expression of the global cultural exchange of food tastes (with the
United States and France essentially exchanging hamburgers for croissants), Fischler and others miss the transformative effect of the fast
food process. For while French-owned viennoiseries have indeed been
successfully operated in the United States selling French croissants and
pastries, they have been produced and marketed not by professional
French "boulangers" or "patissiers,"drawing upon local raw materials
and family recipes, but in mechanized kitchens, supplied by centralized
warehouses, using standardized recipes and processes, and sold in restaurants designed for their efficiency and visual hyperbole. That is, the
French croissants are exported, but in an "Americanized"package that
has transformed traditional production processes, and thus the exchange of croissants for hamburgers has not represented anything
approximating an equal cultural exchange. Again, the medium (of the
social organization of fast food) is the message, and not simply the
exchange of equivalent cultural "tastes."So though, as Hannerz argues,
"it would seem impossible to argue that the transnational cultural influences are generally deleterious," at least in the particular case of fast
food, I am inclined to make just such an argument.1'
There may be truth to the view that even though (or because) the product is standardized, the production process of fast food croissants
makes something French more widely available to Americans than it
would otherwise be. But the availability and accessibility of mass cultural forms should not be confused with their supposed "democratic"
nature, as they often are, for the formulaic character of mass commercial culture represents essentially the obverse of democratic culture. In
the midst of the debates over the Americanization of Europe during
the interwar period, it was just such a confusion that animated a strong
current of anti-Americanism in France, where right-wing Catholic fundamentalists (who were later to play a prominent role in Vichy and the
fascist movement) viewed American materialism, mass consumption,
and standardization as dangerous forms of "democratic collectivism." 12But such viewpoints tell us little about the appeal of American
235
mass commercial culture, from "Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show," to
Howard Johnson's roadside restaurants, to pop culture, to the more
recent introduction of American fast food in France, which has seemed
to embody "democratic" features that have been an important part of
its appeal both at home and abroad.113
Compare, say, the diner to the fast food outlet, which though sharply
distinguished as a "type" of restaurant from other types maintains relatively little that distinguishes one individual outlet from another. Uniformity and predictability are highly valued marketing goals and thus
there is little attempt to allow for a distinctive spatial or interactional
style or "personality" between one outlet and another. This is as true
for the symbolism of the internal space as it is for the scripted interactions between customers and workers whose "selves" must be suppressed and who must be efficient, courteous, and friendly, only in
short bursts and within a narrow range.l14 For the French customers of
a fast food outlet, "participation,"though initially novel in its informality, is limited to certain tasks that elsewhere would be reserved for paid
employees.
With standardization the hallmark of the fast food business, there is
little room for the restaurant itself to change and develop over time in
relation to the people who inhabit it, in contrast to the neighborhood
bar, cafe, or restaurant. While certainly accessible as a popular cultural
form, the fast food outlet can only be considered "democratic" by relying on a fairly narrow conception of democracy. For if democratic culture refers to cultural forms that are shaped and molded by those who
use them, then the fast food outlet is essentially no more "democratic"
than the most elitist of three-star restaurants.
Stephenson, in his account of an American fast food outlet in The
Netherlands emphasizes the ways in which the experience represents a
"cultural decontextualization" whereby, instead of entering a Dutch
place and being able to draw upon a culturally familiar repertoire of
behaviors, the McDonald's in Leiden demands that customers discard
their Dutch "selves" in order to adapt to an "infantilized" American
world.' 5 In this study, I have found the emergence of the fast food
experience in France to be culturally and socially decontextualized.
For the industry, the workers, and the consumers, this has been precisely the point - that fast food has embodied what have been regarded as
distinctly "American"practices, offering the taste of an "Americanized"
world.
236
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Priscilla Ferguson, David Halle, Michele Lamont,
Robin Leidner, Donald Weber, Loic Wacquant, Vera Zolberg, and the
Editors of Theory and Society for their comments and criticisms of
earlier drafts of this article. And special thanks to Christiane Metral
and Ren6 Metral for their assistance on the research for this project.
All errors of logic or presentation are the sole responsibility of the
author.
Notes
1. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Cambridge: Unwin Hyman, 1989);
Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light (New York: Routledge, 1988); Paul Smith,
"Visiting Banana Republic," in Andrew Ross, editor, Universal Abandon? The
Politics of Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
2. Igor Kopytoff, "The cultural biography of things: Commoditization as process," in
Arjun Appadurai, editor, The Social Life of Things (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
3. Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du Gout (Paris: Flammarion, 1982).
4. Anthony Sampson, The New Europeans (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1968),
221; Conrad P. Kottak, "Rituals at McDonald's," in Marshall Fishwick, The world
of Ronald McDonald (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press,
1983); Mort Rosenblum, Mission to Civilize: The French Way (New York:
Doubleday, 1988), 418-419.
5. Steven Greenhouse, "McDonald's tries Paris, again," The New York Times (12
June 1988): Fl.
6. Claude Fischler, L'Homnivore: Le gout, la cuisine et le corps (Paris: Editions
Odile Jacob, 1990).
7. Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine, and Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982).
8. Claude Fischler, L'Homnivore, 214.
9. The trade weekly, L'Hotellerie (No. 2138, 4-11 January 1990) outlined the
design of the project, noting that senior chefs were teaching three-week courses
on taste, culinary history, and regional cuisine to eleven-year-olds in two-hundred
French primary schools.
10. Diana Pinto, "The Left, the intellectuals and culture," in George Ross, Stanley
Hoffmann, and Sylvia Malzacher, editors, The Mitterand Experiment (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987), 222.
11. Quoted in Alan Riding, "Paris schools add a course a la carte," in The New York
Times (6 February 1991): C1.
12. The Fondation Brillat-Savarin was established to valorize and promote the culinary patrimony and "Agro-Alimentaire," the joint agricultural/food-processing
industry in France. See "Les Entretiens de Belley," a special issue of the trade
weekly L'Hotellerie (No. 2088, 3-11 January 1989).
13. Data are drawn from the following publications: "Marketing in Europe, No. 296:
Fast food in France," (London: The Economist Publications Ltd (1987); D.
237
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
Goodman and R. Rama, "Socio-economic and technological developments in the
European catering industry," Report Prepared for the Commission of the European Communities (Brussels, 1987); Report prepared by the trade group
S.N.A.R.R. entitled "Salon International de la Restauration Rapide" (Paris, 1989);
and report in the trade magazine Revue Technique, No. 496 (March 1991):
51-68.
Although it has grown dramatically and is increasingly well-established, the most
hopeful industry prognostications suggest that by the year 2000, fast food will
command only 10 percent of the commercial restaurant market (as compared to
the approximately 35 percent of the market held in the United States). See
Michael Jones, "Nouvelle phase de maturite," in Revue Technique des Hotels et
Restaurants, No. 473 (March 1989): 108-110.
Figures for 1994 provided by Burger King International and McDonald's Corporation; La Croissanterie from Revue Technique des Hotels et Restaurants, No.
496 (March 1991): 54.
I realize that the term actually refers to all of the inhabitants of "America," North
and South, but I use it here, as most French people do, to refer specifically to the
United States.
See J. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 12501350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); P. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade
in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); E. Wolf,
Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1982).
Although originally an Ethiopian export, coffee was introduced in France to the
court of Louis XIV in the late seventeenth century by the Ambassador of the
Grand Turk, Soliman Aga, and soon became a fashion among the aristocracy.
Several years later, the first "Maison du Caff6" was opened by a Sicilian, Francesco Procopio in 1689. The cafe was probably embedded in the French national
identity by its prominence during the Revolution a century later, with such figures
as Desmoulins haranguing the crowd from a table at the Caf6 de Foy at the Palais
Royal, and the use of the Cafe Corazza nearby, as the headquarters of the Jacobins. "Depuis 300 Ans pourquoi va t'on au Cafe?" undated publication produced
by the trade association, F.N.B. 49, Rue de la Glaciere, Paris 75013.
The data for this article are drawn from several sources, including interviews with
fast-food industry executives, editors of industry trade journals, representatives of
the French culinary establishment, and a union delegate assigned to the fast food
industry, all conducted in summer 1989; and focus-group interviews conducted in
May 1991 with forty-nine lycee (high school) students in a small city in the Haute
Savoie region of France, centering on their experience with fast food restaurants,
their consumption of American goods generally, and their images of the United
States and its people. In addition, the article draws upon industry marketing surveys, trade journals and magazines, and notes from observations in fast food outlets throughout France in 1991.
The percentage of women in the labor force has climbed slowly but steadily since
the 1960s, according to data provided in Michel Forse et al., editors, Recent
Social Trends in France 1960-1990 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press,
1993), 89. For industry analyses of the basis for a fast food market, see the following industry sources: "Fast food in France," Special Report No. 2 (London:
The Economist Publications Ltd., 1987) and the yearly reports produced for the
"Salon International de la Restauration Rapide" by the Syndicat National de
238
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
L'Alimentation et de la Restauration Rapide, Paris. And see the following sociological analyses: "Mangeurs fin de siecle" by Pascale Pynson and "Le mangeur
solitaire" by Michelle Rigalleau, both in Fabrice Piault, editor, Nourritures (Paris:
Autremont, 1989); Matacha Wolinski, "Gastronomie en kit" in L'Etat de la
France Et De Ses Habitants, Edition 1987 (Paris: Editions La Decouverte), 3;
Claude Fischler, L'Homnivore (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1990), 175-217; and
Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine, and Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), 188. For data on the development of the "journee continue" see
Archibald A. Evans, Hours of Work in Industrialised Countries (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1975), 83-86.
See Claude Fischler, ibid.; Fabrice Piault, ibid., and see Natacha Wolinski, "Gastronomie en kit" in Minelle Verdie, editor, L'Etat de la France Et Ses Habitants,
Edition 1987 (Paris: Editions La Decouverte, 1987), 33.
Max Boas and Steven Chain, Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story of McDonald's
(New York: New American Library, 1976), 153.
Recent industry accounts, including a brief history published by the chief employer association, SNARR (Syndicat Nationale de l'Alimentation et de la Restauration Rapide) locate the introduction of fast food in France to McDonald's in
Paris in 1972. However, in earlier accounts in the trade magazines Neo Restauration (March 1979) and Revue Technique (March 1984), it is documented that fast
food was introduced prior to 1972 by companies that are no longer in business
(with such names as "Crip Crop," "Dino-Croc," and "Chicken Shop"). And I personally recall eating in a "Wimpy's"fast food restaurant on the Blvd. St. Michel in
1970. Although locating the very first fast food restaurant in France is not very
important, it is interesting to consider the history that the industry is presenting of
itself. An image of "success" is no doubt more easily sustained by the current
version than that provided in previous accounts in which the businesses failed.
McDonald's and Burger King are regularly ranked first and second in numbers of
units and gross sales. In 1988, McDonald's had 786 outlets in Europe, Burger
King had 150. Overall, of the ten largest fast food companies operating in Europe,
five were American-based companies. "Europe Face Aux Grands" in Neo Magazine, No. 196 (March 1989): 77.
John F. Love, McDonald's: Behind the Arches (New York: Bantam Books, 1986).
A 1989 interview with a McDonald's Corporation spokesperson basically confirmed the account offered by Love (ibid.) that in 1982, McDonald's sued Raymond Dayan to save its reputation. However, interviews with the President of the
fast food employer's association in France and the Director of a French fast food
company in 1989 offered a different interpretation. They suggested that while
some of the original outlets were poorly maintained (in terms of cleanliness and
service), most were not. They explained that these exceptions were seized upon by
lawyers for McDonald's in order to win control over what had surprisingly
emerged as a potentially lucrative French market for fast food.
Greenhouse, 1988, "McDonald's." For numbers of outlets owned by each of the
major chains, see NEO Restauration No. 282 (March 4, 1994), 34-43.
See Howard Aldrich, Organizations and Environments (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1979); and see Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, "The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational
fields," in American Sociological Review 48 (April 1983): 147-160.
The numbers of outlets are provided in Revue Technique, No. 473 (March 1989);
and advertising policies are reviewed in "Fast food in France," Marketing in
239
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
Europe, No. 296 (July 1987): 48 (London: Economist Publications Ltd). Burger
King was acquired by Grand Metropolitan, a British conglomerate, several years
ago.
The definition is provided by the chief industry trade association, SNARR.
Daryl D. Wyckoff and W. Earl Sasser, The Chain Restaurant Industry (Lexington,
Mass.: Lexington Books, 1978).
See Goodman and Rama, 1987, Report.
The other 23 percent are mostly chain pizza and sandwich shcps, though a few
sell Asian foods or pasta, according to the Report prepared for the 1989 "Salon
International de la Restauration Rapide," in Paris by the trade association,
S.N.A.R.R.
Although only 24 percent of McDonald's restaurants are outside of the United
States, in recent years 40 percent of the five hundred new restaurants that it has
opened yearly have been in foreign countries. See Steven Greenhouse, 1988,
"McDonald's," and Special Issue on "The top fifty commercial restaurant groups,"
Revue Technique, No. 496 (March 1991).
For example, 132 "Quick Burger" and "Freetime" hamburger restaurants were
absorbed into the Casino Group, a food conglomerate whose restaurant division
had a turnover rate ("chiffre d'affaires") in 1990 of 700 million dollars. Similarly,
ACCOR, an industry group with over 250 various catering establishments, absorbed a great variety of fast food restaurants; and Group Le Duff, the twelfth
largest commercial restaurant company in France has purchased 109 fast food
outlets. See Goodman and Rama, Report, Revue Technique, No. 496 (March
1991): 59; and "Fast food in France," Special Report Number 2, Marketing in
Europe (London: The Economist Publications Ltd.) No. 296 (July 1987): 37.
"Rapidite oblige," L'Hotellerie, No. 2214 (4 July 1991): 32.
See, for example, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall," Forbes 106 (1 November 1970):
21; "I'm the Hamburger man," (interview), Institutions/Volume Feeding Management 71 (15 September 1972): 73-88; "For Ray Kroc, life began at 50: Or was it
60?" Forbes 111 (15 January 1973): 24-30; "Appealing to a mass market," (interview), Nation's Business 56 (July 1968): 70-74. And see Ray Kroc's autobiography, written with Robert Anderson, Grinding It Out (Chicago: Henry Regnery,
1977).
See Boas and Chain, Big Mac; and Love, McDonald's.
Boas and Chain, ibid., 128-133.
Wyckoff and Sasser, The Chain Restaurant Industry, lviii.
Boas and Chain, Big Mac, 132.
"Fast food in France," Marketing in Europe, Report No. 296 (July 1987): 43
(London: The Economist Publications, Ltd.).
John Love, McDonald's, 417-419.
Barbara Garson, The Electronic Sweatshop (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1988), 21.
See Robin Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and Routinization of
Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
Garson, The Electronic Sweatshop, 28.
Quoted in John Love, McDonald's, 397.
The agreement that the fast food industry operates within is the "Convention Collective Nationale de la Restauration Rapide," published by the Ministere du
Travail, de l'Emploi de la Formation Professionnelle, Journal Officiel de la
Republique Francaise, 26 rue Desaix, 75272 Paris.
240
49. See Robin Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk, 51. See Rick Fantasia, "Everything and
Nothing," La Revue Tocqueville Vol. XV No. 2 (1994): 78.
50. See Goodman and Rama, 1987, Report.
51. In 1988, 23.8 percent of women workers were part-time workers, and 3.4 percent
of male workers, both figures having virtually doubled since 1971. See Michel
Forse, et al., Recent Social Trends in France 1960-1990 (Montreal: McGillQueen's University Press, 1993), 111.
52. Yves Van De Calseyde, Ouvrirun Fast Food (Paris: Editions B.P.I., 1982), 90-92.
53. Helene Bovais, "Analyse strategique d'un fast food," unpublished Memoire de
Maitrise (Paris 1987).
54. Bovais, ibid., 4. A study of Burger King in Nantes found an employee age range of
20-25 years, with 90 percent part-time. A. Robert, "Organization Humeine du
Travail dans un Fast Food," unpublished (Nantes 1992).
55. A 1982 industry survey found that employment in the hamburger chains was 49
percent part-time, while only 20 percent in viennoiseries; 14 percent in pizzerias;
and 10 percent in fast food sandwich shops, see "La Carte 82 de la Restauration
Rapide," Neo Restauration, No. 118 (October 1982): 25-36. It is likely that the
proportions have risen throughout the industry in the past decade, but it is interesting that in 1982, McDonald's and Burger King were not yet dominant in the
French market, suggesting that this "flexibility"was an innovation modeled on the
success of the American fast food experience.
56. Boas and Chain, Big Mac, 154-155.
57. "Fast food, 1' an 1 de la reussite?" Neo Restauration (March 1979).
58. Paul Moreira, "Les adventuriers du gout meconnu," in Fabrice Piault, editor,
Nourritures (Paris: Autrement, 1989); and Jean Baudrillard, America (London:
Verso, 1988), 100.
59. This was greatly accelerated with the Marshall Plan, which flooded France (and
the rest of Europe) with American products and provided a model for new managerial strategies, advanced technologies, and industrial power. It should not be
overlooked that American methods of management, like marketing and the
"human relations" approach were promoted as a condition of Marshall Aid. See
Luc Boltanski, The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Irwin M. Wall, The United States and the
Making of Postwar France 1945-1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991).
60. Boltanski, ibid., 106.
61. Jane Marceau, "France," in Tom Bottomore and Robert J. Brym, editors, The
Capitalist Class: An International Study (New York: New York University Press,
1989), 64; and see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Pierre Bourdieu,
Luc Boltanski, and Monique de St. Martin, "Les strategies de reconversion,"
Information sur les Sciences Socialies, No. 12 (1973): 61-113.
62. Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table (New York: Oxford University Press,
1988); Calvin Trillin, American Fried (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
63. Roger M. Keesing, "Theories of culture," Annual Review of Anthopology 3 (New
York: Basic Books, 1974) 9; and Ann Swidler, "Culture in action: Symbols and
strategies," American Sociological Review 51 (April 1986): 273-286.
64. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, 6.
65. "Fast food, an American success," Neo Restauration (November 1979).
66. I have reviewed marketing studies conducted in 1983, 1986, and 1989. The first,
241
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
produced by a private marketing firm, was based on an exit survey of one thousand consumers in eight French cities, as well as an opinion poll of a random and
representative national sample of two thousand persons ("La Restauration
Rapide") (Paris: The Marketing Office, March, 1984). The two later surveys were
commissioned for the trade association, SNARR, and were based on surveys of
one thousand consumers in fast food restaurants in Paris and Lyon.
This was the view advanced by two representatives of the Federation Nationale de
L'Industrial Hotelerie, a trade association whose members are cafe owners, restauranteurs, and hoteliers. Interview, June 1989.
"Fastfoudeurs, Qui Ites-Vous en 1986?" commissioned for the 5th Salon de la
Restauration Rapide by SNARR.
Marketing Office, "La Restauration Rapide," 42.
Prices of one "toque" restaurants (the lowest ranking by Gault Millau Magazine,
designating restaurants that are not particularly expensive, but serve what the
magazine considers to be good meals). Four "toque" restaurants range from
$70-180. See Gault Millau Magazine, No. 261 (March 1991): 32-33. Prices of
fast food meals (rounded up slightly to adjust for inflation) were surveyed in Revue
Technique des Hotels et Restaurants, No. 473 (March 1989): 100; and in "Les fastfoudeurs se mettent a table," a marketing study produced for the 8th Salon International de la Restauration Rapide by SNARR in 1989.
Valerie Lecasble, "Ils pesent 400 milliards de francs," L'Evenment du Jeudi (6-12
June 1991): 100.
"La restauration rapide en france: 725 united en 1983," Revue Technique des
Hotels et Restaurants (March 1984): 98.
Interview with Mon. Carraux, President of S.N.A.R.R., in Paris, June, 1989.
Marc Rohan, Paris '68 (London: Impact Books, 1988), 104.
Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1982), 297.
Conrad P. Kottak, "Rituals at McDonald's," in Marshall Fishwick, editor, The
World of Ronald McDonald (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular
Press, 1983), 53-54.
Peter H. Stphenson, "Going to McDonald's in Leiden: Reflections on the concept
of self and society in the Netherlands," ETHOS: Journal of the Society for PsychologicalAnthropology 17/2 (June 1989): 226-247.
There are fast food outlets located in two other cities, each less than two hours
away by car, so it is likely that some of the customers had visited fast food outlets
previously.
Jacques Maho and Pascale Pynson, "Cantines, comment s'en debarraser?" in
Fabrice Piault, editors, Nourritures (Paris: Autrement, 1989), 200.
Steven Greenhouse, "McDonald's."
"Les fastfoudeurs se mettent a table," marketing report prepared for the 8th Salon
International de la Restauration Rapide (Paris 1989), Table 3.
France, which had over 150,000 cafes in 1960, lost 16,000 between 1978 and
1984, a period of rapid growth in the number of fast food outlets. But fast food is
only a small part of the reason for this shrinkage. Industry analysts point to the
exodus of population from rural villages, housing improvements that have increased consumption and entertainment in the home, as well as television, as key
factors. See Denis Legoupil, Debits de Boissons (Paris: Centre d'Etude du Commerce et de la Distribution, February 1985); and Steven Greenhouse,
"McDonald's."
242
83. Recounted in "Experience McDonald's of France, where food is an experience,"
McDonald's Management News (February 1988): 5; and in a press release entitled
"16th French McDonald's opens in Paris," distributed by McDonald's System of
France, Inc., Paris, 26 January 1984.
84. French data provided in "Fast food in France," Marketing in Europe, No. 296
(July 1987) (London: The Economist Publications, Ltd.) 40; and the American
data are cited in Wyckoff and Strasser, The Chain Restaurant Industry, liii.
85. Each of seventeen establishments (seven fast food hamburger and viennoiserie
outlets, and ten traditional establishments, including restaurants, bistrots, and
cafes) were measured with a photometer during daytime hours. Measurements
were taken in what appeared to be the dimmest and the brightest sections of each
establishment, thus producing a low and a high range, which are indicated by the
double figures for each type of establishment.
86. Bovais "Analyse," 47-49.
87. Van De Calseyde, Ouvrir, 19-20.
88. Garson, The Electronic Sweatshop, 21.
89. Boas and Chain, Big Mac, 140.
90. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning From Las
Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
91. A young American who attended high school in France reported to me that twice
while eating in McDonald's restaurants in Geneva, she was approached by a
manager and asked if she wanted a job, reportedly because he thought that it
would be good for business to have a "friendly American" working at the counter
(none of her friends were so solicited).
92. See Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991); and Richard J. Parmentier, "Reproducing
history at colonial Williamsburg," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the
American Anthropological Association, 19 November 1988, Phoenix, Arizona.
93. So, for example, in 1989 Rh6nes-Alpes (which includes Lyon) had 131 fast food
outlets and Provence/C6te d'Azur (Nice and Cannes) had 122, while the less
urban regions France-Comte and Limousin had 15 and 8 outlets respectively.
These numbers were drawn from a report prepared for the 1989 "Salon International de la Restauration Rapide" and provided to the author by the President
of SNARR.
94. "La Carte 82 de la Restauration Rapide," Neo Restauration (October 1982):
25-35; and see Florence Jacquemond, "Lieux de vie, lieux de culture," Revue
Technique des Hotels et Restaurants, No. 497 (April 1991): 67-72.
95. The McDonald's Restaurant Directory lists the addresses of all their outlets in
France and worldwide. French companies have made comparable real-estate
investments to compete with McDonald's and the other American companies,
and are well aware of the symbolic value of opening a restaurant on what is
regarded as a prestigious site (See Jaquemond, Lieux, 67).
96. The controversy was recounted to me by the President of the Chambre Nationale
de la Restauration et de L'Hotellerie (CNRH) a trade association in June, 1989.
Subsequently, a $45 million renovation was conducted over a 2-year period
ending Sept. 1994, M. Blume, "On Spruced-up Champs-Elysees, Paradise Regained," International Herald Tribune (27 Sept. 1994), 2.
97. Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 218.
98. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy,"
Public Culture 2/2 (Spring 1990) 5.
243
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
112.
113.
114.
115.
John Love, McDonald's, 418.
John Love, ibid., 438-439.
Boas and Chain, Big Mac.
John Love, McDonald's, 419.
"Les 50 premiers groupes," Revue Technique des Hotels et Restaurants, No. 496
(March 1991): 59-74.
The members of the Fondation Brillat-Savarin are listed in "Les entretiens de
Belley" a special issue of the trade weekly L'Hotellerie, No. 2088 (5-11 January
1989): 2.
Diana Pinto, "The Left," 221.
See Suzanne Berger, "French business from transition to transition," in George
Ross, Stanley Hoffmann, and Sylvia Malzacher, editors, The Mitterand Experiment, and Dina Pinto, ibid.
Quoted in Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 316.
Quoted by H. Dubreuil in David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 252. Ford's unprecedented
S 5.00 daily wage has been viewed as an important component of this "vision," but
Ford was compelled to offer high wages because employee turnover rose to
almost 400 percent when the first assembly-line was established. See Gareth
Morgan, Images of Organization (Beverly Hills, Calif: Sage Publications, 1986),
31.
Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 318.
Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture," 16.
Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity, 244.
Luc Boltanski, The Making of a Class, 106; and see Richard Kuisel, Seducing The
French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: U. of Calif. Press, 1993).
See Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1982), 36; Warren J. Belasco, "Toward a culinary common denominator:
The rise of Howard Johnson's, 1925-1940," Journal of American Culture 2
(1979): 503-518; Gabriel Bar-Haim, "Actions and heroes: The meaning of Western pop information for Eastern European youth," The British Journal of Sociology 40/1 (March 1989): 22-45.
See Robin Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk.
Stephenson, "Going to McDonald's."