Tag Archives: France

THE PASTRY WAR or HOW THE UNITED STATES GOT CALIFORNIA FROM MEXICO.

Posted on by
Reply

As you may know, I enjoy telling history stories that sound so improbable that people assume that I made them up. The Pastry War is one of those stories. How did the United States get California from Mexico? Believe it or not, it was because somebody swiped some French pastries from a bakery in Mexico City in 1832. In 1832, a French pastry chef named Monsieur Remontel wrote a letter to King Louis-Phillipe of France. Monsieur Remontel stated that he owned a small bakery on the outskirts of Mexico City and that one day, some Mexican officers looted his bakery and stole his pastries. Monsieur Remontel asked the king to force the Mexican government to pay him 60,000 pesos for the stolen French pastries and damage to his shop. This was a wildly inflated valuation of the pastries. Back in those days, a Mexican peso was a large silver coin. It contained just under 1 ounce of silver. 1 peso was a day’s wages in Mexico City. This means that Monsieur Remontel was claiming that the damage to this pastry shop and the stolen French pastries were worth 50,000 ounces of silver. That was, of course, preposterous. How could the inventory of a French pastry shop have been worth 50,000 ounces of silver? The appraised value of the bakery itself was under 1,000 pesos.


The Pastry War. The story of the stolen French pastries was widely circulated in newspapers across France. In 1838, King Louis-Phillipe of France demanded that Mexico immediately pay France 600,000 pesos for a long list of dubious claims, beginning with 60,000 pesos for the stolen French pastries. The Mexican government couldn’t have paid France 600,000 pesos even if they wanted to. They didn’t have 600,000 pesos. So, the king of France ordered the invasion of Mexico. Below is a painting of the Battle of Veracuz, in which the French navy bombarded the city’s fort, reducing it to rubble. The commander of the French fleet, Admiral Baudin, then threatened to open fire on the city itself unless the Mexican government immediately agreed to pay France 60,000 pesos for the French pastries. The Mexican government had no choice but to agree, thus ending the Pastry War. However, the Pastry War also led to Santa Anna becoming the dictator of Mexico again. Santa Anna had ruled Mexico before, but after losing the War of Texas Independence, Santa Anna had been forced out of power. After becoming dictator of Mexico as a result of the Pastry War, Santa Anna once again pursued disastrously bad foreign policies with the United States, which led to the Mexican War, which Santa Anna also lost. Santa Anna was a terrible general, but he didn’t know it. He called himself the “Napoleon of the West.” Well, that is how the United States got California, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah; and parts of Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. However, that wasn’t the end of the Pastry War.

The Second Pastry War. (aka The Second French Intervention) Even though the Mexican government had agreed to pay France for the stolen French pastries, they never did pay for them. As the years passed, the amount of money that France claimed that Mexico owed them grew enormously because the French kept adding interest to the debt and at very high rates. In 1861, France invaded Mexico again, ostensibly to collect the debt. Emperor Louis Napoleon of France installed an Austrian duke, the Emperor Maximilian, as head of a puppet government in Mexico City. In this second war, France had powerful allies. Many European countries sent armies to Mexico to help the French collect the money. In addition to the European armies, several thousand Confederate soldiers also fought for France. However, this time things were different. Santa Anna was gone, and Mexico was now led by President Benito Juarez, an astute politician and military strategist. The Second Pastry War was much bloodier than the first. Over 50,000 Mexicans were killed in the second French intervention, including over 10,000 Mexican civilians who were simply shot by the French. However, this time the French lost the war and were forced out of Mexico for good, and the Mexicans executed Emperor Maximilian. Hostilities between France and Mexico continued even after the French army left Mexico. Mexico had still not paid for the stolen French pastries. In 1880, the French government finally accepted that this nonsense had gone on long enough and dropped their demand that Mexico pay for the French pastries that were stolen almost 50 years earlier. I think this story illustrates how a stubborn and arrogant government can allow a small incident to spiral out of control. That has happened many times in history. Now – be honest – you’ve never heard of the Pastry War before, have you? I have never met a Mexican history buff who had ever heard of the Pastry War before, and there are a lot of Mexican history buffs here in California. I wonder how many of you are going to look up the Pastry War on Google to see if I made up this improbable story. 

Building Cathedrals in Medieval France.

Posted on by
Reply
People seemed to enjoy my article last month about the identical statues in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Here is another from my collection of badly written homework:

“They built huge cathedrals all over France during the Midevil Period. They couldn’t build them earlier because France was still in its Evil Period. They had to wait until France was Midevil before they could build these big churches. Now France is good, so now they can build all the churches they want.”

Later on, and from the same essay: “We took a tour of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. Our tour guide was a French priest. He spoke English very well considering how short he was. I was surprised that he didn’t have a French accent because he was only 5 feet tall.”

Hmmm. A know a Catholic priest who teaches at the Graduate Theological Union here in Berkeley. I’ll check with him about this. I wonder what he knows about France’s ‘Midevil Period’.

Whatever Happened To World’s Fairs?

Posted on by
Reply
I miss world’s fairs. It has been decades since they had a world’s fair in the United States or Canada. There was supposed to be a world’s fair in Chicago in 1992, but it was canceled. They still have world’s fairs, but now they are at places that I don’t want to go to. In 2017, there will be a world’s fair in Astana, Kazakhstan, but I’m not going there. I don’t travel to places that that end with ‘stan’, like Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Uzbekistan. The last world’s fair I went to was Expo 67 in Montreal. It was a wonderful world’s fair. Montreal is a beautiful city. The west side of Montreal is English. That’s where you went to get cheap English imports. The east side of the city is French. Predictably, that’s where the best restaurants are located. Why don’t they have world’s fairs anymore in places like Montreal? French Canadians don’t hijack airplanes and crash them into skyscrapers or behead infidels. At least none of the French Canadians I’ve ever met did stuff like that. If there was another world’s fair in Montreal, I would go!

Charles de Gaulle’s Plan To Ship The Eiffel Tower To Montreal. This story is incredible, but true. Charles De Gaulle was frequently criticized in both America and France for grandiosity – and with good reason. France used to be the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, and the French language was the international language of government, science, and business. Charles De Gaulle never really accepted the idea that those days were over and would never return. De Gaulle wanted France to be the most influential country in Europe again and a first-tier world military power in its own right. Most people, even in France, thought this was unrealistic.

De Gaulle hoped that someday the people of Quebec would break away from the rest of Canada and become an independent French-speaking country politically tied to France. When the World’s Fair came to Montreal in 1967, de Gaulle wanted the French exhibit to be spectacular. He proposed disassembling the Eiffel Tower and shipping it to Montreal for the fair, then shipping it back to Paris after the fair was over. At first, many people in France thought this proposal was a joke, but de Gaulle was serious. The French government did a cost estimate for the proposal. When de Gaulle saw how much it would cost, he dropped the idea. Charles de Gaulle was grandiose, but not insane. De Gaulle attended the Montreal World’s Fair, where he created a international incident when he made an off-the-cuff statement to a large crowd. He said: “Vive le Quebec. Vive le Quebec libre!” (with emphasis on the word ‘libre.’) He was supposed to just say “Vive le Quebec”, but he got carried away and added the rest. The Canadian government was furious. The prime minister of Canada said: “Canada does not need to be liberated.” He told President de Gaulle that he was no longer welcome in Canada. De Gaulle was forced to cut his trip short and go back to France. He never returned to Canada. I came to Expo 67 after the ‘Vive le Quebec libre” incident, but it was still the hot topic of conversation.