The cultural significance of the French school canteen

A little over two years ago, Suzanne Raine and I started the podcast Garlic & Pearls, in which we attempt to define Frenchness and Britishness by putting different expressions of our respective cultures through a crucible of comparison and conversation. The starting point of each episode, our leading thread, will often be an everyday thing – a bar of Marseille soap, say, or a bolt of Harris tweed – which has acquired enduring significance as a cultural phenomenon or ‘myth’, as defined by French critic Roland Barthes in his 1957 essay Mythologies. By the end of our talk, larger vistas will have opened, revealing fundamental angles of difference between France and Britain.

One especially illuminating example of this was the topic of French school canteens. I had observed that while British people’s memories of school food tend to the traumatic (and are often the root of some lifelong food aversions), the French on the other hand remember with fondness communal lunches of tangy carottes râpées, savoury endives au gratin and cloud-like pommes dauphine and will happily continue to eat these things in adulthood. 

The word cantine is resonant for the French, redolent with childhood memories, endowed with a Proustian trail of nostalgia. But it also has a more fundamental cultural significance: just beyond the dishes enjoyed in the school canteen rises the towering figure of the French Republic. Although French children do not begin their days by singing the Marseillaise or swearing allegiance to the Republic, the French state and its rules are present as the underlying framework of French childhood. 

The French place a high value on food, so it is unsurprising that this should be expressed from the early years of French childhood. Alongside the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic is food education, a civilising process which begins at home but is also carried out in nursery and primary schools. What does this process consist of, what is its purpose, and how is it structured?

As part of her account of expat life in Paris, American journalist Pamela Druckerman reflected in her 2012 memoir French Children Don’t Throw Food that much of her children’s cultural acclimatisation to Frenchness happened through the way they were taught how to eat at school. In order to better understand this, she attended a meeting of the menus committee at her child’s nursery school and got a glimpse of the backstage activity that goes into shaping menus for children. Present on the committee were kitchen staff, teaching staff and parents, all engaging in a lengthy discussion of variety and seasonality, with a particular focus on the avoidance of monotony. Attention was also given to a systematic, omnivorous approach: French schools aim to introduce small children to all foods in turn and, if a food proves unpopular, it will be reintroduced in a different recipe. ‘They should taste everything’ and ‘Eventually they will grow to like it’ are typical pronouncements. 

Most French schools have such a committee, because the French school canteen isn’t simply where small children eat their lunch communally: it is a social space where their papilles (taste buds) are educated, and a potent means of imparting and transmitting knowledge associated with food. The French canteen is a cultural instrument that shapes French experience and sensibility. 

I grew up in France and my own memories of school lunches, dating back to the 1970s, are of picking up new, unfamiliar vocabulary: la cantoche, slang for cantine, where the dinner ladies were called cantinières, and most importantly le rab (seconds). Rab is short for rabiot, a mid 19th-century military slang word describing leftover soup at the bottom of a soldier’s mess tin, which migrated into schoolchildren slang and is still current. Avoir du rab means being given seconds of something you especially like – preferably chips, because they only appear once in a while in the French cantine. 

The military pedigree of the word rabiot is not accidental. In a 1913 essay about primary education, the Catholic and socialist poet Charles Péguy coined the nickname ‘black hussars’ in reference to the young trainee primary schoolmasters who had taught him in the 1870s and 1880s, describing them as ‘svelte, severe, buttoned up, serious and slightly trepidatious at their precocious, sudden omnipotence’. These young men were clad in regulation black trousers, waistcoat and frock coat, ‘a civilian uniform’, Péguy writes, ‘that was all the more severe, all the more military, for being a civic uniform.’ These schoolmasters constituted a ‘regiment’, tasked by the government of the Third Republic with the mission of teaching French children and imparting to them non-religious Republican values. This followed the passing of laws bearing the name of Jules Ferry, the architect of the French state school system which is still with us today. In the course of the 1880s, Ferry introduced free, compulsory and, crucially, secular (laïque) primary schooling for children aged six to 13. State-run primary schooling in France emerged as a Republican project in opposition to the Catholic church.

Ferry had not originally thought to incorporate school lunches into his educational project. A national framework for this emerged gradually, and only really crystallised after the Second World War, when the reconstruction of France brought a renewed focus on the wellbeing of children and the importance of nutrition. One significant milestone was the banning, in 1956, of wine, beer or cider being served with lunch in school canteens to children under 14 years old. The ban was officially extended to older children in 1981. It is worth remembering that in France wine had long been considered a help to growth just as precious and nutritious as bread and meat, and that one notable advocate of this idea was Louis Pasteur, pioneer of pasteurisation and vaccination against rabies. 

Aside from the necessities of nutrition and the educational purpose of gastronomy, a new problem has now arisen in relation to French state school canteens. Should they provide special meals for those religious groups – primarily Muslim families requesting halal meals – that demand them? The short answer is No. Being continuous with the classroom as a place of learning, the school canteen is, like state education itself, a Republican institution and therefore a bastion of French secularism, or laïcité. 

In the wake of Ferry’s 1880s rack of laws, the separation between state and church in France was established by law on 9 December 1905. The aim of this was to guarantee freedom of conscience, and the freedom to practice any or no religion in private. No state religion exists in French law, in order to protect French citizens from the oppression of any religion. It follows that all public services including and perhaps especially schools have a duty of religious neutrality. Any special treatment granted to one religious group is perceived, in the French secular mindset, not as a gesture of inclusiveness, but as a form of favouritism at best and, at worst, as a kind of stigmatisation. French school canteens do not offer special meals. Nor do they allow packed lunches, though exceptions are made for children with a medical condition. 

The reasoning behind this is twofold: on the one hand, French law forbids special treatment for any religion in the public sphere, and on the other, there is a concern not to mark children out, not to separate them into identitarian groups. Beyond this lies the idea of freedom of conscience: school should be a neutral space, one that might offer children a haven from religious taboos enforced at home. Added to this is the school canteen’s avowed mission to promote omnivorous gastronomy, which naturally militates against food exclusion. 

Laïcité in all its forms has since the 1980s come under attack in France. This explains the dismay caused by the appearance of young schoolgirls – a visiting party from a private religious primary school – wearing hijabs in the confines of the Assemblée Nationale and the current debate surrounding Marine Le Pen’s avowed intention to extend the ban on the hijab to all public places should she succeed in the next presidential election.

Laïcité forbids the display of visible signs of religious allegiance in schools with the purpose of defending children against sectarianism, and in this context the French canteen has become something of a battleground. In the face of sustained pressure from parents, it has been deemed by the French judiciary to be ‘neither compulsory nor forbidden’ for a state school canteen to provide a meat-free dish as an alternative on days when pork is served. But the dish must not be labelled as special, nor should it be reserved for a particular group of children. It must be available to all as a matter of personal choice and taste. 

The purpose of French school canteens is thus threefold. It is where millions of French children eat lunch communally. It is a means of placing the enjoyment of food squarely at the centre of French life. And it is a Republican space where the principles of French secularism are enacted and preserved. Outside of the French tradition, this might appear strange and counterintuitive. It requires something of a Copernican revolution to see that by refusing special treatment to any religious group, what the French framework actually aims to achieve is inclusivity.