The travelling salt merchant is a feature of Breton life which has disappeared over the past hundred years.

Right up until the early 1900s every village and hamlet was visited at least once a year by someone selling salt. Villagers would exchange grain for salt – usually measure for measure – acquiring enough salt to last them the whole year. Traditionally, the salt was stored in a wooden box attached to the chimney breast and was used to flavour soups and crèpes.

The ‘Paludiers’
In most cases these travelling salt salesmen were men who themselves harvested the salt from the salt marshes in and around the city of Guérande, close to the Loire estuary.

The walled city of Guerande is not included in the modern region of Brittany, but historically the salt marshes to its south were a crucial part of the Breton economy

During the summer months these men, known locally as paludiers, worked on the marshes collecting the salt, and in the autumn, traditionally between All Saints Day and Christmas, some of them travelled round Brittany with trains of mules.

Salt destined for Central Brittany would have been loaded onto a ship and sailed along the coast to Lorient, Hennebont or Quimper, where it would have been met by paludiers who had travelled overland with their mules. The paludiers then made their way from village to village, exchanging salt for the necessities of life which were in short supply in their own region. Very little money probably exchanged hands in these transactions.

For many years these salt merchants were amongst the few people who regularly travelled across the Breton countryside, and they were used by people to deliver messages to friends and family who lived far away; they also transported commodities, such as cloth, on behalf of merchants in the large towns. The fact that they had to use mules rather than horses and carts gives an indication of just how impassable Breton roads were in the past.

Salt Production in Guérande
Salt is produced in the salt marshes around Guérande in the same way today as it was a thousand years ago.

The area between Guérande and the peninsula which contains the village of Batz and the port of Croisic, is a silted up bay, more or less at sea level. Over the past thousand years it has been remodelled to create an area of salt pans covering thousands of hectares.

The sea is kept at bay by stone dykes. Sea-water is allowed through the dyke at high tide and channelled into reservoirs where it is stored and where the process of evaporation begins.

Salt workers are able to draw off water from the reservoir and direct it along ditches and into holding areas where it is subject to the drying action of wind and sun. The brine gradually becomes more and more concentrated until it is eventually channelled into a salt pan, an area approximately 10 metres square surrounded by a shallow clay bank.

It is allowed to stand in this salt pan until it becomes ‘supersaturated’ and salt crystals start to form.

‘Fleur de Sel’
As the brine approaches supersaturation, small salt crystals form over its surface in the evenings. These crystals can be scooped off with a sieve attached to a long pole. When dried, they are pure white and small. They are known as ‘fleur de sel’ and command the highest price in the market.

‘Sel Gris’
As more water evaporates, large salt crystals start to form which sink to the bottom, and these are drawn to the side of the salt pan with the help of a flat piece of wood attached to a pole. They are allowed to dry at the side of the pan and are then collected up into mounds. These crystals form the bulk of the crop and tend to have a slightly greyish tinge, because they contain traces of the clay which lines the salt pans.

This salt can either be bought as it is or, more commonly, it is ground down to smaller crystals which are sold in the form of ‘sel fin’.

The salt marshes of Guérande have proved remarkably impervious to industrialisation. No machine bigger than a strimmer is used on the marshes themselves. Salt is still moved from the salt pans to the road side by wheel barrow, and it is only then that it enters the world of mechanisation.

‘Sel de Guérande’ is now an extremely successful brand name, selling under a premium in supermarkets across Europe, and even under the name of Celtic Ocean Sea Salt in the United States.

The History and Politics of Breton Salt

Salt has probably been produced in Brittany for many thousands of years, but it could well have been the Romans who introduced the technique of evaporating sea water in open salt pans (prior to that salt had been produced by heating vats of brine over wood fires). The south-eastern coast of Brittany is surprisingly well suited to this method of salt production. Contrary to the popular image of Breton weather, it receives an unusually high number of hours of sun each year, and has one of the lowest levels of rainfall in France.

During the early Middle Ages Brittany was the main salt-producing area of Northern Europe, with salt being exported to Scandinavia, England, Holland, Ireland, Spain and Portugal. Salt was in great demand as the principal preserving agent, and was used in large quantities to preserve fish such as sardines, and in the production of salted beef.

Breton salt was exported through the town of Croisic, which became a major port, with permanent consulates from all the major European trading powers. Over the course of the centuries, control of the salt market appears to have passed between merchants from different countries who settled in the town, being at various times under the control of Dutch, British and Scandinavian merchants.

After the discovery of the New World, sea voyages became longer and the demand for salt beef for the ships increased. At the same time fishing vessels, who were exploiting the fishing banks off Canada, had an almost unlimited demand for salt, which they needed to preserve their catch.

Salt Tax
While salt was providing wealth and trade to Brittany, it was being used as a means of tax raising in the rest of France.

Brittany, and some other French Provinces, were exempt from centralised taxation right up until the revolution – the Dukes of Brittany imposed taxes on the local people, but the King of France could not.

Salt tax – known as the ‘Gabelle’ – was one of the most notorious taxes of the old regime. The royal authorities maintained a monopoly on salt, making it illegal for it to be stored or sold except through their agents. The price was maintained at an extraordinarily high level, sometimes fifty times more expensive than the price in Brittany, where salt was more or less exempt from tax unless it was exported.

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that people developed a taste for Breton salt smuggled over the border, and in an attempt to eradicate the black market in salt, heavy penalties were imposed on anyone caught buying or selling contraband salt. Furthermore, everyone over the age of 8 years old was legally obliged to purchase a minimum amount of salt from the official suppliers each year.

Even so, salt smuggling remained a widespread and lucrative occupation throughout the eighteenth century.

The Revolution
The Revolution marks the turning point in the fortunes of the Breton salt industry. The greatest blow was the standardisation of taxation across the whole of France. Brittany lost its medieval rights to set its own taxes. The revolutionary government had won popularity in the rest of France by abolishing the Gabelle, but it imposed a tax on salt production, which caused resentment amongst the paludiers of southern Brittany.

The travelling salt merchants soon became suspected of aiding the Chouans, a Breton resistance movement opposed to the revolutionary government. As part of their campaign to suppress the Chouans the authorities imposed restrictions on the movement of the salt merchants, which seriously curtailed their ability to sell salt direct to the public.

To make matters even worse, Napoleon banned trade with England, which had traditionally provided a good market for Breton salt, and in response British ships blockaded the French coast, making it perilous for salt ships even to round the point from Croisic into the Loire estuary, and effectively stopping all trade with Scandinavia, Spain, Holland and Portugal. This trade never really recovered.

During the 1800s, successive governments continued to impose the tax on salt production and the paludiers continued to try to evade paying them. At one point there were over five hundred full-time customs officers patrolling the marshes of southern Brittany, trying to ensure that every grain of salt produced was noted and taxed. This weight of bureaucracy appears to have crushed the local salt industry just as its competitors were beginning to mechanise.

Industrialisation
By the mid-1800s the salt marshes on the Atlantic coast of France were producing approximately the same amount of salt each year as the producers on the Mediterranean – about 220,000 tons per year. The Mediterranean producers, however, embraced industrial techniques while the producers on the Atlantic coast did not. By the 1930s Mediterranean salt production was fully mechanised, with sea water being pumped between concrete evaporating tanks and harvested by heavy machinery.

By 1990, Mediterranean salt production had risen six fold from its level a century before, while the amount of salt produced on the Atlantic coast had slumped to an average of just 12,000 tons per year – little more than five per cent of its level in the mid-1800s, which itself represented a decline from the heyday of salt production in the Middle ages.

By then, salt production had disappeared from the Atlantic coast south of the Loire, and the large salt pans around Vannes and Carnac had also fallen into disuse. The only large area which had survived in operation was the bay between Guérande and Batz – the area in which salt production probably first started in Brittany.

In the 1980s, this final refuge of salt production was threatened by development of the seaside resort of La Baule, which is just along the coast, to the South.

At the last minute, salt workers (the modern day paludiers) combined with the salt merchants and local politicians to launch a campaign to save the marshes from ‘development’.

The campaign was successful and, perhaps to everyone’s surprise, the level of salt production has ceased to decline, and the marshes are once again the home to a successful and world-renowned salt-producing industry.

To find our more about the Breton salt industry visit Terre de Sel, Guérande, a museum, exhibition and shop: www.seldeguerande.com

The salt is available locally in supermarkets, Bio Coops and in Châteauneuf du Faou