The famous words of General de Gaulle – “How can you govern a country where there are 246 varieties of cheese?” – show just how closely regional identities are linked to a country’s cheesemaking heritage that seems to be rooted in ancient history. And yet this is both true and false, as this tradition that the French are so proud of only dates back five or six generations.

Exploring the subject of cheese produced by the distant and not so distant ancestors of modern-day France, proves difficult for various reasons. On the one hand, cheeses discovered in an archaeological context are rare: those from the Bronze Age are the exception that proves the rule and were only able to have been preserved thanks to specific climatic conditions. The cheeses of the past were, in actual fact, different from the cheeses we know today and they belonged to societies with gastronomic values and tastes distinct from our own.

When Émile Zola wrote Le Ventre de Paris (1873), a novel in which he writes about “a cacophony of foul odours” to describe the stinky cheeses of the time, the map of the cheeses consumed by urban (and affluent) populations had only just begun to take shape. It was at the dawn of France’s Third Republic, at the very time when the industrialisation of rural France gradually led to the slow but inevitable disappearance of family-based craftsmanship and traditional utensils used in cheesemaking, such as wood, wickerwork and ceramics.

Among the various elements that contribute to French identity, cheeses are held in high esteem, as they symbolise the country’s diverse regional characteristics, and we deign to only accept a few noble and rare foreign varieties already mentioned by Zola on our tables:

“A golden-coloured Chester, a........

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