How myths and marketing made Camembert famous

The history of Camembert is all about origin myths and clever marketing. In many ways, it is the story of how an unknown rural French cheese burst onto the tables of France and went on to spread throughout the world, despite all the attempts of Norman cheesemakers to retain a Camembert monopoly.

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Sources
Boisard, Pierre. Camembert: A National Myth. Translated by Richard Miller. Berkely and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.
Commission, European, "eAmbrosia: The European Geographical Indications Register" https://ec.europa.eu/info/food-farmin....
Corneille, Thomas. Dictionnaire Universel Géographique et Historique. Vol. 3. Paris: Chez Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1708.
Donnelly, Catherine, ed. The Oxford Companion to Cheese. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Jobey, Charles. Histoire D'orbec. 1778.
Palmer, Ned. A Cheesemonger's History of the British Isles. London: Profile Books, 2019.
Sukapdjo, Amye R. ""Le Camembert": French Memories, Identities, and Heritage in the First World War." The French Review 87, no. 4 (2014): 99-107.

Images
Original statue of French peasant woman: neverstop2travel, via Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/neverst...) (CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...)
Replacement statue of Marie Harel: Mark Noordink, via Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcnoo...) (CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...)
Thomas Corneille by Jacob van Loo, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) (Public Domain)
Map of the Western Front 1915-1916, US Department of History, US Military Academy West Point, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...)
Portrait of Napoleon III by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...)
Camembert le Châtelain: Jon Sullivan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...)
Industrial Camembert: Normandieshop, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) (CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...)

00:00 Introduction
01:37 Origin Story
08:19 The Railway and the Emperor
11.50 Imitation
13:23 World War I
15:52 A Statue of a French peasant woman
18:17 Pasteurisation and Industrialisation
23:12 Outro

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