When you walk into the bakery craving that iconic, buttery, flaky breakfast pastry with a dark chocolate centre, do you ask for a pain au chocolat or a chocolatine?
The answer to that question has been dividing France - along strictly regional lines - for centuries.
In terms of numerical majority, pain au chocolat wins, at least according to one website entirely devoted to the topic (it's something that French people feel quite passionately about, OK?)
Its survey of over 110,000 people found that almost 60 percent would say pain au chocolat, with 40 percent going for chocolatine.
The website also asked voters for their region of France, and its interactive map that reveals the chocolatine voters are hugely congregated in the south west.
An even better map was put together by linguist Mathieu Avanzi after he carried out a survey of hundreds of French people in different parts of the country.
Pain au Chocolat vs Chocolatine In France More about the difference: brilliantmaps.com/pain-au-c...
— Brilliant Maps (@brilliantmaps.bsky.social) January 14, 2025 at 6:04 PM
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Being the 'chocolatine' region has become almost a point of identity for those from the south west.
Heads to towns like Toulouse and you can even buy T-shirts or tote bags with the region's unofficial slogan Ici, on dit chocolatine (here we say chocolatine), while sports fans from the south-west have been known to fly this banner at away matches when they travel to the 'badlands' of pain au chocolat country.
In fact, pupils from the south western town of Montauban penned a letter to France's president in a bid to get the word chocolatine added to the French dictionary.
"It's a word of our region, where a lot of people live, and there's no reason why the rest of the country shouldn't know it. We're proud to be from the south," one pupil told La Dépêche du Midi newspaper.
So why the confusion?
The origins of the ubiquitous French breakfast pastries can be fairly reliably traced to the 1830s, when an Austrian named August Zang opened the very first boulangerie viennoise at 92 rue Richelieu in what is now the second arrondissement of Paris.
According to culinary historian Jim Chevalier, author of "August Zang and the French Croissant: How the Viennoiserie Came to France", it was the schokoladencroissant, a crescent-shaped, chocolate-filled brioche that slowly evolved into the rectangular chocolatine/pain au chocolat.
As the French gradually integrated viennoiseries into their culture - changing it from a brioche bread to a laminated pastry - chocolatine became one and the same with pain au chocolat, which historically referred to any chocolate-filled bread that children enjoyed as a snack at school. The southwest region, meanwhile, is supposed to have stuck with chocolatine due to its similarity to the Occitan word chicolatina.
Another theory floats around that, during a period of English rule over France’s Aquitaine region in the 15th century, the English would walk into bakeries and ask for “chocolate in bread, please!” which the French understood as, simply, “chocolate in.” However, this theory has been largely disproved due to the fact that chocolate did not arrive in Europe from the Americas until 1528, by which time the English were no longer occupying Aquitaine.
Is this a serious disagreement? Really?
Chocolatine wars are more in the realm of playful than actually violent, it's a fun tradition and everyone enjoys winding up their neighbours.
It's true that in the south-west bakers might have a little fun with pain au chocolat folk - such as handing them a baguette with a bar of chocolate (literally 'chocolate in bread') while some places have price listings that show chocolatines as cheaper than pain au chocolat - despite, obviously, being the exact same thing.
If you're visiting the south west it will certainly ingratiate you with the locals if you know your chocolatine law.
But that doesn't mean that the two sides are likely to agree any time soon - in a report about torturous negotiations for the 2025 French budget one lawmaker, reaching for a metaphor on why it's so hard to find a compromise, said 'It's like asking the pain au chocolat camp and the chocolatine camp to come to an agreement'.
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