The famous long, thin and crispy French baguette, so loved by visitors to France, has disappeared from the shelves of Paris bakeries. This was something which last happened 221 years ago (1789) and which sparked off the French Revolution and resulted in the heads of the French king and queen being chopped off.
To blame for the disappearance of the baguette this time are two people: Carla Bruni, the one time model, singer and lover of Mick Jagger, but today the wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy, while the other is American movie maker, Woody Allen.
Woody began shooting his next movie, 'Midnight in Paris', this week in Paris and Bruni plays one of the movie's 1287 characters.
For Bruni's first scene she had to walk into a Paris bakery and buy a baguette. She could not however get the scene right and after she had 'bought' the bakery's stock of baguettes (150) Allen moved to a nearby bakery, but there the same thing happened. Allen continued to the next bakery, and the next, and the next, and after 75 hours Paris no longer had any baguettes left.
"This - the Parisians without bread - is an explosive situation," said a spokesperson for the FBU, the French Bakers Union.
He warned that what had happened in 1789 could well happen again today.
"A Parisian who can't dunk his baguette in his cup of coffee first thing in the morning, is a furious beast. I therefore offer no guarantee that what happened to Louis 16th and Marie-Antoinette could not happen today," he said.
"I fail to understand what the brouhaha is about. If the Parisians do not have bread, let them eat cake!" was Bruni's response when journalists asked her to comment on the FBU's warning.
Woody is now flying to Paris a thousand plastic 'souvenir' baguettes from a factory in China.
Said his spokesperson: "He is determined to keep Carla Bruni in the movie even if he has to fly in yet another thousand baguettes."
