Last Updated on September 24, 2026 by Jean Louis
I am going to say something that will upset people in my profession, and I am going to say it anyway because the truth is more interesting than the myth.
The croissant is not French.
Or rather: it is and it is not, depending on which part of the story you are talking about. And the part most people think they know is the part that is wrong.
Let me explain. I have strong feelings about this.
The croissant began as the Austrian kipferl, a crescent-shaped bread documented in Vienna as early as 1227, when bakers presented Duke Leopold with kipferl as a Christmas gift. It arrived in Paris in 1839. The word croissant first appeared in French culinary records in the mid-19th century. The pastry France is most famous for in the world did not exist in France until less than 200 years ago.
The direct ancestor of the croissant is the kipferl, a dense, crescent-shaped bread made across Austria and Central Europe for centuries. It was sweetened with vanilla or poppy seeds, shaped into its distinctive curve, and enjoyed throughout the Habsburg Empire long before any French baker had heard of it. The crescent shape that the whole world now associates with French breakfast culture was not a French invention. It was Austrian. Possibly older than Austria itself.
The most dramatic version of the kipferl’s origin involves the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. According to this story, Viennese bakers working through the night in their basement ovens heard the sound of Ottoman troops digging a tunnel beneath the city walls and raised the alarm, saving Vienna from invasion. In gratitude, the bakers were permitted to create a pastry in the shape of the crescent moon on the Ottoman flag: the kipferl as a trophy, eaten in celebration of a city that refused to fall.
It is a magnificent story. It is almost certainly not true.
Food historians have noted that crescent-shaped breads appear in records from centuries before the 1683 siege, and that several other foods, including the bagel and the Kugelhopf, share virtually identical origin stories conveniently dated to the same battle. The legend multiplied itself across pastries the way good legends tend to do. The kipferl predates the Ottoman siege. The drama was added later.
And then there is the Marie Antoinette story, which is even more appealing and equally unsupported. According to this version, the Austrian archduchess who became Queen of France introduced the kipferl to the French court when she married Louis XVI in 1770, homesick for the pastries of her childhood. No contemporary document supports this. Historians have searched. The story exists entirely in the realm of romantic possibility.
The historically credible version is considerably more modest, which is to say it involves one Austrian entrepreneur rather than a queen, and a street address rather than a royal court. His name was August Zang. In 1838 or 1839, he opened the Boulangerie Viennoise at 92 Rue de Richelieu in Paris, bringing Austrian baking technology with him including a patented steam oven that produced a different quality of crust than the French ovens of the time.
His kipferl became popular almost immediately. Parisian bakers noticed. They began making their own versions. And somewhere in that process of adaptation and competition, something genuinely new was born.
Here is where I will defend France, because I would not be French if I did not.
The laminated dough that makes the modern croissant what it is, the technique of folding cold butter repeatedly into thin layers of dough to create those shattering, airy, impossibly flaky interior chambers, is a French innovation. Pâte feuilletée, flaky pastry, was documented in France in 1653, two centuries before Zang arrived. The first recorded recipe specifically for the croissant as we know it today was published by French baker Sylvain Claudius Goy in 1915.
As food historian Jim Chevallier put it: “The croissant began as the Austrian kipferl, but became French the moment people began to make it with puffed pastry, which is a French innovation.”
Austria gave France the shape and the idea. France gave the world the butter and the technique. The croissant you eat this morning is both things at once: an Austrian crescent remade by French hands into something neither country could have produced alone. This is more interesting than the simple story. It is also more true.
What does this mean for the croissant’s identity? Nothing, really. A dish belongs to the culture that perfected it and made it their own. Italy did not invent the tomato, but nobody questions Italian tomato sauce. France did not invent the kipferl, but the croissant is undeniably French in the form the world knows and loves.
What it means for the legend is something else. Every time someone repeats that Marie Antoinette brought the croissant to France, or that Viennese bakers invented it to mock the Ottomans, they are telling a better story than the one that actually happened.
I understand the impulse. The truth, in this case, is an Austrian entrepreneur with a steam oven on the Right Bank.
But the butter is French. And in my profession, the butter is always the most important part.
The kitchen never lies. History sometimes does.
Jean Louis
Sources
- Institute of Culinary Education. A Brief History of the Croissant, From Austrian Kipferl to French Luxury.
- Origin Trace. The Origin of the Croissant: From the Siege of Vienna to Parisian Cafés. 2026.
- Paris Unlocked. Curious History of the Croissant. 2024.
