Chocolat

Reynaud is the secondary voice of the two that Harris uses for the first-person narrative. He represents the narrative foil to Vianne: He is obsessed with self-denial and distrustful of difference and of outsiders. These traits are reflected in their oppositional physical appearances and environments: She wears bright clothing and makes her shop a warm, inviting place, whereas he is confined to the black clothes of the priesthood and the church is gloomy and dusty.

Although he is the antagonist of the book, Harris makes him a rounded, complex character. He feels bursts of love for his parishioners, even though he sees them as stupid, like sheep. He is drawn to food, company, and warmth when he witnesses Roux’s party, but he believes that he has a moral imperative to condemn these things. His disgust toward many characters comes from his fear of these qualities in himself. He is appalled by Muscat’s aggression toward the houseboat community, but he has committed arson on the houseboats himself. He is repulsed by Caro’s neediness toward him and her weakness in breaking her Lent fast at the chocolaterie, but this reflects his own dependency on his père and his obsession with the chocolate. He is horrified at Caro and Vianne’s femininity, noticing the scent of them or the way they choose to dress, but his detailed observations of them suggest attraction. Harris reveals late in the narrative that Reynaud was traumatized by seeing his beloved père having sex with his mother; his fear of the consequences of this “temptation” manifests as disgust.

Reynaud and Vianne mirror each other’s struggles with their pasts. Both are in a parental role themselves—Vianne to Anouk and Reynaud to his parishioners. However, Vianne wants to break free from her past, whereas Reynaud is trapped by it. He has the same instinct for pleasure and joy that Vianne has but represses it due to his past. Ultimately, his attempts to deny this part of himself fail, as he is unable to resist gorging on chocolate when he breaks into the shop.

Vianne’s mother is a defining influence on Vianne’s life, and Vianne feels her presence and speaks to her throughout the book even though she is dead.

Vianne’s mother is a complex, rounded character. When she was alive, she had a spirit of adventure, had an intense love for her daughter, and loved telling stories, but these traits all have other sides to them. Vianne says that much of her life was “make-believe,” and Harris heavily suggests that she kidnapped Vianne as a baby, which is the reason why she was always fleeing and clung intensely to Vianne. She also considered herself a witch, reading the tarot. She fled the “Black Man,” who represents her fear of the institutions, especially the church and its black-robed priests. This is a broad fear: These forces are antagonistic to her way of life as an itinerant person and as a pagan or witch. Her fears also came from a specific encounter: A priest tried to persuade her to leave Vianne with the church once, when she tried to confess, an act that indicates her unresolved guilt and fear over Vianne. When she learned that she had cancer, she tried to flee death by traveling onward constantly.

Vianne’s relationship with her is embodied by her mother’s tarot cards. She feels her presence in them when she gets them out, and they represent her mother’s hopes and fears. Vianne is drawn to them, representing a child’s dependency on and love for a parent and also her connection to magic. However, her struggle to prevent them from dictating her feelings or actions encapsulates her struggle to forge her own life, independent from her mother.

Père is French for “father,” and Reynaud addresses this character as such. This is also the term used to address Catholic priests, and it turns out that père is the previous priest of the village and not Reynaud’s biological father, though this is ambiguous for much of the novel. Reynaud’s point of view is all addressed to him, usually during a visit to him at the hospital, where he is in a coma from which the doctors say he’ll never wake up. He represents the dwindling influence of Catholicism in French communities, something that Reynaud fights throughout the narrative as he prays for père to wake up and attempts to keep villagers in line.

Narratively, père acts as a blank slate onto whom Reynaud projects his thoughts and feelings, unable to respond, but is also presented as the cause of many of Reynaud’s traits. This suggests that Catholicism has played a role in bad deeds even while it attempts to dictate morality in modern society. Père played a fatherly role to Reynaud, who idolizes him. Many of Reynaud’s attitudes are inherited from him: He rallied the villagers to ostracize the itinerant houseboat community in 1975, refusing to sell them medicine or supplies; he also encouraged the young Reynaud to commit an arson attack against them. Reynaud says that “for months [after this, he] screamed in the night” (317), but his père assigned him Paters and Aves (types of prayer) to atone for this. Reynaud has internalized the idea that his penance can make something right: He believes if he fasts enough and defeats Vianne, this will reawaken his père. Before he breaks into the shop, he promises himself a nice meal if he succeeds. Reynaud’s père has shaped his narrative: Reynaud feels that he is not entitled to the pleasures of life until he has atoned for his guilt.

Armande is an older woman living in Les Marauds, the informal housing areas of the village. She describes herself as a witch and seems to know things about Vianne and other villagers that she shouldn’t know. She has many cats, an animal traditionally seen as a witch’s companion. She loves her cats despite her allergies, reflecting her prioritization of happiness and spirituality above her health. She has holes cut in her house to allow her cats freedom, showing that she sees agency as important for all living beings.

She is independent, living alone and disregarding the disapproval of Reynaud’s congregation, including her own daughter. However, she values community and human connection enormously. To her great joy, she builds a relationship with her grandson, Luc, once Vianne’s chocolaterie gives them a good place to meet. She looks out for Guillaume and Josephine through their struggles and in turn leans on Roux and Vianne to help her in her final days, embodying the value of intergenerational support. She is welcoming to the traveling community, offering her property for them to moor on so that they can’t be accused of trespassing and providing them with supplies in return for work on her roof. Despite her differences with the Clairmonts, she wants them at her party, recognizing that they are still important in each other’s lives.

Her 81st birthday party embodies Armande’s major values: pleasure and agency. She indulges in chocolate throughout the book, despite its risk to her health, as she doesn’t see the point of living without any pleasure. She maintains her right to sensual pleasure regardless of age and social role, wearing red underwear and reminiscing about past lovers. Armande knows that her illness (diabetes) is degenerative and that she is likely to spend her remaining years in a nursing home without her sight, which would represent an enormous loss of agency for an elderly person without great resources. She asserts her agency, secretly choosing to stop taking her medicine and timing this so that she dies after an enormous, indulgent party.

Anouk is Vianne’s six-year-old daughter. She has an imaginary or magical companion, a rabbit called Pantoufle. Vianne passes many of her traits onto Anouk, dressing her in bright clothes and including her in magical rituals. Anouk is spirited and independent, running out to play on her own and making friends. She expresses resentment toward Vianne when Jeannot is forbidden from playing with her because of Vianne’s alternative lifestyle, but she then comforts her mother and reassures her that she loves her and won’t leave. This shows maturity for a six-year-old, reflecting the adult demands of their traveling lifestyle in which they only have each other. She expresses a desire to stay in the village, though she loves the song about the wind changing, suggesting that she may have inherited some of Vianne’s traveling tendencies. She is the primary reason why Vianne decides to settle in the village, wanting to offer her community and stability. Despite her intense love for her, Vianne respects her agency, allowing her total freedom to go out and play and asking her what she wants when Jeannot is banned from playing with her. She even asks if she wants to go to church despite this being antithetical to Vianne’s worldview.

Pantoufle represents one of the main stylistic features of Chocolat—the magical realism genre. Anouk expresses herself through him: He gets hungry or scared, for example. He is not physically visible, but Vianne sometimes senses his presence, and Armande sees him, asking what animal he is. He is an example of a central feature in magical realism: ambiguous phenomena that could be read as literally magical or as symbolic literary devices. Harris uses magical realism to reflect one of the main themes of the book, The Importance of Spirituality. The line between science and magic in Chocolat is blurred; for example, Vianne is drawn to the tarot cards but tells herself that they are projections of her own concerns. She makes her chocolate to precisely measured recipes, scientific in method, but sees the process as a form of sorcery. Pantoufle encapsulates this ambiguity.

Josephine is a woman in the village married to an abusive husband, Muscat. She is excluded by Caro and Joline’s clique and is isolated. At the start of the book, she always has a hand “drawn up against her stomach in an odd, protective gesture,” and her mouth is “perpetually downturned” (37). She steals compulsively, taking trinkets from the market stalls and a packet of chocolates from Vianne’s shop. Harris doesn’t explicitly explore the reason for this but shows that Josephine feels that she has no control in her life; she feels trapped in her marriage and frustrated that the confident, aspirational woman she used to be has gone.

After Vianne initiates a friendship with her, she gets the courage to leave Muscat and stay in the chocolate shop, where she blossoms back into her happier former self. Harris shows that she remains impacted by her marriage and social ostracization: She is afraid of public disturbances and finds Roux’s anger distressing. However, she is determined to forge her own path, telling Roux that Muscat set fire to the boats despite her fear of this conversation and going back to the café alone to get her things. Vianne is amazed by her optimism and open-heartedness toward other people: She sees Muscat as weak and Caro’s group as foolish and has not become bitter about people in general. Through her, Harris suggests that there is hope for those trapped in difficult situations, who can escape with the help of community.

Guillaume is one of the first villagers Vianne notices—he is a timid and nondescript older man with a sick dog, Charly. She immediately notices that his “expression is complex with love, concern, guilt” (19). This is because he adores Charly and is dependent on his companionship, but Charly is dying of a tumor. Guillaume can’t bear to have him put down, and his agonizing is compounded by Reynaud’s assertions that dogs don’t have souls, so Guillaume should not be so emotionally involved. His struggle to overcome his love and dependency for Charly’s own good parallels Vianne’s interdependent relationship with her mother and her struggle to avoid this with her daughter: He repeats the phrase, “What would I do without you?” (69), which Vianne thinks about Anouk and heard her mother say about her. Guillaume’s difficult acceptance that he must do what is best for Charly also mirrors the acceptance of the few people in the know, including Guillaume and Vianne, about Armande’s choice to stop taking her medicine. Through the solace of the chocolaterie, Guillaume builds a small community—although he is formal and reserved by nature, he becomes friends with Armande and Josephine as well as Vianne. Guillaume loves to give Charly treats and take physical care of him. He is fundamentally driven by compassion. Vianne comments about him that “some people never have to think about giving” (47). He later takes in a new puppy, which Anouk believes might house Charly’s reincarnated soul, suggesting that there is hope after letting go of a loved one.

Roux is a red-headed Romani man, part of the community of people living on houseboats who come to the village to moor, referred to as “gypsies” or “travelers” by the villagers. The former is an offensive term for Romani people, highlighting the racist roots of the villagers’ feelings toward Roux and his community. He has a strong Marseilles accent, which becomes stronger when he is feeling uncomfortable or distressed, emphasizing his status as an outsider in the community. He is proud of his boat, which he restored from a ruin, showing Anouk and Vianne around it. He is also a skilled cook, preparing a beautiful feast for his social gathering.

He is standoffish initially, thanks to the prejudices and hostile reception of the villagers; Muscat, for example, bars them from his café unprovoked. He begins visiting Vianne’s shop, but his underlying wariness remains: He is defensive about apparent displays of charity in response to the prejudices that traveling communities often face, and after the fire, he cuts himself off from his new acquaintances, feeling attacked by the whole village. He is afraid that he will be blamed when Armande collapses, highlighting the targeting of minoritized communities by law enforcement—Harris suggests that he has bad experiences with the police.

Through Roux, Harris shows The Power of Community and human connection. He and Armande mutually support each other, as she gives him somewhere to moor and helps him with supplies, and he mends her roof and helps her physically. He and Vianne comfort each other through physical intimacy after Armande’s party. Vianne describes this as “the only magic [they] ha[ve] between [them] to combat the night” (351)—they have commonalities in their spiritual worldview, oriented toward broadly pagan ideas. Harris shows the importance of human connection to give meaning in the face of death.

Ultimately, Roux’s past is ambiguous: Vianne notices that his hands are soft for a laborer’s and that his strong accent is fading, and when she asks about his name, he says, “[N]ames don’t matter […]. Accents don’t matter either” (350). Harris suggests that a person’s history and background are unimportant compared to who they are in the here and now.

Caro is Armande’s daughter and Luc’s mother. She is married to Georges Clairmont. Caro is the leader of Reynaud’s “Bible groupies,” as Armande calls them, a clique of church-going women who dress fashionably and seek social status through their conformation to a socially conservative lifestyle and church attendance. They exclude those who don’t fit in, like Josephine, and seek to pressure others into conformity, visiting Vianne to tell her that Anouk needs to stop sharing stories in class that are outside the biblical canon. They are wary of outsiders and prejudiced toward the houseboat community: Georges refuses to trade with them, and Caro treats Roux with suspicion. They encapsulate the potential of a small community to be insular and closed-minded, particularly if a prominent figure encourages this, and they represent Harris’s ideas about the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church and social conservatism since their conservative, religious morality prevents them from doing good. They are positive about the idea of the chocolate festival originally, but Caro fronts a campaign against it following Reynaud’s censure.

Caro has a complex relationship with sensory pleasures: She initially breaks her Lenten vow to indulge in Vianne’s chocolate and is tempted by it throughout the book, but she denies herself due to social pressure. This pressure relates to the church but also to her desire to be slim. She follows diets and worries about her hips. Her interest in fashionable clothes similarly represents her conformity to social pressure, but it also mirrors her mother’s appreciation for fine, colorful underwear as a source of pleasure, further highlighting Caro’s hypocrisy. Georges also pursues sensory pleasures: He has affairs with women and flirts with Vianne. This is not broadly censured in the way that Caro’s alleged vanity is, reflecting a sexist double standard. Both Reynaud and Vianne are unreliable narrators regarding Caro; they see her as shallow and weak, as she holds different values from both of them.

Although she is generally antagonistic to Vianne, Caro is a rounded character with complex motivations. She has a bad relationship with her mother, as she wants her to attend church and follow the doctor’s advice. She is reluctant to let Armande see Luc, seeing her as a bad influence. Her attitude toward Armande partly comes from concern for her, but she fails to recognize Armande’s right to self-determination, believing that she knows best and seeking to control her, just as she does Luc. Despite this, she attends Armande’s party at her request, representing a degree of closure before her death. She brings her mother a silk scarf and a silver flower vase—despite their differences, she has chosen personal gifts that cater to Armande’s love of silk and flowers.

Muscat is Josephine’s husband. He is aggressive and self-centered, abusing Josephine physically and emotionally. He blames her for his behavior, telling Reynaud about “her stupidity, her thieving, her laziness” (241). He confesses each week but does not have any drive to change, highlighting the moral complexity of the Catholic practice of confession, in which even repeated sins can be forgiven each time with penance. This exemplifies Harris’s portrayal of a Catholic sense of morality being different from real good.

Muscat bars Roux and the other travelers from his café, demonstrating his intolerance. The ultimate example of this is his act of arson against them. He finds justification for his behavior in his own prejudices but also in Reynaud’s preaching, demonstrating the dangers of intolerant rhetoric, which have real consequences. He is a negative example of Intergenerational Influences: Armande remembers him hiding from his own drunk, aggressive father, showing the vicious cycle of abusive behavior.

Luc is Caro’s son and Armande’s grandson, both of whom exert influence on him throughout the book. He is initially shy, speaking with a stutter and wary to accept chocolate, as Caro has warned him that it will give him “zits.” Caro has discouraged him from having any relationship with Armande, but Vianne’s chocolaterie offers an accepting place to meet in secret, and he grows close to her. Armande offers him a different outlook on life from his mother’s, embracing sensory experiences as they share chocolate together. At home, he hides the much-loved Rimbaud poetry book she gave him, repressing parts of himself. This provides a potentially LGBTQ+ subtext to Luc’s character since Rimbaud famously had a relationship with fellow poet Paul Verlaine.

Armande is interested in Luc as an individual, asking him to read his favorite poem. When he reads to her, he no longer has a stutter, showing the confidence that acceptance and encouragement can give. Initially always with his mother, Luc grows into his own person, supporting his grandmother by indulging in chocolate, sharing her love of bright colors, working on her flowers, and gifting her the red silk slips she loves. He manages his relationship with his mother so that they remain on good terms while he asserts his independence and right to see Armande: “[H]e is unmoved by the display, but puts an arm around her shoulder” (325). Harris shows how parent-child relationships shift over time as the child grows.

Joline is the schoolteacher in the village and one of Reynaud’s “Bible groupies”—part of the fashionable, church-going women in Caro’s clique. She is influenced by the pressure to belong, dressing similarly to Caro and obeying Reynaud’s instruction to ban Jeannot from playing with Anouk. However, Jeannot and his group of friends love the chocolate shop and Vianne’s stories and welcome Anouk into their group, playing with her in Les Marauds where Joline, Caro, and the other socially conservative adults don’t go. Jeannot and his friends embody the simple joy of childhood, enjoying chocolate, stories, and games without yet associating these things with complex moral or social codes. He doesn’t have any of his mother’s prejudices, welcoming outsiders easily.

Narcisse is a local farmer whose primary concern is his farm and plants and who is welcoming and nonjudgmental toward others. He attends church, makes the palm crosses for Easter, and provides flowers and advice for Reynaud in the churchyard. However, his values remain independent from church politics: He has argued in the past with Reynaud, as he wants to allow Romani people to camp on his land and offer them employment in the summer. He supports both Vianne and Josephine establishing their independence in the town, providing flowers for the shop and the café, and he also bonds with Roux over plant varieties. Harris portrays how his uncomplicated appreciation for plants and flowers helps him to bond with others regardless of their differences.