Chocolat

Chocolat is a novel by Joanne Harris, published in 1999, which was adapted into a film of the same name in 2000. The story is set in the invented French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes between Mardi Gras and Easter Sunday. Its heroine, Vianne Rocher, arrives with her six-year-old daughter Anouk and opens a chocolate shop opposite the church just as Lent begins, the traditional season of fasting and abstinence. Their timing scandalises the village priest, Francis Reynaud, and his supporters, and the community splits between the austerity of the Church and the indulgence of chocolate.

The novel has two first-person narrators: Vianne herself and Father Reynaud, who addresses his account to his confessor. Vianne reveals that her mother was a witch of sorts, and that she has inherited similar beliefs and gifts. Mother and daughter were wanderers, following the changing wind, and they earned their living through a kind of "domestic magic" built on cooking and an intuitive understanding of people. After her mother's death from cancer, Vianne tries to settle down and to escape the shadowy "Man in Black", a recurring figure in her mother's folklore.

A group of regular customers forms around the shop: Armande Voizin, an elderly woman estranged from her daughter; Guillaume, an old man devoted to his sick dog; and Joséphine Muscat, the abused wife of the owner of the local café. As the chocolate shop grows in popularity, Reynaud's hostility intensifies. He tries to keep his parishioners away from Vianne, and the conflict becomes a personal crusade. Tension mounts when a group of river travellers, led by the unflinching Roux, moors its boats nearby. Vianne welcomes them, while the priest and many villagers reject them. A fire set by Joséphine's husband, Paul-Marie, forces the travellers to leave, but the same episode pushes Joséphine to abandon him and move in with Vianne and Anouk.

Armande's death after a birthday party she organises as a farewell marks a turning point. In the final stretch, Reynaud bursts into the shop intending to wreck it but ends up gorging himself on chocolate, and the chocolate festival goes ahead with great success. The novel closes with Vianne discovering that she is pregnant by Roux, though it remains unclear whether they will raise the child together or whether she will move on.

Key themes include the tension between indulgence and guilt, motherhood set against patriarchy, and chocolate as a metaphor for love, tolerance and forgiveness. The bond between Vianne and Anouk is also central. Harris has acknowledged that her own four-year-old daughter inspired Anouk and her imaginary rabbit Pantoufle, and that her strong-willed, independent great-grandmother shaped Vianne and Armande. She has said she wrote much of the first draft on Sunday mornings while her husband was at work and her mother looked after their daughter.

The book was a bestseller on publication and has sold millions of copies worldwide. It won the Creative Freedom Award in 1999 and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. It gave rise to several sequels, among them The Lollipop Shoes (2007), Peaches for Monsieur le Curé (2012) and The Strawberry Thief (2019), as well as a prequel, Vianne, published in 2025.