How many varieties of cheese are there in France?

How to get close to this number

Estimate from regions and producers. The country has dozens of distinct dairy regions, each with several traditional cheeses, and many farms produce their own variant. Regions times cheeses per region, plus farm-level variation, gives a figure in the high hundreds to low thousands.

The protected-designation figure is the useful contrast: only around forty-five hold that status out of over a thousand varieties. Protection requires a documented traditional method and a defined geographic area, so the vast majority of cheeses are made without legal protection and could disappear without anyone noticing.

The De Gaulle line in the explanation is the famous one and the explanation corrects it in the right direction: the quoted figure of two hundred and forty-six was an undercount. A remark intended to dramatise how ungovernable the country was turns out to have understated the case by a factor of five.