Who invented the croissant?
The croissant began as the Austrian kipferl, a crescent shaped bread. August Zang brought it to Paris in 1838, and it became French once bakers made it with puff pastry.
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A crescent from Vienna
Long before Paris, there was the kipferl, also written kipfel. It is a crescent shaped bake from Austria, made with plenty of butter or lard and sometimes sugar and almonds. It is old. A poem from 1227 lists it among the Christmas treats the bakers of Vienna gave to Duke Leopold. So the shape and the idea were around for centuries. What the kipferl did not have yet were the light, flaky layers that make a croissant shatter when you bite it.
Two famous legends
The best known story says Viennese bakers made the crescent in 1683 to celebrate beating the Ottoman army at the siege of Vienna, its shape copying the moon on the Ottoman flag. The 1227 poem shows the bread is far older, so that story does not hold. Another legend says Marie Antoinette, homesick for Vienna, brought it to France. The scholar Jim Chevallier looked and found no evidence for that either. He found no mention of the croissant in France before about 1850.
A bakery on rue de Richelieu
The trail leads to August Zang, an Austrian businessman. In 1838 he opened the first Viennese bakery in Paris, at 92 rue de Richelieu on the Right Bank. He was good at selling. He took out newspaper adverts and dressed his windows with care, and Parisians came for his Vienna bread, his kaiser rolls and his kipferl. Zang later went home to Austria, where he founded the country's first daily newspaper and made money in banking and mining.
How it turned French
French bakers copied the crescent and named it after its shape, croissant. Then they changed what was inside it. Chevallier puts it simply: the croissant began as the Austrian kipfel but became French the moment people made it with puffed pastry, which is a French invention. By the 1870s it was known in Paris. Charles Dickens, writing after a visit in 1872 and 1873, mentioned the dainty croissant on the boudoir table. Britannica notes that the first recipe for the croissant as we know it today only appeared in 1906.
A 20th century star
So the croissant is younger than most people think. Britannica calls its huge rise in popularity a 20th century thing, which means the pastry that now stands for a French breakfast spent most of its life as a Paris novelty with Austrian roots. A typical croissant today is one medium crescent from the bakery counter. It is made by folding butter into the dough and rolling it out again and again, so it bakes into thin, crisp layers. Those layers are the whole point, and they are the part the old kipferl never had.