Fougasse in French cuisine is a type of hearth bread originally used to assess the temperature of a wood fired oven. It is found in Provence and is the French equivalent of a Calzone. The name has the same Latin roots as modern Italian Focaccia bread.
Fougasse is not otherwise a word in French, though it sounds like it might be. Fou means 'crazy' or 'mad'. 'Gasse' sounds like 'gas' in English but 'gas' in French is gaz.
Fougasse and fougade both mean a type of buried mine but I cannot find any reference to word origin in either English or French.
"Ceterum censeo Hillary esse delendam."
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Thanks for the additional information. I was going by the 1971 Oxford English Dictionary, which does say that the word is an alteration of “fougade” but gives no other derivation.
There is an OED entry for the obsolete 17th-century word “fougue” or “fogue”, meaning fury, passion, ardor, or impetuosity, and derived from the French word “fougue” which my French-English dictionary defines as spirit or ardor.
So I think you could put together a plausible connection between the word “fougue” and either meaning of “fougasse”, bomb or bread.
I have to stop now, or Slings and Arrows will demand that I take a drink for trying to hijack this thread.