Was the croissant invented in Austria rather than France?

The claim confuses a pastry's predecessor with its later development. The croissant traces its ancestry to the Austrian kipfel, but its familiar flaky form developed in France.

Smithsonian's historical account, drawing on researcher Jim Chevallier, distinguishes the Austrian crescent-shaped baked good from the French pastry adaptation. It identifies August Zang's nineteenth-century Viennese bakery in Paris as an important part of that history. France.fr also describes this Austrian-to-French transformation, although its account links back to Smithsonian.

That does not establish a single inventor or an exact moment when the modern croissant appeared. Austrian ancestry and French development can both be true; presenting the pastry as exclusively Austrian obscures the distinction.