Paris and the other great cities of France usually manage to snare the lion’s share of attention among those fascinated with French politics and culture, but within France itself there is a visceral attachment to what is known as la France profonde, the French countryside. It is a phrase that captures a widely held belief that the deepest, most profound elements of the French nation are to be found in its rural retreats, where time seems to pass more slowly and tradition wields a tighter grasp. Like all national myths, the idea of la France profonde contains both truth and imagination. But it is the reason why French presidents traipse through the enormous agricultural show in Paris every year, complimenting cows and attempting repartee with skeptical farmers; it is why there is so much media attention on the decline of small towns and agricultural trades.
This affinity for la France profonde has much to do with the concurrent attachment to the foods and wines that emerge from its depths. Perhaps one of the best expressions of this dual affection are the numerous gastronomic trails snaking through the French countryside, celebrating specific local products. We have already encountered the Route du Chabichou, a network of rural goat cheese producers in Poitou-Charentes. Each summer, horse riders and hikers re-create the Route du Sel, or historic salt trade routes, through the Languedoc region. And on the French-Swiss border, a mountainous hiking trail known as the Route de l’Absinthe extends for thirty miles of stunning pastoral scenes, with frequent tastings of absinthe, the notorious local specialty known as la Fée Verte (the Green Fairy).
The Absinthe Trail begins in the picturesque mountain town of Pontarlier, the site of the first French absinthe distillery, built in 1805 by a Swiss man named Henri-Louis Pernod. He and his father-in-law adapted their herbal distilled liquor, with its distinctive flavor of anise, from a medicinal potion patented by a French doctor named Pierre Ordinaire, who had fled to Switzerland during the French Revolution. Pernod’s French distillery was successful, and the absinthe business gradually became the lifeblood of little Pontarlier. At its height, a century later, there were twenty-five absinthe distilleries around the town, producing nearly 30,000 liters of absinthe per day.1
Among the earliest fans of absinthe were members of the French army, as Pontarlier also hosted at that time a training camp that brought thousands of artillerymen to the town each summer. During the extended conquest of Algeria, absinthe rations were given to the troops there to purify their water supplies and hopefully prevent malaria and other fevers. It was a popular and seemingly effective policy, and absinthe became a consistent feature of colonial conquest throughout Africa and Southeast Asia.
The soldiers continued to enjoy absinthe upon returning home and made it popular among the bourgeoisie during the gilded era of the Second Empire. Absinthe became the perfect aperitif, traditionally drunk before dinner (to drink absinthe all night would have been incredibly gauche in mainstream society). It became so popular in Paris that the aperitif hours between five and seven p.m. became known as the “green hour.” The adding of water to the drink made it seem very refreshing and light, and the ritualistic serving of absinthe (slowly poured into a glass through a bit of sugar placed on a specially made spoon) made it attractive to a crowd in search of a new sensation.
Absinthe attracted a more bohemian reputation as the century wore on. Writers and artists in the Belle Époque, including Van Gogh, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Toulouse-Lautrec, believed the Green Fairy sparked their creative spirit. (Not all writers succumbed to absinthe’s charms; Proust famously needed only a madeleine to liberate a lifetime of memories in Swann’s Way, the first volume of his epic In Search of Lost Time.) Picasso, Degas, and Manet painted absinthe drinkers with varying degrees of approbation. Absinthe also became popular among the working classes in the 1870s, in part because lax regulations enabled the proliferation of cheaper, inferior versions.
Absinthe became ever more popular despite—or perhaps because of—its reputation for causing hallucinations, euphoria, seizures, and violent tendencies. Interestingly, recent pharmacological studies have shown that wormwood, thought to be the source of absinthe’s hallucinogenic effects, could not have been the true culprit; more likely, the extreme intoxication associated with absinthe was the result of its absurdly high alcohol content (around 70 percent), or toxicity due to haphazard distillation methods. Nevertheless, the appeal of absinthe was also strengthened when wine, the usual vehicle for French intoxication, suffered an apocalyptic crisis thanks to an accidental and most unfortunate American import.
Phylloxera is a nasty little louse that feeds on the roots of vines, causing them to swell. The infected roots are rejected by the vine, sap stops circulating, and within three years the entire vine dies. Phylloxera was native to the United States, and the long sailing times on maritime voyages effectively quarantined the pest to its home continent. But the nineteenth-century steamship allowed the Atlantic to be crossed in ten days instead of several weeks, and somehow phylloxera hitched a ride to France, now helpfully crisscrossed with ever-faster railways. Its first victim was a vineyard near Arles in 1863. Bordeaux was infected in 1866, followed by Cognac, Burgundy, and the rest of France. French wine production fell from 84.5 million hectoliters in 1875 to 23.4 million hectoliters in 1889—a monumental calamity.2 Champagne was the last major region to be infected, at the end of the nineteenth century.
The loss of the French wine industry was unthinkable, and every effort was expended to find an end to the crisis. Unfortunately, eliminating the pest by fumigation was too expensive and labor-intensive for most producers. An alternative path was proposed by French scientists, who rationalized that this American problem must have an American solution. Vines in America had adapted to phylloxera and were immune to its effects, so the obvious answer was to graft resistant American vines onto European vines. As you can imagine, the idea of introducing American vines to French winemaking sent some producers into apoplexy, and the French government did not approve the plan for nearly nine years. But after a great deal of trial and error, the experiment worked, and French vines slowly began to recover.
However, the traditional French wine producers returned to a much-changed market. During the phylloxera crisis, the French population coped by drinking imported wine, or watered down wine, or even fake wine made from raisins. (It was only as a result of the phylloxera crisis that France finally enacted a legal definition of wine, in 1889.) The vineyards of Algeria, which had produced wine even before the French conquest, expanded sixfold in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, and viticulture became an increasingly important sector of the colonial economy. Some people had stopped drinking wine entirely, turning to alternative liquors like absinthe.
And so French wine producers entered into an unholy alliance with the temperance movement. As in the United States, the French temperance movement blamed the excessive consumption of alcohol for the most pernicious ills of modern society. The French had become the largest consumers of alcohol in the world, with the average person consuming more than forty gallons of wine per year by the 1860s.3 Alcohol was increasingly blamed for a whole raft of social problems: physical and mental illness, criminality, political radicalism. Alcoholism, a term that had not even been coined until 1849, became seen as a national problem, not an individual one. Rising alcoholism was then—as so often now—largely blamed on the poverty, urban misery, and questionable morals of the lower social classes. The conditions that propelled radical workers’ movements were thought to also cause alcoholism, and so the two phenomena became closely linked in the minds of those who lived in dread of both. (By contrast, French socialists argued that alcoholism was encouraged by the bourgeoisie to keep the working class in thrall, and so it was yet another social ill that would disappear after the glorious workers’ revolution.) But in truth, the rise in alcohol consumption was more likely due to France’s increasing prosperity, with more people having the disposable income to afford alcohol, as well as the scientific innovations in alcohol production that led to new and cheaper forms of alcoholic drink.
The average French person still drank far more wine than any other alcohol, and French temperance activists were unique within the global temperance movement in tolerating, or even advocating the consumption of wine. It was a “natural alcohol,” like beer and cider, and moderate consumption was acceptable. Indeed, wine had long been thought to have medicinal benefits, especially for digestion. It was the “industrial alcohols” that were seen as the primary driver of alcoholism, and among these, absinthe was seen as particularly noxious, causing madness, perversity, criminality, and death.
So as long as the French temperance movement had its sights set on industrial alcohols, it was supported by the wine industry. In fact, the Ligue Nationale Contre l’Alcoolisme (National League Against Alcoholism), which campaigned to ban absinthe, was co-founded by a wine producer named Émile Cheysson. During the massive wine protests of 1907, when hundreds of thousands of people across the Languedoc protested the importation of cheap Algerian wines, one of the recurring slogans was “All for wine, and against absinthe.” The emotional resonance of wine drinking in France was captured in a statement by the archconservative writer Léon Daudet: “I am for wine, and against Absinthe, like I am for tradition, and against revolution.”4 This tactical alliance of temperance activists and vintners was ostensibly pursued for social and humanitarian reasons, but it must be admitted that wine producers would also benefit materially from the elimination of rival alcohols.
In August 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, the French government banned the sale and later the production of absinthe, part of a wider campaign against social practices seen as undermining the country’s military and moral strength. (France was not alone in this: in the same year, Russia made the shocking decision to ban the production of vodka.) Other industrial alcohols were subsequently banned, but by contrast, each serviceman in the French trenches received a daily ration of wine.
In France, a total prohibition on alcohol, as in the United States, was never seriously considered, although efforts to reduce alcoholism continued. As late as the 1950s, alcoholism was still a leading cause of death in France, but the creation of the national health service, better understanding of treatment methods, and government determination to reduce the social and economic costs of alcoholism finally led to a dramatic change in French drinking habits. Between 1960 and 2010, average annual consumption was cut in half, although it remains high relative to the United States and other western European countries, and it is a continuing source of concern for French public health authorities.
In the wake of the absinthe ban, the distilleries of Pontarlier managed to successfully convert to the production of pastis, an alternative anise-flavored liquor that did not contain wormwood, the supposed cause of absinthe’s malevolence. But in 2010, the French government reversed its absinthe ban, and Pontarlier joyously embraced the Green Fairy once again.
French winemakers, meanwhile, remain a powerful and combative force, especially in regions where they constitute the dominant economic sector. More than a century after the 1907 wine protests, the Languedoc continues to seethe with frustration over government wine policies and rival producers. Their main antagonist today is the bulk wine industry, both Spanish and French, which floods French supermarkets with cheaper wines at the lower end of the market, the traditional selling point for small Languedoc producers. Most protests are nonviolent, but the militant group Comité Régional d’Action Viticole (CRAV) has claimed responsibility for numerous incidents of arson and sabotage since the 1970s, as well as more recent propaganda efforts like emptying Spanish tanker trucks full of thousands of liters of wine after they cross the French border. The French government’s countercharge is that the Languedoc wine industry needs to evolve in tandem with industry trends and be more innovative: French people today drink less wine, of better quality, and there are more non-European producers than ever to compete with. But such arguments fall flat in a region with unemployment rates of up to 20 percent and what they see as insufficient government investment.
This dramatic poster was apparently distributed to bars around France following the ban of absinthe. It depicts the president of France, Raymond Poincaré, standing victoriously above the mortally wounded “Green Fairy,” while a World War I battle rages in the background. Le fin de la Fée Verte © David Nathan-Maister, 2017. Courtesy of the Musée Virtuel de l’Absinthe.
It is a mark of how vitally important the French alcohol industry is—not just economically but socially and emotionally—that the question of what people should drink has been so all-consuming and furiously politicized throughout the modern era. It is a dynamic that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon, as the combined effects of globalization, climate change, and evolving drinking habits will force some of the most powerful economic interests in France to adapt or perish. The consequences of failure for the French countryside would be profond indeed.