Professor John Merriman:
So, the subject is drink
and in particular drinking too
much.
And I want to make a very
obvious point that drink and
drinking, for better or for
worse,
often for the latter,
is closely tied to the economy,
political life,
culture,
and social life,
sociability,
of France, and that this has
always been the case as a wine
producing country and a country
that,
in the course--over the
centuries produced lots of other
alcohol as well.
So, let's get going on that.
Here I've drawn on the work of
an old friend of mine,
Susannah Barrows,
who studied aspects of this,
and lots of other people as
well;
and in addition some probably a
firsthand experience,
not about drinking too much,
of course, but about living in
France.
In 1934 the President of
France, a quite forgettable
character called Albert Lebrun,
said that wine "does not only
confer health and vigor to those
people who are drinking it,
it has soothing properties that
both ensure the rational
equilibrium of the organism and
create a predisposition to
harmony among men;
in addition it can be,
in difficult times,
it can pour confidence and hope
into our hesitating hearts."
One of course thinks of
Pétain increasing the rum
ration at Verdun in 1916 and the
regular rounds of doing shots
before you went over the
trenches,
the hesitating hearts soon dead
hearts.
There has been in France,
a very long time from about the
1880s really into the early
'90s, 1990s, a denial of the
problem of drinking.
This is not only France,
Poland, of course,
which has even a higher rate of
alcoholism--I spend a lot of
time in Poland these days,
and it's really kind of
amazing--and in Russia as well.
But, because of the identity of
France and its national identity
with products of quality,
with fine wines,
with fine Bordeaux,
with fine Burgundy,
this denial became rather
easier and the people who drank
too much were not drinking fine
Burgundies and fine Bordeaux,
nor are they today.
In 1875 Barrows discovered that
the Grand Dictionnairen du XIXe
Siècle informed its
readers that,
in quote, "in our country
although drunkenness is not
unknown, it is far from having a
character as repellent and as
nefarious as in England and as
in America."
Now, one of the reasons why a
dictionary consulted by so many
zillions of people over the ages
could throw out such a line is
because there's been a close
identification with people
drinking too much in,
particularly the lower classes,
in Britain, with drinking hard
liquor, gin--that is in Hogarth
and the prints--and not just
getting wasted on beer.
And the United States,
as Louis-Philippe himself found
out, the drink of choice was
bourbon and various whiskies,
as in Scotland.
So, wine seemed to be okay.
And in England where the
Temperance Movement closely tied
to organized religion was
terribly important,
and in the Scandinavian states,
and in Germany the Temperance
Movement was but a small dike
put up against the waves,
the hurricane like waves of
drink.
Now, wine has always been
produced in France for centuries
and centuries.
There is a wine called Cornas,
c-o-r-n-a-s,
that's produced down here in
Ardèche,
quite near the Rhône,
that's a very dark
costaud,
en français,
a very hearty red wine that has
to be sat down for a long time,
that one of the Roman poets
discussed in some Roman century,
B.C.
century.
In that particular region
people had to produce wine,
most of it was bad wine,
in order to trade the wine for
something to eat because the
region, that particular region,
called the Vivarais--it doesn't
matter--couldn't produce very
much at all because of the rocky
soil,
and so they would trade their
rather bad wine for lentils,
for example,
produced around Le Puy,
higher up--it doesn't matter,
the details don't matter.
So, wine had always been
produced.
But wine was fairly expensive
and so people,
as we'll see in awhile,
began to drink other things.
Bordeaux wines were well known
in England, and thus in Britain
they refer to red wine as a
claret and the reason that
Burgundy wines were not well
known in Britain is fairly easy,
just look at a map.
Bordeaux, dangerous trips
across--around France,
around Brittany,
would end up wines arriving in
British ports;
whereas, for example,
in Belgium when people drink
great wines or very good wines
they tend to drink Burgundies
because of the way the lay of
the land works.
But what's interesting about,
and what fits right into what
we're talking about,
is where people drank,
because obviously the role of
the café
is so fundamental in French
economic,
political, social,
and cultural life.
There's just--any aspect you
think of modern France,
particularly in the Third
Republic, is closely tied to
that institution.
Impressionist painting,
for example,
the role of
café-concert where
you could go and be entertained
as you drank,
is important in Impressionism;
or paintings of the coast,
of the Normand coast by
Morisseau and lots of other
people.
Drink is totally prevalent,
and Degas and all of the other
ones, there was just the
preoccupation with absinthe,
for example--more about that in
awhile--which has just been made
legal again,
within the last couple of years.
Cafés are where deals
did used to get done and where
deals still get done;
or, if you're living in a large
city, in a world of apartments,
people will tend,
the first time they'll invite
you will be to a café,
often not to their own home.
But just as restaurants--which
I'll talk about at the end,
if there's time--cafés
themselves are relatively,
in French history,
a recent phenomenon.
Even the word café,
a café,
what is café?
Well, café
is coffee, and it is with the
arrival of coffees from the new
world that becomes the real
rage,
the real hit of the eighteenth
century and the emergence in
Britain of the coffeehouse where
politics is done.
We use, and I use today,
café to be a generic
place where one drinks,
but in fact in the period that
we're considering,
at the end of the nineteenth
century,
people were clever enough to
realize that--and aware of their
surroundings enough--to know
that the cafés are where
the wealthy people went,
on the big boulevards of Paris
or on the Rue de la
République in Lyon,
or in the fancy neighborhoods
of almost every large city,
and ordinary people went to
drink in places where they did
not often serve café
because it was so expensive,
and if they did it was a fairly
rare thing because café
was expensive;
drink, as we'll see in awhile,
cost absolutely nothing.
And even the names--I just
picked a few,
six or seven,
and nobody's responsible for
this,
except maybe the French people
would like to think about
this--just kind of describe
where people go to drink.
It varies from region to region
often, but let me just go
through this briefly.
A café,
well I've already said that,
and how they change because the
days of the flipper
machine are all gone,
the pinball machine and all
that, it just changes,
and my God, now there's
Starbucks--I have nothing
against Starbucks,
do I?--I don't know--but have
arrived in Paris now,
and that's as much of a shock
and,
dare I say, blow as the arrival
of McDonalds all those years
ago.
But, anyway,
a cabaret, when you think of
cabaret you think of the
cabaret, and you think of people
dancing,
and you think of Berlin in the
1920s or something like that.
But a cabaret was a place where
ordinary people went to drink,
that's what a cabaret is.
An estaminet is simply a word
for the same thing,
but in the north of France an
estaminet you wouldn't go to
Agen,
you wouldn't go to Marseille,
and ask for the local
estaminet.
A guinguette is
sort of a rural place that you
would drink, and again I'm
thinking of Impressionist
paintings that you might have
seen with the role of people
going out there on Sunday,
both males, unattached males
looking for unattached females
and families going out,
along the Marne,
which in the 1920s and '30s,
outside of Paris,
was a real hot place to go--a
guinguette was very
rural.
A bouchon,
the word in French
bouchon means a cork;
it also means a traffic jam,
as a cork in a bottle is a
traffic jam, nobody can get
through because it's
bouchonné,
or a wine can be
bouchonné,
too.
But, anyway,
a bouchon is a rural
drinking place,
and when I think of
bouchon I think of a
place where you go with your
friends and maybe play a little
boule,
along side of that,
and it's sort of identity with
leisure but seeking the outside
of the city,
to find some greenery on a
Sunday.
And you think of Lyon,
for example,
of the all the Lyonnais at the
end of the nineteenth century
going across the Rhône
River to a working-class
faubourg called La
Guillotière,
and then going further out in
these places like Brotot--it
doesn't matter--but where it's
just full of places to drink.
Or chambrays,
a chambray is a form of a place
of male sociability;
women did not go there usually.
It was sort of a club where you
drank essentially tax free booze
on the sly,
and it's more,
it's identified particularly
with a department called the
Var,
v-a-r, which is-- you don't
have to remember,
obviously, that--but which is
where Toulon is and
Saint-Tropez.
And they were important because
in the Second Republic,
that is 1848 to 1851,
this is one of the places where
politics sort of came to very
ordinary people.
So, but what you have is an
expansion of these places that's
simply phenomenal.
And it's hard to say--I guess
it's more accurate to say that
the expansion in the production
of wine helps generate the
expansion of places to drink,
along with the expansion of the
population itself.
Between 1840 and 1875 the
amount of wine produced in
France doubled--now,
this is the same time as the
population is stagnating--and in
part this is because there are
better roads and there's
railways to carry wine that's
produced to far off places.
But regions that hadn't
traditionally produced much
wine, for example,
Corbières and
Roussillon,
way down here,
that is north of Perpignan,
around Perpignan and then north
of Perpignan,
begin producing lots of wine;
and Languedoc,
that is this region down here
becomes a massive producer of
wine, that is around Montpellier
and all that.
So, more and more people are
dependent upon wine for getting
by.
And, as a matter of fact,
there are lots of people who
worked, who worked the fields
during the various harvests,
are paid in wine as part of
their salary,
as opposed--and have to take
those kinds of conditions.
And then of course you can't
carry a lot of wine with you,
so you end up getting--drinking
a lot of it wherever you can.
And then of course what comes
along, and this is part of these
blows against the rural economy
in the Third Republic that helps
also explain why the rural
population begins to depopulate,
why rural France begins to
depopulate--remember two-thirds
of the
départements have
smaller populations in 1939 than
they did in 1871--is along comes
the phylloxera disease here,
the phylloxera disease,
which starts in the late 1870s.
And it comes after another
disease, it doesn't matter the
name, the pébrine
which attacks the silkworm
production.
So, it just devastates,
it devastates particularly this
part of France.
But there isn't any place that
produced wine that isn't
affected by the phylloxera.
And Louis Pasteur,
a name of whom you've
certainly--you've heard of Louis
Pasteur,
he does a lot of his work
trying to study the origins of
this wine blight as well as the
origins of the silkworm blight,
that are these little--begin as
little taches,
they're little spots on the
silkworm;
and phylloxera is basically a
disease that attacks the sap,
that attacks the kind of roots
of--in the vineyards.
And ironically what resolves
the problem is they started
planting American roots,
plants, that are resistant to
the phylloxera.
And somebody told me recently
that California wine is now
facing phylloxera.
I'd heard that.
I don't know much about
California wine.
But what this does is it just
absolutely devastates wine
production in France.
And one of the results is that
when the wine crops begin to
bounce back, in the 1890s,
that many places that produced
wine simply stopped producing
wine because it's not
rentable,
you can't make any money on it.
I'll give you a couple of
examples.
Brittany, it's hard to imagine
wine being produced in Brittany,
outside of a very ordinary wine
called Muscadet,
a white wine,
right on the edge,
and some just god-awful reds
also.
But basically that all stops,
the production of wine up in
the north stops,
wherever is possible,
with the big exception
obviously of Champagne,
here, and in other places the
production of wine is really cut
back.
But this is a big blow to the
rural economy and lots of people
abandon their fields,
or they're converted to other
things.
But wine bounces back and takes
its place again as one of the
real dynamic forces in modern
French life.
But what's incredible is that
the number of cafés
continues to expand
exponentially.
And this suggests--an obvious
point is that people drank more
than just wine--more about that
in a minute.
Let's give you some
suggestions, some ideas,
some figures.
1790, Paris only had 4,000
cabarets, 4,000 cabarets in a
town then of about 600,000
people, more or less.
In 1830 places that had
licenses to serve alcohol in
France, 282,000 in France.
Now, let me add one thing
though, having a license to sell
alcohol, one of the things that
really basically no longer
exists anymore but existed until
the 1960s was places where you
did other things but you could
also buy a drink--well,
I mean I still--I've been in
grocery stores that still are
cafés,
or cafés that are
converted into grocery stores as
well.
But let me give you a ghoulish
example.
I'll talk later about
Oradour-sur-Glane,
about the massacre there on the
10th of June,
1944, by the SS and where they
simply kill everybody in the
village.
And when you go to this sacred
site to see what they left
standing, which was
everything--you'll notice there
are all these places that were
barbershops that were also
part-time drinking places.
I had a barber,
my barber in Paris--I don't go
to the barber that much,
but he was kind of a buddy and
he was on the Ile on Saint
Louis,
and you had to get to him early
because if you got there late
he'd already had five,
six, or seven,
or maybe ten beers,
and you kind of look even more
damaged than I do.
I tried to outfox him once.
I made a rendezvous for 8:30 in
the morning, because he starts
at nine, and I got there and he
was already-- he'd been at that
bar quite a long a time,
a bar that we called the Annex,
because that was sort of the
annex of his shop.
But, anyway,
when you see this horribly
ghoulish place,
because of what happened there,
and they left everything the
way it is, you see these
part-time half grocery stores,
half drinking places,
half barbershops,
half drinking places.
A bougnat,
I can remember in the Marais,
the center part of the Right
Bank,
I can remember right down the
street from a place that we
lived for a long time,
and not even that far from our
apartment, the last
bougnat of the quarter
and you bought coal there,
coal, and you bought drink
there.
So, these places that are
licensed to sell drink cover all
sorts of things,
they're not just your basic
café with the red sign or
whatever,
the big flashing neon sign or
the small ones you can barely
read;
but the number is incredible.
Okay, 1865, this does not count
places in Paris,
this is in France,
a country that's the size of
Montana,
a little bigger,
slightly more populated of
course.
1830 there are 282,000 in
France;
1865 351,000;
1900 435,000;
and then they count Paris the
first time the next year,
464,000;
1937 half a million places to
drink;
and in 1953 a mere 439,000.
Now, this represents for every
man, woman and child one bar for
every ninety-seven inhabitants,
one place, a bar,
a generic bar for every
ninety-seven inhabitants,
counting babies,
counting old ladies who could
put them down too--maybe more
about that in a minute--compared
to one for every 225 for Italy;
one for every 273 for Germany;
and one for every 425 for
England.
Now, also just an aside,
I got to concentrate on going
ahead or I'll just--every time
I'll go off on an aside,
but if you go to Alsace,
you don't find cafés in
the French sense,
they're really some of more
like wistubs,
they're sort of drinking places
and they look like German
drinking places,
they're more influenced by the
culture there.
So, this is a huge number of
places to drink.
But it's also regionally
specific.
Oh, here's another good word
for you, for those people,
in French, and I'm not trying
to exclude the others at all,
but it's just kind of fun to
talk about.
This is more of--well it's a
Parisian but--I'll go to my
zinc to have a
drink--zinc means zinc,
like the metal,
and because in a poor cabaret
or a poor bar it's not copper or
something like,
ladi-da like that--those were
things like the Café
American and the sort of sense
of luxury being associated in
the 1890s with the British and
American world.
Mon zinc is my sort of
grungy bar where I have my place
at the bar, which is,
depending on how long you've
been there, will be near where
the patronne,
where the woman working the
cash register is.
We used to go to a place for
ages, in fact that's where I was
married, I was married here in,
what's that place,
Dwight Hall.
And then we went--we had the
reception here and then we went
to France and the café
that we'd been going to--I'd
been going to for a very long
time closed the café
and had a little reception for
us,
right across from the National
Archives.
And I'd been in there so long
that I moved up the ladder.
So, when I went in there my
place was right next to the--no,
I'm not saying I was drinking a
lot of stuff,
I was just there for
conversation.
You know me well enough already
to know that was the case.
But there's this sort of
hierarchy there that has to do
with your association with that
particular place.
And that was a very typical
place in that the couple were
from Auvergne,
that is in central France,
born in misery,
la misère,
thirteen children--I mentioned
them before once--and twelve in
the other case,
and they had got the money
together because they had a
neighbor who had no children
that loaned them the money to
get on the--kind of the
equivalent of the Web in those
days,
and to buy a café
from another person from
Auvergne, and then they worked
there every day from five in the
morning until nine at night.
Now they're gone and it's sort
of a chic and ridiculous place.
But these places,
these zincs were ones
that you had.
And you never went to the one
across the street,
never, never.
I would go to another place in
the Marais and I used to
start--I started going there
because Jean Jaurès went
there,
and because Trotsky had been
there, and it was called La
Tartine, and it's still there,
and that's a very different one
because all the--now it's also
become very chic,
very bougie,
very ridiculous,
and with the Bush dollar
unaffordable for almost anyone.
Anyway, so, but it's regionally
specific.
In the Nord,
which you already know about,
there was one bar for every
forty-six inhabitants.
That's amazing.
And you compare that to
Elboeuf, which is a town in
Normandy, one for every sixty.
Béziers,
way down in the south of
France, which had a lower
alcoholism rate,
by the way, Béziers,
there was one for every 120
people.
So, it tends to be very
specific.
But again this is babies too,
and of course everybody has
heard those horror stories about
young mothers in the 1950s,
and the 1930s,
and the 1890s,
their baby is crying all the
time;
well, you get a little
baguette, a little piece of
bread, and dip it in some
brandy,
and stuff that bread in the
baby's mouth,
and there's a smiling happy
baby and they get some sleep.
Is that disastrous, or what?
It's absolutely terrible,
and they have to have these
huge campaigns against all this.
But basically babies didn't
drink.
Older people did for sure.
There's this woman that used to
come into--even the terms of
what they would drink.
You'd go down in the morning--I
have my coffee before I go to
work at the Archives and really
a coffee,
nothing else--and there'd be
this rather elderly lady in
there, une
mémère,
comme on dit en
français,
and she would be tossing down a
petite blancette,
which is a little glass of
white wine, and she would call
the drink her
gloria--now,
that's mocking the church,
because a gloria,
what you sing and what other
people were singing in the Mass
I guess,
gloria in excelsis dei
or whatever they sang,
and she would have her gloria,
right there at her zinc,
and she'd knock a couple of
those babies down and go off
with her little shopping bag,
maybe lurching and trying to
avoid the sixty-eight bus as it
roars by, and she was out of
there.
Again, I said,
I'm making fun of this a little
bit but it's sad because you'd
see all these people just
blotto.
There was a guy at our bar
called Jean, and he was kind of
a marginal guy,
and he disappeared.
And, so, people in the bar--I
wasn't there then,
I was down working at another
place--but people went out and
tried to find him,
because he was on the Spree,
as you say--that's a term that
comes from Berlin,
I guess when soldiers would get
all drunked up during the
occupation and they'd go on the
Spree,
which was the river and get
all--and drink way too much of
these spirits.
So, how much did people drink?
It's scary;
it's just scary.
If the consumption of wine per
person, per baby,
per old lady,
per you, per everybody--I hope
not per you--was in 1790 was 61
liters per year.
By 1850 it was 75 liters per
year.
By 1895 it was 113 liters per
year, but that's only wine.
Now, also remember people drank
at work.
We have a former neighbor who
was an alcoholic who stopped
drinking;
he's also moved away.
He was a wonderful guy.
He worked at EDF,
which is a big gas factory,
electrical factory in Lyon,
and he would drink six or seven
liters a day,
a day, because it was so hot
where he worked.
And you see the difference
between American construction
industry and French construction
industry.
As you know--sometimes you go,
and they're standing--they're
out directing traffic and
they've got a bottle in their
hand as they're directing you
along there.
It was part,
unfortunately,
of the culture of daily
existence.
Now, that's just wine.
Then you have to add these
other things,
and the other things,
the numbers are just
phenomenal.
If you add distilled liquor,
per capita consumption of pure
alcohol, in other words all
distilled and fortified liquors,
fifty-proof and above,
it was, the average was 1.2
liters a year--that's again
counting every old person and
every baby--and in 1880 it
doubled to 2.24,
and by 1890 it was 4.35 liters.
So, that's plus all the wine on
the average.
And what about beer?
Now, beer was not drunk in
France until quite late.
Again, then here we go back to
myth, but the myth is that it
came back with soldiers of
Napoleon's armies returning from
the German states,
just as the myth that the
consumption of vodka,
which is very--now there's a
big problem because they sell,
these companies sell this
pernicious vodka stuff mixed
with fruit juice,
and the lycée
students get wasted with it.
But the taste for--pas les
miens, mais quand meme--but
the taste for vodka supposedly
came to Montmartre with the
first Russian restaurant opened
up by occupying soldiers in
1815.
But the big problem
among--well, among other
problems--but one of the big
problems is absinthe,
absinthe.
And that's worth retaining.
Absinthe is made from wormwood.
It used--it was made illegal.
It's physiologically addictive,
it is addictive--well,
drinking's addictive,
too;
but, this is physiologically
addictive, it's bad stuff,
and they banned it in 1915
because of the war.
And I had some absinthe--we
have friends in Besançon
who don't drink very much,
but they had some absinthe and
of course I was willing to take
a shot at that and drink that.
And then it became legal again,
and now you can produce it,
and you can drink it,
and it's more of a southern
drink.
It's rather like--no,
it's sort of like pastis,
it tastes sort of like pastis.
Pastis is pastis,
it's sort of licorice tasting
and you mix water with it,
hopefully lots of water and a
little pastis,
and people in the south,
in Corsica, and Marseille,
and Balazuc,
and Ardeche,
if they're playing boule
on Sunday or something like
that, and stuff that'll
tourner la tête,
a couple of pastis.
And it's not very good for you,
it actually damages your brain
cells in rather major ways--you
might have noticed,
I don't know.
But, anyway--no,
I don't drink very much pastis
at all.
But absinthe became one of the
focuses of even some of the
Impressionist paintings of
café life.
I think it's Degas who
has The Absinthe
Drinker where you see a
woman sitting next to a man,
and you don't know their
relationship.
They're anonymous in the
café, you've kind of
figured it out.
And in this painting,
which I should have brought in
but I forgot,
Degas brings you into it by not
having any table leg,
and so you wonder,
"where's the table leg?"
And then you reach the glass
and you see the glass.
And it's simply called
Absinthe.
And it's always on the cover of
Emile Zola's,
which I'll come to now,
Emile Zola's
L'Assommoir,
inevitably in the translation.
Zola realized,
among others,
that France seemed to be
drinking itself to death,
and this came at a time when
there was fear about the French
population, which I've already
said,
that the French population is
not reproducing itself,
and so they're afraid of that.
L'Assommoir,
briefly, is the story about the
decline, the fall,
l'assommoir--really you
can't even translate it,
it's never translated,
and l'assommoir would
mean- well assommé
would be just completely get
wiped out,
but also if you went to a
place, a bar,
every day instead of coming to
class,
the place that you went that
caused your ruin would be the
place of your fall,
sort of, so it's got--but,
anyway, it's just translated
it's the dive--that was a bad
translation once somebody
did--or just the bar,
l'assommoir where things
are going wrong.
And it's the story about a
woman called Gervaise and her
"family," in quotes,
and is part of this long series
of novels, and they all
basically drink themselves to
death,
and when she dies on a bed of
straw at the end of the
novel--one of the amazing
scenes--and the doctors are
looking at her partner who's
this completely raving
alcoholic,
it touched many,
many people,
and the upper classes were
saying well there they go again,
they're drinking because
they're the drunken commoner,
while they were putting away
their apéro;
an apéro,
by the way, is a drink,
or two, or three that people
would have before dinner.
And, so, Zola published this in
1877.
And what it was,
according to Barrows,
and other people,
it was a call,
a cry of alarm for parliament
to do something about that.
He was a man of the Left,
he defended Dreyfus,
against the church and against
the Army and all that,
as you know.
But it was a non-political,
it was an apolitical statement.
He just wants somebody to do
something about the fact that
the French seem to be drinking
themselves to death,
and if you didn't believe that
all you had to do was to go up
to Montmartre,
or as today,
and see all the people--and a
lot of them are sort of sad
sacks who've had terrible things
happen to them,
but the problem is just simply,
absolutely amazing.
Now, this book,
L'Assommoir,
there was thirty-eight
printings of the book in one
year, after, that year of its
publication, again 1877.
And by 1882 over 100,000 copies
had been sold.
Let me give you an example that
Barrows also found interesting,
of the influence of the book,
even in the way that the first
psychologists or the first
sociologists,
the first anthropologists
described crowd behavior.
There was a guy called Gustav
Le Bon, l-e b-o-n,
who wrote a book called The
Crowd,
and because France was the
France of revolution and
strikes, Decazville and these
other places,
these other scenes that you
know about from Germinal.
He was interested in the way
that crowds behaved,
and he described them in ways
that reflected three of the kind
of cultural/intellectual
preoccupations of the period,
of the Third Republic before
World War I.
First, he describes crowds as
flighty, that they'll go from
one place to another-- think of
the women in the castration
scene in Decazville--and that
was reflective of the fact that
women were supposed to be
flighty and not rational,
and what does that fear reflect?
The fears reflect a feminism of
people like Michelle Perot and
of women putting forward claims
for the right to vote and for
other things as well.
Secondly, crowds were supposed
to be able to be manipulated by
people on a big white horse,
like Boulanger;
that crowds didn't have minds
of their own,
but the rationality would sort
of be sucked out of them by the
moment.
And what does this reflect?
It reflects the first interest
in hypnosis.
Charcot, whom you've read about
in Chip Sowerwine's book,
Charcot, c-h-a-r-c-o-t,
whom Freud went to visit,
to pay homage to,
when he went to Paris.
And third, crowds were supposed
to lurch like drunks,
and the image of the drunken
commoner,
this sort of upper class view
that the Commune was the work of
the people who had nothing to
eat but found plenty to drink in
Paris,
in the caves of other
people's fancy apartments,
that the drunken commoner was
capable of inflicting the same
kind of harm on the upper
classes as had been the case,
or in many cases the imagined
case, in previous revolutions.
And, so, the impact of drink
itself can be seen in the
origins of crowd psychology,
of a very primitive nature,
et cetera, et cetera.
And in the novel,
which you've not read,
they read it in the other--the
first half of this course,
but he puts--focuses the novel
on a street called--which I will
write on the board,
it's still there--the Rue de la
Goutte d'Or, and he picks this,
the golden kind of taste,
he picks this because it was on
the edge of Paris,
it's near the Station of the
North,
the Gare du Nord,
and they had produced wine
there, at one time,
a "fine" wine that was--"fine,"
in quotes--that was offered to
the king once a year.
But it was a street that was
very identified with very
ordinary people,
with workers in the big new
industries but also these old
artisans.
And Gervaise starts her own
laundry, and then everything
just goes wrong that could
possibly go wrong in her life,
and they all get wasted
together, and basically they all
die.
But this was,
this image of this street,
was something that fascinated
upper class readers.
And, in fact,
it's only about fifteen years
ago that during one of the
elections that Jacques Chirac
went to that same street,
which is now identified with
immigrant populations and still
has this same sort of lightening
rod effect on the upper classes,
and said something like,
"God, it really smells here."
And just, it was almost like
when Sarkozy referred to the
racaille,
the people in the suburbs as
scum, two years ago.
And so these are still sort
of-- these images are very,
very powerful.
And Zola knew what he was
doing, and this was the effect
that he wanted to make.
And what these people
drank--you can follow it if you
read L'Assommoir;
it's a great paper topic--they
drank almost everything they
could.
But in addition to absinthe,
the regional production of
fortified eau de vie,
both liqueurs which are sweet,
and eau de vie which is fairly
sweet, which is extremely,
powerful, it's like a brandy.
If you look at a map of
alcoholism in France today,
very--the same thing,
really,
since the middle of the
nineteenth century,
since you first have statistics
really from the 1870s.
The big regions of alcoholism
are not in wine producing areas.
Now, here again you can
say--the wine producers say
"yeah, we have that healthy
drink,
baby, don't get us confused
with these heavy drinkers in
those other places";
which is complete nonsense,
as you know.
But, basically the big alcohol
rate is there,
it's in Paris and its immediate
surroundings,
it's in the north which is in
the Pas-de-Calais because of all
the economic disadvantage in
those regions--these are not
wine producing areas at all--and
in Brittany,
above all in Finistère,
which is the most western
department in France.
And they're not drinking wine
there.
What are they drinking?
They're drinking brandy,
apple brandy,
in that case.
Calvados is the name of a
département in
France, Calvados,
the capital is Caen,
c-a-e-n there;
Bayeux, the Bayeux tapestry;
and Deauville,
a god-awful place,
and all this stuff there.
But Calvados became named after
that département,
and it is basically apple
brandy.
There's old Calvados which is
extremely good and very,
very expensive,
but there's just your kind of
rot-gut Calvados also.
But it's not just that,
at that particular fruit,
there's almost--if you think of
Alsace there you have this pear
drink called poire,
which means pear in French,
and it's eau de vie that's made
out of pear;
and you also have eau de vie
that's made out of raspberries.
There's eau de vie that's made
out of strawberries,
there's eau de vie that's made
out of prunes,
there's eau de vie that's made
out of almost any kind of fruit
you can imagine,
out of kiwi, out of anything.
And everybody in France still
has the right to produce I guess
it's about half a bathtub full a
year, of that,
untaxed, at no expense.
And, of course,
now in more refined times is
that true or not?
Who knows, but the idea--more
about this in a minute--that
those kinds of alcohols are what
you would drink after dinner,
as digestives.
But that's not what they were
doing at the time of Zola,
and that's not what they were
doing in the 1930s,
and the 1940s in Lille,
and that's not what they're
doing in the 1960s and 1970s in
all sorts of places.
You go to--Sunday morning,
while women were in church the
men were out getting totaled,
knocking down this stuff.
And not all the women went to
church.
But all of this,
it tells you two things,
that they're drinking,
well, obviously way,
way, way too much,
but an unbelievable amount of
alcohol, which cuts back on life
expectancy,
to be sure;
but, also that these,
all of these,
these alcohols become part of
regional identities in France,
that--Champagne is the classic
example.
Champagne is still obviously
the fanciest drink.
It's ordered for big occasions
and champagne is extremely
expensive.
There are other equivalents
that are less expensive that are
produced in places like Die,
the Clarette de Die,
or there's--they're all over
the places--produced in Alsace.
But champagne,
Champagne is basically this
region here, and that becomes
not only part of the identity of
Champagne,
which is a region,
but with French national
identity.
And there's a book on how that
happened, how Champagne becomes
to become seen as a drink that
you really celebrate,
for big birthdays.
We have a friend who just hit
eighty and we left him--before
we went we left him a bottle of
really good champagne,
because that's something they
couldn't possibly afford;
and the symbolism is really
there.
But Bordeaux,
Bordeaux wines profit
enormously from--I think it's
1855 (or is it 1857?
I don't remember),
where they classify them
according to the great wines.
And of course now a bottle of
Chateau Petrus or something like
that, which is the most famous
Bordeaux,
along with Chateau Yquem,
would go up to a thousand
dollars.
It's just incredible,
those big kind of a Bordeaux.
We took as a present to
somebody a Bordeaux that's now
$500.00 for the bottle because
we bought it about 15 years ago,
and these prices they hold
their own.
But for all the corruption,
for all of the trafficking too
that has gone on in Bordeaux--
Burgundy, it's the same thing;
how closely the production of
burgundy wines like
Vosne-Romanée,
and Gevrey Chamertin,
and really the great ones that
I could never possibly afford to
taste even,
like Richebourg,
how those are identified with
the region is still very
important.
And another drink came along
too, that's identified with the
region, that some of you may
know about,
and I hope if you're under 21
you've never drunk,
and that is called a kir,
k-i-r.
You look at the k,
and you think,
"well, that's an Alsatian or
Breton name," because there
aren't words in French that
begin with k.
But actually Kir was,
he was the mayor of Dijon,
I guess, in about the 1940s and
'50s,
and he came up with the idea of
putting--somebody else had had
the idea but he drank a lot of
these things--of putting this
sort of black currant into white
wine.
And, so, then the kir becomes
part of the sort of regional
identity of Burgundy.
I remember, I was about your
age, seeing this great big
posters saying--of some sort of
imagined Burgundian person,
proud of being a Burgundian,
and he's tossing down a kir.
But all this fits together to
create almost the impossibility
of doing anything about the big
problem of drinking.
And when Pierre
Mendès-France,
whom we'll meet later,
when he tries to run for
president--he was the greatest
politician who never held--was
never president of France and a
great,
great man--he tried to start a
"drink milk" campaign in 1954
and he was toast,
or French toast,
if you will,
because they absolutely--they
just destroyed him,
the wine lobby just destroyed
him, they just went after him.
And you could still--I remember
when these drunken guys would
park their big trucks on hills,
and not put the brake on,
and they'd go--and they'd come
back after about ten drinks and
these things would crash out of
control and kill a bunch of
people.
Again, even ten years ago they
started this campaign against
drinking too much.
I must say now the last five or
six years they really have made
it harder because they have not
gone the Swedish way,
but they have--it used to be
you could have an aperitif,
you could have three glasses
of--a big ballon,
a ballon is a big glass
of wine, and maybe a little
calva afterward,
and the guy said,
"blow into this"-- what do you
call those, those
ballons,
and he says,
"well see you,
allez-y,
pas de problème."
And that's not the case
anymore, and that's really hurt
rural restaurants.
We had a guy in our village who
had a restaurant in the summer,
and he had this little teeny
waiter,
this guy who was a tiny,
tiny little guy,
and at the end of his job he
had one beer,
and he went out on the road and
bam;
you go there,
you turn the corner and there's
all these guys in big orange
jackets,
and all these lights,
and say, "soufflez,
monsieur," blow into the
little balloon.
And he had to pay a fine he
couldn't have afforded,
and he wasn't drunk at all,
but he was a very,
very thin guy and it was that
kind of count.
I went to a--why am I telling
these stories?;
but, they're interesting.
I went to a place,
people we know produce pretty
good wine, so I went there with
this guy who's a friend of mine,
and he makes me look like a
dwarf, the guy's probably about
oh, 280,290 pounds,
a very big guy.
And he brought his friend from
work, ironically in a halfway
house for alcoholics,
and this guy made my friend
look like a skatback,
look like this tiny little guy,
and this guy's at least about,
I'm serious,
about 350 pounds.
And it was our village so I'm
not driving anywhere,
I'm going to go home,
go back to reading my book.
And so this guy he hits the
road.
He lives about an hour and a
half away.
And he got controlled twice,
twice.
They said, "blow into the
balloon;
no problem, see you."
That's because the guy weighs
about, literally,
about 380 pounds,
and it's out of there.
But, they've done a very good
thing in trying to control
drink.
And the problem is that--see,
it used to be when you started
out as--we're leaving the
subject,
we're not leaving the
subject--it used to be when,
and when our kids were growing
up in France it was the same
thing,
even when they were two or
three years old,
if you know them you can ask
them,
but you'd put a--you'd go to
someone's house and you'd put a
little symbolic drop,
and they would never drink it
but it was a sense of
participation.
And then when they got to be 12
or 13 they'd put a little bit of
champagne there,
if they wanted to drink it they
could drink it.
But they grew up with it.
And it wasn't like in high
school, when we first discovered
that stuff, and then you're just
chugging it down and you see
people staggering around and
vomiting their lungs out.
And part of it I really truly
think is that because it was so
part of the culture,
for both good and for bad,
and I emphasize the bad,
but it was a sense of
participation.
And that's what came to this
sort of elaboration of meals and
occasions for sociability,
that's where it becomes part of
the culture.
The whole idea of a meal where
you--how are we doing here?
we've got to roll--a meal where
we have to--where you start out
with a little something to
drink,
and then you have white wine
with a fish course,
or with oysters,
or something like that,
and you have a certain kind of
red wine with duck,
or whatever,
and then a little red wine with
cheese,
but you can also have white
wine with goat cheese,
and maybe a little eau de vie
at the end of it.
This is something that's recent.
Most people could never afford
to eat like that.
They did choucroute,
they ate whatever they could;
they couldn't afford to have
wine.
But this is something that
comes out of the evolution of a
restaurant culture.
The first restaurants were
created--a really good book by
Rebecca Spang about the origins
of the restaurant--were created
in the eighteenth century,
basically;
because remember the chefs
worked for the nobles,
and you'd have bouillon,
which was supposed to make you
better if you were sick,
so you'd go to a place to have
bouillon.
And then the chefs are all out
of work--this is a short version
of a long subject--and they
start setting up restaurants.
But it's really only in the
late nineteenth century that the
elaboration of meals,
and Michelin,
and grading meals,
and grading what is a good
restaurant--that's first 1900,
the Michelin;
they're not grading yet,
they're simply saying to people
on the road--and Michelin makes
tires,
so they're the first ones that
say you have to have signs on
roads saying how far it is to
get to Vierzon,
or wherever.
And, so, this is part of this
elaboration, that keeps food and
drink in people's assessment of
the French and the French of
their assessment of themselves.
And regional identity has,
to an extent it's
disappearing-- more about that
in a tirade sometime,
but not now,
because we're out of time.
But one can even argue that
whether Michelin with its
regional guides,
and with the guides to
restaurants,
and Gault Millau,
and the other guides have not
kept alive in some useful way a
sense of what--that one is from
one region as opposed to
another,
and where you eat certain
things in one region that you
don't find specialties in
another,
and where we all started,
that you drink some kinds of
wine in some regions and not in
others,
but above all that you not
drink too much.
I'll pick up that theme again
when we get to the Belle
Époque,
because I won't be able to
resist it.
