A Brief History

In his four great books on world history between 1789 and 1991, Eric Hobsbawm has only two things to say about alcohol. First, in The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, we find the following gem:

“The phylloxera infection after 1872 cut French wine output by two-thirds between 1875 and 1889.”

Some will find this example of the historian’s art - a densely and perfectly stacked sentence, like a completed line in Tetris - wanting in excitement. But try answering the following questions without it: Which infection after 1872 cut French wine output by two-thirds between 1875 and 1889? By how much was French wine output cut between 1875 and 1889 as a result of the phylloxera infection after 1872? Between which years was French wine output cut by two-thirds as a result of the phylloxera infection after 1872? Which product of France was affected by the phylloxera infection after 1872? And, who said “the phylloxera infection after 1872 cut French wine output by two-thirds between 1875 and 1889?”

For those who like a bit of interpretation with their facts, the following, on bourgeois values, from The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, may offer more food for thought:

“On the lower rungs of the ladder of middle-class aspiration … heroic efforts alone could lift a poor man and woman, or even their children, out of the slough of demoralization on to the firm plateau of respectability and, above all, define his position there … Indeed, the movement for total abstinence from alcohol, which also flourished at this time in Protestant and puritan countries, illustrates this clearly. It was not effectively designed as a movement to abolish, still less to limit, mass alcoholism, but to define and set apart the class of those individuals who had demonstrated by their personal force of character that they were distinct from the unrespectable poor.”

Temperance movements and their moralizing kin would do well to remember such origins, keep their decisions on what is and is not morally or spiritually significant to themselves, and let the unrespectable poor (among whom I include myself) find their own salvation. For my part, I have as much interest in getting evangelical among normal drinkers with my own realization that I am powerless over alcohol as I have of conditioning friendship on knowing the facts on French wine production in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century.