ABSINTHE-DRINKING WITH THE DEVIL

The Absinthe Drinker by Viktor Oliva

Conjuring images of bohemian artists, pale-faced poets and the long-lost glamour of 19th-century café culture, discover how absinthe fever intoxicated a nation.

The clock strikes five on the left bank of the Seine on a lazy Parisian afternoon in 1850. Here, the artists and poets, the writers and dreamers, gather in intimate bars and pavement cafés as the shadows lengthen, the famous rubbing shoulders with their followers, models and muses. Here they begin nights that will last until dawn and beyond, no care for the bustle of those in the streets, the office workers who hurry home with no time to think of anything other than the here and now.

Yet at five o’clock a ritual begins not only in Paris, but across the country and beyond. This is the time to take a moment, to lazily mix a glass of absinthe and drift away in the thrall of the Green Fairy. This is l’heure verte. In time, Europe’s love for this unique and infamous beverage will lead to scandal, rumours of murder and insanity and, eventually, an outright ban. For now though, the green hour holds the country under its spell.

In fact, if not for a catastrophic aphid attack on the vineyards of Europe, absinthe might never have become popular at all. It began life in 1792 as a medicinal tonic developed in Switzerland by Doctor Pierre Ordinaire, a French physician. The doctor’s potent blend of wormwood (a plant), fennel and anise had an eye-wateringly high alcohol content, but Ordinaire didn’t envision the future that lay ahead for his concoction.

13 years later, Switzerland’s Henri-Louis Pernod, who became famous for a liquor that bore his own name, opened the first ever absinthe distillery. The unusual drink found a market with soldiers, who used it as a cure-all, though it proved particularly effective in the fight against malaria.

Despite its popularity with the military, the aniseed-flavoured drink with its vivid green hue was a far from popular tipple. After all, in 19th-century France, wine was the drink of the nation. All of that changed in the late 1860s when a parasitic aphid, the phylloxera, ravaged the vineyards of Europe, eventually reaching the fertile flora of France. With the vines stripped bare and the aphid showing no sign of lessening its grip, the drinkers of France were in need of something to fill their empty glasses.

With so many returning soldiers singing its praises, absinthe became the obvious choice, and it didn't take long until everyone in France was indulging in a glass. Although absinthe will always be associated with the bohemian set, especially those who caroused at the Moulin Rouge and whose poetry, artworks and escapades have become famed, the drink wasn’t solely the preserve of the artistic classes.

Despite its reputation as ‘the poet’s poison’, you were as likely to find a factory worker sipping absinthe in the suburbs as you were to glimpse Picasso indulging on the left bank and, crucially, the bourgeoisie loved it. Their lives were safe, secure and respectable, and in something so simple as the ritual pouring of a glass of absinthe, they tasted bohemian decadence. Tomorrow they would be respectable all over again, but the evening was for intoxicated debauchery.

When absinthe ensnared the bourgeoisie, its dominance was secured. Production increasing to meet the massive demand and rapidly falling prices put absinthe in everyone’s reach. Although its popularity in most other countries didn’t quite reach French levels of enjoyment, it was quaffed across the continent and beyond, reaching as far as the Czech lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Perhaps the only place where the popularity of absinthe rivalled its French standing was in Prague. Here absinthe was a favourite of the artistic community, while across the Atlantic in New Orleans a bar named The Absinthe Room opened in 1874 and attracted some very illustrious clients. Standing alone in the annals of absinthe lore is Spain, the only mainland continental country never to have banned the drink. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the original proprietor of that New Orleans bar was a Spanish national.

Across the world, celebrity thinkers reached for a bottle, hoping to find their muse somewhere in the green tipple. It inspired many paintings, including Édouard Manet’s The Absinthe Drinker, which got his career off to a controversial start. Traditionally, full-length portraits were reserved for aristocracy and royalty, but here was a painting of a drunken tramp. Similarly, Edgar Degas’s L’Absinthe depicts the expressionless addicts, sitting isolated and zombie-like in a café, and Paul Gauguin’s love of the mind-altering drink inspired his unmistakable subject, but in the style that is uniquely Gauguin.

The most notorious episodes of absinthe consumption in the art world don’t involve paint and canvas, however. Toulouse-Lautrec was so devoted to the drink that he carried a hollowed cane filled with it, so that he would never be far from a taste. His works make frequent reference to absinthe, and in Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 movie Moulin Rouge, it’s Toulouse-Lautrec who introduces the innocent hero to the Green Fairy on a riotous night on the town.

Vincent van Gogh, a man with a reputation for extremes, drank huge quantities of absinthe. Indeed, some believe that van Gogh was under its influence when, in a legendary episode of mania, he cut off his ear and then sent it to a brothel maid. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that van Gogh’s companion during this incident was Paul Gauguin.

In the realms of literature, absinthe was no less influential. Charles Baudelaire and Guy de Maupassant drank it often and referenced it in their work. Playwright and author, Alfred Jarry, was so devoted to the Green Fairy that he painted his face green, took to his bicycle and pedalled through Paris singing its praises. Even Ernest Hemingway was among its many fans. In 1931, while intoxicated, he performed gun and knife tricks in his Florida home and reported them with glee to his friends.

For poet Paul Verlaine, the absinthe experience was considerably less good-humoured. A slave to alcohol, Verlaine’s health failed and he spent his final years in destitution, his only comfort coming when he enjoyed the green hour with what little coin he could beg.

Verlaine’s former lover, Arthur Rimbaud, is perhaps the most iconic of the bohemian absinthe drinkers. An anarchic artist with a need to shock, Rimbaud drank absinthe to open his mind, creating some of his most celebrated works under its influence. When Rimbaud and Verlaine’s affair ended, Verlaine shot his lover, leaving him with a flesh wound. Later, Verlaine was rueful when he recalled that the couple had sold some of Rimbaud’s poetry to pay for their absinthe binges. They had not taken copies of the pieces, meaning that these great works of the original wild child were forever.

Absinthe of course, is notorious for its wormwood-fuelled psychoactive effects, which were mostly overtated if not outright fabricated.

In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) by Edgar Degas

False rumours of psychotic side effects and hallucinations were played up enormously once the Green Fairy began to transform into the Green Curse. Works like those of Manet and Degas didn’t show absinthe drinkers as glamorous bohemians, but as figures so jaded by the drink they were barely functioning at all. Hollow-eyed, dressed in drab clothes and alone with their drinks, on their initial exhibition such apparently moralistic works were unpopular. Eventually, however, the tide turned as the vineyards grew bountiful once more and the French wine industry began to recover.

The temperance movement and the wine trade might seem like odd bedfellows, but when they joined forces in the late-1800s to rid France of the supposed scourge of absinthe, they proved a powerful lobbying group. If drinking wine was civilised, classy and traditional, then taking absinthe was quite the opposite. Those who enjoyed it weren’t role models, said the temperance movement, but slothful wastrels, drinking away their lives and their livelihoods, sacrificing their moral fibre for a thrill. With opinion shifting, the bourgeoisie turned their backs on the Green Fairy too, keen to distance themselves from its rapidly souring reputation.

In 1905, a horrific crime proved just the fuel that the anti-absinthe movement needed and, just like the moral majority has throughout history, they didn’t let the facts get in the way of their crusade. Although the drink had been banned in the Congo Free State as early as 1898, it remained legal across Europe and the United States of America. All of that was about to change.

Jean Lanfray was a French labourer who lived in Switzerland with his pregnant wife and two young children. He was also a violent alcoholic. On 28 August 1905, Lanfray spent the day binging on a potent mix of alcohol, including two glasses of absinthe. When he returned home, a domestic argument spiralled out of control and ended when Lanfray tragically murdered his wife and their children. Found guilty of the crime, he was spared the death penalty but imprisoned for life. By now painfully sober, Lanfray couldn’t endure the overwhelming guilt and took his own life, hanging himself in prison just days after the court read out the guilty verdict.

Although Lanfray had consumed more than 15 glasses of alcohol that day including wine, cognac and crème de menthes, it was those two measures of absinthe that were blamed for the murders. With the temperance movement and the popular press railing against it, the death knell was sounding for the Green Fairy. In 1906, Belgium banned the sale and consumption of absinthe and, as outrage over the killings spread though the press and across borders, Europe and North America followed suit. In the United Kingdom, however, no such ban ever came into force and absinthe drinking could continue unabated, much to the relief of the likes of Oscar Wilde and Aleister Crowley.

As the years passed and new moral panics erupted, absinthe was eventually forgotten and, one by one, the bans on the once notorious drink were lifted. In Switzerland, the birthplace of the controversial tipple, the ban came into force in 1910 and remained until as recently as 2005, when it was finally set aside. France, meanwhile, found plenty of loopholes to get around the ban, but the time of absinthe had passed and the green hour became nothing more than a cultural hangover.

Today, absinthe retains its glamorous allure, forever associated with the Parisian bohemians and their romantic, often tragic era. It remains a favourite of those who seek to be part of that long-gone set, of artists in search of a muse or just something a little different. Its notoriety may have dimmed but the modern absinthe-drinker can still indulge in any number of brands with even musician Marilyn Manson putting his name to a bottle. The green hour is over, the Green Curse reversed, but for some, the Green Fairy remains a regular visitor.

By Catherine Curzon in "All About History",UK, n.42, excerpts pp.54-59. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.