The intoxication of the Revolution

Investigating the causes of the Revolution is not without danger for the historian. What about someone who tackles, in the light of a subject both glorified and taboo in France - alcohol - and who is not a trained historian but precisely an alcohol specialist by profession? Faced with these resistances, Michel Craplet, as an addiction specialist, delves into the great moments of the Revolution. The storming of the Bastille, the September massacres, the arrest of the King in Varennes, the fall of the monarchy during the storming of the Tuileries, the noisy clubs where Girondists and Montagnards clash and philosophize, the republican banquets, the Terror and its formidable Committee of Public Safety, the Vendée wars: all famous episodes of the Revolution that the author revisits to uncover, beneath the glorious and tragic splendor of those tumultuous years, the hidden influence of alcohol. As revealed in the book, alcoholic beverages, including the most common wines, were rare and expensive products in the Old Regime. Only a tiny portion of the population could consume them regularly. Offering a drink was thus a gift. This is the explosive story of these gifts with powerful and difficult-to-control effects, whose circulation is followed at the heart of the Revolution. It is not about taking an anti-revolutionary stance, of course. Michel Craplet candidly describes the pathological behaviors of all sides, including the aristocrats. Without exempting Louis XVI, to whom a long and fascinating chapter is dedicated. The author is the first to address the monarch's triple addiction, combining excessive alcohol consumption, gluttony, a passion for hunting, and problematic sexuality. Neither an ideologue nor naive, Michel Craplet does not claim to explain the rich chronology of the French Revolution through a reductionist determinism. Alcohol consumption, though never the cause, is often a contributing factor. An unprecedented and fascinating investigation into the secret history of alcohol in times of Revolution.