La Fée Verte

Content Warning

Before we begin — today's episode is a discussion of absinthe and the campaign to ban it, and it deals with some heavy historical content, including alcohol dependence and the killing of a mother and her young children. Listener discretion is advised.

In 1893, in a London gallery, a painting by Edgar Degas went on show with no title. The catalog, from the Grafton Galleries, lists it as number 258, untitled.

It's a café scene. A woman and a man sit at a table, close together, and they don't look at each other. There's a glass in front of her. She's staring at nothing in particular, and the man beside her isn't talking to her either. Today it's called Dans un café – In a Café – and it hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Degas had painted it about seventeen years before that London show, around 1875 or 1876\. And these weren't anonymous café types. The Orsay names the two sitters: Ellen André, and Marcellin Desboutin. Real people, with names and reputations, who sat for a painter and went home.

Then the picture went public, and the museum's account of what came next is hard to improve on. The painting, it says, "cast a slur on their reputations." The sitters, the museum notes, were "not alcoholics."

Keep in mind what a painting could do in 1893. There was no caption explaining the arrangement. There was a woman, a man, a glass, and a crowd of people supplying the rest.

Think about how little that took. Nobody had to prove anything about either of them. A glass sat on a table in a painting, and that was enough for people to decide what kind of woman she was, and what kind of man was sitting beside her.

I keep trying to understand how two people lose their good names to a picture of a drink, when all they actually did was sit still for a friend. I don't really think anyone looking at that painting in 1893 thought they were making a judgment, though. I imagine it just felt like seeing.

Hold on to that, because it comes back.

Nineteen years after that London show, on July 25, 1912, three men in Washington signed a document with a one-word title. The word was "Absinth."

The document is called Food Inspection Decision 147. The three names on it are R. E. Doolittle, F. L. Dunlap and A. S. Mitchell, who together made up the Board of Food and Drug Inspection at the Department of Agriculture. It went to the Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson, for approval.

It wasn't a law passed by Congress, and there was no vote. It was a ruling, made under the Food and Drugs Act of 1906\. That act said a food counted as adulterated if it contained an added ingredient that was poisonous or harmful to health. And adulterated doesn't mean watered down. It means something was added that shouldn't be there. So the board wasn't asking whether absinthe was strong, or whether it was a bad idea. It was asking whether wormwood counted as a harmful addition. It decided that wormwood, the plant that gives absinthe its name, did. It also noted that Belgium, Switzerland and Holland had already banned the drink. And then it set a date. Starting October 1, 1912, absinthe would count as adulterated, which meant it couldn't cross a state line and couldn't be imported.

I honestly would have expected more than three signatures to ban a drink. Maybe a vote, a hearing, or even a fight on a floor somewhere. Instead, it was a decision made by a board, under a food-purity law, and a date.

The same law had something to say about opium, too. Section 8 covered drugs, and it said a package had to state on its label the quantity of any alcohol, morphine, opium, cocaine, heroin, and several others on a list. That was the rule: say what's in it. Absinthe went through a different door, the food section, with its clause about an added poisonous or other deleterious ingredient. Different sections, different rules. But the effect, in 1912, was that a bottle of an opium preparation could cross a state line as long as the label said what was in it, and a bottle of absinthe couldn't cross at all.

Eight years after that ruling, the country would ban alcohol altogether, and that's a story for a later episode. But in 1912, one drink was singled out first.

Switzerland, by the way, did it the other way around. Four years before that ruling, in 1908, it put the question to the voters, and they answered it.

However a country got there, the story that went with the ban is one you probably know, or at least the version that got around. A green drink. Hallucinations. Madness. Banned. You may never have believed all of it, but you've heard it.

Here’s what happened to the drink in a span of a few years. By March of 1915, five countries had banned it. Belgium in 1905. Switzerland, after that 1908 vote. The Netherlands in 1910. The United States in 1912. And France in 1915.

Five countries, in ten years, all landing on the same drink. They had to be working from the same story. So who wrote it? And what did they leave out?

To answer that, we should start with the drink itself, because somebody had to make it.

In 1896, a company called Pernod Fils published a catalog about its own operation, and in it the makers describe, in their own words, how the green got into the bottle. Wormwood, fennel, and anise went into a spirit, and soaked. That was then distilled in a boiler heated by steam. Then came a second step. Some of the clear result was soaked again with more herbs, hyssop and a smaller plant called petite wormwood, and that second soak was where the green came from.

So it was made twice. First, heat pulled the aroma out of the plants and left the color behind. Then the clear liquid steeped in more herbs, a bit like steeping tea after you've finished cooking, and the color came out.

Water does one more thing, and I'll give it a single sentence, because it has a whole episode coming later this season. When you add water to the finished drink, it clouds, because tiny droplets of oil come out of the liquid and scatter the light.

What kinda surprises me about that catalog is how ordinary it sounds. It reads like someone describing a factory, because it is one. There is no mystery. It's just a boiler, a soak, a second soak, then a color.

And it was a factory at scale. In 1905, the town of Pontarlier, in eastern France, had twenty-five distilleries running a hundred and fifty-one stills between them. One of those companies, Pernod Fils, ran sixty stills by itself and made about forty thousand hectoliters a year. A hectoliter is a hundred liters, so that's four million liters. Spread across the calendar, it comes to about eleven thousand liters a day, from one company, in one town. Picture eleven thousand one-liter bottles leaving the same gate every single day. If you listened to the Proof of Fire episode, you know what a still does. Now picture sixty of them, owned by one company.

So where exactly did that demand come from?

Well, one story says it started with soldiers. In the 1840s, French troops in Algeria reportedly added wormwood to their wine, to ward off fevers, and brought the taste home with them. It's a good story, but the evidence is somewhat thin. Armies are great at spreading habits, and terrible at keeping records of them.

What turned a soldier's habit into a national one, though, was a bug. Starting in the 1860s, a tiny sap-sucking insect related to aphids began feeding on the roots of grapevines in France. It's called phylloxera, and it killed the vines it fed on. The first cases in France show up in 1863. Wine got scarce.

Distilleries that made absinthe needed alcohol. Cheaper alcohol took over, and absinthe became cheaper than wine. That put it within reach of working-class drinkers, who could suddenly afford a drink that had once belonged to the well off. By around 1910, the French were drinking roughly thirty-six million liters of it a year.

This was the Belle Époque, the beautiful age, as people would call the years before 1914 once they were over. In Paris, five o'clock had its own name: l'heure verte, the green hour. A glass of absinthe ran about fifteen centimes in the 1870s. A bottle of wine ran a franc. Artists sat in those cafés with it. Van Gogh painted a café table with a glass of absinthe on it in 1887, and a Belgian artist, Henri Privat-Livemont, drew a woman in profile raising a footed glass for an Absinthe Robette poster in 1896.

Painters had noticed the drink even before that. Manet's The Absinthe Drinker is from 1859, and it isn't a fashionable café at all. The model was a ragpicker named Collardet, a man who scraped a living on the streets of Paris. There's a glass beside him and a bottle at his feet. The Salon, the official exhibition, rejected it.

In roughly seventeen years, the person at the table goes from a ragpicker to a woman in a café, and the painting still reads as a verdict. It's a completely different drinker, but the same conclusion about whoever sits near the glass. Nobody asked either of them what was even in the glass.

The drink had picked up a nickname along the way, and the nickname came with a verdict. The French were calling absinthe la fée verte, the green fairy, in print by 1864. A Paris newspaper that October has a man who "divorced the Green Fairy that very night." In 1882, an English paper set her beside a rival. Chartreuse, it said, was what French ladies called "the good yellow fairy." Absinthe was "the wicked green fairy." Same word, fairy, and one drink got good and the other got wicked. Somebody picked the adjectives.

So the drink was cheap, and it was everywhere, and it was strong. The Van Gogh Museum's note on that 1887 painting puts it at sixty to seventy percent alcohol, often mixed with water. A drink like that was going to get a doctor's attention.

Doctors were getting interested in a country where heavy drinking was plain to see in every neighborhood, and nobody yet had a good way to sort out what was causing what. In the 1860s and 70s, a French doctor named Magnan argued that absinthe caused its own disease, separate from ordinary drunkenness. It got a name, absinthism. And it got a laboratory demonstration.

A report in The Lancet in 1869 describes it. A guinea pig sits under a glass cover. Beside it is a saucer of wormwood oil. And the animal, in the account, convulses.

Picture that. That's the experiment people pointed to. And look at what the animal was exposed to: the pure oil, undiluted, in a saucer, in a sealed space. That’s not a drink. That's the concentrated extract of the plant and nothing else.

I keep rereading that and arriving at the same place. A saucer of pure oil under a glass and a glass of absinthe on a café table are two completely different things. Whatever happened to that guinea pig, it didn't happen at a café.

But it made a clean case. It was a clear cause, a visible result, and a doctor to explain it. And it took more than a century for anyone to open the old bottles and measure what was actually in them.

That's exactly what a lab in Karlsruhe, Germany, finally did. In 2008, a team there tested thirteen bottles of absinthe made before the bans.

They were measuring a compound called thujone. Thujone is a natural chemical in wormwood, and at high doses it can cause seizures. For well over a century it was the prime suspect behind the legend. Claims from the old days put it as high as two hundred and sixty milligrams in a liter of absinthe. The Karlsruhe team found a range of about half a milligram to forty-eight, with a median of thirty-three. That two-hundred-and-sixty claim, in their words, was "clearly disproven."

Those numbers mean nothing until you pour them into a glass. At that median, a one-ounce pour carried about one milligram of thujone. A whole seven-hundred-milliliter bottle carried about twenty-three. The European Medicines Agency puts the level where subtle effects begin at around fifteen milligrams. Think of that one-ounce pour as a bit less than a standard shot. To reach fifteen milligrams, you'd be pouring about fifteen of them, one after another. Put another way, you would have to drink about four-tenths of a liter of undiluted absinthe, or roughly two-thirds of the bottle, straight.

Thujone is real, and I don't want to wave it away. At the right dose, it absolutely has effects. It just isn't the hallucinogen of the legend, and a drinker who gets anywhere near fifteen milligrams has already gone through most of a bottle of very strong spirit. That's a different problem from the one people were pointing at.

The accusers also said the cheap bottles were poisoned. The authors address that, and they're careful about it: the cheap, short-lived brands are exactly the ones that wouldn't have survived to be tested. So the study can't clear them. It can only say the ones that survived don't look like the legend.

I want to be fair about one more detail, because it changes how I read these numbers. The researchers say they received no outside funding. But two of the co-authors own absinthe companies, and they disclosed it in the paper. I'm not treating the study as gospel. I'm treating it as the best measurement anyone has, from people who expressed what they had at stake.

That covers the bottles. It leaves the disease that Magnan named. So what was absinthism?

In 2006, a review of the old medical literature reached a blunt conclusion: chronic abuse of absinthe "did not cause any distinct syndrome." The sickness the doctors described, it says, "cannot exactly be distinguished from chronic alcoholism."

In plain terms, the patients were people who drank a great deal of strong spirit, for years, and got sick the way heavy drinkers get sick. Doctors already had a name for that. Absinthe got a second one.

I'll note that one of the authors of that 2006 review also wrote the Karlsruhe study, so these aren't two independent voices. They're one research group, reaching the same place from two directions. Still, set the two side by side with the guinea pig. The saucer held pure oil. The glass on the table held alcohol, water, and a little of the oil.

So the evidence we do have points one direction, and the claim that absinthe was uniquely poisonous needs evidence that nobody has produced. Cheap absinthe may well have been dirtier than the surviving bottles show. That can't be settled, and I'm not going to pretend it can.

There was another crowd in those cafés, and it matters for how the legend grew. Laudanum, which is opium dissolved in alcohol, was a popular narcotic taken recreationally across much of Europe, and doctors were promoting hashish for various ailments. Baudelaire wrote about opium and hashish in Les Paradis artificiels in 1860, and he took laudanum and drank absinthe. Nobody can prove opium shaped the absinthe legend, and I'm not claiming it did. But look at who was describing the drink: poets taking several things at once, writing about visions. My reading is that when one of them wrote about madness, the glass everybody could see on the table got the blame.

Which raises the question. If the harm looked like heavy drinking of anything, why was only this drink put on trial?

A historian named Prestwich gave one of the best answers. Most temperance campaigners saw wine as harmless. Absinthe made an easy target because its makers were few, concentrated in a couple of regions, the Doubs and the Rhône, and weak politically. Wine had a country full of vineyards behind it. Absinthe had a few towns.

And the vineyards had their own reasons. After phylloxera, growers replanted, and the market flipped from shortage to glut. In the Midi, the south of France, ordinary wine sold for about thirty francs a hectoliter in the 1880s and about eight by 1901\. Swiss accounts describe the campaign against absinthe there as an alliance of abstinence advocates, winemakers, kirsch makers and brewers. Producers of a competing drink, in other words, sat in the same coalition as the people who wanted all drinking to stop.

I find that funny in a bleak way. Wine growers who'd just watched their prices collapse, standing next to teetotalers, both pointing at the same bottle for completely different reasons. You don't need a conspiracy for that. You just need the interests to line up.

And then a single case gave them a face to point at. In late August of 1905, in the Swiss village of Commugny, a laborer named Jean Lanfray killed his wife and their two young daughters.

He had been drinking heavily that day. Absinthe was part of it. The newspapers named the case for the drink: the absinthe murder. At his trial, according to one account, a psychiatrist blamed the absinthe, and the prosecution said he had drunk far more of other alcohol.

I'm not going to go further into the case than that, because everything else that went into him that day went unnamed. The absinthe got the headline.

The bans came quickly. Belgium banned absinthe in 1905. Switzerland put the question to its voters on July 5, 1908\. About half of eligible voters turned out, and of those, sixty-three and a half percent said yes. Only two cantons voted no, Geneva and Neuchâtel, and in Neuchâtel, only about a third said yes. The ban took effect in October of 1910, the same year as the Netherlands. In July of 1912 came the three signatures in Washington. France banned the sale by decree in August of 1914, and a law followed in March of 1915.

The beautiful age, as it came to be called, ran out in 1914. So, in France, did the legal sale of the drink that had filled its cafés.

Look at that staircase of dates, and remember who was in the room. Wine had a country behind it. Absinthe had a few towns. I think that's most of the answer.

Basically, in my reading, one drink was blamed for harms that had several causes, and the easiest story stuck.

The causes are all on the table. People drank strong spirit, heavily, for years, and got sick. A wine trade recovering from phylloxera had every reason to push against its competitor. A temperance movement that treated wine as harmless needed a target. A doctor ran an experiment with pure oil. A murder case put one drink on trial while the rest of the man's day went unnamed. And governments acted at a moment when they were ready to act.

The thujone was real. Cheap bottles may have been dirtier than the survivors show. None of that is the whole story, but the story that traveled had one villain.

Lands on a thing still standing. Sign-off is the last line.

The Swiss ban took effect on October 7, 1910, and it stayed in force until March 1, 2005. That's ninety-four years.

And in the Val-de-Travers, a valley in Switzerland, there were, by one estimate, sixty to eighty clandestine distilleries working during that ban. The authorities mostly looked the other way. The locals called the drink la bleue, the blue one.

Now, a ban that long should have ended the thing. Instead it ended the paperwork, and the drink went on being made in a valley where everyone knew exactly who was making it.

The legend outlived the law, too. Take the part that feels like the oldest tradition of all, setting a sugar cube on fire. The classic way to serve absinthe is slow: cold water dripped over a sugar cube sitting on a slotted spoon, until the drink clouds. Setting the sugar on fire is something else. The earliest account of it I could find was from a café in Prague in 1998, where two British importers, George Rowley and John Moore, saw it done as a serve for a Czech absinth they were bringing to market. It was a late-1990s Czech serve, only twenty-eight years old. Plenty of the drinks we think of as ancient are younger than the person pouring them, and this one is younger than a lot of people reading the label.

Then there are the American rules. On October 16, 2007, the federal agency that regulates alcohol labels, the TTB, issued a circular that set the terms. A product could be called "thujone-free" if it contained under ten parts per million. The word absinthe couldn't be the brand name. And label art "may not project images of hallucinogenic, psychotropic, or mind-altering effects." That's a federal rule that addressed the legend directly. A government was regulating the legend, because the legend was what people were buying.

Europe wrote rules too, and one of them surprised me. The European Union sets a thujone limit for each kind of drink. For spirits made from wormwood, it's thirty-five milligrams per kilogram. For non-alcoholic drinks made from the same plant, it's half a milligram. That's seventy times lower. A drink with no alcohol in it gets its own category and its own number, which makes the zero-proof wormwood drink the most tightly regulated of all of them. Whatever the reasoning behind the number, the law gave it a rule of its own.

France, meanwhile, got the name back in 2011, by a law passed on May 17. The ban on selling it had already loosened in 1988, so the law gave back the word, and according to one account, it did so partly to stop the Swiss from registering it as a place name. "Absinthe de Pontarlier" is now a protected name in Europe, and France recognized it in July of 2013.

The Swiss had gone after the names, too. In 2006, producers there sought to register absinthe, la fée verte and la bleue as protected designations, and a Swiss court later ruled the words generic. Which means the green fairy, legally, is a common word.

What I keep coming back to is that nobody in this story had to lie. A doctor really had watched an animal convulse under a glass. A newspaper really had printed the name of the drink. A board really had read a food-purity law and found a harmful ingredient. Each one was a true thing that someone chose to read a certain way.

That's where the paper trail ends, and where I'd rather leave the story: a single glass, sitting in front of you, with its ingredients on the label.

If you want to see where all this ended up, there's a museum for it in Auvers-sur-Oise, outside Paris, at 44 rue Alphonse Callé. It keeps a rare panel of absinthe spoons, a reconstructed café from the period, and etchings by Manet and lithographs by Daumier. It's open this season until November 22, though not every day, so check before you go.

The glass in Degas's painting is long gone. The spoons and the café are still there to look at, and nobody in that room is being accused of anything.

Pay attention to what's in the glass.

DISTILLATE is a production of The Alchemist's Bar — part of the Obscura Meridian family of projects. New episodes every Tuesday at 6:00 AM Central.