82), was a largely uninfluential flop, publication beginning in 1886 and ceasing in 1888. In fact, Paris was not an absinthe-fuelled bonanza (Adams concedes this repeatedly), and the Décadent, which Adams describes later as published between 18 (see p. The image of Paris overflowing with absinthe and creativity is impressionistic rather than accurate, and is typical of the approach of the whole book. In the introduction, Adams sets the scene, and, in an overstatement typical of the book, claims that ‘y the 1880s, Paris had become an absinthe-fuelled bonanza of disparate literary groups, performances and small magazines, including the Décadent, a literary magazine that owed its philosophy to Verlaine, and set the tone for much of the bohemian life that followed’ (p. The vertebrae of the book are a series of potted biographies of well known absintheurs, including Verlaine, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch, Strindberg, Toulouse-Lautrec, Ernest Dowson and, to a lesser extent, Oscar Wilde. Adams describes the physical and psychological effects of absinthe well, and he demonstrates how it came to be emblematic of a decadent modernity in a number of paintings by Degas, Manet and Picasso. Oscar Wilde, never much of an absintheur, described the effects of absinthe as occurring in three stages, the first stage an ordinary alcoholic effect, the second engendering ‘monstrous and cruel things’, and the third stage engendering ‘wonderful and curious things’ (p. Identified early on as a portal to the unconscious, artists and writers of a bohemian ilk were eager to try its intoxicating and hallucinogenic properties. Hideous Absinthe is an entertaining cultural history of the drink and its contexts and it proceeds chronologically, beginning with the popular take-up in France in the nineteenth century by the poor, the bourgeois and the artistic elite and closing with its appropriation by the aspirant jet set in the twentieth century. Its unique properties were vastly exaggerated by both its supporters and its detractors to suit their own requirements (p. It had sufficient psychoactive properties for it to be a favoured drink of the creative when social change, available money and national movement made for the development of centres of artistic excellence. Its physical properties of changing colour with water and attractive aroma made it adaptable for use by those with refined tastes when they were in the ascendant. It had sufficient alcohol to be the major alcoholic drink at a time when social dislocation and a vine blight led to an increase in alcohol consumption. Henri-Louis Pernod for distilling in 1797:Ībsinthe, as developed in Switzerland and mass produced in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was the right product at the right time. Much has been attributed to the wormwood drink – madness, genius, social disorder, infertility, epilepsy – but, as Adams argues, the potent image of absinthe has been articulated for different purposes since its recipe was handed over to Mr. In the most recent of publications on absinthe, Jad Adams’s Hideous Absinthe: a History of the Devil in a Bottle, we confront the drink in all its guises – as anti-malarial agent for French soldiers in early nineteenth-century France, as a gin-equivalent for the poor, as symbol of ascendancy for the middle class, as muse for the bohemian and decadent, and as the scourge of the temperance movements in the latter part of the nineteenth century. (1) Perhaps it is a function of millennialism that interest has been stimulated in a drink formulated over two hundred years ago and demonised as the ruin of modern French civilisation. For aficionados of strong drink and a good story, there are quite a few books published on the subject of absinthe, and most of them have been published in the last ten years.
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