French workers and the temperance movement.

In 1852, when the medical discoverer of alcoholism, Magnus Huss, was being honoured by the Academie franqaise, a spokesman for the Academie wrote that "France has many drunkards, but happily, no alcoholics." Sixty years later, on the eve of World War I, if one is to believe the reports of parliamentary commissions, economists, hygienists and social reformers, France had few drunks but a plethora of alcoholics, from the Breton peasant who fed calvados to his children to the worker of Paris and the Midi who had abandoned wine, that "natural and hygienic drink", for the evils of mass-produced industrial alcohol, especially absinthe. By 1914, alcoholism was considered one of the three grands fleaux, or great plagues, that had struck France in the late nineteenth century, and it was blamed for all the ills of society, from a rising rate of criminality, suicide and mental illness to depopulation, revolutionary worker movements and even feminism. Alcoholism was, therefore, not just an individual misfortune, but a national tragedy. It had become, in the words of Clemenceau, "the whole social problem" and as such required the mobilized forces of the country to conquer it. If alcoholism was considered a national calamity, one sector of the population, namely the working class, was thought to be both particularly vulnerable and culpable. Misery, it was believed, was largely caused by alcoholism and temperance propaganda invariably drew on the lives of the most visibly miserable, the urban workers, for examples to illustrate the evils of excessive drink. Emile Zola's novel L'Assommoir dramatized the problem, and among workers themselves there was the widely known