Drink and the politics of social reform: anti-alcoholism in France since 1870

research" (p. 89). Such infelicities, however, should not lull the reader into a routine denunciation of a positivism-inspired plot, for the judgement would be mistaken. Canguilhem's account of science and progress in history arises from the epistemological configurations hatched up by Gaston Bachelard. The Anglo-American reader who can tolerate what seem on first hearing to be whiggish pronouncements will find much in this text of value. It comprises a number of different essays, written at different times, mainly on nineteenth-and twentieth-century biology and medicine. Unless I am looking in the wrong place, however, the essay on John Brown's medical system contains nothing original. By contrast, the paper on biological regulation is full of insights as is the piece on nineteenth-century medical theory. Unfortunately and tantalizingly, both papers sketch a view of Claude Bernard's physiological programme as ideologically congruent with nineteenth-century political theory, but fail to fill in the details. At over ten pence a page, this is a rather expensive price for an Impressionist. As a French import, Pasteurization may well represent better value for money. Patricia Prestwich's book is a well-researched and carefully reasoned history of both anti-alcoholism and alcoholic consumption in France since the last years of the Second Empire. It goes well beyond the scope and depth of earlier attempts by historians to interpret the French approach to the public-health consquences of drink. Prestwich's interpretive challenge is to explain why the French temperance movement was less successful than its English and American counterparts in pressuring the state to pass anti-alcoholism legislation. Her account undermines the resilient myth that anti-alcoholism mainly attracted teetotal, puritanical, and moralizing men and women of the middle class. She also disputes Michel Foucault's thesis that anti-alcoholism movements were dominated by bourgeois reformers who, obsessed with fear of mounting social disorder among the lower classes, mainly sought to impose greater discipline on vulnerable social groups. "If discourse on drink has often revealed bourgeois values of order and progress, as well as insecurities about the growth of the working class," she writes (p. 286), "it is also true that middle-class temperance movements had a valid and well-documented concern about the effects of increased consumption of alcohol." These concerns about the growth of alcoholism, Prestwich concludes, had a basis in reality and therefore enjoyed a certain "scientific validity" (p. 2). Prestwich argues convincingly that French temperance advocates had a stiff task because "in France anti-alcoholism had …