The Sober Revolution: Remaking Wine and Nation-State in Postwar France, 1946–76

My paper looks at the role of the French state’s postwar anti-alcohol campaign in the consolidation of the Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) labeling system during the “Economic Miracle.”  I use wine as a prism through which to understand France’s transition from a rural, empire based political economy and identity to an increasingly urban and globalized one.  The expansion of the AOC system, and the concurrent and dramatic decline of table wine consumption, depended upon an anti-alcohol coalition of doctors, French and European technocrats, appellation winegrowers, and automobile and insurance interests, as well as important structural transformations that impacted the scope of the state:  the fall of the Fourth Republic and the foundation of the Fifth, where a strong executive branch mobilized public opinion and circumvented the industrial wine interests in Parliament in order to make French wine more internationally competitive; the end of empire, which meant the eventual termination of Algerian wine imports that were used to cut with weaker French wines; and the creation of a Common Market, in which French policymakers convinced member states to adopt a variant of France’s AOC system.  The AOC system was consolidated at the very moment that the state’s spheres of influence were openly challenged.

Anglo-American scholars have largely downplayed the importance of agriculture to postwar economic modernization.  This paper examines how rural France, La France profonde, responded to and took advantage of market integration, and how AOC producers worked with postwar modernizing elites to make wine “authentic,” or loyal to its place of origin.  Working together, they carved out a niche in a postwar world economy that was increasingly dominated by industrialized agriculture, and have left their mark on global capitalism.