Hygienists’ Alcoholism: Contested Professionalization in the Early Third Republic

During the final decades of the 19^th century French hygienists produced an enormous amount of talk regarding the dangers that alcoholism posed to the national community. Proposing a variety of reforms that touched upon questions of taxation, criminality, colonialism, urbanization, birth rate, sanitation, and worker morality, these hygienists urged the French people, and more specifically the National Assembly, to undertake dramatic measures or face certain ruin.

Considering the many other public health risks of the period, what can explain this near obsession with alcoholism in particular? This paper will argue that French hygienists repeatedly made alcoholism a topic of debate within their professional milieu because it allowed them to enter a variety of diverse public discourses. By inserting alcoholism into a number of seemingly unrelated issues hygienists could consolidate their profession and underline their value to the national community. In an effort to do just this hygienists offered one of the first models of the refined, personal control the state could gain over a large portion of the population. Many of these measures were rejected, but the failures of the hygienists help to clarify which discursive tactics were most effective for professionals in fin-de-siécle France hoping to gain financial backing and professional prestige.