By Alicia Yau
It is during the summer of 1905 in rural Switzerland that a man stands accused. His wife and two daughters are dead by his own bullet, gone in an inexplicable fit of rage declared by psychiatrists (and soon enough, the country and continent) to be induced by his consumption of the insidious, mind-rotting liquor known as absinthe.
The lifespan of the culprit began when a Doctor Pierre Ordinaire, living in exile during the French Revolution, created an all-purpose remedy using Artemisia absinthium (wormwood) as its base. The herb had been used as a folk medicine by the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and now French soldiers quelling local resistance in Algeria circa the 1840s were spiking their wine with it (malaria, mass fevers and dysentery do put a damper on colonial projects like that). Upon their return, soldiers brought an appetite for absinthe with them, a taste that rapidly spread through the civilian populace.
5pm in the evening was dubbed “green hour” for the smell of absinthe that wafted through the streets as the masses indulged. In the 1860s, 70s and 80s phylloxera plagues devastated European vineyards, crippling the wine and brandy industries, and by the 1880s, mass production made absinthe accessible to all classes. It was during this time that absinthe acquired the moniker of the Green Fairy for the devotion it inspired in bohemian creatives such as Manet, Van Gogh, Verlaine, and Hemingway. The mystique lay in its exotic appearance, the vivid emerald of the fluid, unnatural yet alluring; the hallucinogenic effects created a mythology of unveiled ideas and elevated perceptions.
Concurrently, it symbolized madness, a deterioration in culture and society. The idealization of intoxication scandalized much of polite society. Psychiatrists of the time embarked on a determined search to find correlation between absinthe consumption and a simmering public health crisis of violence and psychosis. Some claims were not unfounded, as fraudulent distillers may have added cheap and likely poisonous ingredients like copper sulfate for coloring. However, false myths were perpetuated in large part by the flawed scientific studies of Dr. Valentin Magnan, who fed guinea pigs pure wormwood oil extract and used the violent convulsions that they suffered as proof of absinthe’s evils, which in modern medicine is akin to feeding animals massive doses of caffeine to prove the horrifying effects of an americano. Still, this view caught on and many Parisians began ordering absinthe by asking for ‘une correspondence’, or a ‘ticket’ to an infamous lunatic asylum in the outskirts of Paris.
The discourse around the perceived ‘poisoning of the population’ grew in force, and yet it took the ‘The Absinthe Murders’ of 1905 to galvanize citizens against liquor as more than a mere cause of moral decay, but now a violent threat to society (it was promptly overlooked that the murderer was an alcoholic who had drunk no less than five types of alcohol that day). This tide of public opinion was spurred on by lobbying from wine producers, longtime temperance movements, and a host of medical authorities. Thus, in fairly quick succession, bans on absinthe appeared in Switzerland, France, Belgium, and many other nations.
Prohibition has never been terribly good at making something go away completely, but the heights of absinthe’s popularity did eventually perish. Its specter survived only in popular imagination of a bygone age of European decadence, as that of both a fairy and a devil, worshipped and reviled - until its revival in the modern age, that is. Unsurprisingly, countries began noticing a conspicuous lack of Absinthe Murders, and science has since caught up. The Scooby-Doo villain was poor regulation and chronic alcoholism all along.