Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Reinhard Bendix Memorial Research Fellow, 2007-2008

Joseph Bohling, History: Declining Wine Consumption in Postwar France. One of the hallmarks of French civilization can be found in a glass. Along with the baguette, wine is invariably associated with French identity, and for good reason -- throughout the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, the French were the world's heaviest consumers of alcohol. But since the 1960s, a quiet revolution in consumption has been underway. According to statistics collected by the Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (INSEE), the wine consumption rate has fallen steadily from its high-water mark of 180.66 liters per person over 14 years of age in 1955 to 61.53 liters in 2000. Today, only a minority of the French drinks wine regularly.

This dissertation sets out to explain how the French uncoupled wine with the quotidian rituals of the table, and what this tells us about changes in French daily life. Mr. Bohling examines the extent to which this postwar dietary revolution was part of a larger process of French modernization. To this end, he analyzes the relationship between three principal dimensions of the wine question: the discourses on wine and alcoholism, alcohol legislation, and drinking practices. He intends to measure the effectiveness of anti-alcohol discourse and legislation on French drinking behavior. While the postwar state obsessed over the problem of habitual drinking, and even institutionalized anti-alcoholism as part of its plan to modernize the country, Bohling's preliminary research suggests instead that subtler structural changes caused the decline in French drinking. He will explore the following factors: the market and prices of various consumer goods; urbanization and mass migration; demographic developments; the new organization of work and family structure; improvements in education; social mobility; greater consumer choices and new lifestyles; the de-structuring of meals; and the rise of an increased health-consciousness. By analyzing the sequence of these structural transformations and their relationship to the decline in wine consumption, he illustrates how drinking wine, which by French custom requires time, had to compete with more modern lifestyles. In terms of how the French have managed to modernize since the Second World War, the contents of a wineglass just might be telling.