A timeline of absinthe

Absinthe went from a village tonic to the most consumed spirit in France to an outlawed substance to a legal drink again, in a little over two hundred years. The arc is worth setting out plainly, because the popular version compresses it into a fable.

1792–1805: the invention and the business

In the Val-de-Travers in Switzerland, the Henriod sisters of Couvet are credited with the first commercial absinthe, sold locally as a herbal tonic. Dr Pierre Ordinaire, a French physician practising nearby, appears in competing versions of the same origin story. The recipe passes to Major Dubied, who founds a distillery with his son-in-law Henry-Louis Pernod; in 1805 the firm moves across the border to Pontarlier, France, where Pernod Fils becomes the industry's reference producer.

1830s–1840s: the army

French forces in North Africa are issued absinthe as a fever preventative and to make questionable water palatable. Returning soldiers bring the habit home, and the drink acquires its first mass audience outside the Jura.

1860s–1870s: phylloxera and the green hour

The phylloxera aphid devastates the French vineyards. Wine and brandy become scarce and expensive; absinthe, made from grain and beet spirit, does not. Consumption rises steeply across every class, and Paris acquires l'heure verte — the green hour that begins on the cafe terraces around five in the afternoon.

1859–1914: the drink enters the canon

Manet paints The Absinthe Drinker in 1859 and is rejected by the Salon. Degas paints Dans un café in 1875–76. Van Gogh sets a glass on a cafe table in 1887. Picasso paints his absinthe drinker in 1901 and casts Glass of Absinthe in 1914. Rimbaud, Verlaine, Wilde, Dowson and Jarry put it into literature. The drink becomes shorthand for bohemian Paris and remains so permanently.

1905: the Lanfray case

In Switzerland, a labourer named Jean Lanfray murders his family after a day's drinking that includes, among a great deal of wine and spirits, two glasses of absinthe. The prosecution and the press fasten on the absinthe. A petition drive follows almost immediately. It is the hinge of the whole story: a case that demonstrated the effects of catastrophic alcoholism was successfully read as a case about one botanical.

1908–1915: the bans

• 1905 — Belgium bans absinthe.
• 1908 — Switzerland votes to prohibit it by constitutional referendum; the ban takes effect in 1910.
• 1909 — the Netherlands follows.
• 1912 — the United States bans its manufacture, import and sale.
• 1915 — France, with the country at war and the wine lobby fully mobilised, bans it outright.

The bans are never complete. Spain and Portugal never prohibit the drink, and production continues quietly there and, famously, illicitly in the Val-de-Travers, where clear uncoloured la Bleue is made in farm kitchens for the better part of a century.

1988–2007: the unravelling

European Union food law from 1988 sets thujone limits by category rather than banning wormwood spirits as such, which quietly makes absinthe legal to produce in most of the EU provided it complies. British importers exploit the fact that the United Kingdom had never actually banned absinthe at all, and a revival begins in the 1990s — initially, and unfortunately, on Czech “absinth” that was neither distilled nor anised and gave a generation a very wrong idea of what the drink tastes like.

Serious historical reconstruction follows: sealed pre-ban bottles are analysed, the thujone panic collapses under measurement, and traditionally distilled absinthe returns. In 2007 the United States permits absinthe again under the “thujone free” standard of the food additive regulations. Switzerland lifts its ban in 2005; France finally repeals its 1915 law in 2011.

Now

Absinthe is legal in most of the world and being made, in the Val-de-Travers and Pontarlier and a good many places neither of those regions would have expected, closer to the nineteenth-century product than anything available in 1970. The historical record is available in a way it was not for most of the twentieth century: much of the period literature that made absinthe famous is freely readable at Project Gutenberg, and the general history is now reasonably well sourced.

What has not recovered is the reputation. Ask most people what absinthe does and they will still tell you about hallucinations. See the page on thujone for why that is not so, and the page on art and literature for what it actually did.

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