Learning to Drink: Attitudes toward Drinking in Seventeenth

Learning to Drink: Attitudes toward Drinking
in Seventeenth-Century Guides to Manners
by
Peter Shoemaker
In “Pour une psycho-sociologie de l'alimentation contemporaine,” Roland Barthes comments that:
En achetant un aliment, en le consommant et en
le donnant à consommer, l'homme moderne ne
manie pas un simple objet, d'une façon purement
transitive; cet aliment résume et transmet une situation, il constitue une information, il est significatif
[...] (979–80)
As his reference to “modern man” suggests, Barthes is primarily
concerned with consumer society, where individual foodstuffs are
markers of social and cultural identity. Nevertheless, his insight
could equally well apply to any form of ritual consumption in any
culture. Indeed it could be argued that virtually all eating and
drinking is ritualistic. Whenever more than one person is present,
these “natural” bodily functions necessarily become social acts,
governed by a set of conventional and stylized gestures. By eating
or drinking in certain ways, individuals and groups represent their
relationships with one another and perform their social identities.
This question of identity will guide my survey of aristocratic
drinking etiquette in France between the late 1500s and early
1700s. I will argue that as aristocrats embraced the values of selfdiscipline and polite conversation, the drunken body increasingly
became a marker of inferior social status and an object of social
control.
The aristocratic culture of drinking in early modern France revolved around two poles: the cabaret (a commercial business that
served alcohol and food on its premises) and polite society. To
judge by the poetry that was produced by Saint-Amant, Théophile
de Viau, and its other lesser known bards, the cabaret was primarily a masculine place. The pleasures of the mouth—food, wine,
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and song—provided the basic elements for a ritual of “male bonding” between aristocrats, poets, and other hangers-on. Women
were largely absent from this world, mentioned only to the extent
that female companionship was considered inferior to wine. SaintAmant's famous “Orgye” gives a flavor of this cabaret poetry:
Sus, sus, enfans! qu'on empoigne la coupe!
Je suis crevé de manger de la soupe.
Du vin! du vin! cependant qu'il est frais.
Verse, garçon, verse jusqu'aux bords,
Car je veux chiffler à longs traits
À la santé des vivants et des morts. (2: 76)
What is striking, here, is the physicality of drinking—from the
grabbing of the glass (“qu'on empoigne la coupe!”), to the coolness/freshness of the wine (“cependant qu'il est frais”), to the
drinking itself, captured in the wonderfully suggestive verb “chiffler.” Imbibing, for Saint-Amant, is an immediate, sensual experience that engages the entire body.1
Saint-Amant, of course, was writing within a poetic tradition
that went back to the sixteenth century and beyond, and that had its
own literary conventions. Nevertheless, other sources confirm that
the cabaret was a frequent haunt of the Parisian aristocracy during
the early seventeenth century. In his vituperative anti-libertine
screed La Doctrine curieuse, published in 1623, Father Garasse
describes the cabaret as a point of contact between aristocrats and
free-thinkers:
[Les libertins] sçavent que tel jeune seigneur a
de l'amour, ils composent une ode en laquelle ils
comparent sa maistresse à une divinité raccourcie
de toutes les perfections du monde, ils prennent leur
temps, ils s'ingerent sur l'heure du soupper: ils se
glissent és bonnes compagnies pour dire le mot, la
partie se nouë à deux pistolles pour teste dans un
cabaret d' honneur: ils suyvent asseurément, et se
rendent officieux mechaniquement, la table se couvre, ils en sont comme l'importun de Regnier, ils
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payent leur escot, partie en bouffonneries, partie en
cajolleries ou en impietez. (760)
Émile Magne has speculated that the cabaret provided aristocrats a
refuge from the official culture of court and church, an escape from
conventional norms and beliefs. With its focus on the satisfaction
of natural bodily desires and the shedding of inhibitions, cabaret
culture encouraged libertine discourse—or at least such was the
perception (195).
The other pole of aristocratic drinking, and the subject of this
essay, was the polite society of the salons, ruelles, and other similar social gatherings. Here the company was mixed, and drinking
practices intersected with the emerging discourse on manners that
flourished in the seventeenth century, variously referred to as
honnêteté, civilité, politesse, and courtoisie (Magendie).2 Whereas
the cabaret poets highlighted man's corporeal nature and celebrated drinking as an “idiom of social exchange” (Brennan 80), the
exponents of honnêteté and civilité were primarily concerned with
the ways in which drinking revealed an unruly body and was thus
potentially incompatible with polite sociability. In particular, they
directed their scrutiny to the mouth—site of both consumption of
alcohol and production of language.
Guyon's Les Diverses leçons, published in 1604, contains a
curious chapter entitled “Comm[ent] on connaîtra facilement de
quel breuvage sera enyvrée une personne.” As the title suggests,
the chapter provides a useful guide to the physical signs of inebriation produced by different intoxicants: wine, cider, poiré,
mead, and so on. Beer drinkers, we learn, “ne chancelent pas de
tous costez, mais seulement en arrière, & la renverse” whereas
wine drinkers “chancelent [...] & tousjours tombent, ou se
couchent sur la face, & sur le nez” (270-71). As confirmation of
this observation, Guyon notes that French soldiers in the Netherlands found it easy to take advantage of beer-drinking Dutch
women, as they passed out on their backs: “C'est pourquoy celles
qui auront soin de leur chasteté, se donneront garde de s'enyvrer”
(271).
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Beyond its anecdotal amusement value and mild-mannered
misogyny, Guyon's text signals an increased interest in the signs
produced by the drinking body and the ways in which such signs
are mastered (or not) by the drinking subject. Presumably, people
had always been aware, on some level, of the symptoms of drunkenness. These signs, however, become an object of increased scrutiny and discourse in the early seventeenth century.
Nicolas Pasquier's roughly contemporary Le Gentilhomme,
published in 1611 compares the drunken subject to a carriage
without a coachman:
[T]out ainsi qu'un chariot que les chevaux meinent après avoir jetté le cocher par terre vague ça et
la à l'aventure sans guide: ainsi l'ame et le corps
privez de leurs fonctions sont vuides de sens et de
raison, qui courent à bride abatuë le frain aux dents
sans repos et sans cesse où le vin les dresse: l'on
peut dire que celuy qui se rend esclave du vin et qui
n'est temperé en son boire, ne fait jamais rien approchant de ce qui est de la decence du Gentilhomme [...] (199–200)
The analogy of the carriage of course recalls Plato's Phaedrus and
his comparison of the soul to a chariot piloted by a charioteer and
drawn by two winged steeds, the one pulling the soul up toward
the realm of Ideas and the other dragging him back down to Earth
(493-95). Without the charioteer (or reason), the downward-pulling
steed gains the upper hand and the chariot becomes mired in the
corporeal realm. Pasquier extends this lesson to the subject of
drinking, reasoning that without the higher functions of reason
governing his behavior, man cannot act in a gentlemanly fashion.
When he is intoxicated, the lower body takes over, rebelling
against the higher functions:
[C]ar où l'yvresse a quelque surintendance, elle
fait voir au jour tout ce qui est caché en l'esprit de
l'yvrogne: comme le moust boüillant dans le vaisseau pousse à mont tout ce qui est au fonds: aussi le
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vin desbonde les plus cachez secrets à ceux qui en
ont pris sans choix et outre mesure. (200)
On the one hand, the must (“moût”) represents the secrets of the
mind that are revealed when reason loses its sovereignty. On the
other, by virtue of its crude materiality and its location at the bottom of the barrel, it recalls the imperfect, corporeal steed that
weighs down Plato's chariot in the Phaedrus. Its rising to the surface thus signals a reversal of proper hierarchy of upper functions
and lower body.
The term “surintendance,” it should be noted, suggests a political subtext. Indeed this entire passage can be read as political allegory, with the sober pilot serving as a figure for the sovereign reason of the prince and the drunken body evoking the menace of
popular rebellion (Merrick). In the early modern political imagination, the masses are typically represented as amorphous and chaotic, flailing wildly in all directions—much like the limbs of a
drunkard. By establishing a parallel between the individual body
and the body politic, Pasquier makes the gentleman's sobriety a
sign of his participation in the reasoned political activity of the
prince.
Thomas Brennan has pointed to a divide, in the eighteenth
century, between popular traditions of drinking as a form of
working class sociability, and the elite disapproval of drunkenness
as an “offence against reason” and public order. Whereas the Encyclopédistes attacked drunkenness on utilitarian grounds,
“popular discourse preferred not to speak of drunkenness and
cloaked it in terms of sociability” (76). In the popular imagination,
drink was not a menace to society or Reason; rather it was a social
lubricant that helped shopkeepers and workers drop their social
inhibitions and fraternize. As my examples show, this same divide
is present over a hundred years earlier, in early seventeenth-century aristocratic texts. Like popular drinking, cabaret culture represents a form of social exchange that takes place in a refuge free
from the demands of family and court. Texts such as Pasquier's Le
Gentilhomme, by contrast, offer a reaction against this model of
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sociability and anticipate the new modes of elite conduct that
would emerge over the course of the seventeenth century.
Drunkenness was of course not unknown in elite circles in the
latter half of the seventeenth century. La Bruyère describes
courtiers abandoning wine and seeking stronger liquors to satisfy
their jaded tastes. “Il ne manque à leur débauche,” he writes, “que
de boire l'eau forte” (232). In another fragment, he comments that
the only difference between an aristocrat and a commoner is that
the former gets drunk on better wine (219). Similarly, in his
Réflexions sur la politesse, Morvan de Bellegarde describes a
young man showing up in a mondain gathering, half-drunk after
dining in a cabaret. While testifiying to the persistence of such
behavior, however, Bellegarde nonetheless makes it clear that it is
considered unacceptable and draws a sharp line between the masculine cabaret and the mixed salon: “Est-ce en cét état,” he asks
“qu'il faut se montrer à des femmes d'une naissance distinguée?”
(54). Vaumorière, in his 1701 L'Art de plaire dans la conversation,
similarly insists that while heavy drinking may have its place, it is
antithetical to the spirit of conversation: “Demeurons d'accord que
la conversation ne sauroit être agréable durant le repas, ni immediatement aprés, si on y mêle quelque excés de vin” (74).
Treatises on manners from the period show an increasing
preoccupation with controlling the signs produced by the drinking
body. Courtin's famous Nouveau traité de la civilité, first published
in 1673, gives detailed prescriptions for drinking. To start with,
before putting the glass to one's lips, one should wipe one's mouth
and swallow any remaining food. The affectation of tasting wine
and savoring it slowly is to be avoided as “trop [...] familier,” as is
the opposite excess of thirstily gulping it down, which is described
as “une action de goinfre.” Rather, the entire glass should consumed in a single, poised gesture. Courtin further specifies that that
the drinker should take care not to make any noise with his throat;
otherwise, as he points out, the rest of the company might find itself tempted to count the number of swallows. After drinking, finally, the drinker should wipe his mouth, taking care not to let out
a deep sigh (176-78). Courtin, in other words, systematically sup-
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presses all of the signs of pleasure that the body might produce.
Such signs externalize the sordid inner mechanics of the body,
causing discomfort to others. Social drinking, in other words, becomes a performance of corporal restraint and self-control.
Jean-Baptiste de La Salle's 1703 treatise for wayward schoolboys, Les Règles de la bienséance et de la civilité chrétienne, follows Courtin closely on these points:
Il ne faut pas boire, ni trop lentement, comme si
on suçait et si on goûtait avec plaisir ce qu'on avale,
ni trop vîte, comme font les sensuels; mais il faut
boire doucement et posément, quoique cependant
tout d'une haleine, sans reprendre son vent, et non
pas à plusieurs reprises: on doit, en buvant, avoir la
vue arrêtée dans le verre, et toujours boire tout ce
qui est dedans sans en rien laisser [...] il ne faut pas
non plus, en buvant, faire du bruit avec le gosier, et
donner lieu, par ce moyen, de compter les gorgées
qu'on avale. Il est indécent, après avoir bu, de
pousser un gros soupir pour reprendre son haleine;
il faut cesser de boire sans faire aucun bruit, non pas
même avec les lèvres; & aussitôt après avoir bu, il
faut essuyer sa bouche, comme on a dû faire avant
de boire. (360–61)
La Salle is particularly insistent on certain points, mentioning three
times, for example, that one should wipe one's mouth before
drinking. This reflects his larger preoccupation with liquids—soup,
gravy, saliva, phlegm, and so on—and keeping them contained
within appropriate limits. To the extent that it is possible, the body
should be a sealed vessel, its orifices tightly closed. It should not
leak, so to speak, any auditory or visual signs. He thus devotes
long sections to not only drinking, but also spitting and sneezing.
For La Salle, the policing of the mouth extends beyond the
consumption of drink to the production of language itself. The discourse on drinking, so important in cabaret society (because it indicates shared enjoyment), disappears in La Salle. The drinker
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should not express his opinion on the wine, as that might draw attention to the satisfactions (or insatisfactions) of the body and thus
offend the sensibilities of others. Nor, for that matter, should the
drinker draw attention to himself when he desires to quench his
thirst; he should ask, rather, to drink “tout bas” and “par signes”
(358).
Another related aspect of the new drinking etiquette is its
treatment of the practice of toasting, one of the staples of drinkingas-sociability. In Courtin, this ritual is subject to an elaborate etiquette. In order to avoid the informality that breeds incivility, he
insists upon using the appropriate formula of address when offering a toast:
C'est le comble de l'incivilité, d'ajoûter, comme
nous avons déjà dit, le nom de la personne qualifée
[...] Il faut nommer la femme par la qualité, ou par
le surnom du mari; & les autres, ou par leurs
surnoms, ou par quelque qualité, s'ils en ont; en
disant par exemple, A la santé de Madame la Maréchale, de Monsieur le Marquis. (177)
The egalitarian spirit of reciprocity that pervades cabaret drinking
is absent here: toasting is permissable, but only to the extent that
the manner of toasting reaffirms social hierarchies. La Salle goes
one step further, suggesting that all toasting reeks of informality:
“il ne faut pas même boire facilement à la santé les uns des autres,
à moins qu'on ne soit avec ses amis les plus familiers” (362).
Behind such prescriptions clearly lurks the spectre of popular
culture, with its association between drinking, the body, and informal sociability. Rather than bringing people together, drinking,
for Courtin and Salle, has the potential to separate them by revealing the potentially revolting bodies that they inhabit. The new polite sociability consists in policing one's body (and particularly the
mouth) and in executing a corporal performance that manages,
paradoxically, to erase the body—or at the very least, to hide its
inner workings. The most remarkable symptom of this erasure of
the body is the virtual disappearance of drunkenness from the
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moral discourse on drinking. Unlike Pasquier and Guyon, Courtin
and La Salle have little to say on the subject. This omission undoubtedly reflects an increased social taboo attached to the body.
In a social context where one is supposed to drink without swallowing, so to speak, intoxication is beyond the pale, outside the
realm of even the discourse of manners itself.
To some extent, of course, this evolution in drinking manners
closely parallels Elias's famous “Civilization Process.” Drinking,
however, has its own history, linked to demographic changes in
France and the general economy of alcoholic beverages in early
modern Europe. The waning years of the sixteenth century saw
broad shifts in French drinking practices. In 1587, an ordinance
allowed cabarets to expand their clientele to include locals, and
not merely travellers and coachmen (Sournia 18). As it became
increasingly available and affordable, alcohol lost its function as a
social marker of the aristocracy (Austin 129, 281; Braudel 236). As
alcohol consumption increased, moreover, it was increasingly associated with political and social disorder.3 In 1596 the jurist
Barthélémy Laffemas deplored “les yvrogneries qui ruynent bien
souvent les mesnages et les familles.” He returned to this theme
again in 1600, blaming the problem specifically on the deregulation of the cabarets (Dion 488).4
These trends go a long way to explaining the shift in focus,
noted in the examples analyzed above, from drinking itself to the
manner of drinking. In order to distinguish themselves from the
lower classes and what were increasingly considered to be popular
forms of sociability, authors such as Courtin developed what we
might call a euphemistic art of drinking. In a paradoxical reversal,
the erasure of the signs of the body became a sign in itself—a
present absence that served as an indicator of social status. Drinking assumed what David Mandelbaum has referred to as a
“diacritical function”: “one group or class within a larger society
follows drinking patterns that serve as a badge marking them off
from others” (Marshall 16).
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This explanation, however, fails to account for La Salle, who
wrote not for aristocrats or would-be aristocrats, but for the young
boys who attended his schools, the majority of whom came from
humble origins. How, then, do we explain his quasi-obsessive
prescriptions regarding drinking and popular culture? One plausible explanation is that La Salle was aware of the scrutiny that these
boys, who came to schools without the slightest rudiments of manners, would face when they entered the outside world. He knew, in
particular, that any deviation from good manners, especially in the
realm of drinking, would be attributed to their social origins.
Whereas an aristocrat could afford an occasional lapse, La Salle's
boys needed to exercise constant vigilance if they were to keep
signs of the body—which were also signs of potential social disorder—under control.
These examples give an insight into the unique place of wine in
modern French cultural identity. In his essay on wine and milk in
Mythologies, Roland Barthes argued that wine was the consummate French national food. In the France of the 1950s as described
by Barthes, drinking wine was not a matter of personal preference,
it was a “national technique”: “Savoir boire est une technique nationale qui sert à qualifier le Français, à prouver à la fois son pouvoir de performance, son contrôle et sa sociabilité” (Mythologies
76). The origins of this distinctively French “technique,” I would
offer, can be traced back to the treatises on manners examined
above, with their characteristic focus on performance. Following a
typical pattern, a mentality that was formerly limited to the social
elite gradually became a constituitive element of French national
identity—a sign of the quintessential politesse of the French people
(Muchembled). A Frenchman of Barthes's generation, to put it
simply, knew how to drink his wine, and this knowledge was an
implicit condition for citizenship in the “imagined community” of
the French nation.5
Of course, there is much that separates twentieth-century
drinking practices from the norms expressed in late seventienthcentury treatises. Pleasure, for instance, plays an essential role in
Barthes's description of French drinking-as-performance: “la bois-
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son est sentie comme l'étalement d'un plaisir” (Mythologies 75).
The art of gastronomy, first elaborated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, provides a synthesis between the traditions of
drinking-as-pleasure and drinking-as-polite-performance.6 Finally,
there is much that separates contemporary twenty-first-century
French drinking practices from those observed by Barthes. In particular, net consumption of alcohol has decreased and younger
drinkers, rejecting the traditions of their elders, have turned away
from wine toward more international drinks such as distilled spirits
and beer (Heath 107–11). These trends suggest that the national
“technique” of wine-drinking is on the decline, along with the
spirit of polite sociability that it expressed.
The Catholic University of America
NOTES
1
Cabaret poetry reflects the predominant moral tradition prior the
seventeenth century. This tradition treated alcohol not as a
intoxicant, but rather as a foodstuff to be consumed in healthy
moderation. Erasmus, for instance, specified that children limit
themselves to two or three glasses of wine per meal, diluted with
water (67). And Montaigne, for his part, recommended that the
drinking of wine be guided by natural thirst, and that drinkers
avoid the two extremes of excessive and over-fastidious
drinking—of consuming too much or too little wine (12–20).
2
Italian theorists set the tone. In his 1555 Galateo, Giovanni della
Casa's emphatically rejected the opinion of scholars who “greatly
praise someone by the name of Socrates [...] because he lasted
through an entire night, from dusk to dawn, drinking challenges
with another good man who was called Aristophanes” (58).
3
An early text dealing with the public impact of drunkenness is
Sebastian Brant's 1494 Ship of Fools (Austin 130).
4
Over the course of the seventeenth century, these trends of
democratization and elite censure continued. Soon, Parisians were
discovering new poisons, such as hard spirits and thronging to the
“guinguettes” outside of Paris to drink duty-free on weekends.
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5
What about women? Barthes does not address the question, but it
is difficult to escape the suspicion that women, traditionally
viewed as less able drinkers, would also be less qualified
“Frenchmen.”
6
This synthesis is anticipated by Saint-Évremond (1616–1703),
who established l'Ordre des Côteaux de Champagne, one of the
earliest wine-aficionado clubs.
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