Hideous Absinthe: A History of a Devil in a Bottle

For aficionados of strong drink and a good story, there are quite a few books published on the subject of absinthe, and most of them have been published in the last ten years.(1) Perhaps it is a function of millennialism that interest has been stimulated in a drink formulated over two hundred years ago and demonised as the ruin of modern French civilisation. In the most recent of publications on absinthe, Jad Adams’s Hideous Absinthe: a History of the Devil in a Bottle, we confront the drink in all its guises – as antimalarial agent for French soldiers in early nineteenth-century France, as a gin-equivalent for the poor, as symbol of ascendancy for the middle class, as muse for the bohemian and decadent, and as the scourge of the temperance movements in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Much has been attributed to the wormwood drink – madness, genius, social disorder, infertility, epilepsy – but, as Adams argues, the potent image of absinthe has been articulated for different purposes since its recipe was handed over to Mr. HenriLouis Pernod for distilling in 1797: