In Emile Zola’s novel Le Docteur Pascal (1893), alcoholism is a deadly mystery. While it is sure that Antoine Macquart, a somewhat auxiliary character, dies as a result of his heavy and chronic drinking, the exact mechanism that causes his death remains unknown. The narrator ushers the reader into Macquart’s house in Plassans just as he falls asleep in his kitchen, his pipe tumbling into his lap. The pipe lights his thigh on fire; a cool blue flame burns the “alcohol soaked fat” slowly until his entire body is consumed. The page is at once clinical and ghastly. His relative, the eponymous Doctor Pascal, discovers the body much later.

C’était le plus beau cas de combustion spontanée qu’un médecin eût jamais observé… Lui-même, jusque là, s’était méfié, n’avait pu admettre, comme les anciens, qu’un corps, imprégné d’alcool, dégageât un gaz inconnu, capable de s’enflammer spontanément et de dévorer la chair et les os.1
(It was the most beautiful case of spontaneous combustion that the doctor had ever seen… He himself, until that moment, had been wary, and couldn’t admit, as his forbears could, that a body, engorged with alcohol, gave off an unknown gas, capable of combusting spontaneously and of devouring flesh and bone).2

Despite the observer’s close relationship to the deceased, the description lacks any empathy. The reader encounters the corpse through a medical, rather than familial lens. If the description is shocking, it is due to the coolness of the narration faced with grisly details. It may also have shocked because, as the narrator notes, medical experts no longer believed that an alcohol-soaked body could erupt in flame. Why then did Zola decide to include a scene that current medical experts would consider far-fetched and spectacular, and yet describe it in such an authoritative way? What medical theories, if any, supported Zola’s claim that alcohol-soaked tissues are liable to erupt into flame?

The conception of alcohol that Zola presents was based on many competing theories that emerged in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. Scholars like Susanna Barrows3 have already shown that alcoholism was a major preoccupation in that period’s imagination. In Paris, whose bars, guinguettes, estaminets, and marchands de vin greatly outnumbered any other European city per capita in the second half of the nineteenth century, theories surrounding drink abounded among the medical, literary, and lay communities. The slangy expression ivre-mort, while being startlingly literal to modern ears, was first and foremost a metaphor, and needed some insistence before a literal interpretation of the figure of speech became accepted; even Victor Hugo, in the heyday of medical discourse on the disease of alcoholism, still calls it this old metaphor.4 In this paper, I will attempt to locate the moment at which general wisdom held that immoderate alcohol consumption could directly cause death, rather than just threaten an already unstable patient’s health. Through analysis of scientific texts, vulgarizations of scientific knowledge, and literary texts, I will show that myth mingled with fact to such a point that, in order to arrive at our current perception of alcoholism, it was necessary to associate alcoholism with unlikely (and now archaic) phenomena: Lamarkian conceptions of heredity, and spontaneous human combustion. In regards to Zola, I will also demonstrate that, while he claimed to write with scientific authority, he in fact espoused all theories – some contradictory and unproven– in order to impress upon his readers the mortal dangers associated with alcoholism.

The story of the direct linking of alcoholism to death is one that crosses many discursive borders, and such requires a study of the interaction between disciplines – medical and literary – in order to be told. This is the history of an echo chamber, in which medical texts were picked up by Zola, reinterpreted, and then integrated back into the medical discourse of the time. It is also the history of science as told by literature. C.P. Snow, a chemist and novelist, famously described our contemporary notion of the strict separation of the intellectual cultures of science and literature in 1959.5 The scholar Allen Thiher has since argued that in the nineteenth century, the disciplinary border was less defined.6 I hope to add to Thiher’s claim in suggesting that the history of alcoholism can only be understood through the interaction of these two intellectual disciplines.

Zola has long the reputation of including scientific knowledge into his literary endeavors. He himself encouraged this reputation when he wrote in an essay that “from this day, science enters into our domain, the domain of novelists, who are presently the analysts of man in his personal and social actions.”.7 One of Zola’s major scientific preoccupations was alcoholism, which is present in some way in all of his Rougon-Macquart series of novels, published from 1871 to 1893. Zola’s alcoholic epic traced the effects of alcoholism on a family living under the Second Empire, from generation to generation. From there comes his other controversial theory: alcoholism can be hereditary, and can cause mental or physical aberrations generations later. The accomplishments of the series are numerous, but most importantly for this paper, Zola ushered art into the conversation about medicine and sociology. He gave literature equal authority in determining what exactly alcoholism meant for an individual and a family.

To better understand Zola’s approach, it is important to understand the debate he was entering. Armand Housson, future member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques and L’Académie de médecine, composed a large-scale statistical analysis of what Parisians ate and drank in the first half of the nineteenth century. Les Consommations de Paris appeared in 1856 as a modern history of the means and materials of consumption in the capital, almost exclusively based on taxes levied at the border. Housson estimated that per capita wine consumption in Paris was 0.7 liters per day (225.5 liters per year). According to another source, published a few decades later, the average French person consumed 3.1 milliliters of pure alcohol per day (all distilled or fortified liquors adjusted to 100 percent spirits) or 1.12 liters per year.8 How did Housson interpret these numbers?

As we will see, chronic alcoholism had moral, rather than health, implications for French society: drinking was a threat not to one’s health, but to one’s family. He writes:

Il est malheureusement certain que, dans la classe ouvrière, on n’a pas encore perdu l’habitude de s’attarder, le matin ou après le travail du jour, au comptoir des marchands de vin, pour y boire, à coups répétés, des quantités vin, qu’il serait si sage et si salutaire de réserver pour le repas de la famille.9
(It is unfortunately true that, among the working class, we have not yet dropped the habit of stopping by, in the morning or after the work day, the bars of wine merchants in order to drink - glass upon glass - considerable quantities of wine which would be healthier and wiser to drink during family dinners.)

Wine itself was not the problem, according to Housson. Rather, the author blamed the rise of the retail marchand de vin and the anti-familial habits of the working classes. Note as well that it was not necessarily the quantity of wine that the author feared, but the location and the company of the drinker. When Housson used the work salutaire (healthy), he was speaking not of physical health, but of moral values. Housson clearly hid a moral imperative beneath his claims to scientific objectivism - a moral imperative that was also shared by Zola.

A quick reading of many of Zola’s novels will present numerous scenes like the one describes by Housson of the drinker at the marchand de vin while the family waits at home. In one notable page of Zola’s L’Assommoir (1876), Gervaise Macquart worries about the drinking habits of her zinc worker husband Coupeau. In an attempt to get him home, she waits to intercept him before he can make it to the bar:

Gervaise aperçut quatre ou cinq femmes qui montaient la garde comme elle, à la porte du maître zingueur; encore des malheureuses, bien sûr, des épouses guettant la paie, pour l’empêcher de s’envoler chez le marchand de vin. Il y avait une grande haridelle, une figure de gendarme, collée contre le mur, prête à sauter sur le dos de son homme.10
(Gervaise noticed four or five women who waited to ambush like her, at the door of the master zinc worker; even more desperate women, of course, wives keeping a watch on the wages, to stop them from disappearing at the marchand de vin. There was a giant hag, the aspect of a cop, pressed against the wall, ready to pounce on her man.)

In this scene, the women of the neighborhood all share the same concern. For Zola, it is a way of indicating the epidemic nature of the urge to drink. Like Housson, he believed that drinking came from a place of moral corruption, and that certain forces – like the women lying in wait – could attempt to abate the symptoms, but could not cure the underlying cause: both Gervaise and Coupeau die of compliations – physical or mental – due to over consumption of alcohol.

There were two strains of medical discourse on the subject of alcoholism in the mid-nineteenth century. The first stated that the quality of alcohol ingested determined the effect on the drinker, and the second was that over-consumption led to problems – such as delerium tremens, stupor, and senility. As a thesis by Marie-Hubert Aviat from the Ecole de médecine pointed out:

Pour les uns... l’alcoolisme dépendrait presque uniquement de la mauvaise qualité des alcools ingérés... C’est l’opinion la plus anciennement défendue.
D’autres... incriminent beaucoup moins la mauvaise qualité des alcools que la grande quantité consommée et considèrent, en un mot, que le développement de l’alcoolisme est fonction de l’augmentation de la production et de la consommation des alcool.11
(For some, alcoholism depends almost only on the poor quality of ingested alcohols... This is the oldest-held opinion.
Others... place the blame less on the poor quality of alcohol and more on the large quantities consumed, and they consider - in short - that the development of alcoholism is related to the augmentation of the production and the consumption of alcoholic drinks.)

This representation of the medical argument about alcoholism indicates that, not only did older opinions of alcoholism neglect the effect of over-consumption, but also that the newer theory opted to place its cause in material rather than chemical terms. Alcohol, according to Aviat, would be over-consumed if too much was produced or if it was too present around the potential drinker. These were the beginnings of a theory of alcohol dependence, but expressed in economic and cultural terms. Of course, alcohol was a substance that could be abused – and chronic use was an abuse – but the specific biological impetus to drink could only be expressed in the idiom, in use in the nineteenth century, of qui a bu boira (once a drunk, always a drunk).

Why did certain people over consume? Many causes were suggested. As it may already be apparent, technological and cultural innovations made drinking a public activity. The nascent industry around the production of alcohol contributed to the decline of the pastoral image of viticulture and the increased consumption of spirits and liqueurs. The invention of the alembic by Edouard Adam in 1805, and the rise of the industrial distillery – one of which in Croisset, near Rouen, was capable of manufacturing 32 liters of eau-de-vie daily12 – also helped to intensify habits by lowering the cost and increasing the supply. To facilitate this consumption, new drinking spaces emerged to supply drinkers with alcohol. Paris particularly held this distinction, with a growth of all types of establishments: café-concerts, bodegas, cabarets, estaminets, guinguettes, marchands de vin, and assommoirs abounded, each type of public space catering to a specific type of client. In the eighteen-nineties, there was one retail drink outlet for every 92 inhabitants of Paris13 – again, including women and children – which meant that a drinker had a bit of liberty in choosing his or her environment. This could have been the main reason that theses like that cited earlier by Aviat understood the argument that chronic over consumption was rampant because alcohol was easier to procure, and, due to increasing supply, cheaper to drink. Alcohol had become a visual and cultural standby, fully integrated into the public system of social reference in Paris.

The ubiquity of alcohol and alcohol culture meant that alcoholism became a fact of daily life. In literature, this de-mythification of production allowed for novels such as L’Assommoir in which eau-de-vie is fabricated by the marchand de vin in the back of his retail outlet.

L’alambic, sourdement, sans une flamme, sans une gaieté dans les reflets éteints de ses cuivres, continuait, laissait couler sa sueur d’alcool, pareil à une source lente et entêtée, qui à la longue devait envahir la salle, se répandre sur les boulevards extérieurs, inonder le trou immense de Paris14.
(The alembic carried on, muted, without a flame, without any cheerfulness in the dull reflection of its copper tanks, sweating alcohol like a slow and stubborn spring that would eventually swamp the room, spill out upon the boulevards, flood the hole of Paris.)

Paris itself was hungry for the burgeoning industry to satisfy it. Zola compared the machine à soûler (drunk factory) to a living beast, using the distillation process as a metaphor for the production of bodily fluids – the alembic “sweats” like a person would. Through a curious metaphor, the process of fabricating pure alcohol had become synonymous to the need for ingestion of liquids, the secretion of fluids from the body. Zola at once de-humanized the alcoholic, seated for hours like a permanent fixture of the bar, and humanized the machine. A reader could have heard echoes of a popular expression, boire comme un trou (drink like a hole), in the image of Paris as a hole filled by alcohol. While some, such as Zola or Aviat, looked to industry to explain rampant drinking, others looked to the natural sciences.

For some, it could not have been the case that people drank because it was easy to drink; there had to be innate reasons that drove people to do so. As one could have read in the hundred-volume, often consulted Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales of Amédée Dechambre, the article on the pathology of alcoholism stated that the causes of alcoholism were still up for debate:

Suivant le docteur Magnus Huss, 15les mauvaises habitudes contractées dans ces circonstances seraient plutôt le résultat de l’exemple que de l’hérédité. Tout en admettant cette proposition, on ne peut cependant s’empêcher de reconnaître que ces tendances, dans certains cas, ne sont que l’effet d’une modification organique héréditaire.16
(According to Doctor Magnus Huss, bad habits contracted under these circumstances are the result of bad examples rather than heredity. While agreeing with this proposition, I cannot however deny that these tendencies, in certain cases, are none other than the effect of an organic hereditary modification)

Despite previous claims, it could either be hereditary or based on bad example. The hesitancy of the author to make an authoritative claim as to the causes of chronic alcoholism is akin to the “nature/nuture” debate that arose around Darwin’s evolutionary theory. People either drink because they saw their parents do it – their parents may have even encouraged them – or people drink because something acquired by the parents is passed along, giving children the propensity for alcoholism.

The moral argument, however, had not yet disappeared from the discussion. Again, the Dictionnaire Dechambre:

L’Alcoolisme... doit être regardé comme l’un des plus grands maux de l’humanité et rangé au nombre des maladies les plus fréquentes du cadre nosologique…17
(Alcoholism... must be seen as one of the greatest evils of humanity, and be counted among the most frequent illnesses within its nosologic category.)

Medical professionals were, like the moralizing statisticians, waging war against the greatest threat to humanity. The risk of alcoholism did not restrict itself to over-consumption and delinquency, but spread to long-term analysis of the human race. Dechambre makes a subtle reference with his use of the expression maux de l’humanité to a famous scientific theorist of the eighteenth century, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, one of the major evolutionary biologists before Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel. For Dechambre – and for many others – alcoholism presented a threat not just to French morals but also to the future of humanity itself. The project that Zola undertook to write “the history of a family under the Second Empire” fit squarely in line with the debate around acquired versus inherited alcoholism, and even toyed with the idea that the sins of the father could be passed on to an entire historical period.

Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, named for the family that populates its pages, begins genealogically with Aunt Dide. An alcoholic and a hysteric, Dide is the matriarch of a family plagued by the consequences of her drinking. The Rougon-Macquart family expresses hereditary alcoholism, the Second Empire mark of Cain, in various ways: some become alcoholics themselves, some are infertile, some murderously violent, one is a nymphomaniac – all of their conditions are linked to their heredity and to the conditions in which they live. Zola describes the lowliest places and professions in France, as well as some of the greediest, in a panoply clearly in the totalizing tradition of Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine. The end of the Rougon-Macquart family shows us how alcoholism could kill – not just the drinker him/herself, but also their children through inherited sickness.

In the last novel in the series, Le Docteur Pascal (1893) the eponymous protagonist is a medical doctor, retired to Plassans to research his family’s genealogy as an example of hereditary transmission of illness. His research is as much a retrospective on the previous adventures of the series as it is a framework in which Zola could, through the voice of Pascal, put forth his theories on progress and science against the obscurantism and mysticism of religion. It is through Pascal’s scientific gaze that the reader is offered a vision of the end of the Rougon-Macquart family with the death of Antoine Macquart, the son of Aunt Dide, which I addressed at the beginning of this paper.

While it may seem like the worst thing that could happen is that the Rougon-Macquart family dies off, and their mal héréditaire would no longer propagate itself. However, the scientific theories on heredity that Zola used to inform his novels suggest that it was not just one family under the Second Empire, but the entire French population that was threatened by epidemic alcoholism.

Lamarck, in his Philosophie zoologique of 1809, also prepared a framework in which moral ideas could be integrated into medical discourse. He based much of his method on the relationship between the moral being – the habitual actions and states of living things – and the physical. Using this relationship, he developed a theory by which traits are inherited by offspring if these traits were acquired by the adaptation of the physical being to its environment. He states in his preliminary discourse that his objective is to show...

...comment les actions devenues habituelles et énergiques, ont occasionné le développement des organes qui les exécutent; comment la force qui excite les mouvements organiques, peut, dans les animaux les plus imparfaits, se trouver hors d’eux, et cependant les animer; comment ensuite cette force a été transportée et fixée dans l’animal même…18
(...how actions, having become habitual and energetic, have affected the development of the organs that complete those actions; how the force that animates organic movements can, in the most imperfect animals, be found outside of their beings, and however influence them; and finally how this force has been transposed and imbedded in the animal itself.)

In the Lamarckian vision, external forces animate certain actions in the animal, which are then internalized and can be passed on to progeny. Lamarck had the insight (since disproven) that the nature/nurture debate is moot, since both external and internal forces can change an organism. So people could change their drinking habits to better their progeny, or – as Zola would agree – alcoholism could lead to rampant genetic problems within society.

Multiple generations of drinkers could, in the Lamarckian model, derail a healthy family and make them degenerate. Bénédict Auguste Morel, a theologian-cum-medical doctor, wrote his famous Dégénérescences de l’espèce humaine in 1857, in which he argues that the French have so hopelessly and radically departed from their primitive type that they have now become frail shadows of their forebears.19 Morel himself has inherited the Lamarckian vision of external stimulus and genetic inheritance, but he added to that a number of forces, such as alcoholism, that could influence the way an entire species behaves. A later doctor, Max Nordau, argued that the results of alcoholism have already become apparent, citing the artistic movement of impressionism as a symptom of degeneration, since vision can be influenced by these genetic aberrations.20 The effects of a corrupt culture could be seen everywhere.

So far, we have seen writers that have been preoccupied with the large-scale effects of alcoholism. Morel, Nordau, and Housson all saw alcohol as a threat at best to the family, and at worst to the human race. However, the individual drinker had no place in such theoretical framework. If the individual had no means of escaping a contaminated gene pool, there was no hope that any specific moral actions would allow for salvation. Literature, however, allows for individual actions to stand for larger ones. Zola in particular let one family represent society in the metaphorical space of his Rougon-Macquart.

When Zola attempted to describe the individual, however, he relied on spurious and archaic theories. When Antoine Macquart’s thigh erupts in flame, consuming his alcohol-soaked muscle, what precedent could Zola have possibly found? Spontaneous human combustion had been mentioned in reference to alcoholism in a much earlier nineteenth-century text, the Chronische Alkoholskranheit oder Alcoholismus Chronicus of Swedish doctor Magnus Huss, published in 1849. It was in this text that the word “alcoholism” first appeared, a term he linked with spontaneous human combustion. He knew alcoholism had been known to lead to death but could not explain how. He theorized on the causes of this internal flame that erupts from the lungs, but added that “having no personal experience with autocombustion, I cannot determine with certainty the existence of this phenomenon.”21 This will be the essential problem of anyone wishing to study the phenomenon: no one has actually seen a body burst into flames. Zola rectified that in placing his narrator, and thus the reader, in a position to observe the scene. Zola gave the first “direct encounter” with the symptom. Using Zola’s own claim of writing “experimental novel[s]” a reader might be convinced that spontaneous human combustion was real. Or at least his description was vivid enough to convince that alcoholism is dangerous.

Using scientific knowledge to promote moral ends came with certain dangers. As much as Zola wished to claim scientific authority, he fell under heavy scrutiny. Max Nordau, maybe misunderstanding Zola’s mission, wrote a response to the author’s claims to scientific truth:

Une expérience scientifique est une question intelligente adressée à la nature, question à laquelle doit répondre la nature, et non le questionneur lui-même. M. Zola pose aussi des questions. Mais à qui? A la nature? Non, à sa propre imagination. Et les réponses auraient une force démonstrative!22
(A scientific experiment is an intelligent question adressed to nature, a question to which nature must respond, and not the asker himself. M. Zola also asks questions. But to whom? To nature? No, to his own imagination. And to think the responses have demonstrative importance!)

His concerns with the “experimentalist” novel were specifically dismissive, wishing to relegate Zola to his own discipline (literature) since he could not, as a novelist, be a scientist. Strangely enough, this article was published in the very issue of the journal that mourned the death of Zola in 1902. Posterity would decide Zola’s importance, and Nordau wished to have the final word. Whether or not Zola took himself seriously as a scientist is not up for debate here; instead what is important is that he took scientific ideas and made them common currency. The precedent was a strong one: writers throughout the end of the century turned to natural and social sciences to inform their literature, particularly in the work of J.K. Huysmans, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Jules Laforgue.

While I have tried to focus mostly on French writers, the debate around alcoholism was not limited to France. Charles Dickens also famously described a scene of spontaneous human combustion in the December 1852 installment of Bleak House, when the owner of a rag and bottle shop, Krook, is reduced to greasy soot due to (supposedly) his alcohol-soaked tissues erupting into flames. Further research into the international importance of some of the questions I have posed in this article would be, I presume, very fruitful. While I would argue that France had a certain specificity given its abundance of drinking establishments in Paris and strong, national viticultural traditions, the French were not alone in theorizing about alcoholism.

Despite all the rigors of medicine, it was finally literature that could resolve the pathology of alcoholism as a disease that could, through no other external influence, be deadly to the patient. Indeed, alcoholism could be passed on from generation to generation, and, through the albeit sensational works of Zola, this transmission came to be seen as the cause of many of society’s problems. The project of synthesis that the novelist undertook began with alcoholism and resulted in a number of ills, all based on this corrupted blood. He implied that anyone could be an alcoholic, since it was not dependent on one’s class but one’s heritage. And finally, he made his public aware that the layman could diagnose alcoholism outside of the hospital. By wresting the methods of medicine away from doctors, he gave it to the people in order for them to diagnose themselves and their society. Whether this represented a cultural revolution, or the beginning of national hypochondria, is still up for debate.