The Green Hour Returns: Absinthe

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An herbal elixir from the Neuchâtel Jura conquered Paris, fell over a murder case, and waited almost a hundred years in obscurity for its rehabilitation.

clarus.news | Culture | July 27, 2026

by Thierry Leserf

A Drop That Clouds Everything

The spoon lies across the glass, flat, perforated, with a sugar cube on top. Ice water drips from the fountain's tap, approximately one drop per second. Each drop traces a milky trail through the clear, greenish-shimmering liquid until the entire glass clouds over and the anise scent rises. This takes time. That's precisely the point: The louche effect – the cloudiness triggered by the poorly water-soluble anethole – is not a trick, but a clock. Those who drink absinthe commit themselves to slowness.

People

Topics

  • History of spirits
  • Prohibition and moral panic
  • Art and bohemia
  • Swiss culinary heritage

An Invention with Disputed Paternity

The origin lies in the Val-de-Travers, that narrow valley in present-day Canton Neuchâtel, where wine was mixed with wormwood as early as 1737. Who first composed the recipe remains disputed to this day: Pierre Ordinaire, a country doctor who fled from France, is said to have administered an «élixir d'absinthe» to his patients in Couvet. Other sources name the Henriod family, where distillation had already taken place around mid-century – for instance by the healing practitioner Suzanne-Marguerite Motta, called "Mother Henriod."

Only the business side is certain. In 1797, a Major Dubied bought the recipe and founded a distillery with his son and son-in-law, producing sixteen liters daily. The son-in-law was named Henri-Louis Pernod, and because customs formalities are tedious, he relocated the distillery to Pontarlier, France, in 1805. There it was soon four hundred liters per day.

The real boost came from colonial history: Starting in 1830, French soldiers in Algeria received daily absinthe rations against bad water and malaria. Pernod increased production to twenty thousand liters daily. The veterans brought the habit back to Paris.

Who May Drink, Who Should Drink

By 1860, the «heure verte» was established, the green hour between five and seven o'clock in the evening. Absinthe was more than a fashion: It was the first high-proof spirit that women outside the demimonde could consume publicly, and at around three sous per glass, it was also affordable for workers. A single, slowly diluted glass bought hours of the right to sit in the bar – given the cramped living conditions of Paris, where around 1900 there were 11.5 taverns per thousand inhabitants, this was an argument. In 1912, 221.9 million liters flowed in France.

Then the mood turned, and not just out of concern. In the 1860s, phylloxera had devastated French vineyards; absinthe made from cheap grain or beet alcohol filled the gap. When viticulture recovered, the market was occupied. The wine lobby financed anti-absinthe campaigns, stylized wine as a healthy staple food, and invented "absinthism" as a special problem that conveniently ignored that alcohol is also in wine. In 1907, four thousand demonstrators marched through Paris with the slogan "Tous pour le vin, contre l'absinthe."

The rest is legal history. In August 1905, vineyard worker Jean Lanfray murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters in Commugny, Vaud. That day he had drunk up to five liters of wine, brandy – and two glasses of absinthe. The debate focused on the two glasses. On July 5, 1908, 63.5 percent of Swiss voters approved a constitutional ban; it took effect on October 7, 1910. France followed, as did the USA. The substance blamed for all this, thujone from wormwood, could later rarely be detected above ten milligrams per kilogram in historical bottles.

What Remains: Six Stations

  • Manet, "The Absinthe Drinker" (c. 1859) – The subject of the derelict drinker was too much for the Paris Salon's selection committee; the painting was rejected.
  • Edgar Degas, "The Absinthe" (1876) – Two people sit next to each other and no longer notice one another. No intoxication, only emptiness.
  • Van Gogh's "Still Life with Absinthe" (1887) – The same year, Toulouse-Lautrec portrayed him in a café, the glass in front of him.
  • Picasso's "The Glass of Absinthe" (1911 and 1914) – First a Cubist painting, then a sculpture: The drink survives as form, shortly before it is banned.
  • Legalization in Switzerland (March 1, 2005) – Six years earlier, the ban had been removed from the constitution. France didn't follow until 2011.
  • The Struggle for Protected Designation – Val-de-Travers and the French neighborhood both apply for the protected name. A border conflict in bottle form.

Voices from the Green Hour

Oscar Wilde considered it the most poetic drink in the world and immediately provided the sobering aftermath: After the first glass, one sees things as one would like them to be – in the end, one sees them as they are, and that is the worst thing. (cited in Conrad, "Absinthe: History in a Bottle"; Die Welt, 2015)

Berthe Zurbuchen from Val-de-Travers distilled illegally for eighty years. Sentenced to 3000 francs in a show trial in the 1960s, she allegedly asked her judge whether she should pay immediately – or only when he next picked up his weekly bottle. Afterward, she painted her house absinthe green. (Grescoe, "The Devil's Picnic")

Hannes Bertschi and Marcus Reckewitz summarize the epoch as the assembled European artistic elite staggering through the fin de siècle in an absinthe stupor. (Bertschi/Reckewitz, "Von Absinth bis Zabaione")

Key Points

  • Absinthe is a Swiss invention that became famous in France and was first banned in Switzerland.
  • The ban was a mixture of genuine concern, moral panic, and market interests of the wine industry.
  • The rehabilitation came not from art, but from the laboratory.

Amusing Snippets

The Irony of Bookkeeping Jean Lanfray had liters of wine in his system on the day of the crime – absinthe was banned. You can also do statistics with the measuring stick of the lobby.

Federal Field Cultivation After the ban, the federal government had the wormwood fields in Val-de-Travers plowed under. Distilling continued anyway – the valley residents insist to this day on 250 years of uninterrupted production. Order yes, but please not in the cellar.

State Reception with Aftermath In 1983, state guest François Mitterrand was served an absinthe-glazed soufflé. Result: house search, four days suspended sentence – and a cantonal representative who almost sank his political career in dessert.

The Collector's Value of the Forbidden One author has suggested that if gin and vermouth had been banned back then, collectors today would pay fortunes for old martini glasses. Nothing preserves a myth as well as a law.

References

Main sources:

  1. Absinthe – Overview article (Wikipedia, German edition)
  2. Editorial dossier "The History of Absinthe – From the Green Fairy to Prohibition and Back" (internal supplement, PDF)

Supplementary sources:

Verification status: ✓ July 27, 2026

This text was created with the support of an AI model. Editorial responsibility: clarus.news | Fact-checking: July 27, 2026

Tags: #Absinthe #ValDeTravers #CulturalHistory #Prohibition #GreenFairy

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