Les Rȇves de la Fée Verte : L’absinthe dans les romans de la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle (Dreams of The Green Fairy: Absinthe in The Novels of The Second Half of The 19th Century)

Abstract

Fabricated from the end of the 18th century, popularized after 1830 by French soldiers returning from Algeria, crowned the green fairy of the Parisian boulevards around 1860, the absinthe dominates the fin-de-siècle imagination as the principal means of transport “anywhere out of the world”. This article resumes the paradoxical mythology of this beverage that appears in French novels in the second half of the 19th century. Octave Féré, Jules Cauvain and the Goncourt brothers give a warning against its pernicious power, while Emile Zola’s attitude to the absinthe is more ambiguous. The magical potential of the green fairy seems to be tempting the father of naturalism who mixes science and mythology, the probable and the grotesque, the strict laws of heredity and the supernatural lightness of a blue flame coming from the “spontaneous combustion”.

Keywords

• French literature
• absinthe
• fin de siècle
• naturalism
• spontaneous combustion