Why was absinthe banned in Montmartre?
The short answer: France banned absinthe nationwide in 1915, at the height of a moral and public-health panic, and Montmartre was the place where that panic had a face. The ban lasted almost a century. Since 2011, absinthe may again be produced and sold in France under its own name.
In the 1880s and 1890s, the hill had its own clock. Late afternoon was l’heure verte, the green hour, when café terraces filled with slotted spoons, sugar cubes and water dripping into glasses that turned cloudy and pale. Absinthe was cheap, strong, and theatrical, three qualities Montmartre has never resisted. Painters put the drink and its drinkers on canvas; Degas’s In a Café, better known as L’Absinthe, scandalised critics precisely because it looked true.
The backlash was just as theatrical. Doctors described an illness they called absinthism, temperance leagues held it responsible for madness, crime and the ruin of families, and winemakers, who had their own market to defend, joined the chorus. The scientific case was weaker than the rhetoric: the harm came mostly from the enormous quantities of cheap alcohol consumed, not from wormwood’s thujone, present in far smaller doses than the panic claimed. It did not matter. In March 1915, with the First World War sharpening every anxiety about national vigour, France outlawed the drink entirely.
Montmartre kept the memory. The cabarets stayed, the legends grew, and the green fairy became one more ghost on a hill that collects them. When European and then French rules changed, and 2011 returned absinthe’s name to French labels, distillers revived old recipes rather than inventing new ones.
On our evening walk, the glass you raise is the legal, present-day descendant of that story: same ritual, same slow drip, and a century of rumour to separate from fact while you watch the water fall.