The Potted Planters

One of the many causes of the French Revolution was the royal tax on brandy, which the victors hastened to repeal. Napoleon reinstated the tax in 1806, but he generously allowed any Frenchman with his own vineyard or orchard to distill tax-free up to ten liters of pure alcohol a year (equal to more than five gallons of 100-proof brandy). Since then, through two empires, two monarchies and five republics. French peasants have guarded their home stills like so many Kentucky moonshiners--and French politicians have cherished the bouilleurs de cru (distillers of the countryside) as zealously as U.S. politicians protect the farm bloc.

Last week Premier Michel Debre rose in the French Assembly and proclaimed that the time had come to crack down on the home distillers. He had found it impossible to police more than 2,100,000 Frenchmen holding home-distilling permits; in some departments, there is a home still for every other adult male, with a gallon and a half of illegal booze produced for every gallon distilled under legal limitations. Furthermore, the ocean of homemade booze was killing too many Frenchmen, he argued. "In the past 14 years,'' said Debre, "total deaths from alcoholism have multiplied by twelve, deaths from cirrhosis of the liver by six, and entries into hospitals for alcoholic psychosis by 18. Do you know that half the crimes in France are due to alcoholism?" The Assembly broke into a storm of protest. Pleaded the Duke de Montesquiou-Fezensac: "Don't banish from the nation men who, living in misery, improve their humble position with products of the soil. Our vines are our glory. Do not the leaves entwine themselves about the capitals of our cathedrals?" Deputy Herve Nader accused Debre of "favoring the Anglomania of whisky galore, which will soon become the opium of the middle classes."

Debre wanted broad powers to regulate, and gradually eliminate, the home distillers. The legislators balked at that. Finally and reluctantly, they passed his bill, but only after adding a proviso that no presently licensed home distiller--or his widow--should be deprived of his right to distill his own brandy. This meant that the government, by granting no new permits, could stamp out home distilling --in only 60 years or so.

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