Mon 20 Oct 2008
The French Shoot Themselves in les Pieds Again
Posted by Fredric Koeppel under What Were They Thinking[5] Comments
French culture has always been a charming and annoying nexus of elegance, arrogance and paranoia, but now the country has reached its nadir, and not all the other nadirs that came before but a new, even more significant one. In the nation that serves 
as a model for excellence in wine-making, many of whose wines are honored as exemplars for the rest of the world, where the integration of wine and food into daily life seems rational and essential, in this nation, I say, articles about wine in newspapers and magazines must carry health warnings. Notice that I didn’t say “advertisements about wine in newspapers and magazines,” but articles, journalism, in other words, stories that review wines or provide overviews of wines or wine regions and so on. The purpose of advertising is, of course, to sell wine, while the purpose of journalism is to inform and educate; the line between those functions, as far as a court in Paris is concerned, no longer exists. All public utterances about wine, apparently, may corrupt the young.
To further the sense of prohibition, the French government has proposed a law limiting advertising for wine, beer and spirits on the Internet to certain sites at limited hours, and the advertising could not be by a third-party, i.e., a public relations or marketing firm. Makes alcohol sounds like pornography, doesn’t it? One result of these measures is that Microsoft Adcenter removed all wine merchants from its client list in France. Google Adsense and Yahoo are expected to follow Microsoft’s lead.
Oh, and a proposal has been made by the government to raise taxes on wine as much as 16 percent.
Most of this news goes back to the summer or first of the year, but I mention it here because (as Eric Asimov pointed out in his blog The Pour), the General Association of Wine Production in France is calling for boycotts on October 30 to call attention to the situation. No mention has been made about what form this boycott would take, but the association represents 500,000 people in the wine business, according to decanter.com.
Sacre bleu, what a state the world is in when France, long the symbol of the sensible indulgence in the pleasures of the body and mind, becomes more puritanical and politically correct than America.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:38 am
I recently learned that France has the highest rate of alcoholism per capita. Do you think this is in response to that?
October 21st, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Yes, cmoore, what you say is true and i would say that these measures are probably in response to the circumstances, but i also think that these measures are so extreme as to be life-denying. Perhaps the rate of alcoholism in France, however, isn’t because of wine-drinking, which is in decline, especially among young people, but because of the increased consumption of beer and spirits.
October 23rd, 2008 at 8:34 am
You take a nicely controversial stand and it makes for good reading
Fortunately France remains a country of people who like social life and where wine drinking is shared with pleasure. People are not “puritanical”. “Politically correct” is a derogatory term used by conservative types.
Now there are many problems in France — including disconnected establishment and widespread alcoholism.
You say that “the purpose of journalism is to inform and educate”. I agree that this is how it was presented two centuries ago. Now it is more about selling and pushing corporate agenda. In this regard I have no problem with the press being treated as an advertisement industry.
So let’s continue blogging and reading blogs
October 24th, 2008 at 6:20 am
Dear Estelle, I’m pleased to hear from a real French person about this post; thank you for taking the time to read. I am happy to learn that the French still have a social life and share the pleasures of drinking wine. I suspect that the problems of alcoholism and drunk driving that plague the country are due to a sharp rise in the consumption of beer and spirits, rather than the convivial drinking of wine. As to politically correct being “a derogatory term used by conservative types,” I am as liberal as they come, but I despise political correctness (on the left or right) because it stems from a knee-jerk and simple-minded reaction to an issue rather than reflecting thoughtful consideration. And I am not only a blogger about wine and the wine industry, but a 22-year full-time journalist at a daily newspaper; I promise you that my colleagues and I would recoil with horror at the notion of “selling and pushing corporate agenda.” In fact, that sounds like a politically correct view of journalism on your part.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:03 am
You use “politically correct” in a derogatory way again — twice. So we at least agree that it is a negative term.