Transformation of the Wine Market in an Era of Crises

During the phylloxera crisis, rising demand for domestic table wine had led to massive imports of Spanish and Italian wine—an astonishing twelvefold increase in the 1880s over the previous decade.^[16] These imports did not stop once French wine production returned to normal and now that foreign wine directly competed with southern wine. To make matters worse, countries that had been clients of southern French winegrowers began to produce wines of their own; the French now had to compete with them on the European market.^[17] Small growers, who lacked the advantages of economies of scale, low transportation rates for bulk shipments, and reserve capital, suffered most from these changes. Wine dealers used the competition to pressure small growers into accepting inferior prices for their wine. Small producers often sold their meager harvests right from the vine, for fear that any delay would oblige them to accept a price lower than the one originally offered.^[18]

The combination of more aggressive entrepreneurship in winegrowing and a more competitive market made southern viticulture ever more susceptible to economic crises, with disastrous effects for vinedressers and small vineyard owners. By 1893 replanted Audois vineyards were in full production, yielding a monumental harvest of over four million hectoliters, and wine prices plummeted from 23 to 12 francs per hectoliter, dropping again in 1896.^[19] Falling prices translated into layoffs on the large estate vineyards, and numerous vinedressers found themselves unemployed overnight. In a spirit of contestation by

now familiar to urban villages and rural bourgs , vinedressers and landowners assembled in demonstrations of up to thirty thousand in November and December 1893 to pressure the government for assistance. Deputies, mayors, and representatives of local agricultural organizations all pleaded with the state to intervene, proposing such measures as nationalization of the Canal du Midi, lowering of railroad rates, restoration of the distiller's privilege (privilège des bouilleurs de cru , which allowed individuals to distill wine for private consumption), and an increase in tariffs on foreign wines. This radical departure from the free-trade liberalism characteristic of winegrowers a generation earlier even included the demand that local municipalities resign and that winegrowers refuse to pay the tax on alcoholic beverages.^[20]

In fact, wine prices did not improve for another three years. When harvests and prices finally did return to normal in 1897, winegrowers breathed a sigh of relief—but not for long. An exceptionally abundant harvest throughout lower Languedoc in 1900 resulted in a major, long-term, regionwide depression that lasted until World War I. Wine prices in the Aude fell as low as 5 francs per hectoliter the next year, and in 1902 as low as 1.25 francs. Although a small harvest in 1903 caused prices to rise somewhat, not until 1909–1910 did they return to respectable levels of 22, 24, and even 36 francs per hectoliter.^[21]

The political economy of the more or less constantly depressed wine market between 1900 and 1914 generated a great debate among contemporaries, who looked for monocausal explanations for the depression. Some, such as the economists Charles Gide and Pierre Genieys, charged that the wine glut of 1900–1901 was due to overproduction.^[22] Others blamed declining wine consumption. Still others pointed the finger at inadequate tariffs that failed to keep foreign wines off the French market. All, however, agreed that "fraud" bore a large measure of responsibility—that is, the production of artificial wines with sugar, water, or raisins.^[23] Some of these explanations were off the mark; others were more accurate. A recent study of the wine market in this period has shown that although fraud occupied a central place in the collective mentality of vinedressers and small peasant proprietors in the 1907 revolt (see Chapter 7), "artificial

wines represented no more than 5 percent of regional production. Moreover, wine consumption actually rose faster than southern production in the last seven or eight years of the nineteenth century.^[24] Still, contemporaries were correct to point out that the practice of cutting southern wine with more alcoholic wine, along with growing imports, increased the quantity of wine on the market and drove down prices. In fact, it was a combination of factors—fraud, cutting wine, and imports—rather than one single factor that produced the most enormous glut of southern wine that France had ever seen.

We will examine the full effects of this turn-of-century crisis on the labor and politics of Audois peasants and workers in Chapter 6. Suffice it here to say that the disaster once again plunged southern winegrowers into massive debt and outright poverty. The writer Ardouin Dumazet, traveling through lower Languedoc, sadly observed regarding the passionate devotion of southerners to their vines: "If this region were to be separated from the rest of France by some sort of disaster, the population would die of hunger in the midst of its vines."^[25] This statement was no exaggeration. Beggars roamed the countryside, often masked so as not to be identified. Between 1900 and 1906 loans made by the Caisse régionale de crédit agricole du Midi in Narbonne rose from 540,000 francs to just over 9 million francs; and by the height of the crisis the Crédit foncier had taken over two-thirds of the vineyards in the south.^[26] Not surprisingly, the nearly continuous economic depression lasting from the 1880s to World War I produced subtle changes in the configurations of property ownership in Audois vineyards.