Untitled

Confessional Drinking in Wilhelmine Germany
with an alcohol-centered everyday leisure culture, reinforced by the pub visit
following Sunday mass. Further, organizations dedicated to the improvement of
workers’ lives often fostered a drinking culture while simultaneously advocating
temperance. This contradiction is best observed in the Catholic labor movement
(KAB). The KAB centered on church-organized, confessionally segregated, and
clerically led Catholic workingmen’s clubs committed to creating a self-contained
social-religious milieu by organizing and controlling leisure consumption.
Although KAB leaders believed that “ennobling” the Catholic worker required a
radical alteration in his relationship to alcohol, drinking habits remained deeply
etched into the everyday leisure, associational, and festival culture of the Cologne
working classes. As a result, alcohol consumption patterns within the clubs became
culturally contested terrain between clerical temperance initiatives and a drinking
working-class membership.
Several theories have explained the popularization of alcohol consumption
among the lower classes in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, all share a
reductionist view of alcohol consumption as an economic derivative void of
cultural considerations. Whether a psychological survival reflex to the dislocations
of industrialization, a type of Foucauldian cultural resistance through nonconformity
to work discipline and rejection of the bourgeoisie’s universalization of
particular norms, a French Annales-style interpretation of alcohol consumption as
a basic physical survival imperative based on nutritional needs, or the result of
increased disposable incomes, leisure time and emerging mass markets and
consumer outlets, the underlying assumptions contain an inherent distortion. To
wit, statistical approaches to consumption ignore cultural contexts and presume a
particular proclivity of the lower classes to consume more alcohol than other
classes during industrialization – an assertion problematized by contradictory
patterns. 7 Although alcohol consumption increased throughout the nineteenth
century in Europe, considerations other than class including marital status, age,
gender, region, religion, and occupation crosscut working-class drinking patterns.
Even along class lines, differentiation of habits was as much a perception as
reality. The “drinking question” remained fixed on the working classes for
subjective reasons based on a legacy from the early modern era of an urban
proletarian drinking problem. Beginning as early as the sixteenth century, new
forms of alcohol, mostly industrial spirits, entered the markets as the drink of
choice for lower classes. The new drinking patterns of the lower classes thus
clashed with those of the established classes, fostering a disjunction in attitudes
between traditional alcoholic forms and the new. 8 In England, gin became
synonymous with lower-class poverty and sloth by the eighteenth century. In
France, the villain was absinthe. Also, public binge drinking, usually by peasants
at festivals and workers on payday weekends, occasioned censure even if the
overall level of consumption between bingers and more discreet drinkers did not
235