In our beautiful France, a country of wine, joy, openness, and good humour, let us not talk about abstinence. Your water, your Lenten drinks, your Ceylon tea, fig or acorn coffee, your sparkling milk, your lemonade and camomile be hanged. You are not only bad hygienists, but bad Frenchmen. (ibid.: 24)
Into this hostile social milieu, Vie Libre sprang forth in a spirit of defiant opposition; it hardly seems accidental that group members ritually drink glasses of water at meetings (Fainzang 1996) and that slang for “teetotallers” is “buveurs d’eau” ("water drinkers"; Prestwich 1988: 24). At the time of its founding, however, things were beginning to change. It had been almost a decade since the state took on the burden of public health care, which forced a gradual recognition of the financial toll of chronic alcohol consumption on the state. By 1954, this knowledge was being used to argue against the once-universal assumption that alcohol production brought wealth to the nation; in that year, a report of the Economic Council on alcoholism made the strong claim that, instead of psychological problems or poverty, alcoholism was being caused by the overproduction of wine and distilled alcohol (ibid.: 264). The movement’s beginnings, then, were at a time of imminent change in official opinion, even if popular sentiments were lagging.
Vie Libre started under the guiding hands of Father André-Marie Talvas, who had once played a formative role for France’s militant workers as chaplain of the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (“Young Christian Workers”), and Germaine Campion, who had once been an alcoholic and sex worker (Fainzang 1992; Fainzang 1996). They were later joined, in 1951, by the Amicale de 147, a group of recovered alcoholics, led by a disulfiram-prescribing[1] doctor, all of whom had been treated at the clinic operated by the Ligue nationale contre l’alcoolisme (“National League Against Alcoholism,” henceforth “LNCA”), the national-level umbrella group under whose mantle numerous once-independent anti-alcoholism factions operated (Prestwich 1988; Room 1998). When chartered in 1954, then, the core members brought with them a tradition of worker-based activism, direct experience with the marginalized, including alcoholics and prostitutes, and a commitment to the belief that alcoholism was curable. Perhaps due to their experience with the most alienated and vulnerable, and as likely due to their militant opposition to an alcohol-biased society and the compromises made by other anti-alcoholism groups[2], Vie Libre called for absolute abstinence from its core members. Finally, the influence of a doctor and the use of disulfiram set a precedent for a close working relationship with the medical authorities and a pragmatic use of care options, which persists to this day.
The structure of the movement reflects in part its unionist or syndicalist origins. The smallest Vie Libre groups consist of a minimum of three former drinkers, and are free to determine the schedule of their meetings, the particular style their meetings take (there is some variety, with some groups even segregated by gender), the subjects of discussion, etc. These local sections are organized into regional sections, which usually have a “core team” consisting of a president (and assistant president), secretary (and assistant), treasurer (and assistant) and a communications/information coordinator, who disseminates relevant journal articles, group publications, etc. Finally, these regional sections are guided by the national committee, which consists of elected members who have been sober for at least four years. (Fainzang 1996)
The group’s members are classified according to their relation to alcohol, and are given coloured cards that signify their classification: new members have a six-month period of abstinence before they are given their “pink card,” which is indicates full membership; pink cards are awarded to both cured drinkers (those who have abstained for at least six months) and their spouses, who are considered to suffer from the same illness and so are also asked to maintain abstinence (more on this below); finally, the groups include non-alcoholic sympathisers who needn’t choose abstinence and are given a green card – sympathisers usually include doctors, politicians, or academics. “Pink card” members are predominantly lower-middle class, including masons, shop-owners, factory workers, office workers, salesmen, servers, cleaning women, and police officers (ibid.). Compared to A. A. in France, Vie Libre has a higher proportion of older, married members, who are predominantly male, with women making up about 5% of membership (Room 1998). It’s beyond the scope of this paper to outline the progression of the group’s policies and prerogatives; readers interested should see the Vie Libre web site’s “Histoire du mouvement Vie Libre et explications de ses positions” (“History of the Vie Libre Movement and Explanations of its Positions”; 2011). For our purposes here, it suffices to note that the group’s key tenets remain: 1) the power of the group is a necessary support for the drinker who has been enslaved; 2) the group’s work is militancy, guided by their theory of the illness and its causes; 3) the group must have close collaboration with doctors and medical centres in hospitals; and 4) there is a cure for alcoholism (Fainzang 1996). Militancy is the central idea here, as it is what allows for the wielding of the group’s power for the sake of individuals, the use of medical knowledge for their recovery and for the education of the public, and the fight for a cure (which is, in their view, social change). Their militancy has two dimensions: support for drinkers, which consists of visits to schools, hospitals, places of work, and prisons to provide information and counseling; and the general social struggle, which consists of educational campaigns, calls for legislative reform, literacy training for movement volunteers, and above all, abstinence, which is considered a rejection of a social enemy (Fainzang 1996; Vie Libre 2011a).
[1] Disulfiram is a pharmaceutical that causes prohibitively acute sensitivity to alcohol, often prescribed under the trade name Antabuse.
[2] For instance, the LNCA called for moderation, and made no criticism of the consumption of wine, beer and cider, believing this middle road to be the most practical policy (Prestwich 1988).
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