Professor Rod Phillips has been awarded a four-year SSHRC Insight Grant to study the impact of the French Revolution on France’s wine industry and culture. He has written several books on the history of wine and while writing his history of French wine (published in 2016) he realized how important the Revolutionary period (1789-99) was to the longer-term development of wine production and consumption in France. This was a welcome finding as Rod is also a historian of the French Revolution, so that his new research project brings together two of his research fields.
Among the issues he will study are changes in the area of land under vines during the Revolutionary period; the impact of the diversification and secularization of wine production after Church land (including vineyards, winemaking facilities, and wine-producing religious houses) were nationalized and sold; the effects on wine consumption of reductions in the taxes imposed on wine during the Revolution; and the politicization of wine when Revolutionary authorities associated fine wines with the nobility, confiscated cellars of fine wines owned by counter-Revolutionaries, and sponsored the production of good-quality wine that common people could afford.
Over the longer-term, the Revolution allowed the expansion of land devoted to wine production, broadened the ownership of wineries, made wine more accessible, increased wine consumption, and raised the cultural value of wine in France to the point that it was declared the national beverage.
This project involves research in archives in several regions of France that were important for wine-production in the 1700s – including the region around Paris which produced vast volumes of inexpensive wine for the metropolis at that time but where little wine is produced today. Before Covid-19 halted travel and closed archives, Rod had carried out preliminary research in several regions, and (with a French colleague) will publish a book in 2022 based on the wine records of a village priest that are conserved in an archive in Burgundy.