"Oiling the Wheels of Social Life": Myths and Marketing in Champagne during the Belle Epoque

Its success in oiling the wheels of social life is so great and so universally acknowledged that its eclipse would almost threaten a collapse of our social system, declared the British author Henry Vizetelly in 1882. What was so essential to social relations during the so-called bourgeois century that its demise could threaten the established order? Vizetelly, a commentator on Victorian society and author of numerous travel books, explained: We cannot open a railway, launch a vessel, inaugurate a public edifice, start a newspaper, entertain a distinguished foreigner, invite a leading politician to favour us with his views on things in general, celebrate an anniversary, or specially appeal on behalf of a benevolent institution without a banquet, and hence without the aid of Champagne, which, at the present day, is the obligatory adjunct of all such repasts.' The hyperbole in Vizetelly's claims aside, his remarks point to the centrality of champagne to bourgeois culture in the late nineteenth century. Before World War I, champagne became a subject of mass culture, a centerpiece of bourgeois society invested with symbolic capital that paid enormous dividends to the wine-producing community of Champagne.2