According to a measurement that calls for a breathalyzer, one token of the opera’s success resulted from an elaborate liquor advertising campaign that was conducted in the first decade of the twentieth century. The stage was set much earlier, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. The herbal Bénédictine came into its own commercially after 1876, when the company that manufactured it was instituted as a public limited company. In the 150 intervening years, there is no tallying the cordial glasses and snifters that have been poured brimful with the liqueur as digestif or nightcap, or pegging the number of shots that have gone into mixed drinks.
In the late nineteenth century, mass-manufactured beer, ale, and spirits were sometimes brewed in facilities designed to fulfill a dual function as tourist attractions.
This general tendency intersected with the market-driven medievalism of the day. In one sense, the smell of change was in the air (and in the spume): brewing and distillation on this level were new developments. In another, the businessmen wished to dress their enterprise in a cloak of old-time respectability. As the production of alcoholic drinks became an ever bigger business, manufacturers and marketers endeavored to conjure up an atmosphere that lies quaintly behind the times. In this case, that meant monkishness and medievalness. In many countries this effort paralleled, at the high-water mark of the Gothic revival, the custom of packaging such varied consumer items as pickles, pepper sauce, and ink in so-called cathedral bottles (see Fig. 1.67).
Fig. 1.67 Cathedral-style pickle jar, late nineteenth century. Photograph by Steve Young Jr., date unknown. Image courtesy of Steve Young Jr., Coast to Coast Antiquities. All rights reserved.
These vessels Gothicized the products of industrialization. This glassware embodies what has been called the “enchantment of technology.”
In the case of Bénédictine, construction of a showcase factory began in 1881–1882 in Fécamp, the Norman town where the greenish-yellow libation has always been produced. The facility was designed as a grandiosely massive, faux medieval abbey (see Fig. 1.68). The éclat of the neo-Gothic edifice, dreamt up by one Camille Albert, a designer follower of Viollet-le-Duc, helped to finesse the inconvenient truth that the concoction had at best an exceedingly tenuous relation to the Benedictine brothers.
The distillery served as both a tourist destination and marketing tool (see Fig. 1.69).
Fig. 1.68 Postcard of Palais Bénédictine, Fécamp, France (ca. 1907).
Fig. 1.69 Advertisement for Bénédictine Liqueur. Design by Charles Maillard, photographs by Jean Lecerf Fils, 1905. Published in Femina (1905), v.
The so-called Palais Bénédictine contains a museum, which the founder of the company established to house real and supposed archaeological remains of the black monks that had been assembled from the town and region, alongside artworks both collected and commissioned. One of its principal attractions is the Gothic Room, with medieval and pseudomedieval artifacts and decor.
The firm’s founding father was a wine merchant by the highfalutin name of Alexandre Le Grand—in English, Alexander the Great. The official story of the company holds that in 1863 the entrepreneur (see Fig. 1.70) lighted upon sets of instructions for medicinal and herbal concoctions, reputedly recorded in a simple cookbook more than three and a half centuries earlier, in 1510, by a Benedictine brother who jotted down the recipes of home-brew remedies. Setting up shop with the necessary substances, Le Grand began brewing the concoctions in beakers, alembics, and retorts. To honor its supposed monastic originator, he gave the name Bénédictine to the liqueur that resulted from his experiments with one of these elixirs. Whatever we are persuaded to believe about the ultimate origins of the spirits, however, monks have at no time played any role in its manufacture by the present-day company. Although the label bears the initials D.O.M., to stand for the Latin phrase Deo Optimo Maximo (“To God, most good, most great”), the sheen of religiosity has no basis in any affiliation with monks, the Catholic Church, or any other denomination.
Fig. 1.70 Henri Gauquié, Statue of Alexandre-Prosper-Hubert Le Grand, 1900. Palais Bénédictine, Fécamp, France. Photograph by Wikimedia user Gordito1869, 2010, https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Alexandre_Le_Grand.jpg. CC BY-SA 3.0.
Le Grand’s greatest genius lay in marketing. Even after his death in 1898, the maker of Bénédictine remained committed to strategic advertising. As the business concern sought to vend its product, it turned to notables of the time from all walks of life. It had their likenesses registered by a French caricaturist of the period, the highly regarded Sem (see Fig. 1.71).
Fig. 1.71 Giovanni Boldini, Portrait of Sem (Georges Goursat), 1901. Oil on canvas.
Milan, private collection.
At the same time, it solicited from them one- or two-line endorsements of the cordial’s potability. Among the galactic figures commemorated was Massenet (see Fig. 1.72), who was portrayed tickling the ivories with evident animation. Atop the instrument—with no coaster to be seen, but within easy reach—an elegant cordial-glass containing more than a thimbleful of Bénédictine stands at the ready. In the handwritten testimonial reproduced beneath the caricature of him, the composer commends the strong and sweet liqueur to sophisticated palates. He invokes cheekily the protagonist of the opera, on behalf of the finished article he is plugging: “I am sure that the Benedictines in the days of Le jongleur de Notre Dame would drink the exquisite Bénédictine liqueur as we happily have it even today.”
This kind of mischievous irreverence about religion within a commercial context would have raised no eyebrows at the time. As confirmation, we have an advertisement for a flavorful tonic. This “Mariani Wine,” to translate the French brand name Vin Mariani literally, had been marketed first in 1871 by its inventor, the Corsican pharmacist and chemist Angelo François Mariani, who aimed to exploit the health potential of its main active ingredient, cocaine. Before the stimulant’s addictive effects
were recognized, trafficking in the drug was legal: everything seemed to taste better when laced with it. A confirmed bibliophile, Mariani in promoting his over-the-counter nostrum took advantage of all that was offered by cutting-edge photomechanical processes. A design made in 1899 plays upon the element “Maria” that is contained within the tonic-maker’s name. By the same token, it refers to the title of a Latin orison that resembled the “Hail, Mary.” The painter has a scantily clad female angel write
“Salve Maria… ni” (see Fig. 1.73). A postcard from 1910 makes a similar play, with the French for “Glory to Mariani” as a legend to a woozy-looking angelic horn player who blows her instrument while swimming a languid celestial backstroke (see Fig. 1.74).
Fig. 1.72 Caricature of Jules Massenet. Illustration by Sem, before 1909. Published in Sem, Célébrités contemporaines et la Bénédictine (Paris: Devambez, 1909).
Fig. 1.73 Postcard of an angel and advertising Vin Mariani tonic (Edouard M. G. Dubufe, 1899).
Fig. 1.74 Postcard of an angel and advertising Vin Mariani tonic (Edouard Toudouze, 1910).
In both, religion is pressed into service to merchandise a social and sexual lubricant.
An even more ham-fisted attempt to monetize Marianism and cash in on Lourdes can be detected in the alcoholic beverage Salettine. Crass commercialization is hardly an invention or innovation of the twenty-first century.
In the Middle Ages, Our Lady’s Tumbler had its fullest and in fact its only demonstrable circulation in France. In the decades around 1900, the most influential literary and musical expressions of the tale were both also French, thanks to Anatole France and Jules Massenet. Yet both the medieval tale and Le jongleur de Notre Dame attained their broadest distribution in the United States. This diffusion came about as elements of Massenet’s musical drama were disseminated both directly and indirectly via media that at the time were developing with dizzying rapidity. The narrative spread only because it was perceived to have an inherent value that rendered it an indispensable item in the canon of what a properly cultured cosmopolite should know. In other words, it earned a niche within what would now be called cultural literacy. Not long before the opera opened in the Big Apple, the New York Times first summed up the tale and then sounded off: “If you have never heard of these things then it is really and truly your duty to read of them, for they are marvels of which no man should be ignorant.” No sitting on the fence here! The premiere in Gotham City took place on November 27, 1908, the day after Thanksgiving, in the lead-up to Christmas. One century and a few years later, most people feel no less dutiful, even though they are unaware of Our Lady’s Tumbler and its brood of descendants. Fill them in, and let the newsrooms of local dailies know that the story still matters.