| Abstrakt: |
This article argues that the French army's alcohol policy on the Western Front during the First World War amounted to a program of emotional conditioning. In order to convince soldiers to fight, endure, and sacrifice, France's Third Republic distributed alcohol to them strategically, at certain times and places, with the intent of priming and driving certain kinds of emotional experiences and behaviors that were beneficial to the war effort. The program consisted of three separate "systems": the daily system, which delivered wine to soldiers in the trenches; the battle system, which provided large amounts of distilled alcohol to men before attacks; and the prohibition system, a collection of rules and surveillance techniques designed to assure that men drank only what was supplied to them by the army. The program amounted to the mass deployment of what historian Daniel Smail has called a "psychotropic mechanism," a way of altering body-brain chemistry in people to create certain experiences and behaviors. By reading a wide variety of sources (such as memoirs, trench journals, medical texts, and communications among commanders) through the sociological theories of Randall Collins, the essay concludes that this program was central to the maintenance of military morale and fighting power on the front. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
