Exposition des Bières Françaises . . . À Paris, Palais de l’Industrie (Grande galerie sud et pelouses adjacents), du 29 Auot au 21 Octobre 1887.
[Paris]: Imprimerie Nationale.—Juillet, 1887. Broadside (22.25 x 30.5 inches), printed in red and black ink on thin laid paper. Old folds, with old glassine tape repairs to splits and some additional splitting; a little chipping along the lower edge; otherwise, in very good condition, quite bright and striking. Item #22446
A handsome and ephemeral official broadside prospectus, advertising the first national trade exposition of French beer and brewing, here inviting interested exhibitors to submit their applications to the Ministry of Agriculture.
In Belle Époque Paris, you had the brasseries.
Brasseries were popping up all over town, and they were cosmopolitan places—modern and up to date. And you can’t have a brasserie without a brasseur, or a brewer.
The brewery was the root of the brasserie (the Eohippus to the latter-day draft horse) and after the brewers started to came over to Paris in fairly substantial numbers from Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War, this more or less began to goose the numbers for Parisian brasseries. Then Pasteur taught the brewers a thing or two about yeasts, and that helped standardize commercial beers. And then came phylloxera and, well, that did not do wonders for French wine.
(The phrase “broadly speaking” should of course be understood to be sprinkled ad lib. throughout this description, like salt on your steak frites, but the substance of the argument is more or less sound throughout. And we ask you please in passing to note the apposite simile—this sort of thing is what we call the Garrett Scott, Bookseller difference.)
The Third Republic around this time had also started to get serious about food adulteration. When imported beers were tested by Parisian labs in the 1880s, reports emerged of concoctions like raw alcohol cut with caramel coloring and strychnine being passed off as German beer, etc., and besides some concern about the obvious health hazards, you were not, in any case, going to upset too many French ca. 1886-1887 if you decided to launch a more or less patriotic campaign against German beer imports—which, crusading popular journalists like Robert Charlie were only too happy to do.
Soon, most of the popular newspapers of Paris had snatched up banner of French domestic beers—and, seeing its chance to expand home markets, the government in 1887 proposed this exposition, which ended up having over 300 exhibitors and culminated with a rousing oration from the journalist Charlie to a standing-room crowd, in which he boasted “la bière en Europe est d’origine gauloise et non germanique” (Joly).
Charlie’s campaign culminated in his 324-page book, Le Poison allemand, published in Paris by A. Savine in 1887. He later became editor of the trade publication, Le Brasseur Français, and was eventually made a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur.
See Henri Avenel, La Presse Française au vingtième siècle (Paris, 1901) for more on Charlie’s career. For further detail on the anti-German beer campaign and its fallout, see Joly, Bertrand. “Économie, patriotisme et santé publique. La campagne contre la bière allemande, 1886-1887.” Revue du Nord 2019/3: 571-583.
This broadside not located institutionally. OCLC notes only a single holding of the 67-page publication with the title Exposition des Bières Françaises, presumably an exhibition catalog or guide—and that, happily enough, at the Technischen Universitat Munchen only.
Price: $1,300.00