Les poilus et le vin, racontés en bande dessinée (French only)

Benoit Gaboriaud | 2/23/24, 3:50 PM

For its new volume, "Le vin des poilus", the "Vinifera" comic book series highlights this beverage as a major player in the lives of soldiers during the First World War. Striking!

" Pinard is wine. It warms you up wherever it goes. Go on Bidasse, fill up my quart. Vive le pinard, vive le pinard ". 1916. In the Marne Valley, French soldiers mired in the mud of the trenches find courage and comfort in a daily ration of wine: a real crutch considered strategic! Scriptwriter Éric Corbeyran and illustrator Lucien Rollin, in the greatest tradition of the ligne claire, revisit this long-ignored and modestly hushed phenomenon, now well documented by historians, as highlighted by a special section at the end of the story. The authors' treatment of the subject is fictional, with a hint of romance, but they also revisit France's winegrowing history, whichwas caught up in the turmoil of the Great War of 14-18.

Getting the soldiers drunk before the assault

The passionate son of a winegrower father, young soldier Gaston takes the debate raging in the trenches very seriously. The different regional allegiances linked to wine production heighten tensions between the poilus, who remain attached to their terroir. So when Polo quips that their "Burgundy is nobler than his thirst-quenching wine", it ruffles his feathers. At the top of the hierarchy, wine is also the object of special attention. On the orders of the generals, millions of hectoliters of poor-quality wine were shipped to the front to get the soldiers drunk before the assault, while production in France fell by half. From piquette to champagne, meticulously hidden and preserved in the cellars of Reims, "Le vin des poilus" paints a portrait of a wine-producing world at the turning point of the Great War, which turned the world market upside down!

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