There are many different ways of approaching history. ‘Our memory of yesterday’, the editors of the Nouvelle histoire de Belgique or Nieuwe Geschiedenis van België wrote, ‘has today many faces’. There are indeed many ways a history of drunkenness in Belgium can be written and this book is one of many such possible stories.

It will explore shifting ideas of deviant behaviour in the making of culture and attempts to understand the role of the drunkard in society. It aims to discover how the preoccupation with excessive drinking and its shifting interpretations revealed wider social and political concerns in a period of profound social change in Belgium from the mid-nineteenth century towards the First World War.

Drink and the Making of Identities

In the stories of drunkenness this book will tell, drinking was a social force whereby identities were formed. It follows hereby the lead offered by anthropologist Mary Douglas when she claimed that ‘drink constructs the world’. Within the narratives, I want to discover what drunkenness meant, as it was lived and experienced by different people. I will try to understand the making of certain groups in society through their different opinions of when and how and especially for whom drinking became ‘too much’ and unacceptable. Social drinking and convivial drunkenness confirmed belonging to a certain group, but at some point drunkenness would become a negative expression of identity; then it belonged to the ‘other’: the drunkard.