Absinthe isn’t Dangerous. It was Framed for Murder

·25 min·1 clip

Jean L'Enfray drank two absinthes alongside 11 glasses of wine before murdering his family.

1. No One Saw It Coming investigates why absinthe became known as a dangerous spirit despite its earlier history as a Swiss herbal drink. 2. Host Mark Fennell interviews Evan Rail, a Prague-based journalist who writes about food, wine, and travel and has tasted historic absinthes. 3. The episode asks whether one 1905 murder helped turn absinthe into a global symbol of madness and danger. 4. Absinthe’s origins are placed in Val de Travers, Switzerland, where it was distilled around 1761 or 1765. 5. Rail attributes the likely invention to Marguerite Henriette Henriot rather than the doctor Pierre Ordinaire. 6. The drink’s “Holy Trinity” consists of Grand Wormwood, anise, and sweet fennel. 7. Rail identifies thujone in Grand Wormwood as a regulated neurotoxin while saying absinthe contains too little to cause poisoning without extreme consumption. 8. Henri-Louis Pernod moved production across the border to Pontarlier, France, where output grew from 16 litres daily in 1805 to 30,000 litres daily by the century’s end. 9. French cafes developed l'heure verte between five and six, when bankers, poets, artists, and poorer drinkers consumed the fashionable green spirit. 10. Rail describes the historical ritual of dissolving a sugar cube over an absinthe spoon with slowly dripped water. 11. The wine shortage caused by disease in European vineyards helped create conditions for absinthe’s rise. 12. France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, reparations, economic crises, and cultural anxiety encouraged people to search for a scapegoat. 13. Doctors at Paris’s St. Anne Hospital described tremors, delusions, and hallucinations as evidence of a separate condition called absinthism. 14. On 28 August 1905, Jean L'Enfray shot his wife and two children after drinking two glasses of absinthe and substantially more wine and spirits. 15. Newspaper reports highlighted absinthe while omitting L'Enfray’s 11 glasses of red wine, cognac, crème de menthe, and brandy-laced coffee. 16. Switzerland’s referendum and later bans in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and the United States turned the murders into a broader campaign against absinthe. 17. Rail describes pre-ban bottles as possible “time travel in a bottle,” linking collectors to the Moulin Rouge, Degas, Manet, Baudelaire, Hemingway, and Oscar Wilde. 18. The interview shifts from historical explanation to a modern forgery story involving an absinthe authority known to Rail and exposed in 2019. 19. Absinthe collectors and cultural-history listeners will appreciate this episode. 20. Listeners seeking straightforward contemporary drinking advice may skip it.

As heard by us

A bright green drink becomes a convenient culprit in a story about fear, medicine, and disputed danger.

Absinthe arrives as a historical scapegoat: a bright green, aromatic drink pulled into a late-19th-century story about a society convinced it was unwell.

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Why you'd press play

You get a bright green drink, a swirl of medical suspicion, and enough thujone chemistry to make the panic wobble.

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