Shopping bag.

Claire Touzard is not in the business of pointing fingers or playing the shame game but she quit drinking two years ago and has never looked back. Journalist and Filmmaker Claire has recently published her memoir Sans Alcool which in the wine-making* and drinking capital of the world, has sparked a fascinating debate – to drink or not to drink?

Speaking to Claire on a rainy Monday evening in Paris left us feeling invigorated and stimulated purely from great conversation, which, as Claire proffers, has been one of the benefits she’s felt since going sober back in January 2020. “My work is about writing and so I need my brain, and something that I never thought of was that I was destroying my brain with alcohol. The thing I’ve really rediscovered is my brain and that was so powerful.”

Having grown up in France, Brittany to be exact, Claire describes the festivity of alcohol that was ingrained in her family and in a wider sense, the whole of the country. “It was really important for us to party, to have wine at dinner — it was my heritage.” Being surrounded by this joviality and the overarching theme of the bon-vivant, alcohol became a second nature in her life, as it does with many of us. In 2019, however, Claire lost her job as a journalist and came to the conclusion that if she carried on drinking in the same way, everything “would be over”. So, come New Year’s Day 2020, a year that changed the world in many unexpected ways, Claire’s life took a new direction. Words were always a salvation and so writing about this new orientation made sense. The proof was accepted by the publishing house Editions Flammarion and the book follows her first year of sobriety. Her day by day journal recounts the physical and emotional white-knuckle ride of giving up alcohol.

As we are racing towards the end of Dry January, we are reminded even more abrasively of the French’s view on voluntary sobriety, with President Macron saying ‘non’ to a month without alcohol when it was suggested by the WHO. His support for viticulture was further reinforced when he told the French public, back in 2018, that he drinks wine with lunch and dinner. The French attitude towards alcohol, stereotypes aside, is truly entrenched; it is a staple around the dinner table, a conversation starter, and chief celebration gambit. France is the largest consumer of wine globally, with the average citizen drinking 50 litres a year. This being said binge drinking is less of a dispute which is often seen to be due to the parental acceptance and normalising of drinking from a young age. Consumption per capita data varies, however, France is, more often than not, a solid contender in the top 10 global consumers behind the Czech Republic and Latvia. This deep-rooted heritage and patriotism surrounding drinking is what makes sobriety such an illicit issue, as Claire explains graciously in her book.