Bacchus’ Wine

Posted: 2nd February 2017

One of the economist Bernard Maris’s favourite sayings was ‘nul chagrin ne résiste à un morgon de chez Marcel Lapierre’ (‘there is no anxiety that cannot be banished by the bottle of Marcel Lapierre’s Morgon’). Maris claimed to be quoting the revolutionary, Guy Debord, but he made the line very much his own. It seemed to sum up the better side of French, even Western life, but as cruel destiny would have it, Maris was gunned down in the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015. His killers, the Kouachi Brothers, stood in fierce opposition to everything the highly educated, liberal, secular, republican, hedonistic Frenchman represented.