N°08 · The Artillery Piece
French 75
A gin sour given a champagne engine. Named after a field gun, dressed for a wedding, dangerous as advertised.
- Spirit
- Gin & champagne
- Glass
- Flute
- Method
- Shaken · topped
- Est.
- c. 1915 · Paris
Where it comes from — as far as anyone can prove
The name is ballistics. The canon de 75 modèle 1897 — the French 75-millimeter field gun — was the pride of the French army in the Great War, famous for a rate of fire that seemed to break physics. Somewhere amid that war, in the American-expat orbit of Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, gin met champagne with lemon and sugar as chaperones, and drinkers agreed the result hit with the same authority.
Harry MacElhone, the bar’s Scottish proprietor, usually collects the credit, though early recipe books show the “75” mutating for a decade — some versions carried calvados — before the modern spec was fixed in print in Judge Jr.’s Here’s How! in 1927 and canonized by The Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930. By then it had crossed the Atlantic and become a speakeasy darling: festive enough for celebration, strong enough for Prohibition.
“Hits with remarkable precision.”
— The Savoy Cocktail Book, 1930
Its two greatest stages came later. In Casablanca, it’s the drink ordered at Rick’s — the most glamorous product placement in cinema. And in New Orleans, Arnaud’s French 75 Bar built a temple to it, serving a cognac version with the gentle insistence that a French drink deserves a French spirit. The argument, like the drink, shows no sign of going flat.
Things worth knowing by the second round
- 01
The 75mm gun could fire fifteen rounds a minute; contemporaries said the cocktail worked at a similar cadence.
- 02
The gin-versus-cognac schism is the drink’s founding controversy — New Orleans pours cognac, Paris history favors gin, and both sides own citations.
- 03
It is structurally a Tom Collins with the soda promoted to champagne — a useful way to understand its danger.
- 04
A French 75 served over ice in a Collins glass is the older service; the flute is a later glamour upgrade.
Famous company
Casablanca (1942)
Ordered at Rick’s Café Américain — one line of dialogue that has sold a century of French 75s.
Harry’s New York Bar, Paris
The expat institution where the drink’s legend was assembled, one hot war and one lost generation at a time.
Arnaud’s French 75 Bar, New Orleans
A James Beard–winning bar named for the drink, and headquarters of the cognac faction.
New Year’s Eve, everywhere
The default upgrade when midnight champagne needs ammunition.