Raki as a "national drink" in the late Ottoman Empire To my knowledge, the first mention of raki - a drink made from grape alcohol flavored with anise - as a "national drink" in the Ottoman Empire first appears in an article published in 1901 in the Revue commercial du Levant, organ of the French Chamber of Commerce in Constantinople. The author of the article deplores the fact that, because of the widespread consumption of this alcoholic beverage, French spirits do not manage to penetrate the Ottoman market. Starting from this remark, I propose to study the validity of the formula during the nineteenth century. The case is remarkable if we think that a century earlier, the raki still seems of limited use in the Empire when compared to wine. What I want to analye is the process by which an alcoholic beverage emerges within the framework of a Moslem State and a multinational society. My research is based on a great variety of sources: Ottoman archives, memoirs, stories of travelers, Ottoman press, etc. It tries to identify the different factors that explain the predominance of raki among the alcoholic beverages consumed in the Ottoman Empire: the political factor (the role of Sultan Mahmud II [1808-1839], the influence of Tanzimat reforms, the impact of the Young Turk revolution of 1908), the technical factor (difficult to prove: progress in distillation and alambics ?), the economic factor (the cost of alcohol, the question of imports) and above all the socio-cultural factor, I mean the desire of the Ottoman elites to "make civilized", while privileging a "native" drink. The development of consumption of raki faces resistance: the appearance of new alcoholic drinks (rum and especially beer); some measures of prohibition taken by Sultan Abdülhamid (1876-1909); the publication of anti-alcohol articles and brochures written by religious men or by doctors trained in modern medicine. Nevertheless, around 1900, the use of raki becomes widespread and almost public in the big Ottoman cities (Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Izmir, Beirut). Around the drink a new sociability appears, what Ilber Ortayli calls "a culture of tavern" in which the muslim elites and the urban middle classes participate largely, alongside the non-Muslims, Greeks , Armenians, Jews, Levantines and foreigners. In my opinion, we can legitimately speak of "national drink", a legacy among others from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic.