Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (29 page)

Napoleon now turned to account this readiness of decent folk “to undergo bodily privation in pursuit of a higher aim.” The movement was not confined to Germany. In France as well, chicory-planting began to flourish. A hundred years later, of course, in the days of the great war, the industry of providing substitutes became far more extensive than anything that had flourished in Napoleon’s time. We learn from a publication of the year 1917 that the unhappy Germans could not get even chicory. They made coffee-substitutes out of Jerusalem artichokes and dahlia tubers, out of dandelion roots, out of comfrey roots, burrs, and chrysanthemum seeds. It was made from monkey-nuts, vetch, chick-peas, carob-beans, horse-chestnuts, asparagus seeds, and asparagus stalks. The roots of reeds were used, so was linseed, so was arrow-head, so was cane, so was bracken, and so were various bulbs. Other ingredients of “coffee-substitute” were quaker-grass roots, parsnips, swedes, juniper berries, sloes, elder-berries and rowan berries, barberries, hips and haws, cranberries, mulberries, holly berries, box seeds, pumpkin seeds, gherkins, sunflower seeds, and hemp seeds. So were the seeds of the lime tree, the acacia, the laburnum, of gorse, flax, and broom. Indeed, “coffee” was made out of the lees of wine and beer—had to be made, lest the populace, deprived of a drink that at least bore the name of coffee, might use roasted wheat to prepare the beverage instead of reserving this carefully rationed product for the making of bread!

Well, Napoleon was primarily responsible for all this, since he popularized chicory, the ancestor of such substitutes. The great emperor entered into an alliance with the modest petty bourgeoise, Dame Chicory, in order, by commands and threats, to impose upon Europe his will that a decoction of roasted and ground chicory roots should pass for coffee. His orders were heard at long range. The fine coffee-plantations in the French Antilles had been for the most part destroyed by the insurgent Negro population, and what coffee remained to be shipped was captured by the British. The coffee of the Dutch East Indies was, some of it, in Javanese store-houses; some of it in London repositories; while some was still brought from Batavia to London in lone ships over which the Union Jack waved, making it unattainable to the Parisians. The Turks, the Egyptians, and the Syrians smiled. They had good reason for doing so, since Arabian coffee, the parent of all the coffees in the world, had come into its own once more. Napoleon’s writ did not run in the southeastern Mediterranean. But in Hamburg, in Breslau and Warsaw, in Milan, Genoa, and Bordeaux, people’s nostrils dilated as they sniffed the breeze to see whether it bore the aroma of that ethereal oil with which the vision of liberty was anointed.

Liberty came at last. The Russian winter, which in the year 1812 broke the ring Napoleon had welded around Europe and made an end of his plans for a raid into Asia, broke the Continental System likewise, and flung its fragments into the sea. It had been in a bad way for some time. Like all systems that are too extensive and too fine-meshed, this widespread scheme of prohibition had made people who were forced to live under it restless. Few men are idealists, or will tolerate for long a coercion that runs counter to their interests.

No doubt it was agreeable to French nationalist vanity to know that France could get along without England, but nevertheless, rich profits could be earned by smugglers; for the “allies of France” (as, by a euphemism, the subjugated nations were termed) did not share this vanity. Discontent spread quickly from the rest of Europe into France itself. “Victory” that is accompanied by growing privations is hard for the victors to bear. Despite so much “encouragement” of domestic industry, the exclusion of British commodities involved undeniable hardships. The public likes to maintain its customary standard of life. In France, no less than elsewhere in Europe, smuggled English goods found ready purchasers. Even when the heavy profits earned by the smugglers had been paid, the English could supply necessities and luxuries that were cheaper and better than the products of French industry!

But it was not contraband that made the first hopeless breach in the Continental System. Napoleon was the master of many legions, and could use formidable means to enforce his will. He did not hesitate to avail himself of them. On all hands could be seen the smoke and the flames arising from bonfires of confiscated English smuggled goods. No, it was the French state that allowed itself to be “corrupted” by the English. England needed grain, of which France possessed a superfluity, and England paid hard cash. When the French treasury became aware of the influx of British gold, and realized that the stream might be greatly increased, instead of intensifying the strictness of import prohibition, it clapped on high import duties. These duties were to serve the purposes both of protection and of revenue. They protected home industry, indeed, but they provided the government with so much money that it was decided to issue “licences for import.”

The exchequer was gaining its ends. Enormous were the sums paid by French and also by German firms for “trading licences.” England, in her turn, when she realized what great advantages the French exchequer was deriving from import duties and licences, began to blockade the continent, and to forbid the export of many articles.

Thus by the logic of events, which differs from the logic of genius, Napoleon’s France and Pitt’s England had long before exchanged roles when, on April 23, 1814, King Louis XVIII cancelled the law by which the Continental System had been established. That system, by then, existed only in name.

With other commodities, coffee was freed.

Parisian café under the Empire (1805)

Coffee-house of 1848

New Year’s present for the coffee-house waiter (Vienna, 1840)

Coffee-mill as a mitrailleuse (Franco-Prussian War cartoon)

Families may brew coffee here” (middle of the nineteenth century)

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barrier which, for seven years, Napoleon’s Continental System established between Britain and the Continent knocked the bottom out of the coffee-market. Coffee prices have seldom been steady for long, but never were they so tumultuously disturbed as during this period. From 1806 onwards, since the stores of coffee that continued to accumulate in London could no longer be exported, they rose mountain high. Any attempt to maintain prices was foredoomed to failure. No one knew how long the Continental System would remain in being, nor how strictly the emperor would enforce it. Coffee can be kept in good condition for a considerable time, but not for ever. The price of coffee in London consequently came down with a run. Cheap though this staple had now become, the English could not make up their minds to use their own coffee. For too long they had been accustomed to tea. Coffee, which in the repositories was slowly losing its flavour, was in the perilous position of a commodity hoarded by middlemen who can find no market for it. England did not in a year consume more than ten thousand hundredweight of coffee, but there was a thousand times that amount in store. Not all of it in England, of course, but at least in the hands of British merchants overseas. It happened to be called “coffee,” but it was in reality a medium of exchange. London, which was the great clearing-house of the world, financed the coffee trade as it financed all other trades. In its merchant vessels it sent machinery and manufactured articles to the hot coffee-growing countries, to Java and Arabia and America, receiving coffee in payment. Exporters everywhere drew upon the merchant bankers of London.

Thus coffee was, substantially, a form of money, but it was money that fluctuated in value. When Prussia, Austria, Russia, and Sweden won the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig in October 1813, they were not fighting primarily to assist British export trade, but, nevertheless, the liberation of the London stocks of goods was an obvious outcome. Except for the Peninsular Campaign, Britain had hitherto prudently refrained from participating in the operations against Napoleon on land. It was natural, however, that the emperor’s escape from Elba and return to Paris should have stirred England out of her reserve. She could not face the possibility of a re-establishment of the Continental System, of a repetition of the years from 1806 to 1813. Driven by necessity, she sent an expeditionary force to the Continent, and Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo.

In January 1813, the price of coffee in London fell to forty shillings a hundredweight. On the Hamburg exchange, coffee had been quoted at over five hundred shillings the hundredweight. This was no more than a fancy price, for a hundredweight of coffee could not be got together anywhere on the Continent. What the smugglers, facing terrible risks, were able to ship across the Channel and the North Sea did not amount to more than a few handfuls of coffee-beans at a time. But when King Louis XVIII abolished the Continental System, prices quickly rose in London and fell in Hamburg to meet one another. The situation of the market was favourable, and a prompt increase in the consumption of coffee might have been expected throughout Europe. Strangely enough, this did not occur. Hamburgers would not, in the long run, content themselves with greatly lowered prices, nor would London merchants be satisfied with a reasonable rise in the price of coffee. They wanted prices that would make good their losses during long years. The upshot of the chaffering between the Continental middlemen and the British, and of their failure to come to an agreement now that British groceries were once more freely admitted to the Continent, was a boom in the tea-market.