The Year Without Summer (36 page)

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J
ANE
Austen’s health deteriorated in the winter of 1816–17. She tired easily, and seldom
left the house in Chawton; neighbors called her “the poor young lady.” To her family,
Austen pretended her illness was really nothing: “air and exercise are what I want,”
she insisted. She spent her days writing letters and the opening chapters of a new
novel,
The Brothers
, even though her hand sometimes trembled badly. To her niece Fanny she admitted on
March 23 that “I have had a good deal of fever at times & indifferent nights, but
am considerably better now, & recovering my Looks a little.…”

But she was not. On May 24, Jane Austen rode in a carriage (it rained nearly all the
way) to the hospital at Winchester. Although she rallied from time to time, her doctors
knew of no cure for her illness, and she passed away on July 18. The precise nature
of Austen’s fatal illness remains a matter of controversy among biographers and physicians.
Over the past fifty years, her death has been ascribed variously to Addison’s disease,
cancer, and, most recently, tuberculosis from the consumption of unpasteurized milk.

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G
RAIN
prices in France rose throughout the winter and spring. By January 1817, the price
of wheat nationwide was 180 percent higher than the average in 1815. In March, it
was 190 percent higher; in May, 230 percent. But the national averages hid significant
disparities among the various regions of France. Eastern provinces such as Alsace
and Rhône-Alpes, where the summer’s cold and rain had wreaked the most damage on the
harvest, continued to face grain prices more than twice as high as those in most western
regions.

For the most part, government officials held fast to the principles enunciated in
the Interior Ministry’s circular of November: They would brook no interference with
the free movement of grain from one department to another, nor would they permit the
mass intimidation of farmers or merchants to force the sale of grain at reduced prices.
At the same time, Louis’ government made substantial purchases of foreign wheat (largely
from Baltic ports), which it intended to sell to the populace below cost; it also
subsidized bakers directly, established soup kitchens, and advised the local prefects
to provide assistance to the elderly and infirm.

Obsessed by fears of a popular uprising in Paris, Louis insisted that local authorities
hold down the price of bread in the capital, preferably below the limit of ninety
centimes for a two-kilogram loaf established during Napoléon’s reign. Nevertheless,
Louis adamantly refused to grant Parisian officials additional funds to help them
achieve that objective. As more and more peasants from the surrounding countryside
drifted into Paris in search of cheaper bread in the late winter of 1817, the task
grew even more daunting: one estimate classified nearly 200,000 Parisians as indigent
and therefore deserving of subsidized bread.

Although a loaf of bread in Paris—even with government subsidies—nearly doubled in
price between the spring of 1816 and the spring of 1817, it still cost only about
60 percent of a similar loaf in the Alsatian capital of Strasbourg. Meanwhile, prices
rose even higher in the French countryside, where bread often cost three to four times
as much as in the cities. And the quality of bread suffered as well. The combination
of prolonged cool weather during the summer (which kept the wheat kernels from ripening)
and rain during the harvest (which led to sprout-damaged wheat) produced grain that
weighed only about 75 to 80 percent of top-quality wheat. Consequently, the flour
absorbed less water and frequently resulted in bread that was sticky and gummy. “You
could not eat the bread,” complained one disgusted peasant in central France. “It
stuck to the knife.”

In February, riots broke out in northern France, particularly in Haute-Normandie and
the Somme, to prevent grain from leaving the region. Throughout the country, authorities
reported an increase in property crimes, particulary theft, and a rise in attacks
by armed bands of outlaws upon travelers. As a result, farmers often refused to risk
shipping their grain, at least until it was completely paid for, and the dearth in
eastern France deepened. In areas where local authorities provided grain allowances
for the poor—in the larger cities, for the most part—they found it necessary to reduce
their allotments and substitute other food, such as potatoes, for wheat or bread.

As grain from the Baltic and the United States began to arrive, royal officials directed
it first to Paris and then to the supply routes in northern France through which grain
shipments usually traveled, to reduce the likelihood of future disruptions. Between
the cost of grain imports and the expense of bread subsidies—which together totalled
nearly 70 million francs—the national budget slid quickly into the red. Only a hastily
arranged loan from British and Dutch bankers in February kept the royal government
afloat. Wellington, meanwhile, agreed to reduce the Allied occupation forces by 30,000
troops, particularly from the eastern departments, thereby alleviating pressure on
both the French budget and local food supplies.

Despite the government’s efforts, distress continued to grow throughout France during
the spring of 1817. En route to Switzerland, Louis Simond—a native Frenchman who had
achieved wealth as a merchant in New York City—noticed the rising number of indigent
peasants as he traveled through eastern France. “Beggars, very numerous yesterday,
have increased greatly,” he noted in his journal. “At every stage, a crowd of women
and children and of old men, gather round the carriage; their cries, the eloquence
of all these pale and emaciated countenances, lifted up to us with imploring hands,
are more than we can well bear.” Numerous citizens already had died, Simond noted,
“if not of hunger, at least of the insufficiency and bad quality of the food.”

Sir Stamford Raffles, too, encountered hordes of beggars as he and his cousin, Thomas,
passed through eastern France that spring. (The former lieutenant-governor of Java
had recently dropped the “Thomas” from his name.) The beggars, wrote Thomas after
leaving the town of Champagnole, “were chiefly children, and their numbers and their
importunity was truly astonishing. From the very slow rate at which we traveled [ascending
a hill], they were frequently enabled to follow us for a considerable distance, and
this they did, entreating in the most piteous accents, and repeating the same words
with a sort of measured intonation,
Monsieur, s’il vous plaît, donnez-moi charité
.” Thomas Raffles breathed a sigh of relief when the road leveled off and his carriage
could pick up speed, leaving the unfortunate children behind.

Peasants and townspeople from the provinces surrounding Paris continued to flock into
the capital; on the first of June, Simond noted one report that “one hundred thousand
souls have been added to its destitute population within a few months!” Nevertheless,
the government’s policy of cheap bread in the city continued to avert any outbreak
of disorder or famine. The rest of France was not so fortunate. In one department
after another, food riots broke out in the spring and early summer. Much of the violence
was perpetrated by bands of armed vagrants, usually peasants desperate for food, who
migrated to areas where there was at least an adequate supply of grain. Sometimes
they seized grain wherever they could find it; often, however, they offered to purchase
it at a reduced price.

At the end of May, a series of large-scale disturbances shook one market town after
another. On May 30, a mob of 3,000 peasants sacked the grain market in the Burgundy
town of Sens; when local officials called in troops from a nearby garrison to quell
the disorder, the rioters dispersed into the countryside, where they extorted grain
from farmers by threatening to kill them and their families. The following day, an
even larger crowd plundered a market town in the department of Aube, in northeastern
France. Again, the authorities required regular army troops to crush the disturbance.

Five thousand rioters assaulted the town of Château-Thierry on June 3, pillaging the
storehouses and seizing grain shipments on the Marne River. A pitched battle ensued
between the peasants—armed with swords, bayonets, and sticks—and government soldiers,
leaving several rioters dead. Once more, the trouble spread into the countryside,
ending only when local officials essentially requisitioned grain from farmers to distribute
among the protestors.

For the most part, these disturbances were remarkably free of any political content.
From the government’s perspective, however, the trouble that erupted at Lyon in the
second week of June bore a far more ominous cast. Long a stronghold of Bonapartist
sentiment, the town of Lyon was suffering acutely from the depression in the textile
industry, and the surrounding countryside from the dearth of grain. Local officials
prudently subsidized the cost of bread in Lyon, but could not afford to match that
price in the rural areas. By June 1817 the price of bread in eastern France had increased
to nearly four times its cost in the spring of 1816. Rumors of Napoléon’s imminent
return had swirled through the region for the past several months, and the royal government
braced for a reprise of the Hundred Days. “The excessive price of bread and of all
kinds of provisions,” warned one local official, “has been the principal cause that
has set off the ill-will likely to spur on the agitation in the country.”

On the evening of June 8, several hundred demonstrators gathered in the suburbs of
Lyon and raised the tricolor flag. Already on alert, government troops quickly quashed
the rising, but the mayor and the commanding general in the department of the Rhône
decided to treat the incident as if it had been a full-fledged insurrection. They
convened military courts and swiftly tried more than a hundred suspected conspirators,
convicting seventy-nine, including a dozen who were sentenced to death. Executions
took place almost immediately.

During the following year, the Lyon conspiracy became a highly charged political issue.
Moderate royalists and liberals, along with the merchants of Lyon, charged that the
government exaggerated the danger of revolt, and blamed the uprising primarily on
the desperate food situation. Ultra-Royalists insisted the demonstrators had posed
a very real threat to the royal government, and that only severely repressive measures
had thwarted an insurrection. Eventually even Decazes, the minister of police, concluded
that the danger had been minimal.

Following the affair at Lyon, conditions gradually improved across France. Most of
the government’s purchases of grain from abroad arrived during the summer, sparking
a decline in the price of bread that began in July and continued through the remainder
of the year, although in December grain still cost 166 percent of its base price in
1815. There were twice as many criminal prosecutions in French courts in 1817 as in
1815, but government officials were happy to attribute the increase to food shortages,
rather than political discontent. Accordingly, the king issued a pardon on August
14 for all crimes committed as a result of the scarcity of grain. “The zeal and firmness
which our courts and tribunals have brought to the maintenance of public order has
merited our approval,” Louis declared, “but our heart has groaned from the severities
that justice and the law have commanded against a too large number of persons, who,
in several parts of the kingdom, have been involved in criminal disorders through
the scarcity and dearness of provisions. We feel the need not to confuse these unfortunates
with the vicious men who would have tried, in some places, to push them into excesses
whose most certain result was to aggravate their distress and to increase the ills
of the state.”

Louis spent the rest of 1817 trying to eradicate the memory of Napoléon from the consciousness
of Parisians. The Austerlitz Bridge was renamed the Bridge of the King’s Garden, and
workers scratched the large letter “N” from the exterior of the Louvre. The first
steamboat “smoked and clattered” its way up the Seine as a harbinger of a new era.
And, as Victor Hugo pointed out, “all sensible people were agreed that the era of
revolution had been closed forever by King Louis XVIII, surnamed ‘the Immortal Author
of the Charter.’”

But in the eastern provinces—particularly Alsace and Lorraine—an estimated 20,000
disillusioned farmers and laborers emigrated by the end of the year, lured by extravagant
promises from agents for shipowners of the opportunities that awaited them in the
promised lands of Russia and the United States. Nearly a fourth of the emigrants were
Alsatians who chose to settle in the United States. After making their way across
France to the port of Le Havre, they found that passage across the Atlantic cost between
350 to 400 francs. Those who could not afford to pay were offered labor contracts
which essentially turned the passengers into indentured servants; many ended up in
Louisiana working in appalling conditions on cotton plantations. Treatment of these
“redemptioners” was so brutal that the Louisiana legislature passed a measure in 1818
providing them with at least a modicum of protection by the state government.

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B
Y
early 1817, the typhus epidemic in Ireland was spreading rapidly from the west. As
cold, wet conditions persisted through the winter and spring, and food shortages mounted,
the fever claimed more and more lives. Nearly all of those affected lived in impoverished
rural areas; wealthy landowners, removed from physical contact with peasants and laborers,
barely suffered at all.

Peel’s hopes for continued peace in Ireland perished in the wake of the epidemic.
The authorities attempted to redistribute what little grain remained in the country,
taking supplies from those regions with even meager harvests to provide for those
areas where the harvest had failed entirely. Not surprisingly, the residents of those
towns forced to export food—many of whose residents were close to starvation themselves—rioted
at the prospect of being left with even less. Merchants whose desire for profit outweighed
their sense of charity began to buy grain, even at expensive prices, and hoarded it,
believing that they could sell it for still more as the shortages worsened. Their
actions provoked angry reactions from starving peasants, who demanded that the government
set a maximum price for grain.