Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (28 page)

Napoleon had realized well enough what would happen. Reiterating his old war-cry “Activité, activité, vitesse!” he planted his feet firmly on the ground, and insisted that the Continent must produce for itself all that it had hitherto imported from England and the colonies. The emperor knew that the contemplated ruin of the English carrying trade would not advantage the French carrying trade, since the French navy and the French mercantile marine had been driven off the seas. There was to be no more overseas trade, so far as the Continent was concerned. His policy was determined by the position of France. As early as 1806, during a reception at the Chamber of Commerce in Paris, he prophetically declared: “Our world is continually changing. In former days, if we desired to be rich, we had to own colonies, to establish ourselves in India and the Antilles, in Central America, in Santo Domingo. These times are over and done with. Today we must become manufacturers, must be able to provide for ourselves what we used to get from elsewhere. We must, let me insist, provide our own indigo, rice, and sugar. Manufacturing industry is at least as valuable as commerce used to be. While I am trying to gain the command of the seas, the industries of France will be developed or will be created.”

“Tout cela, nous le faisons nous-mêmes!” We shall make everything for ourselves! These bold words are charged with a tremor of expectation. Man is to show himself mightier than destiny, which has allotted different climates to different parts of the world, dividing it into different zones. The faculties of the soil are determined by the direction of the sun’s rays, which fall perpendicularly in the tropics and aslant in the temperate zones; but man’s inventive spirit rebels against fate’s decrees. He wants to harvest melons from pine-trees; and, if possible, to make bread out of reeds. With the decreeing of the Continental System, Prometheus was reborn; Prometheus, who made for himself whatever he wanted; who invented, built, and dared; who did not ask for gifts from the gods, because he wished to be independent of the gods.

“Tout cela, nous le faisons nous-mêmes!” Nothing has such deep roots that we cannot make it for ourselves. In Verona, Napoleon visited the magnificent Roman amphitheatre. His eyes shone covetously, and the flame of his enthusiasm kindled the imagination of his companion Marmont. Five days later, Marmont wrote to his father: “In Verona we saw the loveliest monument of antiquity, in a perfect state of preservation; the Roman circus providing seats for 80,000 spectators. The sight of it expands the mind and stimulates the fancy. We, too, are worthy of such a monument. Something of the same kind must be built in Paris.” . . . “Activité, activité, vitesse!” . . . With energy and speed, the emperor’s subjects set themselves to work to realize the teaching of the new Prometheus. Colbert’s vision of an industrialized France was child’s play when compared with the great forcing-house into which the country was transformed by the Continental System.

All kinds of Manchester goods, woollen and cotton textiles, every sort of piqué, muslin, fustian, dimity, and nankeen, must henceforward be made in France—or French substitutes be found. Hardware, dinner-services, knives, everything that can be made of steel, tin, copper, pig-iron, and pewter, were henceforward to be produced by French factories. Tanned leather, carts and carriages, saddles and harness, ribbons, hats, chiffons and shawls, glassware, pottery of all possible kinds, must be manufactured out of nothing by French hands. They must be! A crowd of inventors, of chemists and physicists, of ambitious scientists, hurried to explore untrodden paths. To Oberkampf, the industrial magnate, Napoleon said: “Tous les deux, nous faisons la guerre à l’Angleterre, mais la vôtre est encore la meilleure.”

Thus industry became a titan. The Continental System surrounded France with a barrier more insuperable than that of a high tariff. No British-manufactured articles could any longer disturb the French market. But where were raw materials to come from? Could they be charmed into existence? Surely that was as difficult as it would be to make the sun shine down vertically at noon in the forty-sixth parallel of latitude? No, not so difficult as that! One of the raw materials of which there was the most urgent need, now that overseas imports had been suppressed, was sugar. In the year 1504, sugar-cane had been introduced from Cyprus into the West Indies, and only in this new home had people learned the art of sugar-boiling. Two and a half centuries later, in 1750, Marggraf, a Berlin chemist, showed that beet-root contains a sweet substance, probably identical with sugar; but the discovery was overlooked. Now, however, when cane sugar could no longer be imported from the West Indies, Napoleon got wind of the matter. He reminded his subjects of the possibilities of the sugar-beet. Thanks to additional discoveries made by Achard (1753–1821), another German chemist, it became possible for Europe to supply itself with sugar from home-grown crops.

France even began to cultivate its own cotton. The minister of the interior imported cotton-seeds from Spain and southern Italy, and distributed them among the
départements
. A premium was offered per kilogram of cotton that had been carded and was ready for spinning. Everywhere the emperor was ready to stimulate the cotton industry by appropriate commendations. A Society for the Encouragement of National Industry was founded. Jacquard, a Lyons mechanic, was granted three thousand francs for the invention of an improved loom; another industrial worker, Almeyras, invented an improved carding-machine. The government offered a hundred thousand francs to anyone who should discover an indigenous plant that would furnish a dye akin to indigo; the same amount to the discoverer of a native vegetable dye suitable for wool, cotton, linen, and silk. No less than a million was promised to one who should invent the best machine for spinning flax; the text of this offer was translated into all European languages and posted everywhere.

Prior to the establishment of the Continental System, neither in France nor elsewhere had there existed a special Ministry of Commerce. Commerce and agriculture were within the province of the Ministry of the Interior. Now industrial and agricultural production increased so enormously that two special ministries had to be established, this happening at the outset of the nineteenth century. Soon the century became characterized by a phenomenal division of labour. The barriers imposed by the Continental System were responsible for extreme specialization of industry.

The Continental System was an ideology even more than it was an economic edict. The barriers it erected interfered with worldwide thought. The ideas of millions of human beings became restricted to the regions in which they lived. Thought, investigation, production, were localized. The Continental System was the foundation of many of the inventions of the nineteenth century.

Not in France alone! The Chinese Wall with which the emperor of the French surrounded Europe acted as a stimulus to the British mind no less than to that of the French. It had before this been discovered in England that during the manufacture of coal-tar out of coal an inflammable gas was given off; but little attention was paid to the matter until necessity became the mother of invention. After nightfall, people still lighted their houses with candles made of tallow imported from Russia.

The Russian tallow industry had been one of the most flourishing industries in the pre-Napoleonic world. In 1803, the annual export of raw tallow from Russia was worth ten and a half million roubles, and in addition half a million tallow candles were sent across the Russian frontier. Now, when tallow could no longer be imported from St. Petersburg, was London to suffer darkness? Not a bit of it. As early as 1807, Londoners began to light their houses with gas.

Thus did an evil system promote the work of civilization.

Napoleon himself said (adapting from Thomas Paine) that it is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. In the year 1808, the Chamber of Commerce in Toulouse offered rewards: first to anyone who should succeed in making artificially certain drugs which had hitherto been imported, notably quinine; secondly to anyone who should be able to manufacture “certain comestibles to which people have become accustomed, such substances as sugar and coffee, without any falling-off in their quality and at a price which does not exceed the average price of the days before the war.”

Though it was still a century before the modern plethora of synthetic drugs, a good many native substitutes could be found, even as beet-root sugar could take the place of cane sugar. A coffee-substitute was a more difficult matter. There did not exist in France any plant (or, at any rate, no such plant is as yet known) that combined the peculiar virtues of coffee, providing wakefulness at will and capable of supplying the aromatics produced in the coffee-bean by roasting it. Trimethyldioxypurin in combination with ether, phenol, furfural—in a word, a substance having the formula C
₈
H
₁₀
N
₄
O
₂
—could be produced only by a plant that grew in the damp, warm, porous soil of the tropical or sub-tropical belt. The soil of Europe said no to the beckoning of Napoleon’s imperious finger.

At that time, during the first decade of the nineteenth century, the qualities of coffee had become almost as widely recognized as they are today. As a stimulant, it was indispensable in the fat years, when people could feed liberally, since coffee is a digestive aid. But coffee was no less necessary in the lean years, inasmuch as by its effect on the nervous system, and by its quickening of the heart’s action, it can produce a specious sensation of satiety. No matter whether Napoleon prized coffee chiefly as a stimulant, or chiefly for this faculty it has of making underfed people feel that they have dined well, he regarded it as essential that a substitute for coffee should be provided for popular use. That was why the emperor entered into one of his questionable but momentous alliances, the alliance with chicory.

Chicory is an innocent and insignificant plant. It has a long, brown root, which exudes a bitter juice when freshly cut. There is nothing in this bitter juice to act as a stimulant; it contains neither trimethyldioxypurin nor aromatic oils. The blue-flowering chicory is an ordinary European plant, which flourishes in temperate climes and is free from wonder-working influences derived from a tropical soil. When God made it, long ages ago, it never dreamed of its high destiny, never dreamed that in days to come it would be used by millions as a coffee-substitute. As substitute for a far more wonderful creation—for which, in actual fact, there is no substitute.

The idea of using roasted chicory roots as a substitute for coffee did not originate with Napoleon, nor indeed with a Frenchman. It was born in Germany. Various German industrialists had been on the look-out for a coffee-substitute, until at length, in 1770, Major Christian von Heine and his associate Gottlieb Förster secured an exclusive privilege for a chicory-powder factory. In the
Braunschweiger Anzeiger
of 1772 we read that the new enterprise was proving a great success. Before long chicory was being grown throughout Prussia, and factories for roasting and grinding chicory roots were established. All over Germany, Förster and Heine’s ground chicory was sold in packets, having as trademark on the cover a vignette of a German farmer sowing chicory-seed, and waving away ships freighted with coffee-beans. Beneath was the legend:

To what is this success to be ascribed? How had it been possible to induce the populace to drink the new beverage, an infusion of chicory, which was certainly not coffee?

Heine and Förster understood the psychology of their fellow-countrymen. First of all, since everybody else was drinking coffee, the Germans wanted to be in the swim. But the high tax that even the most insignificant potentate imposed on “articles of luxury” made it impossible for the masses to drink real coffee. Those who were bold enough to roast and powder a bitter-tasting root, to say confidently “This is coffee,” and to sell it at a very low price, were doing a good turn to the petty bourgeois, who are of the same type the world over. These petty bourgeois were being invited to become confederates in a falsification—but it soon became apparent that the falsification was both physiologically and morally justified.

The reader must not forget that though by this time coffee was widely drunk in Germany, being prized for its taste and its aroma, the Germans were afraid of its effect. They were alarmed at the wakefulness and restlessness produced by coffee. Now chicory provided them with a means for drinking a beverage that they could call “coffee,” but that did not have the, to them, undesirable effect. Especially for social purposes, from the German outlook true coffee imported from the tropics had a grave drawback. It could not be drunk in large quantities, hour after hour, as the Germans were accustomed to drink beer and wine; for intemperance in the use of coffee produces palpitation. Those who replaced genuine coffee as a beverage by chicory were using a substitute that enabled them to keep money in their pockets, and that, so they believed, improved their health.

The fable that chicory juice is an extremely wholesome beverage dates back to the wife of one of the first manufacturers of chicory as a coffee-substitute. She had had personal experience of its beneficial influence. Major Heine’s lady had been robbed by a “party of French cavalrymen.” Thereafter the lady suffered from nervous shock, and her doctor prescribed a decoction of chicory-root as a calmative. This medicament had to be taken for several weeks. The taste of the decoction of the unroasted root was so disagreeable that the patient decided to roast it “as if it had been coffee.” That was the origin of chicory as a coffee-substitute, and of the legend that it “strengthens the nerves.”

There is pleasure in renunciation. The puritan method of political thought had seeped so far down among the bourgeoisie that townsfolk no longer ignored the problem of imports and the consequent influx of money with a possibly unfavourable balance of trade. Restriction of the import of luxuries, a restriction that Justus Möser had again and again recommended, was in conformity with the asceticism of German-Protestant feeling.