The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (30 page)

In the rich agricultural country near Payrac in southwestern France,
Young wrote, "All the country, girls and women, are without shoes or
stockings; and the ploughmen at their work have neither sabots nor feet
to their stockings. This is a poverty that strikes at the root of national
prosperity."14 Much of France was on the subsistence edge.

With appalling poverty so widespread, even a minor increase in bread
prices caused immediate agitation. The French diet was almost entirely
cereal based, comprising either rye or oat bread and various gruels and
broths. Only the affluent consumed wheaten loaves. Poorer French people consumed up to a kilogram of bread a day in the years before 1789,
spending about 55 percent of their earnings on loaves alone. Better off
folk like minor tradespeople and artisans might earn as much as thirty to
forty sous a day, but when bread cost more than two sous a half kilogram,
even their hunger margin was small indeed.

Rising population densities made the situation worse. Between 1770
and 1790 alone, France acquired an additional 2 million people. Wrote
the villagers of La Caure in the Chalons region: "The number of our children plunges us into despair. We do not have the means to feed or clothe
them; many of us have eight or nine children."15 By the late 1780s, people were frantically searching for land. The poor had already taken over
the commons, and were overrunning forests and marshlands. In an at mosphere of chronic deprivation, distrust ran rampant. Farmers no
longer trusted millers and bakers, even their neighbors. Towns began to
live in fear of violent attacks by their rural neighbors. Every wanderer in
the countryside was seen as a brigand. Inevitably, a wave of complaints
against wealthy landowners rose as the crisis intensified. Many demanded
the sale and free distribution of the king's estates or the subdivision of the
great estates into small holdings.

The land-hungry needed work to feed their families in a rural economy where employment opportunities were relatively limited, except for
rural craftspeople and such folk as millers, tavern-keepers, or quarrymen.
Most rural poor sought work on the great estates, but little was available,
except at harvest time or when the grapes were gathered, and that at very
low wages. During the quiet winter months, rural unemployment was
virtually universal. The average worker was doomed to perpetual hunger
and grinding poverty, even when cottage industries like weaving and
spinning provided derisory wages. Pay was no better in the towns. Declared a town council in northern France: "It is certain that a man who
earns only twenty sous a day cannot feed a large family; he who has only
fifteen sous a day is poor indeed."16

For centuries, peasants had enjoyed the right to glean in harvested
fields, to gather the standing stubble left by the sickles. They used the
straw for repairing roofs and covering stable floors. They were also permitted under ancient law to graze their cattle on fallow land and on fields
after the second harvest. These rights were progressively usurped by
landowners and nobles during the second half of the eighteenth century.
The peasants resisted desperately, for they knew they could not survive
without these cherished rights. They already bore a heavy burden of taxation to the Church and State and also to their parishes, to say nothing of
other services and payments such as the corvee, paid in labor or cash.

After 1770, climatic swings became more extreme, with many poor
harvests interspersed with good ones. The weather fluctuations removed
stability from the marketplace. Rents climbed and revenues fell, as produce markets swung between abundance and scarcity. In 1778 there was a
complete failure of the vintage, but by the early 1780s there was a wine
glut. In 1784 and 1785, a year after the Laki eruption in Iceland, which
caused a cold summer in western Europe, hay was in such short supply that thousands of cattle and sheep were slaughtered at knockdown
prices.17 Hail fell in Brittany at the end of April, and there were floods
followed by a long drought.

Such conditions were disastrous to farmers still using the simplest farming technology. Harvesting methods were still so primitive that threshing
was carried out laboriously with hand flails, meaning that grain only became available gradually through the winter. Lack of barn space meant that
much harvest corn stood in the open in stooks, where it could easily rot. If
the harvest was bad, granaries were empty long before the next ripening.
There was never enough grain in reserve, especially when merchants emptied their storehouses to sell the crop elsewhere. Deeply conservative and
suspicious of innovation, the peasants opposed any measures that increased
hay crops or hectarage devoted to orchards. All that mattered was grain.
The ravages of marauding armies and constant warfare merely compounded the situation. The soldiery raided the land and emptied granaries.
Officials constantly demanded even more taxes to pay for the armies.18

Even in good times, beggars wandered the countryside-the unemployed, the disabled, and the sick. Official relief was almost nonexistent,
except at the parish level, and that only for the locally resident poor. Begging became a trade. Even large families who had some land sent their
children to beg for bread. Quite apart from the regular ebb and flow of
migrant workers at harvest time, villagers and the urban unemployed
were both constantly on the move trying to earn a living. These vagrants
were a constant source of fear. During the bad harvest of 1788, beggars
gathered in bands and took to knocking on farmhouse doors at night.
They would wait until the men of a household had gone to the fields,
then descend asking for charity. If they considered it too meager, they
would help themselves. No one dared turn them away for fear of vandalism or reprisal-fruit trees cut down, cattle mutilated, crops burnt. The
situation was worst at harvest time, when corn was cut at night before it
was barely ripe and mobs of wanderers descended on the field to glean.
Wrote an observer near Chartres: "The general temper of the population
is so highly charged ... it may well feel itself authorized to ease its
poverty as soon as the harvest starts." 19 Rural crime rose as bands of brigands intimidated farmers and robbed them. Fear generated by hunger
haunted the countryside long before the disastrous climatic shift of 1788. The spring of 1788 was dry. Classic anticyclone conditions during the summer produced widespread crop failures due to drought and especially thunderstorms, always a hazard for French agriculture. A catastrophic hailstorm
developed over the Paris region on July 13. According to British Ambassador Lord Dorset, some of the hailstones were forty centimeters in diameter. "About 9 o'clock in the morning the darkness at Paris was very great
and the appearance of the heavens seemed to threaten a dreadfull Storm."
The clouds dissipated, as thunderstorms, hail, and heavy rain descended on
the surrounding countryside. The king himself, out hunting, was obliged
to take shelter in a farmhouse. Huge trees were uprooted, crops and vineyards flattened, even some houses beaten to the ground. "It is confidently
said that from four to five hundred Villages are reduced to such great distress the inhabitants must unavoidably perish without the immediate assistance of Government; the unfortunate Sufferers not only lose the crops of
the present year but of three or four years to come."20 In a later report, the
ambassador estimated that 1,200 to 1,500 villages were damaged, many
badly, over an area from Blois to Douay. "The noise which was heard in the
air previous to the falling of the immense hail-stones is said to have been
beyond all description dreadfull."21 The wheat harvest may have been more
than 20 percent lower than the average over the previous fifteen years.

Inevitably, food shortages developed, not only because of the immediate bad harvest but because the government had not foreseen a dearth.22
In 1787, a good harvest year, the debt-laden government had responded
by encouraging the export of large amounts of grain and removed all restrictions on the corn trade to encourage agriculture. When 1788
brought dearth instead of plenty, a need for imports rather than exports,
the unprepared authorities imported far too little to alleviate the shortages. The shortfall was not entirely their fault. The external political situation was volatile, because Turkey had just declared war on an alliance of
Austria and Russia. Sweden and other nations were poised to join in, creating unsafe conditions for shipping in the Baltic and a drop in grain imports at a critical moment.

Almost simultaneously, Spain forbade the import of French cloth,
throwing hundreds of weavers out of work. Then women's fashions changed. Fine lawn came into favor and silks went out of fashion, a catastrophe for the silk makers of Lyons. Grain prices rose rapidly in an economic environment already depressed by a long recession, which had reduced wine prices by a half. By July 1789, a loaf of bread cost four and a
half sous in Paris and as much as six sous elsewhere. Inevitably, following
the predictable pattern of crisis years, there were disturbances. Mobs
forced bakers and shopkeepers to sell grain and bread at popularly established prices, destroyed feudal documents that bound peasants to the
land, and burned their masters' chateaux.

The poor harvest could not have come at a worse moment. France had
entered into an unfavorable trade treaty with England in 1776. The pact reduced import duties on English goods, the notion being to encourage
French manufacturers to mechanize production in response to enhanced
competition. A flood of cheap imports from across the Channel overwhelmed the cloth industry. Cloth production alone fell by 50 percent between 1787 and 1789. The 5,672 looms in Amiens and Abbeville in 1785
were down to 2,204 by 1789. Thirty-six thousand people were put out of
work, throwing many poor workers onto city streets at a time when hungry
peasants were flocking to urban centers in search of food. The rural crisis
might have been short-lived had not urban unemployment mushroomed at
the same time. In Paris, the government subsidized bread prices out of fear
of the mobs, but to no avail. The situation was soon out of control.

Many political agendas seethed in France in 1788, but the poor, who
had no interest in politics, had one primary concern-bread. And bread
came from grain, whose abundance in turn depended on good harvests or
generous imports. The weather of 1788 was not, of course, the primary
cause of the French Revolution. But the shortage of grain and bread and
the suffering resulting from dearth contributed in large measure to its
timing. The weakness of the French social order, born of generations of
chronic hunger, contributed to the outbreaks of violence before the historic events of the summer of 1789, when "the Great Fear of 1789"
gripped much of France in mass hysteria and revolution and cast the
peasantry into the political arena.

In the bitterly cold winter of 1788/89, heavy snowfall blocked roads,
major rivers froze over, and much commerce came to a standstill. The
spring thaw flooded thousands of hectares of farming lands. Bread riots
broke out in March in Brittany, then in Flanders and elsewhere, with ri oters fixing prices in shops and marketplaces. In April the disturbances
spread to Paris, where people were anxious about the lean months between the exhaustion of one year's crops and the harvesting of the next in
late summer. Bread riots continued sporadically through the summer in
towns large and small, where peasants attended weekly markets. Hungry
day laborers were only too glad to join in riots over food prices. Rumors
of widespread disorders spread like wild fire through the countryside.
Desperate families stopped grain wagons and seized their cargoes, paying
the appropriate price or simply helping themselves. Only the largest convoys had military escorts: there was insufficient manpower for comprehensive protection. Everyone distrusted and feared everyone else. The
towns lived in constant fear of mobs of ransacking peasants. Farmers became apprehensive that a surge of townspeople would come and rob their
granaries. Every beggar, vagrant, and rioter became a "brigand." Inevitably, too, rumors swept the countryside that the aristocrats were forging an alliance against all commoners.

With bread prices higher than they had been in almost twenty years,
many people expected even larger hungry mobs to take to the streets.
When the riots did come, they were triggered by a chance remark by a
wallpaper manufacturer named Reveillon, who said in a public meeting
that the government should lower grain prices so that wages could be limited to fifteen sous.23 Rumors of impending wage reductions swept the
restless capital. The disturbances were old fashioned bread riots, but they
came as the Estates-General was about to meet. Political events soon overtook the disturbances, as the popular minister reformist Jacques Neckar,
who had taken frantic measures to import grain to the capital, was dismissed by the king. On July 12, Neckar left office. Two days later came
the storming of the Bastille.