Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity

by H. E. Jacob

  “The more citizens there are, the more persons to contribute to public revenue, and consequently the smaller the amount that has to be demanded from each individual. This is one of the first principles of sound taxation.”

  These four “rational principles” for a policy that would increase population are of dubious validity, and were supported by an extremely lame logic. But they were characteristically Austrian in their goodnature.

  Very different was the Prussian creed, as formulated by Johann Gottlieb Fichte in relation to the problem of superfluity. In his Der geschlossene Handelsstaat, published in the year 1800, he flatly repudiated the right to luxury and display, and advocated a planned economy:

  “All must first be well fed and properly housed before anyone sets about decorating his habitation; all must first be comfortably and warmly clad before anyone tries to dress splendidly. There must be no luxury in a state where agriculture is still backward, and where there is still a lack of hands for the simplest mechanical crafts. A man does not excuse himself adequately for the indulgence of luxurious tastes by saying, ‘I can pay for what I want.’ It is unjust that anyone should be able to pay for things he does not really need, and the money with which he pays for luxuries is not rightfully or reasonably his own.”

  There is an echo of Luther’s zeal in these words. Above all, however, Fichte was inspired by reminiscences of an outstanding man who had passed away more recently—Frederick the Great.

  Sonnenfels and Joseph II were not soldiers like their arch-enemy Frederick II of Prussia. The hardships of his life had made King Frederick a stoic rather than an epicurean. Experience had determined his attitude towards “superfluities.”

  In his early years, indeed, he had been an epicurean. That was when he was only crown-prince at Rheinsberg; when his humanism was not the outcome of ripe observation, but was the expression of his natural philosophical promptings. Why should he not allow himself and the world at large the happiness of luxury? Writing to Voltaire, he said: “I like the French love of pleasure. It pleases me to think that four hundred thousand town-dwellers are concerned only to enjoy themselves, and know practically nothing of the seamy side of life; that proves to me that these four hundred thousand persons are happy. . . . It seems to me that every ruler must do his utmost to make his subjects happy, even if he cannot make them wealthy; for there is no doubt that there can be content without wealth. A man, for instance, at a banquet or at the theatre, one who can mingle freely with congenial associates-such a man, at such times, is happy, and takes home with him a number of impressions that have fertilized his spirit. We must therefore do our utmost to provide for these masses many such moments of refreshment, which can sweeten the bitterness of life, or can make people forget their troubles for a time! The most tangible good in life is pleasure; and therefore we do good, much good, when we provide a large community with possibilities for enjoying itself.”

  Words of a green youth, wishing to supply circuses in abundance, because he has never known the need for bread! But when, during long years of warfare, the crude need for bread had been brought home to the lonely monarch, he ceased to dream of making his people happy by “spectacles and superfluities.” Still less did he continue to think it a king’s duty to act as a purveyor of pleasure.

  When Frederick the Great returned home on the evening of March 30, 1763, though only fifty-one, he was already an old man. Seven years of warfare had aged him as much as seventy might have done. The well-ordered country he had once thought of establishing no longer existed even in his dreams. He had won a province, and had lost everything else. Financial devastation was obvious as far as the eye could reach.

  With the native force of genius, Frederick now devoted himself to the task of reconstruction. This was a war that lasted more than seven years. It began on the day when the king converted his war-chest into a peace-chest. The eastern provinces had been laid waste by the Russians. Frederick sent hundreds of thousands of gold pieces rolling thither, and bestowed his cavalry horses upon the impoverished peasants. In the towns, he provided subsidies for manufacturing industry. Just as a hundred years before Colbert, in France, had conjured manufactures out of the ground, so now in Berlin, Breslau, and Königsberg thriving factories appeared as if by magic. The old man on the throne set his subjects an example by working twelve hours a day himself. The “excessive diligence” of the Prussians had come into its own.

  Great financial schemes were drawn up. The new industrial policy must be safeguarded by a protective system. As a mercantilist, the king laid stress, above all, upon a favourable balance of trade. Exports began to exceed imports. Silesian linen was sent to Russia. Only two articles of daily use took the form of costly imports. These were things paid for in Prussian thalers, which had much better, thought Frederick, have been kept in the country. All the same, they were things for which the monarch himself had a taste: good tobacco and good coffee.

  As regards tobacco, the problem was not difficult to solve. He had tobacco planted in his own land. Certain kinds throve well enough, others not so well. One day Frederick asked Achard, the chemist, whether it was not possible “to discover a sauce which, without being in any way injurious, could improve Prussian-grown tobacco so that it would rival Virginian in flavour.” But no such sauce could be found; and everyone who could afford it smoked imported tobacco.

  Even Frederick had no scruples about establishing a state monopoly in coffee and tobacco. He regarded them as luxuries that could bear high taxation, since in any case the poor among his subjects could not afford to buy them. That was the way in which he justified a policy that was ill-conceived and unsuccessful. Following the French precedent, the monarch farmed out both these monopolies. He was influenced, no doubt, by his usual tendency to overvalue all that was French. Just as in youth he had believed that only in Paris good plays could be seen and good poetry written, so, in his old age, he swore by French political economy.

  Frederick prepared a sackful of troubles for himself and his country through the malpractices of the French lessees of the monopolies. (One of them, it was currently reported, was a bankrupt from Marseille.) As with all hide-bound mercantilists, nationalist aims were more important to him than nationalist means, with the result that he used means that were anything but nationalist. One of the main principles of mercantilism was: “Skilled workers must be imported whenever they are needed.” Since the king was convinced that French officials would work in monopolies better than his German subjects (who were, in his estimation, clumsy, inexperienced, and too good-natured), the king filled two hundred posts in his monopoly services with French officials. The upshot was a manifest recalcitrance on the part of the Prussian burghers, who could not understand to what end they had conquered the French at Rossbach and elsewhere if the vanquished were to occupy lucrative and respected posts. High-handed actions on the part of the foreign monopolist officials, which might have been overlooked if they had been committed by Prussians, became a serious grievance when committed by Frenchmen.

  The habit of coffee-drinking became established later in Berlin than in Hamburg and Leipzig, these latter towns being centres of foreign intercourse in northern Germany. It was plain enough, as the outcome of a careful inquiry that the king instituted, that in Prussian towns there was a growing demand for the anti-Bacchic beverage; and this was surely a good thing, in view of the fact that his subjects must work harder if they were to increase their output. Still, Frederick pulled a wry face when he learned that seven hundred thousand thalers or more were going abroad year by year to pay for coffee, the money being sent chiefly to Holland. Meanwhile there was a corresponding decline in the brewing trade. We cannot doubt that Frederick knew well enough that his subjects drank coffee in order to work better and for longer hours. Still, he was vexed to discover that the increase in the consumption of coffee was set off by a decline in the consumption of beer. When, however, he reacted by imposing a tax of eight silver groschen per pound of imported coffee, it w
as only to find that he had equipped his state with a new industry—that of smuggling! The “hole in the West” began at Emden, and extended up the Rhine as far as Cleves. There was also a “hole in the North,” through which coffee found its way illicitly in to Prussia, across Swedish Pomerania. The most earnest attempts were made to stop such abuses. Revenue officers were multiplied. Many of these “coffee-watchmen” were in league with the smugglers, and shared their ill-gotten gains.

  With French subtlety, the monopoly administration now advocated a new expedient to stop smuggling. The coffee that was imported above-board was to go straight to the roasting-houses that the king had established, and none but roasted coffee was to be sold. This provided a check upon the consumption of smuggled coffee. If a house-owner or an innkeeper were to roast smuggled coffee, the volatile oils, the pyridine and the furfural, would assail the nostrils of the neighbours and the police, acquainting them with the fact that there was illicit coffee on the premises, and the smuggled goods could be promptly confiscated. The king was assured that this measure would not interfere in any way with trade. Frederick agreed to this plan when it was explained to him that the new method of control would provide employment for time-expired soldiers. Now there were to be seen veterans from the Seven Years War ferreting about in town and countryside-all of them replicas of Frederick, wearing uniforms, sporting pigtails, carrying crutch-sticks—a sad spectacle. In the towns that were big enough to have a public opinion, in Berlin, Breslau, and Königsberg, there were loud complaints when members of this guild of “coffee-smellers” made their way into private houses, impounded coffee-pots, searched the store-rooms, making a mess and giving trouble. In the countryside people were more dutiful; but the gentry of the regions of Lauenburg and Bütow gave the royal customs service to understand that they would promptly expel any coffee-spy who should venture to set foot upon Pomeranian estates.

  The surveillance thus exercised over consumers became preposterous, with the natural result that trade fell off. By now, the import duty imposed on coffee had been increased to one thaler per pound. When coffee could not be sold at the consequent high price, the duty was reduced by one-half. That did not help matters. People began to use coffee substitutes. The curtain had risen on the first act of a tragicomedy. In the dispute between coffee-drinkers and potentates, a laughing third character, chicory, had entered the stage.

  It was no easy matter to tell the truth to a king who was not only extremely authoritarian, but was also a man of genius. His minister Heinitz ventured to do so. Heinitz was bold enough, in a detailed memorial, to denounce the mismanagement of the coffee-monopoly. He showed that the ostensible increase of revenue derived from the monopoly by the state was really useless. The 96,000 thalers derived from the tax upon coffee was only a spurious gain, for while the returns had increased in a ratio of five to seven, expenditure upon the coffee-monopoly had increased in a ratio of three to ten.

  Frederick the Great was extremely annoyed, but all the same, as a result of Heinitz’ intervention, no more French officials were appointed. Three months before the death of Frederick II, the crown prince, subsequently to ascend the throne as Frederick William II, who had J. C. Wöllner as chief adviser, determined to abolish the coffee-monopoly. Lest Frederick the Great should be too much mortified, everything was arranged on the quiet. “I do not think that I am doing wrong,” wrote Wöllner in a letter accompanying his memorial, “in working secretly for Your Highness in this matter, and, for the nonce, inscribing my opinion in a memorial for Your Highness’s eyes alone.” In this memorial, Wöllner described the coffee-monopoly as “extremely harassing to merchants, bringing about a decline in the trade and a decay of the fairs, interfering with transport, and swelling the army of officials, to the great alarm of the working-classes. There has resulted a marked increase in the cost of administration, while salaries and royalties are paid mainly to foreigners.”

  As soon as Frederick William II mounted the throne, he issued an edict considerably reducing the tax on coffee. “To remove all desire and inclination for fraud,” on July 1, 1787, the decree insisting that coffee should be roasted only in the state roasting-houses was quashed.

  Mirabeau penned a savage epitaph upon the outworn financial system of monopolies and tax-farming. It was strange that a Frenchman, in his Monarchie prussienne sous Frédéric le Grand, should write such a tribute to the greatest of all francophils. Yet not so strange after all, for three years later the charged political and economic atmosphere that lowered over Europe was to burst in a tremendous thunderstorm. Old-time France, so much admired in its day, the France of the ancien régime that had given birth to the institution of farming the taxes, perished very soon after its admirer Frederick of Prussia had passed away. A new generation had been born, the generation of those who were in revolt against the system according to which:

  The king bars the bridges and the roads,

  And saith: “The tithe is mine!”

  15

  Napoleon’s Alliance with Chicory

  THE bad old days of tyranny were over and done with. So believed the French until, after a brief frenzy of liberty, there appeared a new and mighty tyrant, Napoleon, the man of genius.

  One of the first things the French forfeited in their craze for freedom was their best colony, their coffee-paradise of Santo Domingo. Ripples from the tidal wave that had made an end of authoritarianism in Paris ran swiftly over the surface of the sea to break upon the shores of the French Indies. In these colonies, Negroes and mulattoes took the talk of freedom at its face value. Among their palms, they erected a tree of liberty, crowning it, like the French, with a Phrygian cap; they encircled it with a park of artillery, and gaily shot down their white masters. France for the French? Well and good! But in that case, Haiti for the Negroes!

  The crime of the French absolute monarchy, which had colonized its West Indian possessions with kidnapped Africans, was now avenged upon its successor, the republic. The excellent coffee of Santo Domingo had been used by Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, and other eighteenth-century writers to keep their brains lively. But the Blacks who now made themselves lords of the island owned the coffee-plantations, and they sent no coffee to France. The frequenters of the Café Procope sat before empty cups, unless they were sufficiently well-to-do to pay for the more expensive coffee from Java.

  Since about 1740, the French Indies had been a premier source of supply. Two-thirds of all the coffee drunk in Europe came from the Antilles. The revolution in Santo Domingo not only severed for a considerable time the political ties with France, but also put an end to coffee-planting, which was the chief local source of wealth. The Negro liberator, Toussaint Louverture, who headed the insurrection, would have saved the plantations had he been able; but the rebellious slaves regarded these plantations as symbols of their slavery, with the result that, not content with massacring their some-time masters, they burned the crops.

  After 1791, coffee-growing came to an end in Haiti and Santo Domingo, their places as sources of supply being taken by Java. The fruit of Desclieux’ pioneer work had been destroyed. Henceforward, the Dutch Indies, and not the Antilles, provided fully two-thirds of the coffee that was consumed throughout the world. The total production fell off, and this enabled the Hollanders to jack up prices. All the better for England! The lords of the Anglo-Indian tea plantations could undersell coffee, and could market their tea better than before.

  Among the hundred grievances Napoleon harboured against England was the loss of the good coffee of Santo Domingo—or, rather, the trading advantage England derived from the revolution in Haiti. Indeed, his grievances against England were manifold and worldwide. During the last years in St. Helena, the dethroned emperor came clearly to recognize that all his other troubles and combats had been no more than preliminary skirmishes for the final tussle with England, in which he was so cruelly defeated.

  Yet from the first he realized that England was the arch-enemy.

  How long had he wai
ted in camp at Boulogne, hoping for a miracle that would enable him to cross the Channel and land in England? Would not the waters divide, as of old the waters of the Red Sea had divided, that his army might march on dry ground to invade England? Alas, there was to be no miracle; so, unwillingly, and often bored, he fought other enemies who were not English. Britannia ruled the waves he could not cross. Sea-power made Britain invincible.

  On one occasion he successfully took to the water. Early in his career, when he was still more the romanticist than the statesman, he crossed the Mediterranean to Egypt. Thiers has pointed out how inadequately, from the military standpoint, this Egyptian expedition was prepared. Could it be shown as any better, politically considered? Was General Bonaparte well advised to deprive France of her best army for two long years in order to found a chimerical colony in Egypt? Since France was unable to hold her own against Britain on the seas, this colony could not remain in permanent connexion with French seaports. Nevertheless, though fundamentally preposterous from the outlook of the soldier and from that of the statesman, Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign was the opening of his fabulous glory. The nations were fired by its romantic aspect. Here was a man setting out towards India, at the head of a French army; a man treading in the footsteps of Alexander the Great. Cairo, the pyramids, Suez, were but steps on the road to Hindustan.

  Francis I, Henry IV, Louis XIV, Mazarin, would probably have clapped General Bonaparte into the Bastille if he had propounded to them a scheme for the conquest of Egypt. What could seem more disadvantageous to France than to wage war against the Turks? Defeat would be disastrous, but victory hardly less so. Wars against the Turks were for Austrians and Russians, to whom a weakening of the sultan would be helpful. The French, on the other hand, needed a powerful Turkey as a tacit ally against central Europe.