Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity

by H. E. Jacob

  Nevertheless Napoleon undertook the conquest of Egypt, and the world was greatly impressed by his deeds in the ancient land of the Nile. Why? Because the world has always idolized romanticist will—and such was the obvious inspiration of the Egyptian campaign. Later, at Boulogne, Napoleon was but thirty miles from England; but in Egypt, General Bonaparte was aiming at remote Hindustan, and Hindustan was England! Hindustan was the mystical source of British wealth, of British power. The sea-route to the East Indies was Britannia’s, now that Britannia, having vanquished the Portuguese and the Dutch, ruled the waves. But the land-route to India was not under her command, the route that led by way of Egypt and Araby!

  When, later, political realism gained the upper hand in Napoleon’s mind, he fled from Egypt. He no longer possessed a fleet, for Nelson had destroyed the French fleet in Aboukir Bay. Nothing was left to him but two small vessels. Regarding himself as more important than his army, Napoleon left his army to its own devices in Egypt, just as he forsook the shattered remnants of the Grand Army in Russia thirteen years later. What had really been his aim in going to Egypt? Letting his imagination run riot, he actually forgot France for the moment. The night before the battle of Acre, he declared: “If all goes well, I shall make myself pasha of Syria, shall march upon Damascus and Aleppo. . . . I shall reach Constantinople and uproot the Turkish empire. In the East I shall found a new empire, which will make my name glorious for ever!” Later, when he had become emperor in the West, on the evening before the battle of Austerlitz he reverted to these wish-dreams. While breathing the sober atmosphere of the Moravian plains, he delivered himself as follows to the members of his staff: “If, in 1799, I had taken Acre, I should have turned Mohammedan, and probably my army with me. . . . I should not have been here to fight tomorrow in Moravia. Instead, like Alexander, I should have fought a battle at Issus, should have made myself supreme sultan of the East, and should have returned to Europe by way of Byzantium. I should have founded a new religion to replace that of Mohammed; should have been mounted on an elephant, wearing a turban on my head, and holding in my hands my new Koran.”

  At a later date, speaking of his experiences during the Egyptian campaign, he said: “I always had seven coffee-pots on the boil while I was discussing with the Turks, for I had to stay awake all night talking over religious matters with them.” Emperor of the West and of the East! To go to India in the footsteps of Alexander! What a strange hotchpotch of mysticism, self-idolization, priestcraft, and highly practical genius. For always those twenty to thirty nautical miles were to cut off his armies from Britain. He could fight only on land. The naval disasters in the battles of the Nile and Trafalgar ruined the possibilities of success on the high seas.

  India, where at noon the sun touched the zenith, so that its perpendicular rays encouraged the growth not only of vegetation, but of gold likewise! Asia was always the goal of his ambition, Asia counted more for him than Europe. Just as at the opening of his career he hazarded destruction by his expedition to Egypt, so, in the end, did he destroy himself by his expedition to Russia. For it was rather an expedition than a campaign. In 1797 he went to Africa as a detour on the way to Asia. In 1812 he chose an even less practicable detour, the northern route by way of Moscow. Bubonic plague proved an insuperable obstacle to General Bonaparte in Egypt and Syria, putting an end to his attempts to invade India as a new Alexander. It was the Muscovite winter that compelled Emperor Napoleon to turn back from his second eastern raid. Never was he to see Hindustan, never was he to drive his foes the British out of India. Once only did he, for a time, grasp his formidable enemy by the throat, so that the spices of India no longer found a market in Europe. It was in the year 1806, midway between his overture in Egypt and his disastrous finale in Muscovy, that he seemed to be making headway against England. This was by means of the blockade which became known as the Continental System.

  The Berlin Decree, issued at Charlottenburg on November 21, 1806, the decree by which a blockade was declared against the British Isles, was a measure of war economics. As such, we can compare it with like measures of earlier and later dates. Especially it has been compared with the blockade of the Central Powers by the Allies from 1914 to 1918. But the Continental System, which closed the seaports of the Continent, of France and her feudatories (among which Russia was soon to be numbered) to British ships, was a grander scheme. Grander both geographically and politically. Geographically, because in those days the world, which knew nothing of steamships or railways or airplanes, was much larger than it is today. Politically, because Europe was never so centralized as under Emperor Napoleon—not even in the days of Charlemagne.

  Napoleon had, in his own person, become Europe. The exclusion of England from Europe, the pointing of a finger from the Continent to indicate to the British Isles that henceforward they might consider themselves isolated in the desert of the Atlantic, was symbolic of the man who undertook it. It was not merely a “system,” which may be sound or unsound. It was not a purely intellectual product, but was the outcome of Napoleon’s “sensibilité d’Etat.” Intelligence apart, he possessed this “state sense” as a sixth sense. For Napoleon, politics were not only a logical and practical activity, they were also his bodily and mental reaction to the daily situation. There was a psycho-physical identity between himself and the organism of the State.

  On that foggy morning of November 21, when, in a Prussian castle, he signed his name to a document, his anger became creative. The hostility which throughout life he cherished against Britain found vent in momentous written characters, Therewith, simultaneously, mighty gates, so to say, were lowered in front of the mouths of the Elbe, the Weser, the Oder, and the Vistula. The ports of Naples, Marseille, and Barcelona were closed. St. Petersburg, Königsburg, Danzig, and Amsterdam were defended as if by casemates.

  For a time the Continental System was marvellously effective, producing results which hardly anyone but Napoleon, with the imagination of genius, could have foreseen. The Continent was to be organized industrially as if England did not exist.

  Had Napoleon failed to realize that, when British commodities were excluded from his empire, all foreign commodities would be excluded? England had the monopoly of the carrying trade. One who established a blockade of goods brought in English bottoms, was primarily blockading himself. No vessel flying the French flag could steer a course for Hamburg, Bordeaux, or Ragusa, without a ninety per cent chance of being captured as a prize by the English. The huge mass of territories lying between Illyria and Scandinavia was no longer refreshed by the introduction of wares from overseas. It was isolated. Continental Europe was left to itself.

  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 mightie
r 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 C8H10N4O2—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 substi
tute 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:

  Without you,

  Healthy and rich!

  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.