Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity

by H. E. Jacob

  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.

  Napoleon now turned to account this readiness of decent folk “to undergo bodily privation in pursuit of a higher aim.” The movement was not confined to Germany. In France as well, chicory-planting began to flourish. A hundred years later, of course, in the days of the great war, the industry of providing substitutes became far more extensive than anything that had flourished in Napoleon’s time. We learn from a publication of the year 1917 that the unhappy Germans could not get even chicory. They made coffee-substitutes out of Jerusalem artichokes and dahlia tubers, out of dandelion roots, out of comfrey roots, burrs, and chrysanthemum seeds. It was made from monkey-nuts, vetch, chick-peas, carob-beans, horse-chestnuts, asparagus seeds, and asparagus stalks. The roots of reeds were used, so was linseed, so was arrow-head, so was cane, so was bracken, and so were various bulbs. Other ingredients of “coffee-substitute” were quaker-grass roots, parsnips, swedes, juniper berries, sloes, elder-berries and rowan berries, barberries, hips and haws, cranberries, mulberries, holly berries, box seeds, pumpkin seeds, gherkins, sunflower seeds, and hemp seeds. So were the seeds of the lime tree, the acacia, the laburnum, of gorse, flax, and broom. Indeed, “coffee” was made out of the lees of wine and beer—had to be made, lest the populace, deprived of a drink that at least bore the name of coffee, might use roasted wheat to prepare the beverage instead of reserving this carefully rationed product for the making of bread!

  Well, Napoleon was primarily responsible for all this, since he popularized chicory, the ancestor of such substitutes. The great emperor entered into an alliance with the modest petty bourgeoise, Dame Chicory, in order, by commands and threats, to impose upon Europe his will that a decoction of roasted and ground chicory roots should pass for coffee. His orders were heard at long range. The fine coffee-plantations in the French Antilles had been for the most part destroyed by the insurgent Negro population, and what coffee remained to be shipped was captured by the British. The coffee of the Dutch East Indies was, some of it, in Javanese store-houses; some of it in London repositories; while some was still brought from Batavia to London in lone ships over which the Union Jack waved, making it unattainable to the Parisians. The Turks, the Egyptians, and the Syrians smiled. They had good reason for doing so, since Arabian coffee, the parent of all the coffees in the world, had come into its own once more. Napoleon’s writ did not run in the southeastern Mediterranean. But in Hamburg, in Breslau and Warsaw, in Milan, Genoa, and Bordeaux, people’s nostrils dilated as they sniffed the breeze to see whether it bore the aroma of that ethereal oil with which the vision of liberty was anointed.

  Liberty came at last. The Russian winter, which in the year 1812 broke the ring Napoleon had welded around Europe and made an end of his plans for a raid into Asia, broke the Continental System likewise, and flung its fragments into the sea. It had been in a bad way for some time. Like all systems that are too extensive and too fine-meshed, this widespread scheme of prohibition had made people who were forced to live under it restless. Few men are idealists, or will tolerate for long a coercion that runs counter to their interests.

  No doubt it was agreeable to French nationalist vanity to know that France could get along without England, but nevertheless, rich profits could be earned by smugglers; for the “allies of France” (as, by a euphemism, the subjugated nations were termed) did not share this vanity. Discontent spread quickly from the rest of Europe into France itself. “Victory” that is accompanied by growing privations is hard for the victors to bear. Despite so much “encouragement” of domestic industry, the exclusion of British commodities involved undeniable hardships. The public likes to maintain its customary standard of life. In France, no less than elsewhere in Europe, smuggled English goods found ready purchasers. Even when the heavy profits earned by the smugglers had been paid, the English could supply necessities and luxuries that were cheaper and better than the products of French industry!

  But it was not contraband that made the first hopeless breach in the Continental System. Napoleon was the master of many legions, and could use formidable means to enforce his will. He did not hesitate to avail himself of them. On all hands could be seen the smoke and the flames arising from bonfires of confiscated English smuggled goods. No, it was the French state that allowed itself to be “corrupted” by the English. England needed grain, of which France possessed a superfluity, and England paid hard cash. When the French treasury became aware of the influx of British gold, and realized that the stream might be greatly increased, instead of intensifying the strictness of import prohibition, it clapped on high import duties. These duties were to serve the purposes both of protection and of revenue. They protected home industry, indeed, but they provided the government with so much money that it was decided to issue “licences for import.”

  The exchequer was gaining its ends. Enormous were the sums paid by French and also by German firms for “trading licences.” England, in her turn, when she realized what great advantages the French exchequer was deriving from import duties and licences, began to blockade the continent, and to forbid the export of many articles.

  Thus by the logic of events, which differs from the logic of genius, Napoleon’s France and Pitt’s England had long before exchanged roles when, on April 23, 1814, King Louis XVIII cancelled the law by which the Continental System had been established. That system, by then, existed only in name.

  With other commodities, coffee was freed.

  Parisian café under the Empire (1805)

  Coffee-house of 1848

  New Year’s present for the coffee-house waiter (Vienna, 1840)

  Coffee-mill as a mitrailleuse (Franco-Prussian War cartoon)

  Families may brew coffee here” (middle of the nineteenth century)

  BOOK FOUR

  Coffee in the Nineteenth Century

  16

  The Advance of Tea

  THE barrier which, for seven years, Napoleon’s Continental System established between Britain and the Continent knocked the bottom out of the coffee-market. Coffee prices have seldom been steady for long, but never were they so tumultuously disturbed as during this period. From 1806 onwards, since the stores of coffee that co
ntinued to accumulate in London could no longer be exported, they rose mountain high. Any attempt to maintain prices was foredoomed to failure. No one knew how long the Continental System would remain in being, nor how strictly the emperor would enforce it. Coffee can be kept in good condition for a considerable time, but not for ever. The price of coffee in London consequently came down with a run. Cheap though this staple had now become, the English could not make up their minds to use their own coffee. For too long they had been accustomed to tea. Coffee, which in the repositories was slowly losing its flavour, was in the perilous position of a commodity hoarded by middlemen who can find no market for it. England did not in a year consume more than ten thousand hundredweight of coffee, but there was a thousand times that amount in store. Not all of it in England, of course, but at least in the hands of British merchants overseas. It happened to be called “coffee,” but it was in reality a medium of exchange. London, which was the great clearing-house of the world, financed the coffee trade as it financed all other trades. In its merchant vessels it sent machinery and manufactured articles to the hot coffee-growing countries, to Java and Arabia and America, receiving coffee in payment. Exporters everywhere drew upon the merchant bankers of London.

  Thus coffee was, substantially, a form of money, but it was money that fluctuated in value. When Prussia, Austria, Russia, and Sweden won the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig in October 1813, they were not fighting primarily to assist British export trade, but, nevertheless, the liberation of the London stocks of goods was an obvious outcome. Except for the Peninsular Campaign, Britain had hitherto prudently refrained from participating in the operations against Napoleon on land. It was natural, however, that the emperor’s escape from Elba and return to Paris should have stirred England out of her reserve. She could not face the possibility of a re-establishment of the Continental System, of a repetition of the years from 1806 to 1813. Driven by necessity, she sent an expeditionary force to the Continent, and Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo.

  In January 1813, the price of coffee in London fell to forty shillings a hundredweight. On the Hamburg exchange, coffee had been quoted at over five hundred shillings the hundredweight. This was no more than a fancy price, for a hundredweight of coffee could not be got together anywhere on the Continent. What the smugglers, facing terrible risks, were able to ship across the Channel and the North Sea did not amount to more than a few handfuls of coffee-beans at a time. But when King Louis XVIII abolished the Continental System, prices quickly rose in London and fell in Hamburg to meet one another. The situation of the market was favourable, and a prompt increase in the consumption of coffee might have been expected throughout Europe. Strangely enough, this did not occur. Hamburgers would not, in the long run, content themselves with greatly lowered prices, nor would London merchants be satisfied with a reasonable rise in the price of coffee. They wanted prices that would make good their losses during long years. The upshot of the chaffering between the Continental middlemen and the British, and of their failure to come to an agreement now that British groceries were once more freely admitted to the Continent, was a boom in the tea-market.

  But the rise in the consumption of tea on the mainland of Europe during the first decade of the Restoration was partly determined by other causes than commercial ones.

  In the Napoleonic era, Russia had been for a time allied with France, and then had become one of her most formidable adversaries. Russia had, to begin with, participated willingly enough in Emperor Napoleon’s commercial war against Britain, closing her harbours to British ships, and therefore to commodities brought round the Cape from Hindustan. Unceasingly, however, throughout the years of the blockade, caravan traffic across Asia continued. While in the rest of Europe the stimulating beverages to which people had become accustomed were no longer obtainable, it was otherwise in Russia. There tea was still to be had, tea which, like coffee, contained trimethyldioxypurin. Tea relieved both thirst and hunger, and was also a remedy for excessive cold or excessive heat. Nobles and serfs alike drank tea. What had been carried across the snows and across the blazing deserts from China to Russia was a fraternal link uniting all classes of the Russian people. The northern route led by Kiakhta and Omsk; the southern route, by way of Bukhara and Tashkent.

  The Russians had conquered France, and as a result, tea suddenly became a Paris fashion. The green-clad Alexander, the mightiest of the allied rulers, and his suite of Russian officers—men who tramped along the boulevards wearing top-boots ornamented with clanking spurs–all drank tea. They brought with them the romance and the far-flung distances of the Russian steppes. For years after this incursion, Parisian life had a Russian note. Never before had the French seen so many Russians. At the courts of Catherine I and Catherine II people had thought, conversed, and loved in the French manner. But now Russianism was the mode in France. The army of the victorious Alexander brought with it the ideas and customs of Russia.

  For a long while there existed mystical ties between St. Petersburg and Berlin. Through the instrumentality of Frau von Krüdener, the tsar, with his literary tastes, exercised a considerable influence in German intellectual circles. Now the wave flowed over Paris. This was strange, for one might have expected the vanquished to be hostile to anything that reminded them of their conquerors—but it was a remarkable proof of suppleness in the French character. Hardly was Napoleon crushed when, easily and lightly, Paris renounced the literary trappings of the First Empire, to become Bourbon and Christo-Romantic.

  Throughout Europe, the Christo-Romanticists drank tea. This infusion influenced poetry, opinions, conversation. It promoted gentleness and thoughtfulness, but also emotionalism and sentimentality. Chateaubriand, the leading light of the new poetic world, read his epics aloud at the famous Parisian tea-parties. He read well, but when he reached a climax in one of his descriptions of Weltschmerz he was likely to be so carried away by his own eloquence as to burst into tears. Even when the reading was over, his tears would drop into his teacup. Such scenes were repulsive to those who were out of tune with the Restoration epoch, to Italian carbonari, to Spanish revolutionists, to enthusiasts who were ready to fight for the liberation of Greece. In a word, the political opponents of “a Europe that had gone to sleep” remained true to the ardours of coffee.

  As far as Germany was concerned, it was especially in the circles that were out of sympathy with beer-drinking students that tea was widely consumed. Even before the inauguration of the Continental System, before 1806, tea had been a favourite beverage in the literary salons of Berlin—English tea imported by way of Hamburg.

  It need hardly be said that Britons travelling on the Continent were great propagandists for tea. After the downfall of Napoleon, when a German tour became the vogue for Londoners, the English who went up the Rhine on their way to Switzerland wanted tea-rooms, so tearooms were provided for these travellers with money to spend. Even in typical coffee-drinking countries like Austria and Italy, Englishmen insisted on being supplied with Ceylon tea. But they were not able to impose their beverage upon the inhabitants. In Italy today, according to the latest statistics, the consumption of tea is no more than one ounce per annum per head of population. The quantity is so small that we may assume the only tea-drinkers in Italy to be British visitors.

  Nevertheless, tea made headway in Germany both before and after the Napoleonic epoch, as we can learn from the literature of the period. Uhland wrote a poem in praise of tea. The evening tea-parties that became fashionable in literary circles were gently ridiculed by that prince of satirists, Heinrich Heine.

  17

  Pleasures of the Ladies of Berlin

  YET it would be an illusion to suppose that in those days more tea than coffee was drunk in Germany. The reverse was true, and herein we have an elementary instance of how the writers of history err when they depend mainly on “literary evidence.” Such evidence is all we have to rely upon as regards the greater part of antiquity. But when we come to the nineteenth century,
we are guided by figures relating to economic life, by the science of statistics.

  During the year 1841, Hamburg imported 36,000 tons of coffee, but only 137 tons of tea. The figures show indisputably the interesting fact that two hundred and seventy times more coffee was imported than tea.

  The figures are remarkable even though the difference between the consumption of tea and coffee was not so extensive as they might seem to imply. From a given weight of leaves, six times as many cups of tea can be prepared as of coffee from the same weight of beans. Allowing for this fact, however, we learn that forty-five times as much coffee was consumed as tea.

  The port of Hamburg, of course, did not supply German territory exclusively, being in part a place of transit trade supplying various regions in northern and eastern Europe. Still, since this applied both to tea and to coffee, the consumption of the respective beverages in Germany was not notably affected by the consideration.

  Forty-five times as much coffee was drunk in Germany, as compared with tea. At the first glance this seems barely credible. Where were these great quantities of coffee consumed? In the public life of the country there is little vestige of anything of the kind. Coffee-drinking did not leave any noteworthy traces in the street life of Berlin during those days. About the middle of the nineteenth century, when there were numerous coffee-houses in the streets of Paris, and a still larger number in the streets of Vienna, there were hardly any such places in Berlin. The Prussian capital was abundantly supplied with eating-houses, beer-saloons, wine-shops of all sorts and sizes, but had very few coffee-houses. Since we know that at that date, in literary circles, tea was the principal beverage, we have to ask who, during the epoch in question, were the consumers of these vast quantities of coffee?