On the evening of June 9, between 250–300 men—many of them reluctant converts pressed into service by Brandreth at gunpoint—left Pentrich in the pouring rain, armed with scythes, pikes, and a small number of guns. En route to Nottingham, where they expected sixteen thousand reinforcements to join them, they met a detachment of Light Dragoons, dispatched by the government in response to Oliver’s reports. The marchers panicked and fled. Authorities tracked down and arrested more than eighty of them; in October, thirty-five were tried on charges of attempting “by force of arms to subvert and destroy the Government and Constitution.” Twenty-three were found guilty: fourteen—including Bacon—were transported to Australia, six were imprisoned, and three (one of whom was Brandreth) were hanged and beheaded for treason. It was a pitiable end to a wretched enterprise that has been termed “England’s last attempted revolution.”
By that time, Parliament had begun to investigate alternatives to the traditional system of poor laws and parish relief. Alarmed by the rising cost of providing assistance to the poor in the early months of 1817, the House of Commons appointed a select committee to investigate the effects of the poor laws and recommend improvements. In July, the select committee delivered its conclusion that “unless some efficacious check be interposed, there is every reason to think that the amount of the [poor rate] will continue as it has done, to increase, till … it shall have absorbed the profits of the property on which the rate may have been assessed, producing thereby the neglect and ruin of the land.”
In the meantime, Parliament approved the Poor Employment Act of 1817, which empowered the British government to make loans for up to three years to individuals or corporations who could demonstrate that the funds would be used to employ large numbers of workers. Initially, the total amount available for loans was capped at 1.75 million pounds sterling; within two months, the government had received applications for projects—generally for public works such as roads, canals, or draining marshlands—totalling more than a million pounds. The swift response proved the depth of the distress that still afflicted Britain in the summer of 1817. Although Parliament clearly intended the measure as a temporary expedient, it was renewed repeatedly. The act represented “a significant new departure,” as M. W. Flinn has pointed out, since it “implicitly acknowledged the obligation of governments to do something more about depression than they had formerly considered adequate.” Instead of limiting assistance solely to financial institutions or established commercial firms, it provided funds that would be used directly for the relief of unemployment and poverty, and in that sense provided critical momentum to the notion that the government bore a responsibility to improve the life of the ordinary British citizen.
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JANE Austen’s health deteriorated in the winter of 1816–17. She tired easily, and seldom left the house in Chawton; neighbors called her “the poor young lady.” To her family, Austen pretended her illness was really nothing: “air and exercise are what I want,” she insisted. She spent her days writing letters and the opening chapters of a new novel, The Brothers, even though her hand sometimes trembled badly. To her niece Fanny she admitted on March 23 that “I have had a good deal of fever at times & indifferent nights, but am considerably better now, & recovering my Looks a little.…”
But she was not. On May 24, Jane Austen rode in a carriage (it rained nearly all the way) to the hospital at Winchester. Although she rallied from time to time, her doctors knew of no cure for her illness, and she passed away on July 18. The precise nature of Austen’s fatal illness remains a matter of controversy among biographers and physicians. Over the past fifty years, her death has been ascribed variously to Addison’s disease, cancer, and, most recently, tuberculosis from the consumption of unpasteurized milk.
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GRAIN prices in France rose throughout the winter and spring. By January 1817, the price of wheat nationwide was 180 percent higher than the average in 1815. In March, it was 190 percent higher; in May, 230 percent. But the national averages hid significant disparities among the various regions of France. Eastern provinces such as Alsace and Rhône-Alpes, where the summer’s cold and rain had wreaked the most damage on the harvest, continued to face grain prices more than twice as high as those in most western regions.
For the most part, government officials held fast to the principles enunciated in the Interior Ministry’s circular of November: They would brook no interference with the free movement of grain from one department to another, nor would they permit the mass intimidation of farmers or merchants to force the sale of grain at reduced prices. At the same time, Louis’ government made substantial purchases of foreign wheat (largely from Baltic ports), which it intended to sell to the populace below cost; it also subsidized bakers directly, established soup kitchens, and advised the local prefects to provide assistance to the elderly and infirm.
Obsessed by fears of a popular uprising in Paris, Louis insisted that local authorities hold down the price of bread in the capital, preferably below the limit of ninety centimes for a two-kilogram loaf established during Napoléon’s reign. Nevertheless, Louis adamantly refused to grant Parisian officials additional funds to help them achieve that objective. As more and more peasants from the surrounding countryside drifted into Paris in search of cheaper bread in the late winter of 1817, the task grew even more daunting: one estimate classified nearly 200,000 Parisians as indigent and therefore deserving of subsidized bread.
Although a loaf of bread in Paris—even with government subsidies—nearly doubled in price between the spring of 1816 and the spring of 1817, it still cost only about 60 percent of a similar loaf in the Alsatian capital of Strasbourg. Meanwhile, prices rose even higher in the French countryside, where bread often cost three to four times as much as in the cities. And the quality of bread suffered as well. The combination of prolonged cool weather during the summer (which kept the wheat kernels from ripening) and rain during the harvest (which led to sprout-damaged wheat) produced grain that weighed only about 75 to 80 percent of top-quality wheat. Consequently, the flour absorbed less water and frequently resulted in bread that was sticky and gummy. “You could not eat the bread,” complained one disgusted peasant in central France. “It stuck to the knife.”
In February, riots broke out in northern France, particularly in Haute-Normandie and the Somme, to prevent grain from leaving the region. Throughout the country, authorities reported an increase in property crimes, particulary theft, and a rise in attacks by armed bands of outlaws upon travelers. As a result, farmers often refused to risk shipping their grain, at least until it was completely paid for, and the dearth in eastern France deepened. In areas where local authorities provided grain allowances for the poor—in the larger cities, for the most part—they found it necessary to reduce their allotments and substitute other food, such as potatoes, for wheat or bread.
As grain from the Baltic and the United States began to arrive, royal officials directed it first to Paris and then to the supply routes in northern France through which grain shipments usually traveled, to reduce the likelihood of future disruptions. Between the cost of grain imports and the expense of bread subsidies—which together totalled nearly 70 million francs—the national budget slid quickly into the red. Only a hastily arranged loan from British and Dutch bankers in February kept the royal government afloat. Wellington, meanwhile, agreed to reduce the Allied occupation forces by 30,000 troops, particularly from the eastern departments, thereby alleviating pressure on both the French budget and local food supplies.
Despite the government’s efforts, distress continued to grow throughout France during the spring of 1817. En route to Switzerland, Louis Simond—a native Frenchman who had achieved wealth as a merchant in New York City—noticed the rising number of indigent peasants as he traveled through eastern France. “Beggars, very numerous yesterday, have increased greatly,” he noted in his journal. “At every stage, a crowd of women and children and of old men, gather round the carriage; t
heir cries, the eloquence of all these pale and emaciated countenances, lifted up to us with imploring hands, are more than we can well bear.” Numerous citizens already had died, Simond noted, “if not of hunger, at least of the insufficiency and bad quality of the food.”
Sir Stamford Raffles, too, encountered hordes of beggars as he and his cousin, Thomas, passed through eastern France that spring. (The former lieutenant-governor of Java had recently dropped the “Thomas” from his name.) The beggars, wrote Thomas after leaving the town of Champagnole, “were chiefly children, and their numbers and their importunity was truly astonishing. From the very slow rate at which we traveled [ascending a hill], they were frequently enabled to follow us for a considerable distance, and this they did, entreating in the most piteous accents, and repeating the same words with a sort of measured intonation, Monsieur, s’il vous plaît, donnez-moi charité.” Thomas Raffles breathed a sigh of relief when the road leveled off and his carriage could pick up speed, leaving the unfortunate children behind.
Peasants and townspeople from the provinces surrounding Paris continued to flock into the capital; on the first of June, Simond noted one report that “one hundred thousand souls have been added to its destitute population within a few months!” Nevertheless, the government’s policy of cheap bread in the city continued to avert any outbreak of disorder or famine. The rest of France was not so fortunate. In one department after another, food riots broke out in the spring and early summer. Much of the violence was perpetrated by bands of armed vagrants, usually peasants desperate for food, who migrated to areas where there was at least an adequate supply of grain. Sometimes they seized grain wherever they could find it; often, however, they offered to purchase it at a reduced price.
At the end of May, a series of large-scale disturbances shook one market town after another. On May 30, a mob of 3,000 peasants sacked the grain market in the Burgundy town of Sens; when local officials called in troops from a nearby garrison to quell the disorder, the rioters dispersed into the countryside, where they extorted grain from farmers by threatening to kill them and their families. The following day, an even larger crowd plundered a market town in the department of Aube, in northeastern France. Again, the authorities required regular army troops to crush the disturbance.
Five thousand rioters assaulted the town of Château-Thierry on June 3, pillaging the storehouses and seizing grain shipments on the Marne River. A pitched battle ensued between the peasants—armed with swords, bayonets, and sticks—and government soldiers, leaving several rioters dead. Once more, the trouble spread into the countryside, ending only when local officials essentially requisitioned grain from farmers to distribute among the protestors.
For the most part, these disturbances were remarkably free of any political content. From the government’s perspective, however, the trouble that erupted at Lyon in the second week of June bore a far more ominous cast. Long a stronghold of Bonapartist sentiment, the town of Lyon was suffering acutely from the depression in the textile industry, and the surrounding countryside from the dearth of grain. Local officials prudently subsidized the cost of bread in Lyon, but could not afford to match that price in the rural areas. By June 1817 the price of bread in eastern France had increased to nearly four times its cost in the spring of 1816. Rumors of Napoléon’s imminent return had swirled through the region for the past several months, and the royal government braced for a reprise of the Hundred Days. “The excessive price of bread and of all kinds of provisions,” warned one local official, “has been the principal cause that has set off the ill-will likely to spur on the agitation in the country.”
On the evening of June 8, several hundred demonstrators gathered in the suburbs of Lyon and raised the tricolor flag. Already on alert, government troops quickly quashed the rising, but the mayor and the commanding general in the department of the Rhône decided to treat the incident as if it had been a full-fledged insurrection. They convened military courts and swiftly tried more than a hundred suspected conspirators, convicting seventy-nine, including a dozen who were sentenced to death. Executions took place almost immediately.
During the following year, the Lyon conspiracy became a highly charged political issue. Moderate royalists and liberals, along with the merchants of Lyon, charged that the government exaggerated the danger of revolt, and blamed the uprising primarily on the desperate food situation. Ultra-Royalists insisted the demonstrators had posed a very real threat to the royal government, and that only severely repressive measures had thwarted an insurrection. Eventually even Decazes, the minister of police, concluded that the danger had been minimal.
Following the affair at Lyon, conditions gradually improved across France. Most of the government’s purchases of grain from abroad arrived during the summer, sparking a decline in the price of bread that began in July and continued through the remainder of the year, although in December grain still cost 166 percent of its base price in 1815. There were twice as many criminal prosecutions in French courts in 1817 as in 1815, but government officials were happy to attribute the increase to food shortages, rather than political discontent. Accordingly, the king issued a pardon on August 14 for all crimes committed as a result of the scarcity of grain. “The zeal and firmness which our courts and tribunals have brought to the maintenance of public order has merited our approval,” Louis declared, “but our heart has groaned from the severities that justice and the law have commanded against a too large number of persons, who, in several parts of the kingdom, have been involved in criminal disorders through the scarcity and dearness of provisions. We feel the need not to confuse these unfortunates with the vicious men who would have tried, in some places, to push them into excesses whose most certain result was to aggravate their distress and to increase the ills of the state.”
Louis spent the rest of 1817 trying to eradicate the memory of Napoléon from the consciousness of Parisians. The Austerlitz Bridge was renamed the Bridge of the King’s Garden, and workers scratched the large letter “N” from the exterior of the Louvre. The first steamboat “smoked and clattered” its way up the Seine as a harbinger of a new era. And, as Victor Hugo pointed out, “all sensible people were agreed that the era of revolution had been closed forever by King Louis XVIII, surnamed ‘the Immortal Author of the Charter.’”
But in the eastern provinces—particularly Alsace and Lorraine—an estimated 20,000 disillusioned farmers and laborers emigrated by the end of the year, lured by extravagant promises from agents for shipowners of the opportunities that awaited them in the promised lands of Russia and the United States. Nearly a fourth of the emigrants were Alsatians who chose to settle in the United States. After making their way across France to the port of Le Havre, they found that passage across the Atlantic cost between 350 to 400 francs. Those who could not afford to pay were offered labor contracts which essentially turned the passengers into indentured servants; many ended up in Louisiana working in appalling conditions on cotton plantations. Treatment of these “redemptioners” was so brutal that the Louisiana legislature passed a measure in 1818 providing them with at least a modicum of protection by the state government.
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BY early 1817, the typhus epidemic in Ireland was spreading rapidly from the west. As cold, wet conditions persisted through the winter and spring, and food shortages mounted, the fever claimed more and more lives. Nearly all of those affected lived in impoverished rural areas; wealthy landowners, removed from physical contact with peasants and laborers, barely suffered at all.
Peel’s hopes for continued peace in Ireland perished in the wake of the epidemic. The authorities attempted to redistribute what little grain remained in the country, taking supplies from those regions with even meager harvests to provide for those areas where the harvest had failed entirely. Not surprisingly, the residents of those towns forced to export food—many of whose residents were close to starvation themselves—rioted at the prospect of being left with even less. Merchants whose desire for profit o
utweighed their sense of charity began to buy grain, even at expensive prices, and hoarded it, believing that they could sell it for still more as the shortages worsened. Their actions provoked angry reactions from starving peasants, who demanded that the government set a maximum price for grain.
On the night of February 19, 1817, the residents of the western coastal town of Carrigaholt attacked the supply ship Inverness, which had been loaded at Limerick with butter, pork, and bacon to be shipped to London. When the ship landed briefly at Carrigaholt, a mob formed, apparently furious that Irish provisions were destined for the more affluent English. As the local police commander, Captain Miller, explained in a note to the shipment’s owner, the crowd “boarded and rendered [the Inverness] not seaworthy, by scuttling her, and tearing away all her rigging.” The rioters then proceeded to “rob the crew of all their clothes, tore their shirts, which they made bags of, to carry away the plunder, and then broached the tierces of pork and distributed the contents to people on shore, who waited to convey them to the country.” The police intervened, recovered the goods, and arrested the rioters.
Trouble continued the following morning, however, when local residents “collected in some thousands, and went down to the beach, where they formed into three bodies … declaring that they defied the police, and would possess themselves again of what had been taken from them.” This time the crowd succeeded in overcoming the police; again they boarded the ship and stripped it clean. “A more complete plunder,” reported Captain Miller, “has seldom been witnessed.” The mob even managed to steal the ship’s anchors and bilge pump, while the women of the town supplied their husbands and brothers with whiskey. A detachment of twenty cavalry managed to disperse the crowd, but not before three men were killed and thirty-five arrested.
The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History Page 27
