The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850

by Brian Fagan

  The bitterly cold winters of the late seventeenth century found France ill prepared for food shortages. Agricultural production declined seriously after 1680, then tumbled disastrously during the cold and wet years between 1687 and 1701. Several severe subsistence crises ensued, as grain prices rose to the highest levels of the seventeenth century. An apocalyptic famine descended on much of northern Europe and France in 1693/94, the worst since 1661. England suffered little, because of higher agricultural productivity, crop diversity, well-organized grain import networks from the Baltic, and advances in farming technology and farming. Most French peasants were still firmly wedded to wheat, which is notably intolerant of heavy rainfall. Nor could Flemish methods and fodder crops be adopted in the warmer, drought-prone south. Having lived through a long period of relatively benign climate, cereal farmers were not equipped for cold, wet seasons when grape harvests came as late as November. With each bad harvest, grain shortages made themselves felt immediately. Many poor subsisted on bread made from ground nut shells mixed with barley and oat flour. Wrote an official in Limousin prophetically: "People will be hungry after Lent."8 The rootless population of beggars and unemployed mushroomed. Provinces and parishes held on to grain stocks to fulfill constant army requisitions while entire communities went hungry. There were bread riots, but few peasants related their hunger to the actions of their rulers. This indifference was an authoritarian government's strongest weapon.

  In the end, a tenth of Louis XIV's subjects perished from famine and its attendant epidemics in 1693/94. The glittering life at Versailles continued unaffected. No one, whether monarch, noble, or peasant, gave much thought to broadening the diet or of encouraging new farming methods in the face of real declines in productivity. Regular food short ages were as much a reality of life as the changes in seasons and the venality of petty officials.

  Yet the kingdom was weakened by famine, malnutrition and disease, and undermined by constant war. Thousands of hectares of land had been abandoned, towns were depopulated, and trade suffered badly. The troubled times frightened many of the nobility, who were well aware of the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 across the Channel, which had toppled the Stuart monarchs, brought William of Orange to the throne and a true form of democracy to England. For the first time, deference and conformity gave way to the first stirrings of dissent and independent political thought among nobles and intellectuals.

  The death of Louis XIV in 1715 brought to an end an era when neither the king nor his advisers wasted any time listening to popular critics. No official body like the English Parliament served as a focus for public political debate. The Estates General had last met in 1614, at a gathering more remarkable for the quarrels between its members than any opposition to the king. During Louis XV's reign, loud opposing voices were heard from many quarters-the church, provincial courts, and writers of many political convictions. This was the Age of Enlightenment, when hallowed orthodoxies were challenged at every turn, when the king and his advisers became increasingly irresolute in the face of more vociferous opposition. Occasionally, a powerful minister would advocate new ideas such as agricultural reform or financial reorganization of government in response to the constant barrage of political agitation in books, broadsheets, pamphlets, and speeches. Invariably the reform foundered on the hesitation of the monarch and the petty rivalries of his courtiers. Government became increasingly vulnerable in the face of public opinion. Growing tensions within French society and the emergence of powerful rivals such as Britain, Prussia, and the Russian Empire began to undermine the supreme authority of the Bourbon monarchs-the ancien regime. And the entire superstructure of the state rested on highly insecure economic foundations, which, far more than in Britain, were at the mercy of sudden climatic shifts. But no one concerned with political change in France paid much attention to the peasantry, who fed them and bore the brunt of poor harvests.

  For the earlier part of Louis XV's reign, climatic conditions were favorable. Between 1730 and 1739, the North Atlantic Oscillation was in a high mode, with a pronounced westerly circulation that brought mostly mild, damp winters and cooler, dry summers. Frontal system after frontal system crossed the North Atlantic, dumping ample rainfall on western Europe. The winters were the mildest for a generation, as much as 0.6'C above normal for England and as much as 1.3'C warmer in Holland. Memories of savage winters faded rapidly. From 1735 to 1739, seasonal temperatures in the Low Countries were higher than those for the entire period from 1740 to 1944.9

  The sudden cold of 1739 to 1742 came as a shock. In early 1740, Paris suffered through seventy-five days of frost, causing "a great dearth of all provisions."10 Peasants throughout France lived on the verge of starvation. Many died of accident hypothermia and hunger-related diseases. Northern France had such primitive housing conditions that thousands of children perished from cold. When the thaw came, "great floods did prodigious mischief," as rivers rose far beyond their banks and inundated thousands of hectares of arable land. The cool, dry spring of 1740 delayed planting as much as six weeks. Throughout much of Europe, excessive rainfall then damaged growing cereal crops and vineyards. As prices climbed and food became scarce, alarmed bureaucrats started referring in their correspondence to earlier, well-remembered famines.

  From two and a half centuries' distance, the signs of environmental stress and population pressure in late eighteenth-century France are easy to discern. Under such circumstances, preindustrial states, especially those in some political and social disorder, are extremely vulnerable to partial or total collapse.

  There are ample precedents from earlier history. II Ancient Egyptian civilization almost disintegrated in 2180 B.C., when El Nino-caused droughts reduced the Nile to a trickle and the central government was unable to feed starving villagers. Only the efforts of able provincial governors saved the day. Maya civilization in Central America offers another sobering analogy. By A.D. 800, the Maya city-states of the southern Yucatan were living on the edge of environmental disaster. An ambitious elite, living in a world of frenzied competition and warfare, was oblivious to the impending environmental crisis in the surrounding countryside. Their escalating demands for food and labor from the common people came at a time of environmental stress, when the land was showing dangerous signs of exhaustion and growing population densities meant that the Maya had literally eaten up their environment. A series of catastrophic droughts in the following century helped bring disaster to a society already in political and social turmoil.

  Eighteenth-century France was not on the verge of environmental collapse, but the links between land shortage, population growth, growing vulnerability to poor harvests, and sudden climatic shifts made for a volatile countryside that would have been unimaginable in earlier times.

  Until 1788, the plight of the farmer figured little in the volatile political equations of eighteenth-century France. During the second half of the eighteenth century, between 75 and 80 percent of France's population were still peasants. Four million of them owned their land; the rest, some 20 million, lived on someone else's and paid rent. The larger scale farmers were mostly in the north and northeast, many of them renting hectarage from absentee landlords. A small number of landowning peasants survived on smaller properties, but most were settled on tiny rented plots, supplementing their incomes by outside work, and marginally self-sufficient in the best of years. The landless formed the lowest tier of the peasantry: several million people living off casual labor, on rare plots of common land, or as vagrants. By the late eighteenth century, increasing rural populations, and complex inheritance laws that led to ever tinier subdivisions, had created a chronic land shortage. There were pressures to enclose land, intensive competition for vacant properties, and an inevitable rise in the destitute vagrant population.12

  Over the country as a whole, an averaged-sized family needed about 4.8 hectares to support itself at a basic subsistence level. Most did not have this. Depending on the region, 58 to 70 percent of the peasants, including day
laborers, had access to two hectares or less. In some heavily populated regions, 75 percent of the peasants owned less than a hectare. The British farming author Arthur Young, who traveled widely in France on the eve of the Revolution, summarized the situation in terse words: "Go to districts where the properties are minutely divided, and you will see great distress, even misery, and probably very bad agriculture. Go to others, where such subdivision has not taken place, and you will find a better cultivation and infinitely less misery."13 Compared with England or the Low Countries, most French agriculture was astoundingly backward. Farm buildings were primitive and poorly arranged, intensive cultivation that was now routinely practiced in England or Holland was unknown in most areas. Few peasants had enough feed or forage for their livestock, so they slaughtered many head of cattle when drought struck, in the autumn, or when the hay harvest was poor. They left their fields fallow one year out of three, sometimes for two out of three. As much as a quarter of the low-yielding annual crop yield went for seed rather than food. Many farmers did not even have iron plows.

  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, m
any 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.