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

by Brian Fagan

  The poor harvest could not have come at a worse moment. France had entered into an unfavorable trade treaty with England in 1776. The pact reduced import duties on English goods, the notion being to encourage French manufacturers to mechanize production in response to enhanced competition. A flood of cheap imports from across the Channel overwhelmed the cloth industry. Cloth production alone fell by 50 percent between 1787 and 1789. The 5,672 looms in Amiens and Abbeville in 1785 were down to 2,204 by 1789. Thirty-six thousand people were put out of work, throwing many poor workers onto city streets at a time when hungry peasants were flocking to urban centers in search of food. The rural crisis might have been short-lived had not urban unemployment mushroomed at the same time. In Paris, the government subsidized bread prices out of fear of the mobs, but to no avail. The situation was soon out of control.

  Many political agendas seethed in France in 1788, but the poor, who had no interest in politics, had one primary concern-bread. And bread came from grain, whose abundance in turn depended on good harvests or generous imports. The weather of 1788 was not, of course, the primary cause of the French Revolution. But the shortage of grain and bread and the suffering resulting from dearth contributed in large measure to its timing. The weakness of the French social order, born of generations of chronic hunger, contributed to the outbreaks of violence before the historic events of the summer of 1789, when "the Great Fear of 1789" gripped much of France in mass hysteria and revolution and cast the peasantry into the political arena.

  In the bitterly cold winter of 1788/89, heavy snowfall blocked roads, major rivers froze over, and much commerce came to a standstill. The spring thaw flooded thousands of hectares of farming lands. Bread riots broke out in March in Brittany, then in Flanders and elsewhere, with ri oters fixing prices in shops and marketplaces. In April the disturbances spread to Paris, where people were anxious about the lean months between the exhaustion of one year's crops and the harvesting of the next in late summer. Bread riots continued sporadically through the summer in towns large and small, where peasants attended weekly markets. Hungry day laborers were only too glad to join in riots over food prices. Rumors of widespread disorders spread like wild fire through the countryside. Desperate families stopped grain wagons and seized their cargoes, paying the appropriate price or simply helping themselves. Only the largest convoys had military escorts: there was insufficient manpower for comprehensive protection. Everyone distrusted and feared everyone else. The towns lived in constant fear of mobs of ransacking peasants. Farmers became apprehensive that a surge of townspeople would come and rob their granaries. Every beggar, vagrant, and rioter became a "brigand." Inevitably, too, rumors swept the countryside that the aristocrats were forging an alliance against all commoners.

  With bread prices higher than they had been in almost twenty years, many people expected even larger hungry mobs to take to the streets. When the riots did come, they were triggered by a chance remark by a wallpaper manufacturer named Reveillon, who said in a public meeting that the government should lower grain prices so that wages could be limited to fifteen sous.23 Rumors of impending wage reductions swept the restless capital. The disturbances were old fashioned bread riots, but they came as the Estates-General was about to meet. Political events soon overtook the disturbances, as the popular minister reformist Jacques Neckar, who had taken frantic measures to import grain to the capital, was dismissed by the king. On July 12, Neckar left office. Two days later came the storming of the Bastille.

  The bread riots and harsh security efforts that tried to expel vagrants from Paris and other centers heightened the anxiety. Everyone believed the aristocrats would forge an alliance with brigands and wage war against the poor. In fact, the alleged alliance was a rumor propagated by revolutionaries who saw an aristocratic plot at every turn. Bands of peasants armed themselves throughout the country.

  Hunger, hope, and fear drove the rural crisis of 1789. But what made the crisis different from earlier ones were political expectations arising from an impending election of deputies, in which each peasant would have an individual vote and a chance to state a grievance in a cahier. Many were naive enough to believe that the writing of a cahier would produce an immediate addressing of the complaint-the reduction of tithes, an easing of taxation, and so on. When nothing happened, the peasants started refusing to pay taxes and feudal dues. After July 13, -there were widespread disturbances in the countryside, directed especially at seignorial castles and manor houses. The insurgents searched for grain stores and especially for legal documents establishing feudal rights, which were promptly burned. In some cases, lords were forced to sign declarations that they would not reimpose them in the future. The disturbances were remarkably orderly except when lords or their agents offered violence. Then there was bloodshed and burnings. Some bands were led by men who even bore orders said (falsely) to have come from the king himself.

  The trail of destruction and reports of widespread rural insurrection soon reached Paris, where the National Assembly turned its immediate attention to feudal privilege and to the needs of the peasants. On August 4, 1789, deputies of the more liberal aristocracy and clergy surrendered their feudal rights and fiscal immunities. In triumph, the Assembly claimed that "the feudal regime had been utterly destroyed," a misleading statement, for they merely surrendered some lasting remnants of serfdom, while other privileges were only redeemable by purchase. Four years later, the insistence and militancy of the peasants led to the cancellation of all debts.

  A prolonged drought now added to the chaos. Rivers dried up and watermills came to a standstill, resulting in a flour shortage and another surge in food prices. By mid-September, the women of the markets were leading the agitation that led to the famous march to Versailles on October 5. Two columns of protesters marched in the rain to the palace to present their demands to Louis XVI. He promptly gave orders to reprovision the capital and sanctioned the National Assembly's August decrees and the all-important Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, which was to form a partial basis for the new Constitution. The royal family was forced to accompany the crowd back to Paris and the ancien regime collapsed.

  The Great Fear was, in the final analysis, the culmination of a subsistence crisis that had brewed for generations, of a chronic food dearth triggered by draconian land policies and sudden climatic shifts that pushed millions of French peasants across the fine line separating survival from deprivation. The panic was followed by a violent reaction, when the countryside turned against the aristocracy, unifying the peasants and making them realize the full extent of their political power. There would probably not have been a French Revolution if hate for outmoded feudal institutions had not unified peasant and bourgeois in its attempted destruction. The events of 1789 stemmed in considerable, and inconspicuous, part from the farmer's vulnerability to cycles of wet and cold, warmth and drought. As Sebastian Mercier wrote prophetically in 1770: "The grain which feeds man has also been his executioner."24

  This was succeeded, for nearly an hour, by a tremulous motion of the earth, distinctly indicated by the tremor of large window frames; another comparatively violent explosion occurred late in the afternoon, but the fall of dust was barely perceptible. The atmosphere appeared to be loaded with a thick vapour: the Sun was rarely visible, and only at short intervals appearing very obscurely behind a semitransparent substance.

  A British resident ofSurakarta, eastern Java, on the Mount

  Tambora eruption, April 11, 1815

  n April 11, 1815, the island of Sumbawa in eastern Java sweltered under a languid tropical evening. Suddenly, a series of shocks, like cannon fire, shattered the torpid sunset and frightened the inhabitants, still jittery about gunfire. Napoleon's representative to the Dutch East Indies had only recently been driven from the islands and the British were administering the region. The garrison at Jogjakarta sent out a detachment of troops to check on nearby military posts. As the sun set, the fusillade seemed to grow louder. By chance, the Britis
h government vessel Benares was in port at Makasser in the southern Celebes. She set sail with a force of troops to search the islands to the south and flush out any pirates. Finding none, the Benares returned to port after three days. Five days later, on April 19, the explosions resumed, this time so intense that they shook both houses and ships. The captain of the Benares again sailed southward to investigate, under a sky so dark with ash he could barely see the moon. Complete darkness mantled the region, cinders and ash rained down for days on villages and towns. Mount Tambora, at the northern tip of Sumbawa, had erupted with catastrophic violence.

  After three months of violent convulsions, Mount Tambora was 1,300 meters lower. Its summit had vanished in a cloud of lava and fine ash that rose high into the atmosphere. Volcanic debris smothered the British resident's house sixty-five kilometers away and darkened the sky over a radius of five hundred kilometers. The British lieutenant governor of Java, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, wrote: "The area over which tremulous noises and other volcanic effects extended was one thousand English miles [1,600 kilometers] in circumference, including the whole of the Molucca Islands, Java, a considerable portion of Celebes, Sumatra, and Borneo. ... Violent whirlwinds carried men, horses, cattle, and whatever came within their influence, into the air."' At least 12,000 people on Sumbawa died in the explosion, and another 44,000 from famine caused by falling ashes on the neighboring island of Lombok. Floating trees covered the ocean for kilometers. Fierce lava flows surged downslope into the Pacific and covered thousands of hectares of cultivated land. Floating cinders clogged the Pacific to a depth of six meters over an area of several square kilometers.

  Volcanologists have fixed the dates of more than 5,560 eruptions since the last Ice Age. Mount Tambora is among the most powerful of them all, greater even than the Santorini eruption of 1450 B.C., which may have given rise to the legend of Atlantis. The ash discharge was one hundred times that of Mount Saint Helens in Washington State in 1980 and exceeded Krakatau in 1883. Krakatau, the first major eruption to be studied at all systematically, is known to have reduced direct sunlight over much of the world by 15 to 20 percent. The much larger Tambora event, coming during a decade of remarkable volcanic activity, had even more drastic effects at a time when global temperatures were already lower than today.

  At least three major volcanic eruptions occurred between 1812 and 1817: Soufriere on Saint Vincent in the Caribbean erupted in 1812, Mayon in the Philippines in 1814 and Tambora a year later. This extraordinary volcanic activity produced dense volcanic dust trails in the stratosphere. The Krakatau event provides scientists with a baseline index for measuring the extent of volcanic dust veils. If 1883 is given an index of 1,000, 1811 to 1818 is roughly 4,400. Another set of powerful eruptions between 1835 and 1841 produced an index of 4,200 and further colder weather.

  Dense volcanic dust at high altitudes decreases the absorption of incoming solar radiation by reducing the transparency of the atmosphere, which leads to lower surface temperatures. The effects can be gauged by worldwide measurements taken after the Krakatau eruption of 1883, when the monthly average of solar radiation fell as much as 20-22 percent below the mean value for 1883-1938. While an increase in scattered light and heat (diffuse radiation) compensates for some of the depletion, a fluctuation of only 1 percent in the solar energy absorbed by the earth can alter surface temperatures by as much as 1 °C. In a marginal farming area like northern Scandinavia, this difference can be critical.

  A decrease in solar radiation leads to a weakening of zonal circulation in northern latitudes and pushes the prevailing westerly depression tracks southward toward the equator. The subpolar low moves southward. Cooler and duller spring weather arrives in northern temperate latitudes, bringing more storms than usual. Sustained volcanic activity can have a powerful effect. The great eruptions of 1812 to 1815 helped move the subpolar low of midsummer down to 60.7° north, a full six degrees farther south than it was in the Julys between 1925 and 1934.

  The years 1805 to 1820 were for many Europeans the coldest of the Little Ice Age. White Christmases were commonplace after 1812. The novelist Charles Dickens, born in that year, grew up during the coldest decade England has seen since the 1690s, and his short stories and A Christmas Carol seem to owe much to his impressionable years. Volcanoes were the partial culprit. The Tambora ash, lingering in the atmosphere over much of the world for up to two years, produced unusual weather. A two-day blizzard in Hungary during late January 1816 produced brown and flesh-colored snow. The inhabitants of Taranto, in southern Italy, were terrified by red and yellow snowflakes in a place where even normal snow was a rarity. Brown, bluish, and red snow fell in Maryland in April and May. Everywhere, the dust hung in a dry fog. Wrote an English vicar: "During the entire season the sun rose each morning as though in a cloud of smoke, red and rayless, shedding little light or warmth and setting at night behind a thick cloud of vapor, leaving hardly a trace of its having passed over the face of the earth."2

  The year 1816 acquired immediate notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic as "the year without a summer." Heavy rain accompanied abnormally low temperatures in western and central Europe throughout the vital growing months. The monthly temperatures for that summer were between 2.3 and 4.6°C colder than the mean. Northern England experienced the coldest July in 192 years of record keeping. Hailstorms and violent thunder showers battered growing crops. On July 20, the London Times remarked that "should the present wet weather continue, the corn will inevitably be laid and the effects of such a calamity and at such a time cannot be otherwise than ruinous to the farmers, and even to the people at large." 3 In Kent, one of the warmer parts of England, a poor wheat harvest ended on October 13, compared with the usual September 3. The crop was in "so damp a condition, as to be unfit for immediate use."4

  Europe was still reeling from a generation of war and economic blockade. Widespread industrial unemployment from the scaling down of warrelated manufacturing and the demobilization of thousands of men from armies and navies had already created hunger for many poorer families. The meager harvest soon drove cereal and bread prices beyond these families' reach. English wheat yields in 1816 were the lowest between 1815 and 1857, at a time when food and drink consumed two-thirds of a laboring family's budget. Fortunately, large grain reserves from the previous year kept English cereal prices reasonably low for a while.

  In France, "you could not eat the bread, it stuck to the knife."5 In the country as a whole, the crop yielded half the normal grain after a cold summer marked by widespread flooding and hailstorms. The wine harvest began on about October 29, the latest date in years. In Verdun, the grapes failed to ripen at all. More sophisticated transportation facilities than a generation earlier eased the threat of hunger in many areas. There was a food dearth rather than a famine. French prices rose sharply in rural areas, but politically mandated subsidies in Paris kept bread prices there low.

  Conditions rapidly worsened in remoter and mountainous areas. Southern Germany suffered a complete harvest failure in 1816, such that by the following winter there was "a true famine ... so far as this is still possible in the state of civilization in which we find ourselves." Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote those words, described poor villages and remote towns where "ruined figures, scarcely resembling men, prowling around the fields searching for food among the unharvested and already half rotten potatoes that never grew to maturity."6

  The mean summer temperature in Geneva, where the English poet Lord Byron had taken up residence in the Villa Diodati after abandoning his wife in London, was the lowest since 1753. Byron's lakeside refuge was filled with houseguests, among them Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary. The cold weather kept the party indoors, so they entertained each other with stories. Mary's invention became the classic horror novel Frankenstein. The tourists were surrounded by famine. Grain and potato prices had tripled, and more than 30,000 Swiss were breadless and with out work. The poor ate sorrel, Iceland moss, and cats. The streets of Zurich swarmed wi
th so many begging adults and children that 1817 became known as the "year of the beggars." "They are supported by private and public charities, and distributions of economic soup." 7 In response, government imported grain from as far away as Lombardy and Venice. All too often, bandits intercepted the precious cargo in mountain passes or on Lake Como. Offenders convicted of arson or robbery were beheaded, robbers whipped. Three women were decapitated for infanticide, and the number of suicides rose rapidly.

  Inevitably, the widespread hunger brought a surge in religious devotion, mysticism, and prophecies of the imminent demise of the world. Baroness Julie de Kri dener of Baden, expelled from Baden in southern Germany for her missionary zeal, distributed charity at every opportunity through a fund supported by the sale of her jewels, income from her estates, and donations from wealthy supporters. "The Lady of the Holy Alliance" caused a great uproar in Switzerland by proclaiming that "The time is approaching when the Lord of Lords will reassume the reins. He himself will feed his flock. He will dry the eyes of the poor. He will lead his people, and nothing will remain of all the powers of darkness save destruction, shame, and contempt."" Baroness Krudener's protests over the treatment of beggars and her claimed miracles caused her to be banished from several towns.

  Social unrest, pillaging, rioting, and criminal violence erupted across Europe in 1816, reaching a climax the following spring. For centuries, the popular reaction to poor harvests and famine had been fervent prayer and civil disturbances. The latter followed a well-established patterndemonstrations in front of bakers' shops and in market squares, accompanied by arson, looting, and riots. Whenever a food dearth and high grain prices loomed, the working poor took to the streets, as they did in response to poor harvests in France and other countries throughout the eighteenth century. But the grain riots of 1816/17 were marked by a level of violence unknown since the French Revolution.