Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (27 page)

It was no easy matter to tell the truth to a king who was not only extremely authoritarian, but was also a man of genius. His minister Heinitz ventured to do so. Heinitz was bold enough, in a detailed memorial, to denounce the mismanagement of the coffee-monopoly. He showed that the ostensible increase of revenue derived from the monopoly by the state was really useless. The 96,000 thalers derived from the tax upon coffee was only a spurious gain, for while the returns had increased in a ratio of five to seven, expenditure upon the coffee-monopoly had increased in a ratio of three to ten.

Frederick the Great was extremely annoyed, but all the same, as a result of Heinitz’ intervention, no more French officials were appointed. Three months before the death of Frederick II, the crown prince, subsequently to ascend the throne as Frederick William II, who had J. C. Wöllner as chief adviser, determined to abolish the coffee-monopoly. Lest Frederick the Great should be too much mortified, everything was arranged on the quiet. “I do not think that I am doing wrong,” wrote Wöllner in a letter accompanying his memorial, “in working secretly for Your Highness in this matter, and, for the nonce, inscribing my opinion in a memorial for Your Highness’s eyes alone.” In this memorial, Wöllner described the coffee-monopoly as “extremely harassing to merchants, bringing about a decline in the trade and a decay of the fairs, interfering with transport, and swelling the army of officials, to the great alarm of the working-classes. There has resulted a marked increase in the cost of administration, while salaries and royalties are paid mainly to foreigners.”

As soon as Frederick William II mounted the throne, he issued an edict considerably reducing the tax on coffee. “To remove all desire and inclination for fraud,” on July 1, 1787, the decree insisting that coffee should be roasted only in the state roasting-houses was quashed.

Mirabeau penned a savage epitaph upon the outworn financial system of monopolies and tax-farming. It was strange that a Frenchman, in his
Monarchie prussienne sous Frédéric le Grand
, should write such a tribute to the greatest of all francophils. Yet not so strange after all, for three years later the charged political and economic atmosphere that lowered over Europe was to burst in a tremendous thunderstorm. Old-time France, so much admired in its day, the France of the
ancien régime
that had given birth to the institution of farming the taxes, perished very soon after its admirer Frederick of Prussia had passed away. A new generation had been born, the generation of those who were in revolt against the system according to which:

T
HE
bad old days of tyranny were over and done with. So believed the French until, after a brief frenzy of liberty, there appeared a new and mighty tyrant, Napoleon, the man of genius.

One of the first things the French forfeited in their craze for freedom was their best colony, their coffee-paradise of Santo Domingo. Ripples from the tidal wave that had made an end of authoritarianism in Paris ran swiftly over the surface of the sea to break upon the shores of the French Indies. In these colonies, Negroes and mulattoes took the talk of freedom at its face value. Among their palms, they erected a tree of liberty, crowning it, like the French, with a Phrygian cap; they encircled it with a park of artillery, and gaily shot down their white masters. France for the French? Well and good! But in that case, Haiti for the Negroes!

The crime of the French absolute monarchy, which had colonized its West Indian possessions with kidnapped Africans, was now avenged upon its successor, the republic. The excellent coffee of Santo Domingo had been used by Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, and other eighteenth-century writers to keep their brains lively. But the Blacks who now made themselves lords of the island owned the coffee-plantations, and they sent no coffee to France. The frequenters of the Café Procope sat before empty cups, unless they were sufficiently well-to-do to pay for the more expensive coffee from Java.

Since about 1740, the French Indies had been a premier source of supply. Two-thirds of all the coffee drunk in Europe came from the Antilles. The revolution in Santo Domingo not only severed for a considerable time the political ties with France, but also put an end to coffee-planting, which was the chief local source of wealth. The Negro liberator, Toussaint Louverture, who headed the insurrection, would have saved the plantations had he been able; but the rebellious slaves regarded these plantations as symbols of their slavery, with the result that, not content with massacring their some-time masters, they burned the crops.

After 1791, coffee-growing came to an end in Haiti and Santo Domingo, their places as sources of supply being taken by Java. The fruit of Desclieux’ pioneer work had been destroyed. Henceforward, the Dutch Indies, and not the Antilles, provided fully two-thirds of the coffee that was consumed throughout the world. The total production fell off, and this enabled the Hollanders to jack up prices. All the better for England! The lords of the Anglo-Indian tea plantations could undersell coffee, and could market their tea better than before.

Among the hundred grievances Napoleon harboured against England was the loss of the good coffee of Santo Domingo—or, rather, the trading advantage England derived from the revolution in Haiti. Indeed, his grievances against England were manifold and worldwide. During the last years in St. Helena, the dethroned emperor came clearly to recognize that all his other troubles and combats had been no more than preliminary skirmishes for the final tussle with England, in which he was so cruelly defeated.

Yet from the first he realized that England was the arch-enemy.

How long had he waited in camp at Boulogne, hoping for a miracle that would enable him to cross the Channel and land in England? Would not the waters divide, as of old the waters of the Red Sea had divided, that his army might march on dry ground to invade England? Alas, there was to be no miracle; so, unwillingly, and often bored, he fought other enemies who were not English. Britannia ruled the waves he could not cross. Sea-power made Britain invincible.

On one occasion he successfully took to the water. Early in his career, when he was still more the romanticist than the statesman, he crossed the Mediterranean to Egypt. Thiers has pointed out how inadequately, from the military standpoint, this Egyptian expedition was prepared. Could it be shown as any better, politically considered? Was General Bonaparte well advised to deprive France of her best army for two long years in order to found a chimerical colony in Egypt? Since France was unable to hold her own against Britain on the seas, this colony could not remain in permanent connexion with French seaports. Nevertheless, though fundamentally preposterous from the outlook of the soldier and from that of the statesman, Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign was the opening of his fabulous glory. The nations were fired by its romantic aspect. Here was a man setting out towards India, at the head of a French army; a man treading in the footsteps of Alexander the Great. Cairo, the pyramids, Suez, were but steps on the road to Hindustan.

Francis I, Henry IV, Louis XIV, Mazarin, would probably have clapped General Bonaparte into the Bastille if he had propounded to them a scheme for the conquest of Egypt. What could seem more disadvantageous to France than to wage war against the Turks? Defeat would be disastrous, but victory hardly less so. Wars against the Turks were for Austrians and Russians, to whom a weakening of the sultan would be helpful. The French, on the other hand, needed a powerful Turkey as a tacit ally against central Europe.

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.