The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (54 page)

FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR

Death toll:
435,000 (185,000 soldiers
¹
and 250,000 civilians
²
)

Rank:
80

Type:
hegemonial war

Broad dividing line and
Major state participants:
France vs. Prussia, obviously

Time frame:
1870–71

Location:
France

Minor state participants:
Bavaria, Wurttemberg

Who usually gets the most blame:
Bismarck, Napoleon III

Another damn:
war of trenches and idiotic frontal assaults

S
PAIN NEVER REALLY RECOVERED FROM THE NAPOLEONIC OCCUPATION.
During the half century following the restoration of the old regime, Spain was torn by one civil war after another, interspersed with shaky cease-fires. Finally, in 1868, the queen was chased away, and the Spaniards began shopping for a new monarch.

Ironically, Spain was not an actual participant in this chapter’s multicide, but Spanish troubles have a tendency to radiate outward and disrupt the rest of the world (see also “War of the Spanish Succession” and “Spanish Civil War”). Its vacant throne was offered to a Prussian prince. France absolutely forbade it, so Prussia grumbled and backed down. France then insisted that King Wilhelm II of Prussia promise to never consider such an offer again, a demand that Wilhelm considered ridiculous. The crisis was almost settled diplomatically, but Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Prussia noticed that hatred of the French was the only thing all of the little nations in Germany agreed on. A large enough crisis might be used to unite the smaller princes of Germany under Prussian rule if everybody got angry enough, so Bismarck taunted the French about the Spanish throne until their emperor, Napoleon III, declared war.

Within a few weeks, both armies were drawn up for miles in the open country along the border west of the Rhine. To outside analysts, the war seemed to be a toss-up. The French had better rifles and primitive machine guns, but the Germans had better artillery. The French army was more professional (400,000 volunteers), but the German army was larger—1.3 million regulars and reservists, mostly draftees, mobilized within the first few weeks. In practice, the Germans were in total control from beginning to end.

In the opening battle, the Germans loaded up their left wing and attacked the French right wing, driving it southward in disorder. As the Germans wedged open the breach and aimed for Paris, the French left wing also pulled back, but in the opposite direction, northward. The main German force then shepherded that half of the French army into Metz, where it was isolated and besieged. The former French right wing now rallied and reassembled between the Germans and Paris. Militarily this half army had no chance of beating the Germans, but politically the French had to give it a shot. When they moved forward to free their besieged countrymen at Metz, the Germans enveloped and captured them at Sedan, taking Napoleon III prisoner.

With their emperor in the hands of the Germans, the French people proclaimed the return of the republic and danced in the streets, until they remembered that the Germans were still coming. The French offered to negotiate, but the German price was too high. The French government withdrew to the safer city of Tours in the Loire Valley and scrambled to raise a new army in the provinces. Parisians raised the militia, herded livestock into the city, and braced for the arrival of the German army.

The Germans surrounded Paris so completely that the government was forced to send messages and officials by pigeon and balloon. The siege of Paris dragged on for month after month as the inhabitants ate through their stockpiled supplies, then ate vermin, zoo animals, and pets. German artillery bombarded the city.

While the capital starved, the French government scoured the hinterlands for enough spare men to assemble another army. They actually cobbled together two new armies to throw against the Germans, one on the Loire River and one near the Swiss border. Neither made any dent, so France finally gave up.
³

Europe may have lost one emperor with the fall of Napoleon III, but it gained a new one as King Wilhelm of Prussia was promoted to emperor of all of the Germans. Meanwhile, political chaos in France saw Europe’s first socialist government, the Paris Commune, come to power in the city. When the national government tried to disarm the Parisian militia, the Commune refused, so the French army moved in and eradicated the Communards block by block. As each pocket of resistance surrendered, the rebels were lined up and shot. Two thousand prisoners were summarily executed during the fighting, and up to 25,000 random Parisians were dead in the rubble.
⁴

FAMINES IN BRITISH INDIA

Death toll:
26.6 million famine deaths
¹
(not including the Bengal famine of World War II)

Rank:
4

Type:
commercial exploitation

Broad dividing line:
British oppressing India

Time frame:
major famines in 1769–70, 1876–79, 1896–1900

Location:
India

Major state participant:
United Kingdom, which ruled about half of India directly as a colony

Minor state participants:
native princes who ruled the other half as autonomous vassals

Who usually gets the most blame:
Most people have never heard of this, so no one gets blamed.

Economic factor:
grain

The Dismal Science

Famine seems so easy to explain. If there’s not enough food, people starve. If it doesn’t rain, crops fail and people starve. If frost or locusts show up at the wrong time, people starve. The problem is that starvation never distributes itself evenly across a society. Even in the face of a bad harvest, the rich and powerful remain fat and happy.

A relatively new theory among political scientists states that deadly famines don’t occur in democracies. Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for this in 1999. “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,” he wrote in
Development as Freedom
.
²
At first glance, the simple, boring explanation for this would seem to be that democracies are usually rich countries where food is plentiful. But Sen notes that a nation’s wealth doesn’t matter, “be it economically rich (as in Western Europe or North America) or relatively poor (as in post independence India, or Botswana).” The deciding factor seems to be that elected governments have to keep the voters happy, and letting citizens starve to death results in a loss of votes in addition to the obvious loss of voters.

The experience of India tends to support Sen’s theory. A poor country that often hovers on the edge of starvation, India has never experienced a full famine since independence in 1947 despite several spells of hardship; however, while the British ruled India, famines occurred quite frequently.

Underlying the theory is the assumption that government action can always prevent famine deaths—at least in the modern era. If that’s true, then whenever famine strikes, the people in charge allowed it.

Sen’s theory is in direct conflict with the teachings of Adam Smith, the revered eighteenth-century philosopher of free-market capitalism. Smith wrote in 1776 that famines happen only when governments interfere with natural market forces. “Famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of dearth.”
³

In imperialist England, the word of Adam Smith was the word of God.

1769–70

With their victory at Plassey (see “Seven Years War”), the British (in the form of the East India Company) ended up ruling Bengal, but right away they got off to a bad start. In 1769, the seasonal rains failed to come to India, and the resulting famine of 1769–70 killed some 10 million people, a quarter of the population of Bengal.

Whose fault was it? A Dutch naval captain in the area at the time wrote, “This famine arose in part from the bad rice harvest of the preceding year; but it must also be attributed principally to the monopoly the English had over the last harvest of this commodity, which they kept at such a high price that the most unfortunate inhabitants . . . found themselves powerless to buy the tenth part of what they needed to live.”
⁴

It was a deadly prologue to the next couple of centuries of British rule.

1876–77

Let’s jump ahead a hundred years to a time when the whole of India had been brought under British control, and the East India Company’s authority had been transferred to the Crown. In 1874, a drought in the northeastern Indian provinces of Bengal and Bihar ruined the harvest. Starvation loomed for millions of unlucky peasants, but the local official, Sir Richard Temple, leapt into action and set up a model welfare system to ease hunger. Importing a half-million tons of rice from Burma, he distributed it freely to the poor. Thanks to Temple’s prompt action, only twenty-three people starved to death in that famine. It has been called “the only truly successful British relief effort in the nineteenth century.”
⁵

Temple was severely reprimanded for his extravagance in feeding the hungry natives in his charge. The
Economist
scolded him for teaching the Indians that “it is the duty of the government to keep them alive.” He was scorned all across the governing class for spending public money and meddling in the natural order of things.
⁶

Humbled by the criticism, Temple learned his lesson and wanted to make amends. The opportunity came quickly, in 1876, when the monsoon rains failed to arrive across a much larger area. The earth dried up and died. Crops shriveled; livestock wasted away.

When Temple took the job of supervising the relief effort of this new famine, he was desperate to prove that he could stay within budget. “Everything must be subordinated,” he promised, “to the financial consideration of disbursing the smallest sum of money consistent with the preservation of human life.”
⁷

This went over well with the viceroy of India, Robert Bulwer-Lytton, who needed all of the cash in the treasury to fight a new war of conquest into Afghanistan. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli had assigned Bulwer-Lytton to India specifically to get the frontier moving forward again after an earlier defeat, and both men were determined that the cost would be covered by Indian taxpayers, not the British public.

Meanwhile, Queen Victoria had just been proclaimed empress of India,
*
and Lord Lytton spent much of 1876 planning an extravaganza to celebrate the queen’s promotion. All of the native lords of India were brought together to see the magnificence of their new overlord. The festival climaxed in a weeklong feast for 68,000 native rulers—the largest such celebration in history.

Famine relief, therefore, was a distant third on the British government’s list of priorities in India.

Native rulers in India such as the Mughals had traditionally stockpiled the harvest from good years as a buffer against lean years, but under British rule, the previous good harvests had been exported to England. When the crops failed in India in 1876, there was nothing to replace them. The scarcity drove prices up beyond the reach of the ordinary Indian. Merchants hoarded their grain supplies in hopes that the prices would rise even further.

As hungry peasants took to the road to find food, roadblocks kept refugees out of the cities of Bombay and Poona. Police in Madras (now Chennai in southeast India) expelled 25,000 hungry squatters. The colonial government finally set up work camps where the hungry would build canals and railroads in exchange for a meal.

The guiding philosophy at the time was that relief should be difficult to obtain in order to discourage the poor from becoming dependent on government handouts.
⁸
Recipients were expected to work hard for their supper, digging ditches and breaking stones. The camps accepted only the able-bodied and healthy into their public works projects, and they hired only workers from at least ten miles away, on the theory that a long walk would weed out the weaklings. Hundreds of thousands were turned away as too weak to be of any use.

Most British authorities agreed that helping the poor only created a cycle of dependency. The finance minister declared, “Every benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the evils resulting from overpopulation.” Lytton argued that the Indian population “has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil,” and that any relief would simply be absorbed in further unrestrained breeding.
⁹
A later government report concluded, “If the government spent more of its revenue on famine relief, an even larger proportion of the population would become penurious.”

The ration that Richard Temple distributed to each inmate of these labor camps was only two-thirds of what he had given out during his successful relief in 1874—1,627 calories per day instead of 2,500. In fact, the new daily ration for the starving Indians of 1876 had 123 fewer calories than the ration for an inmate in the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald in 1944. The Temple ration of one pound of rice a day—no meat, no vegetables—was half of what felons in Indian prisons received.
¹⁰

Temple and Lytton imposed the Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 on all of the lands under their control, which outlawed any private relief donations that might undercut the price of grain set by the open market. The law was backed up by the threat of imprisonment. Meanwhile, as the people of India starved, over 300,000 tons of grain was exported from India to Europe.
¹¹

Futurists and modernists had hoped that the bright new technology of the modern era, particularly railroads, would make famine obsolete by rushing food into the stricken areas, but in practice, technology had the opposite effect. The areas best served by railroads suffered the most because this allowed merchants to export local crops to more lucrative markets.
¹²

Lord Salisbury, the secretary of state for India, waffled on the proper response to the hunger. On the one hand, he tried to distance himself from countrymen who “worshipped political economy as a sort of ‘fetish’ ” and who considered “famine as a salutary cure for over-population.” On the other hand, he congratulated Disraeli for not being fooled by “the growing idea that England ought to pay tribute to India for having conquered her.” Salisbury denigrated the idea “that a rich Britain should consent to penalize her trade for the sake of a poor India” as a “species of International Communism.”
¹³

Among the large native potentates, only the Nizam of Hyderabad in south-central India offered charitable help. Hungry thousands hiked many miles to get to his distribution centers and often died along the way.

An English publisher tried to get his fellow journalists to investigate what was going on in India. “For long weary years have we demanded the suspension of [the land tax] when famine comes and in vain. With no poor law in the land, and the old policy once more set up of letting people pull through or die, as they can . . . we and our contemporaries must speak without reserve or be partakers in the guilt of multitudinous murders committed by the men blinded to the real nature of what we are doing in the country.”
¹⁴