The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (29 page)

A huge stratum of subsistence farmers persisted into the eighteenth
century, increasingly taxed and deprived of the use of common lands by
an absent and uncaring nobility. Like their medieval predecessors, most
of these farmers lived from harvest to harvest, at the mercy of the weather
and a despotic government. The peasants' fear of starvation was regularly
renewed. Subsistence crises were part of the political landscape, and bread
riots were put down with brutal severity.

Louis XIV, the Roi Soleil, the Sun King, reigned over Europe's most powerful nation for seventy-two years, from 1643 to 1715, with a magnificence that became a near CUlt.6 He was an absolute monarch, symbol of
his age, the epitome of the purest form of supreme kingship. "The State,
it is I," he is said to have once proclaimed, and he seems to have believed
it. Louis brooked no opposition, ruled without any form of central legislature, and used his talent for publicity to foster an illusion of perfect authority. His great palace at Versailles near Paris was the stage for dazzling
spectacles meant to convey an image of near supernatural power. Royal
balls, ballets, concerts, festivals, hunts and firework displays tied his nobles to his service and that of the state. "Self aggrandizement is the most
worthy and agreeable of sovereigns' occupations," the king wrote to the
Marquis de Villars in 1688.7 Louis used it with great effect.

Louis XIV and his successors, Louis XV (reigned 1715-74) and XVI
(1774-93), were intelligent men, but not rulers of initiative or innovative
ideas. The byzantine intrigues of the king's closest associates militated
against major economic and political reform. More resolute leaders than
even the Sun King would have had trouble reforming a system that
thrived on intrigue and privilege, especially when those with the king's
ear had a vested interest in the status quo. In theory, the king's authority
passed down to intendants, provincial officials who reported to the central
government. The mechanisms of government were simple, but obfuscated by the inefficiency, vacillation, and lethargy of more than 50,000
venal and corrupt royal officials. Most of the nobility, the Second Estate,
had little interest in farming except as a source of revenue, much of it acquired from ancient feudal rights, some of them as arcane as the right to
display weather vanes or to gather acorns in forests.

Even had the nobility been closely involved, French agriculture was in
trouble. Bread was a merciless tyrant that held producers, middlemen,
transporters and consumers in economic slavery. For the most part, the
French peasantry turned up their noses at potatoes and other new foods
and relied on cereal crops and vines for survival-the cereals to eat, their
grapes for some cash.

The king's ministers took a great interest in textiles and other manufactures, also in foreign trade, but they usually neglected agriculture.
Their only concern was to prevent social disorder and stifle dissent with
low bread prices, maintained, if necessary, by importing grain. At the
same time, the king taxed his subjects heavily to support his vast expenditures and constant military campaigns. Between 1670 and 1700, Louis
XIV waged almost continuous war on his neighbors, during years when
the cooler, unpredictable weather caused frequent poor harvests and agricultural production declined.

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.