The Year Without Summer (30 page)

Hordes of itinerant beggars wandering across Ireland in the wake of the failed harvest
exacerbated the situation, as did the Irish peasantry’s custom of gathering for the
wakes of their friends. “On such occasions,” observed Peel, “the infectious disease
of a few is communicated to the many, and the disorder becomes violent and general.”
Peel seemed genuinely moved by the irony of the situation: that the generosity and
hospitality for which the Irish were justly renowned and praised also gave rise to
epidemics of contagious disease. And the government could do nothing to stop it. “No
persuasion can induce them to shut their door against the wandering beggar,” he noted,
“or refuse to pay the last sad tribute to the remains of their friends and kindred.…
In Ireland, no fear of contagion—no fear of death—can operate to induce the people
to forego the habits which they cherish.”

*   *   *

O
N
October 16, King Louis XVIII and the royal French court commemorated the twenty-third
anniversary of the execution of Marie Antoinette. Every church in Paris held funeral
services; every theater in the city closed. The king and his household were in mourning.
Neither Louis nor his brothers appeared in public that day, but the late queen’s eldest
daughter, Marie Thérèse, the Duchess D’Angoulême, rode to St. Denis at eight o’clock
in the morning to pray at the tomb of her mother. Several hours later, the room in
the Conciergerie in which revolutionaries had imprisoned the doomed queen was dedicated
as a chapel to her memory, hung with black cloth and illuminated with candles.

Final results from the elections for the Chamber of Deputies: 92 Ultra-Royalists (mostly
from the south and west), and 146 supporters of the Moderate cabinet. The Ultras—who
called themselves “pure royalists”—were well on their way to establishing a cohesive
and disciplined political party, headed by the king’s brother, the Count d’Artois,
and backed by a majority of the French clergy. The new majority of deputies, on the
other hand, were united primarily by their opposition to the Ultra-Royalist cause,
and included both those who sincerely desired a constitutional monarchy, and smaller
groups who favored a republic or the restoration of a Bonapartist regime, but felt
it prudent to pose as constitutionalists for the time being.

All factions agreed on the need to rid France of the Allied army of occupation. The
costs of feeding the Allied troops, added to the scheduled reparations payments, put
a severe strain on the French budget, especially in light of the dismal harvest. Opposition
to the Allied army united even King Louis XVIII and Madame de Staël. The doyenne of
Coppet decided to return to France, but before she left Switzerland she married her
longtime lover, the chevalier Albert Jean Michel de Rocca, a Swiss military officer
who had served with the French army during the Peninsula War. Upon her arrival in
Paris, Madame de Staël established a new salon in the rue Royale which quickly became
the home of a group of French liberal intellectuals known as the Doctrinaires. Occasionally
an Ultra stopped by to debate politics with the most famous woman in France. One “pure
royalist” seeking respect for his party reminded her that “we also, Madame, we enter
within the constitution,” to which Madame de Staël replied, “Yes, as the Greeks did
into the Trojan horse, to set fire to the city!”

Unlike Napoléon and the various revolutionary factions who had tried to silence Madame
de Staël, Louis chose to simply ignore her. “We attach so little importance to anything
you do, say, or write,” the king informed her before she left Coppet, “that the government
wants to know nothing about it; nor does it wish to give you any fear on this account,
or even allow anyone to hinder you in any way in your projects and mysteries.” Royal
disdain notwithstanding, Madame de Staël retained substantial influence in Paris;
the Doctrinaires who basked in her principles would play a vital role in ending the
Bourbon dynasty in 1830. But in the autumn of 1816, she spent much of her energy—despite
her chronic insomnia—attempting to persuade her old friend, the Duke of Wellington,
to reduce the size of the army of occupation and remove it as soon as possible.

Wellington initially demurred. “All of you who have such short memories, and such
a strong imagination, you forget everything that has brought France to the situation
she finds herself in,” the Iron Duke wrote to Madame de Staël. “You forget where she
was last year, and the far worse situation she might have found herself in as a result …
[and] national hatred now inspires you to cry that it is to England that we owe our
misfortune, and that we are under English influence.” The British government, he insisted,
could not display weakness by backing down simply because the French people had turned
against the Allied army. But Wellington also understood the parlous state of French
finances. Without a loan from British bankers, he informed Lord Castlereagh from Paris,
“France will be aground this year…”

Reports from the provinces confirmed Wellington’s pessimism. The “general scarcity
of the harvest,” combined with widespread unemployment presaged a winter of hardship
and discontent. In the fields around Le Havre, for instance, the harvest was reportedly
“in a deplorable state.” Cold weather throughout October added to the misery, since
the necessity of maintaining fires forced up the price of fuel, and left the poor
even less of their income to spend on food. The price of bread continued to rise,
and shortages already had developed in Paris. In one quarter of the capital, bakers
ran out of loaves by nine o’clock on a morning in late October, leaving long lines
of angry citizens who continued to clamor for bread until a deputation of gendarmes
dispersed them. “Nothing but the utmost vigour and wisdom can carry the Government
through this trying season,” predicted one resident.

Few contemporaries associated the words “utmost vigour and wisdom” with King Louis,
but the monarch and his advisers recognized the crisis and responded with unwonted
alacrity. At the end of September, the government issued a circular to the prefects
in the provinces, urging them to ease the plight of the poor “during the rigorous
season,” specifically through a program of public works. “The repairing of highways
and roads affording works of the greatest utility, his Majesty requests that they
will promote them with all possible activity,” the government announced. Not only
should the prefects immediately spend their funds allocated for road repair, and ensure
that they spent monies budgeted for charity throughout the coming winter, but if they
had any funds left over from any other account, “they shall hasten to authorize the
disposal thereof in useful works.”

Wellington, meanwhile, ensured that the Allied army of occupation would have enough
to eat during the winter by purchasing substantial quantities of grain from several
northern German states that had escaped the ravages of the summer rains.

*   *   *

B
YRON
and John Hobhouse departed Geneva on October 5 for a tour of northern Italy—first
Milan, and then Verona. Before departing, Byron sent detailed instructions to John
Murray, his publisher in London, about the copyediting of several of his latest poems.
In a moment of introspection, Byron mused that his compulsion to write poetry was,
he feared, incurable. “God help me!” he confessed to Murray, “if I proceed in this
scribbling, I shall have frittered away my mind before I am thirty; but it is at times
a real relief to me.”

As he entered Italy, Byron admitted that the autumn weather was “very fine, which
is more than the Summer has been.” He found Milan “striking—the cathedral superb,”
an opinion tempered by his admission that the city reminded him of a slightly inferior
version of Seville. The inhabitants seemed “very intelligent and agreeable,” although
one suspects his opinion also reflected the fact that the region was “tolerably free
from the English.” Doubtless Byron’s English contemporaries who were unaware of the
Calvinistic side of his personality would have been surprised that he considered the
state of morals in Italy “in some sort lax.” During his stay in Milan, Byron attended
the Teatro della Scala, where he met Stendhal, and visited the Ambrosian Library,
where he purportedly managed to purloin part of a lock of Lucrezia Borgia’s hair.

Byron resumed his friendship with Polidori in Milan—the doctor had arrived several
weeks before Byron—but after quarreling with a police official, Polidori was asked
to leave the city. The local authorities became suspicious of Byron, as well, accusing
him of harboring liberal sympathies. So the poet and Hobhouse left Milan for Verona,
but along the way the weather turned bad, and very heavy autumnal rains prevented
them from visiting the country house of Catullus on Sirmione.

Northern Italy’s harvest in 1816 mirrored those of its neighbors on the other side
of the Alps. Late snowfalls in April delayed the planting of crops; cold temperatures
persisted throughout the growing season; and frequent, pounding rains led rivers to
overflow their banks. In many areas, desperate farmers—already impoverished from poor
harvests the previous two years—cut their grain early to save what they could. A significant
percentage of Italian crops never matured at all. Lombardy and Venetia, especially,
suffered from flooding and frosts in late September and early October that rendered
much of the wheat unsuitable for human consumption, or even as fodder. According to
the American consul at Livorno, “the oil and wine crops had also failed” throughout
northern Italy as a result of the frigid weather. Alarmed by the prospect of famine,
the government of Naples offered a bounty for the importation of wheat and other grains.

Austrian officials decided to permit the importation of wheat, flour, oats, barley,
and rice free of duty into their Italian provinces; by the first week of October,
significant quantities of wheat from Odessa, Ukraine, and Alexandria, Egypt, had arrived
at Trieste, and the government was negotiating contracts to purchase more grain for
Dalmatia. Nevertheless, by the time Byron arrived in Milan, the price of bread was
rising sharply.

In the Netherlands, where distress was “very great, owing to the failure of the harvest,
and the incessant rains that have prevailed in that country,” the government prohibited
the export of potatoes and grain. Attempting to control the price of food, a number
of German states followed suit; in Bremen, the storehouses of wheat had nearly disappeared.
Rain continued to fall in Hanover, and the prices of most types of provisions rose
“most uncommonly”; a scarcity of potatoes touched off a corresponding rise in the
demand for and price of wheat. Baden suffered its worst harvest in 400 years. Facing
a drastic shortfall in the harvest of rye, the King of Saxony, Frederick Augustus
I, ordered the purchase of a large quantity of grain and potatoes to help feed the
poor. From Switzerland came reports of rising food prices and philanthropic societies
feeding hundreds of poor citizens daily, as cantonal authorities desperately sought
supplies of foreign grain. In Liège, a full-scale food riot occurred following a dramatic
surge in the price of grain.

To help alleviate the distress of the working class, petitions asked the German Diet
at Frankfurt to prohibit the importation of English manufactured goods. German journals
carried numerous articles outlining “the immense loss which the free trade of England
occasions to German industry.” A Brussels newspaper launched a campaign to urge Belgians
to abstain from wearing any clothes made in England, to check the “inundation of British
goods” that threatened to overwhelm native manufacturers.

At Salzburg, officials prohibited the distillation of grain-based liquor. Sadly for
the wine-drinking population, the grape harvest failed across nearly the entire continent.
Grapes ripened so late throughout France and Switzerland that the start of the harvest
(the vendange) occurred later in 1816 in every single wine-producing region than in
any other year from 1782 to 1879. One study of the area determined that the mean harvest
date of October 29 was approximately four weeks past the average vendange, a highly
unusual occurrence; as John D. Post has noted, “from 1601 to 1926 there were only
six dates in the Paris region later than October 15.” In Verdun the grapes never ripened
at all that season. From Frankfurt came reports that “wines rise daily in price to
an alarming extent,” even though consumption seemed to decline every day: “The vintage
is next to nothing.” And if prices continued to rise, “we shall soon have nothing
to quench our thirst but water or beer.”

Württemberg, in southwestern Germany, faced far more severe problems. There, too,
the frigid summer delayed the harvest for nearly six weeks. “Every storm of the past
summer … was followed by the most severe cold, so that it regularly felt like November,”
a local almanac recalled years later, “and no month went by in which many houses were
not heated.” Whatever crops remained in the fields on October 17 perished from the
one-two punch of a severe frost and a snowstorm several days later. “Fields in the
highland districts could not be harvested at all,” concluded one study, “and more
than two-thirds of the oat fields rotted under snow and ice.” Confronting this disaster,
the King of Württemberg, the immensely corpulent Frederick William Charles (who recently
had purchased a rhinoceros at great expense for the royal zoo), approved the release
of a substantial quantity of wheat from the royal storehouses. The wheat was to be
ground and made into bread sold at a discounted price and distributed every morning
to needy residents of the capital, Stuttgart. Several days later, King Frederick—severely
afflicted by gout—passed away.

After the frigid summer temperatures retarded the ripening of grapes in both Spain
and Portugal, “immense rains” set in, beating down the grapes and causing them to
rot on the vines. Early autumn brought snows to northeastern Spain that covered the
peaks of Montserrat and Montseny, outside of Barcelona, and a cold wave froze the
Llobregat River. According to José Manuel da Silva Tedim, “the vineyard harvest [in
Spain] lasted until the 19th of November, due to the lack of heat necessary to mature
grapes”; in Portugal, Franzini noted that “grapes have suffered for the same reason
and never got ripe and as a consequence the wine was of inferior quality.” Since the
olive harvest also suffered, the price of olive oil on the Iberian peninsula commenced
a yearlong rise that set a record for the years between 1750 and 1854. Wheat prices
in Lisbon were not far behind. Although the abnormally low temperatures continued
to reduce the frequency of the usual summer ailments—such as dysentery and bilious
fevers—in the Iberian peninsula, they also produced more cases of scarlet fever and
various inflammatory diseases that typically struck in the winter.