The Year Without Summer (8 page)

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P
ARIS,
too, shivered through a cold and wet springtime, but in May 1816 Louis XVIII appeared
to face considerably more pressing problems than the dreary weather. Following Napoléon’s
defeat at Waterloo, the Allied sovereigns had reinstalled the corpulent Louis on the
throne of France; critics jibed that he had been “brought back in the baggage of the
Allies.” But they also had imposed upon Louis the stringent terms of the second Treaty
of Paris. France was reduced to its borders of January 1790, which meant the loss
of about 5,000 square kilometers and 300,000 citizens; the French people would also
have to repay all foreign debts incurred by previous French governments—including,
of course, Napoléon’s. Far more damaging were the reparations France would have to
pay the Allied victors: 700 million francs over a period of five years, plus the entire
cost of feeding and sheltering an Allied occupation force of 150,000 (stationed mostly
in eastern France) for at least three years. Adding the annual costs of the indemnity
and the occupation troops to the regular budget, Louis’s government in the spring
of 1816 was facing short-term obligations of nearly 1,500 million francs, a sum which
would require both substantial tax increases and cuts in government spending.

Compounding Louis’s financial woes was the presence of a zealously reactionary Ultra-Royalist
majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Led by the Count d’Artois—the king’s brother,
who was barely on speaking terms with Louis—the Ultra-Royalists were determined to
seek out and punish the “accomplices” of Napoléon, and especially his most vocal supporters
during the Hundred Days. Famously “more royalist than the king,” the Ultras knew they
could not count on the indolent Louis (whom they privately mocked as “a crowned Jacobin,
a King-Voltaire, a dressed-up comedian”) to carry out a thoroughgoing purge of French
society. Accordingly, in late October 1815 the Chamber seized the initiative and passed
the first of a series of measures that launched the “White Terror,” authorizing the
arrest of individuals suspected of plotting against the restored monarchy, and the
establishment of special courts to try them.

Doubtless the results disappointed the deputies. Authentic antiroyalist conspiracies
were few and far between. “There are continual reports of insurrections and plots,”
reported a British military officer in Paris in the spring of 1816, “but it is now
well known that the most of them are ‘got up’ by the Ultras to entrap the unwary.
The French people seem sunk in apathy and to wish for peace at any rate; nothing but
the most extreme provocation will induce them to take up arms.” Meanwhile, the clergy
sought to restore the Roman Catholic Church to its privileged pre-Revolutionary position,
including the return of real estate that formerly belonged to the Church. Priests
whipped up popular sentiment against the alleged enemies of the Church, reportedly
forging communications from the Holy Ghost or claiming to have received letters dropped
from heaven by Jesus. The result was a series of attacks by Catholic mobs on Protestants,
particularly in the south of France; in Nimes, a mob massacred sixteen Protestants
during a two-day riot.

Such tactics succeeded mainly in arousing anxiety among the populace, most of whom
were willing to tolerate Louis but opposed any attempt to resurrect the Ancien Régime,
particularly if it meant returning real estate to the Church. Fearful that the vengeful
actions of obdurate reactionaries would alienate the French public to the point of
threatening his throne yet again, Louis and his ministers repeatedly opposed the majority
in the Chamber, until the nation was treated to the spectacle of Ultra-Royalists defending
the prerogatives of the legislature against the king. After beating back an Ultra
attempt to abolish divorce, the government at last decided to prorogue the Chamber.
On April 29, the king declared the legislative session closed, and his ministers began
to plan for new elections in the fall.

A week later, a lawyer named Jean-Paul Didier launched an abortive uprising in Grenoble
that collapsed almost before it began. Supported by a force of several hundred peasants
and retired soldiers, Didier purportedly sought to overthrow Louis and replace him
with Napoléon’s infant son, the King of Rome. Government troops easily quashed the
feeble uprising and executed twenty-one alleged conspirators, including a sixteen-year-old
boy; Didier, who fled to Savoy, was subsequently captured and executed on June 8.
Meanwhile, the police in Paris claimed to have uncovered another plot, this one led
by a small group of working men.

To make matters worse, the price of bread was rising due to a shortage of grain from
the war and the need to provision the Allied army of occupation. Well aware that he
could ill afford to alienate the poor of Paris, who depended upon cheap bread, Louis
issued an ordinance permitting foreign vessels to import grain without paying the
usual duties. Then he hoped for a plentiful harvest.

“The uneasiness of the court is indescribable,” reported an American correspondent
in Paris, “the palace at night may be said to exhibit the aspect of a camp or of a
besieged palace. A double line of guards surround it on all sides.” Patrols of gendarmes
and the national guard kept watch in every street; coffee houses were cleared at 11
P.M.
The London
Star
reported that ships bound for the United States from French harbors were full of
prospective émigrés. “There was a strange feeling of unrest in the country,” concluded
one observer, “and there were rumours of the return of Napoléon and of the massacre
of nobles and priests.”

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W
HEN
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin arrived in Paris on May 8, she found her French hosts
less than congenial. “The manners of the French are interesting, although less attractive,
at least to Englishmen, than before the last invasion of the Allies,” she wrote to
a friend; “the discontent and sullenness of their minds perpetually betrays itself.”
Doubtless their resentment stemmed from the humiliation of 150,000 foreign troops
on French soil, but Mary saw no reason why “they should regard the subjects of a Government
which fills their country with hostile garrisons, and sustains a detested dynasty
on the throne, with an acrimony and indignation of which that Government alone is
the proper object.”

Mary was traveling with her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, their infant son, William,
and her stepsister, Claire (nee Clara Mary Jane) Clairmont. Nineteen years old in
the spring of 1816, Mary Godwin had met Shelley in 1813, and the two fell in love
at once. The daughter of William Godwin, a writer notorious for his free thinking
and philosophical anarchism—Godwin believed advancing human knowledge and morality
would eventually render government obsolete—and noted feminist Mary Wollstonecraft
(who died shortly after Mary was born), Mary grew up reading widely in the works of
the
philosophes
, poets William Blake and Samuel Coleridge, and, of course, her parents.

For his part, Shelley was a child of privilege who attended Oxford until the authorities
expelled him for his public defense of atheism. In 1811, at the age of nineteen, he
had married Harriet Wentworth, then only sixteen herself. Shelley soon tired of monogamy
and began to spend much of his time at the home of William Godwin, whose philosophy
he admired and whose daughter he subsequently pursued. When he learned that his daughter
had fallen in love with a married man, Godwin decided to fall back upon conventional
morality and forbade Mary to see Shelley. In late July 1814, the lovers ran off to
Europe. By the time they returned in early 1815, Mary was pregnant. The child, born
premature, lived only eleven days; Mary later dreamed she could bring her daughter
back to life.

Burdened by financial problems and wounded by the critical dismissal of an early poem,
“Alastor: Or, the Spirit of Solitude,” published in February 1816, Shelley decided
to leave England. Accordingly, he and Mary (accompanied by Claire and three-month-old
William) crossed the Channel in early May. Originally Shelley had planned to visit
either Italy or Scotland, but Claire—who recently had become the lover of George Gordon,
Lord Byron—convinced them to stay in Geneva instead, because that was where Byron
would spend the summer. Shelley agreed; at least the cost of living in Geneva was
lower than in England.

Their journey by coach from Paris to Geneva took them across the Jura Mountains; Shelley,
like Mary, did not regret leaving France and the “discontent and sullenness” of Frenchmen.
The weather in the middle of May was far worse than Mary expected. “The spring, as
the inhabitants informed us, was unusually late,” she wrote to a friend, “and indeed
the cold was excessive; as we ascended the mountains the same clouds which rained
on us in the valleys poured forth large flakes of snow thick and fast.” Initially
the snow stuck only to the overhanging rocks, but as the coach climbed higher it started
to freeze on the road.

Evening fell; the party pressed on, snow pelting against the carriage windows as darkness
descended. Then Mary could see Lake Geneva and, far in the distance, the Alps. “Never
was scene more awfully desolate,” she noted. “The trees in these regions are incredibly
large, and stand in scattered clumps over the white wilderness; the vast expanse of
snow was chequered only by these gigantic pines, and the poles that marked our road.”

They settled in a secluded villa known as the Maison Chapuis, a pleasant if humble
two-story cottage on the south edge of the lake, facing what Mary termed the “dark
frowning” Jura range. On the infrequent evenings that were pleasant and clear, they
would sail upon the lake. “Unfortunately,” complained Mary in early June, “an almost
perpetual rain confines us principally to the house.… The thunderstorms that visit
us are grander and more terrific than I have ever seen before.” One night a brilliant
streak of lightning lit up the lake, “the pines on Jura made visible, and all the
scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder
came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness.”

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A
S
a member of a consortium of New England college professors who regularly made weather
observations, Professor Chester Dewey of Williams College kept a thermometer suspended
on the north side of his house, well protected from the sun. Three times a day (7
A.M.
, 2
P.M.
, and 9
P.M.
), Dewey noted and recorded the temperatures, deducing the mean temperature each day
from his observations. In the first few days of June, Dewey noticed the temperatures
fluctuating wildly, as if on a roller coaster. June 1 and 2 were quite warm; the following
two days were much cooler. June 5 brought sweltering heat: At noon Dewey’s thermometer
soared to 83 degrees.

It was not an isolated reading. Montreal reported “hot and sultry” weather on June
5. To the east, Boston experienced a high of 86 degrees; at Waltham, the mercury reached
90 degrees; and at Salem, 92 degrees. The
Vermont
Mirror
reported from Middlebury that June 5 was “the warmest day that has here been experienced
during the season,” and the
Rutland
Herald
noted “the intense summer’s heat.”

“The mild influence of the sun,” wrote a newspaper editor in eastern Massachusetts,
“gave us fond anticipations (tho’ our seeds were but just springing out of the ground,)
of a plentiful harvest.” A wave of thunderstorms passed through in the afternoon,
cooling the region briefly before unusually high temperatures returned. At ten o’clock
that evening, Albany recorded a temperature of 72 degrees, 15 degrees warmer than
the normal overnight low temperature. A reporter in Danville, Vermont, could see heat
lightning in the distance. “The night was so warm,” noted a resident of Bangor, Maine,
“that one blanket was sufficient to keep a person comfortable.” Overnight, a steady
rain developed.

The warm, humid air and rain in New England preceded a strong low-pressure system
that was making its way across the Great Lakes on June 5. In the Northern Hemisphere,
the winds around low-pressure systems spiral counterclockwise; as lows move from west
to east, the winds drag warm air from the south ahead (i.e., to the east) of the low-pressure
centers. When this warm air meets colder air, such as was present across New England
on June 3 and 4, the warm air slowly rises, resulting in steady rain and occasionally
in thunderstorms. While these warm fronts are usually benign, lows are often followed
by sharp cold fronts, due to the winds pulling cold air from the north. It is cold
fronts that most often cause thunderstorms and tornadoes, as the sudden influx of
cold air causes the existing warm air to rise quickly.

Highly unseasonable, frigid air lurked behind the cold front of the low that crossed
the Great Lakes on June 5. In a weather pattern more typical of winter than summer,
a polar high-pressure system was following the low. In summer, Arctic air is usually
contained north of Hudson Bay by the subpolar jet stream: strong westerly winds high
in the troposphere that effectively form a barrier to weather systems. Occasional
southward excursions of this jet stream in winter can produce frigid, but often clear
days across the Great Plains and Eastern United States. First in May and then again
in June 1816, however, the jet stream dipped far to the south, forming a U-shape and
allowing Arctic air to flow from northern Canada as far south as the Carolinas. The
collision of this air with the warm, moist air masses that normally prevail in New
England and eastern Canada produced powerful storms.

Limited weather observations from the early nineteenth century and the chaotic nature
of the atmosphere make it difficult to determine with certainty why the jet stream
moved so far south. One explanation is that a broad area of high pressure, a “blocking
high,” had developed in late May in the central Atlantic. These systems impede the
normal west-to-east flow of the jet stream, causing it to shift north and south to
avoid the block. The effect then cascades backwards and forwards along the jet stream
in waves, disrupting the jet stream for thousands of miles in each direction and forming
the type of U-shaped bends that affected eastern North America in 1816. As with water
moving through a clogged pipe, the block slows the movement of weather systems, stagnating
the weather and allowing extreme conditions to persist for longer than they might
otherwise. A slow, meandering jet stream is consistent with the impact of Tambora’s
aerosol cloud on the North Atlantic Oscillation—a weak polar vortex and frequent incursions
of Arctic air into the middle latitudes—in the summer of 1816. The aerosol cloud did
not necessarily cause the early June storm that struck New England, but the stratospheric
veil almost certainly cooled the air behind the storm and set the atmospheric circulation
pattern that allowed the air to penetrate so unseasonably far south.