Let Them Eat Cake?
Today we’re going to take a little side trip from French Algeria to think about grain*, thanks to Paul Hancq, who responded to my recent attempts to convert the price of an eighteenth century grain purchase into modern American dollars with the comment, “At any rate, that is a LOT of expensive grain!”
He’s right. That is a lot of grain. The army of the French Republic was large (in theory reaching a million and a half men following the unpopular levée en masse of 1793*) and it subsisted largely on bread.**
And grain was expensive. Fluctuations in the price of grain, and consequently bread, was a regular source of unrest in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe. In France the price of bread and its effect on the urban poor helped trigger the French Revolution--leading to the popular story that Marie Antoinette, on learning that the peasants could not afford bread, said “Let them eat cake”*--thereby demonstrating her fundamental lack of understanding of the realities of daily life for anyone other than a queen.
* In some ways, it’s not a detour at all. North Africa was the breadbasket of the Mediterranean from the time of imperial Rome through the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962).
**A million and a half on paper probably translated to 800,000 fighting men on the field. That’s still large compared to the British army in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, which totaled 40,000 in 1793 and peaked at 250,000 in 1815. (I’d love to know the size of the army Russia fielded in the same wars, but Google has failed me. Any suggestions, Marginians?)
***There’s a reason they call it the “staff of life”.
****The source for this is Rousseau’s notoriously unreliable Confessions--in which he claimed that an unnamed “great princess” said “Let them eat brioche.” Not quite as snappy as the cake line. Not necessarily Marie Antoinette. (Antonia Fraser attributes the statement to Queen Maria Therese, 100 years earlier.) Possibly no one ever said it. In short, another example of what we’ve come to call “comic book history” here at the Margins--historical stories that are emotionally satisfying but factually untrue. They just keep coming.
The Incident of the Flyswatter
Yesterday I received an e-mail from a friend and regular reader of History in the Margins suggesting I write a post about the long, complex, and often difficult relationship between France and its Muslim citizens, hoping it would give her/you a context for the Charlie Hebdo killings and their aftermath. I will admit that I hesitated. I'm a historian, not a political commentator.
But in fact, I feel strongly that the West in general and Americans in particular need to know more about this history of other parts of the world in order to understand how we got to where we are today, and more importantly to understand that no single perspective of the past is universally shared. I say so right on my website.
This is exactly the type of moment where some historical context might be useful. That said, I'm not going to give you a pundit-style analysis of current events. Instead, over the next several blog posts I'm going to tell you some stories about the French in North Africa and Muslim resistance to their presence, with perhaps a few detours that catch my attention. These are not intended as explanation for the recent events in France. They are simply pieces of the past that are part of the shared French and North African experience.
Let's start at the beginning:
Anon. French illustration. I'd love to see its Algerian counterpart. Anyone?
In 1795, revolutionary France bought 8 million francs* of Algerian grain to feed its army. The French Republic failed to pay its debt, as did the French empire which succeeded it. When Napoleon was overthrown in 1815, the newly restored Bourbon monarchy disavowed the debt. From the French perspective, the matter was done but the Algerians weren't willing to let it go. Not surprisingly, given the amount of money involved.
Despite ongoing negotiations, the matter was still unresolved by April, 1827 when a meeting between the Ottoman regent of Algiers, Hussein Dey, and the French consul, Pierre Duval, turned ugly Reportedly, when Hussein Dey pressed for an answer, Duval told him that France didn't discuss money with Arabs. (!!!) The governor hit Duval in the face with the fly whisk that formed part of his royal regalia.** The French press dubbed the incident "the affair of the fly-swatter"--a term that magnified the insult.
Charles X demanded an apology for the insult to his representative. When no apology was forthcoming, he sent French ships to blockade the harbor of Algiers--a"cut off your nose to spite your face" technique that limited French access to much needed Algerian grain for almost three years.
In June, 1830, tensions between Charles X and French republicans were coming to a head. The French king attempted to distract his detractors by accelerating tensions in Algeria. On June 12, 1830, using a plan originally developed by Napoleon, 34,000 French troops landed in Algeria. Three weeks later, Dey had fled into exile and the French military found itself the occupying power in coastal Algeria. France's decades- long struggle to conquer North Africa had begun.
The invasion did nothing to help Charles X, who was forced to abdicate on July 30.
*How much is that in today's money? Good question, and not easily answered. The short answer is billions, if not gazillions.
If anyone knows of a good resource for translating 18th century francs to 21st century dollars, let me know. I spent way too much time chasing this down the rabbit hole. Eventually I found a site that gave me a conversion rate between francs and pounds sterling in the 1780s (1 pound =23 livres and a bit), then a site that gave me a rate for converting pounds to dollars in 1795 (1 pound=$4.53), and finally a site that gave me the relative worth of American dollars from 1795 and 2013. The answer ranged from $28,200,000 to $68,900,000,000--depending on the measures you use. (If you're interested in the possibilities, I refer you to MeasuringWorth.com . And that's not even taking into account my own questionable methodology in sliding from 1780s values to 1795.
**Is "royal regalia" redundant?
Cities of Empire
In Cities of Empire: The British Colonies and the Creation of the Urban World, historian Tristram Hunt (author of Marx’s General) explores Britain’s imperial history through the lens of the formerly colonial cities that he argues are her greatest legacy to the modern world.
Hunt organizes his work around ten cities and their role in the development of the British empire. Most, such as Boston and New Delhi, were founded as part of the empire. Others, such as Dublin and Liverpool, were transformed by the empire’s expansion. Hunt considers the history of each city’s creation or annexation not simply as an imperial act but as a series of negotiations and exchanges between two cultures, though admittedly often on unequal terms. He looks at their architecture, civic institutions and street names as imperial artifacts. He discusses the role of each city as both an entrepôt within the imperial network and a hub of the economy that developed around it. Working more or less chronologically, he traces the history of the empire from Boston’s transformation of itself from a colonial to a revolutionary city through Liverpool’s post-imperial decline. The book ends with Hunt’s assertion that Britain is now on the receiving end of the empire it created, shaped by exchanges and negotiations with its former colonies.
Cities of Empire is informed by post-colonial theory, urban history, and Hunt’s own Labour Party politics, but Hunt uses them with a light hand, creating a work of colonial history that is both lively and authoritative. If you’re fascinated by the British empire, this one’s for you.
This review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.