IT was characteristic of eighteenth-century France that the terms “coffee” and “enlightenment” were practically synonymous. When Pietro Verri, an Italian domiciled in Paris, founded a literary and philosophical periodical in the French capital, he christened it “Il Caffè” without more ado, although the contents had no concern with coffee as a beverage.
What about Germany? As if the Rhine had been wider than it is today, it was then usual in Germany to look askance at everything French. Or, to say the least, Germany’s attitude towards France was ambiguous. Modern historians are apt to tell us that at the close of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, German burghers turned their eyes longingly towards France. But why, in that case, were German pamphlets of the day so unanimously anti-French in tone? For decades the Germans remained profoundly mortified because the castle of Heidelberg had been blown up by the generals of Louis XIV; and, for the very reason that news spread slowly in those times, such a catastrophe as the devastation of the Palatinate produced greater and more enduring effects upon the popular mind. Had the Germans really been such enthusiastic admirers of France as one might gather from the fashion-plates of the period, what could account for the frenzied enthusiasm of the German nation when the troops of Frederick the Great defeated the French at Rossbach (1757)?
In all earnestness one must admit that it was an advertisement of dubious value to declare that a commodity had been “made in France.” Such a label might inspire admiration, but it was just as likely to inspire aversion. The national legend concerning Kolshitsky and his heroic deeds, the legend associated with the introduction of coffee into Europe, did not spread far beyond Vienna. In High Germany and central Germany all that people could see was that coffee came from France! Only to professed cosmopolitans were French wares congenial—in places where an internationalized and uniform code of manners and customs was in vogue. That meant at the courts of the rulers! Among the treasures preserved in Dresden from the days of Augustus the Strong, we find a coffee-pot made by Melchior Dinglinger, a bombastically barbarian vessel almost sublime in its uniqueness. No one nowadays would want to drink coffee poured out of a utensil having so ornate an aspect of royal snobbery. The belly of this coffee-pot is encircled by strange emblems of gold and enamel—crocodiles, serpents, and cocks. Such an orgy of bad taste reminds us of the chimera slain by Bellerophon, “a fire-breathing monster, with a lion’s head, a serpent’s tail, and a goat’s middle.” Use and shape could not contrast more hopelessly.
It was, therefore, from the royal and grand-ducal courts that, towards 1730, a knowledge of the use of coffee began to make its way among the higher circles of the bourgeoisie. Not without difficulty, however. One of the fundamental characteristics of snobbery is that the most exalted snobs wish to defend their customs from imitators, so that we find it perfectly logical when the bishop of Paderborn threatened middle-class coffee-drinkers not only with high fines but also with a sojourn in the stocks. Still, in regions where there was exceptionally brisk intercourse with the outer world, coffee-drinking began to spread, apart from a desire to imitate the habits of the great and in defiance of prohibitions issued by the authorities.
There were in the Germany of that epoch only two towns freely visited by foreigners throughout the year. These metropolises were Hamburg and Leipzig. As early as 1690, Hamburg was distinguished by the foundation of a coffee-house. Not, indeed, to cater to the enjoyment of its own citizens. The place was opened to fulfil the demands of English merchants and seamen; and, it need hardly be said, the necessary supplies did not come overland from Venice through Nürnberg, but by water from London. When, a few decades later, the realm of Brother Coffee collapsed, the custom of coffee-drinking, not having secured a good hold in Hamburg, fell into desuetude there. In Leipzig, on the other hand, a city of fairs and one much frequented by foreigners, coffee-drinking was sooner and more firmly established. We learn of the importance of Leipzig in central-European life from Goethe’s Memories of Youth. This was the first metropolis, the first town of importance, visited by the lad of sixteen. True, at the date when young Goethe came to Leipzig, the fortunes of the city had already passed their climax. The war indemnities exacted by the Prussians had done damage that seemed wellnigh irreparable. All the same, down to about 1750 Leipzig set the tone for Germany, being wealthier and more influential than Berlin or its nearest rival, Dresden, the official capital of Saxony. Staple-right, situation upon a leading commercial route, and the importance of its fair, gave to Leipzig a prestige and an aspect which justified its friendly nickname of “little Paris.” The importance of the place was intensified when it became the centre of the German book-printing trade in place of Frankforton-Main. This made it the haunt of men of letters as well as of merchants.
No less celebrated than the gardens that framed the city of Leipzig (the Rosental was even more renowned for its elegance than the Vienna Prater) were Leipzig’s eight coffee-houses. The Kaffeebaum was frequented by students who, incredible as it may seem, were no longer exclusive devotees of beer. To Richter’s came all those who had business at the fair, sellers and buyers, many of them foreigners: Russians, Poles, and Frenchmen. Above all, among its habitués were to be found the Saxon scholars who, like Zachariae the satirist, towered head and shoulders above the beer-swilling students and the “braggarts of Jena.” Coffee was quick to play its part. In a tranquil Germany, which had not hitherto been prone to value any sort of intellectual extravagance, there was born “Saxon turgidity,” the tongue of the German rococo, which found expression in six-footed Alexandrines.
Those who decry this style for its spiritless baldness are apt to forget that German classical literature could not be created out of the baroque desert. The purifying-decades of the intermediate Gottsched epoch, the thin stratum of the German rococo, were of great importance to German literary evolution. The praise of coffee in Alexandrines is more readable than the exordium penned sixty years later in hexameters by Rector Johann Heinrich Voss, The coffee scene in that writer’s Luise is an anachronism. It was certainly out of date, in the year 1800, to style coffee “a heating Moorish beverage.” The way Voss ignores the effect of coffee on the intelligence makes his description humdrum.
Hardly less philistine, though with flashes of humour and genius, is the famous Coffee Cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. Of course, having no sense of humour, Voss failed to realize that in genre works humour and pathos must be conjoined. Impudent, broad, and withal comic, yet dignified, is Bach’s cantata. It is composed with the wit of a paterfamilias endowed with genius.
Bach’s inspiration came from one of the Parisian Fables of Picander:
The news comes from Paris: A few short days ago
An edict was issued. The king, you Germans must know,
Declared his will thuswise: “We have, to our grief and pain,
Learned that coffee wreaks ruin and does terrific bane.
To heal the grievous disaster, We hereby declare
That none to drink this same coffee in future shall dare,
Save Us and Our court, and the greatly privileged few
To whom, in Our royal kindness, We leave may endue.
Without such a permit, the drink is unlawful.”
Hereupon there resounded a clamour most awful.
“Alas!” cried the women, “take rather our bread.
Can’t live without coffee. We’ll all soon be dead!”
But the king would not budge, nor his edict revise;
And, lo, as predicted, his subjects died off like flies;
Interments were wholesale, as if from the pest;
Girls, grannies, and mothers with babes at the breast,
Until the king, becoming more and more afraid,
At length cancelled his edict, and then the plague was stayed.
This skit relates, of course, to the disturbance that raged round coffee in the early part of the reign of Louis XV, when a state monopoly was established. Picander’s somewhat dull and indubitably lame poem, published in 1727, seems to have pleased Bach so much that he asked the author to write him a libretto for a new cantata which was to deal with the “caffeomania of women.” It was common in those days for composers to write music as a sort of arabesque surrounding the concerns of folk-life. There was a Wine and Beer Pæan; an extremely realistic Dentist Cantata, punctuated with screams and groans; a cat-and-dog piece entitled Night-Watchman Love; a Worm-Tablet Round; and many other pieces of the same sort. In Bach’s Coffee Cantata, Father Oldways wants to break his daughter Lieschen of the coffee habit, since, like most of the women of Leipzig, she has become a coffee-addict. Threats prove futile, until he has recourse to the formidable menace: “Either you give up coffee or I will marry you off to a husband who will take the matter in hand.” But Lieschen cheats her father. While he is hunting round for a son-in-law, she spreads abroad the news:
No lover shall woo me
Unless I have his pledge,
Written in the marriage settlement,
That he will allow me
To drink coffee when I please.
It need hardly be said that the music is well calculated to set off the words. In any case the Coffee Cantata is a document in the history of civilization. It would, however, be a mistake to infer from it that towards the year 1740 in other parts of Germany than Leipzig young women of the middle-classes could drink as much coffee as they pleased. Life was simple and luxuries were scarce in the Germany of those days, for various reasons. Although in his fable Picander makes the sovereign responsible for the prohibition of coffee, the rulers were not exclusively to blame for the straitened economic conditions of the epoch. The causes of unfreedom had often to be looked for in other quarters. For instance, in the German corporative spirit.
By the time when “liberating coffee” had become a commodity, it was itself no longer free. It belonged, first of all, to the planter, then to the trader, then to the consumer—and, more than to all three of these, to the king. Unless it belonged to the guild, which was often more tyrannical than the state!
Not only in France, but elsewhere as well, princes and potentates were on bad terms with the guilds, and worked against them, often for excellent reasons.
Guilds, which had been of great utility, giving handicraft prestige and guaranteeing quality of output, had, in the course of centuries, petrified into trade monopolies.
At the outset it had been necessary for the craft-guilds to forbid free competition, since that was the only way of restricting the activities of bunglers. Nevertheless, the trustifying of urban handicrafts that was characteristic of the industrial history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was necessarily distasteful to the rulers. It conflicted with the guiding principle of the governments of those days. For enlighted absolutism was highly concerned about fostering the growth of population. This latter rivalled afforestation in importance, being regarded by sovereign princes as essential to the development of the economic life of their realms. Down to the year 1800, owing to devastating wars and widespread pestilences, Europe remained thinly populated. The inhabitants of Germany and Austria taken together numbered no more than five-and-twenty millions; while the population of England was only six millions. These low figures are the more remarkable since families were much larger than they are today. It was usual for a married couple to have eight, ten, twelve, or even fifteen children. Yet Europe remained sparsely peopled! Why? Owing to the bad sanitary conditions that prevailed before the rise of modern hygiene, half and more than half of the members of these large families died before attaining maturity.
Social factors, too, were in great measure responsible for the slowness of the growth of population. The craftsmen had formed rings into which admission was extremely difficult, with the result that immigration was hampered no less than freedom of occupation. Here was reason enough why thoughtful princes should be antagonistic to guilds and other monopolies. What was the use of looking eagerly across the frontier for the likelihood that, say, the archbishop of Salzburg, a prince-archbishop, would expel his Protestant subjects, if, when a far-seeing ruler was about to net this catch of industrious persons, the master-craftsmen of his own realm were to insist upon the privileges of their guilds?
Hence the cry: “Down with the guilds!” A good many of the arbitrary measures of the rulers of those days were, in truth, advantageous to the population at large.
Like other guilds, the Viennese guild of coffee-boilers experienced many ups and downs during the pendulum swings from coercion to freedom, and from freedom back to coercion. The Viennese guild of coffee-boilers was one of the latest. When Kolshitsky began to popularize the use of coffee, the Viennese bakers’ guild had already been in existence for five hundred years. We learn from Enikel’s Chronicle, that at Christmas in the year 1217 the bakers took corporative action against Duke Leopold von Babenberg. But it was in the declining days of the guilds that the coffee-boilers’ guild was founded. By the year 1700, a good many people had come to think ill of any restraint upon freedom of occupation.
Yet it was natural enough that the coffee-boilers should want their “secret” to become a privileged craft. They were not dwelling in the East, where Mohammed and the Koran had forbidden the use of alcoholic liquors. Very different were conditions in Vienna. There, from the outset, the vintners declared war against coffee. According to documents unearthed from the archives in the year 1933, Kolshitsky had to wait for years before being allowed to practise his craft. Permission was not granted him until, in numerous letters and petitions, he had reminded the town-council of his glorious services! But, in a contradictory spirit, “the trade” tried to force Kolshitsky to enrol himself under its banner. The guild of the “water-burners,’’ insisted the tavern-keepers, had the chartered right of preparing beverages “with the aid of fire”—and this specification included Mokka as well as distilled liquors.
We do not know whether street brawls took place between the employees of the coffee-boilers, on the one hand, and those of the distillers, on the other; but it is likely enough. Ere this there had been many guild battles in Vienna. Flour wars between bakers and millers raged so fiercely that the streets and the squares were often whitened as if there had been a snow-storm. Quarrels between distillers and coffee-boilers waxed so fierce, both brandy and coffee being in great demand, that the law-courts were frequently called in to settle the disputes. In the year 1750, Maria Theresa, a wise sovereign and mater-familias, put an end to the conflict by a Solomonic decision: she “permitted”—that is, ordered—the coffee-boilers to provide spirituous liquors as well as coffee in future; and at the same time she permitted the sellers of alcoholic liquors to prepare coffee. Thereupon peace was restored by the formation of a guild of distillers and boilers.
It is true that Maria Theresa’s action did not introduce “freedom of trade and occupation,” but it put an end to a vexatious monopoly. From the date of the empress’s edict, people could drink coffee in public whenever and wherever they pleased. They had long since been able to make coffee for themselves at home, but the edict encouraged the development of the coffee-house frequenter.
Another step taken at that date served to promote the drinking of coffee—a step that was extremely ill-advised. I refer to the tax on alcoholic beverages imposed by Maria Theresa (1779) in accordance with a proposal made by Councillor Greiner. The empress was guided by the wish to transfer taxation from the shoulders of the poor to the shoulders of the rich, and chose this injudicious method.
As a preliminary, various taxes were abolished which were considered to press heavily upon the poor. This was, naturally, a popular measure. The consequent loss of revenue was to be made good by the new taxes on liquor. Councillor Greiner justified his advice on the ground that anyone who chose could avoid taxation by abstaining from alcoholic beverages. Above all, he declared, the poor, whose limited means made it impossible for them to drink such beverages, would be exempt from taxation. It seems hardly credible that Maria Theresa, towards the end of her long reign, should have agreed to so amateurish a proposal. The upshot was that in a land where wine was exceedingly cheap and was the ordinary beverage of the population, it was greatly increased in price.
The new tax made the empress unpopular, but it certainly favoured the drinking of coffee, which, being non-alcoholic, was left untaxed.
Maria Theresa’s liquor tax was a typical luxury-tax of the wrong kind. It was not followed up by other luxury-taxes. Austria was never a puritanical country, and none of its sovereigns ever ruled it in a Draconian spirit. They were always inspired with kindly sentiment towards their subjects.
The sociology of Sonnenfels, a noted political philosopher during the days of Emperor Joseph II, was almost eudemonist. Sonnenfels assumed that man should try to obtain more than mere necessities, and that he has a right to more! “The needs of man,” he wrote, “are extremely restricted if we use the term ‘needs’ in the narrowest sense. If, however, people were to be confined to the satisfaction of bare need, their activities would likewise be exiguous. That would be most undesirable! An increase of need is characteristic of the growth of comfort and the provision of superfluity—these two together comprising what we term luxury. To rail against luxury and ostentation is, therefore, misguided, except in so far as we wish to hinder extravagant.”
Under the regime of a statesman holding such views, it was only to be expected that the import duties upon “articles of luxury” (Sonnenfels was thinking of such foreign goods as pickled herrings, coffee, and southern wines) would remain moderate. People must not be prevented from satisfying their natural desire for good things. In an age that was in most respects illiberal, the advantages that would accrue to the State from a liberal economic order were already beginning to be recognized. “Liberty multiplies desires.” A cheerful citizen would consume more and would work better than one who was gloomy and oppressed.
Like other apostles of enlightenment, Sonnenfels was an adversary of the guilds. They prevented freedom of occupation, and thus checked the growth of population! In those days, an increase in population was not merely one of the chief aims of the state, but also, as Sonnenfels in his eudemonism, in his desire to promote general happiness, was ready to prove to all and sundry, would redound to the interest of individuals:
“The larger the population, the greater its stability. This is one of the first principles of politics.
“The larger the population upon whose support a ruler can count, the less has the latter to fear from his subjects. This is one of the first principles of the promotion of public order.
“The more people, the more needs to be satisfied; the more hands there are, the more abundant the possibilities of creating the wares necessary for domestic and foreign trade. This is one of the first principles of political economy.
“The more citizens there are, the more persons to contribute to public revenue, and consequently the smaller the amount that has to be demanded from each individual. This is one of the first principles of sound taxation.”
These four “rational principles” for a policy that would increase population are of dubious validity, and were supported by an extremely lame logic. But they were characteristically Austrian in their goodnature.
Very different was the Prussian creed, as formulated by Johann Gottlieb Fichte in relation to the problem of superfluity. In his Der geschlossene Handelsstaat, published in the year 1800, he flatly repudiated the right to luxury and display, and advocated a planned economy:
“All must first be well fed and properly housed before anyone sets about decorating his habitation; all must first be comfortably and warmly clad before anyone tries to dress splendidly. There must be no luxury in a state where agriculture is still backward, and where there is still a lack of hands for the simplest mechanical crafts. A man does not excuse himself adequately for the indulgence of luxurious tastes by saying, ‘I can pay for what I want.’ It is unjust that anyone should be able to pay for things he does not really need, and the money with which he pays for luxuries is not rightfully or reasonably his own.”
There is an echo of Luther’s zeal in these words. Above all, however, Fichte was inspired by reminiscences of an outstanding man who had passed away more recently—Frederick the Great.
Sonnenfels and Joseph II were not soldiers like their arch-enemy Frederick II of Prussia. The hardships of his life had made King Frederick a stoic rather than an epicurean. Experience had determined his attitude towards “superfluities.”
In his early years, indeed, he had been an epicurean. That was when he was only crown-prince at Rheinsberg; when his humanism was not the outcome of ripe observation, but was the expression of his natural philosophical promptings. Why should he not allow himself and the world at large the happiness of luxury? Writing to Voltaire, he said: “I like the French love of pleasure. It pleases me to think that four hundred thousand town-dwellers are concerned only to enjoy themselves, and know practically nothing of the seamy side of life; that proves to me that these four hundred thousand persons are happy. . . . It seems to me that every ruler must do his utmost to make his subjects happy, even if he cannot make them wealthy; for there is no doubt that there can be content without wealth. A man, for instance, at a banquet or at the theatre, one who can mingle freely with congenial associates-such a man, at such times, is happy, and takes home with him a number of impressions that have fertilized his spirit. We must therefore do our utmost to provide for these masses many such moments of refreshment, which can sweeten the bitterness of life, or can make people forget their troubles for a time! The most tangible good in life is pleasure; and therefore we do good, much good, when we provide a large community with possibilities for enjoying itself.”
Words of a green youth, wishing to supply circuses in abundance, because he has never known the need for bread! But when, during long years of warfare, the crude need for bread had been brought home to the lonely monarch, he ceased to dream of making his people happy by “spectacles and superfluities.” Still less did he continue to think it a king’s duty to act as a purveyor of pleasure.
When Frederick the Great returned home on the evening of March 30, 1763, though only fifty-one, he was already an old man. Seven years of warfare had aged him as much as seventy might have done. The well-ordered country he had once thought of establishing no longer existed even in his dreams. He had won a province, and had lost everything else. Financial devastation was obvious as far as the eye could reach.
With the native force of genius, Frederick now devoted himself to the task of reconstruction. This was a war that lasted more than seven years. It began on the day when the king converted his war-chest into a peace-chest. The eastern provinces had been laid waste by the Russians. Frederick sent hundreds of thousands of gold pieces rolling thither, and bestowed his cavalry horses upon the impoverished peasants. In the towns, he provided subsidies for manufacturing industry. Just as a hundred years before Colbert, in France, had conjured manufactures out of the ground, so now in Berlin, Breslau, and Königsberg thriving factories appeared as if by magic. The old man on the throne set his subjects an example by working twelve hours a day himself. The “excessive diligence” of the Prussians had come into its own.
Great financial schemes were drawn up. The new industrial policy must be safeguarded by a protective system. As a mercantilist, the king laid stress, above all, upon a favourable balance of trade. Exports began to exceed imports. Silesian linen was sent to Russia. Only two articles of daily use took the form of costly imports. These were things paid for in Prussian thalers, which had much better, thought Frederick, have been kept in the country. All the same, they were things for which the monarch himself had a taste: good tobacco and good coffee.
As regards tobacco, the problem was not difficult to solve. He had tobacco planted in his own land. Certain kinds throve well enough, others not so well. One day Frederick asked Achard, the chemist, whether it was not possible “to discover a sauce which, without being in any way injurious, could improve Prussian-grown tobacco so that it would rival Virginian in flavour.” But no such sauce could be found; and everyone who could afford it smoked imported tobacco.
Even Frederick had no scruples about establishing a state monopoly in coffee and tobacco. He regarded them as luxuries that could bear high taxation, since in any case the poor among his subjects could not afford to buy them. That was the way in which he justified a policy that was ill-conceived and unsuccessful. Following the French precedent, the monarch farmed out both these monopolies. He was influenced, no doubt, by his usual tendency to overvalue all that was French. Just as in youth he had believed that only in Paris good plays could be seen and good poetry written, so, in his old age, he swore by French political economy.
Frederick prepared a sackful of troubles for himself and his country through the malpractices of the French lessees of the monopolies. (One of them, it was currently reported, was a bankrupt from Marseille.) As with all hide-bound mercantilists, nationalist aims were more important to him than nationalist means, with the result that he used means that were anything but nationalist. One of the main principles of mercantilism was: “Skilled workers must be imported whenever they are needed.” Since the king was convinced that French officials would work in monopolies better than his German subjects (who were, in his estimation, clumsy, inexperienced, and too good-natured), the king filled two hundred posts in his monopoly services with French officials. The upshot was a manifest recalcitrance on the part of the Prussian burghers, who could not understand to what end they had conquered the French at Rossbach and elsewhere if the vanquished were to occupy lucrative and respected posts. High-handed actions on the part of the foreign monopolist officials, which might have been overlooked if they had been committed by Prussians, became a serious grievance when committed by Frenchmen.
The habit of coffee-drinking became established later in Berlin than in Hamburg and Leipzig, these latter towns being centres of foreign intercourse in northern Germany. It was plain enough, as the outcome of a careful inquiry that the king instituted, that in Prussian towns there was a growing demand for the anti-Bacchic beverage; and this was surely a good thing, in view of the fact that his subjects must work harder if they were to increase their output. Still, Frederick pulled a wry face when he learned that seven hundred thousand thalers or more were going abroad year by year to pay for coffee, the money being sent chiefly to Holland. Meanwhile there was a corresponding decline in the brewing trade. We cannot doubt that Frederick knew well enough that his subjects drank coffee in order to work better and for longer hours. Still, he was vexed to discover that the increase in the consumption of coffee was set off by a decline in the consumption of beer. When, however, he reacted by imposing a tax of eight silver groschen per pound of imported coffee, it was only to find that he had equipped his state with a new industry—that of smuggling! The “hole in the West” began at Emden, and extended up the Rhine as far as Cleves. There was also a “hole in the North,” through which coffee found its way illicitly in to Prussia, across Swedish Pomerania. The most earnest attempts were made to stop such abuses. Revenue officers were multiplied. Many of these “coffee-watchmen” were in league with the smugglers, and shared their ill-gotten gains.
With French subtlety, the monopoly administration now advocated a new expedient to stop smuggling. The coffee that was imported above-board was to go straight to the roasting-houses that the king had established, and none but roasted coffee was to be sold. This provided a check upon the consumption of smuggled coffee. If a house-owner or an innkeeper were to roast smuggled coffee, the volatile oils, the pyridine and the furfural, would assail the nostrils of the neighbours and the police, acquainting them with the fact that there was illicit coffee on the premises, and the smuggled goods could be promptly confiscated. The king was assured that this measure would not interfere in any way with trade. Frederick agreed to this plan when it was explained to him that the new method of control would provide employment for time-expired soldiers. Now there were to be seen veterans from the Seven Years War ferreting about in town and countryside-all of them replicas of Frederick, wearing uniforms, sporting pigtails, carrying crutch-sticks—a sad spectacle. In the towns that were big enough to have a public opinion, in Berlin, Breslau, and Königsberg, there were loud complaints when members of this guild of “coffee-smellers” made their way into private houses, impounded coffee-pots, searched the store-rooms, making a mess and giving trouble. In the countryside people were more dutiful; but the gentry of the regions of Lauenburg and Bütow gave the royal customs service to understand that they would promptly expel any coffee-spy who should venture to set foot upon Pomeranian estates.
The surveillance thus exercised over consumers became preposterous, with the natural result that trade fell off. By now, the import duty imposed on coffee had been increased to one thaler per pound. When coffee could not be sold at the consequent high price, the duty was reduced by one-half. That did not help matters. People began to use coffee substitutes. The curtain had risen on the first act of a tragicomedy. In the dispute between coffee-drinkers and potentates, a laughing third character, chicory, had entered the stage.
It was no easy matter to tell the truth to a king who was not only extremely authoritarian, but was also a man of genius. His minister Heinitz ventured to do so. Heinitz was bold enough, in a detailed memorial, to denounce the mismanagement of the coffee-monopoly. He showed that the ostensible increase of revenue derived from the monopoly by the state was really useless. The 96,000 thalers derived from the tax upon coffee was only a spurious gain, for while the returns had increased in a ratio of five to seven, expenditure upon the coffee-monopoly had increased in a ratio of three to ten.
Frederick the Great was extremely annoyed, but all the same, as a result of Heinitz’ intervention, no more French officials were appointed. Three months before the death of Frederick II, the crown prince, subsequently to ascend the throne as Frederick William II, who had J. C. Wöllner as chief adviser, determined to abolish the coffee-monopoly. Lest Frederick the Great should be too much mortified, everything was arranged on the quiet. “I do not think that I am doing wrong,” wrote Wöllner in a letter accompanying his memorial, “in working secretly for Your Highness in this matter, and, for the nonce, inscribing my opinion in a memorial for Your Highness’s eyes alone.” In this memorial, Wöllner described the coffee-monopoly as “extremely harassing to merchants, bringing about a decline in the trade and a decay of the fairs, interfering with transport, and swelling the army of officials, to the great alarm of the working-classes. There has resulted a marked increase in the cost of administration, while salaries and royalties are paid mainly to foreigners.”
As soon as Frederick William II mounted the throne, he issued an edict considerably reducing the tax on coffee. “To remove all desire and inclination for fraud,” on July 1, 1787, the decree insisting that coffee should be roasted only in the state roasting-houses was quashed.
Mirabeau penned a savage epitaph upon the outworn financial system of monopolies and tax-farming. It was strange that a Frenchman, in his Monarchie prussienne sous Frédéric le Grand, should write such a tribute to the greatest of all francophils. Yet not so strange after all, for three years later the charged political and economic atmosphere that lowered over Europe was to burst in a tremendous thunderstorm. Old-time France, so much admired in its day, the France of the ancien régime that had given birth to the institution of farming the taxes, perished very soon after its admirer Frederick of Prussia had passed away. A new generation had been born, the generation of those who were in revolt against the system according to which:
The king bars the bridges and the roads,
And saith: “The tithe is mine!”