THE barrier which, for seven years, Napoleon’s Continental System established between Britain and the Continent knocked the bottom out of the coffee-market. Coffee prices have seldom been steady for long, but never were they so tumultuously disturbed as during this period. From 1806 onwards, since the stores of coffee that continued to accumulate in London could no longer be exported, they rose mountain high. Any attempt to maintain prices was foredoomed to failure. No one knew how long the Continental System would remain in being, nor how strictly the emperor would enforce it. Coffee can be kept in good condition for a considerable time, but not for ever. The price of coffee in London consequently came down with a run. Cheap though this staple had now become, the English could not make up their minds to use their own coffee. For too long they had been accustomed to tea. Coffee, which in the repositories was slowly losing its flavour, was in the perilous position of a commodity hoarded by middlemen who can find no market for it. England did not in a year consume more than ten thousand hundredweight of coffee, but there was a thousand times that amount in store. Not all of it in England, of course, but at least in the hands of British merchants overseas. It happened to be called “coffee,” but it was in reality a medium of exchange. London, which was the great clearing-house of the world, financed the coffee trade as it financed all other trades. In its merchant vessels it sent machinery and manufactured articles to the hot coffee-growing countries, to Java and Arabia and America, receiving coffee in payment. Exporters everywhere drew upon the merchant bankers of London.
Thus coffee was, substantially, a form of money, but it was money that fluctuated in value. When Prussia, Austria, Russia, and Sweden won the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig in October 1813, they were not fighting primarily to assist British export trade, but, nevertheless, the liberation of the London stocks of goods was an obvious outcome. Except for the Peninsular Campaign, Britain had hitherto prudently refrained from participating in the operations against Napoleon on land. It was natural, however, that the emperor’s escape from Elba and return to Paris should have stirred England out of her reserve. She could not face the possibility of a re-establishment of the Continental System, of a repetition of the years from 1806 to 1813. Driven by necessity, she sent an expeditionary force to the Continent, and Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo.
In January 1813, the price of coffee in London fell to forty shillings a hundredweight. On the Hamburg exchange, coffee had been quoted at over five hundred shillings the hundredweight. This was no more than a fancy price, for a hundredweight of coffee could not be got together anywhere on the Continent. What the smugglers, facing terrible risks, were able to ship across the Channel and the North Sea did not amount to more than a few handfuls of coffee-beans at a time. But when King Louis XVIII abolished the Continental System, prices quickly rose in London and fell in Hamburg to meet one another. The situation of the market was favourable, and a prompt increase in the consumption of coffee might have been expected throughout Europe. Strangely enough, this did not occur. Hamburgers would not, in the long run, content themselves with greatly lowered prices, nor would London merchants be satisfied with a reasonable rise in the price of coffee. They wanted prices that would make good their losses during long years. The upshot of the chaffering between the Continental middlemen and the British, and of their failure to come to an agreement now that British groceries were once more freely admitted to the Continent, was a boom in the tea-market.
But the rise in the consumption of tea on the mainland of Europe during the first decade of the Restoration was partly determined by other causes than commercial ones.
In the Napoleonic era, Russia had been for a time allied with France, and then had become one of her most formidable adversaries. Russia had, to begin with, participated willingly enough in Emperor Napoleon’s commercial war against Britain, closing her harbours to British ships, and therefore to commodities brought round the Cape from Hindustan. Unceasingly, however, throughout the years of the blockade, caravan traffic across Asia continued. While in the rest of Europe the stimulating beverages to which people had become accustomed were no longer obtainable, it was otherwise in Russia. There tea was still to be had, tea which, like coffee, contained trimethyldioxypurin. Tea relieved both thirst and hunger, and was also a remedy for excessive cold or excessive heat. Nobles and serfs alike drank tea. What had been carried across the snows and across the blazing deserts from China to Russia was a fraternal link uniting all classes of the Russian people. The northern route led by Kiakhta and Omsk; the southern route, by way of Bukhara and Tashkent.
The Russians had conquered France, and as a result, tea suddenly became a Paris fashion. The green-clad Alexander, the mightiest of the allied rulers, and his suite of Russian officers—men who tramped along the boulevards wearing top-boots ornamented with clanking spurs–all drank tea. They brought with them the romance and the far-flung distances of the Russian steppes. For years after this incursion, Parisian life had a Russian note. Never before had the French seen so many Russians. At the courts of Catherine I and Catherine II people had thought, conversed, and loved in the French manner. But now Russianism was the mode in France. The army of the victorious Alexander brought with it the ideas and customs of Russia.
For a long while there existed mystical ties between St. Petersburg and Berlin. Through the instrumentality of Frau von Krüdener, the tsar, with his literary tastes, exercised a considerable influence in German intellectual circles. Now the wave flowed over Paris. This was strange, for one might have expected the vanquished to be hostile to anything that reminded them of their conquerors—but it was a remarkable proof of suppleness in the French character. Hardly was Napoleon crushed when, easily and lightly, Paris renounced the literary trappings of the First Empire, to become Bourbon and Christo-Romantic.
Throughout Europe, the Christo-Romanticists drank tea. This infusion influenced poetry, opinions, conversation. It promoted gentleness and thoughtfulness, but also emotionalism and sentimentality. Chateaubriand, the leading light of the new poetic world, read his epics aloud at the famous Parisian tea-parties. He read well, but when he reached a climax in one of his descriptions of Weltschmerz he was likely to be so carried away by his own eloquence as to burst into tears. Even when the reading was over, his tears would drop into his teacup. Such scenes were repulsive to those who were out of tune with the Restoration epoch, to Italian carbonari, to Spanish revolutionists, to enthusiasts who were ready to fight for the liberation of Greece. In a word, the political opponents of “a Europe that had gone to sleep” remained true to the ardours of coffee.
As far as Germany was concerned, it was especially in the circles that were out of sympathy with beer-drinking students that tea was widely consumed. Even before the inauguration of the Continental System, before 1806, tea had been a favourite beverage in the literary salons of Berlin—English tea imported by way of Hamburg.
It need hardly be said that Britons travelling on the Continent were great propagandists for tea. After the downfall of Napoleon, when a German tour became the vogue for Londoners, the English who went up the Rhine on their way to Switzerland wanted tea-rooms, so tearooms were provided for these travellers with money to spend. Even in typical coffee-drinking countries like Austria and Italy, Englishmen insisted on being supplied with Ceylon tea. But they were not able to impose their beverage upon the inhabitants. In Italy today, according to the latest statistics, the consumption of tea is no more than one ounce per annum per head of population. The quantity is so small that we may assume the only tea-drinkers in Italy to be British visitors.
Nevertheless, tea made headway in Germany both before and after the Napoleonic epoch, as we can learn from the literature of the period. Uhland wrote a poem in praise of tea. The evening tea-parties that became fashionable in literary circles were gently ridiculed by that prince of satirists, Heinrich Heine.