Acclimatization of Cuban Tobacco Varieties and Public Scandalization in the French Empire, c. 1860–1880
ALEXANDER VAN WICKEREN
The history of acclimatization is as much a story of failure as of success. Scientists, state officials, and amateurs all tried to cultivate foreign species in new environments during the second half of the nineteenth century, the great age of acclimatization. European states and their colonies went to great lengths to mobilize plants and animals for “improving” nature. Many histories have been written about the mobility of species, their impacts, and cultural receptions. But far fewer have studied failure, and especially the scandalization that came when states or scientists failed to deliver what they had promised.
One of these failures became a scandal in the expanding and liberalizing public sphere at the beginning of the Third Republic of France (1870–1940). After promising success, France’s state tobacco monopoly administration was forced to admit publicly in 1875 that its effort to acclimatize tobacco from Cuba had failed. The administration had only a little over a decade previously been taken over by engineers trained at the École Polytechnique. The administration ramped up efforts to produce domestic Cuban tobacco. Engineers faced criticism for a lack of expertise from financial officials from the Contributions indirectes and their allied politicians, a significant blow to their professional prestige and a threat to their relatively newfound authority in the administration. In response, the French parliament, the Assemblée nationale, formed a publicized commission of inquiry.1 Eugène Rolland, the general director of the state tobacco monopoly, was questioned at it. In front of the Assemblée, he admitted to failing in efforts to produce Havana-like quality tobacco with Cuban seed, despite earlier claiming the likelihood of success. The affair was highly embarrassing for Rolland, a decorated state official, not least because the acclimatization of tobacco was imagined to be a reasonably simple task.
Media, democracy, and political scandal became interconnected phenomena in France, which influenced the design and publicity of acclimatization efforts by engineers working for the administration. In the eyes of many European observers, the French Third Republic was awash in scandal. As the German historian Frank Bösch has demonstrated, the last decades of the nineteenth century were increasingly shaped and unsettled by public scandals.2 The growth of scandal reflected an expanding and liberalizing world of print. Daily newspapers, pamphlets, and books increased the public visibility of politicians and made it easy to criticize them. Print media brought to light sensitive issues, such as rumors and actual wrongdoings. At the same time, European parliaments gained greater political power, although their influence varied from state to state.
This chapter shows how state efforts to acclimatize tobacco in the French Empire became caught up in a public scandal in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The chapter uses the lens of the public sphere and scandal to connect European social history with the wider history of acclimatization and biotic globalization. Acclimatization had been a feature of European imperial expansion from its early origins in the Mediterranean and Atlantic islands well before 1492.3 Acclimatization reached a first peak of interest in the 1860s to 1880s, an intensive period of introductions facilitated by a growing international network of botanical and zoological gardens, state scientific agriculture and forestry departments, and a lively interest by wealthy amateurs. The 1860s–1880s represented a key turning point in attitudes toward acclimatization. Extensive failures, such as failed tree planting efforts in South Australia and South Africa, led to increased scrutiny by the state and public.4 In France, efforts to acclimatize gained popularity, reaching their pinnacle with the failed effort to transplant eland antelope from Southern Africa to France.
Efforts to cultivate Cuban tobacco occurred during this period of intense interest and growing dissatisfaction. French engineers had been focused on the centralization of tobacco reform in France by planting Cuban tobacco seeds since the 1860s.5 Like many optimists, these engineers believed initially that it would not be difficult to cultivate Cuban seed tobacco. In the 1870s, these engineers began to focus more on the French colonies as better sites for certain crops. This shift aligned with the continuing failure to cultivate French tobacco, despite representations from engineers that the task could still be achieved. Public agitators and politicians began to question whether France could support quality tobacco. Debates about tobacco acclimatization had added potency because of tensions over the direction of France’s tobacco administration by engineers, who had directed the tobacco administration since 1860. The engineers running the administration worried that criticisms undermined their authority and threatened to marginalize them within the state and scientific community. In the end, they decided to concede their mistakes and redirect their efforts to keep Cuban-like tobacco production alive. The Parisian ecological tobacco policy gradually shifted from France to its colonial territories.
The study of tobacco in France adds a needed domestic example to the larger imperial history of agriculture and environmental management in the French Empire. The historiography of nineteenth-century French agricultural and environmental reform has focused primarily on the French Empire. Michael A. Osborne6 and Christophe Bonneuil,7 among others, have argued convincingly that the new attention of French political and scientific elites to imperial acclimatization activities and agricultural policies emerged from the broader “civilizing mission” that underpinned much of nineteenth-century European imperialism.8 The emphasis on the colonies has led scholars to overlook domestic examples that do not seem linked explicitly to the civilization mission ethos.
The study of acclimatization in domestic France can be understood using perspectives developed from European social and cultural history. German-speaking historians have produced a wealth of literature on the public sphere and public scandals in recent years.9 The public sphere, which has been a central topic in the history of science roughly since the 1990s,10 offers important insights into the scandal surrounding tobacco. Historians studying agricultural reform and acclimatization in the French Empire have so far neglected the literature on public sphere and scandal. This chapter aims to transfer the concept of public scandal and scandalization to research on tobacco acclimatization in nineteenth-century France. It argues that public scandals played an important role in the transformation of French national and imperial tobacco policy.
Historians of science understand public media spaces (including journals, exhibitions, and books) and eye-contact spheres (including stages, bars, and semipublic laboratories) as integral parts of knowledge production and expertise. Sociohistorical conceptualization of public scandal, however, helps us to see state experts and scientists as fragile actors who had to respond to the public sphere.11 Historians convincingly argue that the interrelation of parliament spaces and an extension of print culture resulted in a new vulnerability of state actors12—a term, however, often also applied to scientists’ public acting and staging.13 Social historians have analyzed how state actors—such as monarchs, politicians, or administrative officials—became “victims” of scandalizing processes. Accusations first uttered in press and print often ended up in the national political spotlight.14 What made the period so volatile was the expansion of the public sphere to include new groups such as journalists, members of political oppositions, and marginalized “peripheral” actors (for example, lower social classes).15
Finally, social historians have addressed the centrality of scandal by looking at social and cultural norms (mostly related to fields of sexuality and violence), which were objects of scandalized debate and concern.16 By focusing on scandalized tobacco acclimatization, this chapter addresses a comparable issue in the field of science: the nineteenth-century idea of a “scientifically” governed state.17 In this respect, a focus on scandal helps to understand the defense strategies of expanding scientific government administrations toward public accusation and indignation. Reactions by scientists in public scandals influenced the wider processes of professionalization happening within specific disciplines; in this instance, the developing field of polytechnic tobacco sciences. The chapter aims to show how actors scrutinized and challenged, yet also confirmed and consolidated, the intensifying connection between scientific experts and the modern state.
The chapter first outlines how French engineers drew on experiments throughout the French Empire to improve tobacco in the context of similar European projects in the mid-nineteenth century. Second, the chapter shows how public scandal became a feature of French public life in the late 1860s. The third part explores how the scandal turned into an issue of parliamentary debate, giving a voice to experiences of regional tobacco officials who were previously marginalized. Finally, it demonstrates how the scandal of failed tobacco experiments in France moved tobacco engineers to distance themselves from the national dimension of acclimatization and give more priority to an ecological policy focused mainly on the non-European territories of the French Empire.
Cuban cigars gained popularity throughout the Atlantic world during the mid-nineteenth century as a result of the unique effects that they produced when smoked.18 The popularity of Cuban cigars pushed growers outside of Cuba to try to grow a similar style of tobacco. Before 1860, Parisian state institutions showed little interest in acclimatizing tobacco. This changed in 1860, with the decision by the tobacco monopoly organization to purchase Cuban seed and introduce it via Paris to France. They hoped to improve the domestic production of raw tobacco for cigar wrappers and filler as a type of import substitution. Such initiatives were part of the general attempt by France’s state tobacco monopoly administration, which had been founded in 1810–11, to modernize the tobacco industry. The Régie, as it was called, was organized by a Parisian central office instructing tobacco officials in the Départements. The monopoly organization became responsible for the cultivation, processing, and trade of tobacco.
After 1860, officials of the tobacco monopoly organization began to select and instruct farmers to trial Cuban seed.19 The administration advised farmers how to prepare experimentation grounds in their rural properties, how to sow the variety named tabac de Havane, and how to provide regular reports to the Parisian central monopoly administration. In Paris, tobacco engineers, ingénieurs des tabacs, had started ordering various regional Départements like Haut-Rhin and Alpes-Maritime20 to undertake experiments with Cuban tobacco varieties. Engineers trained at the École Polytechnique, founded in 1794, had been systematically employed as technical staff in various French state administrations since the French Revolution. Polytechnic engineers, however, had only begun to form a technical “corps” in the administration after 1830, when they became systematically responsible for the modernization of French state tobacco manufacturing.21 Once they gained more power in the central tobacco office after 1860, the engineers began to dream of harvesting tobacco of Cuban quality in France for Parisian manufacturers producing Cuban-style cigars for the domestic market. They equally sought to encourage the cultivation of tobacco in the empire, but they hoped to be able to satisfy domestic demand by French production.
Before 1860, the monopoly organization had been led primarily by officials from the Contributions indirectes, a tax collecting agency associated with the Ministry of Finance, whose focus on finances and trade had left the office ignorant of the active agronomic involvement of the central tobacco administration. In 1859, the Parisian director of Finances reported to the Ministry of Algeria and the Colonies “that today the tobacco administration became aware of the interest to enrich [doter] our overseas establishments with a cultivation of the richness equal to Havana, Porto-Rico, Brazil etc.”22 Yet, the tobacco officials did not see themselves as the active part in the improvement: “The Régie, as it understands itself, is nothing more than a trader [marchand] that buys from the producers without occupying itself with the conditions of cultivation and the secrets of preparation.”23 Although it would be right, as the director argued, that the Régie employed agents for the cultivation of tobacco in France, those officials were only hired for fiscal goals and to count the tobacco leaves of each plantation.
Internal changes around 1860 led the administration to pursue a more active scientific role in the production of tobacco in France and in its empire. The administration had no official position within the French colonies, but its engineers tried to encourage colonial planters by providing technical manuals. In the Revue maritime et coloniale from 1864, a compiled Note had been published explicitly for farmers in Madagascar, an island that many thought would support quality tobacco for Parisian cigar manufacturers. The Note emphasized the “essential importance” of seeds of “Havanese provenance” and especially those from the Vuelta Abajo, a Cuban tobacco cultivation valley that gained global fame in the mid-nineteenth century.24
In contrast to the acclimatization experiments in France, colonial tobacco resources were not exploited and improved under the supervision of the administration, but by private farmers and agricultural officials in Madagascar.25 In the 1860s, French engineers supported these settlers, merchants, and farmers but did not see their efforts as being equal in importance or success to domestic efforts. This was not yet the state-funded imperial mise en valeur of the later nineteenth century and the interwar period,26 but represented a more decentralized, “benevolent and non-exclusive patronage” of men on the spot envisioning the improvement of colonial tobacco in accordance with contemporary theories of free trade.27
In spite of the differences between metropole and colony, all the reform initiatives were part of a circulation of knowledge connecting the Spanish colony of Cuba, Paris, and the French colonies.28 Parisian engineers had traveled to Cuba since the 1840s. The tobacco administration installed French experts on the island in 1862 to learn about local conditions. French engineers met local savants, entrepreneurs, and farmers, as well as slaves, to learn about tobacco. At the same time, Cuban tobacco specialists frequently visited Paris where they exchanged information with monopoly officials. Jean-Jacques Théophile Schlœsing, the director of the École impériale d’application du service des tabacs, drew on “practical” as well as “scientific” advice from Cuba to design the first experiments with tabac de Havane in Paris-Boulogne.
These experiments reflected the growing interest in acclimatizing foreign species in Europe and its colonies, a trend that had its scientific origins in the mid-eighteenth century. Mid-nineteenth-century France saw an intense scientific discussion led by Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and the Société d’acclimatation, which downplayed the importance of natural climatic habitats and played a pioneering role in the international acclimatization movement. Saint-Hilaire’s so-called transformist theory offered an alternative to further accounts on acclimatization, whether pessimistic or optimistic. The transfer of animals and plants, in Saint-Hilaire’s view, was made possible by an intrinsic “adaptive potential” that corresponded to various types of environments. Saint-Hilaire’s abstract claims on the “limited variability of type” served as a frame for numerous practical experiments with exotic flora. The French notion of “malleability” of species explained the wide range of exotic crops that were used in acclimatization.29 Far from being similarly theoretical, the dictionary of the Académie des Sciences in 1835 defined the verb acclimater as “to accustom to the temperature and influence of a new climate.”30
Finally, the transfer of expertise and tobacco seeds from Cuba to France and its colonies was part of a global agronomic and industrial movement. From the 1850s and 1860s onward, traveling scientists, merchants, and workers contributed to the transfer of seed material and agricultural and industrial knowledge from Cuban tobacco farms, workshops, and manufacturers to tobacco cultivation sites in the Dutch colonies of Indonesia or the U.S. state of Connecticut.31 The British tried to grow Cuban seed in India.32 In 1846, the Dutch consul Guillaume Lobé claimed that it would be possible to find “proper rules” enabling tobacco farmers to grow “in the north of Europe a tobacco quality close to the one of the island Cuba.”33 In port cities such as Bremen and Hamburg, where the production of cigars with Cuban-style labels had increased from the early nineteenth century, Hanseatic merchants (for example, F. H. Meyer) were important intermediaries for the transmission of industrial knowledge about tobacco from Cuba.34
In 1868, as a result of the experiments in his garden in Paris-Boulogne, the tobacco administration’s leading chemist, Schlœsing, touted the benefits that would come when France acclimatized Cuban tobacco in his publication Le Tabac: Sa Culture au point de vue du meilleur rendement.35 In the same year, Louis Grandeau, an agricultural chemist who closely cooperated with Schlœsing, portrayed the acclimatization projects in an even more enthusiastic manner. An article in the Journal d’Agriculture pratique claimed: “He [Schlœsing] finally exposed the results for the cultivation experiments of tobacco imported from Havana into French soil [sol français] and showed that it is possible to clearly improve [d’améliorer] the quality of French tobacco [tabacs indigènes] by the frequently repeated introduction of seeds from Havana.”36 The very idea of a sol français as a frame with which to validate the results of the acclimatization of Cuban seeds echoed the paradigm of national applicability of knowledge, which had become more and more important in the course of the nineteenth century.37
Soon after, a group of publicly engaged representatives of the Contribution indirectes and their allied French politicians challenged the story that French engineers acclimatized Cuban tobacco. Beginning in 1869, just one year after Schlœsing’s results were published, the agitators had published brochures, books, and petitions that discussed the difficulties associated with Havane’s introduction, among other problems with the tobacco administration. In 1871, an anonymous pamphlet Au Gouvernement et à l’Assemblée Nationale blamed the engineers for shortcomings in high-quality cigar production in France, dwelling on Schlœsing’s “Lilliputian experience,” which had misled the officials to entrust him with “exotic species.”38 Baron Charles-Alfred de Janzé, elected as deputy of the Département du Côtes-du-Nord for the French parliament, had made similar accusations two years before in Les finances et le monopole du tabac; a text that had been published as a segmented series in the Journal de Paris in 1868.39 Published immediately after Janzé’s account in 1869, Louis Koch’s De l’introduction des élèves de l’école polytechnique dans les manufactures de l’État et de ses conséquences presented the harshest judgment on acclimatization, encompassing not only Schlœsing’s garden, but also evidence from other parts of France:
This professor, Mr. Schlœsing, much concerned himself with the acclimatization of exotic seeds in France. In this context he tried to establish a cultivation in miniature [culture en miniature], by planting the seeds in pots and boxes with mixed soil.… Due to his carefulness and precaution, the chemist was able to artificially produce plants of an exotic origin that had conserved the structure and the form of their provenance and also a large part of their original essence. However, planted outside his garden [en plaine], the varieties did not acclimatize without losing their former quality [qualité primitive]; it is known from thirty years of experience that all seeds that have been transplanted adapt to the nature [prend la nature] of the new soil and climate, which enables them to grow.40
The tone of the pamphlets directed toward a state institution was rough and clearly took advantage of the transformations of the liberal period of Napoleon III’s Second Empire, an authoritarian regime established in France after 1852. While books or reports in regional journals or newspapers would have been seriously endangered by state censorship in the early 1860s, state restrictions on public assemblies, press, and other print media had been noticeably liberalized after 1869. Consequently, the numbers of daily newspapers rose, and they delivered daily attacks on the government in “violent terms.”41
The pamphlets’ criticism of the administration was no liberal affront against the government or a challenge to the existence of the state monopoly, but rather it served as a pretext to destabilize the monopoly’s polytechnic-trained staff. All the pamphlets agreed that the overly scientific ingénieurs des tabacs who had studied at the École Polytechnique were responsible for the failed experiments with Cuban tobacco varieties. They pointed out that the curriculum at the École concentrated on theoretical subjects, such as mathematics and physics. When Koch vividly mocked the engineer’s “insider relationship” (coterie), he emphasized the fact that “mathematical chemists,” represented by Rolland and Schlœsing, had been responsible for the acclimatization’s failure.42
Koch’s words were not principally directed against mathematics or new scientific disciplines, such as agricultural chemistry, which had increased its public visibility since the 1840s.43 By emphasizing the responsibility of state scientists, the pamphlets repeated stereotypes about the alumni of the elitist École Polytechnique that had circulated since the revolution of 1848. Since then, a growing number of French scientists had stood up against Parisian educational institutions. They caricatured the students of the École Polytechnique as “inept in the real world” and poked fun at the “cerebral otherworldliness” of their abstract mathematical knowledge.44
Instead of polytechnic engineers, the pamphlets generally called for financial officials from the Contributions indirectes to staff the tobacco monopoly administration. The authors of the pamphlets came from this marginalized group. They used the opportunity to try to reclaim authority after the engineers of the École Polytechnique had taken over after 1860. In one of the pamphlets, the tobacco office was described as “our service”45 and the author, apparently a financial official, claimed to speak for a group of “commissioned staff” (employés) of “very numerous members of that administrative family.”46 Koch even explicitly revealed himself as an “Employé Superieur de la Direction générale des Manufactures de l’État,”47 and the hostile wording of his text made sure that he was not to be confused with the administration’s engineers carrying the same title. As the financial officials’ emphasis on different groups competing for state functions showed, the scandalization of the tobacco engineers who supposedly failed to acclimatize Cuban tobacco was part of the battle for positions and competence in the French state between different administrative groups during the nineteenth century.48 Certain politicians represented the criticisms of financial officers. They combined criticism against acclimatization experiments, the expertise of the officer, and ideas of free political speech in their texts. Baron Charles-Alfred de Janzé, for example, whose book had had a main influence on the financial officials,49 exploited the acclimatization issue to position himself in the changing political landscape of the late Second Empire.50
Tobacco officials from the Contributions indirectes felt unjustifiably stripped of their traditional competence in state office and lobbied for a dismissal of the tobacco engineers of the École Polytechnique:
The engineer must disappear in the interests of the financial administration, tobacco farmers, and consumers, in one way or the other, whether by his reunion with another administration, or by a healthier [plus saine] and normal reorganization of the tobacco service. Subordinated under the direction of an upright, intelligent, and enlightened [éclairé] administrator, chosen from the former descendants of the École Polytechnique, the interests of the state, the solid law, and finally also the interests of all would be guaranteed seriously and objectively [appui sérieux et impartial].51
Public calls for a more “healthy” and more “normal” administration might not have been routine in addressing governmental institutions in the press, but lines such as those cited above were routinely uttered in the later nineteenth century when agitators publicly attempted to destroy faith in politicians and high administration.52 The officials’ wording shows that problems of the acclimatization experiments had essentially been transformed into an argument for a subordination of the polytechnicians under the financial experts of the administration.
The tobacco administration’s engineers reacted with a hectically compiled public defense campaign that tried to silence the accusations that had circulated since 1869. A few weeks after Janzé’s book had been published, Eugène Rolland responded with an essay suggestively entitled Réfutation de M. le Baron de Janzé intitulé les finances & le monopole du tabac. For Rolland, the “extra-parliamentary form” of Janzé’s pamphlet with its “increasingly personal” attacks threatened to leave a “disturbing [facheuse] impression on the readers who were less familiar with these sorts of questions.” Rolland believed that “the scandal provoked with such insistence” could only be stopped when it “fell back [retombe] on its authors.”53 Stigmatizing writers like Janzé as provocateurs, the director of the central tobacco administration tried to ignore the accusations, asserting that the acclimatization experiments had failed, while trying to defend his institution in other instances.
The controversy in the late 1860s challenged the legitimacy of science in the administration, but it did not produce any change in policy or leadership. Parisian engineers continued to coordinate experiments domestically. The public scandalization of 1869–70s, and the public interest it generated, paved the way for a parliamentary inquiry that was set up in the political climate of the Third Republic established in 1871. The inquiry helped to generate a political stage for the revival of and heightened attention to the controversial acclimatization policy.
In 1873, an Enquête parlamentaire, headed by Victor Hamille, deputy of the Assemblée nationale, was commissioned to monitor the tobacco administration and determine possible paths for its reform. The state and the consumer, the inquiry argued, had a right to know if it would be necessary to limit or to extend the budget of the office and whether the staff of the monopoly organization should be reduced or enlarged. Among other issues, the parliamentary inquiry investigated the agricultural improvement attempts of the central tobacco administration and carefully analyzed if and how field trials for the improvement had taken place.54
The inquiry had been demanded by both scandalizer and scandalized. In July 1868, Janzé had presented his claims personally to the corps législatif, hoping that Napoleon III’s constitutional reforms would enable the deputies to reorganize the tobacco administration.55 Although his position received some applause among representatives in the Assemblée, the full demand was not considered worthy to be implemented.56 Simultaneously, however, the administration’s engineers had demanded that parliament adjourn the expected “reorganization of our service” until an inquiry had been established where engineers could explain themselves.57 Both the destabilization of the corps des ingénieurs and the vision of legitimizing the engineers’ standing in the new republic regime had been driving forces behind the scenes.
It was not only the actions of the Parisian central administration, financial officials, and polytechnic engineers, but also the peripheral experience with tobacco acclimatization in many French regions that made the inquiry a scandal. The parliamentary questionnaires toured the Départements. Yet some of the department’s general directors in the Contributions indirectes, as well as a few Conseils généraux, emphasized their loyalty to the central administration by submitting rather ambivalent or even positive testimonies to the tabac de Havane inquiry.58 Disregarding such views, most of the other regional interviewees regarded the experiments with Havana tobacco as unsuccessful. Following the Conseils généraux of departments like Haute-Saône and Lozère, “fine cigars,” entirely made from Cuban tobacco varieties cultivated in France and manufactured in Parisian factories, had not improved since engineers had been in charge.59 Other interviewees even complained of an acclimatization “without useful results”60 and in Haute-Pyrénées, officials were aware of a clear tendency toward the variety’s “degeneration.”61 Although the rather dense and compressed form of the questionnaire only revealed a general concern, many tobacco administrations in France’s Départements seemed to have been slightly opposed to the introduction of Cuban varieties before the inquiry. The South Alsatian Département Haut-Rhin, which had not been represented in the inquiry because of the Prussian occupation of Alsace-Lorraine after 1871, nonetheless provided an important example for the perception of the variety and the Parisian administration. Before the occupation, Alsatians had occasionally delivered positive reports to the central administration, while the majority nonetheless rather depicted images of disease and infection. While Schlœsing, as mentioned above, had downplayed instances of “rust” (rouille) in his treatise from 1869, the officials had already noticed bigger spots of “rust” in the early 1860s. Although rust was not perceived as a constant problem but as a seasonal phenomenon, debates on treatment and countermeasures soon began in Colmar’s tobacco office.62 For mid-nineteenth century scientists, merchants, and tobacco officials, “rust” showed the limits to intensifying crop production on a global scale. Coffee plantations, in particular, had been frequently threatened by rust. As a consequence, botanists did more research on the phenomenon.63 In the 1860s, regional tobacco officials in French Départements believed that Havana tobacco varieties were less suited to French environments. The issue of financial compensation for farmers in case of plague spreading in the experimental fields, in particular, resulted in accusations that the Parisian engineers were responsible for these calamities: “The administration confirmed to me that the farmers must count on its equity [équité], but not to an exaggerated favor that is inadmissible. The administration cares about information I have provided on the farmers’ attempts concerning rust that could haunt [envahir] their plantations, but I do not doubt its generous intentions to guarantee the farmers’ interest facing such an eventuality.”64
Even a financial guarantee by the state in cases of acclimatization resulting in crop failure did not convince farmers in Haut-Rhin. In the eyes of some officials, the polytechnic improvement policy had failed completely. In February 1864, the director of Colmar’s office concluded that it would be impossible to fulfil the expectations that were connected to the experiments with Havana tobacco.65 He expressed a long-standing concern with the Parisian policy, but these concerns were ignored in Paris.
Although the engineers cultivated the public image of successful acclimatization, doubts slowly began to take shape in the internal sphere of the tobacco administration. As early as 1861, Rolland confirmed to officials from Haut-Rhin that the success of the experiments with Havana seeds was limited. Nonetheless, he decided to restart the experiments by ordering provincial administrators to stick closer to instructions on Cuban-style agricultural techniques that appeared to “guarantee success.”66 Though criticism from departmental officials was not able to alter the engineers’ view on the possibilities of improving tobacco in France, it was not taboo for the officials to address problems of the introduction of Cuban tobacco varieties—as long as they remained in the inner administrative circles of debate and did not bring it to public attention.
The parliamentary inquiry of 1873 offered the first occasion for officials from the departmental “periphery” to publicly express doubt about the Parisian-led improvement policy. The inquiry also produced a statewide tableau revealing the results of French tobacco seed trials. The scandal further escalated in the wake of the inquiry. Threatened by decisions of a legislative organ with growing political competence, the Parisian engineers began to distance themselves from efforts to acclimatize the Havana variety. In line with the increase in colonial agricultural improvement after the war of 1870–71 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, engineers focused on a policy that concentrated on the French overseas colonies. This policy secured the position of the engineers in the monopoly administration.
Engineers felt rightly threatened. The commissioners of the parliamentary inquiry had threatened the engineers frequently by emphasizing the fact that tobacco engineers, as graduates of École Polytechnique, clearly received higher salaries than the lower administrators.67 Rolland protested in an interview conducted by members of the inquiry’s commission that “the tobacco administration and its director … had been the object of violent attacks.”68 Engineers were victims of their own hyperbole. Hoping to secure the tobacco administration’s organization and the dominant influence of the corps des ingénieurs, Grandeau or Schlœsing had held up images of success that paved the way for a critical alienation from the acclimatization experiments on French national state territory. For the first time, state engineers were confronted with the full amount of the “erosion of the power” that they had gradually experienced in the decades after the Napoleonic era.69
Facing such scenarios of possible removal from or subordination to the administration, the polytechnicians altered their position. Initially, as Rolland pointed out in the interview, the administration had hoped to grow tobacco plants in France that could be specially used as cigar cover leaf. He admitted, however, that experiments in the Départements of Ille-et-Vilaine and Lot-et-Garonne—the only tobacco regions Rolland mentioned explicitly—had suffered from failure.70 He tried to shift the blame to farmers. Things had gone awry because farmers were bound to apply “old-fashioned methods” and ignored instructions on Cuban-style cultivation that Parisian officials had distributed.71 The strategy of distancing from acclimatization experiments in France was successful insofar as Victor Hamille’s final report of the parliamentary inquiry from 1875 left the tobacco engineers’ position untouched. For the French parliament, the polytechnic tobacco administration still appeared as a symbol of progress and success: “The commission, after having deepened its investigations to all segments [rouages] of the Régie’s administrative organism, must truthfully declare that no part has shown traces of abuse [abus] that had been initially signalized to the commission. Therefore, the commission likes to pay tribute to the spirits of order, economy, and progress that characterize the Administration desManufactures de l’État.”72
“Order” and “progress,” main concepts of the “modernity” that had symbolized and stabilized the polytechnic engineers at least since the late eighteenth century, remained leading terms in the perceptions of the engineers. Consequently, the commissioners decided to provide “necessary credits to increase the cadre of staff charged with the surveillance of the cultivation and improve the position of the service’s staff.”73
Rather than referring to the long tradition of polytechnic engineers in the French state administration, the engineers’ confirmation by parliament was legitimated by the new colonial improvement model that Rolland presented to the commission.74 Thereby, tobacco engineers linked their corps with broader agendas encouraging colonial agriculture after 1870.75 They justified this through the idea of a mise en valeur or “civilizing mission.” Following the director, “analogous attempts” to the experiments in France had already been entertained in some parts of the French Empire; as, for instance, in Corsica, Algeria, Guyana, and Réunion, where experiments with Cuban tobacco had been already performed. Though Rolland saw “a certain chance to renew … initiatives successfully,” which had been undertaken in the French Départements before, he highlighted the difficulties of precisely predicting their future results for all of the colonial territories.76
At the same time, however, French parliamentarians appreciated the engineers’ proposed progressive policy of focusing on the colonies because it offered a substitute plan for the Alsatian tobacco cultivation that had been lost as a resource for the state’s cigar production after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71. While tobacco from Bas-Rhin had already been included since the Napoleonic era, Haut-Rhin had delivered tabacs de Havane for cigar cover leaves to the manufacturers of Cuban cigars in Paris-Reuilly only since 1864.77 As Rolland explained to the commission of the inquiry, the loss of Alsace had led to several problematic shortages because the region’s raw tobacco had provided the largest amount of French cigar tobacco processed in the monopoly’s state factories.78 The loss of Alsace, coupled with the images of colonial improvement policies that fostered support for colonial tobacco of Cuban quality, paved the way for new collaborations among state institutions and extended the state policy of distributing knowledge about tobacco cultivation to the colonies. In 1874, when the inquiry was still in progress, the Commission mixte de l’exposition permanente des Colonies published a Note sur la culture du tabac for the parliamentary inquiry, in which conditions for successful cultivation of Cuban-like tobacco in France’s overseas colonies were suggested. Following the parameters set out by the administration engineers in 1869, the role of soil composition and the problematic effects of nitrogenous fertilizer, as well as the choice of varieties, were highlighted.79 Finally, the Note emphasized the importance of seeds from Havana yet it also warned that they had “not been naturally produced in France” and that this would be a “serious obstacle for the propagation of the Havana variety” in the colonies.80
The scandal over acclimatizing Cuban tobacco in France closed the chapter in the circulation of Havana varieties between Cuba and France and opened another one: French officials shifted attention to the colonies, rather than only to France, as a site of tobacco cultivation. In the 1870s, improvement policies of the central tobacco administration changed as they increasingly focused on the colonies. While current research argues that the shift toward the colonies was the result of a “civilizing mission” to improve colonial agriculture, this chapter underlines the importance of the French public and the scandalizing processes scrutinizing the polytechnic engineers in the French state tobacco office.
The story of French Cuban cigar production and the related ecological interventions is one of failure that led to a scandal. Acclimatization experiments often failed or had unexpected results but not all became scandals or even warranted attention.81 Introducing the analytical category of scandalization shows the significance of public spheres in making these failures visible and stopping programs from continuing that might have succeeded. The nineteenth-century production and circulation of ecological knowledge can hardly be understood without considering these interrelated public spheres. An extending, liberalizing print culture and strengthening parliamentary power in the French Third Republic provided new spaces where agitators could refer to nonhuman actors to destabilize the social structure of the human world. How the public sphere and scandal influenced other acclimatization efforts will hopefully be the subject of future research by other scholars.
I would like to thank Corinna Kühn, Lena Rüßing, Pascal Schillings, and Jakob Vogel for their advice.
1. On this particular parliamentary inquiry, see Christophe Charles, A Social History of France in the 19th Century (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 155–56.
2. Frank Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse: Skandale, Politik und Medien in Deutschland und Großbritannien, 1880–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009).
3. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
4. Brett Bennett, Plantations and Protected Areas: A Global History of Forest Management (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
5. Alexander van Wickeren, “Territorializing Atlantic Knowledge: The French State Tobacco Monopoly and the Globalization of the Havana Cigar around Mid-19th Century,” in Transnational Cultures of Expertise: Knowledge and the Rise of the Modern State, edited by Lothar Schilling and Jakob Vogel (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming).
6. Michael A. Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
7. Christophe Bonneuil, “Mettre en ordre et discipliner les tropiques: Les Sciences du Végétal dans l’Empire Français, 1870–1940” (PhD diss., Université Paris-Diderot, 1997).
8. See also Patrick Petitjean, “Science and the ‘Civilizing Mission’: France and the Colonial Enterprise,” in Science across the European Empires, 1800–1950, edited by Benedikt Stuchtey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 107–28.
9. Most recently Caspar Hirschi, Skandalexperten, Expertenskandale: Zur Geschichte eines Gegenwartsproblems (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018); for a more general account, see Frank Bösch, “Kampf um Normen: Skandale in historischer Perspektive,” in Skandale: Strukturen und Strategien öffentlicher Aufmerksamkeitserzeugung, edited by Christer Petersen and Kristin Bulkow (Wiesbaden, Germany: VS-Verlag, 2011), 29–48.
10. Steven Shapin, “Science and the Public,” in Companion to the History of Modern Science, edited by Robert C. Olby (London: Routledge, 1990), 990–1007; Agustí Nieto-Galan, Science in the Public Sphere: A History of Lay Knowledge and Expertise (London: Routledge, 2016); Joris Vandendriessche, Evert Peeters, and Kaat Wils, eds., “Introduction: Performing Expertise,” in Scientists’ Expertise as Performance: Between State and Society, 1860–1960 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015), 1–13.
11. Bösch, “Kampf um Normen,” 33.
12. Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse, 469.
13. Sybilla Nikolow and Christina Wessely, “Öffentlichkeit als epistemologische und politische Ressource für die Genese umstrittener Wissenschaftskonzepte,” in Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit als Ressource füreinander: Studien zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Sybilla Nikolow and Arne Schirrmacher (Frankfurt: Campus, 2007), 273–85, 274.
14. Bösch, “Kampf um Normen,” 38.
15. Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse, 476.
16. Bösch, “Kampf um Normen,” 35; for an empirical case study, see Rebekka Habermas, “Lost in Translation: Transfer and Nontransfer in the Atakpame Colonial Scandal,” Journal of Modern History 86 (2014): 47–80.
17. Vandendriessche, Peeters, and Wils, “Introduction: Performing Expertise”; van Wickeren, “Territorializing Atlantic Knowledge.”
18. Jean Stubbs, “El Habano and the World It Has Shaped: Cuba, Connecticut, and Indonesia,” Cuban Studies 41 (2010): 39–67.
19. van Wickeren, “Territorializing Atlantic Knowledge.”
20. On Alpes-Maritime: Anonymous, “Tabacs,” Département des Alpes-Maritime, Conseil général, Session de 1865—Rapport du Préfet et annexes: Procès-Verbaux des délibérations (1865), 174–75; for archival evidence on acclimatization in Haut-Rhin, see below.
21. On the history of the French tobacco administration, Muriel Eveno and Paul Smith, Histoire des monopoles du tabac et des allumettes en France XIXe–XXe siècles: Guide du chercheur (Paris: Altadis, 2003), 22–25; for a general account on the role of polytechnic engineers in the French state, Bruno Belhoste and Konstantinos Chatzis, “From Technical Corps to Technocratic Power: French State Engineers and Their Professional and Cultural Universe in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” History and Technology 23 (Autumn 2007): 209–25.
22. Cited in Guillaume Capus, Fernand Leuillot, and Étienne Foëx, Le Tabac: Rendement et prix de revient—fabrication—production—action physiologique—régimes fiscaux—usages, vol. 3 (Paris: Société d’Éditions Géographiques, Maritimes et Coloniales, 1930), 77.
23. Capus et al., Le Tabac.
24. Anonymous, “Note de la Direction générale des tabacs sur la culture du tabac les soins qu’elle réclame et ceux à donner à ses produits,” Revue maritime et coloniale 10 (1864): 545.
25. In Madagascar, private botanical research initiatives had been introduced in the mid-nineteenth century, whereas France only sent state officials until the end of the nineteenth century. William Beinart and Karen Middleton, “Plant Transfers in Historical Perspective: A Review Article,” Environment and History 10 (Winter 2004): 14.
26. See the chapter by Idir Ouahes in this volume.
27. David Todd, “A French Imperial Meridian, 1814–1870,” Past and Present 210 (February 2011): 179.
28. van Wickeren, “Territorializing Atlantic Knowledge.”
29. Michael A. Osborne, “Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science,” Osiris 15 (2000): 140.
30. Cited in Osborne, “Acclimatizing the World,” 137.
31. Stubbs, “El Habano and the World.”
32. Kathinka Sinha Kerkhoff, Colonising Plants in Bihar (1760–1950): Tobacco betwixt Indigo and Sugarcane (Gurgaon: Partridge India, 2014), 99–100.
33. Guillaume Lobé, Mémoire sur la culture du tabac dans l’île de Cuba (Cayenne, French Guiana: Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1845), 1.
34. F. H. Meyer’s publication on Cuban tobacco was dedicated to manufacturers in Bremen and Hamburg: F. H. Meyer, Aus der Havanna—Erfahrungen und Ansichten über die Fabrikation der echten Cigarren: Nebst Mittheilungen über Tabacksbau und Tabackshandel sowie nützlichen Winken für Fabrikanten (Bremen, Germany: Meyer, 1854).
35. Jean-Jacques Théophile Schlœsing and Louis Grandeau, Le Tabac: Sa Culture au point de vue du meilleur rendement—Combustibilité des feuilles, richesse en nicotine, etc., etc. (Paris: Librarie Agricole de la Maison Rustique, 1868), 102–5. Schlœsing, however, also spotted “some accidents of rust appearing,” which he mentioned rather randomly.
36. Louis Grandeau, “Culture de Tabac: Recherches expérimentales de M. Th. Schlœsing,” Journal d’Agriculture pratique: Moniteur des comices, des propriétaires et des fermiers 32 (1868): 66–67.
37. On the entanglement between science and national ideas in the nineteenth century, see Ralph Jessen and Jakob Vogel, eds., Wissenschaft und Nation in der europäischen Geschichte (Frankfurt: Campus, 2002).
38. Anonymous, Au Gouvernement et à l’Assemblée nationale—Réformes et économies administratives—Service des Tabacs: Réfutation du mémoire présenté au gouvernement et à l’Assemblée nationale par des ingénieurs des Manufactures de l’État ancien élèves de l’École Polytechnique (Paris: L. Dupont, 1871), 13.
39. Baron Charles-Alfred de Janzé, Les finances et le monopole du tabac (Paris: A. Sauton, 1869), 32.
40. L[ouis] Koch, De l’introduction des élèves de l’école polytechnique dans les manufactures de l’état et de ses conséquences: Détails destinés à compléter le judicieux et très-véridique rapport de M. le Baron de Janzé, député des Côtes-du-Nord, présenter au corps législatif dans sa séance du 21 Juillet 1868 (Paris: Imprimerie de E. Bossan, 1869), 21.
41. Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 269.
42. Koch, De l’introduction, 1–2.
43. For more general information, see Nathalie Jas, Au carrefour de la chimie et de l’agriculture: Les sciences agronomiques en France et en Allemagne, 1850–1914 (Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines, 2001).
44. Robert Fox, The Savant and the State: Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2012), 11, 35–36.
45. Anonymous, Au Gouvernement, 7.
46. Anonymous, Au Gouvernement, 2.
47. Koch, De l’introduction, 28.
48. Lutz Raphael, Recht und Ordnung: Herrschaft durch Verwaltung im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000), 175–76.
49. Anonymous, Au Gouvernement, 5. For the anonymous author, Janzé’s book was an “extremely noteworthy book.”
50. On Janzé and his political agenda, see Anonymous, “Baron de Charles-Alfred de Janzé,” in Dictionnaire des parlementaires français: Depuis le 1er Mai 1789 jusqu’au 1er Mai 1889, FES-LAV, edited by Adolphe Robert, Edgar Bourloton, and Gaston Cougny (Paris: Bourloton, 1891), 402–3.
51. Koch, De l’introduction, 27.
52. Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse, 13, 472.
53. Eugène Rolland, Réfutation de M. le Baron de Janzé intitulé les finances & le monopole du tabac (Paris: Librairie administrative de Paul Dupont, 1869), 5–6.
54. Anonymous, “Extraits des réponses présentées par les conseils généraux,” Annales de l’Assemblée nationale: Compte-rendu in extenso des séances—Annexes—Du 18 Décembre 1875 au 8 Mars 1876 44 (1876): 168.
55. On the constitutional reform, see Price, Second Empire, 396; Daniel Prejko, Gegen Minister und Parlament: Der Conseil d’État im Gesetzgebungsverfahren des Zweiten Französischen Kaiserreichs (1852-1870) (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2012), 316.
56. Rolland, Réfutation, 4.
57. Anonymous, Au Gouvernement, 7.
58. Anonymous, “Extraits des réponses présentées par les conseils généraux,” 331.
59. Anonymous, “Extraits des réponses présentées par les conseils généraux,” 333.
60. Anonymous, “Extraits réponses par MM. les Directeurs des Manufactures d’État,” Annales de l’Assemblée nationale: Compte-rendu in extenso des séances—Annexes—Du 18 Décembre 1875 au 8 Mars 1876 44 (1876): 380.
61. Anonymous, “Extraits réponses par MM. les Directeurs des Manufactures d’État,” 380–81.
62. The Controller of Colmar to the Inspector of Colmar, Neuf-Brisach, 3 Sept. 1864, Série 4/P/209, Archives départementales du Haut-Rhin (ADHR), Colmar, France. See also, The Director of Haut-Rhin to the Inspector of Haut-Rhin, Vesoul, 1. Aug. 1863, Série 4/P/209, ADHR, Colmar, France.
63. Stuart McCook, “Global Rust Belt: Hemileia Vastatrix and the Ecological Integration of World Coffee Production since 1850,” Journal of Global History 1 (Summer 2006): 182.
64. The Director of Colmar to the Inspector of Colmar, Vesoul, 18 Mar. 1864, Série: 4/P/209, ADHR, Colmar, France.
65. The Director of Haut-Rhin to the Inspector of Haut-Rhin, Vesoul, 25 Feb. 1864, Série: 4/P/209, ADHR, Colmar, France.
66. Eugène Rolland to the Director of Haut-Rhin, Paris, 26 Feb. 1861, Série: 4/P/208, ADHR, Colmar, France; see also Eugéne Rolland to the Director of Haut-Rhin, Paris, 23 Jan. 1862, Série: 4/P/208, ADHR, Colmar, France.
67. Victor Hamille, “Rapport fait au nom de la commission d’enquête sur l’exploitation du monopole des tabacs et des poudres, sur la fabrication des tabacs et l’organisation administrative de la Régie,” in Enquête parlemantaire sur l’exploitation du monopole des tabacs et des poudres (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1876), 9–10.
68. Commission d’Enquête sur les tabacs: Séance du Jeudi, 27 May 1873, Série: C//3082, Archives Nationales, Paris, France.
69. Fox, The Savant and the State, 19.
70. Anonymous, “Réponses présentées par M. le Directeur général des Manufactures de l’État après examen et avis de son conseil d’administration,” in Annales de l’Assemblée nationale: Compte-rendu in extenso des séances—Annexes—Du 18 Décembre 1875 au 8 Mars 1876 44 (1876): 168.
71. Anonymous, “Réponses présentées par M. le Directeur général des Manufactures de l’État,” 169.
72. Victor Hamille, “Rapport fait au nom de la commission d’enquête sur l’exploitation du monopole des tabacs et des poudres, sur la fabrication des tabacs et l’organisation administrative de la Régie,” in Assemblée nationale, Année 1875, Impressions: Projets de lois, propositions, rapports, etc., Numéros 3420 à 3488 46 (1875): 163.
73. Anonymous, “Note sur les travaux de la commission d’enquête,” in Annales de l’Assemblée nationale: Compte-rendu in extenso des séances—Annexes—Du 18 Décembre 1875 au 8 Mars 1876 44 (1876): 135.
74. Anonymous, “Réponses présentées par M. le Directeur général des manufactures de l’État,” 174.
75. See Bonneuil, “Mettre en ordre et discipliner les tropiques,” 23–162.
76. Bonneuil, “Mettre en ordre et discipliner les tropiques,” 168.
77. The Director of Haut-Rhin to the Inspector of Haut-Rhin, Vesoul, 16 Aug. 1864, Série: 4/P/209, ADHR, Colmar, France; see also the memorandum of Eugène Rolland to the Directors of the Departments, Paris, 10 Feb. 1864, Série: 4/P/209, ADHR, Colmar, France.
78. Commission d’Enquête sur les tabacs: Séance du Jeudi, 27 May 1873.
79. Anonymous, “Note sur la culture du tabac, publiée par les soins de la Commission mixte des tabacs de l’exposition permanente des Colonies,” in Annales de l’Assemblée nationale: Compte-rendu in extenso des Séances—Annexes—Du 18 Décembre 1875 au 8 Mars 1876 44 (1876): 452. An extended version was published in 1875: Exposition permanente des colonies: Comission mixte des tabac, Note sur la culture des tabacs, Paris, Sept. 1875, Série: C//3082, Archives Nationales, Paris, France.
80. Anonymous, “Note sur la culture du tabac,” 454. The shift in the policy, however, was not complete but rather gradual. The loss of Alsace therefore encouraged engineers, as they claimed in the inquiry, to try new “extensions” of the cultivation of cigar tobacco in “certains Départements”: Hamille, “Rapport fait au nom de la commission,” 23.
81. Brett Bennett, “The El Dorado of Forestry: The Eucalyptus in India, South Africa, and Thailand, 1850–2000,” International Review of Social History 55 (2010): 27–50.