A History of French Rum 5. Napoleon, Sugar Beet And Rum

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                                 A HISTORY OF FRENCH RUM

                          5. NAPOLEON, SUGAR   BEET AND RUM

As our readers know very well, the humble history of rum often goes hand in hand with Great History. Which, this time, means focusing our attention on Napoleon and his long fight  with Great Britain to achieve domination of Europe and the world.

Once again, everything starts with sugar.

“When crowds in Paris rioted in late January, 1792, they were not protesting against the rising price of bread, the usual reason for such actions during the French Revolution. Instead, they were reacting to the increased cost of sugar. … By the time of the French revolution, sugar was one of the most important commodities in French foreign trade, and raw French sugar from the French West Indies dominated the European market. … The cornerstone of the French Empire was Saint Domingue, the colonial name for Haiti, supplier of up to 70 percent of all sugar entering French ports. So decisive was the contribution of Saint Domingue that the French sugar business never recovered from the Haitian Revolution; with the loss of Saint Domingue, France was relegated to a secondary role in the international sugar trade, at least as far as cane sugar was concerned” ( R. L. Stein “The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century” 1988). 

Indeed, in Saint-Domingue  the slaves revolted against the plantation system as much as against France, and political independence was accompanied by a destruction of the plantations. Sugar production fell from nearly 200,000,000 pounds per year in the 1780s to virtually nil by the time France recognized Haitian sovereignty in 1825. 

Before the Revolution, France’s nearest competitor was Great Britain, but the distance between the two countries grew steadily throughout the 1700s. For example, if in 1730 France re-exported some 30,000,000 pounds of sugar, and Great Britain 20,000,000, in 1790 France came to re-export 125,000,000 pounds while Great Britain only 36,000,000 pounds. Hamburg and Holland were the most important refining centers of this sugar. The voyage from the Caribbean islands to France took from six to nine weeks and involved more than six hundred ships per year. The great French sugar ports were  Nantes, Bordeaux, and Marseille. 

Due to the naval superiority of Great Britain, this commerce collapsed when France declared war on England in 1793. With the exception of a brief period following the Peace of Amiens (1802), France was unable to import sugar in any significant quantities from its remaining colonies until 1815, when its final defeat at Waterloo brought finally the peace. 

After the victory of Austerlitz (2 December 1805) Napoleon – having crowned himself Emperor the year before  - was the undisputed dominator of Europe. On land his armies were invincible, but the French Navy had been heavily defeated at Trafalgar (21 October 1805)  and virtually wiped off the seas. Unable to invade Britain, Napoleon resorted to an economic war strategy meant to strangle his enemy, the so-called Continental Blockade, i.e., closing the European markets to British ships and goods, among which the precious sugar. After centuries during which its consumption had increased steadily, Europe was left without sugar. It was imperative to find a solution and, with the help of science and the resources of the French state, Napoleon found it in the humble sugar-beet. 

The potential of beet regarding sugar production was already well known to European chemists, but nobody had taken particular notice. According to Stein, as early as  “ 1740s Andreas Marcgraf had published a paper in Berlin showing the possibility of extracting sugar from beets. Some fifty years later, his pupil Franz Carl Achard turned his attention to the problem, and in 1802 he established the first factory for producing beet sugar. Although Achard has little financial success, word of his endeavors reached France, where they were soon copied.  … Within two years a large sugar beet industry was operating in France. Although it foundered after the wars, it quickly returned to prosperity and by 1835 some four hundred factories were producing nearly 80,000,000 pound of beet sugar, or a third of total French consumption.

”It’s a pleasure now to rely again on an old friend of ours, R.J. Forbes and his fundamental “Short History of the Art of Distillation”.

“During the Continental Blockade the attention of Napoleon was drawn to the production of sugar from new materials as the supplies of can-sugar from the colonies were of course cut off by the English. Now Napoleon stimulated research and first he had been impressed by the possibilities of grape-sugar or glucose, the production of which seemed very simple in the laboratory. But it was exceedingly difficult, well-nigh impossible to realize these laboratory results in practice, though the best French scientists of that day were working on it. Just as Napoleon had given up his last hope of exploiting this new source of sugar his attention was drawn to the production from sugar beets of which CHAPTAL was one of the promoters in France. After a famous visit to CHAPTAL’s beet-sugar factory in Passy on March 25th 1811 Napoleon concentrated all his scientific batteries on the production of beet sugar in his empire. B. DELESSERT  succeeded on Jan. 2nd 1812 and the emperor decorated him with his own cross of the Légion d’Honneur when he visited the refinery.

”Sadly, I know almost nothing about the History of Science, but maybe this is the first example of  a large state-promoted scientific and technological research. Big Science was born. I wonder if we can consider it a direct ancestor of Project Manhattan!

And all this was happening in the context of enormous scientific and technological progress in France. “The better knowledge of the fermentation process meant no only the possibility of making alcohol from other base materials but also better yields and more alcohol from the same quantity of wine and corn. With the growing demand for industrial alcohol it paved the way for larger productions. This meant larger stills or apparatus of greater capacity, which again led to new designs. We shall see that the cultivation of sugar-beets in the time of Napoleon, to compensate for the loss of cane-sugar from the colonies, was a strong stimulant for the design of new types of distilling apparatus, especially as the knowledge of fermenting the pulp of these beets made them an efficient base for the production of industrial alcohol”

“Now it may be generally true that England was supreme in the field of technology and France in the field of pure science. But such generalizations do not always hold when we go into the detail and this dictum is particularly true if we look at the history of distillation. For here the French technologists were supreme in the early nineteenth century, they were the men ‘distilled out of our virtues’ who led in the art. … the genius of the French distillers of the first two decades of the nineteenth century started an avalanche of patents of new distilling systems and apparatus” 

And a lot of litigations, too, for the control of the patents was worth a lot of money.

“The pioneer of the new still was EDUARD ADAM … his new distilling apparatus ‘to prepare alcohol in one operation’ for which he got a patent on May 29th 1801 …So ADAM, SOLIMANI, BARRE and BRUNERE had introduced the idea of running the first condensate counter-current to the vapors and thus enriching it to produce the desired strength of the alcohol in one run. …The final step of using the principles introduced by ADAM, BERANR etc. to build a distilling column was taken by JEAN BAPTISTE CELLIER BLUMENTHAL, …was led to the design of a distilling column by his interest in manufacturing sugar from sugar-beets …He was attracted to the problem of sugar refining with many compatriots by a prize of one million francs put up by Napoleon for a good method of obtaining a uniformly crystallized white sugar in large quantities.”

The apparatus was designed for continuous operation and he “may be truly regarded as the inventor of the modern fractionating column. CELLIER introduced the idea of a continuous stream of wine entering the preheater and a continuous stream of spent residue leaving the still. … The tempestuous development of the new still in France long left the distilleries of Germany and England unaffected. At the same time it was beyond question that the experiments on development of the old still of the cucurbit type were not continued. It may be true that these old stills only gave a weak distillate, that had to be redistilled several times and the taste was often spoiled by empyreumatic oils.”

In Great Britain  “… the new French stills could not be adopted as such, for though the English distilleries worked with rather thin mashes of grain, these stills contained too many solids to be handled in the new apparatus without difficulties. The French pre-heater was discarded altogether, as the hot cooling-water could be used with profit in the malting-house, and therefore heat-economy on this point was only a secondary consideration. The new laws of excise drew a sharp line between the malting houses and the distilleries and then the new continuous stills began to become economical. The English inventors were drawn to the problem and the crown of their efforts was the Coffey still, after which there were several decades of stagnation of the English still design. … AENEAS COFFEY patented his continuous still in 1830. “The Coffey still was an immediate success. … They easily gave 80% alcohol in one operation and therefore worked very cheaply as compared with the continental stills. Soon they were used all over England.”

But let’s go back to beet sugar. At long last Europe  could have sugar in great quantities, produced at home, without having to depend on far away tropical colonies and large, expensive fleets. In the first decades of XIX° century, many European governments, following the example of France, supported the cultivation of the sugar beet and the production and consumption of beet sugar. As early as 1840 beet sugar surpassed cane sugar in the French and German markets. 

The French Caribbean Planters didn’t give up. According to  F. Moya Pons “History of the Caribbean” (2007). “When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, the French government supported the planters of Martinique and Guadeloupe by giving them loans to develop new sugar plantations and promising them a monopoly on the French sugar market. … the production grew … [but cane sugar] could not compete in quality or price with beet sugar … The French producers of beet sugar had the advantages of lower production and transportation costs, as well as much more advanced technology for refining sugar than the Caribbean cane sugar producers.”

“The situation began to shift in 1841, when Paul Daubrée, a French industrialist, proposed to the colonists of Guadeloupe and Martinique that they follow the example of the beet sugar producers by separating farm work from industrial work. According to Daubrée, this could be accomplished by building totally mechanized ‘Central Factories’ to process large quantities of sugarcane cultivated simultaneously on several plantations. … the idea was discussed extensively in Guadeloupe and Martinique for two years, but no one was motivated to build factories until after the earthquake of February 8, 1843, which destroyed more than 400 sugar mills on Guadeloupe alone. In order to rebuild the devastated sugar industry, the colonial government authorized the creation of a steam-powered central factory capable of grinding the sugarcane of the ten or twelve planters who had lost their mills.” The first Central Factories were built between 1844 and 1848.

“The revamping of the sugar industry, which began in the French Antilles, had revolutionary consequences throughout the Caribbean. Everywhere planters were willing to stop producing sugar and simply grow sugarcane. Thus the strategy of building factories equidistant from several plantations became a popular solution. … By the end of the century, the sugar industry in the French colonies consisted of a small number of central mills, with large tracts of land cultivated by contracted foreign workers and the descendants of slaves.” Cane sugar from the plantations was now competitive with beet sugar.

Central Factories  were soon built also in Cuba and Puerto Rico while  the sugar industry in the British West Indies was one of the least advanced in the region. And, as well as sugar, the new, modern Central Factories produced rum, a lot of rum.

In France, rum consumption grew all the time. As well as from a spontaneous evolution of taste, and possibly the first signs of escapism and attraction for all things exotic, French rum benefited also from two devastating blights on the vineyards of France  “In the 1850s, European vineyards faced a species of fungus known as Oïdium tuckerii. The Oïdium, which probably originated from the introduction of North American grape wines into Europe, severely damaged European viticulture. French wine production fell from an annual average of more than 1,1 billion gallons in the 1840s to only 290 million gallons in 1854. Because American grape vines were resistant to attack by Oïdium, many wine makers imported and cultivated American vines to save their operations. Although devastating, the Oïdium crisis was largely over in the early 1860s. … Unfortunately however, the Oïdium-resistant American vines introduced an aphid known as the phylloxera. In the 1860s, the aphid phylloxera began destroying vineyards throughout Europe.” (Smith “Caribbean Rum”). For want of wine and brandy, the French turned to rum: plentiful, cheap and produced in the French colonies.

We will get back to the great growth in production and consumption of French rum in an upcoming article. For now it is enough to underline that, if at the beginning of the 1800s, French Caribbean rum makers continued to rely on inferior distilling techniques, by the 1850s they were producing quality rum equal or even better to that found in the British Caribbean. In 1855, Martinican rum did exceptionally well at an international competition which helped boost its reputation. Maybe, as often in  history, the fact that at the beginning French rum makers were lagging behind  made them more open to innovation; for example they appear to have been more inclined that their Jamaican counterparts to experiment with processed strains of yeasts. However, at the end of the century, France was importing as much, if not more, rum as Britain. 

Yet, not all French Planters were able to benefit from these developments. Many smaller farmers  could not.  The sugar they could produce directly was more expensive and of lower quality of that produced in the great Central Factories and for many of them , especially those situated inland, far from the sea, the costs of taking their few canes to the Central Factories were forbidding. 

Moreover, the small French farmers had often had an independent streak that was at odds with the requirements and the power of the Central Factories. Since their sugar had been driven out of business, they decided to give up producing it and to use sugarcane to produce only rum instead. A strange, different rum, which at the beginning only local consumers liked. As we will see in the next article.

Marco Pierini