Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

The Scottish expedition arrived at the isthmus and built a fort, defended by fifty cannon. Difficulties soon ensued – the greatest problem was malaria. The colony didn’t last even a year; only a handful of colonists managed to flee to New York. Meanwhile the Scots had sent another thousand settlers to New Caledonia. Defoe wrote about the Darien disaster as a ‘contrivance’ – just another failed project. 2 But thousands of Scots perished, many families were on the verge of bankruptcy, and the local shilling was devalued. Broken by events, the Scottish elite agreed to the formation of the Union with England in 1707. Scholars working on David Hume detect the influence of the Darien trauma on his work. 3 Adam Smith grew up with the stories of his fellow countrymen who sailed to their deaths from the village where he was born. It was a national trauma, barely remembered today. *

The regent and coffee

Meanwhile, the French king Louis XIV broke all records with his seventy-two years on the throne. His rule was long and pleasant, but it turned out that he was mortal. A virtuoso of political evil, the king left France with a debt of 3 billion livres and a tax system that failed to collect even 5 per cent of this sum. The greater part of this debt was linked to France’s defeat in the War of the Spanish Succession – a global conflict about overseas and European colonies. England won the war, and Louis XIV lost Canada, with its beaver and fish, but kept a colony to the south. Named in 1682 in honour of the king, Louisiana was a godforsaken place. The French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle had begun his adventures much further north, at the Great Lakes, and expected to find friendly natives and fur-clad animals on the Mississippi as well. The French had no concept of the vastness of the new continent; Louis XIV ordered de La Salle to continue south to seize the silver mines of Peru. Five years later, in Texas, de La Salle perished at the hands of his own sailors. But as a result of his efforts the French territory extended from modern Louisiana to Minnesota, encompassing eight American states. Neither beavers nor metals were to be found in this vast territory. The climate was too cool for sugar cane. The white population of French America was negligible. The bloody War of the Spanish Succession had lasted thirteen years, and only one French expedition had sailed up the Mississippi. Meanwhile France itself was turning into a wild wetland like Louisiana.

Philippe, duke of Orléans, became regent – he was married to his first cousin, a daughter of the late king. Voltaire later spread rumours that Philippe was having an affair with his own daughter, the duchess of Berry, and had fathered her child. For this impertinence, Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille, where he wrote his first play, Oedipus . Unabashed, the regent and his daughter attended the opening performance. Ancient Egypt was just becoming fashionable, and these French royals saw themselves more like pharaohs than emperors, whose powers were a little too limited. But the duke of Orléans was an enlightened ruler. In the recent war he had been a successful military leader; as head of state he became a peacemaker. But there was no money for reconstruction. The great building projects of the previous reign – Versailles and others – were a cause of financial outlay. Paris had no banks, although Genoa and Amsterdam had successfully run banks for years, and even London had one. But the elite, who had been longing for peace, gave themselves up to pleasure. As the Russian romantic writer Alexander Pushkin wrote in his historical novel The Blackamoor of Peter the Great , ‘The Duke of Orléans, combining many brilliant qualities with vices of every sort, unfortunately possessed not the slightest degree of hypocrisy. The orgies which took place at the Palais Royal were no secret to Paris; the example was contagious.’ 4

It wasn’t just the orgies that were contagious. One after another, fashionable coffeehouses opened around the Palais Royal. Louis XIV had his first taste of coffee with the Ottoman ambassador and received a coffee bush as a gift. According to legend, seedlings from this bush started the coffee plantations in Martinique. By the middle of the eighteenth century, millions of these bushes were growing in the French Atlantic colonies. ‘The whole of Paris turned into one big café,’ wrote the historian Jules Michelet about the regency. Indeed, the French Revolution began in the coffeehouses near the Palais Royal. Discussing human and civil rights, the revolutionaries drank coffee, stirred sugar into it and smoked tobacco, which were all produced by black slave labour. In Radishchev’s Journey (see chapter 4 ), two white men chat over coffee in far-away Russia: ‘“Remember”, my friend once said, “that the coffee in your cup and the sugar dissolved in it, have deprived a man like yourself of his rest, that they have been the cause … of tears, groans, blows and abuse …” – my hand trembled and I spilled the coffee.’ 5 In Voltaire’s Candide , it is the mutilated black slave who speaks. ‘If we catch a finger in the sugar mill where we work, they cut off our hand; if we try to run away, they cut off our leg. I have undergone both these experiences.’ 6