It was like something out of a nightmare, the 21st Century’s infatuation with zombies maybe taking its root from the very real terrors of the 19th Century. When it struck in 1832, this cross-continental pandemic is estimated to have emptied New York City of half its residents; they all took refuge in the surrounding countryside thereby spreading it further into the American interior.
No one had known what it was, a novel disease which had been given but the briefest of mentions in medical journeys describing the strange encounters of Western doctors in far-flung locales. The first was around 1817 in India. By the mid-1820’s, the Middle East and Asia. By 1832, cholera was practically worldwide.
The unfortunate victim would suffer without warning, waking up in the morning violently ill having demonstrated no prior symptoms. They would turn a ghastly shade of blue, end up severely dehydrated and die sometimes within a day, even hours.
When it had reached Paris, the city like France was already under tremendous, near-constant strain. An unpopular king had been deposed just two years before, in July 1830, only to be replaced by an incompetent king, a compromise monarch without any natural constituency. Unstable is putting it mildly.
Above all, though, class strife of the sort not well-known at the time to Western society. It would subsequently become widespread knowledge much later in the aftermath, immortalized first by Victor Hugo in his widely published novel Les Misérables. In it, the romanticized sufferers of an oppressive system take to the streets, erect barriers around Paris while declaring themselves kings of their own autonomous zones.
In the heart of every leftist there is the duty to man the barricades in the name of the “people”, a quixotic notion put there by Hugo and Marx among many others. Cholera had only been the final straw, one-too-many negative factors piled on top of a lengthy catalog of everything going wrong.
In June 1832, expecting the people to follow, these idealist revolutionaries soon found themselves instead in the extreme minority (a common result). No one came except the government’s troops. Within a day, the bodies were being counted up as the street blockades were being torn down.
The majority of their isolation was their inability to connect cause with effect. Everyone in France knew the government was corrupt, and many if not most blamed it for all society’s evident evils – to the exclusion of other more comprehensive and applicable explanations.
Primary among these was the aftermath of the world’s brush with its first true GFC; a global financial crisis. Owing much to Britain’s fight with Napoleonic France, the former had abandoned the gold standard in 1797 allowing speculative currency to flood not just the British Isles but also quite a lot of places nowhere near them.
Once that war had concluded at Waterloo, “investments” flourished across especially South and Central America (including the very attractive opportunity to pour funds into the grand principality of Poyais, which didn’t actually exist anywhere except the illicit brokerage brochures of scandalous charlatans) as inflationary currency would do what inflationary currency always does. You didn’t actually think subprime mortgages were the first, or something new?
But it all came crashing down in 1825. Bank panics had happened before, as had asset bubbles, but usually these came to an end through either war or famine. Something more natural (unfortunately, war counts in this way) rather than so absurdly abstract.
In fact, the proximate cause for the Panic of 1825 (which washed over both bond and stock markets) has never been truly identified. In their expansive two-volume work, The Growth and Fluctuation of the British Economy 1790-1850, written in 1953, authors Gayer, Rostow, and Schwartz (the Schwartz being Anna, as in the co-writer of A Monetary History along with Milton Friedman) pay it but one sentence: “In the spring of 1825, a turning point came…” and then say nothing more about it.
The consequences of the deflationary circumstances were easy enough to grasp, as well as recognizable especially to a modern audience. Bank failures and market crashes, sure, but also wage deflation and widespread unemployment. Abject misery as the rising tide of industrialization was interrupted, harshly, for more than a few quarters.
Many decades later, Walter Bagehot admonished the Bank of England for that which quickly spread throughout much of the rest of the world. In 1891, Bagehot, who is now known as the father of the modern central bank, used the Panic of 1825 as a case study in what central banks should not do. At least initially, he wrote, BoE had been “acting as unwisely as it is possible to act.”
Only belatedly, after much damage and future misery had been unleashed, did the currency begin to flow. Sounding entirely too familiar to those familiar with Ben Bernanke in 2008, the Bank eventually tried everything including using methods and means it had never before considered, a great many it had previously considered taboo (accepting stocks as security, purchasing Exchequer bills, a sort of QE, issuing massive advances on deposits for bills of exchange, etc.)
In France, it was too late. Between 1826 and 1830, wages – depending upon industry – would decline by somewhere between a quarter and a third. No one knows just how many workers were eventually dispossessed, but anecdotes suggest a situation rivaling maybe even surpassing the 1930’s.
The large foundry at Chaillot in Paris, for example, cut its payrolls from three to four hundred to one hundred. The royal tapestry factory, La Savonnerie, laid off half its workforce. When in July 1830 the government offered bread cards as a primitive safety net akin to food stamps, reportedly 227,000 Parisians showed up to apply for them – out of a total city population of ~750,000 (and that was with strict government rules and severe social stigma).
This bread bailout had become necessary because, in addition to the economic depression, France suffered crop failures at the worst possible time, especially unusually low levels of wheat harvests. While wage rates were falling for those who could find work, bread prices began to skyrocket as the food shortage (supply bottleneck) added much to the misery – and therefore contributed further to the depression.
By 1828, the price of wheat around France had risen by 40% from where it had been in 1825; by 1829, +60%. The price of bread rose even faster and farther. In 1830, it had been estimated that 26 million of the country’s 31 million inhabitants had seen their incomes fall to just 11 sous (slang for 1/20 of a franc) a day.
A four-livre loaf of bread, on the other hand, the dietary staple of most French, had cost 11.5 sous in 1826 before rising to around 19 sous by 1829.
In October 1828, the Commissioner of Police in Faubourg Saint-Antoine wrote:
“Rise in the price of bread produced bitter complaints; the approach of winter frightens people and with good reason…soon the father of a family will not earn enough to buy bread and how can he provide for clothing his children and for payment of his rent.”
Given that much of the first stages of the industrial revolution revolved around the textile industry, industrial depression combined with food prices meant that French father wouldn’t buy a stitch of clothing for his children or anyone else. It was said that by 1827 and 1828, 11,000 looms in Lyon alone had been idled.
France’s Minister of the Interior, Jean-Baptiste Gay, vicomte de Martignac, began to instruct prefects throughout the country to openly and publicly discourage the unemployed from traveling to Paris seeking out either work or government redress.
By the middle of 1830, conditions were at a boiling point. In 1824, when bubbly prosperity was the order of the day, a large majority of government supporters was returned to France’s parliament to begin working with the new king, Charles X. Three years later, as the depression deepened, largely the same electorate returned a majority of leftists hostile to Charles who they saw as betraying the Republican ideals best represented by, believe it or not, Napoléon Bonaparte.
With the depression only getting worse, and food prices eroding the most of basic human security needs, in 1830 parliament was absolutely overflowing with anti-government members. After three days of worker riots and revolt that July, Charles was exiled in favor of Louis Philippe d'Orléans. Initially popular, it turned out how fleeting the mob’s favor could be.
Casimir Périer, who would be made Prime Minister, wryly observed:
“The trouble with this country is that there are many men who imagine there has been a revolution in France. No, sir, there has been no revolution. There has been simply a change in the person of the chief of the State.”
On November 21, 1831, canuts (craftsmen weavers who contracted with manufacturers and financiers to produce textile products) would march on Lyon, France’s second largest city, barricading much of the city under the anarchist black flag. They had been upset after the prefect of the department of the Rhône, Louis Bouvier-Dumolart, had initially agreed to help them come up with a floor for the price of silk by then still falling.
Crown Prince Ferdinand Philippe, and Marshal Nicholas Soult, Minister of War, who had been one of Bonaparte’s most capable commanders, would eventually march on Lyon with 20,000 troops. Order was restored without any bloodshed, but debate about the incident, and support for it, would continue.
The partisan divide only grew wider under the unrelenting economic pressure neither side could adequately explain. King Louis fingered the remaining supporters of Charles, often acting egregiously and indiscriminately in his response to their alleged insults and insolence. Many of the people began to turn on Louis and further turned against the Church. At Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the raucous crowd chanted, “Vive la République” and “Vive Napoléon” while also claiming, in French, “the King and the Jesuits force up the price of wheat!”
And then came cholera.
Dr. George B. Wood, an American, described the Pandemic of 1832 this way:
"No barriers are sufficient to obstruct its progress. It crosses mountains, deserts, and oceans. Opposing winds do not check it. All classes of persons, male and female, young and old, the robust and the feeble, are exposed to its assault; and even those whom it has once visited are not always subsequently exempt; yet as a general rule it selects its victims preferably from among those already pressed down by the various miseries of life and leaves the rich and prosperous to their sunshine and their fears."
Even the disease was unequal in its visitation of human suffering. The rich and prosperous, those who had access to cleaner, fresher water sources, were seemingly immune or at least much less affected (it would be decades before cholera, and its source, were understood). The poorest people, especially in Paris, were the hardest hit; suffering under unrelenting unemployment, wages depressed year after year, unable to adequately feed their starving families - and now this!
By June of 1832, more than 18,000 Parisians had died from the dastardly disease, striking mostly the cramped, unsanitary quarters of the city’s poorest denizens. Rumors swirled that it was the government who had been poisoning the water in those precincts, one more injustice to have suffered. Ridiculous speculation, by then it didn’t really matter. The lines had been drawn.
June 1, General Jean Maximilien Lamarque died from cholera and was given a public funeral on June 5. Hugely popular as a champion of workers and the downtrodden, as well as a war hero widely known from his exploits serving Napoléon, Lamarque’s funeral procession was redirected to the infamous Place de la Bastille – right where the 1789 French Revolution had begun.
Speeches and chanting, later on shots and violence. By nightfall an estimated 3,000 revolutionaries had taken over the areas surrounding Chatelet, the Arsenal, and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. In the absence of government forces, autonomous zones sprung up purportedly run by workers’ communes. The barricades of Victor Hugo’s lore.
And the modern monument to their effort was to suffer Russell Crowe singing throughout the movie remake of the theatrical remake of Hugo’s original novel.
Back in 1832, a whole lot had been happening, for years, with not much so far as understanding why. The big mistake, the main lesson, if you will, was in official forces even society at large failing to even try to work out the reasons behind what was going on; the actual forces beyond the visible spectrum of the engaging street theater.
It was as easy back then for many to dismiss the plight of the suffering as the rantings of madmen or their given station in life just as it is today to look at what’s going on in Seattle, in particular, as the nothing more than spoiled babies play acting their fantasies for Utopia.
These people, and their infatuation with socialism and leftism, might be (definitely are) misguided, but it might also may be born out of legitimate grievances; those two things not mutually exclusive by any means. Millennials, in particular, have never known prosperity. Sure, we are the wealthiest society ever conceived, but just how wealthy is it today when worker participation dropped after 2008 to the lowest level in many decades?
If you don’t count these hidden underclasses, and the BLS doesn’t, sure, the unemployment rate looks terrific!
Far too often those making up the “middle” have rejected the economic narrative of inequality as nothing more than standard dogma, boilerplate Marxist platitudes, unaware or unwilling to take a closer look at why and, more importantly, why now.
What do you think a roaring stock market signals to the ten maybe fifteen million missing out of the labor force since the first (21st century) global financial crisis? It tells them the system must be rigged, that this booming economy they keep hearing about must only apply to a limited set that purposefully excludes them and nearly everyone they know. And then to champion Federal Reserve Chairmen, one after another, for this “accomplishment.”
Ben Charles X Bernanke and Jay Philippe d'Orléans Powell. Janet Yellen, vicomte de Martignac.
CHAZ, or CHOP, if you prefer, didn’t just happen overnight. As repugnant and as outwardly nasty as Occupy Wall Street had been, why is it still around now in this mutated format? Because Trump fixed the economy?
These are uncomfortable truths that most people would rather never think about.
Unlike Revolutionary France, we have statistics that are perfectly able to illuminate the situation quite well. The unemployment rate said the economy last year was in the best shape it had been since 1969, but that should’ve been reconciled with an economy that also was, at its last peak in Q4 2019, still $5.1 trillion off its pre-crisis pace.
Five point one TRILLION.
Wage rates haven’t declined like they did then, still deflationary all the same, instead millions upon millions of workers never got back to work, never got to work, and then just disappeared silently into the cracks of the unemployment rate’s suspect denominator. Maybe the financial media hadn’t noticed, but a hell of a lot of people sure have.
And now you notice them.
Had the Great “Recession” been a recession, real GDP in the US would’ve been somewhere around $24.7 trillion (in 2012 $s) when the BEA calculates that it was instead just $19.2 trillion. Occupy Wall Street and the Seattle barricades don’t happen if that $5 trillion currently missing had.
Now COVID-19, perhaps one too many negative factors.
The Parisian workers’ paradises didn’t last long, first ruthlessly put down by government assault and then all but forgotten as France eventually recovered, and then prospered, in the late 1830’s and most of the 1840’s. They’d be resurrected yet again in 1848 as another mysterious depression materialized across Europe.
Economic illiteracy may, in fact, have been the biggest problem they faced in the 19th century - mass unemployment was an entirely new manifestation, the business cycle not really documented let alone studied and publicized. What’s our excuse here in the 21st century? Partisanship and factionalism don’t explain it, those evident in all those prior societal divisions.
The protestors are united in believing in their call for an end to capitalism because all they know of capitalism is post-2008. Understand why, don't just dismiss; you don't have to agree with their idea of a solution, or the historical illiteracy from which these ideas arise, reach instead for humanity and charity.
I can only hope, before too much longer, the Fed’s fake boom is eventually set to Russell Crowe’s voice talent. Like revolutionary France, it will get quiet when the economy actually grows again.