The disturbances known as the Flour Wars of April and May 1775, which took place all over France, forced the king’s hand. He instructed his Controller General of Finances, Turgot, to impose a standard price on wheat. This was very much against the Controller General’s instincts at a time when économistes such as Vincent de Gournay, adherents of the invisible hand, were advocating laissez-faire policies.
But nature made a mockery of the king’s response. Poor harvests continued. And then Laki arrived, adding flooding and frost to the rack and ruin. One French priest exorcised a dust cloud, but to no effect. A cycle of extreme, unpredictable weather kicked in, which destabilised a society seeking new answers to old problems.
The spring of 1788, for instance, saw drought take hold. Conspiracy and climate gripped one another tightly in a general panic — the Great Fear — caused by baseless rumours of a plot by the aristocracy to starve peasants and workers. This alleged Pacte de Famine was a factor, too, in the Réveillon Riots of April 1789, another stone on the path to Revolution and Modernity.
A crisis combining climate change and conspiracy. Our age seems well seeded for such a thing. If French peasants of the 18th century, all too familiar with the vagaries of laughing chance and the fragility of nature, can fall prey to such thinking, then populations far more used to having control over their comfortable lives will surely seek “rational” explanations for their misfortune. The discourse surrounding the origins and course of Covid-19, for instance, demonstrates just how difficult it is for the modern mind to deal with contingency. There is a deep need to believe that nothing happens by chance.
That modern mind was forged around the time of Laki. The decades before its eruption had seen an explosion — sorry — of interest in vulcanology, which attracted the attention of Enlightenment philosophers. Immanuel Kant claimed that an erupting volcano was an example of the “dynamic sublime”, impressive in the immediacy of its might. Edmund Burke, in his great reaction to the events across the Channel, Reflections on the Revolution in France, humanised Kant’s insight. He references a Horatian myth about the philosopher Empedocles, who, “in cold blood, is said to have leaped into the flames of a volcanic revolution”. Burke calls this compulsion towards sublime destruction the Empedocles Complex. According to the philosopher David McCallum, he was defining an “extreme psychological state inducing its sufferer to throw himself or herself into the red-hot heat of Revolution in a mad identification with its terrible power”.
European Revolutionaries and Romantics adored the idea of a tragic figure defying God, monarch, or any other fixture of a capricious natural order. The age of Robespierre, of Danton, of Marat was also that of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: the Modern Prometheus. The god who brought fire to humankind was the idol of those who sought to create the world anew, unfettered by nature and its contingencies, which had caused so many to suffer.
Whereas before the Enlightenment, natural disasters were accepted as God’s will, the fathers of modernity politicised the years and lives lost to them, blaming the random on design, the contingent on conspiracy, skewering the order of things when nature wreaks havoc.
Now we look at countries that have “succeeded” in their fight against the virus — New Zealand, Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam — seeking to learn lessons, believing that it was solely the rational acts of politicians and public bodies that brought them success. In doing so, we fail to acknowledge the contingency in those stories: New Zealand’s geographical isolation; Taiwan, South Korea and Israel’s military footing; the experience of SARS in Asia; the lack of obesity in Vietnam. Britain’s new-found success in the vaccination programme is similarly contingent — you might call it “lucky” — founded on the gambling instincts of venture capitalism, a highly centralised health service trusted by the people it serves, and access to world class universities. Policy made in the moment can only do so much.
Soon after its Revolution, France returned to monarchy on a grander scale, in the shape of the Emperor Napoleon, who dressed old-fashioned imperialism in brand new clothing. But Napoleon understood one thing the revolutionaries didn’t: contingency. Rehashing an old saying of Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV’s great diplomat, the Emperor is said to have asked of his generals not “is he skilful?”, but rather “is he lucky?”. Though it seems flippant, it’s an important and enduring insight. The role luck plays in our lives, as individuals, as nations, is a reality we will always find hard to bear.
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