A Wilderness So Immense by Jon Kukla

governors—as did the vacillating imperial policies of Carlos IV and his ministers, especially Manuel Godoy, as they reacted to the ramifications of tumultuous events in Europe. At the same time, Carondelet’s trade and Indian policies undercut the promising intrigues with James Wilkinson and other Kentucky separatists, while the continued growth of the American western settlements and the establishment of a stronger federal government under the new Constitution posed a greater threat from the north. Governor Miró’s prompt deportation of Father Antonio Sedella on a vessel to Cádiz averted one minor tempest in the colony, but in the years between the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and the Treaty of Basle on July 22, 1795, Louisiana itself was like a tiny sloop caught in a hurricane of world events.
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    By itself, bad weather does not topple governments, not even the crippled monarchy of Louis XVI, who had ascended the throne of France at twenty on the eve of the American Revolution. Like his Bourbon cousin in Madrid, who was six years older, Louis XVI was a devotee of hunting who liked to tinker with clocks. On the eve of the French Revolution both men were comfortable in their mediocrity, chronically indecisive, and easily manipulated by their wives and courtiers. In an age of reason, neither man inspired confidence in the antique verities that supported absolute monarchy. It did not help that foreign wars and the expenses of the court at Versailles had rendered the monarchy bankrupt, forcing Louis XVI to summon for the first time since 1614 a meeting of representatives of the clergy, aristocracy, and people (roughly analogous to the British Parliament) known as the Estates-General. 12
    On July 13, 1788, violent hailstorms swept across most of France. Huge pellets of ice ripped branches from trees, leveled crops, and killed birds and wildlife in a four-hundred-mile swath from Normandy, near the English Channel, to as far south as Toulouse and Languedoc, near the Mediterranean. The hail ruined grapevines from the Loire Valley east through Burgundy to Alsace. The storm wiped out apples, oranges, and olives in the Calvados and the Midi. South of Paris the hail destroyed fruits and vegetables in the Ile-de-France, flattened wheat fields around Orleans, and devastated cereal crops to the west in Beauce. “A countryside, erstwhile ravishing,” farmers complained, “has been reduced to an arid desert.” 13
    As though some biblical curse had been unleashed upon the ancien regime, drought followed the hailstorm. The autumn harvest was meager, and a cruel winter, the worst since 1709, came hard on the heels of the drought. Grain grew scarce and flour even more dear, as ice froze the waterwheels of mills throughout the country and deep snow impeded shipments of emergency supplies. “Everywhere I have found men dead of cold and hunger,” a visitor reported from Provence in January 1789, “and that in the midst of wheat for lack of flour, all the mills being frozen.” 14
    In normal times, bread was the dietary staple for three quarters of the French population, and in normal times the standard four-pound loaf cost about 8 sous. With average daily wages of 20 to 30 sous for a manual laborer, most families normally spent half their income on bread. After the devastating hail, drought, and winter of 1788–1789, however, prices of firewood and bread soared—by February a four-pound loaf of breadcost 15 sous. The failed harvest of 1788 drove day laborers into the cities in desperate hordes. As discretionary spending plummeted and markets for manufactured goods collapsed, urban artisans joined the ranks of the unemployed, soon followed by construction workers as economic depression brought building projects to a halt. By the summer of 1789 displaced laborers comprised between one third and three quarters of the French rural population, while in every major city tens of thousands of artisans and their