The Radiant Republic 82. Steel Capital and the Gospel of Cowpox

Jas arrived in Paris by boat at noon on the day of the banquet and took temporary lodgings in a picturesque villa on the Île Saint-Louis, where he shared lunch with his employer, André.

In this Englishman’s eyes, Paris was far less healthy than London. On both banks of the Seine stood solemn and imposing aristocratic mansions and tall buildings, lavishly decorated within and furnished with exquisite luxury. Yet the main districts of Paris remained just as crowded and noisy, muddy and hard to walk through, full of shouting and stench—objectionable in every respect.

In André’s eyes, the heir of old Watt was of dium height, with well-defined features and a neatly trimd full beard. Although Jas spent most of his ti as an engineer in grimy workshops where oil and grease covered the ground, he was, like other English gentlen, ticulous about keeping his nails and beard perfectly grood. Every detail of his dress and manners reflected that characteristic English scrupulousness and orderliness.

Accompanying the Englishman was the chief engineer of the Joint Steam Engine Company, Charles Périer (Périer (the older one)). At the request of General Manager Say, he had co especially to report the latest developnts of the United Investnt Company to André.

Perhaps the long journey had been too exhausting; during their brief conversation after lunch, Jas showed clear signs of fatigue. André quickly signalled to the servants to escort the guest to a room where he could wash and rest. He would be woken towards evening, and then go with André to the banquet at the British consulate.

…

In the drawing room of the villa, André sat on a broad, comfortable sofa, listening in detail to the work report of Périer (the older one). In principle, this reporting should have taken place a week earlier in the conference room of the Joint Steam Engine Company in Châlons-en-Champagne, with General Manager Say and Chief Engineer Périer (the older one) both present. However, Mirabeau’s sudden death had forced André to travel from Reims to Paris to attend the funeral of that “Lion of France.”

Thanks to the assistance of Jas Watt, Edmund Cartwright and several of the best British engineers, the application of steam engines to spinning mules and looms in practical production had been very successful. According to the annual forecast report sent by Say, the steam-engine division (the Joint Steam Engine Company) under the United Investnt Company was expected to shake off its chronic losses by the last quarter of 1791, cease to require financial transfusions and, in 1792, bring the company as a whole into profit.

At the sa ti, crucial breakthroughs had been made in the effort to copy the Watt-type steam engine. With André’s full support and at the cost of repeated and lavish experintation, the “pirate” team under Périer (the older one) had already localised seventy-five per cent of the components. Périer (the older one) stated that by October 1791, half a year later, they would achieve complete dostic production of the engine.

Several projects involving scholars of the Académie des Sciences had likewise made significant progress. High-yield, high-quality potatoes had been successfully introduced in Reims and were gradually spreading to other parts of the départent of the Marne. The introduction of the patent for a piano-style typesetting machine, together with the successful developnt of a new rotary drum printing press, had increased efficiency thirtyfold compared with the older vertical screw presses. Powdered milk and malted milk had also entered mass production and were proving popular with the public.

These pieces of good news were certainly encouraging, but there were still plenty of serious difficulties and problems.

Because of André’s insistence, no more than half of the copper and iron materials used to copy the Watt-type steam engine could be imported from Britain. The other half had to co from talworks in Alsace or Lorraine. Moreover, all such materials had to be fully replaced by dostically produced equivalents before April 1792.

For example, the cylinder block and bedplate were to be made of cast iron; the crankshaft and connecting rods of wrought iron or low-carbon steel; the piston had to be made of dium-carbon steel or better; bronze was to be used chiefly for crossheads and bearings; as for smaller parts, brass was preferred because of its superior conductivity.

Périer (the older one) stated bluntly, “The key problem at present is that the tallurgical works in Alsace and Lorraine are too backward, and they are reluctant to invest in upgrading their plants. Especially in steel, much of their output does not et even the minimum production standards required by the United Investnt Company.”

André had long anticipated this. It was precisely for this reason that, the previous year, he had instructed Fourier in Paris to contact chemists and materials scientists of the Académie des Sciences to work on improving both the quality and the output of steel. In fact, André had already confided his “major discovery” to Fourier: the decisive role played by carbon content in steelmaking.

Following the research direction proposed by Fourier, the scientists soon confird that the higher the carbon content, the greater the strength and hardness of the steel, but the lower its ductility and toughness; conversely, the lower the carbon content, the higher the ductility and toughness, and the lower the strength and hardness.

André said, “If all goes well, Academician Lavoisier will, within two months, present a complete set of improved processes for steelmaking. I have promised Condorcet and Lavoisier that I will actively attract investnt from the Paris tax-farming syndicates into new steelworks and textile mills in the Champagne region.”

The second troubleso issue was that the reserve funds of the Joint Steam Engine Company no longer seed adequate.

Since last year, the obsessive André had poured nearly 20 million livres into the Joint Steam Engine Company and its supporting industrial chain. Most of the huge fortune which Prosecutor André had accumulated in Bordeaux and Reims had been committed to this, and the rate at which money was being burned could be imagined.

Even so, André did not care much about the imdiate ratio of investnt to return. He knew perfectly well that in the eighteenth century the importance of the steam engine to the Industrial Revolution was no less than that of high-end microchips in the twenty-first.

But in the end, the country’s industrial infrastructure could not be built by one man alone. André soon ca to this realisation. After reaching a final settlent with the alliance of tax farrs and resigning as the prosecutor of the Special Fiscal Court, he began to guide wealthy n such as Lavoisier, who had withdrawn from the tax-farming business, to take part in the industrialisation of the Champagne region.

At first, the tax farrs who had been tornted by him were reluctant to trust the deputy chief prosecutor of the Marne, for he had cost them nearly one-third of their family fortunes. Yet a month earlier, the situation had taken a turn.

The advent of steam looms and spinning mules had enabled the textile factories under the United Investnt Company to secure between thirty and forty per cent of all cotton exports from the Lorraine region. The cotton cloth produced by the joint textile mill not only had high quality and high output; crucially, its production cost was less than half that of traditional hospun cloth.

In March of this year, when the first batches of cotton cloth from the joint textile mill entered Paris, they swept the French textile market with their overwhelming advantages of high quality and low price. By the ti André returned to Paris, many wealthy n who had abandoned the tax-farming business, represented by Lavoisier, were approaching him with proposals for cooperation and equity participation.

André, of course, welcod this with open arms. Apart from the United Investnt Company—the parent company—and its most important subsidiaries, the Joint Steam Engine Company and the joint comrcial bank (in which André held half the shares), all of which were non-transferable, shares in the United Investnt Company’s spinning mills, weaving factories, canneries, cigarette factories, Portland cent works, tallurgical technologies, new rotary printing presses and the nutritional products based on powdered milk and malted milk could all be partially or even largely transferred. New plants could be co-financed, or regional patent licences for production might be granted.

In addition, André suggested that Lavoisier, drawing on the technical resources of the Académie des Sciences, should concentrate on research in dyeing chemistry. Once significant breakthroughs were made, they could open more profitable dye works in Paris or Châlons-en-Champagne. For the next hundred years or more, the dyeing industry would be the true cash cow.

On the other hand, André was not limiting participation to wealthy n who had left the tax-farming trade. He also welcod other property owners in Paris to invest in industrial developnt in the Champagne region. For example, Danton invested 100,000 livres in a food factory producing powdered milk and malted milk; the wife of Condorcet sought the right to sell Châlons-en-Champagne cotton cloth in the Paris area; mbers of Lafayette’s family took a liking to investnts in canneries and cigarette factories.

All the specific arrangents for these partnerships, however, were left entirely in the hands of General Manager Say, who was permanently based in Châlons-en-Champagne. André himself would not beco too deeply involved in comrcial operations. As for internal supervision, the audit departnt of the United Investnt Company would naturally carry out routine inspections.

Whenever new technologies and new products appeared, the fiercest resistance always ca from the traditional handicrafts most affected by them. Passing on Say’s words, Périer (the older one) said, “In Lorraine and Alsace, the handicraft workshops suffering the greatest impact—especially the textile workshop owners—are actively joining forces to resist the new steam-powered textile factories. They are even shouting militant slogans, vowing to obstruct, by every ans, the shipnt of Lorraine cotton and steel and Alsatian coal and copper ingots along the Marne waterway to Châlons-en-Champagne.”

In response, Say had considered a compromise acceptable to both sides, but André refused. He was convinced that a competent capitalist must exploit his absolute technical monopoly to force all competitors to submit unconditionally, and then move on to unequal exchange, the compulsory export of capital and every form of debt extraction.

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To shield his own industrial empire, André did not hesitate to resort to the most direct forms of violence. Openly, he united with other shareholders to buy and win over the powerful families and officials in the northeastern provinces, bringing lawsuits against all illicit trade associations for disrupting normal production and business and throwing all recalcitrant parties into prison. In secret, André would make use of his intelligence service or of roaming “forest bandits” to intimidate or eliminate certain uncooperative workshop owners and their protectors.

In Paris, however, when faced with collective resistance from the textile trade, André took the initiative and sent envoys to negotiate a comprehensive compromise. The price of cotton cloth and yarn would be raised to a normal level and sales would be confined to designated districts. In return, the guilds and associations would no longer oppose the sale of the new cotton cloth in Paris.

After all, the Paris market was enormous, and the current capacity of the textile mills was far from sufficient to et the needs of six hundred thousand Parisians. There was no need to start a premature war to the death with fellow producers in the sa line of business. Moreover, the naturally excitable inhabitants of Paris were highly sensitive and inclined to vent every economic grievance in the political arena, which made the risks even greater.

Apart from industrial ventures and their problems, André was also concerned about the smallpox vaccine, where Edward Jenner had still not achieved a major breakthrough in scalable extraction.

Although Jenner would later be hailed as the “father of immunology,” the British doctor, working almost alone, found it hard to replicate on his own the great achievents which Professor Pasteur would one day make in attenuating and inactivating viruses. Even with André’s golden finger pointing the way, the progress was not especially fast. Even now, when Doctor Jenner vaccinated the n of the Champagne Composite Regint in their camp, he still had to keep by his side a small calf infected with cowpox as a living source of vaccine.

Even in the great age of Pasteur, mass vaccination of the people usually took place in the following wretched fashion:

Faced with the choice between life and death, people mustered the courage to co forward for inoculation. They stood in long lines, deeply uneasy. Many of them kept making the sign of the cross over their chests with their right hands, praying for God’s forgiveness. The deaths and sufferings brought by smallpox were so horrific that they felt compelled to accept the temptation of the “devil cow.” In their pockets their left hands were clenched in fists around the two copper coins that would pay the inoculation fee.

Once he had received his fee, the doctor would take a small drop of pus from the pox pustules on the “vaccine calf,” then use his scalpel to cut a small cross-shaped wound on the exposed upper part of the patient’s left arm and finally rub the fresh pus into the wound. Terrified by the tornt inflicted upon it by human hands, the calf in the enclosure would often low in panic, sotis to the point of losing control of its bowels, making it impossible to proceed to the next inoculation.

At such monts, if a priest or other clergyman happened to pass by, the people waiting in line would scatter in panic just like the frightened calf.

As the first large-scale trial site for cowpox vaccination, the Champagne Composite Regint had adopted precisely this thod. The only difference was that Father Marey in the camp did not try to stop the inoculations. Instead he used the na of God to comfort the faithful, shalessly proclaiming that the cowpox vaccine was a blessing which God had entrusted to God-Favoured André to bring to mankind.

At André’s insistence, all officers of the Champagne Composite Regint were to set an example. Starting with Lieutenant Colonel Berthier and Major Moncey, the officers were the first group to be vaccinated (André himself had undergone inoculation back in 1789); they were followed by non-commissioned officers and finally by the rank-and-file soldiers. With the coordinated efforts of the regintal dical officers and nurses, the regint and the attached gendarrie—more than two thousand n in all—completed vaccination in just two days.

During the process, one officer and twenty-three soldiers resolutely refused the vaccine. When simple persuasion failed, the n involved were taken away by the gendarrie. A week later, Captain Chassé of the gendarrie publicly announced the order sent from Paris by their superior, André: all twenty-four officers and soldiers who had disobeyed the military order were to be discharged from the army and expelled from the camp for good.

On the whole, vaccination in the army went relatively smoothly. In the civilian population of Reims, however, matters proved more troubleso. In the second week after Easter, the Reims City Hall publicly announced that, over the next thirty days, more than twenty thousand residents in its jurisdiction who had not received variolation and had never had smallpox (and therefore bore no pockmark scars) would be given cowpox vaccinations free of charge.

Initially, the number of volunteers was pitifully small. After a week, the vast Reims district had produced fewer than eight hundred willing recipients, most of whom were officers and n of the Reims National Guard whom Captain Chassé had urged on, or municipal officials unwilling to risk their posts. Seeing this, André—who had been ntally prepared for such resistance—sent an official letter to the Reims City Hall, instructing Mayor Basile to adopt an iron hand and reverse this passive situation.

In early May, the municipal governnt deployed police and National Guardsn to maintain order everywhere. Those who refused to have themselves or their families vaccinated would be fined; those who used the opportunity to make trouble would be imprisoned. At the sa ti, André persuaded Mother Superior Sophia of the convent to take the lead. The revered old abbess had herself, her nuns and the children of the orphanage vaccinated. In addition, André forced the wife of Marquis de Demoë to bring her twin children to the square in front of the City Hall and have them vaccinated against smallpox in public.

In this way, under the combined use of soft and hard thods by André and the local authorities, more than twenty thousand residents of Reims, realising that they could not win in a contest of strength against the authorities, finally “wept and cursed” as they submitted to the accursed cowpox vaccine, which left them with a small, indelible scar on their arms—and in their minds.

When André returned to Paris for Mirabeau’s funeral, Doctor Edward Jenner’s dical paper that would go down in history, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Cowpox, was officially published in a Paris dical journal. At Jenner’s strong insistence, André Franck was listed as the second author.

This was because André was not only the sole sponsor of the project but, more importantly, also the first person on the European continent (outside Britain) to be vaccinated with cowpox. Indeed, without André’s unstinting support, a large-scale cowpox campaign led by the Reims authorities would not have taken place until the Victorian era, half a century later.

The British doctor resident in France also agreed to place the dical patent for cowpox vaccination in the public domain, for the benefit of all. While André was forcing the people of Reims to accept the vaccine, cowpox inoculation was slowly spreading to the Marne and the greater Champagne region. Without firm governnt guidance, however, voluntary vaccination rates remained diocre. Although a fee of ten sous was not high (equivalent to the price of two and a half pounds of black bread), many people would rather gamble on not catching smallpox in future than take a small imdiate risk by having the injection.

After the successful campaign in Reims, Doctor Jenner, now working with several French doctors and chemists, turned his full attention to the standardisation of attenuation and inactivation of the vaccine. They began to study how to dry and purify cowpox matter and produce it in a soluble powdered form. In another ti and space, this would have been the great achievent of Professor Pasteur.

Having given Périer (the older one) his instructions regarding the imminent rollout of cowpox vaccination in Reims, André shifted the conversation to another major subject in the industrial sphere, which in his view was no less important than the Watt-type steam engine.

“Machine tools?” Périer the elder looked at André in puzzlent, turning over in his mind this new term—which, of course, had also been coined by the man before him.

Machine tools, put simply, were machines used to make other machines—the machines that manufacture machinery. The concept and industry of machine tools as the “mother machines” only took shape in the 1870s and 1880s, when the major capitalist countries of Europe and Arica—Britain, France, the United States, Germany and others—had completed or were about to complete the Industrial Revolution.

In the age of steam, machine tools used to manufacture other machinery did not refer to a single device but to a standardised group of general-purpose machines. They included planers, lathes, steam hamrs, boring machines and so forth. Finished and semi-finished products of such machines had already appeared in the island kingdom across the Channel. However, inadequate tal materials (slting) and relatively backward machining techniques ant that early machine tools were not very efficient and had not yet beco fully standardised general-purpose equipnt.

In fact, thanks to the Académie des Sciences, France was not inferior to Britain in basic industrial research, and in machining it was arguably stronger. The root of its backwardness lay mainly in the bureaucratisation of scholarship, which had beco almost irreparable, and in the lack of the enduringly free and relaxed scientific climate that the English had enjoyed since the Glorious Revolution.

In theory, unless so revolutionary technological breakthrough occurred—for example, the internal combustion engine supplanting the steam engine and enabling the United States to overtake Britain—there was usually no possibility of “overtaking on the bend.” Yet André was, after all, the one from the future, a guiding light whose “absolute correctness” on matters of direction gave France a chance to catch up with Britain in the Industrial Revolution.

Although André could not reverse the bureaucratic nature of the Académie des Sciences, he had, as part of an earlier political deal, pressed Condorcet, Lavoisier and others to promote multi-project cooperation between the Académie and the United Investnt Company. One of these projects was to make tallurgy a formal research topic and set up a branch institute in Châlons-en-Champagne.

At the Reims budget session at the start of 1791, André demanded that the City Hall reform the University of Reims. Courses in Latin and theology were to be reduced to electives; existing strengths in subjects such as law and administration were to be maintained; and engineering and the sciences were to be given full support, including the establishnt of a new engineering faculty. In addition, André required the Reims City Hall to allocate thirty per cent of all smuggling revenue directly to the engineering faculty of the University of Reims.

André had hoped that Academician Lavoisier would head the faculty, even if only part-ti. But Lavoisier could not bear to give up life in Paris and the company he kept there, and once again declined politely. So…

“And so,” André went on, “Deputy Prieur has written back to from Amsterdam. He agrees that, once the Constituent Assembly is dissolved, he will serve as the first dean of the Reims School of Engineering. Before that happens, Fourier will also resign his lectureship at the University of Paris and decide to follow you to gain practical experience at the steam-engine company. When you return to Châlons-en-Champagne, you can take him and his friends with you.”

Because of the severe shortage of funds handed down by the Paris governnt, even venerable institutions such as the University of Paris (the Sorbonne) were finding it hard to make ends et. André therefore instructed Fourier, acting in his own na, to win over frustrated lecturers and professors from Parisian universities, so as to strengthen and expand the University of Reims and its engineering faculty.

…

The British embassy and consulate had set the banquet for five o’clock in the afternoon, so André ordered the servants to wake Jas Watt an hour earlier. This ti they did not travel in a four-wheeled carriage crawling through the congested streets of Paris. Instead they boarded a pleasure boat fitted with both oars and sails, reserved for André’s personal use.

The boat, nad The Musket, had originally belonged to Judge Vinault and had been taken over and refurbished by André for his own use. Valuing his life highly, he usually stayed in the villa on the Île Saint-Louis during his stays in Paris. In an ergency he could use The Musket to escape from the city and return to Reims to regroup—and, in the opposite direction, to slip quietly back into Paris when needed.