Tobacco

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TOBACCO

social aspects
cigarettes and industrialization
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On the eve of the French Revolution, some 250 years after its introduction from the Americas, tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) was used as a recreational stimulant throughout Europe. It was an important article of trade between Europe and the rest of the world and a significant source of income for many European governments. In Spain, France, Portugal, and Austria the supply of tobacco was subject to a government monopoly; in every other European country its import, processing, or sale was controlled by some form of fiscal legislation.

State control of the tobacco supply was challenged at various times during the period, notably in France, where both taxation and the government monopoly were abolished during the Revolution (although both were subsequently reinstated); in Berlin in 1848, when the right to smoke in public places was a demand of and concession made to the revolutionaries; and in Italy in 1848, where protests against an Austrian monopoly led to open revolt in Lombardy, Venice, and Piedmont.

The principal source of tobacco was the Americas, with the United States the largest supplier followed by Brazil and Cuba. Tobacco was also imported to Europe from Sri Lanka and the Philippines in the Far East and Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in the Near East. Tobacco cultivation was banned in many European countries, including Great Britain, in order to protect national monopolies or customs revenues. However, it was grown on a commercial scale in Russia, the Netherlands, and a number of Germany principalities.

social aspects

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the usual way in which tobacco was consumed throughout Europe was as snuff—dried, flavored, powdered tobacco, sniffed by the pinch as a stimulant. Over the next half-century, as a general trend across the Continent, snuffing was replaced by smoking. In some countries such as Great Britain and Holland the trend was a revival, but in others, such as Prussia, the habit was new. The switch from snuff taking to smoking commenced in the Napoleonic Wars, when the British soldiers who served in Spain during the Peninsula campaign were introduced to cigars, hitherto a Spanish or South American method of tobacco consumption, and brought the habit home with them, where it quickly spread: in 1800 Britain imported twenty-six pounds of cigars; in 1830, two hundred fifty thousand pounds. Contemporaneously with the introduction of cigars, Britain also witnessed a revival of pipe smoking, which had been the principal form of tobacco use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The revival, however, was accompanied by new social attitudes to smoking and a new etiquette for smokers. It was accepted that the smell of tobacco smoke might cause offense, and so space was dedicated, in both private houses and public institutions, to the creation of smoking rooms. Moreover, while snuff had been used by both sexes at every level of society, smoking was considered to be a masculine habit, and except among the poor, women who smoked were the subjects of moral opprobrium (although perhaps not in "bohemian" circles).

The pan-European drift toward smoking was uneven: the first year in which more tobacco was sold in France for smoking rather than snuffing was 1830, whereas in Venice the change did not occur until 1860. As a consequence, a variety of tobacco habits coexisted side by side in many European countries, and the particular habit any individual possessed often reflected his or her social class. The ability to determine a person's background by how they used tobacco was employed by novelists as an aid to characterization: Charles Dickens in Great Britain and Honoré de Balzac in France were both careful to specify the tobacco habits of their characters. In Britain, in particular, clear literary conventions were established: the amoral or ostentatious rich smoked cigars; the dependable middle class and intellectuals enjoyed pipes; old people and mill workers took snuff. Tobacco and smoking were also the subject of artistic works in their own right. For instance, Charles Baudelaire included a poem dedicated to his pipe in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857).

Attitudes toward tobacco generally were very positive. It was associated with thinking as well as relaxation and considered to be a mental stimulant. Among the poor it was used to suppress appetite. Despite advances in chemistry and the isolation, in 1828 in Heidelberg, of the alkaloid nicotine—the chemical soul of tobacco—which was found to be highly toxic, neither smoking nor snuffing were thought to be injurious. Criticism usually focused on sanitary matters (the odor of tobacco smoke tainted clothes) or safety: in Prussia, wire cigar guards were employed to protect smokers and their surroundings from ash and burning embers. Opposition to tobacco use gained some momentum in Great Britain with the advent of the temperance movement, which attacked smoking as being godless and wasteful. However such sentiments were rare and were contrary to received opinion.

cigarettes and industrialization

Although tobacco was mass consumed, for much of the nineteenth century its conversion into a consumer product was unsophisticated: it was processed rather than manufactured, and the principal cost of production in every European country was labor. The Royal Tobacco Factory in Seville, Spain, was the largest industrial building in Europe at the beginning of the period, yet it lacked all but the most rudimentary of machinery. The snuff, cigars, and loose tobacco it produced were handmade by a largely female workforce. The loose tobacco was destined for the urban poor, who smoked it rolled in scraps of paper. This manner of smoking was adopted by French travelers who carried it to Paris, where the little hand-rolled paper and tobacco cigar was named the "cigarette" by the writer Théophile Gautier in 1833. Cigarettes acquired romantic associations in France. Works such as Prosper Mérimée's Carmen (1845) put them into the mouths of tempting young women and the men who wished to seduce them. In response to evident demand, the French tobacco monopoly started manufacturing cigarettes by hand in 1845.

In Great Britain, by contrast, cigarettes were a luxury item and their consumption was thought to be effete. They had been introduced to the country in 1856 by a veteran of the Crimean War, were produced in limited quantities by exclusive tobacconists such as Philip Morris of Bond Street, and

were smoked by people of equivocal social standing such as the playwright Oscar Wilde. Matters changed in 1883 with the introduction of mechanization, which enabled British suppliers to produce a cheap and uniform product. Machine-made cigarettes did not displace existing tobacco products but rather created their own market. Unlike pipes they were simple to use, in contrast to cigars they were mild to smoke, and above all, they were consistent in quality. Such attributes made cigarettes appealing to the ever-increasing number of clerical workers; they were also attractive to women and to minors.

Cigarettes inspired the first popular opposition to smoking in Great Britain. It was perceived that such cheap branded products were irresistible to children, and in 1908 the Children and Young Persons Act was passed, which made it illegal to sell tobacco to those under sixteen years of age—an implicit acknowledgment that tobacco use might pose a risk to health. Notwithstanding such reservations, tobacco rations were supplied to British troops and to the soldiers of every other one of the principal combatant nations at the outbreak of World War I, and tobacco consumption throughout Europe ended the period on a rising trend.

See alsoAlcohol and Temperance; Drugs.