Hail, Cake and the French Revolution

• Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette in the 2006 Movie

The weather in England is unseasonably cold at the moment and for the first time in my life I find myself with hay fever; I am allergic to tree pollen, driving through squalls of hail and sleet in the car, and huddling in front of the fire in the evening for warmth!

England's weather is notoriously unpredictable but this spring has been particularly cold with the wind blowing from the north for days on end. Historians and archaeologists are becoming increasingly aware of the influence of weather on the world’s great events and as someone who has been researching life in 18^th century Britain and France I was amazed to find that the weather could be said to one of the causes of the French Revolution.

The summer of 1788 was a particularly warm one in London that year. As temperatures soared in the capital the incidence of Scarlet fever and Typhus spread through the city and in August over 1000 deaths were attributed to fever alone but as Londoners sweltered the French baked. The spring and summer of the year before the Revolution were characterised by searing drought.

The French were not particularly good farmers at the time, the aristocracy and major land owners were not interested applying of developing improvements to agriculture and food production unlike their British counterparts and food production was already pretty poor. At the end of this unprecedented dry period the skies opened and hail the size of fists fell bashing the fruit from the trees and the smashing the crops in the fields to smithereens so when the French entered the winter of 1788-9 food stocks were at an all time low.

To make matters worse the disastrous harvest was followed by months of freezing weather. The temperature barely rose above freezing for three months through November, December and January. In London the river Thames froze but in France the effect of frozen earth meant that root crops had to be chiselled out of the ground.

So when Marie Antoinette reportedly said on hearing there was no bread to be had in Paris, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche," it was because of the weather.