by W. G. Sebald
The arguments which Maximilien de Béthune, Duc de Sully, brought to bear with his sovereign are summed up in the sixteenth volume of his memoirs, a fine edition of which, printed in 1788 by
F. J. Desoer in Liège, à la Croix d'or, I acquired for a few shillings many years ago at an auction in the small country town of Aylsham, north of Norwich. Sully opened his case by maintaining that the French climate was unsuited to producing silk. The spring, so Sully asserted, began too late, and even when it did arrive, humidity, rising out of the fields or descending on them, tended to be too high. This unfavourable circumstance alone, which nothing could countervail, was extremely detrimental both to the silkworms, which could only with great difficulty be persuaded to hatch, and to the mulberry trees, which needed mild air above all else, especially at that time of year when they were coming into leaf, if they were to flourish. Quite apart from this basic consideration, Sully continued, one had to bear in mind that rural life in France allowed nobody any superfluous leisure, with the possible exception of the habitually idle; and therefore, if one really were to introduce silk cultivation on a large scale, one would have to prevent rural labourers from going about their accustomed daily work and employ them in what was in every respect a dubious enterprise. Sully conceded that country folk would in all likelihood be easily persuaded to make such a change in their basic way of life, for who would not give up labouring on the land for a venture like silk cultivation, which required no real effort at all? And therein lay the most compelling reason against a general adoption of sericulture in France, urged Sully in a deft turn of phrase directed at the soldier king: the danger that the rural population, from whom the best musketeers and cavalrymen had always been recruited, would lose their innate vigour by being employed on work more fitting for women's and children's hands. As a result, it would soon no longer be possible to ensure that among the next generations there would be sufficient numbers of men capable of practising the martial arts. And not only would the manufacturing of silk lead to degeneration among the country folk, Sully continued, but it would also promote the insidious corruption of the urban classes through luxurious living and all that went with it—laziness, effeminacy, lechery and extravagance. Far too much was already being lavished in France on ornamental gardens and ostentatious palaces, on the most extravagant furnishings and décor, gold ornaments and porcelain, carriages and cabriolets, galas and festivities, liqueurs and perfumes, and even, Sully noted, on public offices sold at exorbitant prices, and marriageable ladies from the upper classes, who were auctioned off to the highest bidder. Further to encourage the general decline in moral standards by introducing silk cultivation throughout the kingdom was something Sully must advise his King against, and, par contre, he wished to suggest that one might now like to remember the virtues of those who sustained themselves in the most modest and frugal way. However, the prime minister's objections were ignored, and silk cultivation became established in France within a decade, not least because the Edict of Nantes, which was proclaimed in 1598, safeguarded at least a degree of tolerance to the Huguenots, who until that time had been subject to sever persecution, thereby making it possible for the very people who had played a prominent part in introducing silk cultivation to remain in their French fatherland. —Inspired by the French example, the adoption of silk cultivation by royal patronage occurred at almost the same time in England. On the site where Buckingham Palace now stands, James I had a mulberry garden of several acres laid out, and at Theobald's, his favourite country seat in Essex, he maintained his own silk house for the rearing of silkworms. James was so greatly interested in these industrious creatures that he would spend hour after hour studying their habits and needs, and whenever he undertook journeys about his kingdom he always had with him a large casket full of royal silkworms, the keeping of which was entrusted to a specially appointed groom of the chamber. James had well over a hundred thousand mulberry trees planted in the drier counties of eastern England, and in this and other ways he laid the foundations for an important branch of industry which entered its heyday at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when, following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV, more than fifty thousand Huguenots fled to England, many of whom, experienced in breeding silkworms and in the fabrication of silk stuffs—craftsmen and merchant families such as the Lefèvres and the Tillettes, the De Hagues, the Martineaus and the Columbines—settled in Norwich, at that time the second largest city in England, where since the early sixteenth century there had been a colony of about five thousand immigrant Flemish and Walloon weavers. By 1750, a bare two generations later, the Huguenot master weavers of Norwich had risen to become the wealthiest, most influential and cultivated class of entrepreneurs in the entire kingdom. In their factories and those of their suppliers there was the greatest imaginable commotion, day in, day out, and it is said in a history of silk manufacture in England that a traveller approaching Norwich under the black sky of a winter night would be amazed by the glare over the city, caused by light coming from the windows of the workshops, still busy at this late hour. Increase of light and increase of labour have always gone hand in hand. If today, when our gaze is no longer able to penetrate the pale reflected glow over the city and its environs, we think back to the eighteenth century, it hardly seems possible that even then, before the Industrial Age, a great number of people, at least in some places, spent their lives with their wretched bodies strapped to looms made of wooden frames and rails, hung with weights, and reminiscent of instruments of torture or cages. It was a
peculiar symbiosis which, perhaps because of its relatively primitive character, makes more apparent than any later form of factory work that we are able to maintain ourselves on this earth only by being harnessed to the machines we have invented. That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread. On the other hand, when we consider the weavers' mental illnesses we should also bear in mind that many of the materials produced in the factories of Norwich in the decades before the Industrial Revolution began—silk brocades and watered tabinets, stains and satinettes, camblets and cheveretts, prunelles, callimancoes and florentines, diamantines and grenadines, blondines, bombazines, belle-isles and martiniques—were of a truly fabulous variety, and of an iridescent, quite indescribable beauty as if they had been produced by Nature itself, like the plumage of birds. —That, at any rate, is what I think when I look at the marvellous strips of colour in the pattern books, the edges and gaps filled with mysterious figures and symbols, that are kept in the small museum of Strangers Hall, which was once the town house of just such a family of silk weavers who had been exiled from France.
Until the decline of the Norwich manufactories towards the end of the eighteenth century, these catalogues of samples, the pages of which seem to me to be leaves from the only true book which none of our textual and pictorial works can even begin to rival, were to be found in the offices of importers throughout Europe, from Riga to Rotterdam and from St Petersburg to Seville. And the materials themselves were sent from Norwich to the trade fairs at Copenhagen, Leipzig and Zurich, and from there to the warehouses of wholesalers and retailers, and some half-silk wedding shawl might even reach Isny, Weingarten or Wangen in the pannier on a Jewish pedlar's back.
The greatest efforts were made to promote the cultivation of silk, even in the rather backward Germany of the time, where pigs were still being driven across the Schlossplatz in many a principal town. In Prussia, Frederick the Great with the help of French immigrants had attempted t
o bring a state silk industry into being, by ordering mulberry plantations to be established, by distributing silkworms free of charge, and by offering considerable rewards to anyone who would take up silk cultivation. In 1774, about seven thousand pounds of pure silk were produced in the provinces of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Brandenburg and Pomerania alone. The same happened in Saxony, the county of Hanau, in Württemberg, Ansbach and Bayreuth, on the Prince of Liechtenstein's estates in Austria, and in the Rhineland-Palatinate at the bidding of Karl Theodor who, when the succession of the duchy of Bavaria passed to him in 1777, at once set up a silk head office in Munich. Forthwith, extensive mulberry gardens were established in Freising, Egelkofen, Landshut, Burghausen, Straubing and in the state capital itself. The trees were planted along paths, ramparts and roads, silk houses and filatories were built, factories were set up and a host of officials employed. Despite being promoted with such vigour in Bavaria and other German principalities, silk manufacturing ground to a halt even before it had properly begun. The mulberry gardens disappeared, the trees were felled for firewood, the officials were pensioned off, and the steaming vats, filature machines and rearing frames were broken up, sold or carried off. On the 1st of April 1822, the Director of the Royal Gardens informed the General Committee of the Agricultural Association that an old master dyer by the name of Seybolt, who, according to a file in the Munich state library was employed for nine years at a salary of three hundred and fifty florins in the silk factory run by the previous government as Keeper of the Silkworms and Superintendent of Carding and Filature, had told the said director that in his time many thousands of mulberry trees had been planted and numbered, on orders from on high, throughout the city, and that these trees had grown to an astounding size affording much excellent provender for the grubs. Of those trees, Seybolt said, only two remained, one in the garden of von Utzschneider's textile factory by the Einlass Gate, and the other, as far as he knew, in the garden of the former Augustinian monastery, where the monks had made some modest attempts at silk farming. The main reason why silk husbandry failed so soon after it had been introduced was not so much that mercantile calculations were adrift, but rather the despotic manner in which German rulers attempted to force it along, whatever the cost. From a memorandum from Count von Reigersberg, the Bavarian ambassador to Karlsruhe, referring to reports submitted by a certain Herr Kall, who was the only plantation inspector still employed in sericulture at Schwetzingen, it emerges that in the Rhineland-Palatinate, where silk farming had been conducted on the largest scale, every subject, official, citizen and householder who owned more than an acre of land was obliged within a given period to be growing six trees per acre, regardless of his circumstances or the use to which he had hitherto devoted his fields. Whosoever had been granted arms-bearing, brewing or baking rights had to plant one tree, every newly accredited citizen had to plant two, all village greens, town squares, streets, embankments, boundary ditches, even churchyards had to be planted, so that subjects were compelled to buy a hundred thousand trees from the principality's tree nurseries every year. Planting and tending the mulberry trees was imposed as a personal duty on the twelve youngest citizens in every community. In addition, there were the costs involved in employing twenty-nine officials responsible for silk cultivation, as well as the special supervisors in each individual town or village, who were exempted from socage service, granted certain liberties, and paid forty-five crowns a day. Part of the costs which arose from this decree had to be met from communal funds, and part was levied through taxation. Such a burden, which was by no means justified by the true economic value of the silk industry, together with the extreme financial and physical penalties for transgressing against the silk laws, succeeded in making something that had been viewed as a promising venture hateful to the people; it led to endless petitions, applications for concessions, litigation and court cases, which for years overwhelmed the higher judicial and administrative authorities with paperwork until, upon the death of Karl Theodor, the Elector Max Joseph cut the ground from under this rampant absurdity by revoking all the compulsory measures once and for all.
The reports made to the Imperial Royal Counsellor of War in Vienna in 1811, at about the same time as silk cultivation in Germany collapsed, by the border regiments to whom research into outdoor silk cultivation had been entrusted, were also anything but encouraging. memoranda that were almost identical in content arrived, drawn up by Colonels Michalevics and Hordinsky of the Wallachian-Illyrian regiment in Caransebes and the 12th German Banat regiment in Pancsova, to the effect that, after initial hopes of being able to nurture the broods in their care, they had been adversely affected by storms and cloudbursts, and in some cases, in Glogau, Perlasvaroch and Isbitie, where they had sloughed their skins for the first time, and in Homolitz and Oppowa, where they had done so a second time, they had been knocked off the foliage by hailstones and perished. Moreover, the memoranda continued, the caterpillars were at the mercy of numerous enemies, such as sparrows and starlings, which devoured them as soon as they were set in the trees. Colonel Minitinovich of the Gradiskan regiment complained of the worms' lack of appetite, of the changeable weather, of gnats, wasps and flies, while Colonel Milletich of the 7th Brod border regiment reported that, by the 12th of July, the few silkworms and evolving papillons that had survived on the trees had been burned by the fierce heat of that summer, or else, unable to graze on the now tough and leathery leaves, had simply expired. Despite these setbacks, Bavarian Counsellor of State Joseph von Hazzi undertook to advocate sericulture in his Lehrbuch des Seidenbaus für Deutschland of 1826, avoiding, wherever possible, the errors that had been made in the past and emphasizing instead its importance in the formation of a national economy. Hazzi's work, which was conceived as a complete educational programme, followed on from that published in Milan in 1810 by Count Dandolo, Dell arte di governare i bachi da Setta, from Bonafou's De l'education des vers à soie, Bolzano's Wegweiser zum Seidenbau and Kettenbeil's Anleitung zur Behandlung des Maulbeerbaums und Erziehung der Seidenraupe. If the German silk industry were to be revived, wrote Hazzi, it was essential to recognize the mistakes that had been made, which in his opinion had resulted from authoritarian management, endeavours to create state monopolies, and an administrative system which buried any entrepreneurial spirit under a quite risible pile of regulations. In Hazzi's view, silk cultivation did not quire special buildings and institutes, which would always be costly and would look like barracks or hospitals, but instead, as was the case in Greece and Italy, it should be born out of nothing, as it were, and be run as a minor pursuit in domestic rooms and chambers by women and children, servants, the poor and the elderly, in short, by all who were not at present in a position to earn money. Placing silk cultivation on a popular footing in the way Hazzi recommended would not only lead to incontestable economic advantages over other nations, it would also result in the social improvement of the fair sex and all other members of the populace who were unaccustomed to regular work. In addition, observing this apparently insignificant insect, and how it develops in stages under man's care and brings forth the softest and most delicate of tissues, would provide an invaluable and fitting aid for the education of children. In Hazzi's estimation, there could be no more convenient way of inculcating among the lower classes the virtues of order and cleanliness, which were indispensable to all communities, than the widespread cultivation of silk; indeed he would expect, wrote Hazzi, that the breeding of silkworms in the homes of most German families would produce a veritable moral transformation in the nation. Hazzi then goes on to deal with various misconceptions and prejudices connected with silk cultivation, such as that the best place to hatch silkworms was in hotbeds or the bosoms of young girls, or that, once they had hatched, one should heat up the stove on cool days, close the shutters during thunderstorms, and hang bunches of wormwood in windows to dispel harmful miasmas. It would be far more sensible, according to Hazzi, to air the rooms daily and, if necessary, fumigate them at little expe
nse with chlorine gas produced by mixing sea salt, powdered manganese and a little water. Jaundice, consumption and other diseases to which the worms were susceptible could thus be easily avoided, and a cottage industry altogether useful and profitable would be as good as assured by the proliferation of this new knowledge through ever widening circles. Counsellor Hazzi's vision of a nation united by sericulture and educating itself toward higher ends went unheeded, doubtless because the previous failures lay in the too recent past. However, after an interval of a hundred years it was revived by the German fascists with that peculiar thoroughness they brought to everything they touched, as I realized with some surprise when, last summer, searching in the education office of the town I grew up in for the short documentary about North Sea herring fisheries which had been shown to us in primary school, I happened upon a film on German silk cultivation, evidently made for the same series. In contrast to the dark, almost midnight tonalities of the herring film, the film on sericulture was of a truly dazzling brightness. Men and women in white coats, in whitewashed rooms flooded with light, were busy at snow-white spinning frames, snow-white sheets of paper, snow-white protective gauze, snow-white cocoons and snow-white canvas mailing sacks. The whole film promised the best and cleanest of all possible worlds, an impression that was confirmed when I read the accompanying booklet, which was intended for our teachers. Citing