How Potatoes Nearly Broke Berlin In The 1840s

The potato was domesticated by indigenous Andean peoples thousands of years ago. They developed a dizzying number of cultivars before the first European saw one. In the sixteenth century, contact between Spain and the Americas brought the potato to Europe.

People were not enthusiastic about the potato at first. Many thought potatoes caused leprosy. Others said potatoes belonged in a pig pen, not on a plate. Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie carried an entry, penned by physician Gabriel-François Venel, that called the potato tasteless and said it made people gassy. It conceded, reluctantly, that at least it filled the peasant’s belly. Slowly, over time, people grew accustomed to eating potatoes, though the pace varied by region and the process took decades in some places.

In the 1740s, famine struck Prussia. Frederick II, who would later be known as Frederick the Great, responded to the crisis by issuing royal edicts ordering peasants to grow potatoes.

The potato was even better than anyone thought. It grew faster and produced more food than any other crop. This explains why it is so popular today. It’s not hard to see why monarchs loved the potato. Compared to grain, the potato produced a massive amount of food. Under good growing conditions, the potato could produce many times more calories per acre than wheat. Potatoes could also be grown on marginal soils that wouldn’t support grain. From the eighteenth through nineteenth centuries, the potato was widely adopted in northern and central Europe.

Before potatoes, famine was a regular occurrence in Europe. According to historian Christian Vandenbroeke, the potato was almost a solution to Western Europe’s food problem. Regions where the tuber was cultivated saw a significant reduction in famine and population growth as food supply expanded.

There was one organism that annihilated this whole arrangement: Phytophthora infestans, the microbe responsible for potato late blight. It is an oomycete (a type of fungus-like water mold), which resembles a fungus but isn’t technically one. Watching the blight strike was horrific. Dark, spreading spots appeared on the foliage; plants rapidly withered; and, worst of all, the spuds in the soil would rot. When it hit continental Europe in 1845, it swept through Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Britain and Ireland with alarming speed.

Although the Great Irish Famine was the most tragic outcome of the blight, it was not the only one. The disease ravaged potato fields throughout Europe and its impact varied depending on social structure, the level of poverty and how many people relied on the potato crop for survival.

If the potato crop alone had failed, the disaster may have been avoidable. However, Europe was not afforded this courtesy. 1845 and 1846 saw grain crops fail in addition to the potato crop, so bread prices skyrocketed at the very time that potatoes were disappearing from the shelves.

Berlin, having grown so rapidly, contained a large number of workers and artisans who were dependent on their ability to pay whatever the market demanded at the time. Already vulnerable households had nowhere left to go once prices began to rise.

The first spark of violence occurred on April 21, 1847, when protesters in Berlin markets began to confront food sellers. The riot quickly progressed from confrontation with merchants, to the crowds seizing food.

Women, who were usually in charge of buying food for the household, were often the first to notice shortages at local stores and markets. Their direct confrontation with food vendors in early outbreaks of violence suggests to some scholars that Berlin’s women already had heightened political awareness before the revolutionary year of 1848.

Once the crowds started moving, their focus quickly moved beyond potato farmers. Bakeries, grocery stores and butcher shops, too, became targets of the rioting. Looters stole from businesses and caused property damage.

There’s a long history of food riots in Europe. In some cases, local populations took matters into their own hands, seizing goods or assaulting merchants when they felt that the unwritten rules around fair prices and access to food were being broken. The Berlin Potato Revolution fit right in.

Historical sources document over one hundred food riots and unrest throughout Prussia during April and May 1847, while parallel upheaval was occurring in other parts of Europe. Berlin is simply more prominent in history books because it was in the capital city.

To make matters worse, the First United Diet had just assembled in Berlin, placing the Prussian political class in the same city as rioters demanding bread. This generated an embarrassing question that the state was ill-equipped to answer: what purpose did a lawful, ordered, and well-governed state serve if it could not even guarantee its capital city sufficient food?

The Prussian government eventually dispatched police and soldiers to quell the Potato Revolution. At this stage, street protesters were no longer clashing with local shopkeepers. They were confronting the government itself.

While the riots may have failed to topple anyone, they were not entirely fruitless from a political perspective. On April 27, Prussian officials backed restrictions on potato exports beyond the German customs union and cracked down on distilling scarce potatoes into schnapps. These measures did not constitute a revolution, but they show that a sufficiently large angry crowd can force the government to address a crisis, whether they wanted to or not.

Those participating in the riots sought lower food prices, not a new constitution or even the head of King Frederick William IV. Historians like Ilja Mieck and Rüdiger Hachtmann consider the events primarily a food protest, a result of a crisis of subsistence rather than a political uprising. Other historians emphasize the events’ role in increasing the political consciousness of ordinary Berlin citizens.

By March 1848, Europe was experiencing widespread revolutionary upheaval: demands for constitutional reform, democratic representation, nationalist movements, and sweeping social reforms. As Prussian troops engaged demonstrators on the streets of Berlin, it became clear that the small skirmishes of April 1847 might not be so quaint after all.

It would be reductive to claim that this event was a “revolution caused by potatoes.” There were many issues driving public discontent: poor harvests, increased food prices, unemployment, rapid population growth, exclusion from the political process, and growing nationalism, to name just a few. People who are starving are far less patient with a government they perceive to be incompetent!