Behind fame hides horror, behind epic lies greed for profit worthy of the most brutal oaf or the most cynical merchant. There was no mercy for them, even when they died, for virtually nothing remained of the 40,000 or so who died in that terrible carnage, the Battle of Waterloo. Nothing, absolutely. Not even in the country did the level of clash resolve, which would have been something. No: dissolved in the tea of the British, in the coffee of the imperial Austrians, in the sweets of confectioners in Berlin and even in those of Paris. Europa devoured herself and her children and licked her moustache; who knows if anything ended up on the banquet tables in that mess of betrayal and gallantry that was the Congress of Vienna.
In addition, the production times would have been right, because the sugar beet needed several months between birth, cultivation and processing. And in order to be processed to make a sugar as white as the marble of Canova’s statues, it needed one thing: bone powder, finely ground.
Now imagine a boundless field covered by the rotting bodies of tens of thousands of soldiers: it is agreed that disposal is a major problem, especially since there are also the carcasses of horses. But few human and animal remains have ever been found on the Waterloo Plains, as if lost in heaven.
A few months ago, a discreet discovery was made by a group of archaeologists. A group of about ten skeletons, often disassembled and incomplete. When asked where all the other remains were, they found the answer. And the answer makes your skin crawl.
Simply put, the locals stole these bodies for years by digging them up and using these bones to whiten the beet sugar. Initially, it was mainly in England that people thought of the production of fertilizers, but then other evidence appeared.
Dug up and sold to the sugar industry: No more shouting “Merde!” in the face of fate and surrender, and if Napoleon is with the Invalides today, whoever fell under the blasts of a machine-gun loaded cannon in June 1815 was used for vaguely anthropophagic purposes.
The investigation, which also included archeology professor at the University of Glasgow Tony Pollard and German historian Robin Schafer, enabled the discovery of dozens of documents in the Belgian, French and German archives. A sign that the thing, if not well known, was at least well known. If not accepted, at least tolerated, albeit with an indignant raising of an eyebrow. But more than a story of barbarism, there is an interesting story behind it: mercantilist, commercial, proto-industrial.
Yes, because these are the years of the first industrial revolution, the first competition between markets, the first synergies between the country and industry. Above all, these are the years when beet is about to be supplanted by sugar cane: the former in continental Europe, the latter in the British Antilles, we could not afford to lose positions in the market, whatever the cost. As the Belgian historian Bernard Wilkin, director of the State Archives of Liège, near Waterloo, says, “the beet replaced the wheat”. And the sugar industry was based on filtering the beet syrup through an element that at this point it’s useless to remember what it is.
Bones, cheap bones, to make the delicious leachate sweet and pristine: the local farmers, aware of the value of the bones and knowing where the mass graves were, dug and ground them and then sold them on. And the Europe of the first industrial revolution thrived by defeating competition from the colonies across the Atlantic. Wilkin also reports that “Travellers reported seeing the bodies being dug up, Parliamentarians denouncing the trade in rotting bones and the mayor of Braine l’Alleud, a town near Waterloo, holding signs warning that exhumations are prohibited and punishable by law be”. No way.
As late as 1879, when the Concert of European Nations had forgotten the Congress of Vienna and indulged in the first Berlin Conference, the German newspaper Prager Tagblatt proposed using honey to sweeten food. Not for anything else, to avoid the risk of “your great-grandfather’s atoms dissolving in your morning coffee”. The cruelest stories of the Brothers Grimm find fulfillment. It is also estimated that in 1834 the remains of bones sold by Belgium alone to France amounted to 350 tons. Napoleon’s bones would also arrive in France within a few years, but these would be received with all honors by the Invalides.
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