Five governments, five centuries, five spectacular failures. Coffee has been banned under penalty of death, by royal proclamation, by manifesto, by soldiers with their noses in the air. And every single time, the cup outlasted the king. It turns out what they were afraid of was never the drink it was what happened when people sat down together and had no particular reason to leave. New essay on the blog.
The philosophy of table objects: Five times in history, this cup was illegal
Coffee was never the problem. The cup in your hand was.
In 1777, Frederick the Great of Prussia issued a manifesto — not a law, a manifesto — against coffee. He wanted his subjects drinking beer, which he considered more patriotic, more Prussian, more befitting of a people who should be working rather than sitting. To enforce this, he employed a corps of inspectors known informally as Kaffeeschnüffler coffee smellers whose job was to move through neighborhoods with their noses raised, hunting for the scent of illegal roasting. Former soldiers, mostly. Decorated men, in some cases. Now crouching beneath windows, sniffing.
It did not work. It never works. And yet they kept trying.
Charles II of England had tried it a century earlier, in 1675, and at least had the honesty to explain himself. Coffeehouses, he wrote in his royal proclamation, were places where "the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty." He banned them. The public responded with such immediate and total outrage that he reversed the ban eleven days later. Eleven days. It is perhaps the fastest a king has ever been defeated by a beverage though the beverage, really, had very little to do with it.
What Charles understood, and what undid him, was that he wasn't banning a drink. He was banning a room. A table. The particular quality of time that passes when people sit together with something warm and no particular reason to leave.
"The cup was the problem. The cup was always the problem. Not what was in it what it gave people permission to do."
This fear had no borders and no ideology. In 1511, the Governor of Mecca looked at the coffeehouses of his city and saw the same thing Charles would see 164 years later, men with opinions, accumulated slowly over many cups, in no hurry to disperse. He banned it. Cairo followed in 1532, coffeehouses shuttered, sacks of beans thrown into the Nile with the blunt efficiency of people who have decided not to think too carefully about what they're doing. The Sultan in Constantinople eventually overruled Mecca's ban, recognizing perhaps that you cannot legislate the human need to sit somewhere and talk.
Sultan Murad IV tried again in the 1630s, with considerably more conviction banning coffee under penalty of death, patrolling the city himself in disguise, a man so allergic to the unstructured gathering that he took it personally. He was, in this way, not so different from Frederick the Great sniffing through Brandenburg a century later, or Charles II reversing himself in embarrassment before the week was out. Three rulers, three continents, three centuries and the same precise anxiety, the same failure, the same cup still sitting on the table when they were done.
What is remarkable is not that they tried. It is that they all lost.
A person rushing somewhere is manageable. A person lingering is not. The coffeehouse and before it, the tavern, and before that, some fire in some clearing has always been the place where lingering became legitimate, where the cup in the hand said: I am staying. I am not working. I am here, with you, and we are going to talk. No government has ever fully survived the implications of that sentence.
The Kaffeeschnüffler are long gone. The leather bags and the royal proclamations have been filed away. But the cup is still here still doing exactly what it has always done, in every city that ever tried to stop it, giving people a reason to stop, and a reason to stay.