Mac Baren Scaferlati Caporal Rouge

From the time of the Sun King, Louis XIV, until the early 1990s, all tobacco-related activities in France were a State monopoly, and since at least the time of the first emperor Napoleon (beginning of the XIXth century) one of that monopoly's duties was to provide free tobacco to the soldiers in France's armies.

Napoleon thought tobacco was good for soldiers: it kept them awake during guard duty, held them entertained and relaxed during the long waits involved in classic warfare, and, as anyone who has smoked a clay pipe well knows, a lit pipe is a source of warmth and comfort.

After the fall of the old Soviet Union, mass-graves have been investigated belonging to the Grande Armée, the formidable army with which Napoleon invaded the Russian Empire in 1812. Practically every soldier excavated in these archæological searches was found to have an army-issue clay pipe with him.

It was the corporal's duty to distribute their rations of free tobacco to the troops: hence this type of tobacco became known as tabac de caporal (corporal's tobacco), a dark, opaque shag known as petit gris (little grey.) Men would go into the service in their teens. They would there learn to smoke. Naturally, after leaving, they would want to keep smoking the same caporal. And this they did, in clays, in the rugged briars of 19th Cent. Saint-Claude, and as cigarettes, shag being suitable roll-your-own material.

For generations, farmers and peasants bought their caporal in rough paper cubes containing 50 grammes of the stuff: it was the plain working man's tobacco: harsh, acrid, sour, rough; like home-made lightning water. Not for town sissies!

The marquis in his hôtel particulier, the banker in his club, would smoke English tobacco, or expensive cigares de La Havanne. But the peasantry, the working class, inpecunious students, leftists, counterculturists, artists, bohemians, they all would proudly smoke the coarse, harsh scaferlati, leaving the soigné stuff for the hated bourgeoisie. There is an enormous amount of cultural folklore behind this tobacco.

It is emphatically NOT for the faint of heart! Highly nicotinous, vile-smelling, sharp-tasting...wonderfully guaranteed to make animal-rights types collapse in a bundle! Try it with home-made fire-water whiskey or brandy. You will feel the hair sprouting on your chest.

PS:

I am told that the old American classic, Plow Boy, was not unlike Caporal.