Turning the French People Up Sweet

In 1807, the British began a blockade of France, which among other things prevented the import of sugarcane from the Caribbean. The French people stoically did without many things during the Napoleonic Wars, but Napoleon did not for a moment expect them to give up sugar. He put the power of the state behind a search for a solution to the sugar shortage. French banker Benjamin Delessert came up with a sugar extraction process suitable for industrial application and set up several beet sugar factories at Passy. 65,000 hectares (160,000 acres) of French fields were planted with sugar beets. Within two years, the factories had produced four million kilos of sugar. For his efforts, Napoleon awarded Delessert the medal of the Legion of Honor.

Delessert refined an existing process for extracting sugar from beets that had been developed in Germany. German chemist Andreas Marggraf had discovered the presence of sugar in the vegetable in the mid-1700s. By 1793, another German chemist, Franz Karl Achard, perfected the process for extracting the sugar from the beets. The first beet sugar factory opened in Prussian province of Silesia in 1802.