The World

Arkwrights and Krupps, Habsburgs, Bourbons and Sansons

THE IRON -MAD TITAN, CANAL DUKE, DANDY BEAU, OWD WOODEN LEG AND MOLL HACKABOUT

In 1786, George III knighted an irascible, grouchy Lancashire entrepreneur who had started as a barber inventing waterproof periwigs: Sir Richard Arkwright, now fifty-four. Fifteen years earlier, Arkwright, a sturdy tailor’s son, had created a small factory using the new technology of a spinning frame to spin cotton, then set up a water-powered mill at Cromford that was so successful that he founded a new type of workplace, the factory, bringing in more workers, among them children as young as seven, whom he organized in thirteen-hour shifts, policed by ringing bells that enforced strict timekeeping: latecomers were not paid.

The ‘bag-cheeked, pot-bellied’ Arkwright amassed a fortune of £500,000, enabling him to buy a country castle, as he aggressively opened more factories that revolutionized the British textile industry. For a long time, the factories were small cottage industries where women could work while still caring for the growing numbers of children who also joined the workforce. Woolmaking – in England, Flanders, Florence – had helped create the European mercantile class, but Indian textiles still dominated. For millennia, the essentials of life had not changed greatly; for centuries, work had remained essentially the same. But super-shifts require a dynamic nexus of coalescing forces: revolutions and wars combined with new technologies and ideologies. Arkwright’s use of technology was as radical as his creation of the factory system that changed the way people worked. Now everything would change – and fast.

Steam-driven engines were first used to drain coal mines; now deployed in cotton mills, they increased productivity by two hundredfold. Like computers in the 1990s, they powered changes in the very mindset of a generation. Steam power, like the textiles it produced, became a core technology so universal that it attained invisible ubiquity. Such technologies, writes Mark Weiser, ‘weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it’. But the inventions would not have worked without the proximity of fossil fuel – Britain’s plentiful coal was essential. Now the coal had to be transported to the factories.

The entrepreneur who created the means of transporting the coal was as far from being a harsh former wig-maker as you could get: Francis Egerton, duke of Bridgewater, was one of those lucky landowners who discovered coal on his estates. But he had to get the coal to the factories. In 1776, aged forty, he completed his first canal, started in 1771, linking Worsley to Manchester, while he built another between Liverpool and Manchester. He was a serious and unhappy, rather plump boy who had inherited his titles at twelve. He became engaged to a society star, Elizabeth, duchess of Hamilton, one of the Irish Gunning sisters,^* It-girls of the time, famous for their amateur acting. Yet the engagement was cancelled, she married another magnate and Bridgewater closed down his London mansion, never married and retired to collect art and design the canals that made him £2 million – the richest British nobleman.

In 1781, this coal power was harnessed by a maniacal ironmaster, John Wilkinson, a potfounder’s son nicknamed the Iron-Mad Titan, using steam engines to fire up blast furnaces for casting iron to make artillery and sponsoring the Coalbrookdale iron bridge – the world’s first – cast by Abraham Darby III, scion of another iron-mastering family. By now Wilkinson was making an eighth of all British iron, his ‘iron madness’ culminating in his casting of his iron coffin and the iron obelisk over his grave.

The principles of the new technologies had been known for centuries. Steam technology was not itself new; Arkwright’s spinning machine was just an improvement on the work of a long line of inventors, from James Watt and Matthew Boulton back to Thomas Newcomen in 1712, who was inspired by a Frenchman, Denis Papin, who had published his ideas in 1687. The Greeks had had a steam pump in the first century; the Han Chinese had puddled iron. Their development owed less to ‘genius’ inventors than to centuries of accumulated knowledge, small modifications, accidental revelations and now a quickening exchange that allowed educated minds and interconnected networks to experiment, innovate and apply the technologies – and then compete with one another. Many of these British inventors were members of the Lunar Society, which met in provincial Birmingham to debate ‘the first hints of discoveries, the current observations, and the mutual collision of ideas’. It was that ‘collision of ideas’ – they corresponded with Ben Franklin in America and the philosophes in Paris – that now became the engine of innovation and the reason henceforth why so often inventions were being worked on simultaneously in different places.

Yet the knowledge would never be developed without the demand of a market to pay for it, a political system fluid enough to foster it and a society supple enough to reward it: all three were combined in one figure – the king’s son George, prince of Wales, the oldest of an egregious royal brood of depraved, amoral scapegraces.

In 1783, the twenty-one-year-old prince received his own household at Carlton House. Greedy, dissipated, delusional, shameless and running to fat, though refined and artistic, he was scarred by the generational loathing and neglect built into the Hanover family. The king, he said, ‘hates me; he always did, from seven years old’. Allying himself with the opposition against the king and Pitt, he fell in love with a streak of beautiful paramours. When forced to give one of them up, he swooned spasmodically on the carpet, shrieking, ‘How I love her! I’ll go distracted! My brain will split!’ When he finally married a coarse Brunswick princess, Caroline, it was partly to get access to parliamentary money to pay his prodigious £630,000 debts. When he first saw her, he muttered, ‘I’m not well; pray, get me a glass of brandy,’ but drunkenly managed to consummate the marriage perhaps a week after the wedding night – enough to conceive an heiress, Princess Charlotte.

Yet no one so championed and personified the new consumer society as much as ‘Prinny’ and his much younger friend, George ‘Beau’ Brummell, the handsome, self-promoting grandson of a servant, son of Lord North’s secretary. As an Etonian schoolboy then a teenage Guards officer, Brummell had captivated Prinny with his sense of style, replacing sumptuous coats, knee breeches and cotton stockings with a white cravat, pressed shirts, tailored dark coats and trousers, while grooming himself with an elaborate toilette, washing with soap and brushing his teeth – all of which cost a fortune. ‘Why, with tolerable economy, it might be done with £800,’ said Beau at a time when a gentleman could live well on £200 per annum – and a worker on £12.

Prinny and Brummell were the trendsetters for the fashionable elite, known as le ton, who spent their time calling on each other, feuding, frizelating with each other’s wives, fornicating with courtesans, gambling at faro, commissioning art, planning new houses and gardens, travelling to Italy on Grand Tours (returning as fashionable ‘Macaronis’) and promenading around London which would now, thanks to the new manufacturing, become a world capital.

Elite clubs – both exclusively male and exclusively female – existed to exclude but tempt the aspirational middle class. Female trendsetters led by the duchesses and countesses flaunted their fashions and affairs and influenced politics through their salons: the five lady patronesses of the female club Almack’s revelled in their whims and lovers. Their fashions were reported in news-sheets and cartoons, then copied by the middle classes who shopped for drapes, hats, gloves, dresses in new shops that sold accessories manufactured in the factories of Manchester, often by female and child workers paid half what men earned. The middle classes could now afford servants, usually poor women from the countryside. This contrast encouraged a cult of middle-class women who not only did not work, protected by their industrious husbands, but personified frail, idealized virtue.

In London, such people could afford to eat out in restaurants; public eating was not just about nourishment but about entertainment, ostentation and gratification. Public pleasure was just as delicious as the private variety. At Vauxhall Gardens, on the south bank of the Thames, an entrepreneur created a shady pleasure dome where nightly 2,000 punters, sometimes 12,000, high and low, mixed to eat, walk, frizelate and find sex. Cities had dark sides. Slums – known as rookeries – were filthy, gin-soaked stews. Prostitution boomed – there were said to be 80,000 part-time prostitutes in London, personified by the artist William Hogarth’s provincial girl Moll Hackabout, to say nothing of famous courtesans.

No one understood this new market as well as a one-legged Staffordshire pottery manufacturer, Josiah Wedgwood, born into a Nonconformist family of potters, who encouraged these first influencers – whom he called ‘legislators in taste’ – to buy his pottery.

As a young man a bout of smallpox gave him the opportunity to develop new potting techniques, but it damaged his leg, preventing him from throwing pots (from then on he walked with a crutch) and made him into a designer. Twenty-five years later, it led to the amputation of a leg, without anaesthetic, and his workers took to calling him Owd Wooden Leg.

Wedgwood understood that it was women who bought luxuries: ‘Fashion is infinitely superior to merit,’ he mused. ‘You’ve only to make choice of proper sponsors.’ In 1765, when George III’s consort Queen Charlotte ordered a set, he called himself ‘Master Potter to Her Majesty’ and advertised it as ‘Queen’s ware’, producing cheaper sets for the middle classes and pioneering catalogues, money-back guarantees and special offers – in other words, he was the inventor of marketing. In 1767 he built a new modern pottery, Etruria, in Stoke, beside the route of the planned Trent and Mersey Canal in which he invested and which transported his wares.^* As his pottery conquered the world – even Catherine the Great ordered sets – Wedgwood opened a showroom in Mayfair, where he displayed ‘various Table & dessert services completely … on two ranges of Tables … in order to do the needful with the Ladys in the neatest, genteelest & best method’. It was the start of a new commercialism that would develop into monumental department stores and, two centuries later, into the online shopping and influencers of today.

Few aristocrats were as entrepreneurial as Bridgewater. Titled magnates were positioned to dominate the emerging new world but they did not. While their incomes were colossal, they frittered their riches away on country houses, addictive gambling and expensive courtesans, while middle-class industrialists invested in new technologies. Many of the textiles for middle-class shoppers were manufactured by Robert Peel, the hard-working, harsh son of Lancashire yeomen who for generations had ‘put out’ cloth to small cottage weavers. Now in his mid-twenties, he used Arkwright pumps to set up a cotton-spinning mill and then at thirty founded the first industrial complex at Radcliffe, housing his workers in a barracks and using child labour to toil ten hours a day.

This intense commercial system offered families undreamed-of opportunities and penalties. The affluent became more restricted by bourgeois convention and the need to earn salaries: men had to work long hours at offices and obey a new sort of master, now known as the ‘boss’ – from the Dutch baas; virtuous middle-class women were confined to work unpaid at home; and the regimented poor, including women and children, toiled in unrelenting factories, often under abusive bosses.

Peel, the seventh richest man in Britain, soon a baronet and MP, was decent enough to realize his factories were cruel, and fostered the first legislation to improve working conditions. Determined to make his eldest son Robert a gentleman, he trained him not for business but to join Britain’s rulers, making him repeat sermons after church and sending him to Harrow School. The boy would be the first of the new middle class to rule Britain.

North-western Germany was not far behind Britain. It was now that a woman started the dynasty that would power the rise of German industry. In 1782, Helene Amalie Krupp, fifty-two-years old, whose husband Jodocus had died thirty years earlier, bought out of bankruptcy an iron forge north of Essen in the Ruhr and invested in coal mines to fuel her blast furnace, employing her son as her accountant. The Krupps were an old Ruhr mercantile family – one of them, Anton, had manufactured cannon during the Thirty Years War – sometimes serving as burgermeisters of Essen. But, like Merseyside in Britain, the Ruhr possessed the essential matrix of science, innovation and commerce coupled with coal, water and communications. Widow Krupp’s blast furnace was soon manufacturing kitchenware and cannonballs that she sold to German principalities including Prussia. After the early death of her son, she steadfastly trained her grandson, Friedrich Krupp. When Widow Krupp died at ninety-seven, she left him a fortune – which he managed to lose. The Krupps seemed to have failed, but they would recover.

This industrial ‘revolution’ took over a century to modernize human life in a way we would recognize. ‘The Englishman of 1750,’ wrote David Landes, ‘was closer in material things to Caesar’s legionaries than to his own great-grandchildren.’ It was a century that changed human life more than all those before it and that made humans, long the most powerful animal on earth, so dominant that they started to change earth itself, even its climate – an anthropocene age.

In 1700, an alien could have been certain that China and India would continue to dominate the world. Yet the alien would have been wrong. It was not enough for Europe to succeed; the giants of the east had to fail. The Mughals had already collapsed and, though no one yet knew it, China would follow.

There was something about Europe that qualified it for what happened next. No hegemon dominated Europe, a gallimaufry of 500 kingdoms, city states and republics locked in ferocious competition that stimulated independence and ingenuity, propelled by rival civic and economic power centres, cults of aspiration, Enlightened culture – and nuclear families who, like the Wedgwoods and Krupps, intermarried with each other, sharing values and passing on wealth. The idea of a Protestant work ethic has been overdone – Catholic France was also sophisticated – but these northern nations had developed the spirit of self-starting motivation, creating a singular European psychology that favoured individualism, self-improvement and a society of trust. ‘Wherever manners are gentle there is commerce,’ a philosophe, the baron de Montesquieu, reflected in 1749, ‘and wherever there is commerce, manners are gentle.’ Not just manners but standards. ‘Whenever commerce is introduced,’ wrote a Scottish philosophe, Adam Smith, in 1766, ‘probity and punctuality always accompany it – the principal virtues of a commercial nation.’

It was financial capitalism in its widest sense that funded the revolution. The international esprit of Britain, Holland, France and the new US republic stimulated manufacturing and trade. The economic life of the world was shot through with slavery, thanks to sugar, tobacco and cotton. Its profits were embedded in the wealth of those powers, ready to invest in new businesses; it touched everything. Yet there was plenty of wealth that was not linked to slavery, from Bridgewater’s coal and canals to Wilkinson’s iron and Wedgwood’s china – and then there were the German Krupps and other entrepreneurs of the German kingdoms, which had minimal slavery and empire. Slavery was a significant source of capital but far from the only one.

A sudden spurt in the British population – fuelled by rising food production, which doubled between 1600 and 1800 – provided a market of workers and consumers. People poured into cities: between 1790 and 1850, the city dwellers more than doubled from 9.7 per cent to 22.6. By 1800, there were a million Londoners. In thirty years, that doubled; by the 1870s, it had doubled again. The surge was nourished by better food and conditions, but certainly not by medical advances. An eminent case was now to demonstrate how doctors remained an iatrogenic menace – even to the most privileged.

On 16 October 1788, the fifty-year-old George III went mad – at least partly poisoned by his own doctors.

SALLY HEMINGS AND MARIE ANTOINETTE: THE DIAMOND NECKLACE AND THE LOVE CABBAGE

‘I wish to God I may die,’ cried George, ‘for I’m going mad.’ Suffering stomach pains and fever, he started to jabber incessantly, deteriorating until he was demented and in the full grip of psychosis. Sometimes he was violent, oftentimes he ran away from his courtiers and had to be pursued. His appalling doctors treated him with an array of lethal medicines and damaging treatments, including scarification (cutting the skin), blistering (creating pustules on the skin), cupping (applying heated glass cups to the skin), venesection (bloodletting), the application of leeches and dosages of laudanum, purgatives and emetic tartar laced with arsenic.

The king’s madness was later diagnosed as hereditary porphyria, but modern doctors now believe he suffered from bipolar disorder, possibly sparked or exacerbated by chemical poisoning.^* In 1788, doctors had no understanding of mental illness or the properties of their own medicines. Finally a ‘mad-doctor’, Francis Willis, a sixty-year-old vicar and physician who treated ‘wrongheads’ not just with the traditional coercion but also with the ‘health and cheerfulness’ of serene rustic exercise, arrived at Windsor. But although he reduced the poisonous tonic, he deployed his trademark kindness with the use of gags and straitjackets that if anything increased the stress on the patient.

Pitt was forced to pass a Regency Act that allowed for the prince of Wales to become prince regent. Prinny was thrilled at the thought of power – dismissing Pitt and promoting his Whig allies – and more spending. But George recovered, allowing Pitt to avoid dismissal. For now, Pitt increased the prime minister’s authority, partly thanks to the madness, partly thanks to America – where the new republic, chaotic and indebted, was governed by a confusion of committees and states. As Washington tried to restore his declining estates and recapture fugitive slaves, Rochambeau and Fersen returned in triumph to Paris, where Antoinette welcomed the Swede for the most intense period of their relationship. A new American minister soon followed them: Jefferson.

It was an escape from tragedy. The jubilation of American liberty was bittersweet for Jefferson. Just after Yorktown, in May 1782, his wife Martha gave birth to a daughter (who later died young of whooping cough), but after six pregnancies she deteriorated, cared for by Betty Hemings, surrounded by the Hemings children, her enslaved half-siblings, her two daughters with her husband and a distraught Jefferson. Taking Martha’s hand, Jefferson ‘promised her solemnly he’d never marry again’. When she died on 6 September, he gave her eleven-year-old half-sister, Sally Hemings, Martha’s handbell, an ambiguous keepsake that was a tribute to intimacy but also a tool of service. After ten years of ‘unchequered happiness’, he collapsed.

America’s relationship with its chief ally France was paramount: the Continental Congress asked Jefferson to become minister in Paris. He set off, taking his daughter Patsy and James Hemings, who would be trained as a French chef.

Jefferson relished the life of enlightened Paris, where, in his rented Hôtel de Langeac, he engaged with liberal society, became entangled in a passionate affair with a young married woman, Maria Cosway, and a frizelation with Angelica Church (later sister-in-law and intimate friend of another American luminary, Alexander Hamilton), able to live in a way every enlightened American could only dream of.

Antoinette’s delivery of a dauphin, Louis-François, three days after the British surrender at Yorktown was soon followed by the arrival of another son. A happy family life had brought the king and queen closer together, giving Antoinette more influence. The dauphin was sickly, but the birth of a son had increased her power; the American victory had boosted Louis too. It was most likely now, after the delivery of a son, that Antoinette, probably with Louis’s acquiescence, took Fersen as a lover.

The Swede enjoyed an array of mistresses, but he loved Antoinette. ‘I don’t want the ties of marriage which are against nature,’ wrote Fersen to his sister. ‘I can’t marry the only person I would want to, the only one who really loves me, so I can be no one’s.’ An invoice shows that Antoinette now paid a locksmith to create a pulley system that enabled her to lock and unlock the door from her bed in her secret Versailles apartments. Fersen’s logbook notes their ‘plan to lodge upstairs’. If he saw Fersen, Louis would withdraw ‘with infinite tact … so she didn’t have to fear being surprised’. In his letters to her, Fersen called her ‘Josephine’ – her full name being Marie Antoinette Josèphe. Fersen was always with her. ‘Farewell,’ he wrote to his sister, ‘I must go to the queen.’ It is possible her second son, her favourite whom she nicknamed Chou d’Amour – Love Cabbage – was Fersen’s love child. ‘The fashion for looking after your own children,’ wrote the aristocratic bishop and future premier Talleyrand, who as a lame child had been rejected by his parents and passed over in his inheritance, ‘had not yet arrived. The very opposite was true.’ Yet Antoinette – influenced perhaps by Rousseau’s Émile – now spent much time with her children, who caused her great anxiety. The eldest daughter displayed Habsburg–Bourbon arrogance; the sweet, fragile eldest dauphin suffered TB of the spine; but ‘Love Cabbage is charming and I love him to distraction …’

Yet the victory against Britain had come three years too late, costing 1.5 billion francs and bankrupting the kingdom, leaving it stricken with debt, food shortages leading to famine and a surging resentment at the isolated court where the stolid king was seen to be overwhelmed by the exuberant frivolity of his Austrian queen – who now forced her husband to let her buy yet another palace at Saint-Cloud.

Strong states are not undermined by trivialities, but scandal can destroy a weak regime as fast as gunpowder. It started with the Parisian jewellers who had created a mountainous diamond necklace to sell to Louis XV for his mistress du Barry. Louis having died, they were desperate to sell it. Back in 1775 Antoinette had spent 500,000 livres on diamonds, but now a mature queen was not interested when her husband offered it to her, saying such money would be better spent on battleships.

Instead the jeweller was manipulated by a grifter called Jeanne de la Motte, a married woman but mistress to an array of grandees and hucksters including Cardinal de Rohan, grand aumônier at the royal court, disliked by Antoinette for sneaking about her follies to her mother. Motte offered Rohan the necklace. He hoped to win Antoinette’s favour by delivering it. Motte used forged letters to trick him into believing that Antoinette was interested and deployed a prostitute dressed as the queen to persuade him. The jeweller gave the necklace to Rohan, who gave it to Motte to present to Antoinette. Instead Motte instantly sold the stones in London, leaving the cardinal dangerously exposed.

In May 1786, Louis was informed of the heist and ordered Rohan, Motte and the charlatan Cagliostro^* arrested. ‘Sire, I’ve been tricked,’ Rohan told Louis. The mess should have been examined secretly by a commission of the council. But ‘the public assumes I got the necklace without paying for it’, said Antoinette, who pushed for a public acquittal in the Paris parlement. Motte was flogged naked and branded – though she bit the executioner. Yet the parlement was filled with Antoinette’s enemies, who on 31 May 1786 acquitted Rohan of disrespect to the sovereigns. For the monarchs, calumnied then humiliated, it was a double fiasco.

A young artillery lieutenant, third son (out of eight children) of a prominent Corsican lawyer and his wife, impoverished nobles, whose worshipful love gave him an invincible self-confidence, followed the scandal closely, later seeing it as a grave step towards disaster. ‘The queen’s death must be dated from the diamond-necklace trial,’ concluded Napoleon Bonaparte, who believed that ‘Some little thing always decides great events.’

After Jefferson had been in Paris for a year, he summoned his younger daughter Polly, aged nine, who was to be accompanied on her transatlantic journey by her fourteen-year-old enslaved cousin, Sally Hemings. The girls travelled via London, where the priggish American minister John Adams and his wife Abigail were shocked that the beautiful Sally was joining Jefferson. ‘The old Nurse whom you expected to have attended her,’ wrote Abigail to Jefferson, ‘was sick and unable to come; she has a Girl about 15 or 16 with her.’ They advised sending Sally back to Virginia. Jefferson overruled them.

In Paris, Sally joined Jefferson’s household. She was ‘very handsome’ and ‘mighty near white’, a fellow slave, Isaac Jefferson, recalled, with ‘straight hair down her back’. Unusually Jefferson paid wages to James and Sally Hemings, revealing both the different circumstances of Parisian life but also the special status of the Hemingses, siblings of his darling wife. As his affair with Maria ended, Jefferson paid for the expensive inoculation not just of his family but of the Hemingses too by a celebrity doctor to kings, Daniel Sutton. Jefferson also organized French lessons for Sally and bought her clothes.

Jefferson, aged forty-four, who had written on how racial intermixture delivered ‘improvement in body and mind’, now started a relationship with Sally, still only fifteen. ‘During that time,’ as their son Madison put it, ‘my mother became Mr Jefferson’s concubine.’

SAINT -GEORGES, DANGEROUS LIAISONS AND THE ABOLITIONISTS

In the spring of 1789, Jefferson, his daughters and surely the Hemingses attended a concert by a remarkable mixed-race violinist, the eleven-year-old George Bridgetower, marketed as ‘the African Prince’. Many African and mixed-race people lived in Paris, as they did in London. Just as British law was ambiguous about slavery, French law too was confused about whether slavery could exist in France itself. Slaves could register at the Admiralty court and could claim freedom.

Born in Poland, George was the brilliant son of a Barbadian servant of the Esterházy princes, patrons of Haydn. Jefferson and his household would also have followed the career of the most famous mixed-race man in Paris who was close to both political intrigue and the new French abolitionist movement: Joseph Bologne, chevalier de Saint-Georges, a champion fencer, violinist and composer. Saint-Georges was hired by the powerful Orléans family, the king’s cousins, to run their Masonic Concert Olympique which played at their Palais Royal. His opera L’Amant anonyme was successful and he premiered a new one just after Sally’s arrival. Saint-Georges was now friends with the young, liberal, rich Philippe, duc d’Orléans, first prince of the blood, who was not only conspiring against the king but a supporter of a radical cause: the abolition of slavery.

Orléans, his chief of staff Laclos, his adviser the philosophe Jacques-Pierre Brissot and his musician friend and homme de couleur Saint-Georges regularly visited London for politics and pleasure.^* Orléans, always juggling multiple paramours, was friends with Prinny, the prince of Wales, with whom he shared the Scottish courtesan Grace Elliott. After giving birth to a royal bastard, Grace accompanied the duke back to Paris. Laclos based the libertinism of his novel Les Liaisons dangereuses on Orléans’s complicated love life. Orléans admired Britain’s parliamentary monarchy and hoped, by replacing his cousin Louis as regent if not as king, to establish such a system in France. But all of them were also vehement opponents of slavery, now at its diabolical zenith for both Britain and France.

In 1778, France was trading 13,000 Africans annually to the Caribbean; Britain was far ahead, trading 80,000. In both countries, a growing section of the elite was appalled by slavery, though the slave-owning lobby known as the Interest remained extremely powerful. In France the movement would be backed by the first prince of the blood, in London by the prime minister himself.

On 12 May 1787, at Holwood House, Pitt’s suburban home in Bromley, the twenty-seven-year-old prime minister sat under a tree chatting with two MPs, his cousin William Grenville and William Wilberforce, a rumpled Yorkshire merchant’s son. Wilberforce had been Pitt’s friend at Cambridge and together they had gone on a Grand Tour of Europe. It says something about the tininess of the oligarchy of merchants and landowners who ruled the industrializing nation that both Pitt and Grenville were the sons of prime ministers, and both would head governments themselves. ‘I remember a conversation with Mr Pitt,’ recalled Wilberforce, ‘under the root of an old tree.’

‘Wilberforce,’ said Pitt, ‘why don’t you give notice of a motion on the subject of the Slave Trade?’

Wilberforce had been recruited to the abolition campaign by a Cambridge contemporary, the Reverend Thomas Clarkson, who visited him weekly.

The campaign had been gathering momentum since 1765 when a slave named Jonathan Strong, brought to London from Barbados, was beaten by his master, a lawyer, David Lisle, and left to die, but was spotted and rescued by a remarkable doctor, Granville Sharp, a civil servant and member of a talented family of accomplished professionals and amateur musicians. Sharp threatened to charge the slave master with assault if he tried to repossess Strong. Sharp won Strong’s freedom, though the Barbadian died at twenty-five, probably of his injuries. Sharp began to campaign against ‘the injustice and dangerous tendency of tolerating slavery’. But the lord chief justice, William Murray, earl of Mansfield, tried to avoid any change that would challenge the ownership of property until in 1772 he finally ruled that the Interest could no longer enforce slavery in Britain.^*

Then in 1781 an atrocious case intensified anti-slavery feeling. A Liverpudlian slave ship, the Zong, owned by William Gregson, a mayor of Liverpool and slaving mogul, sailed from Cape Coast Castle, the RAC headquarters (Ghana), with 442 slaves crammed into its hold, double the number for which it was designed. Sixty-two Africans died at sea. When water and supplies ran out with disease rife, the captain, aware that slaves who died onshore could not be claimed on insurance, murdered 142 men and women by throwing them into the sea. Another ten killed themselves. The murders allowed Gregson to declare that the slaves had ‘perished just as a cargo of goods had perished’, claiming £30 per drowned slave from the insurance. It is likely that such murders and insurance payments were common, but this time the story was spotted by a freed slave, Olaudah Equiano, an abolitionist campaigner, whose autobiography Interesting Narrative charted his kidnapping from Benin and enslavement in America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia, traded by three owners, until he emerged free in 1780s London.

Starting in 1783, Equiano and Sharp publicized the outrage. The first trial found in favour of the slave traders, but when the insurers challenged this, Mansfield gave an ambiguous judgment, acknowledging property rights while ruling on a technicality that the insurers were not liable.

Ten days after Pitt’s conversation with Wilberforce, on 22 May 1787, he joined Clarkson, along with Sharp and Equiano, at the first meeting of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, funded by the designer Josiah Wedgwood, along with other radical entrepreneurs, often Dissenters.^* Wilberforce would lead the campaign in Parliament, tabling his first bill in 1791. His strategy was to abolish the trade first, avoiding the issue of how to confiscate human property.^* The abolitionists were vigorously opposed by the Interest, led by George Hibbert MP, Jamaican slave trader and builder of the West India Docks in London, but also a botanist, antiquarian and founder of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, who called the slave trade ‘indispensable’, explaining that ‘The colonies would not exist without the African trade. The Manchester & Sheffield Manufactories would instantly go to ruin & their people set a starving.’

In London, in November 1787, the philosophe Brissot was invited to attend Sharp’s Abolition Society. Brissot was supported by a free-spirited young playwright, Olympe de Gouges, who was also a member of the Orléans coterie. De Gouges had already started campaigning against slavery with her play L’Esclavage des noirs, but now published Réflexions sur les hommes nègres. Brissot was prompted to found a French Société des Amis de Noirs which was soon joined by de Gouges and the marquis de Lafayette.^* Brissot admired Jefferson, whom he knew well, and invited him to join the Amis de Noirs. ‘I’m very sensible of the honour,’ replied the ever-supple Jefferson on 11 February 1788. ‘You know nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition not only of the trade but of the condition of slavery: and certainly nobody will be more willing to encounter every sacrifice for that object.’ But he refused because ‘it might render me less able to serve [the cause] beyond the water’. Orléans sent Saint-Georges to London to talk to Prinny and the abolitionists,^* but soon he was immersed in exploiting the deepening crisis faced by Louis and Antoinette. Behind the dazzle of the court, Louis was bankrupt – and he now took his greatest gamble.

REQUIEM: JOSEPH AND MOZART

Faced with his financial crisis, Louis embraced reform and summoned an assembly of Notables to demand real taxes for nobility and the empowering of the parlements. ‘The peasants pay everything,’ said the king, ‘the nobles nothing.’ His plan was not impossible but required the skilful building of a coalition. Instead Lafayette, American paladin, one of the Notables, attacked the court; the Notables rejected Louis’s reform, accelerating the credit crisis. Louis collapsed, his crack-up exacerbated by the death of their tiny daughter Sophie, nursed for weeks by the queen. The couple were both under terrible pressure. Louis turned up at Antoinette’s apartments in tears. She herself leaned on Fersen, with whom she corresponded in lemon juice or invisible ink.

Louis drew her into high politics. As Antoinette made cuts to court expenditure and virtually ran the government from her personal palace at Petit Trianon, confiding to her best friend Polignac that ‘The personage above me [Louis] is in no fit state,’ unrest spread. Treason started in the family and spread to the nobility: Orléans led a révolte nobiliaire that undermined the regime from within. Antoinette was blamed for everything in a spiral of conspiracy theories, denounced as Madame Déficit for her extravagance, La Austrochienne (Austro-bitch) for giving millions to the Austrians. Le Godmiché Royal (The Royal Dildo) and other pornographic pamphlets depicted her having sex with Yolande de Polignac.^* ‘Do you know a woman,’ she asked, ‘more to be pitied than me?’

The people demanded the return of Necker, the speculator whose wheeler-dealings had overpromised and worsened the crisis. Louis reluctantly reappointed Necker. ‘I tremble,’ admitted Antoinette. If Necker failed, ‘I’ll be detested even more.’ Necker kept the regime afloat by more borrowing, yet even the king realized that he now had no choice but to call the États Généraux. This elected assembly of nobles, clergy and commoners, which had prospered during medieval crises and not been called since 1614, would herald the end of the absolutist monarchy created by Richelieu, Mazarin and Louis XIV. ‘All men’s minds are in a ferment,’ noted Fersen. ‘Nothing’s talked of but a constitution. The women especially are joining in the hubbub …’

At Versailles, on 5 May 1789, the Estates met. Louis and Antoinette swiftly lost control as the Third Estate – filled with provincial lawyers outraged by Bourbon decadence – seized the initiative, swearing to create a constitution. Louis tried to dismiss it, but the Third Estate convened in a tennis court as the National Assembly, joined by the renegade Bourbon Orléans and the renegade noble Lafayette, who became Antoinette’s most hated traitors. Amid this nightmare, Louis and Antoinette were facing the greatest horror known to a parent: the dauphin died in agony of spinal TB, and Love Cabbage became the new heir.

In Paris, bad harvests threatened famine. A crowd shouting ‘Bread! Bread!’ stormed the Bastille prison, symbol of royal injustice and now of impotence, seized weapons, decapitated royal officials and terrorized the countryside. Louis’s only hope was to assume leadership of a liberal revolution himself. As troops guarded Versailles, the king’s brothers and many aristocrats fled into exile, but Louis dithered: ‘Do I stay or do I go? I’m ready for neither.’

Antoinette’s brother, Emperor Joseph, watched with horror. In 1787, Joseph had joined Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin on a dazzling, festive tour of New Russia and Crimea, the Tatar khanate just annexed by the Romanovs, but its showmanship provoked the Ottomans to counter-attack: the resulting war was a triumph for the Romanovs, who gained south Ukraine and the Black Sea coast, but not for the Habsburgs. Joseph, at the Ottoman front in Wallachia (Romania) and Moldavia, faced defeats and epidemics, consoling himself by singing the score of Mozart’s new opera.

Mozart was flourishing in fun-loving Vienna, but he overspent on clothes and luxuries, conducting rehearsals wearing a crimson cloak and a cocked gold-laced hat. In 1785, still only twenty-nine, he brought Beaumarchais’s play Marriage of Figaro to Joseph’s favourite librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, a Jew born in the Venetian ghetto who became a dissolute priest and brothel-keeper. Figaro the opera delighted Joseph. Next, Mozart and da Ponte started to work on Don Giovanni, joined by da Ponte’s friend Casanova, who helped with the libretto. ‘My opera Don Giovanni was performed,’ wrote Mozart from Prague where it was premiered, ‘with the greatest of applause.’

Mozart was in a frenzy of creativity – in 1788, he wrote three symphonies in six weeks. Although the war was destroying Joseph, he loved Don Giovanni: ‘The opera is divine, possibly just possibly even more beautiful than Figaro.’ Mozart borrowed too much and went on tour to raise money, writing to Constanze, ‘Dearest little wife of my heart. Are you thinking of me as often as I’m thinking of you? I look at your portrait every few minutes, and cry half out of joy, half out of sorrow … I’m writing this with tears in my eyes.’ But his debts were out of control; he was tormented both by Constanze’s flirtations and by her illnesses. And his patron Joseph was suffering TB, malaria and a revolt in Flanders – just as his sister Antoinette faced destruction in Paris.

Lafayette consulted his friend Jefferson on a French Déclaration des droits de l’homme. Like all the revolutionaries, they were influenced by Rousseau, whose Du contrat social argued that the people expressed themselves through ‘la volonté générale’ – the general will. ‘The law,’ Lafayette wrote, ‘is the expression of the general will.’ The Assembly passed the Déclaration along with a draft constitution. In Paris, royal authority had almost vanished.

‘Is it a revolt?’ asked Louis.

‘No, sire,’ replied a courtier. ‘It’s a revolution.’ The king was appalled when Lafayette was elected commander of the militia, renamed the Garde National, but he was now too paralysed to take advantage of a stalemate between moderates and hardliners. The latter broke the impasse by dispatching a Parisian mob to Versailles, which stabbed two bodyguards and burst into the palace crying, ‘Cut off her head and fry her heart and liver!’ Antoinette hid in a secret passageway: her hair turned grey that day. She and her husband nonetheless appeared on the balcony with Lafayette to face the people, before Louis and Antoinette were dragooned to the Tuileries Palace in Paris by a mob bearing the piked heads of their bodyguards. ‘I was witness of it all and I returned to Paris in one of the carriages of the king’s suite,’ wrote Fersen. ‘God keep me from ever again seeing so afflicting a sight.’ The terrorized king tearfully approved the abolition of old feudal taxes and rules and the Déclaration des droits, drafted by Jefferson.

As Jefferson was enthusiastically watching the revolution, he learned that Sally was now pregnant. Her view of Jefferson is mysterious. ‘Oppressed people … often develop their own internal narratives … contemptuous of their overlords,’ writes Annette Gordon-Reed, but ‘the way Jefferson treated Hemings and her family probably made her more favorably disposed toward him than hostile.’^* Sally knew enough about French slavery laws to understand that she had a choice: she could stay and claim freedom via the Admiralty court, or she could return with Jefferson to slavery at Monticello. So, her son Madison recalled, she did a bold thing: ‘She refused to return with him,’ demanding concessions for their children. Jefferson ‘promised her extraordinary privileges … a solemn pledge’.

Then they set off for America, landing in December 1789, to find an offer from the new president of the United States of America. On 30 April, in New York, Washington had been inaugurated after winning the first election under the new constitution, created by a convention in Philadelphia. His ex-secretary Colonel Hamilton had pushed for an English-style mixed system with a ruler for life called the governor, but others had resisted that as too monarchical: the compromise was a strong presidency, balanced by a bicameral congress and an independent judiciary. Here was a state founded on the principle of freedom, its democracy an example to the world – ‘It astonishes me to find this system so near perfect,’ said Franklin.^*

Washington, who rejected the title ‘His Highness’, preferring ‘Mr President’, offered the secretaryships of state to Jefferson and of the treasury to Hamilton. Among the first items of business was the choice of a new capital and the creation of a state bank. In June 1790, in New York, Jefferson, Virginian aristocrat-planter, invited Colonel Hamilton, penniless self-made West Indian bastard and war hero to dinner, cooked by his French-trained chef-slave James Hemings. In ‘the room where it happens’, they agreed that, after a temporary stay in Philadelphia, they would build a new capital on the Potomac. That December, Hamilton founded a state bank.

At Monticello, Sally Hemings gave birth to her first child by Jefferson, assisted by her mother Betty, but the child soon died (though five more would live to adulthood). In Philadelphia, Jefferson and Hamilton, who loathed one another, clashed over the future of the republic. Washington^* was alarmed by the violence in France. Hamilton was pro-British; Jefferson, pro-French, pontificated that one could not move ‘from despotism to liberty in a featherbed’.

Back in Paris, as foreign powers started to arm against the revolution, encouraged partly by the royal couple, using Fersen as intermediary, Antoinette had not dared to correspond with her brother, Emperor Joseph, but now sought help. Joseph planned to rescue the Bourbons, but, ignored by his Russian friends who were seizing Ottoman lands round the Black Sea, he returned to Vienna, covered in agonizing sores. ‘I’m unfortunate in everything I undertake,’ he wrote, writing his own epitaph: ‘Here lies a prince whose intentions were pure but who had the sorrow of seeing all his plans collapse.’ So much of politics is waiting and silence. ‘He governed too much,’ wrote Ligne, ‘and reigned too little.’

On 20 February 1790, shortly after Mozart premiered Così fan tutte, Joseph died in despair and Mozart lost his patron, whose brother Leopold, the new emperor, now worked to save the monarchy. As he composed his masonic opera Die Zauberflöte, Mozart missed Constanze: ‘There’s a sort of emptiness, which hurts somehow.’ That year he wrote two operas in three weeks, but when he received the commission for a requiem, he told Constanze, ‘I know I must die’; the Requiem ‘is for myself’. Yet he now received the lucrative post of Viennese Kapellmeister. Even Salieri praised him, and he was spending time with his son Karl: ‘So delighted I took him to the opera. He looks great.’ He planned an opera of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Everything was looking up, but then Mozart fell ill. Horribly swollen, he kept scribbling multiple scores. On 5 December 1791, he died. Constanze believed he worked himself to death, that his only fault was ‘too soft a heart’ and not knowing ‘how to handle money’. He was buried according to Joseph’s decrees in a communal grave.

In Joseph, Antoinette lost her dearest ally, but she still saw her lover, Fersen. ‘I’m a little happier,’ he wrote. ‘Sometimes I see her quite freely and this consoles us for all the unpleasantries she has to tolerate.’

ANTOINETTE, THE EXECUTIONER AND THE GUILLOTINE MACHINE

In July 1790, at her chateau Saint-Cloud, Antoinette secretly negotiated with the moderate revolutionary, Honoré, comte de Mirabeau, a sybaritic colossus and president of the Assembly who wanted to be the premier under an English constitutional monarchy. Antoinette, though horrified by the gigantic, messy count, offered him a salary for backing the king. ‘Madame, the monarchy’s saved!’ he boomed; she was ‘the only man the king has’. But Mirabeau died, succeeded in his mission to make constitutional monarchy work by his handsome, slim young deputy, Antoine Barnave. Louis and Antoinette offered the vain, ambitious Lafayette an ancient rank, that of constable, yet the swanning paladin, aspiring to be a Cromwell–Washington, refused – missing the chance to seize the leadership. Without a clear leader, the Assembly laid the foundations for modern society: Jewish rights and equality were granted, leading to the lifting of repression across Europe. But women were neglected; and slavery was positively supported by many of the revolutionaries. The Assembly’s abolition of nobility alienated 250,000 nobles; its persecution of priests sparked a Catholic counter-revolution in western France; its torment of the king mobilized the monarchs of Europe.

Extreme times offered extreme opportunities for those with extreme solutions. The Assembly’s delegates discussed a penal code, adopting Dr Guillotin’s proposal to create a rational instrument of humane execution. ‘Now with my machine,’ boasted Guillotin, ‘I’ll knock your head off in the twinkling of an eye and you’ll never feel it.’ He was not actually inventor of the guillotine, just its advocate, but many who laughed would ‘in the twinkling of an eye’ experience his ‘machine’. The hereditary executioner, known as Monsieur de Paris, was Chevalier Charles-Henri Sanson, who tested the guillotine on sheep and dead convicts. A medical student until he inherited his father’s position as a teenager, he was the fourth in this killing dynasty. Already executioner for three decades, he had supervised the gruesome punishments – by sword, axe and wheel – of the ancient regime. In 1757, when he was eighteen, he had executed an attempted royal assassin, Damiens, whom he tortured, castrated and, harnessing four horses to his limbs, tore apart, slicing his tendons to ease the dismantling, before burning him alive. Sanson recommended the guillotine to the Assembly. His expertise would be much used.

‘At last,’ Fersen told his sister, ‘on the 24th [December 1790] I spent a whole day with Her. It was the first. Imagine my joy.’ Antoinette’s beautiful day with ‘the lovable personage’ touched her. ‘The personage and I managed to see each other safely once,’ she told Yolande de Polignac. ‘You can judge our happiness.’

Louis and Antoinette now agonized over the constitution that the Assembly expected them to approve and demanded the right to move from Paris to Saint-Cloud. When permission was refused, Antoinette ordered Fersen to plan their escape to a fortress, Montmédy, where Louis could manage both the revolutionaries and his exiled brothers, who were inviting Austria to attack the Assembly.

On the hot night of 20 June 1791, two children and two monarchs jumped into a carriage bought by Fersen, with the king disguised as the servant of a Russian baroness (Antoinette). The dauphin thought he was going to a play ‘since we’ve all donned these odd dresses’. Their disappearance was noticed, couriers dispatched; they missed a rendezvous with loyal Hussars, and Antoinette’s hairdresser did not turn up, always a bad sign. When the carriage galloped into Varennes, they were recognized and arrested. The Bourbons were escorted triumphantly back to Paris by a delegation including the sympathetic thirty-year-old Barnave. An attraction flickered between him and Antoinette, the start of a secret correspondence about installing a moderate monarchy. When a priest showed support in the street, the crowd dismembered him and presented his hands and head to Antoinette.

The foiled escape exposed royal duplicity. ‘In that single night,’ noticed a courtier, Antoinette’s already greying hair ‘turned white as that of a seventy-year-old woman’. Imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace, Louis railed against Voltaire and Rousseau – ‘these two men have been the ruin of France’. Antoinette corresponded with Barnave, ascendant in the Assembly, and, through Fersen, with her brother Leopold. ‘Don’t worry about us. We’re alive,’ she told Fersen in code. ‘The Assembly leaders seem to want to treat us gently.’ But then: ‘Speak to my relatives about outside help.’ Two days later, she told him, ‘Look after yourself for me. I won’t be able to write any more. But nothing in this world can stop me adoring you until I die.’ Fersen was jealous of Barnave, noting, ‘It’s said the queen sleeps with Barnave.’ Louis and Antoinette staggered between desperate plans. She ordered Fersen to stop the intervention by Austria and Prussia: ‘Force will only do harm.’ In September, the agonized Louis took the oath to obey the constitution – which still empowered him to appoint ministers and veto laws – as Antoinette and Barnave hoped to steer a moderate course. ‘If I find myself in treaty with some of them,’ she reassured Fersen, ‘it’s only to use them.’ But the arming of Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns undermined Barnave – and condemned the Bourbons.^*

In January 1792, a vanquished Barnave retired to the provinces, his vision of a constitutional monarchy discredited, overthrown in the Assembly by a pro-war government of the more radical Girondin faction, led by Brissot. A month later, Fersen, planning another rescue, crept into Paris in disguise (staying with one of his other mistresses) and, dodging the guards, penetrated Antoinette’s apartment. They spent the night together, their last meeting. ‘I am going to close,’ she wrote afterwards, ‘but not without telling you, my dear and very tender friend, that I love you madly …’

In February, the advance of the German monarchs threw Paris into a crisis that destroyed the Girondins. It was a colourless, awkward, myopic and ascetic lawyer from Arras with a reedy voice who filled the vacuum. The thirty-three-year-old Maximilien Robespierre, elected leader of the Jacobins, a more radical faction, had gradually emerged as the incorruptible voice of virtue and the interpreter of the general will: ‘Legitimately, sovereignty always belongs to the people,’ but a select elite must decide the general will of the people, who ‘want what is good but don’t always see it’. It was an idea that would justify much bloodshed. This puritanical guardian – possibly a unique virgin among swaggering womanizers – increasingly guided the people or rather the radical artisans, the Parisian sans-culottes (they wore trousers instead of breeches). ‘That man will go far,’ Mirabeau had joked; ‘he believes everything he says.’ Robespierre had argued against war, claiming it would strengthen the king. Now the crisis swept Robespierre to power and destroyed the Bourbons. The war, which would last – with short interludes – for twenty-three years, encompassing all Europe and much of the world, intensified the fanaticism and intolerance of the revolution. ‘Your friend,’ wrote Antoinette to Fersen, scarcely encoding her meaning, ‘is in the greatest danger. His illness is making terrible progress … Tell his relations about his unfortunate situation.’

As the Bourbons endured this crisis, a French subject, far away in Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean, was disappointed by the French revolution for very different reasons. Toussaint, the former slave, was launching the greatest slave rebellion since Spartacus and the zanj.

TWO REVOLUTIONS – HAITI AND PARIS: CéCILE AND TOUSSAINT, ROBESPIERRE AND DANTON

In August 1791, a cabal of slave leaders, Dutty ‘Zamba’ Boukman, Georges Biassou and Cécile Fatiman, coordinated by Toussaint, met by night in secret at Bois Caïman, to launch a rebellion on behalf of the 500,000 slaves. They swore vengeance with voodoo rituals, supervised by the twenty-year-old Cécile Fatiman, who acted as mambo (priestess).^* A pig was sacrificed, its blood drunk.

Toussaint was unimpressed by the French revolution: for all its liberal measures, the Assembly was dominated by slave owners who refused to abolish slavery. Now in Saint-Domingue 10,000 slaves joined the rebel army, which was soon 80,000 strong, overcoming the 40,000 whites and 28,000 free black people to conquer much of the colony as slave masters were killed, estates burned. Biassou appointed himself viceroy, but Toussaint ‘directed all the strands of the plot and he organized the revolt and prepared the explosion’. Most wanted abolition of slavery; the radicals wanted to ‘kill the whites’; but Toussaint envisioned a multiracial community that kept sugar estates intact. The revolutionaries positioned themselves as loyalists supporting Louis against the pro-slavery lobby in the Assembly: this was partly a revolution against the French revolution.

In July 1792, Toussaint helped draft a ‘Lettre originale des chefs des Nègres révoltés’, advocating abolition of slavery on the basis of ‘universal natural rights’ and creation of a non-racialized community of equals in a multiracial Saint-Domingue.

In August 1792, rallying against the slave-owning Assembly, Toussaint celebrated the birthday of Louis XVI, just as murderous panic – sparked by the fear of foreign invasion and internal betrayal – crackled through Paris. On 9 August, the urban militants of Paris elected an insurrectionary Commune which, in cooperation with Robespierre, organized an insurgent mob that the next day attacked the Tuileries, killing 900 Swiss Guards, and overthrew the constitutional monarchy. ‘What can do they to me?’ cried Antoinette. ‘Kill me, today’s as good as tomorrow.’ Louis and Antoinette fled to the Assembly, where through a grille they witnessed the suspension of the monarchy before they were arrested and jailed in the forbidding Temple fortress. There Louis humbly taught his son Latin and geography every morning. As elections by universal suffrage were held for a new assembly, the Convention, the hysteria – encapsulated by the slogan ‘La Patrie en danger’ – was now murderous.

Ten days after the Tuileries attack, the Prussians invaded France. When they reached Verdun, Paris spun into a vicious frenzy. In September, as the new Convention gathered, Robespierre’s charismatic ally, Georges Danton, a shaggy lawyer’s son from Champagne, rallied the deputies. ‘Anyone who refuses to serve must be punished by death!’ he cried. To conquer their enemies, ‘Dare, dare again, always dare, and France is saved!’ Then came amazing news: on 20 September, at Valmy, the French revolutionary army had defeated the Prussians. On the 22nd the deputies abolished the monarchy. Although there was a stand-off in the Convention between the Girondins, led by Brissot among others, and the more radical Montagnards, so named because they sat on the highest benches of the Convention, now led by Robespierre, the fear and panic drove squads of killers, some spontaneous, inspired by Danton, some probably organized by the Jacobins, to raid prisons, slaughtering 1,300 courtiers and priests, while prostitutes were gang-raped. Antoinette’s friend the princesse de Lamballe was disembowelled and her head displayed to the queen, who fainted.

Yet the government, overseen by the Convention, was totally chaotic as it struggled not only against external enemies but against Catholic and royalist counter-revolution in the Vendée and moderate republican revolt in Lyons. As Robespierre emerged as the personification of republican virtue in the Convention, the new state was blooded with a royal sacrifice – the start of a modern era of mass national politics that remodelled both dynasty and private family. At 5 a.m. on 21 January 1793, Louis was awoken by drums.

* The other sister, Maria, countess of Coventry, died at twenty-seven of cosmetics poisoning, having overused Venetian ceruse, which gave girls fashionable alabaster skin but contained lead and mercury. When Maria’s skin burst out in rashes, she covered them up with more ceruse, which soon killed her: death by cosmetics.

* Wedgwood’s closest friend was a rambunctious doctor, Erasmus Darwin – they were both luminaries of the Lunar Society – who also invested in the Trent and Mersey Canal and advised him to power Etruria with steam engines. Darwin was a brilliant, fat, promiscuous physician, investor and scientist, a founder of the Lunar Society who notoriously fathered many children, including with some of his servants. His son Robert, a six-foot-two giant of twenty-four stone – married Josiah’s daughter Susannah Wedgwood. Their son Charles Darwin, born in 1809, started to study medicine, then, funded by Wedgwood money, switched to learning taxidermy and natural sciences.

* At a time when doctors had prescribed port for both Pitt and his father, turning both into alcoholics, George’s massive doses of emetic tartar contained as much as 5 per cent arsenic: when his hair was recently tested, it contained seventeen times the level that counts as arsenic poisoning, enough to aggravate his stomach aches, delirium and psychosis.

* This sleazy cast would not be complete without ‘Count Cagliostro’, a charlatan who, claiming to be several thousand years old (born in ancient Egypt) and to have met Jesus personally, thrived in this time of self-invention, social mobility and mystical credulity. Born Joseph Balsamo in Palermo, this mountebank conned a rich gold dealer, then, adopting his exotic title, travelled through Europe with a lissom teenaged wife Serafina, whom he lent to his patrons. Rohan was one of them, but you cannot trick a trickster: he showed Cagliostro the contract faked by Motte: ‘A forgery!’ said Cagliostro.

* Saint-Georges had become a sensation twenty years earlier by winning a duel against a racist fellow pupil. He won a place in the royal guard of honour but made his name as a musician, rising to direct Paris’s Concert des Amateurs. He had been in line to direct the Opéra when its sopranos complained to Queen Antoinette, ‘assuring Her Majesty that their honour and delicate conscience could never allow them to submit to the orders of a mulatto’. But Antoinette favoured Saint-Georges, summoning him to Versailles, where he was ‘invited to play with the queen’ – she liked to play piano, he no doubt played violin. Saint-Georges started to write opera with a literary artillery officer, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, but their Ernestine, attended by Antoinette, was not a hit. This ‘mulatto man’, wrote the American John Adams when he visited Paris in 1779, ‘is the most accomplished man in Europe in riding, shooting, fencing, dancing and music.’

* Mansfield had more experience of this world than he let on for he had adopted Dido Belle, the daughter of his sailor nephew and an enslaved woman, bringing her up with his children (painted with Lady Elizabeth Murray by David Martin) and leaving her an annuity in his will. She later married a Frenchman and had two sons – both of whom worked for the EIC – dying in 1805.

* Wedgwood designed an anti-slavery medallion that showed a kneeling black man, hands raised to heaven, inscribed ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’

* Yet even Wilberforce did not believe the slaves were ready for liberation, telling Parliament in 1805 that before they ‘could be fit to receive freedom, it would madness to attempt to give it to them’. At his dinners for the African and Asiatic Society, black activists ate behind a screen. Opponents of slavery in both America and Britain founded new settlements of returned black slaves in west Africa. In 1787, Sharp and others involved in the Committee for the Black Poor backed a plan to settle several hundred black Londoners in a Province of Freedom in Sierra Leone not far from the slaving castles on the coast. Despite backing by Pitt, then chancellor, most of the settlers died. In 1792, a flotilla of black Loyalists from Nova Scotia, including Harry Washington, an escaped slave of the US president, founded Freetown.

* France, like Britain, oscillated between the ideal that slavery could not exist in a law-based homeland and the reality of the slave owners’ profits. After Louis XIV had freed two escaped slaves in 1691, slave owners won an edict in 1716 that allowed slave masters to bring slaves to France; this was overturned in 1738 and it became routine to free the enslaved until in 1777–8 a procurator at the Admiralty, Guillaume Poncet de La Grave, warned against racial pollution by the growing number of free people of colour, persuading Louis XVI to decree a Police des Noirs to prevent them entering France and marrying whites. Yet slaves could still appeal for freedom at the Admiralty court.

* In London, Saint-Georges endured the whims of the prince of Wales, who insisted on organizing a fencing competition between the mixed-raced composer and the French transvestite the chevalier d’Éon.

* Antoinette was already hated. Ten years before, at the Parisian Opéra, she had endured faltering applause. ‘Why was I scarcely clapped?’ she asked. Bursting into tears, she added, ‘What have I done to them?’ She could not help being a Habsburg, but in 1784 she backed payments to buy off her brother Joseph’s menaces to Holland. She was extravagant – though her extravagance hardly approached that of Catherine the Great – and she never said, ‘Let them eat cake.’ She was, writes John Hardman, ‘the scapegoat of an irrational age suffering a nervous collapse, the so-called rationality of the Enlightenment shot through with the charlatanism of Cagliostro, Mesmer [celebrity hypnotist] and Necker’.

* ‘Every enslaved woman who ever had sex with a white man during slavery in the US’, writes Gordon-Reed, in The Hemingses of Monticello: an American Family, was ‘a rape victim’. Yet ‘whether Jefferson used violence or employed his well-known charming manner with women to win Hemings over, his power was such that he could never be sure of her true desires … She did not – because she could not – consent.’ Yet ‘the profanity of slavery does not define the entirety of the lives of enslaved people … we find enough signs that these two people were emotionally attached to each other … Saying that works no fundamental change in the nature of American slavery’, because ‘the idea of their love has no power to change the basic reality of slavery’s essential inhumanity’.

* The president and vice-president were separately and indirectly elected by an electoral college; the Senate was indirectly elected by state legislatures; the House of Representatives was directly elected. The system’s noble aspirations and universal male suffrage contained a colossal flaw: slaves had no vote. The slave owners of the south negotiated a double triumph that both protected slavery and yet, for the purpose of the proportional representation of the House of Representatives, made their slaves count in their favour as three-fifths of a person. ‘I’d never have drawn my sword in the cause of America,’ said Lafayette, ‘if I had conceived I was thereby founding a land of slavery.’

* The law of Pennsylvania ruled that any slave resident for over six months was automatically freed. In Philadelphia, Washington was always accompanied by his manservants Billy Lee and Christopher Sheels, his cook Hercules and five other slaves. But he shuttled his slaves back and forth from Mount Vernon, without revealing the real reason. ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘to have it accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them [the slaves] and the public.’ It is notable that slavery was the only matter in which Washington compromised his famous honesty.

* The Romanovs too were ready to destroy the revolution which had thrilled the Poles, hoping to create a strong monarchy and rid themselves of Russian hegemony. The old king Stanisław August placed himself at the head of their own revolution. Catherine the Great was horrified by Paris and Warsaw – ‘Better the tyranny of one man than the madness of the multitude.’ Potemkin planned to become king of Poland, but his dramatic death on a Moldavian steppe left Catherine both heartbroken and flint-hearted. First she cracked down on dissent in Russia, then she bloodily crushed the Polish revolution: 20,000 Poles were killed as Russian troops stormed Praga, a suburb of Warsaw. Shortly before her death, the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns joined her in the final carve-up of Poland. Lvov and Galicia – southern Poland, now western Ukraine – were ruled by Austria for the next two centuries. Three million Jews now found themselves under hostile Russian rule; Potemkin had been a philo-semite but the ageing, repressive Catherine confined the Jews to a ‘pale of settlement’, banned from cities to avoid clashes with her Orthodox subjects. Her successors increasingly repressed the Jews. Poland would not exist again until 1918.

* Fatiman was a central figure in Haitian history: the green-eyed daughter of an enslaved African and a French Corsican who had been a courtier of the adventurer Theodore von Neuhoff, briefly king of Corsica in the 1730s. During the Haitian revolution, she married a general, Jean-Louis Pierrot, raised to baron and prince under King Henry Christophe, before being elected president in 1845 and then appointed grand maréchal under Emperor Faustin. Cécile died at 112 in 1883. Her daughter married Haiti’s war minister and later president Pierre Alexis.