The World

Bonapartes and Albanians, Wellesleys and Rothschilds

ANTOINETTE, JOSEPHINE AND THE NATIONAL RAZOR

The night before, Louis XVI – forewarned – told the family that he would say goodbye in the morning, but when the morning came he could not bring himself to see them. His seven-year-old son, the dauphin, sobbed, ‘Let me out!’ The jailer asked him where he wished to go. ‘To talk to the people so they don’t kill my father.’

Robespierre had revealed the Bourbons’ treasonous correspondence with the invaders and called for their execution. Tried before the Convention, Louis answered each of the thirty counts, calling them ‘absurd’, and ultimately declared, ‘I always acted for the people.’ Ironically he was accused of supporting the Saint-Domingue revolution.

Robespierre had demanded death, boasting: ‘I’m inflexible to oppressors because I’m compassionate toward the oppressed.’ The Convention, including Louis’s cousin Orléans who had absurdly changed his name to Philippe Égalité, voted for death. Louis found a confidence in tragedy that he had scarcely known in glory. When his weeping lawyer informed him of the vote and proposed a counter-revolution, Louis replied, ‘Such proceedings would incite civil war. I’d rather die. Order them to make no effort to save me – the king of France never dies.’

The streets were so crowded it took two hours to reach the gallows in the packed Place de la Révolution, where the executioner Sanson awaited Louis with his sons, Gabriel and Henri. Louis started to speak – ‘I die innocent … I pray to God that the blood you shed may never be visited on France’ – but the beating drums drowned him out. Sanson cut his hair and tied to him to the contraption. The blade decapitated him, and Sanson showed the head to the people. ‘Vive la nation!’ cried the crowd. Antoinette and the children heard the roar. Baying citizens bathed in his blood, spattering it on each other.

Antoinette was given Louis’s wedding ring, engraved ‘M.A.A.A. [Marie Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria] 19 Aprille 1770’. In a scene of agonizing drama, played out in their filthy cells, Antoinette, with her daughter Marie Thérèse, curtsied to her son as Louis XVII. But the boy was emaciated and ill. Soon afterwards the children were separated from their mother. ‘My child, we are about to part,’ said Antoinette, gripping Louis XVII. ‘Never forget God who thus tries you, nor your mother who loves you. Be good, patient and kind and your father will look from heaven and bless you.’

Louis’s execution was ‘the foulest and most atrocious deed which the history of the world has yet had occasion to attest,’ said Prime Minister Pitt, who resolved to use British wealth – ‘Pitt’s gold’ – to fund a series of coalitions of European powers in wars against France.^* At home, he feared revolution, legislating to ban trade unions. As French revolutionary armies overran Belgium then invaded Holland, the Convention declared war on Britain.

On 6 April 1793, as the Vendée uprising threatened Paris, the Convention created an emergency Comité de Salut Public (Committee of Public Safety) under Danton ‘to grasp the weapon of the Revolutionary Tribunal’. A democratic constitution was passed in June, but thanks to the war it was never implemented. That month, Danton retired to the country as the Convention announced ‘a revolutionary government until peace’, which gave full powers to the Committee, twelve revolutionaries, mainly provincial lawyers, re-elected every two months by the Convention. On 2 June, Robespierre orchestrated the arrest of Brissot and the Girondins and next month he was elected to the Committee, which ruled from the king’s green study in the Tuileries. The twelve directed the war, and instituted what came to be called La Terreur as a manifestation of ‘justice … severe and inflexible … the emanation of virtue’. On 23 August 1793, a massive conscription programme, the levée en masse, created the first real national army, directed by the ablest of the Committee, Lazar Carnot, ‘organizer of victory’. It was ‘a new era’, said the poet Goethe, ‘in the history of the world’ – the time of nations and ideologies, expressed in mass politics. The end of sacred monarchy inaugurated the cult of the nation and its institutional doppelganger, the nation state, still the basic unit for organizing governments today. Power is the mother of ideology. Nationalism, the identification with a bigger community that shared language, fortified by race and history – both often invented and garnished with plangent myths – developed to justify the nation state. If it looked like reason and virtue would remove families from power, that did not happen: dynasties, old and new, shapeshifted easily and adapted to the new dynamics.

On 17 September, a Law of Suspects granted the Committee powers of summary execution as they assumed total command of the economy and then declared a new revolutionary calendar. Public hysteria, military chaos, factional rivalry and brazen corruption intensified the Terror. On 31 October, Brissot and twenty-eight Girondins sang republican songs on their way to the guillotine. Sixteen thousand victims, many denounced in a frenzy of fear and cowardice, and most guilty merely of being ‘aristos’, would be guillotined. The Terror did not kill people for religious reasons, as had been the practice in Europe for centuries, but to enforce loyalty. Robespierre investigated a Foreign Plot against the revolution that was really a case of peculation of Compagnie des Indes Orientales funds by elite revolutionaries close to the twelve. The law of 14 Frimaire (December) gave the Committee the power to crush opposition, a power that can be said to define the sovereignty of a nation. This was as significant an effect of the revolution in the creation of modern politics as the Rights of Man: one endorsed an omnipotent state; the other heralded the rule of individualism.

The Committee’s envoys travelled across France, executing traitors. ‘These monsters must be unmasked and exterminated,’ said Robespierre of the Lyons rebels. ‘The city of Lyons shall be destroyed,’ ordered Robespierre. Two thousand were killed there, tied together before cannon and shot to pieces. At Nantes, 2,000 were locked into barges that were then sunk.

In Paris, Sanson – now beloved as Charlot, or the National Avenger – and his sons frantically beheaded 2,900 of Robespierre’s victims. Sanson became so exhausted that he handed over to his son Gabriel. In a telling moment of the Terror, Gabriel was beheading so many people that, holding up a head to the crowd, he slipped on the blood, fell off the scaffold and broke his neck. ‘Like Saturn,’ wrote an observer, ‘the revolution devours its children’ – and the feasting had begun. Philippe Égalité voted for the Terror, but when his son, Louis Philippe, disgusted by the king’s killing, defected to the coalition, the duke was guillotined.^* So was Barnave. Among those arrested was a young slave owner’s daughter, Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, the future Empress Josephine, who aged fifteen had arrived from Martinique to marry Vicomte Alexander de Beauharnais. Now in crowded cells, both awaited death.

Little Louis XVII, separated from his mother, half starved and plied with booze, was brainwashed and forced to denounce his mother for sexual abuse. When he heard their footsteps in the cell above, the boy sneered, ‘Have those fucking whores been guillotined yet?’ Antoinette’s eldest child, Marie Thérèse, and her sister-in-law, Madame Élisabeth, remained with the queen. Then they too were parted.

On 14 October 1793, wearing mourning black but red high heels from another era, Antoinette was tried, found guilty of spying for Joseph II, of paying him money and of sexually abusing her son. When informed of her son’s allegation that she was a ‘new Agrippina’, who had taught him to masturbate so hard that one of his testicles had swollen and had then fornicated with him, she replied, ‘Nature refuses to answer such a charge, but I appeal to all the mothers who are here.’ Robespierre feared that her dignity would ‘make her an object of pity’. The daughter of Maria Theresa disdained her tormenters: ‘I was a queen and you dethroned me. I was a wife and you murdered my husband. I was a mother and you’ve torn my children from me. I have nothing left but my blood – hurry up and take it!’ Her last letter to her sister-in-law and daughter testified to her regret at her parting from her children and begged Élisabeth to forgive her son’s allegations – ‘Think how easy it is at that age to make a child say anything’ – asking her to kiss her ‘poor and dear children’. Her letter was not delivered but given instead to Robespierre.

When her executioner, Henri Sanson, who had succeeded his brother, arrived at the Conciergerie prison to bind her wrists she asked if she could relieve herself in private. He refused and she squatted in a corner in front of the jailers. Dressed in white, Antoinette, thirty-seven years old but looking like an old lady, was transported in an open tumbril, mocked by the crowd. At some point, she scribbled a note to Fersen that was later smuggled out to him: ‘Adieu, my heart is all yours.’ She died courageously.

‘I was devastated,’ wrote Fersen. ‘I thought about her constantly, all the horrible circumstances of her sufferings, the doubt she might have had about me, my attachment … tormented me.’

Louis XVII deteriorated in a cell awash with faeces. ‘My brother is sick,’ wrote his sister Marie Thérèse. ‘I’ve written to the Convention for permission to nurse him.’ But Robespierre was implacable. When the boy died, his doctor smuggled his heart out in a handkerchief for sacred burial.

‘If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, its basis in revolution is both virtue and terror,’ declared Robespierre on 5 February 1794: ‘virtue, without which terror is disastrous; terror, without which virtue has no power.’ His whirlpool of virtue would be the template for all similar self-righteous, secular witch-hunts; the Committee was the first modern war cabinet, the first government designed to purify and reshape society.

In March, the return of Danton – demanding an end to the Terror, warning of dictatorship and proposing peace negotiations – threatened Robespierre’s rule and vision. The Sea-Green Incorruptible – the epithet applied to him by the historian Thomas Carlyle – denounced him and his supporters for defeatism, stealing funds from the Compagnie des Indes Orientales and interceding for Marie Antoinette. On 5 April, Danton and the others went to the guillotine. ‘What annoys me most’, Danton supposedly reflected in Sanson’s carriage, ‘is I’m going to die six weeks before Robespierre.’

Robespierre had won, but now no one was safe. He and the Committee accelerated the executions by the ‘national razor’. The war speeded the rise of a generation of young officers. In the south, where British and royalist forces had seized Toulon, Robespierre sent two legates to retake the port, his brother Augustin and an ex-vicomte, Paul Barras, who were impressed by a young Corsican captain called Napoleon Bonaparte, energetic, thin and sallow, who in December 1793 commanded the artillery during its successful recapture. At the age of twenty-four, Bonaparte was promoted to general. In Saint-Domingue, another brilliant young general was taking command of a revolutionary army.

Three years into the revolution, the Convention outlawed racial discrimination but refused to abolish slavery, sending out 6,000 French troops to retake the Jewel of the Caribbean.

BLACK SPARTACUS AND THE TYRANT OF VIRTUE

As the French tried to crush the ex-slaves, Toussaint travelled to the Santo Domingo half of Hispaniola to negotiate an alliance with the Spanish, who duly made him a general. Meanwhile Biassou and several leaders were themselves trading in slaves, whom they sold to the Spanish. Biassou ordered Toussaint’s murder; he then stayed with the Spanish, and Toussaint emerged as paramount leader.

Wiry, tall, tireless, sporting ‘a blue jacket, large red cape, red cuffs with eight rows of lace on the arms, large gold epaulettes, scarlet waistcoat, pantaloons, half-boots, round hat with a red feather’, he ‘managed to make himself invisible where he was and visible where he was not’, an enemy recalled. ‘He borrowed his spontaneity of movement from the tiger.’ Infused with his African culture and slave traditions of voodoo occultism along with Catholicism, the French language and the Parisian Enlightenment, witty, playful and always surprising, Toussaint was a master of military tactics, manoeuvring between France, Spain and Britain. ‘Say little,’ he said, ‘but do as much as possible.’ Presenting himself as a cross between a god of war, Ogoun Fer, and a shapeshifting voodoo spirit of the crossroads, Papa Legba, he adopted a new name, Louverture – the Opening.

After two years ‘behind the curtain’, Toussaint proclaimed, ‘I am Toussaint Louverture: you have perhaps heard my name. You are aware, brothers, that I have undertaken vengeance and I want freedom and equality to reign in Saint-Domingue … to establish the happiness of us all.’

As commander he gathered around him the henchmen who would dominate Haiti. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, future emperor, was one of the slaves Louverture had managed after his own manumission, while Henry Christophe, future king, had worked as slave, stableboy and waiter, and as a drummer boy had fought at Savannah with the black French regiment Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue and with the Americans against the British. Most of Toussaint’s men were African-born slaves, particularly Kongos from Angola, but his chief of staff, General Agé, was white. Louverture boasted that he ‘put ninety Spaniards to the sword’ after one battle and sent heads to the French, yet he disliked ‘warriors with a fondness for spilling blood’, often protecting the colons.

On 4 February 1794, in Paris, Robespierre backed the Convention’s decree to abolish slavery: ‘La Convention Nationale déclare que l’esclavage des Nègres dans toutes les colonies est aboli’, acknowledging that the slave rebellion was irreversible. Toussaint hailed this ‘great consolation for all friends of mankind’. Ending his tactical alliance with the slave-trading Spanish, he negotiated with the French governor Étienne de Laveaux and promised to become ‘devoted to crushing enemies of the republic’. Toussaint praised Laveaux for his ‘exceptional love of black people’; Laveaux raved to Paris, ‘I can’t speak highly enough’ of Toussaint’s ‘virtues, talent, martial qualities; he is full of humanity, indefatigable as warrior’.

Robespierre now embraced a vision of a state of virtue.^* ‘If God didn’t exist,’ he said, quoting Voltaire, ‘it’d be necessary to invent him.’ On 8 June, at a turgidly solemn ritual atop a man-made mountain on the Champ de Mars, Robespierre presided over the launch of a new religion, ‘le Culte de l’Être suprême’. As virtuous potentate and hierophant of the Supreme Being, he was at his murderous zenith – but he was overreaching, his prominence resented by his colleagues. Two days later, a law granted Robespierre and the Committee powers to kill all public enemies. In July, sixty victims were beheaded daily; one of them was Josephine de Beauharnais’s husband, and she expected death herself. Now even the Sansons had doubts: the old father suffered ‘terrible visions … Perhaps I’m punished by God for my cowardly obedience to mock justice.’ Henri Sanson was arrested. But the Committee was reduced to nocturnal screaming rows. Robespierre retired to his lodgings to recover and plan the arrest of all his enemies. On 26 July, he delivered a disastrously misjudged speech, defending his revolution, ‘the first founded on the theory of the rights of humanity and the principles of justice’, and menaced its enemies – ‘the monsters’ – before reflecting, ‘Death is not an eternal sleep … Death is the start of immortality.’ But his threat to ‘crush all factions’ united both moderates and radicals in a conspiracy against him that night. Next day, 9 Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar, when they tried to launch their purge, he and his epigones were accused of planning to ‘murder the Convention’.

‘Down with the tyrant,’ cried Robespierre’s critics.

He tried to speak but fear stole his voice.

‘Danton’s blood’, came the shout, ‘chokes you!’

‘Is it Danton you regret?’ Robespierre replied. ‘Cowards! Why didn’t you defend him?’

Arrested then freed in the chaos, Robespierre and his henchmen fled to the Hôtel de Ville where, besieged by militia, Robespierre shot himself, but merely shattered his jaw. Watched by baying crowds, his face bandaged, he was conveyed to the national razor where Henri Sanson, reinstated, ripped off his bandage. Robespierre emitted a high-pitched shriek and fainted before Sanson removed his head. This was not a revolution but an internecine coup within the Committee, where the Jacobin faction continued to rule in partnership with the now empowered moderates. Prisoners, including Josephine, were released.^* Among Robespierrists arrested in Nice was General Bonaparte, who was fortunate to be released. Meanwhile his patron, Barras, a bisexual Provençal bon vivant who had fought the British in India, helped dismantle the machine of terror.

On 5 October 1795, faced with a revolt in Paris, Barras summoned Bonaparte, who sent a Gascon innkeeper’s son, Joachim Murat, a jet-haired, six-foot-tall, blue-eyed eighteen-year-old, to get forty cannon. ‘The rabble must be moved by terror,’ said Bonaparte, ordering Murat to fire ‘a whiff of grapeshot’ into the crowd. The cannon fire killed 300 and won for the general the gratitude of Barras, who was now chosen as the president of a five-man Directoire. France, fighting the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns and the British in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, was holding its own, efficiently organized by one of the directeurs, Carnot. Released from the Terror, enjoying their power, self-made revolutionaries and returning aristocrats celebrated their survival in a florescence of libidinous luxury and venal dealmaking: none more so than Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, a languid, lame libertine, who in British and American exile had met Pitt and Hamilton, and who became the wily and witty foreign minister.

Barras, whom Carnot described as possessing ‘the tastes of an opulent prince, generous, magnificent and dissipated’, embarked on an affair with Josephine de Beauharnais. When she became too demanding and expensive, he said he was ‘tired and bored’ of that ‘cajoling courtesan’. He promoted the pale, long-haired Bonaparte, whose ‘emaciated thinness was converted into a fullness of face’ and ‘a smile always agreeable’ and now encouraged Josephine to focus on his protégé. After sending her little son Eugène to deliver a message, she finally met Napoleon and he fell wildly in love with her. She was six years older than him but much less innocent – her charm, chestnut hair and hazel eyes, allied with a sophisticated sexual technique that Bonaparte called le zigzag, outweighed the toothlessness that prevented her from smiling, her incontinent extravagance and her supposed lack of intelligence: ‘No one,’ laughed Talleyrand, ‘ever managed better without it.’

‘I awake full of you,’ wrote Bonaparte that December. ‘Your image and the memory of last night’s intoxicating pleasures has left no rest to my senses.’ In March 1796, Barras presided over their marriage and, convinced of Bonaparte’s devoted loyalty, chose him to command the Army of Italy. Left in Paris, Josephine started an affair with a young hussar and tried to regain possession of her estates on Saint-Domingue.

In April, Toussaint celebrated his alliance with Laveaux, who called him ‘the black Spartacus, the leader announced by the philosophe Raynal to avenge the crimes perpetrated against his race’, and appointed him deputy governor. Toussaint was much favoured by the wives of the French colons. Married to Suzanne and father of beloved sons, Toussaint was the lover of Madame Fisson, ‘a white girl of rare beauty’, whose colon husband became one of his agents, and of Marguerite Descahaux, another colon’s wife. He was bombarded with locks of blonde hair and notes that called him ‘my prince’ from planters’ wives and he encouraged his white officials to marry black women, including his own paramours.

Yet his real challenge was to unite his people, most of them bossales from Africa still identifying as Kongos or Ibos. ‘I’m the person black people see when they look in the mirror,’ he said, ‘and it’s to me they must turn if they wish to enjoy the fruits of liberty.’ Yet the Directoire distrusted Toussaint, who retorted that Africans had ‘used their weapons and bare hands to keep the colony French’. Barras was not convinced, sending a general named Hédouville to disarm the black militias. ‘Who’s the greater defender of your freedom?’ Toussaint asked his people, ‘General Hédouville, former marquis, or Toussaint Louverture, the slave from Bréda?’

Toussaint’s revolt was terrifying a nearby coterie of slave owners. ‘I feel sincerely those sentiments of sympathy,’ wrote President Washington, ‘for the distresses of suffering brethren [slave masters].’ In February 1793, he signed the Fugitive Slave Act, permitting the pursuit of escaped slaves. Jefferson too, convinced that ‘all the West India islands will remain in the hands of the people of color’, declared that ‘we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (south of Potomac), will have to wade through’.

British slave owners were afraid too, but Pitt had held up Wilberforce’s 1792 Slave Trade Bill, instead focusing on fighting France and seeking imperial gains. In September 1793 he sent a large expedition to seize a rich French asset, Saint-Domingue, and re-establish slavery in order to safeguard British sugar plantations in Barbados and Jamaica. Toussaint led furious resistance, defeating two British expeditions with the aid of rampaging yellow fever.

In May 1796, turning to India, where the French were conspiring against Britain, Pitt appointed a close friend from Eton and Oxford, the thirty-seven-year-old Richard Wellesley, earl of Mornington, as governor-general of the presidency of Fort William (Calcutta). One of Pitt’s first acts, in 1784, had been to take control of the EIC: henceforth the prime minister would appoint the India Board of Control and the governor-general who actually ran the three Indian presidencies.^* Although Clive had secured Bengal, Britain’s territories were limited and most of India was ruled by the Marathas, enjoying huge revenues. It was only now that Wellesley, dynamic and autocratic, libertine and spendthrift, studied how to lay ‘the foundations of our Empire in Asia’, aided by two younger brothers, one serving as his adjutant, the other as trusted commander. Arthur, the future duke of Wellington, handsome, frosty, laconic and talented, complemented Richard’s overblown schemes and explosive impetuosity. Between them the two sons of an undistinguished Anglo-Irish landowner would establish British power in India and Europe.

A HEAP OF EYEBALLS: TIGER TIPU, THE WELLESLEY BROTHERS AND THE AVENGING EUNUCH OF PERSIA

Once in Calcutta, Wellesley played the proconsul, parading in a fancy carriage and with an armed retinue, building a new resplendent Government House and pursuing sexual escapades. Asia had changed since Clive’s day: a Sikh sirdar, Ranjit Singh, was carving out a kingdom in Punjab, having expelled the heir of the Afghan conqueror Durrani, who had also lost his Persian and central Asian provinces thanks to the conquests of a ferocious eunuch intent on avenging humiliations national and testicular.

Wizened, wrinkly and tiny with a high voice, Agha Muhammad Khan had been castrated at five by Nader Shah’s nephew to prevent any threat from his Qajar tribe, and was then kept as a prisoner at court for decades until 1779 when a change of regime enabled the eunuch to escape, raise his tribal army and conquer Shiraz, Isfahan and Tabriz. When he pivoted into Khorasan he captured Nader’s blind grandson, Shahrokh, personally torturing him by filling his crown with molten lead. He had the body buried under the doorway of the palace in his new capital, Teheran. In 1791, he invaded the Caucasus, expelling Russian forces and recapturing Yerevan. When he took Kumani, he had the eyeballs of its 20,000 people gouged out and collected in heaps.

In August 1795, he attacked Georgia, where its king Hercules II, who had served in Nader’s entourage, begged Catherine the Great for protection. Just before she died, Catherine abandoned Georgia. In September the eunuch routed Hercules and razed Tbilisi, building towers of bodies before taking 15,000 slaves back to Teheran, where he was crowned shah.

His reign was short. In June 1797, when he heard his valets arguing, he sentenced two of them to death but put off the executions until the next morning. Overnight they crept into the royal tent and stabbed him. But the monster had united Iran: his successor, his nephew Fath-Ali Shah, held it together, and the family ruled until 1925.

While the Persians, Afghans and Sikhs were busy in the east, Wellesley was determined to be the founder of the British empire in India where the British were just one part of a cosmopolitan melange of Europeans and Indians who mixed together on equal terms: one in three Britons on the subcontinent were married to Indian women. In Hyderabad, where the British ensured the Nizam did not ally with the French, the British Resident (representative), James Kirkpatrick, was married to the beautiful princess Khair-un-Nissa. Wellesley was said to disapprove, but he focused on Britain’s chief enemy, Mysore, a kingdom recently carved out of the southern Vijayanagar empire by a warlord, Haidar Ali Khan. His French-trained son Sultan Tipu, a tigerish showman whose sultanate was known for its social stability, economic prosperity and harmony between Hindu and Muslim citizens, hired French officers to conquer the Carnatic and Malabar and defeated a British army – believing the French would back him. But they let him down. Having succeeded in ‘drawing the Beast of the jungle into the toils’, Wellesley unleashed his brother Arthur, who stormed Seringapatam and killed Tipu. Wellesley used Mysore to turn on the Marathas. In September 1803, at Assaye, General Arthur Wellesley defeated the maharaja of Gwalior, which he later regarded as a greater victory than Waterloo – ‘the bloodiest for the numbers that I ever saw’ – while in the north another British army defeated the Marathas, commanded by French officers, outside Delhi, which then joined the British sphere. Many of the rulers, including the Mughal emperor, were allowed to rule while the British controlled foreign policy. India had frequently been conquered by war bands from the east, but this was its first conquest by a sea power – and it gave Britain mass and span. By the time Wellesley arrived home with a marquessate and £100,000, the real architect of the British Raj had more than doubled London’s territories and planned to become prime minister. Arthur too entered politics.

Further east, the EIC again tried to penetrate China, the most powerful Asian state, ruled by the octogenarian Qianlong, emperor of 300 millions, who had expanded Chinese power into central Asia: the biggest ever Chinese empire. But he had lived too long and suffered from the success curse: past success makes present reform unthinkable.^* The trade balance was vastly in China’s favour, with the British, confined to Canton, paying in silver, but the EIC hoped to pay for Chinese tea with a new Indian crop, opium. In September 1792, they dispatched an envoy, Earl Macartney, to request ‘a small unfortified island for the residence of British traders’.

Qianlong, slim in build, aquiline of face, serene and majestic, dressed in ‘a loose robe of yellow silk, a cap of black velvet with a red ball on the top, and adorned with a peacock’s feather’, received Macartney, who presented gifts to show off British technology: a telescope, barometer, air pump, planetarium and six Wedgwood pots. Qianlong mocked the air pump – ‘enough to amuse children’ – but it was the Wedgwood that should have alarmed him. With the British sending china to China, the world had changed, yet Qianlong rejected British pretensions, reflecting the worldview of his prime: ‘Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance,’ while Britain’s ‘evil request’ was a ‘flagrant infringement of the usage of my empire’. For now the British looked irrelevant in China.

Britain could no longer deport criminals to America, but Captain Cook’s naturalist Banks suggested that New South Wales was ideal for a new penal colony. Pitt and his home secretary Viscount Sydney dispatched a fleet of eleven ships under Captain Arthur Phillip to secure the colony on the vast continent of Australia, the home of hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples, most of whom had had no contact with Europeans except for a few Dutch and British sailors over the last century.

In January 1788, Governor Phillip raised the flag on the coast, naming the settlement Sydney Cove and delivering the first 732 convicts, thieves from London. By 1792, when Phillip returned to London, 4,221 Britons – of whom 3,099 were convicts – were settled in New South Wales. Its convicts worked in chain gangs, while its indigenous peoples were culled by diseases and broken by settler land grabs.^*

The British were not the only conquerors carving out a Pacific realm. In 1790, it was the predations of an American family of fur traders who unknowingly helped Kamehameha create a Hawaiian kingdom. An American trader, Simon Metcalfe, sailed his Eleonora to the Hawaiian islands, where after a dispute he flogged a Hawaiian chieftain, slaughtered 100 Hawaiians with his cannon and sailed on towards China. A little later, when his nineteen-year-old son Thomas arrived in the ill-named Fair American, the Hawaiians took revenge, storming the ship and killing him and his crew – except one artillerymen.

On a nearby island, his father Simon waited and sent a boatswain ashore to find out what had happened to Thomas. When the sailor was taken prisoner, Simon sailed away to China.

The two British sailors were invited by Kamehameha to operate his newly acquired cannon: wisely they not only agreed but became his intimate courtiers. Isaac Davis from Wales and John Young from Lancashire began as his gunners, then helped command his armies and ultimately married into the dynasty. After buying guns from British and American traders and learning how to manufacture gunpowder from saltpetre – easily found on Hawaii – Kamehameha, assisted by Davis and Young, stormed Maui. Five years later, in May 1795, he led 1,000 war canoes and 10,000 troops, along with cannon operated by his Lancashire and Welsh artillerymen, to seize Oahu, winning a battle at Nu’uanu and then sacrificing its ruler. Next this remarkable conqueror would take on American and European traders at their own game.

In December 1793, Jefferson resigned from Washington’s cabinet, leaving the field to his rivals from the conservative Federalist Party, Hamilton and Vice-President Adams, claiming disingenuously, ‘The little spice of ambition … has long since evaporated,’ while plotting remorselessly. ‘He’s as ambitious’, noted Adams, ‘as Oliver Cromwell.’ Jefferson hated direct confrontation, assuming an Olympian gentility, at the same time manipulating newspapers to destroy Hamilton – and refusing to denounce Robespierre’s Terror. In Monticello, he pulled down and restarted his domed mansion and resumed his relationship with Sally. In 1795, still only twenty, Sally gave birth another daughter, who also died young.

After two terms, Washington returned to Mount Vernon to salvage his fortunes.^* Jefferson’s ‘retirement’ was short-lived and illusory: he carefully transformed himself from Parisian–Virginian aristocrat into austere man of popular virtue and ran against Adams, who won the presidency. As vice-president, his reward for finishing runner-up, Jefferson spent as little time in the capital Philadelphia as possible and as much as he could at home, where in 1797 Sally gave birth to a son, Beverly. While Adams’s presidency deteriorated, Hamilton, high-handed, brilliant but self-destructive, had ruined himself by admitting an affair with a married woman, Maria Reynolds. Jefferson doubtless revelled in the implosion of these Federalist rivals, but as he got closer to the presidency his own secrets became political dynamite.

In 1800, Jefferson, running with an amoral New York lawyer Aaron Burr, was (just) elected president and moved into the President’s House in the new capital Washington – shortly before Sally gave birth to a daughter, Harriet. In September 1801, the Virginian Federalist published revelations about ‘Mr J’, claiming that he ‘has a number of yellow children and that he is addicted to golden affections’. Then a year later James Callender, a racist scribbler used by Jefferson in his battles with Adams, revealed in the Richmond Recorder, ‘It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps … as his concubine one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.’ Jefferson ignored the story.

Initially welcoming Saint-Domingue as part of the age of revolution, Jefferson changed his view when he heard about the killing of white people, warning that the ‘cannibals of the terrible republic’ could spark the ‘combustion’ of a US race war. Yet he tried to avoid the subject of slavery, concentrating on his life’s work – the creation of the new American nation. His greatest opportunity was ironically accelerated by Toussaint’s success.

In return for not encouraging slave revolts, Toussaint now cultivated good relations with the US and Britain. Believing that the best route to freedom lay through Paris, he sent his sons to be educated in France and had just invaded Spanish Santo Domingo, liberating its slaves and uniting the two sides of the island, when news arrived that a French general had seized power in Paris.

Just after his March 1796 wedding to Josephine, the twenty-six-year-old Bonaparte arrived in Italy to fight the Habsburgs, who were defending their northern Italian provinces. Bonaparte manoeuvred with vertiginous grace on the fields both of battle and of publicity. Like Germany, Italy was a ‘merely geographical expression’, as a Habsburg minister would say, ruled in the north by the Habsburg emperor and the Savoyard king of Piedmont–Sardinia, in the centre by the popes and in Naples–Sicily by a Bourbon king. As Bonaparte conquered Milan that May and moved south, he set up new republics to mirror France itself, imposing the principles of the Enlightenment, abolishing the Inquisition and noble assemblies and freeing the Jews from centuries of anti-Jewish restrictions.

Intoxicated by the excitement of power and the exercise of French superiority, ‘I no longer regarded myself as a simple general,’ Bonaparte confessed later, ‘but as a man to decide the fate of peoples.’ None of his ambitions would have mattered without the victories he won, which would have impossible without the unshackled force of France, la Grande Nation, its large population, its remarkable military organization and its generals, sons of innkeepers and coopers promoted on merit, combined with its republican fervour and a sense of French superiority. Their coalition of enemies, the Habsburgs now joined by the Romanovs and funded by Pitt, was overextended and ill-coordinated.^*

Bonaparte dreamed of power and of Josephine, begging her to join him, writing daily, swinging from the practical – ‘I’m a little tired, every day on horseback’ – to the erotic – ‘a kiss on your breast and then a little lower, then much, much lower’. When he discovered that she was sleeping with a ‘very pretty’ hussar, he dived into a romantic swoon: ‘You don’t love me any more, I have only to die.’ Holding court in a Milanese palace, joined by his mother, Bonaparte adopted regal ways, promoting his brothers, marrying his sisters to French generals and Italian aristocrats, while joking disarmingly to the Directoire: ‘If months ago I wished to be duke of Milan, today I desire to be king of Italy.’ ’^*

After signing a peace that won northern Italy and Belgium for France, Bonaparte advised the directeurs that they should aim to attack Britain ‘or expect to be destroyed by the corruption of these intriguing and enterprising islanders’. He added, ‘Let’s concentrate all our activity upon the naval side and destroy England. That done, Europe is at our feet.’ At a Paris triumph, Barras and the Directoire, all absurdly wearing Roman togas, compared Bonaparte to a new Caesar, who now planned an oriental adventure to knock Britain out of the war, found an Alexandrian empire, champion French Enlightenment and make himself invincible: Egypt.

As suggested by Talleyrand, Bonaparte promised that ‘as soon as he’d conquered Egypt, he will establish relations with the Indian princes and, together with them, attack the English in their possessions’. On 19 May 1798, Bonaparte and his 280 ships sailed out of Toulon with an army of 38,000, accompanied by 167 savants (historians, architects, mathematicians and botanists), his brother Louis, his stepson Eugène and his mixed-race cavalry commander General Dumas, plus 800,000 pints of wine.

EGYPTIAN POTENTATES: BONAPARTE AND MEHMED ALI

Bonaparte, immersing himself in the ancient history of pharaohs, Alexander and Caesar, arrived in a semi-autonomous province of the Ottomans. Egypt, like most Ottoman territories, was now semi-independent, ruled by rapacious Mamluk-Turkish pashas. ‘This horde of slaves, bought in Caucasus and Georgia, has tyrannized the most beautiful part of the world,’ said Bonaparte, who ordered his troops to be tolerant of Egyptian culture: ‘Treat them as you treated the Jews and the Italians. Respect their muftis and imams.’

After landing at Alexandria, the vanguard under General Dumas, whom the Austrians nicknamed the Black Devil, rode south. But this irrepressible giant, ‘the handsomest man you ever saw’, resented Bonaparte’s ambitions and started plotting against him.

On 20 July 1798, just outside Cairo, Bonaparte defeated the Mamluks. The publicity maestro named this his ‘Battle of the Pyramids’, declaiming, ‘Soldiers, remember that, from these pyramids, forty centuries of history contemplate you’ – even though they were not actually in view. Dumas’s cavalry pursued the Mamluks. The French occupied Cairo, Africa’s largest city, but ten days later Bonaparte’s fleet, moored in Aboukir Bay, was destroyed by an impetuous one-eyed, one-armed British admiral, Horatio Nelson. Bonaparte was nonplussed, but his options were now limited. In October, the Cairenes rebelled; Bonaparte and Dumas crushed the revolt, killing 5,000 rebels and trapping the last of them in the Al-Azhar Mosque, which they bombarded with artillery and then stormed, with Dumas himself galloping into the mosque on horseback. But now Bonaparte learned of Dumas’s intrigue: he threatened to shoot him, but allowed him to return to France.^* Dumas was replaced by Murat, that Gascon fighting cockatoo, his sword engraved ‘Honour and the Ladies’, who several times saved the French from Mamluk cavalry.

But an Ottoman army was approaching through Syria, supported by the pasha of Acre. Bonaparte marched north and besieged Acre. The expedition was a disaster: he massacred his prisoners, killed his own wounded soldiers and failed to take Acre. While pumping out mendacious bulletins about his achievements and gaining a rallying song, ‘Partant pour la Syrie’, Bonaparte was finally informed that Josephine had been unfaithful all along. ‘I’ve lost faith,’ he sobbed, ‘in human nature.’

In October 1799, Bonaparte abandoned his entire army (not for the last time) and slipped past British ships. ‘Bah! We’ll get there,’ he said. ‘Luck’s never abandoned us!’ Accompanied by his Georgian slave-bodyguard Roustam, he arrived in Paris to exploit his political prestige. Back in Egypt, British and Ottoman forces converged on the French army, which was finally evacuated.^* Sultan Selim III had ordered Egypt’s recapture, massing an army that included a Turkish-Albanian, Mehmed Ali, the exact same age as Bonaparte, who would become the Islamic Napoleon.

Born in Kavala (Greece), Mehmed Ali was the son of an Albanian Ottoman official and nephew of the governor, ‘brought up a gentleman’. But ‘when Napoleon invaded Egypt, his uncle enrolled him in a unit commanded by his own son. He arrived in Egypt in 1801 as the French withdrew and just as Cairo descended into chaos. The Ottomans failed to control the Mamluks. Yet Mehmed Ali, taking command of 4,000 aggressive Albanians, skilfully outmanoeuvred both. In May 1805, Cairene grandees dispatched a delegation to see him.

‘Who,’ he asked, ‘have you chosen as governor?’

‘We’ll accept no one,’ they replied, ‘but you.’ It was only now that he sent for his sons and family from Greece. After just four years in Egypt, scarcely speaking Arabic, illiterate until he was forty, Mehmed Ali ruled Egypt. Like Napoleon, he burnished his legend, often speaking in the Caesaresque third person; but, unlike the Corsican, he created a state and dynasty that endured. The most successful Islamic potentate in modern times, Mehmed Ali would dominate Egypt for forty-three years, conquering (like Napoleon) a vast but short-lived empire, almost causing a European war, but then creating the first industrial economy outside Europe and a dynasty that ruled Egypt until 1952.

In October 1799, arriving back in Paris, Bonaparte found the Directoire falling apart, and – aided by two allies, his spidery brother Lucien, president at twenty-three of the legislature’s lower house, the Council of Five Hundred, and Talleyrand – he agreed to be the ‘sword’ for a coup. At first the coup on 18 Brumaire (9 November) went wrong. Bonaparte strode into the Council of Ancients, the upper house, but fluffed his speech. The Council of Five Hundred refused to be dismissed. As Bonaparte wavered, Murat and his grenadiers expelled the Five Hundred and bullied the Ancients. Bonaparte emerged as first consul, ruler of France, approved by 99.95 per cent in a plebiscite. ‘If he lasts a year,’ said Talleyrand, reappointed foreign minister, ‘he’ll go far.’

After much screaming and sobbing, the first consul forgave Josephine’s infidelities (while embarking on many of his own with enthusiasm but never virtuosity: ‘Three minutes and it’s over,’ he told his staff). They moved into the royal apartments of the Tuileries. Bonaparte enjoyed their transformation. ‘Come on, little creole,’ he joked, lifting his wife into Antoinette’s boudoir, ‘get into the bed of your masters.’ Josephine had the decency to confess, ‘I can feel the queen’s ghost, asking what I’m doing in her bed.’

The consul now turned to the anti-French coalition, as the Austrians took the offensive in Italy. Bonaparte led his army over the Alps, a Hannibalesque exploit with cannon instead of elephants, then, by superb manoeuvring and pure luck, defeated the Austrians at Marengo, pulling off a peace with both Austria and Spain that won France more territories – including the interior of America, Louisiana, which he planned to make the centre of a new empire. It gave Bonaparte a chance to consider what to do with France’s rebel slaves.

TWO GENERALS: TOUSSAINT AND NAPOLEON

Toussaint had also emerged with a fancy new title along with the leadership of his country. Winning a vicious War of Knives in which he fought against a rival biracial warlord, André Rigaud, in July 1801 his Assembly approved a constitution entitled ‘concernant la liberté des Nègres, des gens de couleurs et des Blancs’ that appointed him Liberator, Protector and Governor-for-Life with the right to choose his successor. But he carefully examined Bonaparte’s new French constitution: article 91 allowed some slavery to be reimposed in the Caribbean.

Protector Toussaint was keen to preserve the wealth of the plantations that were now disintegrating without slave labour: he and his generals Dessalines and Christophe now ran their own estates (Dessalines owned thirty), while imposing martial law to enforce indentured labour. Toussaint even discussed importing indentured labourers from Africa. But his regal powers inspired opposition, led by his own venal nephew General Moyse. When the latter tried to seize power, Toussaint had him shot and forty rebels fired out of cannon.

Toussaint assured Consul Bonaparte of the colony’s loyalty, but ‘under the administration of a black man’. Bonaparte approved, briefly. While he was in Egypt, Josephine had requested the return of her plantations. Toussaint restored them, sending her the income; Josephine entertained Toussaint’s sons for dinner, and became fond of Placide. Bonaparte told the young men their father was ‘a great man who’d rendered eminent services to France’ and decided to recognize him as captain-general, hoping that he would lead a French army against British Jamaica and possibly America. Instead the Protector appeased the US and Britain; meanwhile, given that Spain was now a French ally, his occupation of Santo Domingo interfered with Bonaparte’s Spanish relations

Canvassed by the slave masters’ lobby, Bonaparte decided to restore slavery and destroy Toussaint, warning that his rule failed to recognize the ‘sovereignty of the French people’. Refusing to ‘tolerate a single epaulette on the shoulders of these negroes’, Bonaparte told the Council of State, ‘I’m for the whites, because I’m white and for no other reason … How could we have granted freedom to Africans, these men without civilization?’ He added, ‘If the … Convention had understood what they were doing and known about colonies, would have they abolished slavery? I very much doubt it.’ He mustered an army of 20,000, later finding 23,000 reinforcements, his biggest overseas expedition, under Victoire-Emmanuel Leclerc, to whom he had married his most beautiful sister, Pauline. Bonaparte gave Leclerc detailed secret orders to first charm Toussaint, then, if he resisted, to eliminate him while publicly threatening that persons of colour who resisted would be ‘devoured by fire like dried sugar cane’. Yet travelling with the French were two Saint-Domingue generals, and future leaders of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Pierre Boyer, both sons of French colons and enslaved women, who had been defeated by Toussaint and now backed the French. Realizing that the French aimed to restore white supremacy and chattel slavery, as they would soon do in Martinique and other colonies, Toussaint trained his 20,000 men, but declared, ‘If I have to die under these circumstances, I’ll face death honourably – like a soldier.’

The reality was worse. In January 1802, Toussaint watched Leclerc’s troops disembarking. ‘We must perish,’ he concluded. ‘All of France has come to Saint-Domingue.’ Leclerc bungled his landing, but Toussaint ordered Dessalines and Christophe to destroy the town of Cap (once ‘Paris of the Caribbean’) and unleash ‘fire and destruction … Destroy and burn everything so that those who come to re-enslave us always have before their eyes the image of hell they deserve.’ The war was merciless: Leclerc ordered mass drownings of black prisoners and built a gas chamber on a ship using volcanic sulphur to suffocate 400 Haitians; Toussaint corkscrewed the eyes out of French captives.

Leclerc swung from genocidal fury to flaccid despair, barely coping with Pauline, though she was safe aboard his flagship; he told Napoleon that the surrounding chaos ‘wore her down to the point of making her ill’. Reduced to a brigade of 4,000 that included devoted white officers and African-born female fighters, Toussaint fought a guerrilla campaign, travelling in disguise, sleeping on a plank; whites were massacred. ‘Spare no one,’ he ordered. ‘We must conquer or die!’ The French suffered punishing losses. By March 1802, half the French were dead or sick of yellow fever. Leclerc proposed a policy of mass killing; Pauline begged Bonaparte to recall him. Tormented by Pauline, who took a series of lovers from the few French soldiers not dying in the epidemic, Leclerc begged her to go home, but she consoled herself that ‘Here I reign like Josephine; I hold first place.’ But she reigned over desolation.

Yet the French advanced. Toussaint haemorrhaged men, and his generals Christophe and Dessalines negotiated pardons and then defected. Toussaint, forced to negotiate, met Leclerc, afterwards celebrating the ceasefire at a banquet attended by the commander and four future Haitian rulers. Toussaint retired to one of his estates, but Bonaparte demanded his capture. Leclerc, aided by his nemesis Dessalines, suborned a trusted ally to lure Toussaint to his estate where he was arrested and, along with his wife, sons (including Placide, who had joined the fight against the French) and devoted mixed-race servant Mars Plaisir, handed over to Leclerc. The chained Liberator was dispatched to France.^* Between May and July 1802, Bonaparte restored slavery in some Caribbean territories, which sparked a new war of liberation in Saint-Domingue. This was led by Dessalines, who was elected commander-in-chief and joined by Christophe, Boyer and Pétion. Dessalines slaughtered Toussaint’s white and black supporters. The French, Leclerc proposed to Bonaparte, should ‘destroy all the negroes of the mountains, men and women, and keep only children below twelve, destroy half the blacks on the plains and leave not a single man of colour who has worn an epaulette’. But then he himself perished of fever.

In November, Pauline sailed back to Paris with his body;^* his replacement, Donatien, vicomte de Rochambeau, son of Washington’s ally, deployed terror – mass drownings and public burnings, crucifixions and feeding humans to dogs. He held a ball in Port-au-Prince for elite mixed-race women, who banqueted in a black-lined hall after which their host opened doors to a chamber where their husbands, just executed, were displayed. Rochambeau ordered genocidal measures, the killing of every black adult over the age of twelve and the import of new African slaves. But on 18 November 1803, at Vertières, Dessalines vanquished the French. Next day, Rochambeau opened negotiations. Dessalines gave him ten days to evacuate 8,000 men. France’s richest colony was lost: Bonaparte was astonished – ‘the greatest error I ever committed’ – reflecting later that he should just have appointed Toussaint as viceroy. In the third of the three great revolutions, Toussaint and Dessalines had changed the world: after the death of 30,000 French and 350,000 Haitians, Dessalines had defeated a European great power. But it was decisive in another way too: it convinced Napoleon to sell the interior of America.

Jefferson had first supported Bonaparte’s crushing of Toussaint’s rebels, but when he discovered that the consul had regained Louisiana, the core of north America, this Francophile plotted to remove the French, convinced that America needed the port of New Orleans. Jefferson threatened Bonaparte that he would ally with Britain if he did not get it. He dispatched James Monroe to Paris just as Bonaparte realized that he was losing Haiti.

In April 1803, uninhibited by his suspicion of presidential power and imperial diplomacy, Jefferson purchased Louisiana for $15 million: ‘It is the case of a guardian, investing the money of his ward in purchasing an important adjacent territory; & saying to him, when of age, I did this for your good.’ Jefferson had doubled the size of America, swallowing what would be fifteen states and enabling the expansion of the nation into a continental power.^* Fascinated by the stories of Captain Cook, he formed a Corps of Discovery, dispatching an expedition, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to explore the west and reach the Pacific. Soon afterwards, Jefferson met a rough, crude German immigrant whose trade in pelts, Chinese luxuries and Manhattan property would dovetail with American prosperity. The president thought the dour merchant, John Jacob Astor, aged forty, ‘a most excellent man’.

Son of a butcher in Walldorf, near Heidelberg, Astor first moved to London to trade in music instruments, then, following a brother who joined the British Hessian mercenaries to America, he set up a music shop in New York, switching to the lucrative trade in beaver, ermine, mink and otter furs.

Setting out by canoe and cart, Astor bought pelts from Native Americans around the Canadian border, sometimes winning them over by playing the flute, sometimes selling rum and weapons, earning 1,000 per cent profits when the furs sold in London. After marrying a well-off New Yorker, Sarah Todd, with whom he soon had a large family, he started to send a network of trackers into Jefferson’s newly opened lands and on to the Pacific, where California remained Spanish and where Russia had just claimed Alaska.

Astor, coarse, red-faced and avaricious, but a tireless organizer, lobbied politicians, lending money to Vice-President Burr and cultivating President Jefferson, who approved his plans. Often his trackers were massacred by Native Americans, but his American Fur Company prospered.

In April 1804, the president rushed home to Monticello where his daughter, Maria, was ailing. She died in his arms; but, while there, he conceived a child with Sally Hemings. When she gave birth to a son, Jefferson followed his tradition with Sally that each of their children were named after one of his friends: Dolley Madison, wife of the secretary of state, promised Sally a present if the son was named after her husband. No present ever arrived, but the boy was named James Madison Hemings.^*

Ironically, Jefferson’s best service to mankind was linked to his dubious attitude towards slavery. He was aware that the greatest killer was smallpox. In Paris he had had Sally Hemings and her brothers inoculated. In May 1796, an English country doctor, Edward Jenner, noticing that milkmaids were immune to smallpox, scraped pus from a milkmaid’s cowpox blister and injected it into a boy, who himself became immune: he called this vaccination, after vacca, cow. As with many advances, the discovery was not recognized by most doctors. It took amateurs and then leaders to deliver the benefits to the public, and that often required decades. In 1801, Jefferson heard about vaccination from a Harvard professor who – astonishingly – had received the vaccine by post across the Atlantic and sent it in a corked vial to the president. Jefferson realized there was ‘no discovery in medicine equally valuable’ and ‘inoculated about 70 or 80 of my own family … Our whole experiment extended to about 200,’ including some of his children and three slaves, of whom two, his butler Burwell Colbert and blacksmith Joseph Fossett, were immunized successfully. The shock of vaccination was that it was a medicine for people who were not yet sick, leading to an anti-vaxxing movement. ‘As mindboggling as it is to contemplate a sitting president conducting experimental drug trials in his spare time’, writes Steven Johnson, it was appropriate that a non-doctor should defeat anti-vaxxers and promote the most important cure of modern times. Jefferson publicized his findings, leading Congress to pass the Vaccine Act in 1813. It took forty years for Britain to catch up.

Back in Paris, Bonaparte, still only thirty-three, was sitting in his bath when his brothers Joseph, the eldest, and Lucien attacked his decision to sell Louisiana. ‘I know the price of what I abandon,’ he shouted, standing up starkers. ‘I renounce it with the greatest regret.’ Now his chief American preoccupation was the marriage of his youngest brother Jérôme, a feckless naval officer, to an heiress, Betsy Patterson, in Baltimore. Napoleon furiously ordered Jérôme to return, complaining about his avaricious family. The Bonapartes were jealous of Josephine and her Beauharnais children – her charming son Eugène, who served on Napoleon’s staff, and her intelligent, beautiful daughter Hortense – though Napoleon himself preferred them to his own fissiparous brothers. But he tried to reconcile the families by marrying his brother Louis to Hortense. Whatever their faults – and they were legion – he planned to found the greatest dynasty since Charlemagne.

ONE EMPEROR AND FIVE KINGDOMS

On 2 December 1804, at Notre-Dame, in a ceremony at which Pope Pius VII officiated, Bonaparte crowned himself emperor, wearing a long satin gown chased with gold, a scarlet ermine mantel and a golden laurel crown. He whispered to his brother Joseph in Italian, ‘If only Daddy could us now,’ but their mother Letizia, who had survived thirteen pregnancies, was there to see their apotheosis. Joseph had tried to stop Josephine being crowned empress, because Louis and Hortense’s offspring would thereby be imperial grandchildren while his would be grandchildren of a bourgeois. The Bonaparte sisters refused to carry her train, but Napoleon insisted: ‘My wife’s a good woman. She satisfies herself with diamonds, nice dresses and the misfortunes of her ageing … If I make her an empress, it’s act of justice. I am above all a fair man.’ He then crowned a kneeling, weeping Josephine, wearing a white robe and a gilded satin mantel, with diamonds spangled across her coronet, belt, necklace and earrings, and ‘so well made up, she looked twenty-five’.

The emperor, at war with Britain, Russia and Austria, felt that the title would enable him to negotiate with Romanovs and Habsburgs. In August 1802, he had clinched the first consulate for life, and France had already conquered a European empire from Belgium to Italy. In January 1804, a Bourbon assassination conspiracy had focused his attention on monarchy. ‘They seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person. I will defend it for I am the Revolution,’ he proclaimed, adding, ‘The hereditary principle could alone prevent a counter-revolution.’^* In May, the French endorsed him as empereur des français, a new monarchy approved by plebiscite, its stability assured by dynasty – which he briskly designed, borrowing as his emblem the bees of the Merovingians and creating a meritocratic aristocracy and marshalate. Joseph was raised to grand elector and Louis to constable of France, but Napoleon grumbled bitterly about their irresponsible squabbling: as ‘the sole instrument of my destiny, I owe nothing to my brothers’. Murat was rewarded by marriage to his sister Caroline, a grand dukedom, a marshal’s baton and the title premier chevalier d’Europe. Napoleon annulled the American marriage of Jérôme, whom he forgave, while the demands of his sisters made him laugh. ‘To listen to my sisters,’ he joked, ‘you’d think I’d mismanaged the inheritance of our father, the late king.’ Soon afterwards, Napoleon, who was already il presidente della Repubblica Italiana, was crowned king of Italy. ‘Pourvu que ça dure,’ muttered their mother. ‘Long may it last.’

Most politicians struggle to differentiate between their own interests and those of the state, but dictators believe the two are identical. In Napoleon’s case, this delusion justified the deaths of hundreds of thousands in battles to secure his personal rule during a tumultuous decade. But his coronation outraged many. One of them was a young south American admirer, in Paris that day, Simón Bolívar, who fulminated, ‘Henceforth, I viewed him as a hypocritical tyrant.’ In Vienna, the composer Beethoven ripped the title page of his Third Symphony in half. ‘Is he then, also, nothing more than an ordinary man?’ he asked. ‘He’ll exalt himself above all others and become a tyrant.’ Beethoven changed the dedication Entitled Bonaparte and renamed it the Heroic, ‘in memory of a great man’.^*

Napoleon now wanted peace with Britain, hoping that London would be satisfied with its world empire while he dominated Europe, but it was British policy, starting with William III and continuing into the twenty-first century, to challenge any single power dominating Europe. In May 1804, Pitt, now forty-five, returned to power, after a short hiatus. Power had aged him: he had achieved much, including in 1801 the addition of Ireland to join England and Scotland in the United Kingdom. Now an alcoholic, nicknamed the Three-Bottle Man for his port compulsion, prescribed by his doctor, he was determined to stop Napoleon, funding Austrian, Prussian and Russian armies on land and deploying the Royal Navy at sea. Napoleon decided to invade – ‘it is necessary for us to be masters of the sea for six hours only and England will have ceased to exist’ – and ordered his Franco-Spanish fleet to smash the Royal Navy.

When Austria joined the third coalition, Napoleon performed what he called a ‘pirouette’ and dispatched his Grande Armée into Germany. In September 1805, he conducted a virtuoso campaign in which he outmanoeuvred his enemies (‘I’ve destroyed the Austrian army simply by marches,’ he told Josephine) and then in December, after taking Vienna and spending a night at Schönbrunn, he joined his army at Austerlitz, taking advantage of sluggish Austrian commanders, the jejune bungling of the overconfident Russian emperor Alexander and poor coordination between the two, while displaying his masterful ability to apply maximum force at the right point and the right time to smash the Austrian and Russian armies: ‘Let’s finish this war with a thunderclap.’ On the battlefield he wrote to Josephine: ‘I’ve beaten the Russian and Austrian army commanded by the two emperors. I am a little tired.’

Yet just as he won European hegemony by land, his fleet was routed at Trafalgar by Nelson, who was himself killed in the battle. The British victory limited the sustainability of Napoleon’s empire and established British naval dominance for a century. At a dinner in London, Pitt, exhausted and ailing, responded to acclamation as ‘saviour of Europe’ with laconic eloquence: ‘Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.’ But when he heard of Austerlitz he realized the momentum lay with Napoleon: ‘Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these ten years.’

The day after Austerlitz, Napoleon met the Habsburg emperor Franz, grandson of Maria Theresa, whose Habsburg wholesomeness amused the peripatetic Corsican. He was ‘so moral’, laughed Napoleon, ‘he never made love to anyone but this wife’. Trained by his ‘second father’ Emperor Joseph, who thought him dutiful but unimaginative, Franz spoke Viennese German, as well as Czech and Italian, cultivating a style of folksy familiarity and giving general audiences (open to the public) twice a week while wearing a plain military coat, Joseph-style. But he was also suspicious and jealous of his brothers, particularly the fine commander Karl, whom he spied on. He was almost capable of wit: when told of a Tyrolese patriot fighting the French, he replied, ‘I know he’s a patriot – but is he a patriot for me?’ He preferred uxorious life with his wives – he married four times – and toffee-making to detailed politics. Horrified by the swaggering conqueror but agonizingly polite, Franz bitterly acquiesced in Napoleon’s reordering of Europe: the Roman empire was replaced by a Rhine Confederation led by Napoleon. Franz had already changed his own title to emperor of Austria.

On 23 January 1806, Pitt died aged forty-six of a burst ulcer (saying either ‘Oh my country’ or ‘I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s porkpies’), succeeded by his cousin Grenville, the first of a succession of ‘friends of Mister Pitt’ who were all determined to destroy Napoleon.^* The emperor designed a blockade to cut off the income of the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ while he remained at war with the Russian tsar, who was joined by Prussia. ‘Your Majesty’, Napoleon warned the Prussian king, ‘will be defeated.’ In October 1806, Napoleon routed the Prussians at Jena (where Hegel, seeing him riding past, marvelled at witnessing ‘the World-Spirit ride out of town … an individual on horseback raising his arm over the world and ruling it’), then the Russians at Eylau and Friedland. ‘And what are two thousand men killed in a great battle?’ mused Napoleon.

The victories forced Russia to negotiate. On a raft at Tilsit, the emperor was charmed by the strapping, blue-eyed and fair-haired Tsar Alexander, an inscrutable master of duplicity who had survived the courts of his grandmother Catherine the Great and his tyrannical father Paul the Mad, in whose murder he had colluded. Now the chastened Romanov collaborated with the Corsican Ogre in a carve-up of Europe, gaining Finland among other territories.

Napoleon locked in his victories by elevating his family: his brothers became kings – Joseph of Naples, Louis of the Netherlands, Jérôme of Westphalia; his stepson Eugène became viceroy of Italy.^* Napoleon bullied and lectured his royal brothers, telling his favourite Joseph, ‘You must be a king and talk like a king,’ something Joseph never quite managed, and reprimanding Jérôme for being funny: ‘Your letter was too witty. You don’t need wit in war.’

King Louis, married to Josephine’s daughter Hortense, went native, announcing, ‘From the moment I set foot on Dutch soil, I became Dutch.’ This outraged the emperor, who said, ‘If you continue to govern by whingeing, if you allow yourself to be bullied’, he would be of no use. Napoleon went on, ‘You tire me needlessly … Only women cry and complain; men act; you’ll make me regret your weakness. More energy, more energy!’ The brothers in turn were jealous and resentful; no one had Napoleon’s energy, certainly not Louis, whom the emperor soon sacked as Netherlands king – but he was more useful dynastically. Hortense gave birth to a boy, Louis-Napoleon, but then flaunted her affair with Talleyrand’s natural son with whom she had an illegitimate son, Charles de Morny. Long afterwards, Louis-Napoleon would sit on the French throne – and Morny would put him there.

As Napoleon reordered the smaller states of Germany, he unknowingly launched the career of the Jewish banker who became known as the Napoleon of Finance.

THE KINGS OF CAPITAL: THE ROTHSCHILDS

Nathan Mayer Rothschild was the son of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the court agent of Wilhelm IX, prince-elector of Hesse-Kassel, who had made a fortune renting out Hessian mercenaries (usually to Britain, for which they fought in America) and now had made the mistake of backing Prussia. Napoleon punished Wilhelm by giving Hesse to his brother King Jérôme. Wilhelm entrusted his money to Rothschild to conceal it from the French emperor. Rothschild had already dispatched Nathan to Britain, where he used the Hessian capital to set up a family who would personify the new era of international capitalism and become the richest in the world.

‘A rather big man who wore a round unpowdered wig and small goatee beard’, Mayer Rothschild had been born in the Judengasse – Jews’ Lane – of the Frankfurt Ghetto, created by Frederick the Fat in 1458 to protect and squeeze Jews. Given that Jews were banned from owning land, prohibited from entering parks, bars and promenades and forced to wear yellow rings and step off the pavement and doff their hat if any non-Jew said to them, ‘Jew, do your duty,’ they had little choice but to concentrate on their faith and work in commerce. Rothschild, originally a dealer in coins and textiles, became Hoffaktor – court fixer – to Wilhelm IX and then to Emperor Franz. Although Joseph II and the French revolution had started the process of relieving Jews from their restrictions, Rothschild worked to win civil equality for ‘our nation’, whose people craved liberty but refused to give up their Judaism. This would be an enduring Rothschild mission.

Now that Napoleon had cancelled Hesse-Kassel, Rothschild smuggled four chests of coin to Britain, where, first in Manchester, then in London, Mayer’s third son Nathaniel invested Wilhelm’s money, giving the family a powerful foundation as they transformed themselves from court Jews and textile traders into bankers. Mayer’s wife Gutle, who had survived ten pregnancies, was tough enough to withstand a French raid and interrogation in pursuit of the Hessian treasure. But women were excluded from the family business: when Mayer died at sixty-eight, he left a moderate fortune and a will specifying that property must pass through the male line only, which encouraged marriage among family members. Nathaniel, aggressive and ingenious, emerged as the leader of the five brothers, honouring their father’s insistence on the family’s ‘unbreakable unity’ by placing his brothers in different European capitals. ‘My brother in London is the commanding general,’ said Salomon Rothschild, who covered the Habsburgs in Vienna, ‘I’m his field marshal,’ adding, ‘No disapproval shall be expressed by either of us at the conduct of the other since we act always for the joint interest.’

The move to London placed them perfectly: the Rothschilds would be beneficiaries of three world-changing movements. First was industrial expansion, based on British textiles and steel and powered by coal and steam, soon spreading to Germany and France. Next was the opening up of society to talent and the start of mass politics fostered by Napoleon, who by removing restrictions on Jews allowed them to take part in western communities for the first time. Finally, Napoleon’s war obliged nations to deploy armies so large that they had to be financed by a growing capital market that this family would shape – and dominate – for a century.

Their opportunity arrived fast as Napoleon, having settled the east, turned westwards, determined to force Portugal and Spain to join his war against Britain. The emperor resembled a shark who had to keep feeding to stay alive. But each new conquest opened the possibility of another which he could not resist but which further stretched his resources. Spain was ruled by an inept ménage à trois of a bluff oft-cuckolded Bourbon king, Carlos IV, his impulsive queen María Luisa and her preposterous lover, Manuel Godoy, nicknamed El Chorizo – the Sausage – in a nod to his province of Extremadura, known for its meat, and to his formidable sexual equipment. The queen one day saw the Sausage strumming his guitar and fell in love. In 1792 the king jovially appointed the twenty-eight-year-old popinjay as secretary of state, later garlanded with two dukedoms and then with the preposterous title príncipe de la paz (prince of peace). Godoy was soon the most hated sausage in Spain.^*

Napoleon smelled blood in the water. When he wrote to warn Carlos of Godoy’s cuckoldry, the Sausage intercepted it but just passed it on to Carlos – who ignored it. Napoleon easily manipulated the three, along with the embittered heir, Fernando, into joining him in an invasion of Portugal that inserted French troops into Spain; next he persuaded the royal couple to abdicate their throne altogether. He appointed Joseph as king, replacing him in Naples with his brother-in-law Murat. The premier chevalier – whom Napoleon called ‘the bravest man in the world … decked out in gold and feathers that rose above his head like a church tower’ – was in Spain at the time commanding the French army. He occupied Madrid, but on 2–3 May 1808 the Madrileños rebelled. ‘French blood has spilt,’ said Murat. ‘It demands vengeance. All arrested will be shot.’ The crackdown unleashed a ferocious insurgency, its atrocities gruesomely sketched by Goya in his Disasters of War. Napoleon called this ‘my Spanish ulcer’, admitting ‘the injustice was too cynical … it remains very ugly’.

In Portugal, he had provoked something just as extraordinary. On 29 November 1807, as French troops advanced on Lisbon, the príncipe regente, João VI, a long-faced, fat-lipped, bleary-eyed, pot-bellied vacillator who lived in the palace-monastery of Mafra accompanied only by priests and a force of bats deployed to kill the raging insects, left for Brazil.

* An observer of all this, the Anglo-Irish MP Edmund Burke, predicted in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that its consequences would be very different from its intentions, forging an unfailing rule of history. ‘That which in the first instance is prejudicial maybe be excellent in its remoter operation and its excellence may arise from the ill effects it produces in the beginning,’ he wrote. ‘The reverse also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.’

* That tainted his fencer-composer Saint-Georges who, accompanying the duke, backed the revolution and joined a black unit, La Légion Nationale des Américains et du Midi, funded by the richest free black planter of Saint-Domingue, Julien Raymond, who owned hundreds of slaves but had become an abolitionist. Here he met another mixed-race officer who became famous. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was born in Saint-Domingue; his father was a French planter and slave owner, the Marquis Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, while his mother was the enslaved Marie Cessette Dumas, so that he was born a slave. His father was the elder but useless brother of the successful planter Charles, for whom Antoine worked until they argued at which Antoine bought Marie Cessette, then left the white plantations and vanished for thirty years, running a small cacao estate, where Marie Cessette gave birth to Alexandre in 1762. Returning to France to claim his title and estates, Antoine sold Marie Cessette and the children to a baron, then rebought Alexandre, enrolled him in the army and funded his lavish lifestyle. Dumas was a titanic swashbuckler who rose fast in the revolutionary army. Saint-Georges served as colonel of his own Saint-Georges Legion, under Dumas. At the height of the Terror, Saint-Georges, accused of peculation, denounced Dumas. The composer was jailed, and Dumas was about to be arrested when Robespierre fell. Both were lucky to avoid the guillotine. Afterwards Dumas was promoted to général-en-chef – the first general of colour since the Russian general, Abram Gannibal, a protégé of Peter I. Saint-Georges travelled to Saint-Domingue, hoping to find a peaceful revolution of colour. Instead he found Saint-Domingue in a vicious civil war and escaped back to Paris, where he consoled himself with music. ‘I was particularly devoted to my violin,’ wrote this swordsman, violinist, soldier and friend of princes before he died of cancer aged fifty-one. ‘Never before did I play it so well!’

* Women were missing from Robespierre’s vision: the Jacobins associated them with intrigue and the vice and luxury of courts. Olympe de Gouges, one of the first French abolitionists, one of the few revolutionaries to back the Haitian revolution and one of the first feminists, did not live to see the abolition of slavery. Her Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne had challenged the patriarchy of the revolution: ‘A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker’s platform.’ Robespierre sent her to the guillotine where her ‘courage and beauty were unparalleled’.

* One of them was a minor aristocrat, Jean-Baptiste de Gaulle, great-grandfather of the twentieth-century president.

* Among those who joined the EIC’s forces during Wellesley’s rule were two brothers, William and Christopher Biden, who became captains of Indiamen. While William died in Rangoon in 1843 aged fifty-one, Christopher retired to Madras (Chennai), settling with his wife to become a marine storekeeper. A son, Horatio, rose to become colonel of the Madras Artillery, and there were other Bidens out there. One of them, George Biden, was an EIC captain who married an Indian woman, most probably the founder of the Indian Bidens. They are likely to be related to Joe Biden, US president, who called George his ‘great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’.

* The Ming had ruled 1.2 million square miles; by 1790, the Qing ruled 5.7 million – nearly five times larger. The Qing territory was an empire, mainly consisting of ethnically Han Chinese with some non-Chinese attached to its periphery. Since the Shang, Chinese kingdoms had faced the threat of nomadic war bands from the north. Now the threat had vanished, and the triumph of Chinese empire fostered self-congratulatory complacency.

* Phillip was formally in charge of Aotearoa (New Zealand), which was not yet under British control. While a few convicts escaped there and whalers regularly stopped there, Aotearoa was home to the Maori iwi (tribes), descendants of the waves of Polynesians who had settled there as late as 1300, ruled by their rangatiras (chiefs) and often at war with one another.

* As Washington ended his second term, he contemplated emancipating all his slaves – yet never did while he doggedly also pursued escapees: Oona Judge was a young mixed-race maid, a favourite of George and Martha, but in May 1796, knowing that the Washingtons were returning and fearing she would never be manumitted, she escaped. Martha was upset – ‘The blacks are so bad in their nature, they have not the least gratitude for the kindness showed to them’ – and the couple were convinced that she had been ‘seduced by a Frenchman’. Washington ordered his treasury secretary to use customs officials to kidnap her in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Instead Oona persuaded the customs official that she had not been seduced and would return if she was promised manumission. Any such deal, said Washington, was ‘inadmissible’ and he tried one more time to capture her. Finally he stopped, fearing bad publicity, at which the brave Oona insisted, ‘I am now free now and choose to remain so.’ On 14 December 1799 Washington died aged sixty-seven, leaving 317 persons to Martha. They were finally manumitted in Martha’s will.

* When Pitt accused an MP of obstructing the defence of the realm, he was challenged to a duel. On 27 May 1898 the men fought at Putney Heath. No one was harmed, but he was not the last premier to fight a duel.

* Bonaparte cultivated the legend of his Olympian acumen and sleepless energy – ‘Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head like a cupboard; when I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. If I wish to sleep, I close all the drawers and I sleep.’ His talents varied from a logistical mastery and tactical virtuosity to a personal touch with his grognards (veterans) that won him longstanding loyalty. He revelled in his new power: when the king of Sweden sent him Fersen, Queen Antoinette’s lover, as an envoy, he told the Swede he was ‘mocking the first nation of the world’. Later raised to marshal of the Swedish court, Fersen, entangled in the fall of the Vasa dynasty, was stomped to death by a mob in 1810.

* On the way home, Dumas was captured by papal forces and imprisoned; his health broken, he retired. His son was Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo; his grandson the younger Alexander wrote La Dame aux camélias.

* The expedition’s most lasting effect was archaeological. In July 1798, just after their arrival, Bonaparte’s scientists discovered at Rosetta a stele of Ptolemy V, engraved in three languages – Greek, hieroglyphic and demotic – that, later handed to the British, allowed the translation of hieroglyphic, opening up the study of ancient Egyptian writing.

* Toussaint warned Bonaparte, ‘In overthrowing me, you’ve done no more than cut down the trunk of the tree of black liberty in Saint-Domingue. It will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep.’ He begged Bonaparte to free his wife Suzanne, but he never saw her or his sons again. While they were kept in captivity, Toussaint and Mars Plaisir were imprisoned in the Fort de Joux, a medieval fortress in the Jura Mountains, where Bonaparte systematically destroyed him: no contact with his family, no visitors, no reading materials, no medical care. Leclerc was terrified that he would escape to ‘set the colony alight’. Bonaparte sent an aide who reported that the prisoner was ‘self-possessed, cunning and skilful’. As Toussaint’s health collapsed, he felt himself ‘buried alive’ but managed to dictate a testament, justifying his policies, pointing out that no ‘white general’ would have been treated like this: ‘Does the colour of my skin get in the way of my honour and bravery?’ But the winter was cruel: in April 1803, he was found dead in his cell.

* Bonaparte ordered Pauline to return to ‘the consolation in the love of your family’, but she was ‘a less than desolate widow’. Proud of her dynasty and beauty (Canova made the plaster cast of her breasts which can be seen in the Museo Napoleonico, Rome), she was determined to live passionately. Napoleon arranged her marriage to a feckless Roman aristocrat, Prince Camillo Borghese – ‘an imbecile’, she thought – whom she cuckolded wildly. Her brother tried to restrain her, advising, ‘She should not indulge in these bad manners.’

* Jefferson was later tempted by Cuba. ‘I cordially confess’, he wrote, ‘that I have ever looked upon Cuba as the most interesting addition that could ever be made to our system of States.’

* President Jefferson immediately faced a challenge from the slaving dynasties of Tripoli, Algiers and Tunis, the ‘Barbary States’ that benefited from the trans-Saharan slavery and the seizure of western cargoes and ‘white slaves’. Britain and Spain, even Sweden and Denmark, were perennially at war with these predators or paying them tribute. Tripoli had been ruled since 1711 by a dynasty founded by an Ottoman officer Ahmed Karamanli. In May 1801 his descendant Yusuf Pasha demanded tribute from the US and declared war. Jefferson sent a naval squadron into Tripoli harbour and in April 1805, while Europe was distracted by Bonaparte’s campaigns, the former US consul, William Eaton, led eight Americans and 500 Berber, Arab and Greek mercenaries from Alexandria to take Yusuf’s town of Derna. Yusuf backed down and freed his white slaves. It was America’s first Islamic war.

* ‘An end should be put to the hopes of the Bourbons,’ Napoleon said, ordering the kidnap and execution of a Bourbon prince, the duc d’Enghien, who had no connection to the plots. He later claimed it had been Talleyrand’s idea, but the foreign minister denounced it acutely as ‘Worse than a crime, it was a mistake.’ Much of Europe was disgusted by the murder and by the coronation, which intensified the hostility of the European dynasties: the Russian emperor Alexander called him ‘the Corsican Ogre’.

* Beethoven, grandson of a wine merchant and musician, son of an alcoholic court singer for the elector of Cologne, settled in Vienna in 1794, writing pieces for aristocratic patrons, but he targeted an altogether grander audience – the people, his times and posterity. He was singular, sociable with friends, but never married and was, said Goethe, ‘completely intractable’. Now he was alone in another way: he was going deaf: ‘Ah how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘I must live almost alone like an exile.’ He contemplated death: ‘It’s only my art that held me back. Oh it seemed impossible for me to leave this world before I had produced all I felt capable of producing and so I prolonged this wretched existence.’ He wrote tortured letters to an unknown woman, his ‘Immortal Beloved’: ‘No one else can ever possess my heart never never … Vienna is now a wretched life.’ He consoled himself with visits to ‘fortresses’ (brothels). Beethoven personified the suffering genius, hero of the Romantic movement.

* Grenville was also forced to preside over the Delicate Investigation into the scandalous conduct of Princess Caroline, wife of the prince of Wales, which ruled that while, as a footman testified, ‘The princess was very fond of fucking,’ none of it was provable nor was the rumour that a boy she had adopted was her own illegitimate child. Caroline was as popular as George was hated, remaining a lightning rod of radical opposition until her death in 1824.

* The only enduring Bonapartist crown is the one he did not initiate: his marshal Bernadotte, once a fanatical republican with ‘Death to kings’ tattooed on his chest, was competent, haughty and unimpressed by Napoleon, who in turn was unimpressed by him: ‘Very mediocre; I’ve no faith in him.’ But he was semi-family, married to Désirée Clary, Napoleon’s first love, and sister of Joseph’s wife, Julie. When in May 1810 the heir of the last Vasa king of Sweden died, the Swedes offered the throne to Bernadotte. Clever enough to betray Napoleon at the right moment, in 1812, he ruled Sweden as King Carl Johan until 1844. The Bernadottes still reign.

* Juggling the attention of a wife, an armada of girlfriends and the queen, Godoy commissioned the court painter, Francisco Goya, to paint his paramour Pepita, the contessa di Castillo Fiel, in La maja vestida but also naked in the sensuous La maja desnuda, which he kept in an alcove behind a curtain alongside Velázquez’s Venus.