The World

Bonapartes and Manchus, Habsburgs and Comanche

REVOLUTIONS AND MASS POLITICS: LOUIS NAPOLEON AND LOLA MONTEZ

‘I have a firm seat on the horse,’ insisted Louis Philippe, who now suppressed dissent and resisted British-style reforms: only 1 per cent (240,000 voters) of the French population could vote for the Assembly as workers toiled in drear factories and the bourgeois craved the freedoms granted in Britain, which now had a million voters. Louis Philippe tried to distract the French with Bonapartist gloire: in 1840, he staged the return of Napoleon’s body from St Helena, attending its entombment at Les Invalides.

In January 1848, riots started in Palermo and then spread to Paris, where on 22 February crowds took to the streets. The following day, soldiers killed fifty-two protesters. Crowds of socialist workers and liberal bourgeois soon commanded the streets and besieged Louis Philippe in the palace. The king abdicated in favour of his grandson, and after a full day of riots he escaped in a cab in disguise. His fall marked the end of the Capet family, which had ruled France – with a few minor intervals – since 922.

The radical poet Alphonse de Lamartine declared a Second Republic, which enfranchised all nine million adult males (granting universal male suffrage before Britain or America), created National Workshops to employ workers, and finally, on 27 April, fifteen years after Britain, abolished slavery by compensating the slave masters.^*

The news was relayed by a new medium, the telegraph, that accelerated world events: revolution spread through Europe. As the ex-king Louis Philippe sailed for Dover under the name ‘Mister Smith’, Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the conqueror’s forty-year-old nephew, son of his brother King Louis, sailed for Calais.

The prince had seen Napoleon only once – at a parade in the weeks before Waterloo – and for twenty years his escapades had been a European joke. But he possessed invincible self-belief. ‘From time to time,’ he wrote, ‘men are created into whose hands the fate of their country is entrusted. I am such a man.’ His rise illustrates that mysterious process of politics, momentous inevitability, by which the preposterously impossible becomes plausible, then – as alternatives are rejected and other routes closed – likely, and finally, imminent. Yet Louis Napoleon was a herald of the modern world: he helped create new mass politics and founded the last version of French empire.

His mother Hortense, Josephine’s daughter, ‘an exquisite blonde with amethyst eyes’ and a talented songstress who wrote ‘Partant pour la Syrie’, the Bonapartist anthem, had always treated him as a man of destiny, while his mean-spirited father Louis never quite trusted that the prince was his real son. Educated in Switzerland and trained as a gunner at military school, he was shy and taciturn, brown-eyed, big-nosed and full-lipped, with a big head and torso on stubby legs in an age when tight breeches made the male leg essential for masculine beauty. Yet he possessed a romantic mystique appealing to women. ‘It’s usually the man who attacks,’ he boasted. ‘As for me, I defend myself, and I often capitulate.’

As soon as his cousin the duke of Reichstadt – Napoleon II – had died in 1832, he became the Bonapartist pretender. At twenty-five, he published his manifesto Rêveries politiques, gathering a crew of motley adventurers who always included a devoted female patroness, a few officers and his manservant Thélin. They were joined early by Jean Fialin, the soi-disant vicomte de Persigny, a seedy ex-soldier, part-time journalist and political promoter of genius, one of the first of the spin doctors who would become the spirits of modern democracy. In 1836, Louis Napoleon had tried to seize power from Louis Philippe in Strasbourg, hoping to lead a march on Paris, but instead he was humiliated, arrested and expelled from France. Europe laughed, and his father and uncles, who had given up on Bonapartism, desperate to receive pensions from Louis Philippe, were furious.

Yet Louis Napoleon never gave up, embarking on years of exile in London and New York. When Louis Philippe brought Napoleon’s body back to France, Louis Napoleon considered doing a Ptolemy – hijacking the body. Instead, he launched his second coup attempt, which ended with him sentenced to ‘perpetual imprisonment’ in the Fortress of Ham near the Somme. ‘In France,’ he joked, ‘is anything perpetual?’

At what he called Ham University (not the last prisoner to use prison as an academy), he read books and pursued love affairs (fathering two sons with a clog dancer), then escaped with the aid of Thélin. In London, he inherited his father’s fortune, embarking on a further series of love affairs. Once his money was gone, he hooked up with a courtesan-actress performing under the name Harriet Howard; she had run off with a jockey, then settled down with a nabob who left her a fortune. She fell in love with the prince, and, believing in his destiny, backed him all the way.

As Louis Napoleon arrived in revolutionary Paris, the Viennese were rebelling against their bewildered emperor: Ferdinand, aged forty-two, child of double first cousins, had been born with encephalitis and epilepsy and was glad to leave politics to his antique chancellor, Metternich. Ferdinand had failed to consummate his marriage due to a wedding night interspersed with fits, and lived for his beloved apricot dumplings – shouting when told they were out of season, ‘I am the emperor, and I want dumplings!’ He was mentally stable but incapable of ruling. Now, when Metternich told him about the revolution, he asked, ‘Is that allowed?’ It was not, but that is the thing about revolutions: Hungarians and Italians and even the Viennese turned on the Habsburgs, who tried to protect Metternich, then, as troops shot demonstrators, sacrificed him. The Coachman of Europe faced the reality that the monarchy was galloping out of control. ‘I’m no longer anybody,’ he said after thirty-nine years in power. Dressed as a woman, he escaped to London with his young wife and family: ‘I’ve nothing more to do, nothing more to discuss.’

The revolutions were a howl of rage directed at the old hierarchy in a new era of seething cities, billowing factories, careening railways, rollercoasting stock markets, multiplying newspapers, bestselling instalment-novels and news-bearing telegraphs. British railways – in 1840, they had laid 1,498 miles of line, tripling to 6,621 by 1850 – now linked British cities; France was far behind with 2,000 miles. Railway entrepreneurs considered adding a transatlantic route to their networks: in 1840, a Canadian entrepreneur, Samuel Cunard, sailed on his first steamship, Britannia, from Liverpool to his native Nova Scotia in twelve days, launching a service that linked the continents, soon enabling millions of poor people from many countries, from Ireland to Germany, to migrate to seek new opportunities in the settler nations of the Americas and Australia. At the bottom of society, urban working classes toiled in hellish factories that produced goods for the newly confident bourgeois consumers: the first department store, Bon Marché, had opened in Paris in 1838 and its own proprietor was planning a larger version – an age of emporia as well as empires. Workers now confronted industrialists, forming unions and embracing a new ideology that placed the working class at the centre of society: socialism.^*

Twice fleeing their capital, as ministers were lynched and hanged from lampposts, Kaiser Ferdinand and the Habsburgs still possessed the will for power that is essential to keeping it, deploying their loyal armies to crush Italy and then storm Vienna. They held a secret family conference where ‘the only man at court’, Archduchess Sophie, the emperor’s sister-in-law, the Bavarian princess who had flirted with Napoleon’s son in the 1820s, stiffened resolve: she persuaded her husband, the emperor’s brother, to renounce the succession. She had trained their eighteen-year-old son Franzl, fair-haired, blue-eyed, serious and dutiful, for the throne. At Olomouc, the handover was recorded poignantly by the outgoing kaiser. ‘The affair ended with the new Emperor kneeling before his old Emperor and Lord, that is to say, me,’ wrote Ferdinand, ‘and asking for a blessing, which I gave him, laying both hands on his head and making the sign of the Holy Cross … then I kissed our new master … After that I and my dear wife packed our bags.’

Assuming the name Franz Josef, the new emperor resumed the reconquest of the empire, first in Italy, then in Austria. Many dynasties tottered. In Bavaria, one of the oldest, the Wittelsbachs, resembled an opéra bouffe: King Ludwig, at the age of sixty-two, who had ruled for twenty-three years, had recently fallen under the sway of a dazzling Irish courtesan, Eliza James, who claimed to be a Spanish dancer named Lola Montez. ‘I love you with my life, my eyes, my soul, my body,’ he wrote, raving about her ‘black hair, blue eyes, graceful form … I’m young again.’ Lola dominated Munich: ‘I’m on the point of receiving the title of countess!’ she boasted to a friend. ‘I have a lovely property, horses, servants … surrounded by the homage of great ladies, I go everywhere, all of Munich waits upon me,’ and ‘The king loves me passionately.’ But the reign of Lola was short. She amused herself by having affairs with students just as the revolution ignited Bavaria, forcing Ludwig to exile her and accept a constitution. ‘My very beloved Lolitta,’ wrote the cuckolded king, ‘Luis [himself] is no longer loved, only your heart remains to me … I will renounce the crown.’^* His abdication calmed the revolution.

Further north, in Frankfurt, an excited National Assembly promoted a united, constitutional Germany, dispensing with the ‘German Confederation’ chaired by Austria and offering the crown to the timorous Prussian king Frederick William IV. At first a Berlin revolution had forced the Flounderer to agree a constitution. His conservative younger brother, Wilhelm, went into British exile; when he returned, he used gunpowder to restore order in the streets. Now the Flounderer refused to ‘pick up a crown from the gutter, disgraced with the stink of revolution, defiled with filth’. Yet he then flirted with leading a German union. But Austria had recovered and reasserted its power; the Assembly was closed down; the Hohenzollerns had been at once humiliated and shown to be essential.^*

The Flounderer’s performance had infuriated the Junker nobles, none more so than a strapping landowner from Pomerania, Otto von Bismarck, who, provoking liberals with his talk of divine monarchy, fantasized about leading an army to overthrow the king and encouraged the ‘rattling of sabres in their scabbards’. The backlash against the rebellion deeply disappointed two young German radicals planning socialist revolution.

COURTESANS AND DAS KAPITAL: NAPOLEON AND MARX

Frederick Engels, the son of a German industrialist who owned textile factories in Manchester, had met a fellow radical, Karl Marx, in Paris in 1844 when they were aged twenty-three and twenty-six, and together they developed the idea that the working class – which they called the proletariat – would become the engine of world revolution. Marx was the son of a Jewish lawyer from Triers, Herschel Marx, descended from a line of rabbis, who converted to Protestantism and changed his name to Heinrich. Marx was both heartbroken and impoverished by his father’s death, but he married a well-connected, intellectual aristocrat, Jenny von Westphalen, with whom he had already had three children. While her husband planned revolution, her brother was the Prussian interior minister who helped suppress it.

As both an industrialist and a lover – guided by his paramour, an Irish millworker named Mary Burns – Engels knew Mancunian workers, and he had money, enabling him to take Marx on a study tour of Manchester. Marx and Engels observed how industrialized cities were killing the working class: even after the improvements of medicine and food, life expectancy was falling. Liverpudlians died at twenty-five. Working-class Britons now lived seventeen years less than the upper classes, many of them killed by cholera. Doctors believed this was caused by ‘miasma’. In the USA, life expectancy had fallen by thirteen years between 1800 and 1850; in New York City child mortality was almost 50 per cent. Many mothers now gave birth in maternity units in hospitals, but as many as 10 per cent of mothers were dying – and it turned out that it was doctors themselves who (with the best intentions) were killing them.^*

Just as improvements in healthcare and urban hygiene were about to launch a massive improvement in life expectancy, the two Germans, adapting Saint-Simon, saw the new system of capitalism as the culprit. In January 1848, they wrote their Communist Manifesto, developing a ‘critical theory’ that explained an interconnected world: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ They argued that ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ Weeks later, Europe was in revolution. The two threw themselves into the tumult, Engels transporting rifles, Marx using an inheritance to arm Belgian workers.

In Vienna, Milan and Prague, Franz Josef overpowered the rebels, but Hungary embraced national independence, as did the Ottoman provinces of Wallachia and Moldova, aspirations that could easily spread to Nicholas’s Polish and Ukrainian subjects. The tsar occupied Bucharest and Moldavia and offered to crush Hungary. Franz Josef humiliatingly agreed; 190,000 Russian troops hacked their way into Budapest, and the young kaiser never forgave the arrogant tsar for his help. In Berlin, the Flounderer revoked his constitution and restored a limited version of his earlier power. Having enforced order in their own kingdoms, the dynasts watched France. The one name they did not want to hear was Napoleon.

Louis Napoleon, staying in a Parisian hotel in a country he scarcely knew and whose language he spoke with a German accent, had always believed in the magic of the name Bonaparte. At first he let his old uncle, the ex-king Jérôme, and two other cousins run for the National Assembly while he returned to London, where Chartist crowds, infected with the spirit of revolution, demonstrated for more democracy. Wellington, now seventy-nine, massed troops, and Bonaparte registered as a special constable. In Paris, Jérôme and the others were elected. Persigny stuck up posters across the city with Louis Napoleon’s picture and the message ‘Lui!’ Him!

The workers of the National Workshops armed themselves, adopting red as the colour of revolution; the bourgeois panicked at this Red Menace. ‘The spectre of 1792, the sound of the guillotine, was heard,’ observed Gustave Flaubert, a young writer.^* The war minister, General Cavaignac, crushed the rebels, who resisted fiercely. In the fighting, thousands were shot. Cavaignac became the favourite to win the first presidential election, but Louis Napoleon ran too, aided by a new brother he scarcely knew he had. When he was three, his mother had vanished to give birth to Auguste de Morny, who, a debonair player in politics, sex, finance and the Jockey Club, had supported Louis Philippe while he made a fortune in sugar beet. But now he joined his half-brother. Persigny and Morny offered all things to everyone – order and security, socialism and glory.

In December 1848, after the Assembly cut the franchise, Napoleon won 5.5 million votes to Cavaignac’s 1.1 million. The prince-president, moving into the Élysée Palace, behaved as if he was constantly running for office, travelling by railway around the country, declaring that ‘The name Napoleon is a complete programme in itself. At home it means order, authority, religion and the welfare of the people; abroad, the dignity of the nation,’ and promising to represent the ordinary man against the Red Menace of socialism. He was just awaiting the chance to show his Napoleonic acumen. First, he sent troops into Italy to rescue Pope Pius IX from Italian nationalists, brandishing his Napoleonic, conservative and Catholic credentials.

The next step was led by men but partly organized and funded by women: on 1 December 1851, after attending the theatre and then the Jockey Club, Morny launched a Napoleonic coup, Operation Rubicon, funded by Napoleon’s paramour Harriet Howard and his own, the Belgian ambassador’s wife. Friendly generals arrested 26,000, shot 400, deported 9,000 to Algeria and overthrew the constitution. After he had restored universal suffrage, 7.5 million voters approved Louis Napoleon’s dictatorship for ten years. ‘It seems France desires a return to empire,’ he declared, adding, in order to reassure Europe, ‘The empire means peace.’ In December 1852, approved again by 7.5 million, he was proclaimed Emperor Napoleon III.^*

The revolution was over but it had changed everything. Marx escaped to London. Now sporting the beard of a biblical prophet, struggling to survive in dingy Soho digs, short of money, boozing heavily, cursed by boils and headaches, he survived on Engels’s gifts and meagre earnings from journalism for the New-York Daily Tribune, grumbling bitterly about ‘the wretchedness of existence’. But he also neglected his long-suffering wife, got his housekeeper pregnant and persuaded Engels to take responsibility for his lovechild, who was given away to foster-parents.^*

Yet in the British Museum’s reading room Marx was devising an all-embracing ideology in a masterwork, Das Kapital: capitalism was doomed by its own internal contradictions because history was ruled by dialectical materialism, a progression towards, first, the rule of the proletariat and, then, a stateless, classless communism of total equality. In the certainty of his scientific research, Marxism offered an orthodoxy that would replace religion for the many excluded from the spoils of capital at home and empire abroad. A small band of radicals started to follow him. When the working class voted for order and liberty instead of revolution, Marx denounced them as Lumpenproletariat whose views displayed ‘false consciousness’.

Napoleon gloried in the creation of a new empire but, like his uncle, the Nephew required an heir.^* The erotomane emperor picked up women at Élysée balls or ordered his cousin-chamberlain, Felix Baciocchi, to procure them. At the palace, they were instructed to await the emperor naked with the words, ‘You may kiss His Majesty anywhere except his face.’ His mistresses attested to his brazen dexterity, his selfishness as a lover and the melting of his waxed moustaches. One girl recalled that she ‘didn’t even have time to make a token protest before he laid hold of me in an intimate place’. After failing to marry a German princess, Napoleon encountered Eugénie de Montijo, countess of Teba, an icily elegant Spanish redhead. Instructed by her mother,^* Eugénie resisted until he was in love.

‘How can I reach you, mesdames?’ Napoleon jokingly called up at her when he saw Eugénie and her mother on a balcony at a ball.

‘Through the chapel, Sire,’ answered Eugénie.

The Bonapartes disapproved. ‘Louis,’ said Uncle Jérôme, ‘will marry the first woman to refuse him.’ But Morny approved and Baron James de Rothschild spotted her early. In January 1853, Eugénie turned up on Rothschild’s arm for a ball during which she told the vacillating emperor that if he did not propose she would leave for London. ‘Madame la Comtesse,’ he wrote to her mother, ‘for a long time I have been in love with Mademoiselle your daughter …’ After his patroness Harriet Howard had been paid off, Napoleon married Eugénie, who turned out to hate the sex that he relished – ‘Really, why do men never think of anything but that?’ she mused – but she was pregnant.

SPLENDEURS ET MISèRES DES COURTISANES

On 16 March 1856, after an agonizing labour, in which Napoleon begged the doctors to use ‘any sedative modern science has devised’, Empress Eugénie gave birth to the heir, the prince imperial.

Napoleon was an energetic modernizer. He envisioned a modern Paris that would set new standards for the hygiene and layout of cities everywhere, including London. On 23 June 1853, he had appointed a provincial official, Georges Haussmann, as prefect of Paris – ‘one of the most extraordinary men of our time’, said Persigny, ‘big, strong, vigorous, energetic, and at the same time clever and devious, full of ingenuity’. Napoleon ordered Haussmann to ‘aérer, unifier et embellir Paris’. As Napoleon planned the works on a huge model in his office, Haussmann demolished slums and laid out the boulevards, parks, squares and stations of today’s Paris. More important than the beauty was the hygiene. ‘The underground galleries are an organ of the great city, functioning like an organ of the human body,’ the prefect said. ‘Clean fresh waters circulate; the secretions removed mysteriously.’^*

Napoleon promoted railways. Trains encouraged travel and trade, but steam was also about power and conquest – it accelerated the divergence between north-western Europe plus the settler republic of America, and the rest of the world. In Europe, railways facilitated military deployment, pioneered by France but later perfected by Prussia. Abroad, steamships empowered empire, enabling Britain and France to rush troops to Africa or the east.^*

Napoleon’s railway boom was accelerated by his brother Morny but was guided by James de Rothschild. In the railway boom, the Rothschilds prospered greatly, fighting off challenges from rival bankers. By 1870, France boasted 14,000 miles of track.

In 1855, James commissioned a neo-Renaissance palace at Ferrières, built by the same architect who had designed Mentmore for his English cousins. ‘Build me a Mentmore,’ James ordered, ‘but twice the size.’ It was a palace fit for a master of the world, its eighty suites fitted out with every luxury, its colossal hall 120 feet long and 60 feet wide and topped with a glass skylight. It was a ‘fairyland, a palace of Aladdin’, declared his cousin Charlotte de Rothschild, wife of Lionel, while the antisemitic writers, the Goncourt brothers, decried this ‘idiotic and ridiculous extravagance – a pudding of every style’.

At its opening, Napoleon arrived by train, stepped on to a green carpet embroidered with Bonapartist bees and travelled to the palace in carriages fluttering with Rothschild blue and yellow to admire the chateau filled with works by Rubens and Velàzquez. As he left, James joked with his poker face, ‘Sire, my children and I will never forget today. Le mémoire will be dear to us’ – le mémoire also meant the bill.

Napoleon frequently consulted James, who now supervised a global financial empire, raising loans for dynasties from the Brazilian Braganzas to the Ottomans, while his American agent, August Belmont, funded American railways and the US war against Mexico. Yet James discouraged Napoleon from fighting wars. ‘It’s a principle of our house not to lend money for war. It’s not in our power to prevent war,’ he wrote. ‘We at least want to retain the conviction we haven’t contributed to it.’ Antisemites tried to blame Jewish financiers for European wars, yet continental powers had been fighting wars constantly since the Goths, long before the Rothschilds, and would continue long after they ceased to be pivotal players. James mocked Napoleon’s slogan ‘L’empire c’est la paix’, preferring ‘L’empire c’est la baisse’ – The empire means a crash – adding, ‘The emperor was right when he said the empire means peace; but what he doesn’t know is the emperor is done for if we have war.’

James lived for family, but even he could scarcely resist the Parisian phenomenon of the courtesan. In Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes – one of Balzac’s last novels before he died of overwork and coffee-poisoning – the Rothschildian baron de Nucingen pays to sleep with the adorable but fragile Esther. More than James, the emperor’s brother the duc de Morny became the arbiter of pleasure, finance and fashion. Napoleonic luxury was sybaritic and sultanic, but so was the venality in a city of grinding and miserable poverty, crowded with thousands of street prostitutes and middle-ranking grisettes. But the richer courtesans, the grandes horizontales, often ex-prostitutes or actresses who were paid for their favours by aristocrats, plutocrats and playboy cocodès, became celebrities – appearing on stage, their pictures, using the new medium of photography, sold as postcards, their antics recounted in newspapers. They were viciously exploited from childhood, their lives often ending tragically, yet they were also defiantly independent, mocking the restrictions of respectable women. It was a world with music, art and literature, but the horizontales were centre stage. Jacques Offenbach, son of a synagogue cantor from Cologne, was the empire’s trademark composer, with librettos by Ludovic Halévy. In 1855, when Napoleon opened his Exposition Universelle, visited by over five million people, Offenbach launched his first opéras bouffes, debuting Hortense Schneider, who became La Snéder, the personification of Parisian beauty and pleasure. The courtesans starred in his operas, particularly Orphée aux enfers, in which the ‘Galop infernal’ – the can-can – became the theme of its time. La Snéder started as one of Offenbach’s mistresses and became the paramour of Napoleon, Morny and a succession of princes. The brashest horizontale was British: the daughter of Irish musicians from Plymouth, Cora Pearl (real name Emily Crouch) appeared half naked as Cupid in Orphée.^*

Novelists and artists were fascinated by the drama and tragedy of the girls’ lives. In 1863, at the Salon des Refusés, created by Napoleon specifically for innovative artists, Édouard Manet exhibited his painting Olympia of a bold, nude courtesan, modelled by Victorine Meurent, who was his lover and an artist, accompanied by her fully clothed black maid, based on a model named Laure. It shocked the bourgeois but helped launch a new genre that was criticized as too ‘impressionistic’: the name caught on.

The sensitive, talented doyenne of the courtesans, Valtesse de La Bigne, nicknamed Rayon d’Or, was friend and lover of Manet and Offenbach, patroness of painters and writers, actress and author of a novel Isola, but it was her magnificent gilded, canopied bed – still displayed in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs – for which she is best known. A young half-Italian critic, Émile Zola, at the age of twenty-eight launched a series of novels inspired by Balzac chronicling a single family in Napoleonic Paris, Les Rougon-Macquart – a seminal work of family history: ‘I want to explain how a family, a small group of regular people, behaves in society … Heredity has its own laws, just like gravity.’ After interviewing Valtesse and viewing her bed, he created the first novel about celebrity sex appeal, personified by the irresistibly destructive Nana, that ‘good-natured child’ who rises to wealth in her palatial bed, ‘a throne, an altar where Paris came to admire her sovereign nudity’ – a dazzling erotic meteor like the empire itself. Valtesse hated Nana, calling its heroine ‘a stupid vulgar whore’.^*

In 1853, the delights of Paris changed the life of an impressionable visitor from south America, the heir to the dictator of Paraguay, who was entertained by Napoleon and fell in love with a courtesan who would become the most powerful woman in south America and the world’s biggest landowner.

ELIZA LYNCH AND QUEEN VICTORIA: TWO FEMALE POTENTATES

Francisco Solano López was the son of the ruler of the small, isolated, socially and racially egalitarian republic created by the Grand Lord, Dr Francia, who had ruled for twenty-six years until his death in 1840. After a short interlude, he was succeeded by his cousin Carlos Antonio López; ‘this great tidal wave of human flesh, a veritable mastodon’, based his hopes on his eldest son Francisco, whom he dispatched to Europe to buy arms for his outsized army. Francisco, twenty-eight years old, ordered British ships and French artillery, and while in Paris in 1854 ‘gave full rein to his naturally licentious propensities and plunged into the vices of that gay capital’ – until he met the nineteen-year-old Eliza Lynch, red-haired courtesan daughter of an Irish naval doctor.

General López returned to Paraguay with his new steamship and a pregnant Eliza Lynch, who was determined to bring the razzmatazz of Second Empire Paris to his minuscule country, where she gave birth to the first of five children. Meanwhile her lover was promoted to war minister and vice-president. If the Paraguayans were fascinated by Eliza, whom they called La Lynch, the López family were horrified by La Concubina Irlandesa – but it would be Francisco himself who would destroy Paraguay.

Just after Napoleon’s marriage to Eugénie, a vicious skirmish with daggers and pistols broke out between Catholic and Orthodox monks in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The coenobite brawl ignited a European war that gave Napoleon the chance to ally with the only country liberal enough to associate with the parvenu emperor: Britain. Nicholas and Napoleon competed to bully the Ottoman sultan Abdülmecid into conceding their protection of Christians and influence. Napoleon sent a gunboat to assert French ‘sovereign authority’ over the Holy Places. Abdülmecid accepted that authority until Tsar Nicholas threatened war, at which the Ottoman agreed the Romanov was the protector of Orthodox Christians.

The tsar then invaded Ottoman Moldavia and Wallachia, hoping to advance further south to seize Istanbul; as Europe’s chief exporter of grain from Odessa, he aspired to control the Straits. He called for a Balkan Slav revolt, influenced by a new ideology of pan-Slavism, through which Slavs under Russian leadership would defy the hatred and hypocrisy of the democratic west. But Nicholas, spoilt by success, rigid and ailing, miscalculated. He counted on Habsburg support and western divisions. Instead Franz Josef betrayed him. And then there was Palmerston’s loathing for Nicholas’s expansionist autocracy. Pam was a reforming liberal home secretary, a scourge of global slavery, reducer of child labour, protector of women by creating civil divorces and pioneer of the state role in fighting pandemics by making the vaccination of children against smallpox compulsory.^* Now he rushed to Paris to coordinate with Napoleon.

On 27 February 1854, when Nicholas would not retreat, Pam guided Britain and France into a joint war against Russia. In September, 30,000 French and 26,000 British troops, aided by the Italians of Piedmont and the Ottomans, landed in Crimea to seize Potemkin’s naval base Sebastopol and destroy Russian power in the Black Sea. It was the first of the mid-century wars in which the chivalry and ineptitude of aristocratic commanders clashed with the murderous efficiency of modern weaponry. Both sides were blunderingly incompetent, using cavalry charges against massed artillery and exposed infantry against fortified positions; both were commanded by negligent, arrogant martinets.

Palmerston suggested that Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, the quintessence of a new bourgeois prudishness, should do the unthinkable: invite Napoleon, heir to the ancestral enemy and notorious emperor of the fleshpots of the new Babylon, to visit Windsor. Palmerston had welcomed Napoleon’s coup, his enthusiasm outraging Albert, whose complaints forced Pam’s resignation as foreign secretary. The royal couple disapproved of Palmerston, but Napoleon was beyond the pale.

The British queen had succeeded to the throne in 1837 when she was an untried and nervous teenager. The monarchy was no longer powerful, but Victoria, pale, blonde, dumpy with a round face and blue eyes, behaved as if she was the ruler, deploying her influence and prestige with obstinate grandiloquence unencumbered by self-doubt. Her sturdy grandeur provided a reassuring figurehead for her brash, ambitious and prosperous people; her sanctimonious virtue dovetailed with the values of Britain’s self-righteous middle classes. But it was Palmerston and a cast of aristocrats and oligarchs who actually led Britain to world power.

Victoria’s chief job was to marry and provide an heir. The small principalities of Germany had long acted as the matchmaking service for European dynasties, but her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, had made his family, the Saxe-Coburgs, into what Bismarck called the ‘stud farm of Europe’. Leopold was overbearing and sophisticated, avidly developing the newly invented Belgium, aided by his Rothschild friends, into a wealthy modern economy, but he was also the arch-matchmaker. In 1840, he guided his solemn, cerebral and breezy nephew Albert towards the world’s most eligible girl. Albert had reacted against his unbuttoned parents, the duke and duchess of Saxe-Coburg. The duke had taken young Albert and his brother Ernst to sample the courtesans of the Parisian Babylon: Ernst became a sex addict, Albert a prig. Their mother repaid the whoremongering duke by taking her Jewish-born chamberlain as lover, supposedly Albert’s natural father, and was divorced; she was never allowed to see her children again. Albert dazzled Victoria: ‘full of goodness and sweetness,’ she wrote, ‘very clever and intelligent … extremely handsome; his hair is about the same colour as mine; his eyes large and blue, a beautiful nose, very sweet mouth … but the charm of his countenance is his expression, which is most delightful’. Victoria thanked Leopold ‘for the prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me’. She was pregnant for much of their marriage, starting with a daughter, Vicky, followed by a boy, Bertie, prince of Wales, and a further seven children.^*

Victoria and Albert regarded Palmerston and Napoleon as disgraceful fornicators. Now happily married to his long-time mistress, Countess Cowper, Palmerston had never retired from the arena: his venturing into the bedroom of a lady-in-waiting at Windsor shocked the queen, who disliked ‘that strong, determined man with so much worldly ambition’. Albert called him ‘unscrupulous’.

On 16 April 1855, Napoleon and Eugénie arrived at Windsor. Surprisingly, the incorrigible emperor and his parvenu empress charmed the prim Saxe-Coburgs. ‘There is something fascinating, melancholy and engaging, which draws you to him,’ thought Victoria. Soft-spoken, urbane, inscrutable, Napoleon flirted with Victoria, who was, noted foreign secretary Clarendon (a descendant of James I’s favourite Buckingham who happened, in the tiny world of European society, to be the lover of Eugénie’s mother), ‘mightily tickled by it, for she had never been made love to in her life and his love-making was of a character to flatter her vanity without alarming her virtue; she enjoyed the novelty’. Napoleon spoke German to Albert, indulging his pedantic lectures on his worthy plans for museums and charities.

In Crimea, artillery and disease killed 450,000 Russians, 120,000 Ottomans, 100,000 Frenchmen and 40,000 Britons, but the westerners proved marginally less inept, defeating the Russians and finally taking Sebastopol. Tsar Nicholas died miserably, Russian backwardness exposed; his attractive son Alexander II was forced to negotiate the Paris treaty that temporarily extinguished Russian power in the Black Sea.^*

As for the Ottomans, Palmerston had again saved their empire: Palmerston and Napoleon encouraged reformers around Sultan Abdülmecid to modernize their state and promise equal legal rights for non-Muslims, thus protecting Jews and Christians, and the abolition of black slavery – though not of white slavery: brutal Russian operations against the Circassian minority in the Caucasus would now lead to a boom in the sale of Circassian slaves to Istanbul. Ottoman Tanzimat – reorganization – fostered a new ‘Ottomanism’, in a bid to create a multi-ethnic identity to hold the empire together. Palmerston established a special British protection of Ottoman Jews, while the French protected the Maronites of Lebanon. European influence had guided Ottoman tolerance, but this age of cosmopolitanism lasted just three decades.

On 18 August 1855, Napoleon met Victoria and Albert at Dunkirk and escorted them to Paris to visit his Exposition Universelle, his version of their Great Exhibition.^* The first British sovereign to visit Paris since Henry VI, Victoria brought her thirteen-year-old son Bertie, who was enraptured by the pleasure city. ‘I wish,’ the prince of Wales told Napoleon, ‘I were your son.’ Plump, ginger-haired Bertie both craved his father’s approval and loved to shock him: he would return to the Parisian Babylon as soon as he got the chance. Crimea was not the only Anglo-French project – both nations were suddenly drawn into conflicts against the dynasties of the east.

On 11 May 1857, the Mughal monarch Bahadur Shah Zafar, eighty-one-year-old descendant of Tamerlane, Babur and Alamgir, received alarming news: a revolt had started against the British and now the first rebel sepoys were arriving in Delhi to acclaim him as ruler and kill any Christian they could find.

REBELLION: LAST OF THE TAMERLANIANS AND THE FIRST OF THE NEHRUS

Bahadur possessed little power outside his residence, the Red Fort in Shahjahanabad, Delhi. Like all educated Mughals, he was a calligrapher and poet in Persian and Urdu, but he ruled only ‘from Delhi to Palam’ (a Delhi suburb), his court funded by an EIC pension. Britain, which had just taken control of the Punjab in the west and Burma in the east, now dominated India, the first time the subcontinent had ever been ruled by one power. The British aspired to the Mughal realm and, as with the Mughals, theirs was a makeshift structure, run by London, some parts nominally governed by the EIC, much still ruled by Indian princes. Clumsy British arrogance had infuriated both Hindus and Muslims. The early cultural mixing had been replaced by a British racist superiority that closed top positions to Indians and an evangelical mission that raised fears of forced conversion. Princes and landowners resented British annexations. Proto-nationalists resented foreign rule. In early 1857, in the Bengali army, new cartridges, greased with cow or pig fat, alarmed both Hindus and Muslims, who, resenting the punishments of oafish British officers, mutinied in Meerut and now rushed to Delhi.

Zafar felt the expectation of millions as rajas and sepoys turned to him as the traditional authority in India. In Delhi, sepoys joined the Meerut rebels and an underground network of jihadis; the British fled the city or hid in the palace as a popular revolt exploded across Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh as well as Rajasthan and Bihar.

As a mixture of rajas, warlords, peasants, sepoys and preachers – Muslim and Hindu – attacked British soldiers, murdering women and children, the British responded with equal ferocity, aided by the three new technologies that gave them the ultimate advantage: the telegraph allowed them to deploy reinforcements, at home railways rushed troops to ports and steamships conveyed them to India. British security was fragile: there were 45,000 British troops, some EIC, some royal, and 311,000 sepoys. A single unifying Indian leader might have seized the entire country. Yet the mutiny was very regional, with mass support only in western Uttar Pradesh, while the vast majority of the population, most Indian merchants, the port elites and most princely states in the north and centre remained loyal, as did two of the three EIC armies. Without the aid of Indian soldiers, the British could never have crushed the rebellion.

‘I didn’t call for you, you’ve acted wickedly,’ Zafar told the rebel sepoys, but they rushed around him, shouting, ‘Unless you join us, king, we’re all dead men.’

‘I have neither troops,’ replied Zafar, ‘nor magazine nor treasury.’

‘Just give us your blessing.’

Zafar blessed them, resumed the durbars for the first time since Nader’s conquest and appointed his energetic son Mirza Mughal as commander-in-chief. Mirza Mughal urgently built defensive positions. The sepoys, along with his own servants, hunted down Europeans. Mirza Mughal colluded in the massacre of fifty-two Britons in the Red Fort. Within the city, the emperor’s kotwal – chief of police – was Gangadhar Nehru, son of an EIC scribe and now father of four children, who avoided involvement in the rebellion. Ultimately his family would dominate a united India.

In Awadh, south-east of Delhi, Begum Hazrat Mahal, widow of the last king, seized power in the capital Lucknow and enthroned her adopted son, Nana Sahib. Four hundred Britons were slaughtered. Further south, Lakshmi Bai, the beautiful thirty-year-old widow of the last raja of Maratha Jhansi and accomplished fencer and horsewoman whose principality had been annexed by the British, sympathized with the rebels but tried to protect British civilians. Facing invasions from rival Indian princes and British intervention, she joined the rebellion, supervising the casting of cannon and emerging as a glamorous but harsh military leader, fascinating the British with her ‘high character’ and ‘remarkably fine figure’.

Palmerston, prime minister at last, was relieved that the Madras and Bombay armies were loyal, as were the rulers of Kashmir and Hyderabad, along with the Sikhs and Pathans of the Punjab. Appointing Charles Canning, son of the prime minister, as governor-general, he ordered the rebellion to be crushed. Extreme violence on both sides unleashed mutual savagery.

FLAY, IMPALE, BURN: THE BRITISH RECONQUER INDIA

In Awadh in summer 1857, British civilians and troops were besieged in Lucknow. In Kanpur, Nana rescued 200 women and children from a massacre. As British forces advanced from Allahabad, sepoys refused to kill them, whereupon five butchers from the bazaar slaughtered the 200 Britons with cleavers, while babies were brained against nearby trees. The bodies were then thrown down a well. Britons were sometimes fired out of cannon. Altogether, in the rebellion, 6,000 were killed.^*

The killing of British civilians and the supposed rapes of British women luridly reported in the home press were used to justify British vengeance. William Hodson, a vicar’s flaxen-haired son, part scholar fluent in Persian, Latin, Greek and Hindi, part butcher enthused by killing with sword and his favourite weapon, hog spear, formed an Anglo-Sikh militia, Hodson’s Horse, who prided themselves on their butchery. ‘I never let my men take prisoners,’ Hodson said, ‘but shoot them at once.’ An Anglo-Irish brigadier, John Nicholson, was dining with fellow officers when he learned of the rebellion. ‘Mutiny’s like smallpox,’ he said. ‘It spreads quickly and must be crushed as quickly as possible.’ Nicholson, ‘a commanding presence, six foot two inches in height, with a long black beard and dark grey eyes with black pupils that would dilate like a tiger’s’, hardened by wars against the Sikhs and Afghans (during which he found the mutilated body of his brother with its genitalia stuffed in its mouth), formed a ‘strong movable column’ of British regulars and Punjabi auxiliaries and started to hunt rebels. He proposed ‘flaying alive, impalement or burning’ for ‘murderers and dishonourers of our women’, boasting, ‘I’d inflict the most excruciating tortures I could think of with a perfectly easy conscience.’ After hunting down rebels in Peshawar, he hanged the chefs who had tried to poison British officers, saying as he entered the mess, ‘Sorry, gentlemen, to have kept you waiting for your dinner, but I’ve been hanging your cooks.’

Nicholson and Hodson headed for Delhi. In September, they joined the British forces camped on the ridge above Delhi, skirmishing with the rebels but paralysed by the vacillations of their inept colonel, Archdale Wilson. Nicholson, always accompanied by his giant Punjabi bodyguard who stood behind him at meals and slept across his doorway, had become a legend. When, thanks to his aggressive tactics, reinforcements fought their way through, the British stormed the city. In the fighting, Nicholson was shot, still outraged by the dithering colonel, waving his pistol: ‘Thank God I have the strength yet to shoot him, if necessary.’ It wasn’t. Nicholson died as the emperor and his sons retreated to Humayoun’s Tomb.

Hodson galloped with his Sikh horsemen through a hostile Delhi, forcing 2,000 rebels to surrender, then surrounded the tomb and demanded Zafar’s surrender. Taking Zafar prisoner on promise of his life, Hodson returned next day for the surrender of the prince Mirza, his brother and son. As they were conveyed in a bullock cart into Delhi, Hodson stopped and, drawing his Colt, shot all three dead, stripping them, removing their swords and signet rings, then hanging up the naked bodies at Khooni Darwaza, Blood Gate. ‘I can’t help but be pleased with the warm congratulations I received for my success in destroying the enemies of our race,’ he wrote. Most of the emperor’s sixteen sons were killed. ‘I disposed of the principal members of the house of Timur the Tartar,’ boasted Hodson. ‘I’m not cruel, but I did enjoy the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches.’

In November, the British retook Kanpur and in March 1858 relieved Lucknow, where, under fire from the Sikandar Bagh stronghold, troops bellowing ‘Kanpur! You murderers!’ slaughtered 2,000 rebels, their bodies piled ‘in a heap as high as my head’, recalled a future field marshal, Frederick Roberts. ‘A heaving, surging mass of dead and dying inextricably entangled.’ When British troops discovered the bodies of murdered civilians, they went berserk, raping women, sewing Muslim sepoys into pigskins before execution, having Hindu Brahmins killed by Dalits (once known as Untouchables, the oppressed stratum below the four castes). Ten thousand Indians were killed at Kanpur and Lucknow. Hodson, under investigation for corruption, was killed storming the begum’s palace; the begum escaped.^*

After Jhansi had been retaken with a massacre of women and children, Lakshmi Bai rode to Gwalior to make a final stand. In June, the British attacked. Sporting a cavalry uniform, she was wounded and unhorsed by a British sabre, then, as she fired her pistol, shot dead. At home, the British public thirsted for blood; hundreds of thousands of Indians were killed before Canning halted the bloodletting. Mocked as ‘Clemency’ Canning, he now assumed direct control from the EIC, ruling India as the first viceroy in tandem with a secretary of state for India. Victoria became queen of India and the viceregal relationship with princely rulers was promoted in majestic durbars, ceremonies presided over by imperial proconsuls.^*

In 1862, dying in Burmese exile at eighty-seven, Zafar was the last of the Tamerlanians. At the same time, another dynasty was born: as the British shelled Delhi, the emperor’s police chief Gangadhar Nehru had escaped with his wife Jeorani and four children, to settle in Agra. Shortly after the death of Gangadhar, Jeorani gave birth to a son, Motilal. When his elder brother qualified as a lawyer, the family moved to Allahabad, where Motilal too became a successful lawyer and married his second wife Swarup Rani Thussu. On 14 November 1889, she gave birth to a son, Jawaharlal. Motilal, a dapper raconteur with waxed moustache and resonant voice, flourished, in 1900 buying a towered mansion where Jawaharlal was educated, until he was sent to the same British boarding school as Palmerston – Harrow.

India was not Pam’s only eastern crisis. Some of the troops that crushed the Indian rebellion had been on their way to attack China, where British merchants, making fortunes selling Indian opium to Chinese addicts, had been assaulted. In April 1856 as the Crimean war ended and the Indian rebellion started, an imperial concubine in Beijing, the twenty-one-year-old Cixi, gave birth to a boy, the only son of the Xianfeng Emperor.

She would bestride Chinese politics into the twentieth century.

LIMPING DRAGON, IRON -HEADED OLD RAT AND LITTLE AN: THE RISE OF CIXI

Cixi was born into a colossal empire on the verge of catastrophe. She grew up in a comfortable household, the strongminded daughter of a Manchu officer and junior duke; unlike Han Chinese, Manchus did not bind female feet. In 1839, when she was seven, the Daoguang Emperor ordered the seizure and destruction of an illegal British commodity. ‘Opium,’ he said, ‘is poison, undermining our good customs and morality.’ For 200 years, the Aisin Gioro family of the Manchus had ruled an ascendant China, allowing Europeans, first the Portuguese then the British, Americans and others, to trade through Guangzhou (Canton). The Qianlong emperor and his successors resisted European demands for ports and had no interest in British mill cloth. When their cotton business was undercut by the American south, Bengal farmers started to grow opium which was sold in Guangzhou. Since the EIC was banned from trading it, the opiate was bought in Calcutta by entrepreneurs, some of them Parsees and some British, led by a tough Scotsman, William Jardine, an EIC ship’s doctor, who had founded the company Jardine Matheson and become the most successful opium trader, nicknamed Iron-Headed Old Rat by the Chinese. Jacob Astor and other Americans joined the trade.

When the Chinese destroyed British opium, Jardine lobbied Palmerston, foreign secretary, who in Parliament mocked Chinese ‘moral habits’ and ordered war to defend British opium. British warships, armed with Congreve rockets, routed the Chinese war junks. ‘There’s no doubt that this event, which will form an epoch in the progress of the civilization of the human races,’ Palmerston wrote to Iron-Headed Old Rat, ‘must be attended with the most important advantages to the commercial interests of England.’ In 1842, China granted Hong Kong and 140 acres north of Shanghai to the British, then ports to France and the USA.^* For China, this was the devastating end of a two-century ascendancy.

When the shattered emperor ordered corruption investigations, Cixi’s father was fined but could not find the money. Cixi, a teenaged girl, suggested which assets to sell. ‘This daughter,’ said her father, ‘is more like a son.’

In 1852, Cixi, wearing an embroidered Manchu dress and bejewelled headdress, stood among a group of Manchu (not Chinese) girls in a hall at the back of the Forbidden City for the first selection of concubines for the harem of the new Xianfeng emperor, a lame melancholic nineteen-year-old opera lover known as the Limping Dragon. Tiny, with perfect skin, large lips and radiant eyes, now known as Concubine Yi, Cixi was not the most beautiful but she was chosen as a low-ranking concubine to join the eight ranks of the harem.

At the top rank stood Empress Zhen, a year younger than Cixi and nicknamed the Fragile Phoenix: she had ten maids, a private cow, plentiful meat and many eunuchs. At the bottom of the ranks, Cixi had four maids and no cow. But it was not enough for Limping Dragon to enjoy his Manchu concubines in the Forbidden City; he also smuggled into the more relaxed Summer Palace prostitutes with bound feet, a delicacy that he relished. When he wanted sex he marked a concubine’s name on a bamboo tablet which he gave to his chief eunuch; the concubine was then brought to one of his two bedrooms naked in the arms of a eunuch. After sex, she returned to the harem. Cixi was summoned and became pregnant. In 1854, she was raised to rank five. When she gave advice to the emperor, he was unnerved, complaining to his wife Zhen that she was ‘cunning’. Zhen formed an alliance with the pregnant Cixi. When, as her palace file read, ‘Concubine Yi gave joyous birth to a grand prince,’ the emperor was thrilled, promoting her to Noble Consort Yi, number two after the empress, and marrying his brother Prince Chun to her sister.

Xianfeng needed good news. Soon after his accession, ten years after the defeat by Britain, a peasant revolt started in the south, led by a charismatic peasant, Hong Xiuquan, who called himself ‘the Sun’ and ‘brother of Jesus Christ’. His mystical God Worshipping Society, the Taiping, overran the south, where he founded a Heavenly Kingdom, based in Nanjing. When he heard of the revolt, Xianfeng wept. But worse was to come.

His father had chosen him, his fourth son of nine, as successor (sealing his name in a lacquered box with the words ‘Ten Thousand Years’) because of Xianfeng’s hatred of the British, French and Americans. The foreigners had more than tripled opium deliveries in a decade, building new ports at Hong Kong and Shanghai as their missionaries were penetrating the country. Xianfeng appointed officials to crack down on his father’s concessions and restrict the missionaries. In October 1856, as Cixi’s son was born and trouble started in India, a Chinese attack on a British ship, the Arrow, triggered confrontation. Palmerston refused to ‘abandon a large community of British subjects at the extreme end of the globe to a set of barbarians – a set of kidnapping, murdering, poisoning barbarians’. It was war.

Fresh from his joint victory with Britain in Crimea, Napoleon, using the murder of a French missionary in China as his pretext, joined the attack on China.

Xianfeng strengthened his defences around Beijing, but the Anglo-French forces, under the command of James Bruce, earl of Elgin, and Charles Cousin-Montauban, landed troops and advanced to the Dagu fortresses. The emperor agreed to British demands but then reneged. When the British tried to storm the Dagu Forts, they were repulsed. In August 1860, Elgin and Montauban successfully stormed the fortresses. In revenge Xianfeng had British envoys arrested and tortured, fettered with their hands and feet tied tightly behind them: twenty-one of the thirty-nine died in agony. But at Ba-li-qiao (Palikoa) on 21 September the Manchu cavalry was annihilated, and the Europeans took Beijing. Xianfeng and his court, including Zhen and Cixi, moved northwards, releasing the surviving captives to such western outrage that Elgin and Montauban ordered the looting then burning of the beautiful Summer Palace, built by Qianlong. The troops engaged in ‘indiscriminate plunder and wanton destruction’, wrote a young British officer, as they became ‘seized with a temporary insanity’ fixated on ‘plunder, plunder’. Elgin and Montauban – now comte de Palikoa – looted gold and jade staves for Victoria and Napoleon, while an old courtesan who died during the attack left five Pekinese dogs that were taken back to Britain; the queen was given one, crassly named Lootie, who lived in Windsor for ten years. The peace treaties signed by the emperor’s brother ceded Kowloon to Britain, promised indemnities and granted Russia a section of coast, where an eastern port, Vladivostok, was soon built.

Napoleon believed in France’s mission civilisatrice as much as any British statesman believed in his own nation’s imperial destiny. In Algeria, now home to over 100,000 French colons, Napoleon’s forces used brutal methods, massacres and deportations. The French were defeated for a while by a mystical sheikh and then on his death by a female leader, Lalla Fatma N’Soumer, until she was captured and died in prison. Napoleon, visiting Algeria, attempted to counter colon racism and envisioned a French colony and an Arab kingdom with him as roi des Arabes: ‘I’m just as much emperor of the Arabs of Algeria as I am of the French.’ As in Britain, aggressive businessmen drove imperial expansion. When Napoleon was canvassed by the Prom family of shipping tycoons from Bordeaux to move into Africa, he ordered his governors to expand from Saint-Louis on the coast into the interior of what became Senegal. Keen to exploit the French presence in east Asia, he grabbed a naval base in China, then sent a flotilla to attack Annam (Vietnam) where Catholic missionaries had provoked a backlash, with the emperor Tu Duc trying to reject Catholic infiltration by executing two Spanish priests. In September 1857, French troops seized Da Nang and Saigon; both were repelled by the Vietnamese, but Napoleon dispatched reinforcements that in June 1862 retook Saigon. Thus was established the French colony of Cochinchina.

Then in 1863 Napoleon turned on Cambodia. Its kings had long since abandoned Angkor, moving their capital to Phnom Penh, but, weak and divided, it was fought over by the emperors of Vietnam and the kings of Siam (Thailand). In 1848 a Cambodian prince Duong expelled the Vietnamese, backed by Siam, and re-established the Khmer kingdom. But he made the mistake of asking for Napoleonic protection in 1853: ‘What would you have me do? I have two masters as my neighbours, and France is far away.’ Not for long. Duong’s son Norodom was forced to accept a French protectorate. Napoleon had established Indochine, a French Asian empire that lasted until 1954.

In Beijing, the debacle broke Xianfeng, who was succeeded in 1861 by his five-year-old son with Cixi, the Tongzhi emperor, and eight regents, led by a Manchu prince, Sushun, and his brother, while Empress Zhen acted as his formal mother and dowager empress. As the funeral neared, Cixi, still officially Consort Yi, persuaded Zhen to canvass for her promotion to joint dowager empress, adopting the name Joyous – Cixi. Secretly gathering support from her husband’s brothers, Princes Gong and Chun, who encouraged her to ‘listen to politics behind the curtains’, and artfully getting control of the royal seals, she manipulated the regents into shouting disrespectfully at her while she and Zhen cradled the boy-emperor. Sushun ordered Cixi’s murder.

At her husband’s funeral, when half the regents accompanied the coffin and half the new emperor, Cixi orchestrated a coup, hiding the decree to dismiss the regents by sewing it into Zhen’s robes. Some of the regents burst into the harem shouting, ‘We are the ones that write decrees.’ Cixi coolly ordered their arrest. Sushun, in charge of the coffin, was arrested in flagrante with two concubines, unbecoming conduct during royal obsequies. As Cixi fixed the trial, blaming the regents for signing the foreign treaties and falsifying her husband’s will, two ‘received silk’ – the white scarf with which to hang themselves; Sushun was beheaded.

After her son’s coronation, wearing yellow brocade illustrated with dragons, on a nine-dragon throne in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, Cixi was ruler of China, rising each day with Zhen (with whom she nominally ruled for twenty years) to sit in their phoenix-patterned robes, pearl-encrusted shoes and gate-towered hairdos behind the little emperor while they discussed matters of state with the Grand Council. Most urgent was the Taiping rebellion, whose leaders now ruled thirty million in an area larger than all of Europe. The Heavenly King, Jesus’ Brother, had died, but the Heaven Worshippers fought on as bubonic plague raged. Cixi mustered a western-supplied Ever Victorious Army under a civil servant, Li Hongzhang, assisted by two extraordinary adventurers, the American Frederick Ward and the Briton Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon.^* Li invited Taiping leaders to a dinner where they were offered a mandarin’s hat, but as they knelt and bared their heads, they were decapitated. The Taiping was, with the eighth-century An Lushan rebellion, the bloodiest civil war in history: thirty million died, maybe more.

Cixi launched a ‘Self-Strengthening Movement’, commissioning modern warships, steamers and railways. But her power had its price. As a widow, in her early thirties, Cixi was not allowed to wear make-up nor bright reds, instead favouring orange robes, pale-blue waistcoats and, as she got older, a toupee. It was hard for her to have friends, let alone lovers, her companions being eunuchs. Cixi fell in love with a young, sensitive eunuch, An Dehai. When she rashly commissioned Little An to direct the selection of a wife for her son Tongzhi, he proudly set out with an entourage – breaking a rule that eunuchs were not allowed out of Beijing. The princes Gong and Chun ignored Cixi’s authorization. Little An was arrested with six other eunuchs; he was then beheaded and exposed naked. One of Little An’s friends, a fellow eunuch, criticized Cixi for failing to support him. She had him strangled, then collapsed into bed for a month of insomnia and vomiting. She always chose power over love. When her only son Tongzhi died in 1875 just two years after assuming full powers, she adopted and enthroned her baby nephew, the Guangxu emperor, removing him from his father, her enemy Prince Chun, whom she humiliated. Taking the title empress mother she made the emperor call her Papa Dearest. She would now dominate China into the twentieth century.

Napoleon had won wars against Russia and China, had secured Algeria and expanded into Senegal and Indochine. Now a beautiful countess turned his focus on Italy.

IF NECESSARY, SEDUCE THE EMPEROR: NAPOLEON, QUEEN OF HEARTS AND THE RISORGIMENTO OF ITALY

Contessa Virginia ‘Nini’ di Castiglione was no ordinary diplomat. ‘I’ve enrolled the beauteous countess in the diplomatic service of Piedmont,’ said Conte Camillo Cavour, premier of Piedmont, the north Italian kingdom. In order to bring about the unification of Italy, she was ‘to flirt and if necessary seduce the emperor’, obtaining Napoleon III’s support against the Habsburgs. Green-eyed and jet-haired, ‘a miracle of beauty, Venus descended from Olympus’, in the words of the Austrian ambassador’s wife Paulina Metternich, but also insouciant and saucy, Castiglione was a Florentine aristocrat recently married to an older count with whom she had a son before a short affair with the Piedmontese king, Victor Emmanuel II. ‘An imbecile’, concluded Lord Clarendon, but Cavour, a long-haired playboy with flying moustaches and six mistresses, believed she was his secret weapon. ‘Succeed, my cousin, by any methods you like.’

Paris was already filled with ambitious beauties, but Castiglione made herself the cynosure and was swiftly noticed by Napoleon, who had her smuggled into the Tuileries. While Empress Eugénie was pregnant, Castiglione appeared at a ball as Queen of Hearts in a costume ‘entirely open at the sides from hips downwards, her hair flowing loose over neck and shoulders’, with a heart strategically positioned over her pubis.

‘Your heart seems a little low,’ observed the empress. Yet ‘every movement was contrived and she began to get on one’s nerves’, said Paulina Metternich.

‘Very beautiful,’ Napoleon told his cousin Princess Mathilde, ‘but she bores me to death.’ Napoleon moved on to Marie Anne, wife of his foreign minister, Comte Alexandre Walewski, who was the son of Napoleon I with his Polish paramour Marie Walewska. Once when the imperial train was chuffing along to Compiègne, a door slid open to reveal the emperor kissing Marie Anne, in full view of her husband. In the Tuileries, when courtiers caught Napoleon en bonne fortune, he simply saluted and continued; when the empress surprised him, she would snap, ‘Sortez, mademoiselle,’ and the girl would dress and leave fast.

Where sex had failed Italy, murder succeeded. In January 1858, Italian nationalists, disgusted by Napoleon’s neglect of their cause, tossed bombs at Napoleon and Eugénie on their way to the theatre, killing eight. The monarchs, lightly wounded, bravely watched the play, but the near-death experience made Napoleon recall his youth as an Italian patriot. Now, combining his romantic nationalism, compulsive plotting and military ambitions, he backed Cavour and Italian risorgimento, provoking war with Austria.

On 24 June 1859, at Solferino in Habsburg Italy, Napoleon, chain-smoking in the saddle, defeated the Austrians under Franz Josef in one of the first battles of modern warfare and the last commanded by sovereigns. A total of 300,000 soldiers fought and 29,000 were killed – more than at Waterloo. ‘The poor fellows! What a terrible thing war is!’ sighed Napoleon, vomiting at the sight of a heap of amputated limbs. Later he joked grimly but wisely, ‘I’ve had enough of war. There’s too much luck in it.’ In a hut outside Villafranca, he met Franz Josef and agreed a compromise that ceded most of the Habsburgs’ Italian territories to the new kingdom. But, again betraying his Italian allies, Napoleon took Savoy, today’s Riviera, for France. Many Italians were infuriated. A swashbuckling patriot, Giuseppe Garibaldi, a sailor from Nice who became a professional liberator,^* now led his army of volunteers, the Thousand, to seize Sicily, where he was acclaimed dictator. In Milan, Victor Emmanuel declared himself king of Italy, hailed by Garibaldi, who now turned to a new war.

In 1861, Garibaldi offered his services to the newly elected US president, Abraham Lincoln, in the crisis over slavery ignited by the moral contradiction at the heart of the world-changing democracy.

Just months earlier, in April 1860, an ex-officer, fallen on hard times, started work as a clerk in his father’s leatherwear store in Galena, Illinois, where he served customers and collected invoices. Sometimes Ulysses Grant entertained friends with stories of the Mexican war. But there was a shadow in his past: six years earlier Captain Grant had been forced to resign from the army for being drunk on duty. ‘When I have nothing to do,’ he confessed, ‘I get blue and depressed, I’ve a natural craving for drink.’ His father Jesse, now a rich tanner and store owner, gave him a job as shop assistant, and it was from this unlikely perch that Grant observed the rising crisis.

He never grumbled, but he was obviously destined for obscurity, and there was little sign he would soon emerge as one of the greatest Americans.

LICK ’EM TOMORROW: ULYSSES AND ABRAHAM

The next month, the recently formed Republican Party chose as their presidential candidate a little-known prairie lawyer and former congressman, Abraham Lincoln. Six foot four, grey-eyed, simian and loquacious, born in a Kentucky log cabin, Lincoln had been promoted as Honest Abe and the Railsplitter (a backwoodsman used to splitting logs) who had won national attention in the debates for an Illinois Senate race.

The American schism was already simmering into war. It had started in Kansas where a half-mad abolitionist, John ‘I’m the instrument of God’ Brown, led an anti-slavery militia that fought slave owners. In October 1859 Brown invaded Virginia, for which he was hanged. Lincoln loathed ‘the monstrous injustice of slavery’ and the moral decay of ‘slave power’. Although the presidential candidate of the new Republican party acquiesced in its existence in the southern states, he would not countenance its spread. Southerners feared that any limit would ultimately threaten their power to expand. Suddenly the forty-year quest for compromise seemed to exhaust itself.

On 6 November 1860, Lincoln was elected president. In December, South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed by six other slavery states. Together they declared a Provisional Confederacy of the United States, which elected a slave-owning former general and senator, Jefferson Davis, as president and Alexander Stephens as his deputy. At a speech in Savannah, Georgia, Stephens defined the Confederacy through slavery: ‘its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.’ The gentlemen planters of the Confederacy created a myth of Southern gentility that Grant mocked: ‘Southern slave-owners believed that the ownership of slaves conferred a sort of patent of nobility.’ The rebellion was about slavery, not about states’ rights. The ensuing war revealed that slavery was not only morally repugnant but economically disastrous. The Confederacy was less populous, because slavery drove down the wages of poor whites and therefore did not attract new immigrants; and its slave-owning entitlement did not foster industry. Yet this would be a war of conscript armies and industrial slaughter.

As Grant offered his services and took command of a regiment in Missouri, Lincoln offered Robert E. Lee, a handsome Virginian patrician married to Martha Washington’s great-granddaughter, the post of commander-in-chief. Lee, who believed that ‘The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa … The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race,’ refused and took command of Confederate forces. Lincoln turned to a young general, George McClellan, who despised him as a ‘well-meaning baboon’, wanted to maintain slavery and harboured Caesaresque ambitions, telling his wife, ‘I seem to have become the power of the land … I almost think that were I to win some small success now, I could become Dictator …’ Lincoln appointed him to command the Army of the Potomac and then as overall commander, but McClellan prevaricated as the Confederates attacked. Lincoln was soon dissatisfied. ‘If General McClellan doesn’t want to use the army,’ he said, ‘I’d like to borrow it for a time.’

The Confederacy controlled Virginia, and its best chance of beating the more populous north was to strike fast. Lee advanced, but not quickly or forcefully enough. The war that followed demonstrated the destructive power of the new technologies on the flesh of men who were deployed as if they were fighting traditional wars of cavalry and courage. Instead, artillery barrages and long-range rifles marked a new era that required new generals: at Antietam, 20,0000 were killed or wounded, the single bloodiest day in American history. Lincoln soon noticed that Grant, fighting in the west, was a winner. Even when he was almost defeated, at Shiloh, he just said, ‘We’ll lick ’em tomorrow.’ Generals needed the nerve to take punishing casualties, but Grant also possessed the sangfroid and strategic foresight to win. ‘I saw an open field,’ he recalled of the aftermath at Shiloh, ‘so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.’

The end of Lee’s offensive empowered Lincoln, on 22 September 1862, to order the emancipation of the 3.5 million slaves in the Confederate states, effective from 1 January the following year. Frederick Douglass, the once enslaved African-American leader, had wondered if Lincoln would ever deliver: ‘Can any colored man … ever forget the night which followed the first day of January 1863, when the world was to see if Abraham Lincoln would prove to be as good as his word?’^*

More than 179,000 African-Americans escaped the south and joined Unionist forces. Not all Union generals welcomed them, but Grant did.^*

Lincoln finally demoted McClennan, but Grant was criticized for his bloody battles and alcoholic lapses. ‘I think Grant has hardly a friend left except myself,’ said Lincoln. ‘What I want is generals who fight battles and win victories. Grant’s done this.’ Grant took Vicksburg in Mississippi, while another competent general, deploying the Union’s superiority in men and material, defeated the Confederates in a bloody battle at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. When Lincoln visited the battlefield, he defined the American ideal of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’. As he planned his re-election, he feared that Grant would run against him. Once he had checked that Grant had no such ambition, he promoted him to command the Union armies, and the two finally met.

‘Why, here is General Grant,’ said Lincoln at the White House. ‘Well, this a great pleasure, I assure you.’ Grant, laconic, sturdy, intense, admired the gangly, yarn-spinning Lincoln – ‘a very great man’, he said – but loathed the attention, telling Julia, ‘I heartily wish myself back in camp.’ Yet they had much in common: both were underrated, plain-spoken prairie pragmatists who abhorred slavery yet had married into self-important slave-owning families. Both had crosses to bear: for Lincoln, it was depression; for Grant, drink. Lincoln’s operational orders were simple. ‘He wished me to beat Lee,’ said Grant, ‘but how I did it was my own duty.’ Grant and Lee were opposites: Lee a patrician who manoeuvred like a Virginian Napoleon; Grant ‘the quietest little fellow you ever saw’, noted an officer. ‘The only evidence you have that he’s in any place is that he makes things git.’ He soon made things git, advancing in Virginia and Georgia.

Lincoln ordered conscription, though the first drafts led to riots in Manhattan. Civil wars divide families, and the Roosevelts were typical: the ageing millionaire CVS Roosevelt and his son Theodore were passionately abolitionist and Yankee, but the latter’s wife, Mittie, was an equally passionate Confederate. In 1860, Mittie gave birth to Theodore junior, Teddy, by which time America was in crisis. Mittie secretly sewed clothes for Confederate troops, and her brothers were Confederate agents plotting to assassinate Lincoln and buying new battleships in Britain. Her husband Theodore refused to fight her family, instead, like many of his class, paying a surrogate to fight in his place. Little Teddy admired his mother, yet he worshipped Lincoln and dreamed of fighting for the Union.

The self-destruction of the USA was an opportunity for its rivals. Out in the west, the native peoples started to raid again. Comanche bands attacked Texas; in September 1860, Governor Houston dispatched a unit of Rangers and their Tonkawa auxiliaries to hunt the Comanche raiders, ambushing Peta Nocona’s village and massacring men, women and children. Peta Nocona and his son Quanah were away, but the Rangers captured a fair-haired, blue-eyed woman and her baby daughter.

CYNTHIA PARKER AND PETA NOCONA; FRANZ JOSEF AND SISI

When she was questioned, the blonde woman said, ‘Me Cynthia,’ at which one of the Rangers exclaimed, ‘Why, Tom, this is a white woman, Indians don’t have blue eyes.’ She was taken back to Fort Belknap, where her surviving brother Isaac Parker could not identify his long-lost sister – who could barely remember any English. But finally the Parkers adopted her. Yet Cynthia grieved for Peta and her sons, whom she believed were dead. When her daughter died of influenza, she tried to kill herself, cutting her breasts, and finally starved herself to death.

Out on the prairie, her husband Peta Nocona mourned her too, dying of wounds soon afterwards. Their son Quanah, now fifteen, learned for the first time that his mother was American. Determined to fight for his people, he joined another war band and planned revenge.

Napoleon and Palmerston also saw opportunities. Ironically the first Old World potentate to back Lincoln was Alexander II. The virtuous backwoods lawyer and the concupiscent Romanov emperor had something in common: in February 1861 Alexander had liberated Russian serfs, two years before Lincoln’s emancipation. In both cases, the measure raised radical expectations that proved disappointing – and both would pay with their lives.

Surprisingly, Britain and France leaned towards the Confederacy. Palmerston had been re-elected in 1859 at the age of seventy-four, his vigour confirmed by rumours of illegitimate children and his citation in a divorce case, which only added to his roguish popularity. Pam was exasperated by his chancellor, the melodramatic, wild-eyed, self-righteous Gladstone, who stalked the streets of London seeking prostitutes to redeem: this involved long, titillating conversations about Christ with ladies of the night after which Gladstone tried not to masturbate. ‘Whenever he gets my place,’ said Palmerston, ‘we’ll have strange doings.’ Palmerston had orchestrated the navy’s anti-slavery campaigns, yet the British and French textile industries were dependent on southern cotton. Gladstone proposed an armed intervention,^* and Palmerston came close to recognizing the Confederacy – as did their ally Napoleon, who was restrained in part by his American dentist, Thomas Evans, certainly the most powerful dentist in history.^* But Napoleon, in the midst of expanding in Asia and Africa, saw the chance to found an American empire – in Mexico.

Halved in size by American gains, and hobbled by misrule and racial and economic inequality, the republic was struggling, but its president Benito Juárez, a lawyer risen from the humblest Zapotec origins, had restored order after Santa Anna but suspended payments on its European debts. Encouraged by Morny, who held Mexican bonds, Napoleon assembled an Anglo-French coalition to exploit American chaos. Although Palmerston backed French intervention, he limited his involvement. In December 1861, Napoleon’s troops, conveyed in steamships, landed in Mexico, expelled Juárez and in June 1863 took the capital. Eugénie introduced her husband to Mexican grandees, who proposed a European monarchy. In July, Napoleon sought an emperor for Mexico and found him among the Habsburgs: Maximilian, the brother of Franz Josef.

The young emperor had faced defeat at Solferino and lost Italy, but he had survived it all. Until recently Archduke Maximilian had been his heir, but their mother Sophia had arranged Franz Josef’s marriage to her Bavarian niece, the twenty-three-year-old Princess Sisi. The dour kaiser fell madly in love with her. ‘Dear Angel’, he always called her, ‘My sweet dearest soul, my heart’s love’, signing himself ‘your little man’. As he recovered from the loss of Italy, Sisi gave birth to two daughters. But she was unmoved by the stolid emperor, stifled by the pompous court and harassed by her strident mother-in-law, who commandeered the babies and mocked Sisi as a ‘silly young mother’. When a daughter died of typhus aged two, Sisi sank into depression, refusing to eat. Setting up gyms in her palaces, she exercised, dieted and binged obsessionally.

Tall, slim, beautiful, she prided herself on her waist (16½ inches), strapping herself into tightly laced corsets. She craved freedom, fame and love like a modern woman, riding and hunting manically, making herself Europe’s fastest equestrienne. Growing ever more self-absorbed and self-indulgent, she had little time for Franz Josef and not much for her children: ‘Children are the curse of a woman, for when they come, they drive away Beauty.’ She adored Heinrich Heine’s verses and wrote poems herself, often mocking her enemies; she hated royal life – ‘this drudgery, this torture’, she called it. ‘She espoused the view that freedom was everyone’s right,’ wrote her future daughter-in-law Stephanie. ‘Her picture of life resembled a beautiful fairy-tale drama of a world without sorrow or constraint.’ In 1858, she gave birth to a son, Crown Prince Rudolf, fulfilling her chief duty, after which she travelled the world, pursued pleasure and avoided court, husband and children.

Maximilian was a problem. Recently married to Leopold of Belgium’s daughter Charlotte, another Saxe-Coburg splicing, he craved a crown. The emperor appointed him naval commander but sacked him for liberalism. Now, in the summer of 1863, as the American civil war raged, he was offered the throne of Mexico. Charlotte pushed him to accept. It was not quite as absurd as it seems today: there was already a successful Brazilian monarchy, ruled by his cousins, and the Habsburgs had ruled Mexico for centuries. Napoleon turned his charm on to Maximilian, who disdained him as a ‘circus ringmaster … with bow legs, a sidling walk and a furtive look out of half-closed eyes, running after every pretty woman’. But Napoleon played on Maximilian’s sense of liberal mission. ‘It is a question of rescuing a whole continent from anarchy,’ he said, ‘of setting an example to the whole of America.’ He promised, ‘France will never fail the Mexican Empire.’

Embroiled in civil war, Lincoln warned against a plan that contravened American paramountcy in south America, expressed in the Monroe Doctrine, but he was in no position to stop it. Franz Josef encouraged it but insisted that Maximilian renounce his rights to Austria. A furious Maximilian had second thoughts, but Charlotte insisted, and Napoleon wrote, ‘It’s impossible you should give up going to Mexico. The honour of the House of Habsburg is at stake.’

Maximilian and Charlotte sailed for Mexico.

AMERICAN WARS: PEDRO AND LóPEZ; CHARLOTTE AND ELIZA

In May 1864, the couple arrived in Mexico,^* setting up their court at the vast but ruined Chapultepec Castle, once a shrine for the Mexica tlatoani, more recently stormed by US troops, and now extravagantly restored. Maximilian favoured universal education and workers’ rights, which alienated conservatives; French support discredited him with liberals. He pivoted to the right, backed by his tiny Mexican forces, French troops and a black Sudanese regiment, dispatched by Napoleon’s Egyptian ally, Said, son of Mehmed Ali. But Juárez, the elected president, rallied a national insurgency.

Maximilian could look southwards to his first cousin, Pedro II, in Brazil with some envy: there the young emperor was beloved. Aged fourteen, the grandson of Franz of Austria, nephew of Napoleon I – very Habsburgian, blond, big-chinned – had been crowned as constitutional emperor with sceptre, toucan cloak and epaulettes of galo-da-serra feathers, attended by black and mixed-race courtiers. ‘The monarchy,’ writes Lilia Schwarcz, ‘was tropicalizing itself.’

Moving between Rio and a summer palace at his new resort, Petropolis, Pedro directed but did not dictate government, diligently promoting American monarchy and new technology, steamships and railways, and becoming the first royal photographer, buying daguerreotype equipment. ‘If I wasn’t emperor, I’d love to be a teacher,’ he said, sometimes adding, ‘La science, c’est moi.’ Breezy, studious, multilingual, studying Greek, medicine, astronomy and engineering, dutifully married to a Bourbon princess, discreetly devoted to his mistress, he embraced Afro-Brazilian culture, backing the Rio carnival and paying homage to its elected black leaders, the Three Kings and the Emperor of the Divine Holy Spirit.

Yet this was a society still based on coffee plantations, worked by slaves. Between 1841 and 1850, at least 83 per cent of African slaves went to Brazil, with the rest going to the USA and Cuba. But the British Royal Navy was seizing ever more ships. Brazilian planters still feared a Haitian-style revolt – in 1849 in Rio there were 110,000 slaves to 266,000 whites. The area around Rio’s palace was so filled with slaves that it was known as Little Africa and, for all the mixing of races, the Brazilian elites were all white. Countesses attended royal balls and shopped in the Parisian emporia of the Rua do Ouvidor, as recounted in the stories of the novelist Machado de Assis, whose character Cândido Neves is a slave hunter proud of his work. In 1850 Brazil banned the trade but not slavery. Yet it was not a slave revolt that challenged the monarchy but a war.

In 1864, Marshal Francisco López, president of Paraguay since his father’s death^* and partner of Eliza Lynch, mother of his five sons, attacked Brazil. In the seven years since she had arrived from Paris, La Lynch had taught the locals how to enjoy French food, cooking and fashion, while amassing twelve million acres of state land transferred to make her the world’s greatest landowner.

On his deathbed, the marshal’s father had warned him to avoid war with Brazil. Yet with 55,000 troops armed with the latest technology, López, known as El Mariscal, using the independence of Uruguay as pretext, attacked both Argentina and Brazil. His folly was astounding: Paraguay’s total population was smaller than the Brazilian National Guard. As Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina counter-attacked and Maximilian struggled to survive in Mexico, General Grant was strangling the Confederacy from north and south.

LINCOLN AND GRANT: WE’RE ALL AMERICANS

In Washington, DC, on 4 March 1865, as black soldiers marched in his inaugural parade, Lincoln was sworn in for the second time, promising ‘malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right’, but warning, with exquisite eloquence, that the war would continue if necessary ‘until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword’. Vice-President Andrew Johnson got drunk. ‘Don’t let him speak,’ ordered Lincoln – but he did anyway. Among the guests was a fanatical Confederate actor, John Wilkes Booth, invited by his girlfriend, a senator’s daughter. He had recently acted in a production of Julius Caesar and considered killing Lincoln at the inauguration. Instead he started to put together a conspiracy to kidnap or kill the president.

On 9 April, at Appomattox in Virginia, Grant outmanoeuvred Lee, who finally agreed to negotiate terms. At the local courthouse, Lee, dapper in immaculate grey uniform, with buckskin gauntlets, silk sash and polished boots with red silk toppings, offered his sword to Grant, who was chewing on a cigar wearing a ‘common soldier’s blouse, unbuttoned, on which, however, the four stars; high boots, mud-splashed’. Grant made chitchat. ‘I met you once, General Lee, while we were serving in Mexico.’

‘Yes, I know, but I’ve never been able to recollect a single feature,’ retorted Lee grandly. ‘I asked to see you to ascertain upon what terms you’d receive the surrender of my army.’ Grant scribbled his terms, which were written out by his adjutant, General Ely Parker, the full-blood Tonawanda Seneca converted to Christianity, who handed them to Lee. The Confederate blushed and hesitated, believing Parker was black. Then he offered his hand.

‘I’m glad to see one real American here,’ said Lee.

‘We’re all Americans,’ replied Parker. Lee signed. Three million Americans had fought, including about 180,000 black soldiers and 20,000 black sailors; 750,000 had died. The Union had won, 3.5 million slaves had been freed and would soon be granted the vote. Lincoln welcomed the south back: ‘Let ’em up easy.’ Not everyone was convinced he would defend the freed slaves: Lincoln, said Douglass, was still a ‘white man’s president’.

At the White House, on 14 April, Grant recounted the surrender to Lincoln and his cabinet, after which the president invited the Grants to Ford’s Theatre that evening to watch Our American Cousin. When Booth visited the theatre, he learned that the Lincolns and Grants would attend that night; he and his cohorts planned to save the Confederacy – which still had one active army in the field – by decapitating the Union. But Julia Grant, who did not get on with Mary Lincoln, vetoed the invitation. ‘Dear Husband,’ said Mary Lincoln to Abraham that afternoon, ‘you almost startle me by your great cheerfulness.’

‘And well I may feel so, Mary,’ said Lincoln. ‘I consider this day the war has come to a close.’ Mary Lincoln was unwise, inconsistent, unstable and possibly bipolar, a trial for her husband, but they had lost one son aged three, and another, Willie, aged eleven, died of typhoid; during the war, they had endured appalling stress. The president added, ‘We must both be more cheerful in the future – between the war and the loss of our darling Willie – we have both been very miserable.’

As the Lincolns prepared for the theatre, the Grants headed to the station. On the way, a horseman – Booth – galloped alongside and peered into their carriage, confirming that they would not be at the theatre. At 10.13 p.m., at Ford’s Theatre, Booth sneaked into the president’s box and shot him in the back of the head with a Deringer pistol, then jumped out of the box on to the stage, shouting ‘Sic semper tyrannis!’ before fleeing. One other conspirator ambushed the secretary of state, William Seward, who was sick in bed, and stabbed him, while the third failed to find Vice-President Johnson – and got drunk. Lincoln died next morning. Booth was killed in a shoot-out; the other conspirators were hanged.

Johnson, a long-haired, hard-drinking and pugnacious mediocrity, was sworn in. As the only southern senator to support the Union, he had been selected for the vice-presidency by Lincoln as a sign of reconciliation, but he was a diehard racist: ‘This is a country for white men, and by God, as long I’m president, it’ll be a government for white men.’ The Civil Rights Act of 1866 promised the vote for all citizens ‘without distinction of race or color, or previous condition of slavery’; Johnson vetoed it, but his veto was overridden. Amendments to the constitution abolished slavery and granted citizenship to all ex-slaves. African-Americans delighted in their ability to vote. As Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts, which detailed the terms under which the rebel states would be readmitted, Union armies occupied the south and Grant ordered his generals to enforce the new laws. The Union had won the war, but it would lose the peace.

The fightback by white supremacism started at once. Southerners passed Black Codes to stop the freedmen voting. In Memphis and New Orleans white mobs murdered black people. In Pulaski (Tennessee), Confederate veterans founded a clandestine militia, named Ku Klux Klan after the Greek kuklos (circle), sporting white hoods to represent the ghosts of dead comrades.

As President Johnson tainted Lincoln’s legacy,^* his paladin Grant announced, ‘Now for Mexico,’ since he regarded Napoleon ‘as an active part of the rebellion’ and Emperor Maximilian as a ‘foothold’ of ‘European monarchy … a direct act of war’. His Mexican war would be ‘short, quick, decisive’ but his plan was derailed by his deteriorating relationship with the egregious President Johnson.

Grant did not need to fight Napoleon in Mexico: Napoleon lost his nerve as his position in Europe deteriorated. ‘The French army is full of enthusiasm for Max,’ Empress Charlotte told her father, but in February 1866 Napoleon, agonized by the successful insurgency against his puppet, exposed by Union victory, started to withdraw – a move which, he wrote to Maximilian, ‘may cause Your Majesty temporary embarrassment’. Emperor Maximilian planned to abdicate, but Charlotte sailed for Europe to appeal to Napoleon, who received her on three tearful but painful encounters: ‘We’ve done our best by Maximilian but all we can do now is help him escape.’ Charlotte, proudly half Bourbon, half Coburg, shrieked, ‘Bourbon blood flows in my veins … I ought not have dishonoured my forebears and myself by treating with a Bonaparte.’ But no one would help. ‘All is useless,’ she cabled Maximilian, then sank into madness, hiding in the Vatican and claiming that she was being poisoned. She was later locked up in a Belgian castle, where she came to believe she was empress not just of Mexico but of many other places too. Maximilian refused to flee as Mexican forces closed in.

Further south, the other Napoleonic protégé, Marshal López, was convinced he had triumphed against Brazil and Argentina, while his lover Eliza Lynch commanded her own battalions of female warriors, Las Residentas. López’s first offensive into Brazil’s Mato Grosso was successful but the second against Argentina was disastrous. Emperor Pedro declared himself Volunteer Number One and rushed to the front. Brazilian ironclads advanced up the Paraná River as the Triple Allies attacked. Brazil had a tiny army of 18,000, but Pedro recruited more, offering slaves their freedom in return for service: ‘More and more strength should be given to [General Baron] Caxias; speed up the buying of slaves and increase our army.’ Twenty thousand slaves joined up.

In May 1866 an allied army invaded and destroyed most of López’s forces in a series of routs in which Paraguayans were mowed down as they charged artillery. Soon the marshal was so short of men, he too had to recruit slaves, and his men went into battle ‘semi-nude without shoes or boots, covered with shoddy ponchos – even colonels go barefoot’. As Paraguay starved and suffered epidemics, the invading army of the Brazilian general Caxias besieged the massive fortress of Humaitá unaware that it was virtually empty – until it finally surrendered in August 1868. Now López was doomed: despite terrible Brazilian losses, Emperor Pedro insisted on hunting down ‘the tyrant’ as the cast changed in Europe.

Napoleon and Palmerston had directed European affairs for twenty years. At eighty, still riding every day, Old Pam finally went into decline. On 18 October 1865, as he sank into a coma, he imagined he was still negotiating treaties: ‘That’s Article 98; now go on to the next.’ Victoria had always been unsure about the old rogue, who ‘often worried and distressed us, though as Pr. Minister he behaved very well’. Palmerston, granted a rare state funeral, had shaped the British century. ‘Death,’ wrote Gladstone, ‘has indeed laid low the most towering antlers in the forest.’

As his partner Pam was exiting, Napoleon, tired, unwell and chastened by Mexico, was holidaying at Villa Eugénie in Biarritz. There he entertained a giant German visitor who ate and drank Brobdingnagian quantities: at one session he downed ‘a glass of madeira, ditto of sherry, one whole flask of Yquem and a glass of cognac’, and he so enjoyed the turbot that he exclaimed, ‘For a sauce like that I’d give twenty banks of the Rhine.’ Napoleon and his entourage mocked his hulking Prussian coarseness – but, learning from Napoleon’s success and exploiting his own remorseless virtuosity, he was about to reorder European power. ‘They treat me like a fox,’ Bismarck said later. ‘A cunning fellow of the first rank. But the truth is that with a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half, and when I have to deal with a pirate, I try to be a pirate and a half.’ The Prussian pirate planned to create a new power: Germany.

* Since British abolition, the prices for slaves were higher, so that the cost of compensating owners for their 240,560 slaves was even higher, totalling 120 million francs.

* The idea of socialism had been developed by a French aristocrat, Henri, comte de Saint-Simon. After fighting for the Americans at Yorktown at the age of twenty with his friend Lafayette, Saint-Simon had supported the French revolution, was arrested and almost guillotined under Robespierre, then planned with Talleyrand to dismantle Notre-Dame and sell the lead from its roof. Living splendidly during Napoleon’s reign, he lost his money and started to study the industrial world. In 1817, at the age of fifty-seven, he wrote L’Industrie, in which he declared two principles: ‘The whole of society rests upon industry’ and ‘Politics is the science of production.’ He grew so depressed by the lack of support that he shot himself six times in the head, but only lost the sight in one eye. A decade after his death, the word socialism was coined.

* Lola was graceless in her narcissism, turning on the heartbroken king. ‘After all I’ve suffered for you, chased from Munich for my devotion to you, your conduct appears strange and heartless,’ she wrote to him. Ludwig died in exile. She went on tour in America.

* There was a darker chauvinism within the German revolution. In Dresden, the court conductor of the Saxon king, Richard Wagner, thirty-five-year-old son of a police clerk in Leipzig, where he was brought up in the Jewish Quarter, and already the writer of a successful opera Rienzi, supported a socialistic German nationalism – ‘I, poor artist, swore eternal fidelity to my German fatherland’ – and joined the revolution. Driven into exile, he anonymously wrote a vicious denunciation of ‘Das Judenthum in der Musik’ (Jewdom in Music) that helped invent the new strain of racism, calling the Jews ‘the evil conscience of our modern civilization’. Aiming to ‘explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews, so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike’, he coined a trope that compared Jews to ‘a swarming colony of insect life’ on the noble body of the German nation.

* Since the seventeenth century, most European cities had maternity units within their hospitals, but these had catastrophic death rates from puerperal fever and it remained safer to give birth at home with traditional midwives. Male physicians were increasingly involved in childbirth. For a long time, a few doctors had suspected that they themselves were responsible for the women’s deaths. In 1843, the American professor Oliver Wendell Holmes (father of the judge) identified lack of hygiene as the cause. Three years later, Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor at the Vienna General Hospital, noticed that at its First Clinic, operated by doctors, 10 per cent of mothers died; at the Second Clinic, operated by midwives, only 4 per cent died. When a doctor died after accidentally stabbing himself with a scalpel used in an autopsy, Semmelweis realized that the doctors were constantly going from autopsies to births. Semmelweis’s measures of hygiene at once reduced deaths dramatically. But doctors mocked both the idea that they as gentlemen could be unclean and the very theory of germs. Simultaneously the 1848 revolution, including the Hungarian rebellion, made Semmelweis a suspect figure. He was stymied and forced to resign. He moved to Pest in Hungary, but while the British tentatively welcomed his ideas, German and Austrian doctors attacked him. He went mad, talking incessantly about childbed fever, and died in a lunatic asylum. It was only with germ theory that Semmelweis was proved right and childbed fever and infant mortality sharply reduced.

* Flaubert, a Norman surgeon’s son, escaped the revolutionary chaos by embarking on an aesthetic and sexual tour of Greece, Egypt and Constantinople, sampling boys and girls in exploits recounted in his letters. He disliked both the revolution and its backlash, calling himself a ‘romantic, liberal old dunce’. It was only later in 1857 that he wrote his study of society’s cruel treatment of an unfaithful wife, Madame Bovary.

* In 1849, soon after Napoleon’s election, Faustin Soulouque, the Haitian president, declared himself Emperor Faustin. Born in 1782, of Mandinka descent, he was freed and then fought the French, rising to chief of the presidential guards. On the death of the president, the ‘mulatto elite’ chose the unambitious sixty-five-year-old Soulouque as a frontman. Instead, he formed a militia, the Zinglins, executed any opponents, then founded a new Haitian empire. Since he and Empress Adelina had only a daughter, he chose his nephew as heir. The emperor tried to reconquer the Dominican Republic, independent since 1844. But Haiti was not allowed to keep its conquest. In 1859, the emperor was overthrown by his henchman, General Fabre Geffrard, duc de Tabara, who became president. It was the end of Haitian experiments in monarchy.

* Disgusted by the rise of Napoleon III, ‘the Nephew’, Marx joked grimly, ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ In their letters, in which they vehemently denounced their many enemies and rivals, he and Engels traded racist abuse (‘n——’ was a favourite); Engels called Marx ‘the Moor’ for his swarthiness; Marx called Engels ‘the General’.

* Napoleon was accompanied back to splendour by his uncle Jérôme, whose two children were the heart of the family: the heir, the inept and petty Plon-Plon, thought he should be emperor and consoled himself by stealing Napoleon’s mistresses and demanding money; his sister Mathilde was the opposite, artistic and unpretentious, laughing, ‘If it weren’t for Napoleon I, I’d be selling oranges in the streets of Ajaccio.’ Jérôme, king of Westphalia, commander of a corps in Russia and at Waterloo, was now president of the Senate. Jérôme’s son by Betsy Patterson, Bo Bonaparte, had stayed in America where his son Charles served in Teddy Roosevelt’s Cabinet.

* Eugénie’s mother Manuela was an Irish wine merchant’s daughter who had married a Spanish grandee and then become mistress of an array of European luminaries, including the British foreign secretary, Lord Clarendon. Her friend Prosper Mérimée based his novel Carmen on her life, later adapted for opera by Bizet.

* Lionel de Rothschild, head of the British bank, visiting his uncle James, was impressed: ‘I wish we had a man like the emperor to make a few alterations in old London.’ Twenty years earlier, Lionel had succeeded his father NM, who at his death in the 1830s was probably the richest private individual in the world: ‘his personal fortune’, estimates Niall Ferguson, ‘equivalent to 0.62 per cent of British national income’. Now, Lionel was close friends with the man who commissioned a ‘few alterations in London’: Benjamin Disraeli. Five years later, in the summer of 1858, London, also suffering frequent cholera epidemics, emulated Paris after a faecal stench – the Great Stink – had overwhelmed the city. The Conservative chancellor, Disraeli, denounced the ‘Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors’, and launched the construction of London’s magnificent sewers by a visionary engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, who created 82 miles of brick-lined sewers and 1,100 miles of street sewers with pumping stations as splendid as palaces. It took twenty years but it ended the stink and reduced cholera too. Cholera had probably originated in India centuries before it was identified on its arrival in Britain in 1831. Known as the Blue Death – lack of oxygen in its last stages turned patients blue – it was caused by a bacterium in the drinking water of industrial cities contaminated by human faeces. At exactly this time, late 1854, John Snow, a doctor who had anaesthetized Queen Victoria with chloroform during the delivery of her eighth child, was tracking a cholera outbreak that killed 127 in Soho, London, when he realized that a street pump was the key contaminator. Closing the pump ended the epidemic, proving that cholera was passed by water.

* To keep up with steam, the telegraph was developed, and in 1851 a line was laid between Britain and France. In July 1858, an American tycoon, Cyrus West Field, who had made a fortune supplying paper to newspapers, orchestrated the laying of a transatlantic telegraph cable, 2,000 miles long, that allowed President Buchanan and Queen Victoria to exchange greetings. Field’s achievement contributed to the link between Britain and America and accelerated the globalization of the world. By 1865, a message from London to Bombay took thirty-five minutes. The smaller world made news more urgent: after Charles-Louis Havas, a Jewish writer from Rouen, had founded the first press agency, one of his employees, Israel Josaphat, a rabbi’s son from Kassel, defected to start his own agency, first using pigeons, then paying steamships to throw canisters with American news off ships at the first Irish port and finally, after moving to London and changing his name to Reuter, his new company used telegraphy to become a global news agency.

* Cora became a courtesan by accident, starting out with a ‘horror of men’, but became the lover of Morny and a series of high-born young men including Tsar Alexander II, the Prince of Orange, Napoleon, Plon-Plon and later the British prince of Wales. She held court in a Paris mansion nicknamed Les Petites Tuileries and a country chateau, her bedrooms and bathrooms fitted in gold. Once she had herself borne by four giants into a dinner party on a silver salver which was then opened to reveal Cora, inviting the guests to ‘cut into the next dish’. Typically, the story ended tragically: a young man, ruined by Cora, shot himself in her mansion. Her luck turned, her chateaux and jewels were sold and she died in poverty.

* Alexandre Dumas, son of the author of The Three Musketeers, asked Valtesse if he could call on her. ‘Sorry, monsieur,’ she replied, ‘it’s not within your means.’ Valtesse was one of the few horizontales who survived into old age, keeping her fortune and dignity. Dumas immortalized his love affair with Marie Duplessis and her death from TB in his novel La Dame aux camélias, coining the term demi-monde for this world between the street and the palace. Reality and theatre merged as the play became a hit, watched by the entire demi-monde; Verdi later turned it into an opera, La Traviata. Out of this cruel, implacable world emerged a real genius. Sarah Bernhardt was the daughter of a Dutch-Jewish courtesan, Julie, who was a lover of Morny (possibly Sarah’s father). Morny arranged for Sarah to join the Comédie-Française where, playing roles like the heroine of La Dame aux camélias, she became the world’s most famous actress.

* The advances of medicine could save the lives of millions only thanks to the public measures of leaders like Palmerston, combined with international cooperation. In 1851, the first international health organization had been founded when twelve European nations each sent a diplomat and a doctor to the International Sanitary Conference in Paris to agree quarantine measures against cholera. In 1907 the conference metamorphosed into the Office International d’Hygiene Publique. But it took decades to coordinate measures to prevent infection. For almost a century, smallpox was the only disease treated with vaccination.

* Albert was a reforming visionary filled with ideas to improve palace and public. He was one of the creators of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in the Crystal Palace in 1851 – its exhibits included the Koh-i-Noor diamond just procured by the annexation of the Sikh Punjab – which was visited by six million people. It was filled with the technological wonders of progress but also with those of destruction. A Prussian ironmaster named Alfred Krupp displayed a Krupp cannon and a 43,000-pound ingot of steel, a technical wonder. (The eccentric did not sell any cannon and Prussia remained a minor power still crippled by the recent revolutions. There seemed little use for his colossal guns.) Albert used the Exhibition’s profits to build his next project, Albertopolis, still London’s quarter of museums. Yet he was often stymied by courtiers, politicians and even his own wife. ‘I’m very happy and contented,’ he said, ‘but the difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is that I am only the husband, not the master in the house.’

* Alexander II, genial, lascivious and urbane, saw himself as a European cosmopolitan like his uncle Alexander I rather than as a despotic nationalist like his dread father. Russia’s first defeat since 1812 convinced him that his country needed reform. In 1861, he liberated twenty-three million serfs whose lot was similar to slavery; he created local self-government bodies and jury trials, raising hopes of deeper reforms. Yet he was every inch a Russian autocrat, completing his father’s war against the Chechen jihadis and purging the Circassians, both in the Caucasus. Then in 1863 the Poles launched a rebellion; to European outrage (though he was backed by Prussia) Alexander crushed them; 22,000 Poles were hanged or deported, and he ordered Russification policies, banning the use of Polish, Ukrainian and Lithuanian languages in schools and offices. As in 1830, Russian society, even liberals, backed the suppression of Poland and of Little Russia (one of the three Russian governates that comprise today’s Ukraine), an attitude that the dissident writer Alexander Herzen called ‘patriotic syphilis’. Yet Alexander also promoted the use of the Finnish language and offered Finland its own constitution. He redirected Russian expansion into central Asia, where he ruled through Islamic institutions and notables. Frustrated in Europe, he dreamed of an attack on British India.

* In 1858, Albert negotiated the marriage of their eldest child, pretty, fair Vicky, aged seventeen, to the impressive Prince Frederick (Fritz) of Prussia, five years her senior: ‘the 2nd most eventful day in my life’, wrote Victoria. ‘I felt almost as if it were I that was being married again, only much more nervous.’ Vicky was soon pregnant, enduring an almost fatal breech birth, in which the breathing of the baby, born with a withered left arm, was obstructed. The child was named Wilhelm, the future Kaiser of Germany.

* In Madras, retired EIC official Christopher Biden, beach magistrate, author of a manual on naval discipline and relative of a twenty-first-century US president, ‘fell by the hands of a band of fanatics’.

* Buried in Lucknow, his epitaph read: ‘Here lies all that could die of William Stephen Raikes Hodson.’

* All empires are based on fear: the killing enabled Britain to dominate India with relatively few officials for around seventy years. A frosty British sense of racial superiority now reigned over the British Raj: marriage and indeed mixing between British and Indians diminished; British girls sailed for India to find husbands. British civil servants and officers governed, excluding Indians from the senior positions, with a new sense of seigneurial responsibility. Railways and telegraphs were useful for suppressing any future rebellions but also provided the infrastructure of India as a single political unit, raising rural incomes by as much as 16 per cent. By 1900, Indian railways were the world’s third largest network. Schools, universities and a British-style judiciary started to train an Indian middle class.

* It was a time when British conquistadors could still seize new provinces for the empire. In 1838, a young adventurer called James Brooke, son of an EIC judge in Calcutta, chartered his own ship and intervened in the internecine politics of the sultanate of Brunei. His defeat of Malay pirates and Dayak tribesmen in 1842 persuaded the sultan, Omar Saifuddien II, to appoint him hereditary raja of Sarawak. ‘The white raja’ tried to ban Dayak headhunting, but he also used Dayak auxiliaries to crush opposition. In London, accused of atrocities, he defied his critics but struggled to organize the succession to his strange monarchy. As a boy Brooke may have fathered a child, but he was a secret homosexual who fell in love with a Brunei prince, Badruddin, and a series of young English aristocrats and street children to whom he wrote feverish love poems. Since he had no legitimate sons, he appointed a nephew as heir, then fell out with him. The raja spent his old age in Totnes, pursuing and being blackmailed by local boys. When he died he left his raj to a younger nephew, Charles Brooke. The dynasty ruled Sarawak until 1946.

* Ward was a filibuster, a commander of American private armies who had served in the navy, then joined the filibuster William Walker in his attempt to conquer a private empire in Mexico before travelling to China, where he enrolled as a pirate hunter. Next he set up a small Colt-wielding group of mercenaries, the Shanghai Foreign Arms Corps, which developed into an army, until he was killed aged thirty. His successor was a blue-eyed general’s son and fervid evangelical with a Jesus complex who regularly conversed with St Paul. Gordon served in the Crimean War before serving in China. He was disgusted by what he heard of Elgin’s ‘vandal-like’ sacking of the Summer Palace. Joining Cixi’s war against the Taiping, ‘this splendid Englishman’ won thirty-three battles, surrounded by his blue-clad bodyguard, showing unusual mercy in a brutal conflict and earning promotion from the emperor. On his return to England, he became a social worker among the poor boys of Gravesend, inviting these ‘scuttlers’ to stay in his house. Often wishing he had been castrated, he was probably a repressed homosexual.

* Garibaldi had earlier fought for Uruguayan independence. While in south America, he had sought out Manuela Sáenz, Bolívar’s paramour. Garibaldi had lost his own Manuela: during the Uruguayan war, he had fallen in love with a Brazilian gaucho, Anita de Sousa, who joined his freedom fighters. She combined ‘the strength and courage of a man and the charm and tenderness of a woman, manifested by the daring and vigour with which she had brandished her sword and the beautiful oval of her face that trimmed the softness of her extraordinary eyes’. They had four children together and in 1848 she returned with him to fight for Rome, dying of malaria as French and Austrian troops crushed the revolution. Garibaldi always wore her poncho and scarf.

* Douglass was born enslaved on a Maryland plantation, to an African-American mother while ‘My master was my father.’ Escaping from his bondage, he made it to Massachusetts, where he started to campaign against slavery. There Douglass, handsome and charismatic, a beautiful writer and superb speaker, celebrated his freedom with ‘joyous excitement’: ‘I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions.’ He added, ‘I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life.’ But he felt he had no part in American democracy: ‘I have no country. What country have I?’ His autobiography, published in 1845, rallied the anti-slavery movement.

* It was typical of Grant too that when Ely Parker, born Hasanoanda, a full-blood Seneca Native American, who was trained as lawyer and engineer, offered to raise a Native American regiment and was turned down by Lincoln’s war secretary, he was employed and promoted by Grant.

* Gladstone, son of Britain’s biggest slave owner, was still conflicted about slavery. He described ‘the principle of the superiority of the white man and his right to hold the black in slavery’ as ‘detestable’ and favoured emancipation of slaves, yet he supported the Confederacy, claiming that ‘Slaves would be better off if the States were separated,’ and that the Confederacy ‘had made a nation of the South’. Even in 1864, when the war was almost over, he criticized the ‘negrophilists’ who ‘sacrifice three white lives in order to set free one black man’.

* Evans was living the Empire life in Paris, with a mansion (Bella Rosa), an art collection and of course a courtesan, Manet’s model Méry Laurent. It was a long way from Philadelphia, but in 1850 the twenty-seven-year-old dentist was called in to treat Napoleon. ‘You’re a young fellow, but clever, I like you,’ the emperor said. Evans became his doctor surgeon, developing the first fillings and the use of laughing gas, and was soon consulted by Tsar Alexander II and the Ottoman sultan. Visiting Napoleon weekly, he admired Haussmann’s plans for Paris, enabling him to buy property that soon made him a fortune. When Eugénie first came to Paris, one of Napoleon’s adjutants spotted her in Evans’s waiting room and reported her arrival to the emperor. The dentist became her confidant. In 1864, Napoleon sent him to America to report on the civil war.

* Maximilian spent the trip writing a detailed Habsburgian court etiquette with Mexican trappings (‘At this point, the Emperor will hand his sombrero to the attending Field-Adjutant …’). He was not the first emperor: Maximilian appointed the grandsons of Emperor Agustín as princes and possible heirs, while selecting a descendant of the last tlatoani as lady-in-waiting.

* He was the first of a modern phenomenon prevalent particularly in Latin America and Asia: the dynastic republic, a hereditary dictatorship founded not on the pre-1789 sacred monarchy but on a cosplay democracy and presidential constitution with rigged elections. The succession was usually father–son but sometimes husband–wife.

* Johnson’s only real achievement was to order Secretary Seward to buy Alaska from Russia for $15 million, a good deal for America.