The World

Hohenzollerns and Krupps, Albanians and Lakotas

THE MAD JUNKER, THE CANNON KING AND THE TOURNAMENT OF MODERN POWER: I’VE BEATEN THEM ALL! ALL!

In 1865 Otto von Bismarck had been minister-president of Prussia for three years, and he had come to the Villa Eugénie to analyse Napoleon and learn his price for not intervening in his planned war against Austria. The Prussian had admired Napoleon’s use of universal suffrage to win conservative support and was now planning to do the same himself. Nationalism had replaced religion to provide a sense of belonging and meaning for millions; nation states, run by impersonal bureaucracies, became awesome organizers of resources; civil societies grew ever more complicated – but dynasties could adapt and provide stability and leadership. Nations were like families, monarchs their fathers and mothers.

Many believed that the shrewd Napoleon would outwit Bismarck and only hindsight can justify the contempt historians show to Napoleon and the respect shown to the minister-president. ‘We can imagine the eccentric volubility with which M. Bismarck would develop his sanguine schemes,’ wrote a British diplomat, ‘and the covert irony and silent amusement of the subtle sovereign.’

Bismarck was subtler than he looked. He was the brilliant, misanthropic son of an archetypical but ineffectual Junker and his intellectual wife, who was the daughter of an adviser to Frederick the Great. Bismarck despised his ordinary father – ‘How often did I repay his … good-natured tenderness with coldness and bad grace’ – and sneered at his mother: ‘As a small child I hated her.’ He grew up boundless in his confidence.

While at Göttingen University, he was nicknamed Mad Junker for his wild hunting, drinking and duelling (he insulted everyone and sought duels, managing to fight twenty-five in three terms), but he was curious and cosmopolitan, multilingual, well read and drawn to foreigners – his best friend was an American and he fell in love with an Englishwoman. After a crush on a friend’s wife, he married the demure Johanna von Puttkamer, with whom he had three children, including a son he bullied horribly, and later consoled himself in a platonic passion for a Russian princess. He delighted in conflict, yet never served in the Prussian army; he was an evangelical Pietist Christian without an ounce of Christian generosity. A soft-voiced but impressive speaker, he was a beguiling wit and a superb writer.

Horrified by the 1848 revolutions, he thought Frederick William the Flounderer was too weak, offering his services to his conservative brother Prince Wilhelm, while making provocative speeches in the Landtag (the Prussian assembly). But he saw politics with absolute clarity, a skill honed by spells as ambassador to Frankfurt, Paris and Petersburg: ‘Why do great states fight wars today? The only sound basis … is egoism, not romanticism.’ Bismarck learned his essential lesson from Napoleon III: nationalist populism was conservative. ‘Prussia is completely isolated. There’s but one ally for Prussia if she knows how to win and handle them … The German people.’ He would find a way: ‘Politics is less a science than an art.’ He revelled in its risks: ‘This trade teaches that one can be as shrewd as the shrewdest in the world and still go like a child into the dark.’

When Wilhelm succeeded as king, he found the monarchy paralysed, unable to get the Landtag to pass his military budget. The immoderate Bismarck, once unthinkable, had now, by a process of momentous inevitability, become the only choice left. Unlike Napoleon III, Bismarck did not depend on either election or coup, he did not lead a political party; his entire career depended on the favour of one old Hohenzollern officer, Wilhelm, who could dismiss him at any moment. Their relationship was like a stormy twenty-six-year marriage, interspersed with Bismarckian spasms of shouting, weeping and threats of resignation. ‘It’s not easy,’ joked Wilhelm later, ‘to be kaiser under Bismarck.’ This solitary, indefatigable giant was manic, petty, paranoid and vindictive – but the dynamic executor of plans that were the fruit of brutally clear analysis of the alchemy of power.

Bismarck’s plan was bold but not secret: ‘I’ll soon be compelled to undertake … the Prussian government,’ he told Disraeli, visiting London in June 1862. ‘My first care will be to organize the army,’ then ‘I shall seize the pretext to declare war against Austria … and give national unity to Germany under Prussian leadership.’

‘Be careful about that man,’ said Disraeli. ‘He means what he says.’ As minister-president, Bismarck enjoyed shocking Prussian liberals: ‘The great questions of the time will be resolved not by speeches and majority decisions – that was the great mistake of 1848 – but by iron and blood.’

War was risky – Bismarck called it ‘rolling the iron dice’ – but he was a risk-taker: ‘My entire life has been spent gambling for high stakes with other people’s money.’ Bismarck had Jewish confidants but, like many Junkers and many conservative nobles from Russia to France, despised Jews socially and regarded them as harbingers of dangerous liberalism. Yet his schemes required finance. The Rothschilds were close to Austria and France, but he went to dine at the Frankfurt mansion of Mayer Carl von Rothschild, sneering at the ‘real old Jew haggler, tons of silver, golden spoons and forks’, who recommended Gerson Bleichröder, a Rothschild ally. Bleichröder became Bismarck’s banker, diplomatic fixer and arguably one of his few friends.

Bismarck and Wilhelm were aided by the third remarkable Prussian: Alfred Krupp, the Cannon King, founder of a dynasty that would dominate German industry through the rule of Hohenzollerns, Hitler and the European Union.^*

Widow Krupp’s grandson, Alfred’s father, had founded the great steel works in Essen, but he had driven them into the ground, even losing his mansion and being forced to move to a small cottage that stood beside the furnaces. Alfred was as extraordinary as Bismarck, a spidery, stick-thin, neurotic, pointy-faced, hypochondriacal crank who wore a shabby red toupee and was obsessed with steel, technology and weirdly the smell of horse manure.

When his father died in 1826, Alfred, then aged fourteen, brought up ‘with the fear of total ruin’, inherited the works, travelling to Yorkshire to spy on the making of Britain’s finest Sheffield steel. On his return, barely sleeping, constantly ill – ‘I celebrate my birthday in my own way, last year with cough medicine, this one with enemas’ – he single-handedly propelled Krupp: ‘I myself acted as clerk, letter writer, cashier, smith, smelter, coke pounder, nightwatchman at the converting furnace,’ where ‘I succeeded in the important invention of a completely weldable crucible steel.’ First he made money manufacturing spoons for the Austrians, then, riding the railway boom, he started selling his cast-steel axles and springs, and the first weldless steel railway wheels; soon he would be supplying railway track to Europe, America, Asia. Then he tried making rifles with steel.

In 1853, the steel-mad entrepreneur married the twenty-one-year-old Bertha, a blonde fellow neurasthenic whom he romanced with steel: ‘Where I supposed I had nothing but a piece of cast steel, I had a heart.’ She gave birth to a son, Friedrich, but suffered in their dreary soot-smeared cottage. ‘One should be downright simple,’ he lectured her. ‘Knowing you have clean underwear under your dress should be enough.’

Soon she could bear it no longer. But in 1852 Krupp met the other essential relationship in his life: Prince Wilhelm admired a Krupp gun so much that he came to inspect the Essen factory and, as king, ordered 100 sixty-pound cannon. After Bismarck’s ‘blood and iron’ speech, Wilhelm sent him to Krupp, who would provide the iron. At the works, they dined together, Bismarck saying of Napoleon, ‘What a stupid man he is.’ When Krupp designed a breech-loading cannon, Wilhelm and Bismarck bought it, but so did Russia, Britain, Austria. ‘We must,’ wrote Krupp, ‘put all our energy into serving Prussia.’ Bismarck waited to use his new guns.

In November 1863, the death of a Danish king enabled Bismarck to exploit a traditional dynastic puzzle. Denmark claimed the German duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. In January 1864, Bismarck formed a Germanic alliance with Franz Josef to defeat Denmark, each occupying one of the duchies. Bismarck appreciated a moment of felicitous conjunction: Russia was won over by Prussian acquiescence in the crushing of the Polish rebellion; Britain was distracted by India, and France by Mexico.

Bismarck briefed Bleichröder to inform James de Rothschild in Paris that ‘The intimacy with Austria had reached its term. A chill will follow.’ Bismarck visited Napoleon in Biarritz, vaguely dangling bits of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Rhineland, but nothing was agreed. Napoleon thought Belgium ‘a ripe pear which one day will fall into our mouth’, but Bismarck compared him to ‘an innkeeper holding out his hand for a tip’. The emperor was ‘a sphinx without a riddle’. King Wilhelm received Krupp, warning him not to sell guns to Austria: ‘Come to your senses while there’s still time.’

Bismarck engineered the confrontation with Austria. Eugénie encouraged Napoleon to mobilize but, wearied by the corrosion of power and bamboozled by Bismarck, he saw no need.^* The Habsburgs had been the ‘presiding power’ of the German Confederation, the replacement for the Holy Roman Empire, since 1815 (with a short interlude during the years 1848–9). To defend this paramountcy, Franz Josef confidently went to war against Prussia, backed by the kings of Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, all fielding Krupp cannon. Prussia’s needle gun was superior to Austria’s Lorenz gun, but astonishingly the Habsburg believed in his slower guns because rapid fire encouraged soldiers to waste ammunition. The Prussian chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke, had noted the use of railways by Napoleon III, then by the Americans in the civil war, and mastered their use himself.

On 3 July 1866 at Sadowa (Königgrätz in Czechia), Moltke routed the Austrians.^* Bismarck ended Austria’s nominal German leadership and created a North German Confederation, headed by King Wilhelm of Prussia, who wanted to carve up the Habsburg empire. But after a tantrum, tears and screaming, Bismarck won his point, predicting that Austria would become Prussia’s natural ally: indeed, House Habsburg became its chief ally until 1918.

Bismarck relished ‘playing a game of cards with a million-dollar stake he didn’t really possess. Now the wager had been won, he felt depressed.’ Later he was elated, banging his desk: ‘I’ve beaten them all! ALL!’ Krupp too had mixed feelings – one of his cannon had exploded, killing its gunners. After a semi-breakdown, not helped by his wife’s separate, luxurious life and affairs, he offered to swap the old guns for new, demonstrating a new generation of guns to an enthusiastic Wilhelm and Bismarck.

The defeat at Sadowa was a sign for Napoleon to exercise caution, especially as the French were watching the Mexican endgame. Maximilian withdrew to Santiago de Querétaro, where Juárez besieged him. When he attempted to break out, Maximilian was betrayed. Juárez sentenced him to death. ‘I always wanted to die on a morning like this,’ murmured Maximilian as he was taken out before 3,000 troops. He boldly addressed them: ‘Mexicans! Men of my class and race [he meant the Habsburgs] are created by God to be the happiness of nations or their martyrs. Long live Mexico!’ Refusing a blindfold, he choreographed his martyrdom with two of his generals on either side of him like Christ. Franz Josef said nothing about his brother’s death except that he would be missed at the next shoot, where ‘we may still look forward to some good sport’.

Waiting for a chance to unite Germany, Bismarck pivoted like a Krupp howitzer towards France. In April 1867, the world celebrated the apogee of Napoleonic France at the second Exposition Universelle, attended by seven million. The novelist Victor Hugo, usually a Napoleonic critic, wrote the brochure.

On 12 April, Hortense Schneider, the sexual icon of Paris, starred in Offenbach’s La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, a performance attended by Napoleon, King Wilhelm and Bismarck, Tsar Alexander II and Kaiser Franz Josef. Besieged by monarchs, La Snéder would not get into bed for less than 10,000 francs. Bertie, the twenty-five-year-old pinguid prince of Wales, representing his mother, dived into Parisian lubricity.^* But the host would have done better to pay attention to Krupp at the Exposition, where his display of a colossal fifty-ton cannon, 1,000-pound shells and a giant steel ingot of 80,000 pounds was visited by Bismarck and Wilhelm. No wonder that at the theatre Bismarck had laughed at Offenbach’s portrait of power and war: ‘That’s exactly how it is.’

ISMAIL THE MAGNIFICENT AND EUGéNIE: THE EMPIRE IS AN OLD WOMAN

On 17 November 1869, Empress Eugénie opened the Suez Canal, the work of her cousin Ferdinand de Lesseps.^* The project of a canal to link the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, cutting the distance between Europe and India, was an ancient idea but the British role in restraining Mehmed Ali’s conquests led him to favour a French plan. Lesseps was a diplomat, not an engineer, but he had served in Cairo, meeting Mehmed and his successors to pitch a project personally backed by Napoleon. Cairo’s relations with the emperor were so close that the Egyptians had sent a Nubian regiment to fight in Mexico. During the American war, Egyptian cotton supplied British factories; money poured in and thousands of labourers perished building the canal.

Ismail, aged thirty-three, the reigning khedive of Egypt, grandson of Mehmed, son of Ibrahim the Red and his Circassian wife, was a life force who embraced the Suez project, supervised by Lesseps from his villa (still standing) in the new town, Ismailia. Ismail the Magnificent, imaginative, impatient and energetic, was also in the audience for La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein and shopped in Paris, splurging on Krupp’s cannon – and on the Parisian courtesan, Blanche d’Antigny, who joined him in Cairo. Egypt, he said, ‘is no longer in Africa; we’re now part of Europe’, and he built railways, palaces, bridges, theatres.

Eugénie^* and Franz Josef each moored their yachts beside Ismail’s Mahrousa. ‘Magnificent!’ Eugénie telegraphed to Napoleon. At Ismailia, Ismail built a sultanic encampment of 1,200 tents with chandeliers and paintings and commissioned Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, performed at his new opera house. But his real ambition was an African empire and his gambit helped unleash the European carve-up of Africa.

At home, Eugénie found Napoleon suffering from gallstones and exhaustion. His shrewd brother Morny was dead and he tried to appease mounting opposition by conceding some power to ministers and the Assembly – reform is always a dangerous moment.

In February 1870, Spain offered its throne to King Wilhelm’s cousin Prince Leopold von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. Now Leopold consulted King Wilhelm: should he accept Spain? Wilhelm banned it, but Bismarck persuaded him to change his mind, planning to use the offer as bait for Napoleon: ‘Politically a French attack would be very beneficial.’

The French were outraged, forcing Napoleon to react. His sexual energy endured longer than his political will. He had enjoyed a last affair with a circus acrobat but, in agony from his gallstones, he struggled to resist escalation. ‘It’s a disgrace,’ said Eugénie. ‘The empire’s turning into an old woman.’

THE MOUSETRAP: NAPOLEON’S DEBACLE

Harassed by Eugénie, panicked by public war fever, Napoleon allowed his foreign minister to demand that Wilhelm reject the Spanish offer.^* When Wilhelm did so, instead of banking this success his ambassador insisted on a written rejection, possibly seeking a pretext for war. If so, he succeeded only too well: the irritated old king dictated a telegram. Bismarck doctored it to make it positively rude. Napoleon’s honour was impugned. France declared war. In July, the French mobilized an army forged in Algeria and Mexico that had beaten Russia and Austria; many expected it to beat Prussia. Wilhelm mobilized, joined by Bavaria and other kingdoms, 1.1 million men in all. ‘We’ve been shamelessly forced into this war,’ Crown Princess Vicky told her mother Queen Victoria. Both deplored Napoleonic aggression and admired Prussian honour, oblivious to Bismarck’s gambit.

Napoleon insisted on taking command of one army in Lorraine accompanied by the fourteen-year-old prince imperial, Loulou, while leaving Eugénie in Paris as regent; the other army mustered in Alsace. Yet the mobilization was incomplete, the emperor in pain and not in control. On the Prussian side, the cerebral, meticulous chief of staff von Moltke, Der Grosse Schweiger – the Great Silent One – manoeuvred brilliantly over specially built railways, deploying Krupp cannon with twice the French range.^* The sick Napoleon could barely mount a horse let alone command a war and he and his marshals were repeatedly confused by the direction taken by the Prussians. After narrowly escaping Metz, which was besieged by the Prussians, Napoleon tried to relieve his other army and cover Paris, falling into a Prussian trap. After tearfully hugging Loulou, he sent him to safety.

At Sedan, on 1–2 September 1870, Moltke’s 250,000 troops with 500 guns, and with Bismarck and Wilhelm spectating, trapped Napoleon and 110,000 men. ‘We have them,’ said Moltke, ‘in a mousetrap.’

‘We’re in a chamber pot and they’re shitting on us,’ exclaimed General Ducrot. Krupp guns scythed through French cavalry charges.

‘Agh!’ gasped King Wilhelm. ‘Brave fellows.’

‘Why,’ asked Napoleon, riding out into the battle to find death, ‘does this useless struggle go on?’ But, unable to die, he ordered surrender. Bismarck was astonished that Napoleon was present. As the emperor rode painfully towards the Prussian headquarters, Bismarck cut him off: ‘I gave the military salute. He took off his cap whereupon I took off mine.’ Led to a cottage, Napoleon lamented that he had ‘been driven into war by public opinion’. Bismarck was amazed by Napoleon’s decrepitude, muttering, ‘There’s a dynasty on the way out.’

Meeting at a nearby chateau, Wilhelm treated Napoleon courteously. ‘I congratulate you on your army, above all your artillery,’ said Napoleon. Krupp had won. As Napoleon sobbed, Wilhelm blushed and looked away.

In Paris, Eugénie received Napoleon’s telegraph. ‘Surely you don’t believe that abomination,’ she cried in a ‘torrent of incoherent mad words’. ‘A Napoleon never surrenders. He’s dead! Why didn’t he kill himself? … What a name to leave to his son!’ Outside, rebellious crowds surrounded the Tuileries chanting ‘La déchéance!’ Dethronement! On 4 September, the Third Republic was declared at Paris’s Hôtel de Ville, launching a new 1792-style war effort against Prussia. Eugénie, insisting that she had ‘no fear of death’ but that ‘I dreaded falling into the hands of the viragoes who’d defile my last scene,’ fled to the house of her American dentist, Evans, who escorted her to England. She settled in Kent, and a dying Napoleon joined her. Their son Loulou longed to enlist in the British army.

La Débâcle coincided with the triumph of the tropical emperor Pedro over Marshal López, who had so admired Napoleon.

KKK AND GREASY GRASS: GRANT AND SITTING BULL

Pedro camped with his soldiers and resisted any move towards peace as the Brazilians fought their way into Paraguay, hunting the tyrant. ‘What sort of fear could I have? That they take the government from me?’ asked Pedro. ‘Many better kings than I have lost it, and to me it is no more than the weight of a cross which it is my duty to carry.’

After the Brazilians had taken Asunción, López twice moved his capital. Pedro appointed his twenty-seven-year-old French son-in-law Gaston, comte d’Eu, as commander-in-chief. Gaston, a grandson of Louis Philippe, had initially been disappointed by his wife, Princess Isabel, but he turned out to be affectionate and capable. The public relished his exploits as he not only won battles but liberated 25,000 Paraguayan slaves – though many were then conscripted into the allied army. The desperate López murdered his own two brothers, his brothers-in-law and hundreds of foreigners; his English engineer committed suicide by injecting nicotine. Short of ammunition, he had his victims lanced to death. Finally at Cerro Corá, López, accompanied by Madama Eliza Lynch and their son Colonel Juan, aged fourteen, her Residentas and a guard of 400 half-dressed youths, was trapped, wounded and abandoned. Brazilian soldiers found him washing his wounds in a stream and shot him. ‘A Paraguayan colonel never surrenders,’ cried his son – also shot. Madama threw herself on to his body shouting, ‘Is this the civilization you promised?’ They forced her to bury both Lópezes with her bare hands.^* Between 800,000 and 1.3 million Paraguayans were dead, a toll from which Paraguay never recovered.

Emperor Pedro was triumphant. Yet the war had exposed inefficiency, injustice and corruption; in particular, the bravery of black regiments had highlighted the infamy of slavery. Pedro was an unhurried abolitionist who lacked the constitutional power to overrule his slave-owning elite.^* But in the wake of his victory, in September 1871, he orchestrated the Law of Free Birth: the babies of slaves were born free. Brazil, with its 1.6 million slaves, was now the last slave society in America. As Pedro was hosted in Washington by a new president, America’s ex-slaves were in danger of losing their liberty all over again.

As Johnson’s presidency was disintegrating, General Grant had resigned from the government. Johnson, widely despised, had dismissed his secretary of war whose tenure was protected by congressional legislation, leading to the first impeachment. Johnson survived his Senate trial but was too damaged to run for the presidency a second time.

Diffident and reticent, but at the height of his prestige, Grant was ambivalent. ‘I didn’t want the presidency,’ he said. ‘But it couldn’t be helped …’ In November 1868, Grant, backed by Douglass, won the election – the youngest president so far, and one determined to defend the 3.5 million freed African-Americans of the south at any cost.

At his inauguration, Grant promised that black suffrage would be protected in a Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, inviting the first African-American senator, Hiram Revels, an Episcopal minister who had helped arrange black regiments during the war, to the White House. In February 1870, he ordered the firing of a hundred cannon to celebrate the Fifteenth Amendment – ‘the most important event,’ said Grant, ‘since the nation came to life.’ While only three black officials had ever been elected in America, sixteen were now elected to Congress, over 1,000 others elected to other positions; black churches and schools were created across the south; and black families – divided by the anti-family mechanism of slavery – were reunited and consolidated in a quest for lost relatives.

Great gains had been made, yet the former slave masters of the south were determined to claw back their power, and they would ultimately be supported by the leaders of the north in pulling off an astonishing reversal of the victory of the war.

All freed slaves were promised forty acres and a mule, but former slave masters refused to deliver – even though their ancestors had received free land by headright. The freed slaves’ poverty made them vulnerable. ‘When you turned us loose,’ Frederick Douglass declared ten years later, ‘you gave us no acres: you turned us loose to the sky, to the storm, to the whirlwind, and, worst of all, you turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated masters.’ Across the south, the KKK assassinated and intimidated freed slaves and white campaigners for black rights. The KKK’s Invisible Empire of racist paramilitaries threatened a new conflict and a new oppression. Two thousand African-Americans were killed in lynchings – extrajudicial murders of African-Americans, supposedly guilty of crimes, often celebrated by whites as part of ‘southern’ culture.

The violence was just the vanguard of a deeper counter-attack. The ex-Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens and many of his racist cohort had been elected to Congress. When the African-American Senator Revels took his seat, southern Democrats tried to stop him. They gradually reimposed supremacy over their ex-slaves but, above all, they wished to prevent black people, 36 per cent of the southern votes, from exercising their rights. Even in the north, only parts of New England gave African-Americans the vote. Connecticut, Wisconsin and Minnesota refused; most southern states now passed ‘Black Codes’. Murder sprees by the KKK and its allies, the Knights of the White Camellia, escalated, and the racists seized power in some counties.

Grant denounced the ‘force and terror’ designed to ‘reduce colored people to a condition akin to slavery’, oversaw the passing of the KKK Act and three Enforcement Acts and dispatched federal troops plus Justice Department marshals and the new Secret Service to destroy these domestic terrorists. In South Carolina, 2,000 Klansmen were arrested. In 1873, the KKK and another paramilitary group, the White Man’s League, rampaged through Colfax, Louisiana, killing around 300; in 1876 in Ellenton, South Carolina, 150 black people were massacred. In both cases, Grant sent in the army, crushing the KKK, but the struggle was just beginning.

Grant proposed another solution, pursuing Lincoln’s idea to buy a new state that would be a safe home for southern black people from ‘the crime of Ku Kluxism’. When Congress failed to ratify the treaty, he sent Douglass down to the Caribbean to investigate the US annexation of the Dominican Republic, the formerly Spanish colony that had won its independence after defying attempts by Haitian President Boyer and Emperor Faustin to conquer their own little empire. Supported by Douglass, Grant bought it for $1.5 million, but Congress stymied the purchase. Douglass was both disappointed and infuriated by the betrayals of the civil war victory.

During his two-term presidency, Grant’s noble work in the south and his decent intentions towards Native Americans were undermined by his personal naivety in high politics, and by his inability to restrain America’s imperial voracity in the west. He backed a Peace Plan, offering the Native Americans ‘civilization, Christianization and citizenship’ when what they wanted was freedom to hunt and raid. The civil war had reinvigorated the Lakota and Cheyenne in Colorado and the Dakotas, while in the south the Comanche had returned to raiding.

Now both fronts deteriorated in tandem. Grant was sympathetic but many of his generals shared the view of General Sherman: ‘The more Indians we kill this year, the less we’d have to kill next.’ In early 1870, US cavalry burned alive and hacked to pieces 173 Piegan Blackfeet, mainly women and children, in Montana, exposing the army’s genocidal instincts.

On 27 June 1874, Quanah Parker, son of Peta Nocona and his Anglo wife Cynthia Ann, led a unit of 300 fighters to attack a hundred buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle. Quanah was accompanied by a new spiritual leader, Isa-tai, a medicine man who in May had envisioned during a sun dance the destruction of the white settlers, uniting many of the Comanche into a newly powerful war band of a thousand fighters. ‘There was never a more splendidly barbaric sight,’ recalled Billy Dixon, one of the buffalo hunters. ‘Hundreds of warriors, the flower of the fighting men of the southwestern Plains tribes, mounted upon their finest horses, armed with guns and lances, and carrying heavy shields of thick buffalo hide, were coming like the wind.’ But their buffalo guns held Quanah at bay and a lucky shot by Dixon killed Isa-tai; Quanah was wounded.

Out west, army predation and a gold rush of settlers raised tensions and forced a reluctant Grant to order the removal of the Lakota. In November 1864, at Sandy Creek (Colorado), US troops killed and scalped 160 Cheyenne. In 1868, a treaty recognized the Black Hills, sacred land, as territory of the Lakota people, the Oglala Sioux, but six years later the army sent in a flashy colonel, George Armstrong Custer, and a thousand troopers of the Seventh Cavalry who confirmed the presence of seams of gold. Prospectors poured into the Hills, founding Deadwood and other raucous mining camps. In June 1876, Sitting Bull, supreme chief of the Sioux and holy man, performed a sun dance and in his trance saw ‘soldiers falling into his camp like grasshoppers from the sky’. He and fellow leader Crazy Horse put together a multitribal alliance and launched a war.

Down south, in Texas, the Comanche kidnapping of a white boy now provoked military action. America, said General Sherman, must not ‘submit to this practice of paying for stolen children. It is better the Indian race be obliterated.’ Troops, backed by Tonkawa scouts, attacked Comanche villages, hunting down Quanah, whose surrender marked the end of Comancheria.^*

In the Dakotas, several army columns converged on Lakota villages. Grant loathed the insubordinate, narcissistic self-publicist Custer, a daredevil with long blond hair and fringed buckskin costumes, who had opposed Reconstruction, had been court-martialled for shooting deserters and had recently murdered more than 100 southern Cheyenne women and children. Grant banned this ‘not very level-headed man’ from the expeditions, but acquiesced when the general in command requested his presence.

On 17 June, Crazy Horse defeated a column under General Crook. At Greasy Grass, on 25 June, the overconfident Custer and his men were ambushed by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and several hundred braves and wiped out in thirty minutes, with 267 killed. Custer was found shot in the head, stripped naked, an arrow through his penis.

The defeat led to the systematic destruction of Native American villages across the Great Plains; afterwards the tribes entered reservations. The Black Hills were seized; the pre-eminent beneficiary of the gold rush was a straggly-bearded Missouri-born mining engineer, now based in San Francisco, called George Hearst. A veteran of the ’49 gold rush, whose Homestake Mine helped make him the richest mining baron, Hearst afterwards won election as a senator and in 1880 accepted, as payment for a poker debt, a failing newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, which he then presented to his son, William Randolph.

Hearst was just one of the robber barons who surfed the wave of muscular American capitalism. While black sharecroppers struggled to survive, cotton production recovered. Railways reached across the continent, doubling in length from 35,000 miles in 1865 to 70,000 by 1870. Railways became America’s business, enriching the titanic oligarchs of what the writer Mark Twain called the Gilded Age:^* Vanderbilt switched into railway building, fighting rivals Jay Gould and E. H. Harriman. It was in his relations with businessmen that Grant, who had coolly overseen the army, now displayed a high-handed naivety that tainted his presidency.

The Gilded Age was coal-fuelled and steam-powered, but an angular and meticulous young man was investing in another carbon fuel that seemed useful only for illumination. In fact it would change the world. On 10 January 1870, the thirty-one-year-old John D. Rockefeller founded an oil refinery in Cleveland, Ohio, that he called Standard Oil. At the end of the civil war, he had started to buy out other oil refiners. Rockefeller’s ascetic nature, manifested in an obsession with order and tidiness, was a reaction against a father who was an itinerant huckster, bigamist and snake-oil salesman. Houses had long been lit by whale oil, extracted by whalers, but in 1857 oil was discovered seeping out of the ground in Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, starting a switch to Rockefeller’s chief product, kerosene, now used to light private houses and the streets of the growing cities. Rockefeller played what he called his ‘great game’, an aggressive integration of the oil business into one ‘trust’ that controlled everything from the gushing oil via ships and refineries to the customers who bought their kerosene tins from the local store. The by-products of refining oil were useful for making lubricants for machinery, skin products and something called gasoline, but it was not lucrative. There seemed no use for it.

Money was Grant’s weakness. The president was entertained by the omnivorous Gould, who, gobbling up railways, was also attempting to corner the gold market. Gould personified the glamour and sleaze of the predatorial capitalist: Americans, wrote Twain, had ‘desired money’ before, ‘but he taught them to fall down and worship it’. If Grant’s misjudgements spoiled his reputation, his real achievements were squandered by his successors.^*

‘You say you’ve emancipated us. You have; and I thank you for it,’ said Douglass at the Republican convention in 1876, but ‘What does it all amount to, if the black man’s unable to exercise that freedom, and, after having been freed from the slaveholder’s lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder’s shot-gun?’

In 1876, Grant steered the country through a viciously contested election that was ultimately won by an Ohio Republican, Rutherford Hayes, thanks to a deal that withdrew federal troops from the south and allowed southern Democrats to ‘redeem’ their states, passing a slew of repressive laws (known as Jim Crow after ‘Jump Jim Crow’, a white theatre act portraying black people) that enforced segregation of schools, entertainment and transport and prevented black people from voting, encouraging an atmosphere in which persecutions were normal, none more malignant than lynchings, which became ever more frequent. Some 6,500 black people (and 1,300 whites, usually immigrants) were lynched between 1865 and 1950. Hayes’s dark deal was scarcely redeemed by his appointment of the ageing Douglass as the first black US marshal in DC. The Union had won the war; the Confederacy won the peace.

On 5 January 1871, Bismarck finally got his way and Moltke’s Krupp guns started to bombard besieged Paris.

THE IRON CHANCELLOR AND DIZZY

After the fall of Napoleon, Paris was quickly surrounded. Bismarck and Wilhelm made themselves comfortable in the most luxurious residence in western Europe, the palace of James de Rothschild at Ferrières. ‘Here I sit,’ boasted Bismarck to his wife, ‘under a picture of old Rothschild and his family.’

‘I’m too poor to buy myself such a thing,’ grumbled Wilhelm. ‘Folks like us can’t rise to this; only a Rothschild can achieve it.’ As Bismarck negotiated a unified Germany with the German kings, the mood darkened at Prussian headquarters. The new French government refused the moderate terms and attacked the Prussians; French peasants joined an insurgency. Moltke ordered villages destroyed, civilians shot, but refused to bombard Paris. Three months later, moving with the king into Versailles, Bismarck got his way: Krupp cannon lobbed 12,000 shells into Paris. In the besieged city a worker’s rebellion seized power and declared the Paris Commune.

Bismarck needed a German monarch to make the request that Wilhelm should become German emperor, and the best candidate was the king of the largest kingdom after Prussia: the twenty-five-year-old Ludwig II of Bavaria. A grandson of Lola Montez’s patron, Ludwig was an unbalanced dreamer who on succeeding to the throne immediately invited to Munich his washed-up, indebted hero, the composer Richard Wagner, who since the 1848 revolution had left a trail of adulterous and indebted adventures. Ludwig identified with the mythical Lohengrin, Knight of the Swan, one of the German heroes that inspired Wagner, who was writing a new operatic cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Ludwig was dazzled by the masterful, wild-haired, sharp-chinned Wagner, who shamelessly flirted with the homosexual monarch. Ludwig sponsored his new opera Tristan und Isolde, but Wagner shocked the Bavarians with a wild affair with his conductor’s wife, Cosima Liszt, and then demanded the dismissal of the kingdom’s ministers. An offended Ludwig sent him away, but ultimately he funded Wagner’s own Festspielhaus and mansion in the small town of Bayreuth, where he presented his Ring, showcasing the soaring range and musical barrage of what he called Gesamtkunstwerk – total artwork – which in its way defined Germanness just as much as Bismarck’s new empire, the empire for which he now wanted Ludwig’s help.

The Swan King preferred a loose Germany under his Habsburg cousins and resisted Wilhelm’s request until Bismarck secretly paid him six million gold marks. Ludwig signed his Kaiserbrief asking that Wilhelm ‘extend presidential rights across the German states … with the title of German Kaiser’. On 18 January 1871, at a convocation of princes and ministers at Versailles, Bismarck ‘came forward in the grimmest of humours’ and read his ‘address to the German People’, after which a grand duke cried, ‘Long live Kaiser Wilhelm!’ A ‘thundering hurrah at least six times shook the room’.^* It was ‘the dream of German poets’, exulted the new kaiser’s son Fritz. ‘Germany has her emperor again …’ The guns thundered as they bombarded Paris. Finally the French Third Republic agreed to German terms, the loss of Alsace and Lorraine and payment of five billion francs, raised by James’s sons Gustave and Alphonse de Rothschild, who had helped defend Paris during the siege.

Bismarck designed an experimental German state, a hybrid of absolutism and democracy in which the king of Prussia, Wilhelm, presided over the many German kingdoms and principalities as kaiser, balanced by a Reichstag, elected by universal male suffrage – a mixed monarchy so complicated that it could be directed only by Europe’s most brilliant manipulator, Bismarck himself. Its contradictions made it unstable, probably unworkable, but it was instantly an economic powerhouse. Krupp, master of the greatest industrial complex in Europe, celebrated. The victorious war was his best advertisement. ‘Cast steel has won its present position as the most indispensable material in war and peace,’ the Cannon King crowed to the German kaiser. ‘Railways, the greatness of Germany, the fall of France, belong to the steel age.’ Now residing in a new 300-room palace Villa Hügel outside Essen, employing 20,000 workers drilled in special Krupp uniforms, Krupp trained his son Fritz as heir.

Bismarck, appointed chancellor and raised to prince, feared the death of his octogenarian kaiser Wilhelm: his heir, Fritz, who had distinguished himself in the war, was a liberal, influenced by his English wife Vicky. Bismarck hated both as obstacles to his plans. The strain of managing his incoherent invention was compulsive but draining even for the cynical, ingenious chancellor. Into his seventies, he could dictate memoranda for five hours while micromanaging his own multiple conspiracies. Yet the stress led to a spiralling psychosis of paranoia, gluttony and insomnia that almost killed him – only saved by a doctor who lovingly placed him on a diet, relaxed him by wrapping him in blankets and held his hand until he finally slept.

The Iron Chancellor allied Germany with the other two conservative emperors, Franz Josef and Alexander II of Russia. The tsar, who had acquiesced in the unification of Germany in return for lifting the limitations imposed by the Crimean War, now focused on Ottoman disintegration as the Orthodox Slavs of eastern Europe sought independence. Serbia and Romania were already autonomous. In 1877, Alexander attacked the Ottomans to forge a new country, Bulgaria – and seize Constantinople and the Straits. As Romanov armies galloped towards the outskirts of the Great City, Disraeli, now prime minister, stopped Russian aggression and saved the sultanate by sending in the Royal Navy. Bismarck supported him, fearing a Russian conquest of Istanbul.

They were from different worlds. Disraeli, son of a bookish Jewish immigrant from Morocco, was the first outsider to rule Britain since the Romans, a rise achieved with brazen intrigue and brilliant wit but without money, land or connections. ‘Mr. Disraeli is Prime Minister!’ Queen Victoria wrote to her daughter Vicky. ‘A proud thing for a man “risen from the people”.’ He celebrated: ‘I’ve climbed to the top of the greasy pole.’

Slim and dandyish with dark eyes and curling ringlets, often sporting green trousers and a primrose, Disraeli had dabbled in shady finance and lived for a time in a ménage à trois with a scandalous potentate and his young mistress before his novels made him famous. Now devoted to a well-off if fey wife, twelve years his senior, who called him Dizzy and who ‘didn’t know’, he joked, ‘who came first, the Greeks or the Romans’, he was the first modern Conservative, an advocate of the unity of aristocracy and the people in ‘One Nation’, and an enthusiastic promoter of British world power, all with shameless panache.^*

In 1867, he outmanoeuvred Gladstone’s Liberals to pass a Reform Act that doubled the number of male voters, the start of a real British democracy in which most male adults had the vote. Winning a landslide in 1874 and raised to earl of Beaconsfield, now wizened, weary and languid, he was Britain’s most cosmopolitan leader, having travelled to Cairo and Jerusalem – the first prime minister from an ethnic minority. Now at a Berlin congress he and Bismarck joined forces to restrain Russia, save Constantinople and rearrange eastern Europe.

The two admired each other. ‘Bismarck soars above all,’ wrote Disraeli. ‘Six foot four, proportionally stout with a sweet and gentle voice which singularly contrasts with the awful things he says, a complete despot here.’ Bismarck declared, ‘The old Jew is the man.’ The congress granted Cyprus to Britain, censured antisemitism and created a band of new national states: Serbia and Romania became kingdoms; Bulgaria and Montenegro independent principalities, each aspiring to recreate vanished, often imaginary realms.^* But the decay of the Ottomans, the ambitions of the new Slavic states and the rivalry of Russia and Austria meant that the Balkans now became the sparkwheel of European conflict. ‘One day,’ predicted Bismarck, ‘the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.’

Disraeli was welcomed home: ‘I’ve brought you back peace – but a peace I hope with honour.’ This delicate balance in Europe now forced the powers to fight their rivalries outside Europe in a new arena: Africa.

* In 1815, Prussia had received the Ruhr, with its yet unknown reserves of coal – and the Krupps would benefit from the exponential growth of the German economy and the growth of population: twenty-two million Germans had doubled to forty by 1870.

* Bismarck’s ally, the Prussian war minister Albrecht von Roon, watched him ‘construct a parallelogram of forces … of that which has already happened, then he assesses the nature and weight of the effective forces which one cannot know precisely – through which I watch the work of the historic genius who confirms that by combining it all’. The gift of a statesman is precisely in ‘combining’ so much that is moving and unpredictable with what can be assured.

* At Sadowa, a young Prussian lieutenant, Paul von Hindenburg, blond and six foot six, son of a Junker landowner and a descendant of Martin Luther, was proud to serve. ‘If I fall,’ he wrote to his father, ‘it’s the most honourable and beautiful death.’ He was almost killed when a bullet lodged in his helmet and knocked him out. Hindenburg would be a key figure in world history: he ruled Germany in the First World War, and it was he who appointed Hitler as chancellor.

* Bertie’s erotic adventures had shocked his prim father Albert, who had died, probably of colitis, in 1861. Queen Victoria blamed Bertie: ‘I’ll never look at him without a shudder.’ She orchestrated Bertie’s marriage to a beautiful and long-suffering Danish princess, Alexandra. But this trip to Paris changed his life. He visited Schneider and Sarah Bernhardt and fell for the Italian courtesan Giulia Barucci, who, told to curtsey on meeting him, instead just shook off her dress: ‘What, didn’t you tell me to behave properly to His Royal Highness? I showed him the best I have!’ Bertie sent her love letters that his courtiers later had to buy back from her. As his spree of sex and gambling scandals shamed his mother, he became an honorary Parisian, designing his own fauteuil d’amour (love chair) for his favourite brothel, Le Chabanais, where he felt at home since it was run by the Irish-born Madame Kelly. Much later, as an admirable king, he turned his Francophilia into a political alliance.

* Mehmed Ali died in 1848, and his favourite son Ibrahim the Red died soon afterwards, leaving the throne to a vicious grandson, Abbas, who so adored his horses that he once punished his groom by shoeing him with red-hot horseshoes. Unsurprisingly, a servant assassinated him.

* Ismail flirted clumsily with Eugénie, presenting her with a golden chamber pot with an emerald at its centre. ‘My eye is always on you,’ the khedive told the unamused empress.

* Leopold did not become Spanish king, but his second son Ferdinand became king of Romania. Ironically this branch of the Hohenzollerns was descended from the Beauharnais and its members were friendly with Napoleon, who had in 1866 joined the Russian tsar Alexander II in promoting Leopold’s elder brother Karl to domnitor (prince) of a new country made up of Wallachia and Moldavia, now called the Romanian United Principalities – the future Romania. Karl, who became King Carol of Romania, had no sons and was succeeded by his nephew, Ferdinand.

* Obsessed with history, Moltke had spent ten years planning a war against France, but he had also long been obsessed with railways, making a fortune from investing in them, joining the board of the Berlin–Hamburg line and advising on the laying of Prussian railways with military use in mind. Later he added to the general staff a railway section plus a historical one too. Now he had just completed instructions for Prussian officers: ‘No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength,’ he ruled. ‘Strategy is a system of expedients’ in which officers must use their initiative. ‘A favourable situation will never be exploited if commanders wait for orders.’

* Madama Lynch’s estates were confiscated, but she was allowed to sail for Europe. She later returned to Paraguay to reclaim her property after she had been promised safety but was tried and expelled, dying in Paris in 1886 still only fifty-two. Bizarrely Madama later became a national hero: the vicious dictator and friend of Nazis General Stroessner brought her body back to Paraguay and entombed her in the national cemetery.

* The French minister in Brazil was the racist ideologue Arthur de Gobineau, inventor of the term ‘master race’, who was disgusted by Brazilian society: ‘a population totally mixed, vitiated in its blood and spirit, fearfully ugly … Not a single Brazilian has pure blood because the pattern of marriages among whites, Indians and Negroes is so widespread,’ leading to what he called ‘genetic degeneracy’. Yet he regarded the blue-eyed Pedro as a perfect Aryan. Pedro befriended Gobineau until, after the diplomat disgraced himself in a brawl, he requested his recall.

* Quanah settled on the Kiowa–Comanche–Apache Reservation in Oklahoma where, leaving his traditional lodge, he built his European-style Star House, took the surname Parker, embraced his own adaptation of Christianity, combined with imbibing the hallucinogenic peyote, and became a successful rancher.

* Twain was himself one of the ornaments of the Gilded Age, a self-invented boy named Samuel Clemens from Hannibal, Missouri, who had worked the steamboats of the Mississippi, toiled in silver mines and then in 1876 published his Adventures of Tom Sawyer, based on his exploits and taking his nom de plume from the cry ‘mark twain’ of the leadsmen who measured the depth of the river. An abolitionist and liberal, he travelled the world to file travelogues, and later produced his other great novel Huckleberry Finn, also starring Tom Sawyer. Twain became rich and famous, usually sporting a trademark white suit, but constantly lost his money, though never his wisdom or wit.

* Nor did Grant learn from his presidency: in his retirement, humiliated by his own lack of capital, he lent his name and prestige to an outrageous fraudster who bankrupted him. Dying of cancer, Grant was forced to write his memoirs, and was rescued by Mark Twain, who turned publisher for the deal. Dictated tirelessly by the old general, the memoirs proved both a classic and a bestseller.

* The ceremony was attended by the strapping Prussian officer Paul von Hindenburg. La Débâcle in Paris also united Italy: as French troops withdrew from Rome, the Eternal City fell to the Savoyard king, Victor Emmanuel. Italy, now a constitutional kingdom, was united for the first time since Theodoric. Pope Pius IX refused to recognize Rome as Italian capital, launching a long papal sulk.

* Disraeli is the wittiest of British leaders: ‘There are three types of lies,’ he said. ‘Lies, damn lies and statistics.’ Joking that he was ‘the blank page between the Old and New Testaments’, he deflected antisemitic attacks in the House of Commons with biblical grandeur: ‘Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.’ He remains an inspiration to all writers. ‘When I want to read a good book,’ he said, ‘I write one.’

* As Carol now became the Hohenzollern king of Romania, the creation of Bulgaria yielded the House of Saxe-Coburg its last throne: the etiolated Prince Ferdinand was chosen as Bulgaria’s king. The tiny ethnically Serbian Montenegro had been ruled under the Ottomans by a hereditary Petrović dynasty of vladikas or prince-bishops, inherited from uncle to nephew until the prince-bishop Danilo transformed himself into a married hereditary prince. When he was assassinated in 1860 his nephew, the giant Nikola, succeeded him; Nikola declared war on Constantinople in 1876 and then married two daughters to Romanov grand dukes, ensuring Russian protection.