the five brothers to conduct their combined businesses in an uninterrupted community [of interest] . . . any proposal, no matter where it comes from, is the object of collective discussion; each operation, even if it is of minor importance, is carried out according to an agreed plan and with their combined efforts; and each of them has an equal share in its results.
As in the case of the Elector’s treasure, the notion of perfect fraternal harmony was very probably inspired by the brothers themselves. When they submitted a design for a coat of arms in 1817 (following their ennoblement by the Austrian Emperor), the fourth quarter depicted an arm bearing five arrows, the symbol of the unity of the five brothers which the firm of N. M. Rothschild & Sons Ltd continues to use on its notepaper to this day. The motto later adopted by the brothers—“Concordia, integritas, industria”—was intended to depict precisely the virtues listed in Brockhaus’s Encyclopaedia.
Gentz was the first of many writers to write about the Rothschilds in essentially friendly (if not sycophantic) terms. Perhaps the best of the more affectionate representations of the Rothschilds can be found in the novels of Benjamin Disraeli, who came to know the family intimately (and was also, like Gentz, not uninterested in their wealth). In Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844), for example, the resemblance between Sidonia and Lionel de Rothschild is close (though not complete). Sidonia’s father is described as having made money in the Peninsular War: he then “resolved to emigrate to England, with which he had, in the course of years, formed considerable commercial connections. He arrived here after the peace of Paris, with his large capital. He staked all on the Waterloo loan; and the event made him one of the greatest capitalists in Europe.” After the war, he and his brothers lent their money to the European states and he “became lord and master of the money-market of the world.” The younger Sidonia too has all the skills of a banker: he is an accomplished mathematician and “possessed a complete mastery over the principal European languages.” In Tancred (1847), the Rothschild-inspired Jewess Eva asks: “[W]ho is the richest man in Paris?” to which Tancred replies: “The brother, I believe, of the richest man in London.” They are, of course, of her “race and faith.” Admittedly, Disraeli’s Rothschild-based characters often act as mouthpieces for the author’s own somewhat idiosyncratic reflections on the place of Jews in the modern world: in no sense can they be regarded as “realistic” portraits of individual Rothschilds. Nevertheless, there are enough traces of his original models to give the novels a genuine value to the historian.
Other “positive” fictional representations are less substantial. An Austrian novella of the 1850s, for example, portrayed Salomon von Rothschild as a kind of Viennese Santa Claus, benignly siding with a carpenter’s daughter who wants to marry her rich father’s gifted but poor apprentice. A later example of the same genre is Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Model Millionaire, a note of admiration” (1887), which describes how an impoverished man-about-town is helped to marry the girl he loves by the generosity of “Baron Hausberg.” Such fairy stories, in which Rothschild-inspired characters are cast as benign dispensers of largesse, have echoes in some of the twentieth-century popular works about the family, particularly the books by Balla, Roth, Morton, Cowles and Wilson. The consciously (and sometimes cloy ingly) positive tenor of such works can be inferred even from their titles: The Romance of the Rothschilds, The Magnificent Rothschilds, A Family Portrait, A Family of Fortune, A Story of Wealth and Power. The 1969 musical about Mayer Amschel and his sons represents the reductio ad absurdum of this sycophantic tendency. Here the family’s early history is transformed into a sentimental yarn of good Jewish boys overcoming the deprivation and degradation of a South German version of Hell’s Kitchen: in a word, kitsch.
Yet such positive representations account for a relatively small part of the Rothschild myth. Indeed, it is not too much to say that for every writer who has been willing to attribute at least part of the Rothschilds’ financial success to their virtues, there have been two or three who have taken the opposite view.
At first, in the 1820s and 1830s, it was not as easy to attack the Rothschilds in print as it later became, especially in Germany; for one of the other favours Friedrich Gentz did for his “friends” was to send instructions to newspapers like the Allgemeine Zeitung that the Rothschilds should not be criticised. Even in 1843 the radical republican Friedrich Steinmann still found it impossible to find a publisher for his detailed and highly critical history, The House of Rothschild, Its History and Transactions ; it did not appear for another fifteen years. The most that could safely be indulged in were mild digs of the sort published in 1826 by the German economist and journalist Friedrich List, whose brief report of a theft from the Paris house gratuitously described James de Rothschild as “the mighty lord and master of all the coined and uncoined silver and gold in the Old World, before whose money-box Kings and Emperors humbly bow, [the] King of Kings.” Even in relatively liberal England, the earliest criticisms of the Rothschilds were made in the form of allegorical cartoons like Cruikshank’s The Jew and the Doctor, or under the protection of parliamentary privilege, like Thomas Duncombe’s contemporaneous allusion in 1828 to “a new, and formidable power, till these days unknown in Europe; master of unbounded wealth, [who] boasts that he is the arbiter of peace and war, and that the credit of nations depends upon his nod.”
It was not untypical, therefore, that the earliest critique of the Rothschilds published in France took the form of fiction. In The House of Nucingen (1837-8), Honoré de Balzac portrayed a roguish German-born banker who had made his fortune from a series of bogus bankruptcies, forcing his creditors to accept depreciated paper in repayment. The resemblances between the overbearing, ruthless and coarse Nucingen and James de Rothschild were too numerous to be coincidental; and in his Splendours and Sorrows of Courtesans (1838-47), Balzac drew a famous conclusion which applied not only to Nucingen but also, by implication, to James: “All rapidly accumulated wealth is either the result of luck or discovery, or the result of a legalised theft.”
It may also have been Balzac who originated or at least disseminated what rapidly became one of the favourite stories in the anti-Rothschild canon; for in The House of Nucingen he describes Nucingen’s second greatest business coup as a massive speculation on the outcome of the battle of Waterloo. This story was repeated nine years later in Georges Dairnvaell’s scurrilous pamphlet, The Edifying and Curious History of Rothschild I, King of the Jews (1846), which claimed that, by obtaining the first news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Nathan had been able to make a huge sum of money by speculating on the stock exchange. In later versions of the story, Nathan was said to have witnessed the battle himself, risking a Channel storm to reach London ahead of the official news of Wellington’s victory and thereby pocketing between £20 and £135 million. Other accounts have him bribing the French General Grouchy to ensure Wellington’s victory; and then deliberately misreporting the outcome in London in order to precipitate panic-selling.
Of course, it is possible for modern writers to retell the Waterloo legend as an illustration of Nathan’s business acumen—indeed, that is what most people today seem to infer from the anecdote. According to a later American banker, Bernard Baruch, it even inspired him to make his first million. However, the idea of a huge speculative profit made on the basis of advance news of a military outcome was a shocking one to many contemporaries: indeed, it epitomised the kind of “immoral” and “unhealthy” economic activity which both conservatives and radicals disliked when they contemplated the stock exchange. In refusing Gladstone’s request to make Lionel de Rothschild a peer, Queen Victoria explicitly questioned whether “one who owes his great wealth to contracts with Foreign Govts. for loans, or to successful speculations on the Stock Exchange can fairly claim a British peerage” as this seemed to her “not the less a species of gambling, because it is on a gigantic scale—and far removed from that legitimate trading which she delights to honour . . .”
A
nother contemporary interpretation of the Waterloo story was as an illustration of Rothschild political neutrality: by implication, if Napoleon had won, Nathan would have been a bear rather than a bull of British bonds. Some writers, however, chose to see his speculation as evidence of positive support for the coalition against Napoleon. To French critics especially, the Waterloo story symbolised the “unpatriotic” (sometimes German, sometimes British) sympathies of the family. As Dairnvaell put it, “The Rothschilds have only ever gained from our disasters; when France has won, the Rothschilds have lost.” That the Rothschilds gave their financial support to the opponents of Napoleon could equally well be taken as a sign of their political conservatism; as could the fact that they floated loans for Austria, Prussia and Bourbon France after 1815. Indeed, for radical opponents of the legitimist regimes restored at the Vienna Congress, the Rothschilds were notoriously the “chief ally of the Holy Alliance.” To the German writer Ludwig Börne, they were “the nation’s worst enemies. They have done more than any to undermine the foundations of freedom, and it is unquestionable that most of the peoples of Europe would by this time be in full possession of liberty if such men as Rothschild . . . did not lend the autocrats the support of their capital.”
Nevertheless, it was not always easy to sustain the notion that the Rothschilds were politically biased towards conservative regimes. As early as 1823, in the twelfth canto of Don Juan, Byron had asked “Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign O’er Congress, whether royalist or liberal?” and answered: “Jew Rothschild, and his fellow Christian Baring.” The crucial point is that Byron saw “Rothschild” as influential over both royalist and liberal regimes, his power stretching as far afield as the republics of Latin America. Even before the 1830 revolutions, the idea was gaining currency that the Rothschilds were more than merely bankrolling the legitimist regimes; consciously or unconsciously, they were acquiring a power of their own which rivalled and perhaps might even replace that of the monarchs and emperors. The events of 1830, when Charles X was toppled from the French throne but James de Rothschild survived unscathed, seemed to confirm this notion of a new financial royalty. “Would it not be a great blessing for the world,” asked Börne sarcastically in 1832, “if all the kings were dismissed and the Rothschild family put on their thrones?” William Makepeace Thackeray joked that “N. M. Rothschild, Esq. . . . play[ed] with new kings as young Misses with dolls.” Heinrich Heine described Nathan sitting as if on a throne and speaking “like a king, with courtiers all around him.” The same point underlies Heine’s vision of a children’s fancy-dress ball given by Salomon:
The children wore lovely fancy dress, and they played at making loans. They were dressed up like kings, with crowns on their heads, but there was one of the bigger lads who was dressed exactly like old Nathan Rothschild. He played his part very well, kept both hands in his trouser-pockets, rattled his money and shook with bad temper when one of the little kings wanted to borrow off him . . .
Elsewhere, Heine analysed the ambivalent nature of the Rothschilds’ power in more detail. He acknowledged that in the short term it served to shore up the reactionary regimes because “revolutions are generally triggered off by deficiency of money” and “the Rothschild system . . . prevent[ed] such deficiencies.” However, he insisted that the Rothschild “system” was also potentially revolutionary in itself:
No one does more to further the revolution than the Rothschilds themselves . . . and, though it may sound even more strange, these Rothschilds, the bankers of kings, these princely pursestring-holders, whose existence might be placed in the gravest danger by a collapse of the European state system, nevertheless carry in their minds a consciousness of their revolutionary mission.
“I see in Rothschild,” he went on, “one of the greatest revolutionaries who have founded modern democracy”:
Rothschild . . . destroyed the predominance of land, by raising the system of state bonds to supreme power, thereby mobilising property and income and at the same time endowing money with the previous privileges of the land. He thereby created a new aristocracy, it is true, but this, resting as it does on the most unreliable of elements, on money, can never play as enduringly regressive a role as the former aristocracy, which was rooted in the land, in the earth itself.
Not only had the Rothschilds replaced the old aristocracy; they also represented a new materialist religion. “[M]oney is the god of our time,” declared Heine in March 1841, “and Rothschild is his prophet.”
Nothing seemed to illustrate better the revolutionary significance of the Rothschilds than their role as railway developers. When the Rothschild-financed lines to Orléans and Rouen were opened in 1843, Heine wrote breathlessly of a social “tremor” with unforeseeable implications. By this time, however, a new note of scepticism can be detected in his allusions to the growing power of the “ruling aristocracy of money” and the apparent convergence of their interests with those of the old landed aristocracy. In the course of the 1840s a growing number of journalists began to express a more pronounced hostility than Heine ever dared—indebted as he was (and hoped to remain) to the Rothschilds. In particular, James’s securing of the rail concession to link Paris and Belgium incensed more radical critics of the July Monarchy. Thus Alphonse Toussenel’s The Jews, Kings of the Epoch: A History of Financial Feudalism (1846) was primarily directed against the financial terms under which the concession had been granted.
At one level, Toussenel was a kind of socialist who believed that the French rail network should be owned and managed by the state. However, his critique of the Rothschilds as capitalists was inseparably linked to an argument about their Jewishness. France had been “sold to the Jews” and the railways were directly or indirectly controlled by “Baron Rothschild, the King of Finance, a Jew ennobled by a very Christian King.” It was this aspect of Toussenel’s book which inspired the most imitation. Like Toussenel, the anonymous author of Judgement Passed against Rothschild and Georges Dairnvaell equated Judaism and capitalism: James was “the Jew Rothschild, king of the world, because today the whole world is Jewish.” The name Rothschild “stands for a whole race—it is a symbol of a power which extends its arms over the entirety of Europe.” At the same time, in “exploiting all that is exploitable,” the Rothschilds were merely “the model of all the bourgeois and mercantile virtues.” The connections between tracts like these and what later developed into Marxism are well known. In his notorious 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question,” Karl Marx himself spelt out his view of “the real Jew,” by which he meant the capitalist, irrespective of his religious background. When, in the wake of the 1848-9 revolutions, the Rothschilds seemed to emerge intact along with the majority of the regimes temporarily overthrown, the moral was obvious to Marx: “[E]very tyrant is backed by a Jew, as is every Pope by a Jesuit.”
By the 1850s, then, Heine’s notion that the Rothschilds were in some sense the allies of revolutionary change seemed to have been comprehensively discredited and replaced by a critique of the Rothschilds not only as defenders of the political status quo, but also as archetypal capitalists and therefore economic exploiters. It tended to be writers on the revolutionary left in the 1840s who were most keen to equate this with their Judaism—though it was never really explained why Jews should have such different attitudes towards economic activity from Gentiles. (For a coherent—if largely fanciful and self-referential—explanation of Rothschild business success as a function of their religion and their race, we need to turn back to Disraeli’s Coningsby and Tancred.)
Further distinctions were possible. In the France of the Second Empire, some contemporaries differentiated between the Rothschilds and other Jews—between the conservative haute banque, personified by the Rothschilds, and the “new” bank, embodied by the Crédit Mobilier which the Saint-Simonian Pereire brothers had established. Thus the Crédit Mobilier was portrayed by many writers as a primarily political challenge to the dominance of the Rothschilds over French public finance—Napo
leon III’s bid to “free himself” from Rothschild tutelage. Unlike most of the overtly anti-Semitic critiques of the Rothschilds, this has proved a more respectable line of argument: the Crédit Mobilier is still sometimes portrayed as a revolutionary new kind of bank, pursuing industrialisation as a developmental strategy in contradistinction to the “old” and implicitly parasitical private banks led by the Rothschilds. But contemporaries—notably the financier Jules Isaac Mirès—sometimes attributed this difference in style to the different cultural backgrounds of the two families (the Pereires were Sephardic Jews, originally from Spain, the Rothschilds Ashkenazim). Others conceived of the difference in more traditional political terms: Rothschild represented “the aristocracy of money” and “financial feudalism” while his rivals stood for “financial democracy” and an economic “1789.” In those terms, the decline and fall of the Crédit Mobilier in the 1860s seemed to be more than just a financial event: it was a harbinger of the collapse of the Second Empire itself. Even in modern historiography, James’s famous epigram, “L’Empire, c’est la baisse,” is often cited as the death-knell for the Bonapartist regime and a reassertion of the haute banque’s political supremacy in France.
The advent of a republic in 1870 did nothing to dam the stream of French anti-Rothschild literature, however. All that happened was that the attacks now came from the right rather than the left. To those snobbish salon conservatives, the Goncourt brothers, the Rothschilds seemed to be the “Pariah kings of the world . . . coveting everything and controlling everything.” Under the veil of republicanism, absolutism had been restored; but it was a corrupt and alien absolutism quite unlike the monarchical and imperial versions which had gone before. The catalyst for a fresh explosion of publications hostile to the Rothschilds was the collapse of the Union Générale bank in 1882, which its founder bitterly blamed on “Jewish finance” and its ally “governmental freemasonry.” In his novel L’Argent, Emile Zola portrayed the affair as a triumph for the Rothschildian figure of Gundermann, “the banker king, the master of the bourse and of the world . . . the man who knew [all] secrets, who made the markets rise and fall at his pleasure as God makes the thunder . . . the king of gold.” But Zola at least acknowledged that there had been a conscious attempt by anti-Jewish Catholics to overthrow Gundermann. It took the twisted mind of Edouard Drumont to argue—in his Jewish France (1886)—that the Union Générale had itself been established by the Jews to rob Catholics of their savings. “The God Rothschild,” Drumont concluded, was the real “master” of France. Another purveyor of similar libels was Auguste Chirac, whose Kings of the Republic (1883) and The Speculation of 1870 to 1884 (1887) denounced the subjugation of the Republic to “a king named Rothschild, with a courtesan or maid called Jewish finance.”
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