The House of Rothschild, Volume 1

by Niall Ferguson

  When a guest at the same dinner expressed the hope “that your children are not too fond of money and business, to the exclusion of more important things. I am sure you would not wish that,” Nathan retorted bluntly: “I am sure I should wish that.”

  Nathan struck some who encountered him as a tight-fisted philistine. The ornithologist Audubon recalled failing to persuade Nathan to subscribe to his lavishly illustrated Birds of America, instead sending him the work in advance of payment. But when Nathan was presented with the bill he “looked at it with amazement and cried out, ‘What, a hundred pounds for birds! Why sir I will give you five pounds, and not a farthing more!’ ” A frequently repeated anecdote has Nathan telling the composer Louis Spohr: “I understand nothing of music. This”—patting his pocket and making his money rattle and jingle—“is my music; we understand that on ’Change.” In another he responds irritably to a request for a charitable contribution: “Here! Write a cheque; I have made one [damned] fool of myself!” Buxton was shocked by Nathan’s somewhat crass attitude towards philanthropy. “Sometimes,” he explained, “to amuse myself, I give a beggar a guinea. He thinks it is a mistake, and for fear I shall find it out, off he runs as hard as he can. I advise you to give a beggar a guinea sometimes; it is very amusing.” It was entirely in character for him to point out to his own dinner guests that a particular service had cost £100.

  The notion that an ill-educated Jew could behave this way in polite society and get away with it purely on account of his newly acquired and largely paper wealth variously fascinated and appalled contemporaries, depending on their social position and philosophical attachment to the traditional hierarchical order. Prince Pückler, for example, did not apparently resent the way Nathan teased him when he first presented himself at New Court with his credit note. On the contrary, he summed him up as “a man who one cannot deny has geniality and even a kind of great character . . . really un très bon enfant and generous, more than others of his class—as long, that is, as he is sure he is not risking anything himself, which one can in no way hold against him . . . This man is really a complete original.” As we have seen, Humboldt was also condescendingly amused by the combination of bad manners, sharp wit and lack of deference which Nathan brought to polite society.

  In the Paris of the Bourbon Restoration, by contrast, James’s many faux pas—his unprompted introduction of his own wife to the duc d’Orléans, for example, or his use of Count Potocki’s Christian name Stanislas—were viewed with distaste. Like so many of James’s socially superior guests, the maréchal de Castellane did not much care for his host even as he accepted his hospitality: “His wife . . . is pretty enough and very well-mannered. She sang well, though rather tremulously; her German accent is disagreeable. James . . . is small, ugly, arrogant, but he gives banquets and dinners; the grand seigneurs make fun of him and yet are no less delighted to go to his house, where he brings together the best company in Paris.”

  According to Moritz Goldschmidt’s son Hermann, whose memoir is one of the few detailed first-hand descriptions we have, Salomon was even more lacking in social graces. “Why should I eat badly at your place, why don’t you come and eat well at mine,” he was once heard to reply to a dinner invitation from the Russian ambassador. Another “highly placed personality” who asked for a loan received a blunt negative: “Because I don’t want to.” Salomon therefore “seldom went into high society, [because] he felt that because of his lack of education he would have to play a difficult and uncomfortable role,” and preferred to leave “intercourse with the beau monde” to Goldschmidt’s father. On the rare occasions when he did have the Metternichs to dine with him, he could not resist vulgar displays of wealth, showing them the contents of his safe as a post-prandial treat. Even in his own more familiar (that is, Jewish) circle, he cut a coarse figure. If his barber was late in the morning—and Salomon habitually rose at 3 a.m.—he would be reviled as “an ass.” If someone came into the office smelling slightly, Salomon would press his handkerchief to his nose, open the window, and shout: “Throw him out, the man stinks.” He dined unsociably early at 6.30 p.m. and habitually drank two bottles of wine before going for a stroll in the park with “blindly loyal toadies and hangers-on.” When he visited the Goldschmidts at their house in Döbling on Sundays he flirted with the prettier girls present “in a manner which was not always proper or polite.” This included cracking crude jokes if any women present were pregnant.

  It is not that all these stories are wholly misleading; no doubt Nathan and his brothers did seem to many who met them like the incarnation of “new money,” with all its rough edges. Nothing makes the point more explicit than the 1848 cartoon (produced as the first of a series of “Pictures from Frankfurt”) which cruelly juxtaposed Moritz von Bethmann and Amschel, the former elegant on his coach and four, the latter slouched atop a money box (see illustration 7.i).Yet such judgements are not the best kinds of historical evidence. Firstly, they tell us only how the Rothschilds seemed to others. Secondly, because “new money” has been the object of scorn for more than 2,000 years, there are tropes which tend to be repeated no matter how little the nouveau riche individual in question actually conforms to the stereotype. The brothers’ own letters tell a very different story.

  In fact, the brothers themselves disliked intensely the great majority of social functions they gave. Amschel “thanked God” when his dinners were over, and Carl thought them expensive “humbug”—“it was very nice, but the money was nicer,” he commented when the chef they had hired presented his bill. “However,” he con-ceded, “it is as good as bribes”: it is noteworthy that at least five of the guests at the 1817 dinner also received parcels of the new city of Paris loan. In Berlin too, where he had relatively little difficulty in securing prestigious invitations from Hardenberg and the British and Austrian ambassadors, Carl retained his scepticism about the value of such socialising: “I don’t really care, because I find we always do better business with those who do not invite us.” Nathan was as much out of his natural element in the ballroom or the salon as in the countryside. As Amschel said of him in 1817, if Nathan gave a mere tea party, he felt his morning had been “stolen.” Even his daughter Charlotte expressed a utilitarian view in 1829 when she hoped that “the Season will be very lively as this is always, I think, an encouragement for trade.”

  7.i: Ernst Schalk and Philipp Herrlich, Baron Moritz von Bethmann and Baron Amschel von Rothschild, Bilder aus Frankfurt, Nr. 1 (1848).

  James shed light on his brother’s fundamentally anti-social temperament when, contemplating yet another ball, he said: “I now feel exactly as you do. I would gladly stay at home and don’t want to drive myself crazy with all the rubbish.” He too was much less enamoured of such occasions than his condescending guests generally assumed. From the outset, he took much the same functional view of socialising. “I think of nothing else but business,” he assured Nathan. “If I attend a society party, I go there to become acquainted with people who might be useful for the business.” To prove the point, early social contacts like Richelieu’s secretary were pumped for useful information. Privately, James admitted to being weary of his lavish balls; he continued to give them, he confessed to Nathan in January 1825, only lest people think he could no longer afford to. “My dear Nathan,” he wrote wearily,

  I am obliged to give a ball because the world claims that I am broke, for the people who have become accustomed to my giving three to four balls, as I did during the previous winter, will otherwise set their tongues wagging, and quite honestly the French are evil people. Well, the carnival takes place next week and I wish it were already over. I give you my word that my heart is not in it but one must do everything to put on a show for the world.

  Six years later, in the wake of the revolutionary crisis of 1830, Charlotte discerned the same link between her uncle’s economic performance and his sociability: although Betty felt too “fatigued” to give “her customary balls,” “the rentes still [continue] to
rise so rapidly [that] James would be disposed to give them.” As we shall see, throwing balls was one of the vital ways in which James signalled to the Parisian beau monde that he had survived the financial and political storm of 1830.

  The Honours “Racket”

  It was not only by giving parties that the Rothschilds sought to transcend the traditional social barriers which confronted Jews, no matter how wealthy, in Restoration Europe. In a social world still dominated by a hierarchy of ranks and orders, they hastened to acquire formal marks of status for themselves. It is perhaps a sign of how fragile the restored Metternichian regime was that they found this exceedingly easy: that is the real point of the “Jew baron” story quoted at the beginning of this chapter.

  Perhaps the most striking illustration of this point is the fact that the Rothschilds were able to acquire noble status from the Emperor Francis II as early as 1817. This was arranged in Vienna after lobbying by the Austrian Treasury official Schwinner, the Finance Minister Stadion and Metternich, and was seen by them primarily as a reward for the Rothschilds’ role in paying British subsidies and French reparations payments to Austria. The significance of this should not be exaggerated, of course. The Rothschilds were not the first Jews to be elevated in this way: six other families had been ennobled (though all the others had converted to Christianity by 1848). Nor did ennoblement by the Habsburg Emperor connote social elevation of the sort achieved two generations later, when Nathan’s grandson Natty Rothschild was given a hereditary peerage by Queen Victoria. Like the Austrian currency, the Austrian nobility had been debased compared with its more exclusive British counterpart. On the other hand, ennoblement gave the brothers three valuable assets: the right to the prefix “von” (“de” in France and England); a coat of arms (albeit not quite the grandiose design they had originally hoped for); and, in 1822, the title “Freiherr” (“Baron” in France and England).3

  Nor were these the only trophies of social ascent which the Rothschilds picked up in the years after 1814. Just as their father before them had sought to enhance his prestige by acquiring the title of Hoffaktor and court banker from as many courts as possible, so too his sons and grandsons applied to be appointed “Financial Councillors” by the family’s old friend the Elector of Hesse-Kassel, and later by the King of Prussia. Such titles were purely honorific, but socially useful because they entitled the bearer to wear a uniform, almost a sine qua non when attending court functions. The titles of Austrian consul, which was secured for Nathan in 1820, and consul-general, which he and James received in 1821-2 as rewards for their financial support during the Neapolitan crisis, had essentially the same sartorial significance, though notionally they also entailed some responsibility for protecting Habsburg commercial interests in Britain and France. That the Rothschilds made use of such uniforms can be seen from a variety of contemporary references. As early as 1817 Carl sought permission to wear the navy and gold uniform of the Hessian Kriegscollegium. James was spotted in 1825 wearing his red consular outfit to Charles X’s coronation at Rheims. Two years later the young Charles Bocher mistook him for an English general when saw him emerging from the Tuileries in his scarlet coat with gold epaulettes.

  A uniform was good; but a uniform with decorations—medals, ribbons or braid—was better. These too the brothers began to thirst after from as early as 1814. In late 1817 Carl was publicly presented with a ribbon by the Prussian Chancellor Hardenberg, having found himself one of only two people at the Prussian court with nothing on his chest. A year later the Grand Duke of Darmstadt bestowed orders on James. When he and Salomon both received the Order of St Vladimir from the Tsar during the Congress of Verona in 1822, Salomon made sure—through Gentz—that it was reported in the German press. A year later James added the Knight’s Cross of the French Legion of Honour to his tally (though he did not become a full member of the Legion until 1841). By 1827 Salomon was sufficiently blasé to request an order—the Constantine Order of St George—for his senior clerk, Leopold Wertheimstein, for services rendered to the Duchess of Parma. When Nat went to Constantinople in 1834—the first Rothschild to do so—he could not conceal his excitement at the prospect of a new and exotic gong:

  You do not know what it is to be received by the Sultan, no person of inferior rank than a minister plenipotentiary can be presented at court—I however consider myself Ambassador . . . & consequently have a right to the most brilliant reception.—The Sultan signified that it was his intention to bestow a mark of his satisfaction, but I do not know whether it is to be a ring, a snuffbox or a grand decoration—I hope the latter. I have already given them to understand that the diamond crescent will be the most acceptable.

  As his letter suggests, royal gifts like rings and engraved snuffboxes, though not unwelcome, were second best.

  The Rothschilds’ pursuit of titles and orders is often seen as a kind of absurd foible: a “weakness” for imitating the nobility, as Capefigue put it. That is undoubtedly the way it seemed to established nobles. Metternich suspected them of “vanity” and “a craving for honours and distinctions”; while critics of the Restoration regime, notably Heine, mocked their apparent deference to aristocratic mores.4 Yet the brothers themselves privately viewed these mores with a certain amount of contempt. Coats of arms were, as Carl put it, “part of the racket. As for uniforms, James privately joked that “if you go to see a Minister here, you must always be made up as if on a visit to your bride.” The brothers even parodied their new titles on occasion: Carl, for example, addressed one letter to “James de Rothschild, Knight of the Society for the Liberation of Christian Slaves [sic], Financial Councillor of Electoral Hesse etc. etc. etc..” When the King of Denmark also invited him “to ask for a title,” he could only ask: “What are we going to do with all these titles?” Indeed, when he was offered “a ribbon with a buckle such as soldiers wear” by the Elector of Hesse-Kassel, he turned it down as beneath his dignity. Nor were the Rothschilds willing to pay over the odds for badges of status: when Nat heard that the Austrian government wished to provide his brother Lionel with a consular secretary—at an annual cost to the firm of £500—he was outraged: “For my part I wd. see the whole consulate at the deuce before I would pay £500 a year for it & have a disagreeable fellow to be master . . . I should like to know who will pay £500 a year for the honor of being Austrn. Consul.” Even Amschel, in many ways the most susceptible of all the family to such things, knew their place. As he put it in 1814, “If we had always worried about what other people were going to think, we would now be left with a great many decorations etc., but without money. And in the end, we would be left without praise, without decorations and without money.” “The highest decoration,” in his view, was “a quiet life, God willing.”

  There were two arguments for nevertheless accepting such honours. The first, as we have seen, was that they improved the partners’ access to the corridors of power. The second argument was that titles and other honours were “a mark of distinction for our nation”—that is, for European Jewry. The Rothschilds’ ennoblement was widely interpreted in Frankfurt as a slap in the face for those in the town who wished to to reimpose the old disabilities on Jews. “[I]f one Jew is a Baron every Jew is a Baron:” that was how they saw it in the Judengasse. In the same way, Nathan’s appointment as Austrian consul in London was “a lucky thing for the Jews” according to Carl. Even the fact that the brothers could be awarded decorations with explicitly Christian insignia—the names of saints, even the sign of the cross itself— was regarded as a kind of victory. Though Amschel refused to accept such orders, Carl had no hesitation in accepting the ribbon and star of the newly founded Order of St George from Pope Gregory XVI in 1832, while Lionel accepted the Order of Isabella from the Queen of Spain three years later. As Heine noted, the Order had originally been established “to glorify the expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain”; how piquant that “Herr von Shylock zu Paris” should thus be acknowledged as “the mightiest Baron of Christendom.” Certainl
y, it seemed that way to scandalised Christian commentators like the Austrian Baron Kübeck:

  His Holiness receives a member of the House of Rothschild, and with heavenly forbearance the representative of Jesus Christ on earth decorates a descendant of the people that allowed Christ to be put to death, with the ribbon and star of a newly founded order of St George, and in return allows his hand instead of his foot to be kissed. And still Rothschild refuses to become a Christian.

  In this light, perhaps the hardest thing to explain is Nathan’s apparent doubt about the value of such honours. For example, a number of letters would seem to suggest that he was offered but turned down the offer of a knighthood (or “Night-hood,” as James wrote it) in 1815 or 1816. When someone tried to tell Carl that his brother had accepted, he refused to believe it “because you love simplicity.” The 1816 ennoblement patents conspicuously omitted Nathan, and the approved coat of arms showed four arrows instead of five. Furthermore, unlike his brothers and eldest son, he rarely used the title “Baron” or the prefix “de.” Was this a matter of milieu, as Corti suggested—a desire not to be too publicly associated with reactionary Austria?5 Mace argues that there is a more practical explanation: although Nathan secured the right to bear arms in 1818 (hence legitimising the fifth arrow), when he applied to the Royal College of Arms for registration of the Austrian title in 1825 he was turned down—probably because he had only received his own royal letters patent of denization eight years before. However, it may also have been partly because, as Amschel thought, Nathan just “did not want” to be ennobled. Thus, when Nathan declined a Prussian decoration in 1818, he suggested that it be given to Salomon instead because “here in London I have no use for such a thing” whereas “my brother . . . loves ribbons and is a Baron who intends to live in Paris, where one can decorate oneself with such things.” James too was at first reluctant to call himself “de Rothschild.” “Let us remain merchants,” he urged his brothers in 1816. “It is extremely nice to possess the title and not to make use of it, except in private.” A positive business letter from a finance minister was “worth more than all the titles of nobility.”