The House of Rothschild, Volume 1

by Niall Ferguson

  If I may speak in confidence, this frenzied veneration is no small affliction to the poor sun which gets no respite from its adorers . . . I really believe that money is more a curse than a blessing to him; if he had a harder heart he would endure less discomfort . . . I counsel every man who is in dire need of money to go to M. de Rothschild; not in order to borrow from him (I doubt whether he would have much success in that endeavour!) but to comfort himself with the sight of the misery money can cause.

  James, argues Heine, is tortured “because he has too much money, because all the money in the world has flowed into his gigantic cosmopolitan pocket and because he has to carry such a burden around with him while all around the great rabble of starvelings and thieves stretch out their hands to him. And what terrible, what dangerous hands they are!” And Heine then tells a very different kind of joke, in which he is the straight-man and James the wit: “ ‘How are you?’ a German poet once asked M. le baron. ‘I am going mad,’ the latter replied. ‘I won’t believe that,’ said the poet, ‘until you start throwing money out of the window.’ The baron interrupted him with a sigh. ‘That, precisely, is my madness: that I don’t throw money out of the window occasionally.’ ”

  When Heine came to rework the original newspaper articles into “Lutetia” ten years later, however, he was able to add (in his “Retrospective Explanation”) a kind of postscript to this joke. Then he had been well off; but that was no longer the case.

  The indigent men whom I had liberally aided laughed at me when I said that in future I would not have enough for my own needs. Was I not related to all sorts of millionaires? Had not [Rothschild], the generalis simo of all millionaires, the millionairissimo, called me his friend? What I could never make my clients understand was that this great millionairissimo called me his friend only because I never asked him for money. Had I done so, our friendship would soon have been at an end. The days of David and Jonathan, of Orestes and Pylades are past. The poor blockheads who wanted my help thought it was easy to obtain this commodity from the rich. They never saw, as I did, the terrible locks and bars with which their great money chests are secured.

  To appreciate the significance of this, it is necessary to know a little of Heine’s financial circumstances. Before his uncle Salomon Heine’s death in December 1844, Heine had received an annual allowance from his rich relative of 4,000 marks. Salomon Heine’s will left Heine a lump sum of 8,000 marks, but his allowance was promptly halved by his cousin Carl, plunging the Heine family into a protracted and bitter wrangle which was not resolved until 1847. It was at this point that Heine for the first time began to need the Rothschilds for their money as well as their friendship. To begin with, he merely sought investment advice, but as his health deteriorated this gradually acquired a charitable dimension. In 1846 James involved Heine in a speculation in railway shares which earned him 20,000 francs. The following year he offered to give his “friend” “the most preferential treatment” in the new French government loan. By 1852, however, Heine’s tone was detectably that of the Schnorrer:

  Whenever fortune smiled on your colossal business operations with particular favour, you allowed not only the closest friends of your house, but also that great child the poet to have a bite at the cherry. At this moment, when you are again taking the leading part in a tremendous enterprise and are emerging victorious and more of a millionaire than ever from the revolutionary storms, I take the liberty of reminding you that I have not yet died, although my condition hardly deserves to be called “life.”

  When the request was granted, Heine was pathetically grateful for “this latest proof of your goodness . . . The blessing of God is clearly upon you, and any contact with you brings good luck.” Three years later he made a similar request to Anselm for shares in the new Austrian Creditanstalt; this too was granted, to the tune of 100 shares. Heine’s letters of thanks—alternately sycophantic and embarrassed—indicate how hard he found it to be reduced to begging. Less than two months later he was dead.

  In all this, an important role was played by James’s wife Betty, with whom Heine had conducted what might be described as an elegant flirtation in the 1830s. They had met at James’s Boulogne château: looking back many years later, Heine recalled in a letter to Betty “the sunny day in Boulogne where you first appeared to me with all your magical charm.” The meeting must have taken place some time before 1834, when he sent her a copy of his new book Der Salon, signing himself as “Ihr ergebener Schützling”—“your faithful protégé.” A year later, he described her to a friend as his “earliest patroness in Paris.” When he wrote promising to visit her, he could not resist adding that her “pretty, smiling face” was “constantly in his memory.” Nor did he confine such expressions to private communications, praising her in one of his articles of the 1830s as “not only one of the best looking women in Paris but [one] who is also distinguished in intellect and knowledge.” Nothing is more futile than for the historian to try to infer the intensity of such an attraction, much less the real nature of such a relationship, from a few written remnants; but these seem more than merely formal compliments to the wife of a patron. “I discovered the other day by chance,” he wrote to her in 1840, enclosing the proofs of Ludwig Börne, “that the beautiful lady whom I took to be only intelligent and virtuous also possesses a great soul. Baron James is indeed the richest of men—but not because of his money . . . Please believe, Mme la baronne, that the interest I take in your house is of no common sort; and accept my assurance of complete devotion for the rest of my days.” Yet at some point in the 1840s the friendship began to fade. He continued to send her his books: in 1847 copies of Atta Troll and a poem called “The Angel” which may have been inspired by her; in 1852 a copy of Romancero; two years later the Vermischte Schriften and in 1855 his Poèmes et légendes. But they saw little of one another—she became, as he put it, “a doubting Thomas” towards him—perhaps because of Heine’s deteriorating health; perhaps because he disapproved of the Rothschilds’ role in the 1848 revolutions;4 most probably because, as Heine had foreseen, his need for money corrupted the relationship.

  The contrast between Heine’s relationship with the Rothschilds and that of his French contemporary Balzac is pronounced; indeed, they are like mirror images of each another. While Heine fretted that James might take umbrage at his writings, Balzac blithely caricatured him with only the most perfunctory disclaimers. While Heine decorously flirted with James’s wife, Balzac sought to palm off one of his old mistresses on him. And while Heine agonised about accepting share options from the Rothschilds, Balzac happily borrowed from James and sought to avoid repaying him for as long as possible. In a famous aside, Balzac described encountering Heine and James in the street one day in 1837: “C’est-à-dire tout l’esprit et tout l’argent des Juifs.” It was the latter which interested him more, though with characteristic egocentricity he persistently misspelt James’s name, usually as “Rostchild.”

  The two first met at Aix in the summer of 1832. James at once took to the mercurial writer, who combined the carnal appetites of Byron with the prose output of Dickens. He immediately offered to assist him with his plan to visit Italy, offering a letter of introduction to Carl and the use of his couriers to Naples. A few months later, having heard nothing more, James wrote to remind Balzac of his offer and to invite him to dinner, chiding him affably for not calling on them since his return to Paris. In Vienna two years later, Balzac took advantage of this goodwill by borrowing 500 francs from Salomon against a bill drawn on his unsuspecting publisher in Paris. He also seems to have asked Betty that same November for some kind of guarantee during negotiations with another publisher.

  Relations were at their most cordial in the mid-1840s. In 1842 Balzac offered James tickets for his disastrous play Les Ressources de Quinola (appropriately enough, about the sinking of a steamship), and two years later dedicated Un Homme d’affaires to “Monsieur le Baron James de Rothschild / Conseil Général d’Autriche à Paris, Banquier.”5
In return, James forwarded his letters to the Polish Countess he was wooing and eased her passage through customs when she went to Naples. More importantly, he provided Balzac with 150 shares in the new Northern railway line in 1846; having paid the first instalment, the writer promptly borrowed 17,000 francs from James, offering the shares as security. He also borrowed a further sum—around 50,000 francs—by mortgaging his fiancée’s Polish estate in order to buy a large house in the rue Fortunée. As he prepared to leave for Poland in 1846, Balzac even asked James to help him establish his former housekeeper (and mistress) in a stamp shop, for which a licence was required. Balzac’s account of the negotiations is worth quoting for the light it sheds on James’s capacity for Rabelaisian banter:

  Rotschild . . . asked me whether she was pretty, whether I had had her. “A hundred and twenty-one times,” I told him, “and, if you want her, I’ll give you her.”

  “Does she have children?” he inquired.

  “No, but give her some.”

  “I’m sorry, but I protect only women with children.” This was his way of escaping. Had she had children he would have said he never protected immorality.

  “Well now, do you actually believe, Baron, that you can split hairs with me? I’m a Northern shareholder! I am going to write you out a note, and you’ll take care of my business as if it were a railway with 400,000 shares.”

  “How’s that?” he said. “If you can make me do it, I’ll admire you all the more.”

  “And you shall do it,” I told him, “otherwise, I’ll turn your wife loose on you so she can keep an eye on you.”

  He burst out laughing and fell back into his armchair saying: “I give in out of sheer exhaustion; business is killing me. Make out your note.”

  I made it out and went to see Madame James.

  Presumably Balzac considered the complete edition of his works which he sent to Betty that same year repayment enough for all these favours.

  But the years after 1847 were not, as we shall see, a time when James could afford to be indulgent towards his debtors, no matter how trifling the sums involved, and no matter how amusing the debtor. In October 1848 Balzac—now ensconced in Wierzchownia—was appalled to hear from his mother that Rothschilds had refused to accept a draft for 2,500 francs drawn by one of his other bankers. Concluding that James now intended to call in the 17,000 francs he owed him, and fearing that he would accordingly deduct the money from any new remittances Balzac received, the author attempted a crude fraud: instead of having money paid to himself, he arranged for a payment of 31,000 francs to be made to his mother in her maiden name. The ruse evidently failed, and by February 1849 Balzac was frantically trying to meet the next payment due on the Northern shares by means of another banker’s draft. “You have no idea,” he wrote irascibly to his mother that March, “how much that debt of 17,000 francs to R[othschild] restricts me and restricts all my movements.” Not that Balzac took the matter personally: veteran spendthrift that he was, he could always see the creditor’s point of view. “The House of Rothschild,” he acknowledged, “like beavers after a thunderstorm, has to occupy itself with repairing the disasters which 1848 has wrought in all its finances.” By the time he returned to Paris in the summer of 1850, normal service had been resumed: on June 11, just two months before his death from a bewildering concatenation of ailments, Balzac was arranging with Rothschilds to invest in a hundred Banque de France shares. Behind his coffin, along with Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and a throng of Parisian hacks and literati, as if sprung from La Comédie humaine itself, walked James. The Rothschilds did Balzac one final favour thirty-two years later, when they bought the house in the rue Fortunée from his widow for ten times the original purchase price.

  Literal-minded modern scholars tend to dispute the notion that James was the model for Balzac’s fictional banker Nucingen. They point to obvious dissimilarities: Nucingen is said to be from Alsace, he is the son of a convert from Judaism, he has no brothers, he is too old (at sixty in 1829) to be James, has only one daughter and so on. Yet Balzac himself told his future wife in 1844 that James—“the high Baron of financial feudalism”—was “Nucingen to the last detail, and worse.” And a careful reading of the relevant parts of Balzac’s great work shows how much of Nucingen was inspired by James. None of the other financiers of the day is more plausible as a model; fictionalised he may be, but Nucingen is James, to the extent that Balzac could never have created the former had he never known the latter.

  Nucingen is first introduced in Le Père Goriot (1834-5) as the husband of one of the two self-centred daughters of the impoverished vermicellier Goriot. He is a “banker of German origin who had been made a baron of the Holy [Roman] Empire,” speaks with a thick, phonetically-spelt German accent (for example, “quelque chose” becomes “keke chausse”) and lives in the rue Saint-Lazare, “in one of those light houses, with thin columns [and] mean porches which are considered pretty in Paris, a true banker’s house, full of expensive elegance, ornaments [and] stair landings in marble mosaic.” In this early incarnation—as also in his second appearance in the Histoire de la Grandeur et de la Décadence de César Birotteau (1833-7)—Nucingen is portrayed as coarse and ruthless. When the bankrupt parfumier Birotteau finally secures an audience with him—again the “superb staircase” and “sumptuous apartments” are described—he is subjected to a baffling interview and referred back to another banker, du Tillet, who is in reality the architect of his destruction. Again, Balzac makes much of Nucingen’s atrocious pronunciation of French: “The shrewd baron, in order to be able to renege on promises given well but badly kept, had retained the horrible pronunciation of German Jews who flatter themselves that they can speak French.”

  This suggestion of fraudulent practice is developed at great length in La Maison Nucingen (1837-8), in which Nucingen’s origins and methods are discussed. The key to Nucingen’s success, Balzac suggests, is a succession of bogus suspensions of payment, whereby he has forced his creditors to accept depreciated paper in payment. Having done this in 1804 and again in 1815, he is poised to unfold his third and most ambitious scheme, a swindle perpetrated at the expense of (among others) a young nobleman and the widow and daughters of the Alsatian banker from whom he had made his first fortune. Naturally, given the imputation of criminality, Balzac is careful to ensure that his character is formally distinguishable from Rothschild: thus Nucingen is described as “the son of some Jew who converted [to Christianity] out of ambition,” and is said “secretly to envy the Rothschild brothers.” But the resemblances are hard to miss. His second great coup involves a massive purchase of funds before the battle of Waterloo, for example. There is a description of Nucingen’s appearance which also has a familiar ring: “Cubic, fat, he is as heavy as a sack, as immobile as a diplomat. Nucingen has the heavy hand and a lynx look that never lights up; his depth is not apparent but concealed; he is impenetrable, and you never see him coming.” The sheer extent of Nucingen’s financial influence is also suggestive: “His genius embraces everything. This elephant of finance sells deputies to the ministers and the Greeks to the Turks. For him commerce is . . . the totality of varieties, the unity of specialities.” At one point Nucingen is even compared, as Nathan had been in his lifetime, with Napoleon. And, perhaps most tellingly, he is said to have been “created a peer by the July Revolution, and a grand officer of the Legion of Honour”—the latter of which honours, as we have seen, James did in fact receive from Louis Philippe.

  La Maison Nucingen is not, of course, intended to be a realistic portrait of James de Rothschild. The book is primarily a satire on the volatile financial markets of the 1830s, which the character of Nucingen personifies ad absurdum. Its underlying “moral” is that “the debtor is stronger than the creditor,” and its most memorable passage summarising “the true principles of the age of gold in which we live” makes it easy to see why the political left sought to claim Balzac as one of their own after his death: “There are arbitrary acts which are criminal
when committed by an individual against another individual, which are expunged when they are extended to a multitude, just as a drop of prussic acid becomes innocent in a bucket of water.”

  Yet this was far from Balzac’s last word on Nucingen. In Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes (1838-47), he is cast in a wholly different light, as the world-weary vieil lard who falls in love with a prostitute he has glimpsed in the bois de Vincennes. In fact, she is the lover of the amoral, ambitious Lucien Chardon, who is himself in thrall to the Mephistophelean master-criminal Vautrin, and the three aim to extort a million francs from the lovesick Nucingen. Once again Balzac takes the opportunity to develop his romantic critique of capitalism: “All rapidly accumulated wealth is either the result of luck or discovery, or the result of a legalised theft . . . The 1814 constitution proclaimed the reign of money, and success became the supreme rationale of an atheistical epoch.” Once again, however, it is remarkable how many Rothschild allusions crop up. Nucingen is described here as “this Louis XIV of the counting house.” Indeed, Balzac describes Nucingen’s role as a patron in terms which are almost identical to those used by Heine in “Lutetia” (so much so that plagiarism seems possible):

  M. de Nucingen, a pure banker, without any inventiveness beyond his calculations . . . only believed in certain values. As regards art, he had the good sense to turn, gold in hand, to the experts in such things, taking the best architect, the best surgeon, the most eminent connoisseur of paintings and statues, the most skilful lawyer, as soon as it was a matter of building a house, checking his health, acquiring some artefacts or a property.