To be sure, there was no shortage of writers who were ready and willing to “puff ” rail travel as the wonder of the age. The 1830s and 1840s saw a spate of odes and hymns to the railway, a classic example of which was composed by an obscure poetaster named Hugelmann to mark the inauguration of the Nord line on June 14, 1846. It was entitled simply: “To Rothschild”:
A dragon hurtled through space,
Throwing fire down on the lanes;
A genius covered its face;
Put its powerful hands in chains;
And turning towards our world
He threw up the dust in a whirl
With the smoking beast in his thrall
He transported it with a firm hold;
Then showing this giant in chains
To the waiting millions of men,
He says: “I will make you some reins;
Be enslaved; here is my gold . . .”
He speaks and the mountain sides yield,
They fall and their clifftops descend;
The dragon traverses the fields,
The earth it shakes under its bonds;
Germans, united with Gaul,
For this power their defences let fall
Who is come back to life to recall
The forts that the emperors quit,
And whose urn, as it inclines
Disperses his seed divine
On the running board lined with ermine
And the labourers’ humble hamlet.
Even the usually acerbic Heine was—on occasion—moved to write in a similar, if rather less hyperbolic, vein. “All eyes are now turned to the House of Rothschild,” he reported when James’s intention to bid for the Nord concession was first made public, “which represents the society formed to construct the Northern French railway system in a way that is financially as sound as it is socially praiseworthy. The House of Rothschild, which in former times directed its talents and resources exclusively to the needs of governments, now places itself at the head of great national undertakings, devoting its enormous capital and its immeasurable credit to the advancement of industry and the prosperity of the people.” When the lines to Orléans and Rouen were opened in May 1843, Heine was positively lyrical in his enthusiasm. He detected in Paris
a tremor, which is felt by everyone, unless he has been sent into solitary confinement. The whole population of Paris constitutes at this moment a chain, which communicates the electric shock from one person to another. While the great mass of people gapes astounded and dumb-struck at the outward manifestation of these great motive forces, the philosopher is seized by a strange horror, the way we always feel when the most monstrous, unheard of thing happens, the consequences of which are unforeseeable and incalculable. Let us just say that our entire existence is being ripped up and hurled on to new tracks; that new relationships, pleasures and torments await us, and the unknown exerts its ghastly fascination, irresistible, yet at the same time fearful. Our forefathers must have felt the same when America was discovered, when the invention of gunpowder announced itself with the first shots, when the printing press sent the first proof copies of the Word of God into the world. The railways are another such providential event . . .
Yet already Heine sounded a characteristically ambivalent note of warning when he considered the political influence which the railways were conferring on those who built them. The “ruling aristocracy of money,” he suggested, exercised “more and more control every day over the rudder of state”: “Soon those people will constitute not only the supervisory board of the railway company, but also the supervisory board of our entire civil society.” For Heine, the most intriguing aspect of the railway boom was the way that aristocratic and military elites (even admirals) flocked to associate themselves with it. They lent their names as non-executive directors and invested their savings. They were even reduced to begging for share options in new companies like the Nord:
[E]very share which members of this house [of Rothschild] grants to individuals is really a great favour—speaking plainly I should say that it is in fact a present of money which M. de Rothschild makes his friends. The shares ultimately issued . . . are from the beginning worth several hundred francs above par, and whoever asks Baron James de Rothschild for such shares at par, begs from him in the literal sense of the word. But then—the whole world is begging from him; he is inundated by begging letters, and where the greatest aristocrats have set such a noble example, begging can no longer be considered a disgrace.
Heine was not alone in portraying James’s mutation into a railway baron in an essentially light-hearted light. Rothschild railway jokes were another characteristic by-product of the era. Punning on the double meaning of the French action (a share) the writer Prosper Mérimée told Madame de Montijo a typical one in February 1846:
The rabbi who teaches the children of M. de Rothschild asked one of them, a young lad of seven, if he knew the difference between a good action and a bad action. “Without a doubt,” replied the child. “A good action is an action of the Nord, a bad action is an action of the Rive Gauche.” Believe me, that boy will not lose his father’s millions.
Seven years later, Count Nesselrode told his cousin a “mot de Rothschild” which may even have been true as well as archetypal. “Count Tassilo Festeticz consulted him about the investment of a considerable sum. ‘M. le comte,’ Rothschild told him, ‘if you want your capital without interest, buy land. If you want your interest without capital, buy shares.’ ” “It happened in Paris,” added Nesselrode, “but it is universally true.” Such anecdotes are too easily dismissed as apocryphal. But the Rothschilds’ private correspondence confirms that at least one of them was not far from the truth. In November 1848 Betty told her son Alphonse how his four-year-old brother Edmond had “got into the habit of taking my prayer book for his devotions. And yesterday, in one of his pious outbursts, what if he doesn’t say, ‘I pray to our good Lord God for Papa [and] for the chemin de fer du Nord !’ ”
Yet not everyone was so amused. In the course of the 1840s, a growing number of journalists began to express hostility towards what they regarded as a dangerous and corrupting private monopoly. Above all, the Nord concession came to symbolise what more radical critics of the July Monarchy regarded as its fundamental rottenness. It began in newspapers like the Courrier Français, the Réforme, the Univers and the Quotidienne. But it took its most virulent form in cheaply produced polemical books and pamphlets like Alphonse Toussenel’s The Jews, Kings of the Epoch: A History of Financial Feudalism.
In some respects, Toussenel was in a tradition dating back to the 1820s of radical critics who laced their diatribes against political corruption with a strong dose of anti-Semitism. The thrust of his argument was directed against the financial terms under which the Nord concession had been granted (and could just as easily have been made without reference to James’s Jewishness). According to Toussenel, the government had effectively ceded all the profits from the line to the Rothschild-led company for forty years, while retaining all the expenses for itself—that is “for the nation.” The state would pay out an estimated 100 million francs for the land across which the railway would be built, while the company would merely advance the state the cost—around 60 million francs—of the rails and rolling stock, money which the state would reimburse when the concession expired. In effect, Toussenel argued, the company was lending the state 60 million francs in return for an income from the line of around 14 million francs a year, to say nothing of the speculative profits on the shares it issued to the public. Would it not have been more rational, he asked, for the state to have borrowed the money itself—which would have cost just 2.4 million francs a year in interest—and to have built and run the railways as a state enterprise? Why pay five times that much to acquire the line forty years in the future?
At one level, this was a not implausible argument for public sector control of the railway network on the Belgian model: similar economic nationalism was being a
dvocated in Germany at around this time. And in its critique of the distributional consequences of government policy, Toussenel’s book evinced a debt to early socialist thinkers like Fourier. “The enormous profits” generated by the railways came partly from the “labour of the French worker and artisan”: “Who pays for the speculator’s premiums of hundred of millions? The worker, the people. Who suffers on account of the ignorance and cowardice of those in power? The people.”
However, Toussenel’s economic argument was inextricably linked to a visceral anti-Semitism. He angrily denounced the “traitors, hacks, deputies, ministers who would sell France to the Jews . . . in these times of irritation and political senility.” This identification of the railway companies with a single religious group required a considerable definitional elasticity, given the prominent role of manifestly non-Jewish investors from England and Switzerland. But Toussenel—setting an example which future generations of anti-Semites would readily follow—had no difficulty with this. Rattling off the names of the various railway companies and their principal shareholders, he portrayed them all as satellites of a single cosmopolitan, Jewish haute banque, personified by “Baron Rothschild, the King of Finance, a Jew ennobled by a very Christian King.” In the 1840s “Jew” ceased to be a purely religious category and became synonymous with the type of the exploitative capitalist.
Toussenel’s book was profoundly influential, spawning a succession of imitators—who were generally only too glad to repeat verbatim his charges, and add some more for good measure. Within a year of the first edition, a still more violent pamphlet was published under the pseudonym of “Satan” by an obscure hack named Georges Dairnvaell, entitled The Edifying and Curious History of Rothschild I, King of the Jews. According to Dairnvaell, the Rothschilds had secured the Nord contract by corrupt means, distributing 15,000 shares to deputies; moreover, they had then defrauded these same shareholders by an unauthorised issue of shares, which reduced the value of the original stock. James was “Rothschild I . . . the speculator-monarch . . . a capitalist who enriches himself incessantly while the fathers of children lose all but their last crust of bread.” In the later wave of anti-Semitic journalism of the 1880s and 1890s, similar allegations were trotted out: Chirac, for example, claimed that James distributed Nord shares to friendly papers like the Constitutionnel or the Journal des Débats and even slipped a couple of shares under the serviettes of selected dinner guests! Drumont repeated the charges made by Toussenel; Scherb merely translated the relevant chunk of Dairnvaell. The same stories were being repeated even after 1945.
Was there any substance to these attacks? One modern historian has argued that “The system of [railway] finance . . . seemed to guarantee the maximum costs to the state with the maximum secure benefits to shareholders.” The public appetite for Nord shares was enormous. The list of names who approached James and Lionel for this purpose is an impressive one: as one contemporary joked, James must have had a “rather precious autograph collection” of the Parisian social elite by the time the deadline for applications passed. Baron Stockmar was an early investor in French rails, conceivably on behalf of Prince Albert. Lady Ailesbury, the widow of the 1st Marquess, was another. Disraeli bought 150 shares in the Paris-Strasbourg line in 1845, though this proved a “very indifferent” speculation and he sold them just a few months later. Lionel also “gave” him some shares in the Nord. Another investor in the Nord was Balzac, though he had to pay for his 150 shares—unlike a less well-known writer Jules Janin, who later wrote that “M. de Rothschild . . . saved me and my novel [Clarisse Harlowe] with a few Nord shares.” Yet evidence that shares were allocated to needy writers with the specific intention of influencing the granting of the concession is lacking. Indeed, one contemporary had the impression that most of the shares were being allocated “arbitrarily.” This seems plausible given the sheer number of shareholders involved. As the Minister of Public Works Dumon, pointed out, there were 12,461 subscribers for the Nord, 31,000 for the Strasbourg line and 24,000 for the line to Lyon. It is also worth asking whether such large numbers would have come forward in the absence of a government subsidy. It seems unlikely. Even with the subsidy, those who held on to their Nord shares saw only a temporary (if impressive) capital gain. In the months between the granting of the concession and the opening of the line, the shares were being traded at prices above 750 francs, compared with a nominal price of 500. However, within days of its inauguration, a tragic and not wholly unpredictable event provided a reminder that, government subsidy or no, railways were a risky business. In the light of the events of 1846-8, the allegation that the Rothschilds made immense and improper profits from the Nord concession must be regarded with scepticism.
An Accident Happens
On June 14, 1846, James de Rothschild invited 1,700 guests to celebrate the opening of the Nord line. Transported in first class carriages of the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Nord, the party lunched at Lille, dined at Brussels and then returned to Paris the next day. A cantata was composed specially for the occasion by Berlioz and Jules Janin and, to ensure the best possible press coverage, invitations were sent to Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Prosper Mérimée and Théophile Gautier, who described the inauguration in a piece for the Presse. It was the day, in Dairnvaell’s words, “when the royalty of Rothschild I was officially recognised” and James Rothschild was proclaimed “King of Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Oceania and other places, and above all, King of the Jews.” Just twenty-four days later, at 3 p.m. on July 8, a train running north on the same line was derailed at Fampoux when a rail gave way on an embankment running along the side of a marshy lake. According to an eyewitness account, the first locomotive pulling the twenty-nine-carriage train kept going, but the second came to a sudden halt, snapping the connecting chains between the carriages behind it. Thirteen carriages came off the track, one was crushed by the impact and three others sank in the lake. Despite heroic efforts by passengers in the rear coaches, between fourteen and thirty-nine people died.
The conflicting estimates of the death toll were products of the subsequent, violent public debate between the railway company and a chorus of hostile journalists, led by Georges Dairnvaell, for whom the accident seemed to encapsulate the wickedness not just of the company but of the political system which had granted the concession, of the Jews and above all of the Rothschilds. There had, of course, been railway accidents before. Heine had already written bitter words on the subject following a fire on the Versailles line:
What a dreadful disaster, for instance, was the fire on the Versailles railway! I am not referring now to the Sunday crowd roasted or parboiled on this occasion; I refer rather to the surviving Sabbath company, whose stock tumbled by so many per cent, and which now awaits, with fear and trembling, the outcome of the lawsuits brought against it after this catastrophe. Will the promoters or founders of the company be made to disgorge some money to compensate the orphaned or maimed victims of their avid pursuit of profit? How terrible that would be! These millionaires are much to be pitied . . .
But Dairnvaell took his recriminations much further. The Nord company, he alleged, had ignored warnings about the poor quality of its rails and continued running the normal service after the accident had happened, despite the fact that the signals were not working properly. At the same time, its directors had profited by selling their own shares before news of the accident got out. This was bad enough by itself; but in truth, he argued, it was just the latest example of the way “Rothschild” and the Jews treated the French people. Dairnvaell thus used the Nord accident as the basis for a vitriolic recounting of the Rothschilds’ “history” of battening off France, beginning with the battle of Waterloo and culminating at Fampoux:
They have enriched themselves from our impoverishment and from our disasters . . . they have stayed with us the way the leech stays on a man’s vein . . . [like] the vampires of commerce and the scourges of nations . . . The Rothschilds have only ever gained from our disasters; wh
en France has won, the Rothschilds have lost. This house is our evil genius.
Dairnvaell’s allegations unleashed an extraordinary and protracted pamphlet war. At least seven separate publications appeared in the succeeding months, some denouncing James in similar terms, others defending him, still others claiming to judge the two sides impartially. The so-called First Official Response of M. Baron James Rothschild claimed that Dairnvaell was little better than a blackmailer who had demanded 5,000 francs from James in return for not publishing his Edifying History, and had gone into print when James had offered him only a thousand francs.5 A similar attack on Dairnvaell appeared in the Response of Rothschild I, King of the Jews, to Satan the Last, King of the Impostors. In swift response came three further anti-Rothschild pamphlets: War on the Swindlers (by Dairnvaell himself ),6 Rothschild I, his Valets and his People and Ten Days in the Reign of Rothschild I, King of the Jews (both anonymous). Finally, there were attempts to adjudicate. The Letter to M. Baron de Rothschild rebutted Dairnvaell’s historical allegations, but concluded that “the Rothschild brothers have done nothing for the peoples [of the world], and consequently, nothing for humanity . . . M. de Rothschild . . . has a thirst for money, and that’s all there is to it.” More overtly hostile to James was the Grand Process between Rothschild I, King of the Jews, and Satan, last King of the Impostors, which described James as “King of the Jews, sometime bailiff of the courts of Europe, farmer general of public works of France, Germany, England etc. etc., and sovereign of discount, usury, pawn-broking, speculation etc.”
The House of Rothschild, Volume 1 Page 73