The House of Rothschild, Volume 1

by Niall Ferguson

As in 1830, it was the outbreak of revolution in France which turned disquiet into panic. Of course, the Rothschilds had never had unqualified confidence in the July Monarchy. The death of Louis Philippe’s eldest son in 1842 had reinforced their pessimism about the future: the King himself confided “that after his death . . . the Revolution of 1830 would begin again.” “I assure you it has given me the stomach ache,” commented Anthony uneasily. “I do not think that there is any danger as long as the present King lives—but what will take place after his death God knows & I hope to God that the good old gentleman will live for a mighty time and that everything will go on well—nevertheless we must be prudent.” This explains the Rothschilds’ fear of a successful assassination attempt against the King. When James himself received a death threat in 1846, he passed the letter on to the government, remarking: “The man who wants to shoot at me could just as well shoot at the King, or vice versa.” When Louis Philippe survived yet another attempt on his life the following April, Nat pronounced him “one of the most admirable men that ever existed.”

  The growing extra-parliamentary pressure for electoral reform in the course of 1847, however, raised the possibility that 1830 might repeat itself even with Louis Philippe still living. Nat’s reports from Paris in January and February 1848 show that he saw the crisis coming: “[G]ood folks speak exactly as they did just before the revolution of 1830,” he remarked on February 20, two days before the fateful Reform banquet was scheduled to take place, in defiance of a government ban.

  I think a change of ministry wd. remedy the evil but in the mean time it is impossible to say what will occur—no one can tell how a french mob will behave & when the [president?] of the chamber of deputies associates with the common people it is a hazardous thing to say how far they will go and when they will remain quiet—We must hope for the best, in the mean time my dear Brothers, I really recommend you most strongly to sell stocks & public securities of all sorts and descriptions.

  Yet the very next day he was more optimistic:

  The nasty banquet continues exciting the public . . . It is really very much the same sort of thing as in 1830 & nevertheless I can not help thinking it will all blow over and leave us [far?] behind.—This country is so well off and in general people are so greatly interested in the maintenance of things that I believe a revolutionary movement [to be] out of the question . . . The end will be a change of ministry & Guizot will in all probability go out on the Parliamentary reform question.—I shall be very glad when that takes place, it wd. make our rentes get up and set matters right again.

  “I have however no doubt that as soon as the affair of the banquet is over we shall see a great improvement,” he added in another letter. “All our friends assure us there is no need of anxiety on acct. of any revolutionary demonstration on the part of the dep[utie]s of the Gauche—in my opinion their banquet will be a complete failure.” “People have much too great an interest at stake in the maintenance of order to kick up rows,” he concluded in his final despatch before the date set for the banquet, “& I don’t think that emeutes will be again à l’ordre du jour at least p[ou]r le moment—” The temperamental pessimist had picked the worst possible moment to look on the bright side.

  Even in his letter of February 23, with barricades in the street and signs of mutiny in the National Guard, Nat still underestimated the gravity of the situation, hoping nervously that a change of ministry would suffice to dampen unrest:

  The ministry has changed, Guizot has just declared in the chamber of Depts. that he had sent in his resignation to the king and his majesty was at the present moment closeted with Molé—We must hope that between them they will cook up a good government but it is a dangerous experiment to yield to the wishes of a factious minority and of a turbulent set of national guards—The great fault was in not sending off Guizot sooner, the people had got up the reform cry and it is impossible to resist public opinion any where nowadays.—The emeute in itself was not of a very serious nature, very little real fighting and few if any killed—but what really made the king anxious was the manifestation of the national guard in favour of reform and against Guizot . . . The emeute by all accounts is over, now they have got reform I do not see what they have got to fight for & I suppose we shall hear of illuminations and the Lord knows what else. I know one thing and that is your humble servant will not hold much French stock in future . . . [I]t’s a dangerous job to give way to a mob incited by the National [Guard].

  This must have been written just hours before the fateful confrontation in the rue des Capucins, in which fifty demonstrators were shot dead by soldiers guarding the Foreign Ministry. The next day, in the face of what he called “a moral uprising,” Louis Philippe abdicated in favour of his grandson and fled to England, leaving the various opposition parties to form a provisional government, including the lawyer Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, the poet Alphonse de Lamartine, the socialist Louis Blanc and a token worker named Albert. The following day a commission was set up in response to unemployed building workers’ assertion of their “right to work.” Nat’s next despatch was short and to the point: “We are in the midst of the worst revolution that ever happened—You may perhaps see us shortly after this reaches [you].” Already he and James had sent their wives and children to Le Havre to take the next ship to England.

  Events in France were shaped as much by the memory of past revolutions as by anything else. Those who recalled how little had been achieved in 1830 were determined to establish a republic on a more authentically democratic basis; those still frightened by memories of the 1790s were determined not to let power into the hands of neo-Jacobins. The issue was undecided until, at the earliest, the end of June. Although the elections to the Constitutional Assembly revealed the limited support for radical republicanism outside Paris, the possibility of a “red” coup within Paris could not be ruled out. In May this was attempted unsuccessfully by the socialists Raspail, Blanqui and Barbès. In June the closure of the national work-shops led to clashes between disillusioned workers and National Guardsmen. As late as June 1849, the so-called Montagne party took to the streets in a last vain bid to rekindle the Jacobin spirit.

  The pattern was roughly similar almost everywhere the revolution broke out. Although relatively few monarchs were definitively deposed by the revolution, a number were prompted to flee their capitals and most were forced to make constitutional concessions by the outbreak of violence in the streets, which exposed the inadequacy (or unreliability) of their civilian police forces. This collective scuttle meant that a variety of constitutional innovations were possible, ranging from French republicanism (also tried in Rome and Venice) to parliamentarism (in many German states). In the Netherlands, a centre of revolution in 1830, the Dutch and Belgian monarchs hastily gave ground to liberal pressure and allowed constitutional reforms to be implemented; the same was true in Denmark. In Germany, the revolution began in Baden, where the Grand Duke was forced to concede a liberal constitution almost immediately after the Paris events, an example followed in short order by Hesse-Kassel, Hesse-Darmstadt and Württemberg. In Bavaria, King Ludwig was forced to abdicate, his reputation irreparably damaged by his liaison with Lola Montez. Such changes within the monarchical system did not satisfy more radical republicans, who attempted a coup in Baden in April. The tremors were felt even in the Rothschilds’ home town: contrary to Anselm’s expectations, 1848 posed a threat to ancient republics like Frankfurt too if their definitions of citizenship were over-narrow and their governmental structures antiquated. The first violence in the town centre occurred in early March.

  Everywhere there seemed to be two (possibly successive) revolutions: one of which aimed at constitutional reform, the other of which had fundamentally economic objectives. Though they overlapped in complex ways, there was a marked social difference between the two. While educated academics, lawyers and professionals made speeches and drafted constitutions, it was artisans, apprentices and workers who manned barricades and got themselves sho
t.

  Perhaps the biggest difference between 1848 and 1830 was that now the revolutionary epidemic spread to Austria. Metternich received the news of the Paris revolution from a Rothschild courier. “Eh bien, mon cher, tout est fini,” he is said to have commented, though his subsequent remarks to Salomon were more bullish. It was indeed all finished. On March 13 crowds of demonstrators clashed with troops outside the hall where the Lower Austrian Estates were meeting. The next day Metternich resigned, fleeing by a circuitous route across Europe in disguise and with barely enough money—a credit-note from his faithful banker Salomon—to pay his family’s passage to England. The Emperor Ferdinand replaced him with his arch-rival Kolowrat and promised a constitution. As elsewhere, when the new government opted for an English-style bicameral parliament with a property franchise for the lower house, radical democrats—mainly students like Hermann Goldschmidt’s maverick cousin Bernhard Bauer—took to the streets (May 15), prompting the Emperor himself to flee to Innsbruck. When the Constituent Assembly proved quite conservative (the peasant deputies were satisfied with the abolition of serfdom) and the revolutionary government tried to reduce the money spent on public works, there was further unrest: workers went on strike in July, and students attempted a last-ditch coup in October.

  The collapse of Habsburg authority at the centre set off a chain reaction throughout Central Europe. In Prussia, unrest had already begun in the Rhineland, but it was the news from Vienna which transformed the mood in Berlin. On March 17, after days of public demonstrations, Frederick William IV appeared to capitulate by agreeing to a constitution, but simultaneously deployed troops to restore order. As in Paris, it was shots fired by nervy soldiers at demonstrators in the city centre which turned reform into revolution. For more than twenty-four hours fighting raged; then the King gave in, issuing a series of proclamations to Berliners, Prussians and—significantly—“the German nation.” As in Baden, Württemberg and Hanover, liberals became ministers, though all those who accepted office soon came to realise the difficulty of reconciling their aspirations for economic and political liberty with the more radical aims of the artisans, students and workers. For a time, the best hope of unity appeared to be nationalism. Thus, from an early stage, the German revolution was more than merely a matter of constitutional reform within states: it promised a parallel transformation of the German Confederation itself.

  The ramifications of the Habsburg collapse were not confined to Germany. In Prague, moderate liberals like Frantisek Palacky pressed for a modern parliament based on a property franchise in place of the antiquated Bohemian Diet. In Hungary, Croatia and Transylvania there were similar separatist tendencies with varying degrees of liberalism. It was the same in Italy, though the timing was slightly different. As we have seen, the revolution in the Two Sicilies had begun early: on March 6 Ferdinand II granted a separate parliament in Sicily and was shortly afterwards deposed there; two months later he allowed a parliament to assemble in Naples itself. In Piedmont and the Papal states, Charles Albert and Pius IX made similar concessions, both granting constitutions in March. In Venice and Milan, revolution took the form of revolt against Austrian rule. As in Germany (though on a smaller scale), some revolutionaries saw the opportunity to make Italy more than merely a geographical expression.

  Why did 1848 seem “the worst revolution that ever happened” to the Rothschilds? It is important to notice that their reaction was not determined by a uniformly ideological aversion to liberal or republican forms of government. Attitudes towards the revolution varied widely from one member of the family to another. At one extreme, Salomon seemed almost incapable of comprehending the calamity which had befallen him other than in religious terms. When not trying to justify his own financial mistakes in rambling letters to his brothers and nephews, Salomon interpreted the revolution variously as an avoidable political mishap attributable to the incompetence of Louis-Philippe, the vanity of Princess Metternich and the irresponsibility of Palmerston, and a world-historical upheaval on a par not just with 1789 but with the Peasants’ Wars, the Crusades and a biblical plague of locusts. Whichever it was, he regarded it as a divine test of religious faith.

  His nephew Nat lacked this consolation. Already more politically conservative and personally cautious than his brothers in London, he was deeply traumatised by the revolution—to the point of suffering something like a physical or nervous collapse. A worse “political cholera never yet infected the world,” he lamented, before repairing to take the waters at Ems, “& I am afraid the Doctor does not exist to cure it, a great deal of blood must be shed first.” Virtually every letter he wrote to his brothers during the revolutionary months concluded with a warning to sell all their stocks and shares.

  No one else in the family took the revolution quite as badly. Neither Amschel nor Carl seems to have reflected deeply on the subject: for them, the revolution was like a natural disaster—inexplicable, but with God’s blessing survivable. The ideas of the revolution were beyond their ken—Carl dismissed talk of Italian nationality as “the stupid projects of a few deranged minds”—and as far as possible he and Amschel sought to keep their distance from political debate. Similarly, the pageantry of nationalism—the tricolours, the patriotic songs—left the older Rothschilds stone cold. A contemporary cartoon depicts a puzzled Amschel asking Arnold Duckwitz, the “Reich Trade Minister” appointed by the Frankfurt parliament in the summer of 1848 (on the optimistic assumption that a new Reich was in the making): “Nothing to trade yet, Mister Minister?” (see illustration 16.iii). It was probably right to imply that he was baffled by the protracted and inconclusive debates in the parliament. James, by contrast, had a good idea what the revolutionaries were after. Increasingly of the opinion that all regimes were at once unreliable and financially biddable, he was inclined to salute whichever flag was run up the mast after the storm. His refusal to let Alphonse serve in the National Guard, for example, was more an assertion of the primacy of family interests over all politics than an explicitly anti-republican gesture. James shed no tears for Louis Philippe.

  This pragmatism was to some extent shared by the four eldest sons, Anselm, Lionel, Mayer Carl and Alphonse, who already tended to take a similar, sober view of political developments. Unlike James, however, they all occasionally expressed sympathy with liberal reforms, though they distinguished these from the ideas of radical democrats, socialists and communists. Anselm’s commentaries on German developments suggest little sympathy with the various kings, princes and archdukes obliged to bow to “the will of the people,” as well as considerable impatience with the “old wig-heads” of the Frankfurt Senate. He was interested enough to attend the first debates of the German “pre-parliament” in Frankfurt before leaving for Vienna, though it was a detached kind of interest: unlike their London cousin Lionel, neither he nor Mayer Carl thought for a moment of standing for election. And Anselm warmly welcomed the Austrian constitution issued in March 1849, the terms of which were in fact moderately liberal. By contrast, the various younger brothers had more idiosyncratic responses. Adolph in Naples was simply terrified. Anthony, on the other hand, regarded the German princes as “a set of donkeys” and had “a very good opinion” of the Frankfurt parliament’s project for a united Germany which he thought “Right and reasonable.” As for the nineteen-year-old Gustave, he itched to get back to Paris to see the action for himself—only to be disappointed by the “tristesse” he encountered there, the extent of working class unrest and the poor calibre of the republican politicians.

  16.iii: “W.V.,” Baron: “Noch niks zu handele, Härr Minister? ” (1848).

  Nowhere is the ambivalence of the Rothschilds towards the revolution more apparent than in letters and diaries of female members of the family. James’s wife Betty was vehemently hostile to the revolution, applauding her four-year-old grandson James Edouar when he declared: “If I had money, I would buy a gun to shoot the republic and republicans.” She expected the French republican constitution “soon to go
to join its sisters whom oblivion has long since buried in the mists of time” and dismissed the deputies in the National Assembly as “the wild beasts of our great Parisian menagerie.” She was equally contemptuous of the German revolution. The Frankfurt parliament was, she told her eldest son, “an agent of false doctrines and anarchy.” When Robert Blum was shot in Vienna, she was delighted that “his factious voice has been extinguished” and regretted only that the same had not been done in Paris. Bizarrely for one whose parents had been born in the Frankfurt ghetto, Betty even expressed nostalgia for the ancien régime of the eighteenth century, “that century when minds were so fertile, and when anyone knew how to bring honour to his rank with dignity without departing from it, and did not consider himself lowered by obedience to a higher authority.” The nineteenth century she thought “an evil age.”

  Her cousin, Lionel’s wife Charlotte, took a very different view, however. She feared for the family’s financial future, of course; yet at the same time she derived a certain moralistic satisfaction from the crisis, seeing it as an opportunity for self-denial and self-improvement. Following political events on the continent in her relatives’ letters and in the newspapers gave her a sense of exhilaration, of historical acceleration. It was, she wrote in her diary, “in truth . . . the age of the railways, for the last six weeks have been almost as eventful as the six years which saw Louis XVI’s death, the great Terror, the Convention and Napoleon.” Above all, she was captivated by the possibilities of German unification raised at Frankfurt:

  As for Germany, there are hopes that she will soon become prosperous, powerful, united and free. In Prussia also the people have won a victory over the army and the king is forced to grant his subjects all the reforms and concessions they demand. The ministry has changed; the prince of Prussia has fled; the press is free; the proceedings of the law courts are public . . . and all confessions and religions have equal rights. Once more as a great and united empire, strong and happy, elevated and proud, Germany will trounce the Russian storms, the Cossack invasions and the warmongering of the French.