The House of Rothschild (15 page)

It was malice on Hübner’s part to portray Betty’s relationship with General Changarnier as a romantic one. In fact, her recently rediscovered letters to Alphonse during his absence in America reveal that her first impressions of him were less than favourable. The general struck her as a “thin, ugly man of medium height and with nothing military about him but his moustaches. At first sight he seems old and worn out.” When he dined with them in January 1849, he “was as good company as possible and most desirous to please,” but “in this respect he was only partly successful. I don’t find in him the spirit of openness and loyalty which I have so often heard him praised for; on the contrary, he gave the impression rather of being a two-faced man ...” Disraeli was told by Hannah that Changarnier was rather straitlaced: when invited to dine at the Rothschilds along with a celebrated opera singer, he refused and “lectured [Betty] for inviting a public singer to her table.” Nor by this stage had Betty ruled out some kind of accommodation with Louis Napoleon. The President, she told her son in April, was “doing well. Every day he gives certain proofs of [his belief in] the principle of order and legal authority.” So reassured was she that she “finally broke the ice and appeared in the President’s salons. Without appearing to affect to a political sulk, it would have been difficult for me to remain away any longer.”

On the other hand, there is no question that Changarnier said the right things to reassure a woman who, more than other members of the family, had reacted strongly against the revolution. “He is,” she wrote approvingly, “a reactionary of the right sort ... The other day he was talking about the symbol of the third virtue on our flags, and he said to me, ‘I hate fraternity so much that if I had a brother, I would call him my cousin.’ ” Soon she was assuring Alphonse, “My friend Changarnier will hold the madmen in check,” and adding that the family was “protected by our worthy Changarnier.” “In our excellent Changarnier,” she declared in June, “we have a sure friend, who is too well acquainted with what is going on not to let us know [of trouble] immediately. I would not be able to tell you how honourable this man is, what a noble heart and loyal soul he has, how open-minded he is, this former hero, uniting knightly courage that brings strength of purpose and resolve which must succeed.” If she said this sort of thing in public, it is perhaps not so surprising that Hübner detected an amorous as well as a political attraction. Her aunt Hannah herself commented discreetly that Changarnier was “much devoted to the family, thinks a great deal of the talent and abilities of Betty, appreciates the courage and manner of acting of the family during the time of the revolution and appears to study their welfare.” For his part, James commented—with a mixture of admiration and bemusement—that although Changarnier was willing to give him sensitive political information (for example, over French policy in the Don Pacifico affair), he would never speculate himself on such news: “Now Charganier has never got mixed up [in speculation] and he has never said to me that he wants to speculate. In fact I am sure that if I were to propose something to him or to his adjutant, he would no longer receive me nor accept my invitations. He is the most singular fellow I know!” Bonaparte, by contrast, was more than happy to speculate—but not with James.

Throughout 1850, James struggled to reconcile the two men, increasingly conscious that it was Napoleon who had the upper hand, and that this could spell trouble for him. “The President probably thinks that I have wronged him,” he reported in January 1850, “so it seems that I too do not stand very high in his regard, particularly as Fould will do me no favours. Thank God I have no need of him.” As this suggests, it is also true that he distrusted Fould (the fact that he had married a Gentile did not help). Still, the nature of their rivalry should not be misunderstood—they saw one another often, and one detects a grudging respect: to have one brother a banker and the other a Finance Minister was, as James acknowledged, no mean strategy. James plainly felt himself at a disadvantage in business and in politics: “Unfortunately,” he grumbled, “I see with annoyance that business is being taken away from us and we are not what we used to be.” But it is wrong to suggest that his failure to secure the issue of rentes which took place at the end of 1850 was a symptom of his waning financial influence. In fact, James had prepared a bid, but stayed away from the auction because of the death of Nat’s four-year-old son Mayer Albert, whose funeral coincided with the Finance Minister’s auction. Even as he mourned, James could not resist gloating that his absence would make Fould’s auction “a fiasco”: “Now they see that one cannot push Rothschild aside, as Fould wanted to do.”

In truth, James’s principal concern was more diplomatic than financial. He feared that the President’s erratic foreign policy might lead to friction, if not war, between France and the other powers, whether Britain (over the Don Pacifico affair) or Prussia (over Germany). Chirac’s story about James attempting to tone down French policy in late 1850 at a meeting with Napoleon and Changarnier has the ring of truth about it. “Come now, let’s see, vat is it about, this quarrel ofer Germany?” James allegedly said. “Let’s come to some arrenchment, for heafen’s sake, let’s come to some arrenchment.” Napoleon, so the story goes, merely turned his back on him. James did indeed see Napoleon on a number of occasions in 1850 and 1851; but he never claimed to have any success in influencing his policy. On the contrary, he grumbled that the President “like[d] nothing more than to play the little soldier”; he was “an ass ... who would end up turning the whole world against him.” In particular, the possibility of French meddling in the quarrel between Austria and Prussia which flared up in the second half of 1850 filled him with foreboding. Though he continued to dread ending up “in the hands of the reds,” James would not have been entirely sorry if Louis Napoleon had been “chased away like Louis Philippe” over his foreign policy blunders.

All this explains why, as the likelihood of a Bonapartist coup d‘état increased, James was nervous. As early as October 1850, he began to remit gold to the London house, explaining to his nephews that “I would rather have all my gold over there earning 3 per cent on deposit than put it in rentes or keep it in the cellar, when a man like that [Napoleon] might take my money away for being a friend of Changarnier’s. I’m not afraid but I like to be careful. Politically, this is a wretched country.” At the same time, James increased his political exposure by remaining in contact with Changarnier even after the latter’s dismissal from his army and National Guard commands. In October 1851 James told his nephews that “our General” had “great hopes.” “I suspect that before they are realised,” he added uneasily, “Paris may be bathed in blood. I have sold all my rentes.” It was thus not unreasonable for James to fear that he too might be arrested along with Changarnier and the other republican leaders when the coup was launched on the night of December 1-2. Symbolically, he had fallen downstairs and sprained his ankle a week before “Operation Rubicon” (as the coup was codenamed), so he was quite literally prostrate when the Bona partists struck. Small wonder his letters to London immediately after the coup say nothing about politics; as James explained, he had reason to fear that they were being intercepted. Fortunately for the historian, Betty was less discreet when she met Apponyi, so we have a good idea of her furious reaction:

Yet James was never a man to confuse his political preferences with his business interests. Beyond his liking for Changarnier, he felt no loyalty to the Republic, and accepted the new situation with (as Hübner put it) “great resignation.” Pereire brought a reassuring account of the situation to an impromptu gathering of bankers at the rue Laffitte. Those present did not

Moreover, it soon became apparent that, in smashing the republican left and signalling his support for an expansionary credit policy, Napoleon was generating a climate of financial optimism. The price of rentes tells its own story. On the eve of the coup, 3 per cent rentes were quoted at 56 and 5 per cents at 90.5. Immediately after, prices leapt to 64 and 102.5 respectively; and by the end of 1852—when Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor on the first anniversary of the coup—3 per cents stood at 83—a capital gain of nearly 50 per cent from Republic to Empire (see illustration 2.i). Figures for gross investment in railways tell the same story: after a perod of stagnation between 1848 and 1851, investment increased by a factor of five in the period to 1856. James had for some time been conscious that economic and political events were out of synchrony: even the war scares and domestic alarms of the pre-coup period had not been as destabilising as he himself had anticipated. “To listen to the politicians,” he remarked in 1850, “you would think all was lost; to listen to the financiers is to be told quite the opposite.” But from December 2 onwards, politics and economics were brought back into harmony by a government that consciously identified its own health with that of the bourse.

The Napoleonic regime was thus far from an ideal outcome for James, who would probably have preferred Changarnier to pave the way for an Orléanist restoration. But once it was apparent that Napoleon had no intention of penalising him personally, he could live with it. He had already summarised his position—pre sciently—in October 1850: “In the end we shall have an Emperor, which will end with war, for if I wasn’t so afraid of war, then I would be an imperialist myself.” After the coup, he was quick to recognise that his rivals would steal a march on him if he was identified too closely with the defunct republic. While Betty could express her “demoralisation” with Napoleon by retreating into internal exile at Ferrières, her husband had (once again) to move with the times: “I think Napoleon is gaining strength,” he reported to London, just three weeks after the coup, “despite the fact that the great and the good will not accept his invitations. Do you think that we too should stay away completely?” It was a rhetorical question. Even the Rothschild women could not sustain their social boycott indefinitely. Indeed, their mood began to soften even before the end of December. “At the Rothschilds,” observed Apponyi waspishly after an encounter with Nat’s wife Charlotte and Betty, “the mood of calm stems from the enormous amounts of money they are making at the moment as a result of the boom in all the bonds and shares they have in their portfolio.”

It was at least the fifth change of regime since James had settled in Paris, and it was evidently becoming hard for him to take such events seriously. “My good nephews, how would you like a French constitution for two sous? They’re being sold in the streets for that here.” An absolute government was “not very good; but here you can do what you like and it’s all forgotten.” As early as October 1852, James could breezily report that he was “on the best footing with the Emperor and everyone”; this was fully two months before Napoleon actually proclaimed himself Emperor. It was also just days before Napoleon’s famous Bordeaux speech in which he declared: “The Empire means peace” (“L‘Empire, c’est la paix”). This seemed to rule out the rash infringements of Belgian neutrality or challenges to Prussian rule in the Rhineland which had caused most concern in the previous two years, and explains why the other powers recognised Napoleon as Emperor with only token quibbles.

Of course, it was not that easy: in January 1853 James was still having difficulty getting to see the new Emperor. But he had two routes into the new court. Firstly, he remained Austrian consul-general, and made a point of wearing his scarlet uniform to remind anyone who had forgotten his diplomatic status. In August 1852 he had been able to relay an anodyne message to Napoleon from the new Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph; and, although Hübner did his best to undermine James’s claim to represent Vienna in Paris, he had no chance of dislodging him as long as the Rothschilds remained Austria’s bankers. The second way James sought to ingratiate himself with Napoleon was by championing the cause of the half-Spanish, half-Scottish adventuress Eugénie de Montijo, who more snobbish Parisians assumed would merely be Napoleon’s next mistress. Napoleon had been introduced to her in 1850 and by the end of 1852 was infatuated; when his plans foundered for a diplomatic marriage to Princess Adelaide of Hohenlohe (one of Queen Victoria’s nieces) he impulsively resolved to marry her—to the dismay of his ministers.

This decision was still a secret, however, on January 12, when Eugénie arrived at a ball at the Tuileries on the arm of none other than James—who, noted Hübner, had long been “under the spell of the young Andalusian, but now more than ever, for he was one of those who believed in a marriage.” One of his sons—presumably Alphonse—escorted her mother. When the party entered the Salle des Maréchaux, intending to find seats for the ladies, the wife of the Foreign Minister Drouyn de Lhuys haughtily informed Eugénie that the seats in question were reserved for the wives of ministers. Napoleon overheard this, came across to the two women and offered them seats on the imperial dais. After two hours, the Emperor and Eugénie disappeared into the cabinet impérial, to return later arm in arm. Three days later he proposed; on the 22nd the engagement was made public; a week later the wedding took place. “I prefer a young woman whom I love and esteem,” declared Napoleon. “One can love a woman without esteeming her,” commented Anselm’s wife Charlotte shortly after this, “but one only marries a women one honours and respects.” This compliment—a rather strained one given the Rothschild family’s habitual distinction between romantic love and marriage—was duly relayed to the imperial couple.