The House of Rothschild (28 page)

Publicly, the Bonapartes and Rothschilds were now on friendly terms, and James and his relatives were regularly invited to court social functions. In January 1863, for example, he was spotted by the Goncourts at a soiree given by the Emperor’s cousin Princess Mathilde. A few months later, Alphonse went to Compiègne once again to discuss monetary policy with the Emperor, noting with satisfaction that “HM appears to understand the necessity to take rigorous measures.” He and his wife returned there just four months later for an evening of charades—a favourite imperial pastime-in which Leonora appeared as “Judith with the head of Holofernes,” complete with “three or four millions in diamonds on her head and neck.” The following year, Fould specifically asked James to discuss the monetary situation with the Emperor, fearing that the Pereires might yet persuade Napoleon to abandon convertibility. Instead, James sent Alphonse, whose only complaint was that the Empress was rather garrulous and “wanted to know too much about the Jews.” In November 1865 Leonora was again asked to join the amateur theatricals at Compiègne. She and her husband, along with Gustave and his wife Cecile were also present at the Emperor’s celebrated fancy-dress ball in February 1866, at which the Empress somewhat ominously appeared as Marie-Antoinette.

Yet contemporaries could not help noticing the ambivalence of the relationship. Compared with James, Napoleon was still young: he was fifty-four when he visited Ferrières, James seventy. Yet the Emperor’s health was indifferent, depriving him of energy at critical moments, whereas James—though his eyes were deteriorating and his hands increasingly arthritic—had lost little of his prodigious vigour. When Charlotte called to see her uncle in the rue Laffitte in 1864, she “found him at luncheon, eating first beefsteak with potatoes and then an enormous helping of lobster. One must be well or nearly so to venture upon such heavy diet.” She was equally impressed by his “excessively exhausting” lifestyle, “perpetually oscillating between Paris and Ferrières,” not to mention Boulogne, Nice, Wildbad and Homburg. He remained the dominant force in the Paris house until the last year of his life, indefatigably corresponding and rushing from one meeting to the next, driven by a work ethic his younger relatives could not hope to match. In August 1867 Anthony gave a pained account of a visit by James to London:

Nevertheless, James still found time to build up an unrivalled collection of wild-fowl at Ferrières and to conduct a protracted flirtation with the comtesse Walewska, the minister’s wife. Nor should the long periods he spent each year at such spas be taken as a sign of failing strength: for it was precisely when he went to take the waters that he seemed “more juvenile, more frisky than ever,” “din[ing] at the public table, and speak[ing] with every lady, provided she is pretty and young.“ When the French press carried exaggerated reports that his sight had failed altogether in 1866, James was:

Supremely self-confident, and perhaps now a little reckless in his old age, James felt free to give vent to that sardonic humour which in the past he had tended to suppress. Some of his jokes were the stuff of stock exchange lore: “At the bourse, there comes a time when, if you want to succeed, you have to speak Hebrew”; “You ask, do I know what causes the bourse to rise and to fall? If I knew that I would be a rich man!” Asked by an eager young broker if he thought installing a turnstile and charging admission to the bourse would affect the price of rentes, James, deadpan, responded: “My fiew is that it vill cost me tventy sous a day.” But his most famous jokes—like the pun on “mémoire” at Ferrières—subtly mocked the Emperor. “L‘Empire, c’est la baisse” defies translation: literally “the Empire means a falling market,” this pun on Napoleon’s famous claim that the Empire meant “la paix” was to prove a damning epitaph for Napoleon’s regime.

Small wonder, then, that contemporaries reverted to the old Orléanist joke that he and his family were the real rulers of France. Those most malicious of contemporary diarists, the Goncourt brothers, pictured a gathering of seventy-four Rothschilds at Gustave’s wedding:

To the Goncourts, James was “a monstrous figure... the most base, [with] the most terrifying frog-like face, his eyes bloodshot, eyelids like shells, a mouth like a purse and drooling, a sort of golden satyr.” But those, like Feydeau, who saw James in his “natural element”—his office—could not help but be impressed by the sheer life force he exuded:

Thus, even as Napoleon began to loosen his own grip on political power, James became more and more the absolute monarch of Parisian finance. Before this “holi est of holies of money,” as the Goncourts put it, “all men were equal, as absolutely as before Death itself!”

The question remains: how far did Rothschild power actually undermine the Bonapartist regime, as some contemporaries believed it did? If James seemed at least ambivalent towards the imperial regime in public, in private he and his family remained downright hostile. His French relatives, Natty felt, were “more ridiculously Orleanist than ever, finding fault with every thing and every body connected with the emperor,” a view echoed by Benjamin Davidson after an encounter with Betty.
⁴
James at first gave the shift towards a more parliamentary constitution a cautious welcome, but half expected Napoleon to resort to another
coup d‘état.
When Alphonse resolved to follow his uncle Lionel’s example and stand for election it was as an opposition candidate—though James had reservations about making Rothschild opposition so “overt.”

But why were the Rothschilds opposed to a regime which, by the 1860s, was scarcely unfavourable to their business? More important than lingering Orléanist sentiment, James and his sons saw a fundamental contradiction between the supposed new era of sound finance under Fould and the Emperor’s foreign policy, which remained as adventurous—and in their eyes dangerous—as ever. The early 1860s saw a succession of international crises in which Napoleon seemed tempted to “make mischief”; and each time he showed signs of doing so, the expectation of increased military expenditure and yet more government deficits tended to depress the price of rentes. As early as July 1863, there was talk of a new French loan, for example; the recurrent monetary difficulties of the Banque could also easily be attributed to the effects of imperial foreign policy on financial confidence. Even before the Italian war, as we have seen, James had formulated his theory of Bonapartist politics: “No peace, no Empire.” The events of the subsequent years only made him the more sure of this, and his letters abound with references to the connection between financial weakness and diplomatic room for manoeuvre. “There won’t be no war [sic],” he assured his‘nephews in October 1863. “As I said, the Emperor should speak terribly peacefully. He has to if he wants to get money [and] if indeed a loan is to be made.” “I believe,” he wrote in April 1865, “that the weak bourse will help to keep the Emperor in a more peaceful frame of mind.” And again in March 1866: “We will maintain the peace for some time, as the great man [Napoleon] cannot [afford to] make war.” His recurrent anxiety was that internal political weakness might nevertheless tempt Napoleon to gamble on foreign adventure. The more Napoleon confirmed this fear, the more James foresaw financial trouble: that was what he meant when he said that the Empire had come to mean “la baisse” rather than “la paix.”

Distrust of Napoleon provides one of the keys to understanding the Rothschild response to the events of the 1860s. There is, however, a point of equal importance to be made about the political and diplomatic role of the British Rothschilds in the same period, namely their acceptance of what amounted to a policy of non-intervention in the conflicts not only of the European continent but also of the American.

It is not at all easy to plot the course of the British Rothschilds’ political engagement in the 1860s. Having secured admission into the House of Commons, Lionel never addressed his fellow MPs, but it is an error to suppose that he was politically inactive. He attended the House frequently—even being carried into a debate on one occasion when immobilised by arthritis—and saw senior political figures and journalists so frequently at New Court and Piccadilly that his wife could write in 1866: “Politics interest your father to the exclusion of all other topics.” Naturally enough, Lionel remained a Liberal, having for so long enjoyed the majority of that party’s support in his campaign for admission to parliament, as did his bucolic younger brother Mayer. He was a Liberal on economic policy too, as much a convinced free trader as his friends Charles Villiers, the brother of the Liberal Foreign Secretary Clarendon, and the future Liberal Chancellor, Robert Lowe. But ties of friendship inclined him in the direction of Disraeli, if not Disraeli’s party; he and Charlotte were also friendly with other Tories, including General Jonathan Peel (Sir Robert’s brother, though not a Peelite) and Lord Henry Lennox, MP for Chichester. It was typical of Lionel that in 1865 he asked Delane to tone down his attacks on Russell’s government in
The Times,
while at the same time welcoming the government’s most effective critic—Disraeli—to New Court. In April 1866, in the thick of the debate over Russell’s Reform Bill, the Rothschilds had “the two great rivals at dinner—the whig [Gladstone] on Saturday, the tory [Disraeli] on Sunday. Natty says that the two entertainments represent Scylla and Charybdis—and that we are sure to have crossness and ill-humour on one of the two days, if not on both.”