A PURE NEW HOLY REPUBLIC: 1848
“I grieve at the prospect of a republic in France.” 1
—FOREIGN SECRETARY LORD PALMERSTON TO AMBASSADOR LORD NORMANBY, FEBRUARY 28, 1848
“The banks are crashing one after another.” 2
—LÉON FAUCHER, FUTURE MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR
Paris thrived on political humor, including Ludwig Börne’s satirical sketch of Louis Philippe as “the emperor of the five-percenters [interest on state securities], the king of the three-percenters [bondholders], the protector of bankers, [and] the mediator of stockbrokers.”3 That financially strapped king left the realm’s coffers nearly bare, with state revenue reduced to a trickle, an ossified economy unreformed, and nationwide poverty. Like Charles X in 1830, Louis Philippe, too, now seemed to understand nothing of what was happening all around him.
Nor, for that matter, even as late as New Year’s Day 1848, did Baron James de Rothschild, the practical realist and usually extremely well informed head of the French House of Rothschild, who seemed to remain inexplicably oblivious to the state of the nation: “We made 19 million [francs] in 1847; if all goes well we should do 20 million this year,”4 he noted with surprising complacency on the first of January 1848. Unlike his older brother, Nathan, in London, he thought things had never been better, there were no clouds on the horizon, at least no more than usual. He had just underwritten a 3 percent, 250-million-franc government bond issue (well over $3,200,000,000 today) at the request of Louis Philippe, and Rothschild was a very contented banker. But from the impoverished populace, “a vengeful world lurked behind society,” as a more dramatic Chateaubriand recorded. In Paris a laborer earned and attempted in vain to support a family on less than two francs for a twelve-hour workday, with almost two-thirds of the city’s population of one million dwelling in abject poverty. But the most ominous sign to any banker, shop owner, and member of the bourgeoisie was not only the suffering but the growing number of widespread street protests. Novelists and social artists, like the two Honorés—Daumier and Balzac—had long seen what the king and Rothschild had not, “a deadly terror” behind the hungry faces, “haggard, sallow, leathery,” of desperate fathers and mothers with nothing to lose, amid an appalling mortality rate that, nevertheless, ungenerously failed to relieve the burgeoning medieval slums of the French capital.5
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“The newspapers will relate [the events surrounding the revolutionary situation here in Paris] far better than I can. Suffice it so say, I am still alive, that’s all I know,” Auguste de Morny wrote his half sister, Emily [de Flahaut], Countess of Shelburne, on the first of March, 1848. “If I am most fortunate in that respect, so far as the state of my finances is concerned, however, well, I am utterly ruined—everything is gone! Heaven only knows what lies in store for us.”6
* * *
Louis Philippe abdicated without warning and under the worst possible circumstances during the early hours of February 24, 1848, leaving a trail of political mayhem and bewilderment in his wake. In fact there had been very clear signs of public unrest for many months, including a “banquet” held at Clignancourt on July 9, 1847, a forum demanding sweeping national electoral and economic reform. It had been answered by a defiant King Louis Philippe at the opening of parliament on December 28, 1847, when he had denounced “the agitation fomented by blind hotheads,” a government position which Morny himself mostly supported.7 When meeting with the conservative premier François Guizot in February 1848 to suggest a modest compromise to ease tensions, however, Morny had been rebuffed. This call for parliamentary reform was just the beginning of their demands, Guizot had insisted. “We are not dealing here with the usual ‘reformers,’ these people are out-and-out revolutionaries,” so there was nothing to discuss. Morny then appealed directly to the king: “Not to worry, young man,” Louis Philippe reassured him, “the French government is run by loyal professional administrative officials and they know their duty very well indeed and will see us through [this crisis].”8
Nevertheless, widespread discontent continued, and opposition leaders insisted on government authorization for another political banquet to be held on February 19. More than six hundred paid to attend this gathering, and unlike the protests during the Revolution of 1789, this was initiated by educated men, men of property, not by angry mobs from the slums of Paris. These men today planned to meet in order to protest their denial of voting rights and parliamentary representation. As a member of the chamber of deputies, Morny was one of the two representatives designated by Guizot’s government to negotiate with the leaders of this banquet. Following difficult talks, a much relieved Morny reported to his sister Emily and brother-in-law in London: “I intervened … and reached an agreement between the government and the opposition.” The crisis seemed resolved, and the banquet was rescheduled for the twenty-second of February, 1848. But then without warning an arrogant Interior Minister Charles Duchâtel unilaterally cancelled that second banquet altogether. Appalled by this underhanded action, which had also undermined his own role, Morny, who had just been offered a portfolio in the government, recoiled. “God forbid my ever accepting such a post now in a country like ours!”9 On that same twenty-second, thousands of businessmen and shop owners gathered to protest along the Champs-Élysées, where the banquet had been scheduled to be held. Scuffles broke out, and the situation quickly deteriorated as barricades went up, closing off one street after another. A flash flood of anger and defiance swept the city. It was all Morny’s fault, and the king had betrayed them.
The explosion of events on the twenty-third, followed by the news of Louis Philippe’s bewildering nocturnal flight to the coast on the twenty-fourth, caught everyone off balance, and no one more so than a shocked Auguste de Morny. The already skittish financial markets were as usual the first to panic. Rothschild’s solution: “I think we should purchase some American Treasury [bonds],” he advised his nephews. “America is still the most secure country for the investment of capital.”10 Meanwhile, members of the cabinet and parliament, the war ministry, even the foreign ministry and diplomatic corps—all were left in the dark. With share prices plummeting, the Bourse immediately closed its doors, only adding to the turmoil. Long queues formed all night outside the Banque de France, the public desperate to exchange their certificates, notes, and letters of credit for gold. The National Treasury, down to a mere 192 million francs on February 22, and even that thanks in part to Rothschild’s recent initial loan flotation, was hemorrhaging out of control with no tax receipts to replenish it. The government was completely closed down.
The thirty-six-year-old political insider Auguste de Morny was not the only one to be caught completely off guard by the unpredicted fall of Louis Philippe, despite his long, very close ties over the years with the ruling family through Fanny Le Hon, his late grandmother, Adélaïde de Souza, and of course his father, General Charles de Flahaut, at this very moment serving as French ambassador to Vienna.11
“I am simply staggered by the utter stupidity by which he [Louis Philippe] lost the day [February 23],” eyewitness Maxime Du Camp commented. The former governor general of Algeria, and now military governor of Paris, Marshal Thomas Bugeaud, could have moved in immediately with troops and nipped the uprising in the bud, Du Camp insisted, but instead “simply gave speeches.” As for the king’s son, the Duke de Nemours, in nominal command of the Royal French Army, “he never left the Palace and the safety of his general staff.” Of the only two members of the Orléans family noted as men of action, the Prince de Joinville was with the navy and the Duke d’Aumale far away in Algeria with the army.12 “This whole business has been so thoroughly botched [by the king].” Morny fully agreed with his friend, Du Camp. “They [the new provisional government under Lamartine] have also lacked the most elementary common sense and courage to act.”13
Such was the situation Morny, like the rest of the people, found himself in. Powerless to act, he prepared to leave the capital. “[And now therefore] I am obliged to send all my paintings and the remaining money I am able to salvage, to you in London for safe keeping,” he informed his sister.14 With creditors literally pounding on the door and even accosting him in the streets, Morny, like so many others, sold what jewelry he could and let his servants ago, unpaid. Most of his friends had already fled the country, including the mother of his natural daughter Louise, Fanny Le Hon, her father and brother—François and Alfred Mosselman—along with nearly all the principal bankers of the capital.15 “Tell me whether Shelburne thinks I should also send you my horses and carriages. In such volatile times as these it’s quite impossible to sell them here in Paris,” he wrote.16
Lord Shelburne, a great landowner and influential member of Parliament, who was destined to serve as undersecretary at the Foreign Office under Lord Palmerston, certainly knew the state of affairs in England. Moreover, he personally knew the nation’s leaders intimately, including Peel, Aberdeen, and Prime Minister Lord John Russell. And he and Harry Palmerston had been students at Cambridge together and had even contended the same parliamentary seat there. Auguste de Morny, like his father Ambassador de Flahaut, along with Prince von Metternich and ex-king Louis Philippe, would eventually be accorded a safe haven in London. Many dozens of fellow French were not quite so fortunate, including some leading musicians, such as Jacques Offenbach, choosing other traditional refuges in times of crisis at Bruxelles, Geneva, Amsterdam, Cologne, or Hamburg.
Charles de Flahaut was not the only diplomat to be caught up in this unexpected political vortex. In Barcelona, the forty-four-year-old French consul general, Ferdinand de Lesseps, was as much at a loss about what to do as anyone else, in his case because of the absence of an official government in Paris or instructions from a silent foreign ministry. Who indeed was the minister of foreign affairs at this moment? What, Lesseps asked his family, “are they going to do with me now?” A few days later he was at last summoned to Paris where Alphonse de Lamartine personally informed him that he, Lesseps, was to replace the French ambassador at Madrid. One of his first visitors at that embassy was the Countess Eugénie de Teba (later, de Montijo), his first cousin and the future wife of Napoléon III, who implored him to intercede on behalf of some Spanish officers who were about to be executed. The long-term consequences of that unexpected meeting were to be beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.17
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All the thoughts and “theories” of a new republican-socialist order evolving after the Revolution of 1789, and in renewed form throughout the 1830s and 1840s, now converged, jumbled together, confusing, conflicting, and contradictory, all vying for political approval and ultimate domination. The shattered French economy, perhaps Napoléon I’s most destructive immediate legacy, which had in turn undermined the Bourbons between 1815 and 1830, remained largely unaltered in 1848. The result: continuing nationwide impoverishment of the people, a major factor, along with the lack of electoral reform, in bringing down Louis Philippe. The deepening national depression persisted unabated, engulfing all classes, driving even the bourgeoisie to revolt and join the commercial classes in calling for the banquets of protest this February.
The names and works of the socialist and republican heroes still pervaded the atmosphere of the Isle de France this 1848: Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon—“Property is theft”—Philippe Buchez, and Louis Blanc with the National Workshops he espoused in his famous Organization of Labour. And then of course there was Louis Auguste Blanqui, scorning both romantic Christianity and pure unrealistic socialist theory—who, when released in 1848 after decades in prison, thought he had the answer. Instead of a call for the violent overthrow of governments, there would be a revolutionary dictatorship of his choosing calling for the end of destructive capitalism. A dangerous agent provocateur, Blanqui was immediately rearrested.
On the other hand, Saint-Simonism and its “moralistic responsibility” remained active in thought and practice, even gaining adherents for the first time from a few of the idealistic younger bankers and financiers, such as Émile and Isaac Pereire, and Michel Chevalier, and one Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. Henri, Count de Saint-Simon, had preached his own version of a “new Christianity,” of brotherly love, but one combined with the practical support of commerce. Unlike Proudhon, he accepted the need for private property, but under the thoughtful administration of a government led not by politicians, but by technocrats—industrial managers, engineers, and scientists—experts capable of running a new society in the true interests of the people, and thereby avoiding the usual pitfalls of daily politics.
In defiance of the traditional closed banking establishment reserved uniquely for the wealthy and great property owners, in the 1840s and 1850s the Pereire brothers were to remain sympathetic to the Saint-Simon school. To be sure, James de Rothschild, like 99 percent of bankers and political leaders of that era, couldn’t have cared less about the masses, although he did personally know Émile Pereire, a former employee, very well. On the other hand, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte continued to proclaim Saint-Simon his own personal apostle.
And then there were the new politicians sporting republicanism or Bonapartism who claimed their rightful place in these revolutionary times. Paramount among them, and at first glance the least likely, the handsome and eloquent Burgundian aristocrat, lyrical idealist, and poet, diplomat, and historian, Viscount Alphonse de Lamartine, stood out. From the first hours in February 1848, he proclaimed from the tribune of the Palais Bourbon a new democratic France, praising past republican “heroes” of the 1789 revolution in his History of the Girodins, including none other than the terrorist Robespierre.
This Lamartine was now to emerge as the self-appointed spokesman for the righteous in the emerging Second Republic. His highly emotional, zealous, and uncompromising espousal of the republican cause, like his mellifluous aristocratic oratory, expounded with an ethereal religious fervor—“this new, pure, holy, immortal great and peace seeking Republic, transcendent and acclaimed by the people”—clearly stirred the literate bourgeoisie, though as events turned out, not the unseen mass of hungry, unemployed workers. Meanwhile, from the Collège de France, Professor Jules Michelet published his own purified, carefully filtered version of events in Le Peuple, even as he was preparing his monumental History of the French Revolution, in which he presented “the common man” as the hero of France. Such was the heady intellectual admixture intoxicating this immediate post–Louis Philippian era of France in 1848.18
Under the circumstances, the ensuing confusion in seeking a feasible solution to right the country’s woes, a solution that had somehow escaped everyone since 1789, was hardly surprising. Some, such as the poet, novelist, playwright, and self-imposed social conscience of France, Victor Hugo, the son of a popular Bonaparte general, reduced it simply to insisting on the takeover of mass republican democracy, while those who feared chaos and what they saw as the aimless and rampaging destructive masses, like Auguste de Morny and his fellow aristocratic members of the Jockey Club set, instead desperately sought the security and stability of the state through a strong monarch or benevolent dictatorship. The propertied classes looked in vain to the Bourbons or Orléans, others to powerful soldiers, such as the gaunt General Louis Eugène Cavaignac, governor of Algeria, while still others reflected wistfully on the days of Napoleonic France. But for the masses who had been disenfranchised by Louis Philippe—only 250,000 qualified voters, instead of the nearly five million who had voted for Napoléon’s First Empire in 1804—the old order simply had to be swept away once and for all.
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As for the current situation in Paris in the early months of 1848, “I can see absolutely nothing good coming of these upheavals,” a depressed Morny concluded. Prosper Mérimée agreed, “and this time we don’t have a Napoléon around to save us.” With no firm leadership in sight, privately Morny saw only doom and damnation. “In the final analysis no one in a position of power has behaved intelligently or courageously, least of all the royal family [Louis Philippe],” whom he dismissed as having acted “most shamefully” by abandoning their responsibilities and their people.19
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Across the English Channel, Prime Minister John Russell’s foreign secretary, Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, shared this suspicion and anxiety about events in France. He had always considered Louis Philippe “a tricky fellow,” ever since that king’s opposition to the full recognition of Ottoman suzerainty over Egypt back in 1839–1840, aiming instead for an independent Egypt with the aid of French intervention in the affairs of that province. “If we give way now,” Palmerston had argued, then “France will [next] take Morocco and Tunis,” as well as Algeria, and of course France eventually did just that.20
Political volatility in France in February 1848 did nothing to allay anxiety, and like James de Rothschild and Auguste de Morny, the British foreign secretary too wished very much indeed “to avoid these [revolutionary] upheavals.”21 “I grieve at the prospect of a republic in France,” Palmerston confided to his ambassador in Paris, Constantine Henry Phipps, the Marquis of Normanby, five days after the collapse of the Orléans government. “I fear it must [eventually] lead to war in Europe,” just as the creation of the First Republic in the 1790s had led to years of military conflict with France’s European neighbors.22
Of even more immediate attention was Palmerston’s growing concern over the spread of French republican egalitarianism to British shores, a contagion encouraging voting rights among Britain’s still disenfranchised working class. This movement “and other mischief” the foreign secretary was determined to stanch at any price.23 And there were already dramatic signs of similar unrest in Frankfurt, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Rome, and Naples. Nevertheless, Palmerston in London, again like James de Rothschild in Paris, was a pragmatist. “We must deal with things as they are,” he counseled the British minister to Berlin, the Earl of Westmorland, “and not as we should wish to have them.”24
For all his misgivings, Palmerston shed no tears over the ousting of Louis Philippe—for whom he had an almost visceral loathing—and his chief minister, François Guizot, “who were more bent on reducing and crippling the power of England than any men … since Napoléon Bonaparte.”25
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Meanwhile, back in Paris and facing a new reality of his own, for perhaps the first and only time in his life, the notoriously egocentric Morny, who felt himself so superior to every man and every situation, broke down on reading his sister’s immediate reassurances that she and Shelburne—the future Lord Lansdowne—would guard his property and provide a roof over his head while in exile in the English capital. “Tears came to my eyes when reading your letter,” an overwhelmed Morny responded, “for you do not know how dear you are to me!… We can never forget that we are the children of a father whom we adore and embrace with all our affection and tenderness.” This was a Morny the outside world never knew. All they had in this world, he wrote, was each other and their familial love. “Apart from that, God alone knows what fate has reserved for us in the midst of this abominable chaos. As for France, my poor child, the country is lost and dishonoured.”26
* * *
In his London exile Louis Napoléon Bonaparte maintained a vigil from a safe distance, patiently awaiting the right moment to intervene. Ironically, his old foe Louis Philippe was by now, like himself, a political refugee, also a guest of Queen Victoria, a combination of drama and farce fast at work. The Charter of 1814, the Constitution, and the government were no more, while the streets of Paris lay wide open, completely unprotected.
“It was as extraordinary as it was terrible to see,” the noted jurist Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, watching spellbound in the French capital. “The whole of an immense city, filled with so much wealth, left under the sole protection of those [masses roaming the streets] who possessed nothing … sheer terror gripped all other classes,” he later recalled.27 Now fearing for the lives of his family, James de Rothschild rushed his wife, Bette, and their children first to the safety of their estate of Ferrières, and then to England.
“Everyone is afraid, of course,” Rothschild’s visiting English nephew, Nathaniel, informed his family back in London. “The town is greatly agitated … God alone knows what will happen.”28 From his residence in the Place des Voges an enthralled Victor Hugo, too, was gripped by these precarious events. “Something sinister seems to be brewing,” he noted. “Last night more than fifteen of Paris’s finest mansions were marked with a chalk cross on the door, for the crowds to pillage, among them Princess Lieven’s mansion in the Rue Saint Florentin [owned by James de Rothschild].”29 The Louvre had already been pillaged, followed by Louis Philippe’s château at Neuilly.
Outside Paris another mob rampaged through Salmon de Rothschild’s château at Suresnes, led by the local poultry butcher, smashing furniture and gilt mirrors while slashing paintings and stealing what they could carry, before then burning it to the ground.30 The mob violence continued everywhere. “They no longer pay taxes of any kind, they cut down woods on private property and torch country estates and factories,” a sober Prosper Mérimée observed. “But everyone is simply too terrified of them to complain.” The violence spread as workers tore up tracks and burned down railway bridges at Asnières, Chatou, Croissy, and Maison-Laffitte. “Whatever happens now,” Morny reflected, “there is no more Liberté left in this land. The only thing I wish for is that plain common sense will calm and temper the new Republic, and that we can soon return to more tranquil times once again.”31 “One never knows what to expect from a Republican government,” Rothschild summed up.32 An ad hoc triumvirate was established by Lamartine (as titular head of state) and Foreign Minister Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès, with the adroit lawyer-politician Adolphe Crémieux holding the justice portfolio, though most of the country’s judges and police officials had also fled the capital.
Upon his return to Paris, the successful playwright Ernest Feydeau, now in his national guard’s uniform, ran into the small, heavyset Rothschild, who was curious about nearby gunfire as he left his office in the Rue de la Paix and walked toward the Tuileries. “‘Monsieur le Baron,’ I said, ‘You could not have chosen a worse day for taking a walk.’” Seventy men had been shot before the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then situated in the Boulevard des Capucines. “I think it would be safer if you returned home rather than expose yourself to wild gunfire.” But Rothschild replied in his heavy accent that he had to get to the Ministry of Finance. As for stray bullets, he had no time for such tomfoolery, and continued on his way.
* * *
If that banker never worried about his own personal security, he continued to be preoccupied with that of his family. And when his eldest son was called up to serve on active duty with the national guard, the reality of the national emergency struck home. “My Alphonse … fighting for the Republic. As a father I want to avoid these upheavals. What’s more, I’m not even that much of a republican.”33
“I feel calmer now,” the banker assured his wife in London, “although the situation here is still dangerous. All we can do is to keep meeting our [banking] obligations [though the other banks had by now closed their doors]. I am even taking on new business,” he exaggerated.34 And on March 7 the Paris Bourse tentatively reopened. “Rentes” (interest yielding securities), which had been quoted at 116.10 francs back on February 22, now plunged to 89, and by the sixth of April fell to 50 francs, while dividends were more than halved, before stopping altogether. The State Treasury was now down to a mere 59 million francs. If Rothschild himself was barely scraping through, even the oldest banking establishments were not, including those of the Protestant elite, Mallet, Hottinguer, and Delessert.35
As for Rothschild, in addition to the collapse of the normal markets affecting his banking transactions, there remained his anxieties about the acts of sabotage by thousands of striking railway workers against the tracks, locomotives, bridges, and stations of his Paris–Lille northern line, resulting both in further falling stock values and the pressing need for currently unavailable millions to meet the cost of those repairs.
Regardless of the air of stability, the Paris office, the most junior of the five Rothschild branches—London, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Naples being the others—was indeed in jeopardy. In the ensuing weeks following the departure of Louis Philippe, the Paris branch, like those in Vienna and Naples, was obliged to suspend all credit. James even had to deny a modest loan to the wife of the English ambassador. When word of this got around, the marketplace tensed, even as Rothschild secretly implored his brother in London for a golden infusion. “Let us be courageous, let us show our greatness [at this critical moment],” the uncle wrote on March 17, attempting to buck up his nephews.36 And at least one shrewd observer and future interior minister, Léon Faucher, knew just how grave the French national financial situation really was. “Everyone is ruined in Paris. The banks are crashing one after another.… Rothschild alone is still standing, albeit bled white,” Faucher reported.37
The façade remained, but not much else. A little of “the old family magic,” as Amschel Rothschild put it, was very badly needed to stave off bankruptcy. The House of Rothschild had risen since the Napoleonic era, thanks to the combined, coordinated strength of the five Rothschild brothers, and James now desperately appealed again to London, the strongest of the five family banks. But when brother Nathan in England balked, back in Germany Amschel insisted on an immediate transfer of at least six million francs (more than seventy-seven million dollars), while privately advising James to close his doors permanently and return to a less tempest-tossed Frankfurt. The proud James stubbornly refused to admit to the family that his faith in France had been misplaced and his own judgment faulty. In any event, nephew Lionel duly crossed the channel with the necessary funds and James was narrowly saved, “by a thread,” as he acknowledged.
But if the Paris house had fallen, or if James had simply given up and moved to Frankfurt, the entire teetering economy of France could very well have completely collapsed, leading to a long-term economic depression. One man symbolically stood between survival and ruin. For the first and only time in his life, James de Rothschild was shaken, though he gradually pulled himself together. “If only we had stood firm and not allowed ourselves to be intimidated [by the general panic] in the first place,” he belatedly understood.38
France was not like other countries, and the fact was that times had changed; the social and economic stability based on the assumption of a powerful stable monarch, as found in London, for instance, just did not exist in Paris and never would. Even a Napoléon Bonaparte had been overthrown eventually, leaving the nation, indeed most of Western Europe, destitute and in utter ruin. Brother James was the first to accept the necessity of adjusting to this new daily uncertainty. “We are going to have riots, property will lose value [and income will fall], but the situation will improve and so will prices. However it will never become completely normal again,” he advised the family on May 1, 1848. “It is on that assumption and reality we must work from now on.”39
James’s cautious nephew, Nathaniel, disagreed, however, with all that was being done. “I think it downright madness to plunge up to one’s neck in hot water just on the odd chance of making a little money,” he confided, while publicly supporting James.40 On the other hand, James de Rothschild had many years of experience that his occasionally critical nephew Nathaniel lacked, not to mention complete faith in his own long-term good judgment and ability to analyze, and combined with the redoubtable family determination, he was resolved to carry on. And thus the House of Rothschild prevailed, and remained in Paris, and the French economy survived. But as Rothschild himself had readily admitted at one weak moment, it had all been a closely run thing, with nephew Nathaniel still advising complete family withdrawal once and for all from France and her unstable political history.
As for the 250-million-franc state loan so desperately needed by the government, and guaranteed by a 25-million-franc deposit by Rothschild, that was in turn successfully renegotiated and all parties were saved, including the Banque de France.41 Moreover, very serious threats by the republican government to nationalize his northern railways were dropped. But James had also personally provided an imploring Louis Philippe with a last-minute four-million-franc personal loan, which would never be repaid, and that was another lesson Rothschild learned the hard way.42 From now on, political loyalty had to be calculated more carefully; after all, crowned heads of state were not family.
The public turbulence so dramatically anticipated by James de Rothschild—“we are going to have riots”—remained the real permanent wild card in French politics (and Rothschild thinking), the quantum mechanics problem they would have to factor into all future financial equations. Nephew Nathaniel Rothschild’s anxiety continued to grow concerning this 1848 French revolution, “this political cholera,” as he called it, “that has infested the world,”43 and was now spreading across the Continent, forcing even brothers Salomon in Vienna and Karl in Naples to flee for their lives.
* * *
At Whitehall, the veteran British foreign secretary, Henry Lord Palmerston, who claimed France as “the pivot of my foreign policy,” and particularly wary of this latest French revolutionary contagion, was now striving to cope with the full consequences of the fall of Louis Philippe and the founding of a second republic. If anything personally sympathetic to France, a country he had known since his youth and whose language he spoke fluently, Lord Palmerston had carefully to keep himself in check. While cautiously warning that “in the uncertain state of things in France, it would be imprudent … to consider ourselves secure from the necessity of having to defend ourselves [from the French].”
Nevertheless, the foreign secretary remained basically optimistic about maintaining peaceful relations between Britain and France,44 especially after long conferences with the Lansdownes—father and son—and General Charles de Flahaut and his son, Auguste de Morny. “Before the summer is over,” he wrote his brother William Temple one year later, “I should not be sorry if it [the changes in the French government] ended in Louis Napoléon being made Emperor.”45
As usual, the prescient Harry Palmerston had anticipated events, in this case four years early. On the other hand, what even he could never have possibly foreseen was just how inextricably his own destiny as England’s foreign secretary and then as first minister would be linked with this very Louis Napoléon as emperor of the French and his own unique brand of “political cholera.”