Queen Victoria, letter to her daughter Crown Princess Victoria of Prussia (March 4, 1868)
The greatest showman of British leaders, the most literary, and one of the wittiest, Benjamin Disraeli—known appropriately by everyone, even his wife, as Dizzy—matured from an adventurer into a heroic statesman, superb parliamentarian and virtuoso orator. Under him, the Conservative Party developed its guiding ideology, one that was to endure for over a century: fervent support for the monarchy, the empire and the Church of England, but also a commitment to achieving national unity by social reform. And although baptized a Christian in 1817, he remains the only British prime minister to have come from a Jewish background (let alone a Sephardic Moroccan one), a source of pride throughout his career. “I’m the empty page between the Old and New Testaments,” he told Queen Victoria. When he faced anti-Semitic taunts in Parliament, he proudly replied, “Yes I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the Rt. Hon. Gentleman were living as savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”
Most of Disraeli’s political achievements came late in life. The son of the writer Isaac d’Israeli, he was best known in his early years as a rakish literary figure, Byronic poseur and financial speculator. (Indeed, he and Winston Churchill remain the only outstanding literary figures among British leaders.) “When I want to read a book, I write one,” he once said; his books included romantic and political novels—the most famous being Coningsby—which often earned him substantial sums of money. He traveled the Ottoman empire and visited Jerusalem, where he rediscovered and reinvented his exotic persona as a Jewish Tory. He was famed for his extravagant dress sense and bumptiousness, which made him as many enemies as friends. His financial life was rackety, his sex life was shocking and, at one point, he lived in a ménage à trois with the lord chancellor Lord Lyndhurst and their joint mistress, the married Lady Henrietta Sykes. It was all a far cry from the sobriety of his arch-opponent, the Liberal leader W.E. Gladstone, with whom he had a fiery, combative relationship. He married late—childlessly but happily.
Disraeli entered Parliament in 1837, his maiden speech a disaster as the bumptious dandy (in green velvet) was booed: “You will hear me,” he said as he sat down. Before long he was recognized as a brilliant speaker and a tricky character. In 1846 he was instrumental in splitting the Conservative Party, by opposing the repeal of the Corn Laws in defiance of his leader, Robert Peel. When the Conservative Party formed a minority government in 1852, the earl of Derby appointed Disraeli chancellor of the exchequer. But his first budget was rejected by Parliament, and Derby’s government resigned after just ten months. Disraeli served twice more as chancellor under Derby, in 1858–9 and 1866–8.
It was in 1867 that Disraeli—now in his sixties—made his first great contribution to posterity, when he and Derby vigorously pushed through the 1867 Reform Act. This nearly doubled the number of people entitled to vote (although it did not enfranchise any women) and had the effect of underpinning the two-party system in England, lining up Conservatives against Liberals. When Derby became so ill that he had to resign the premiership in 1868, Disraeli was the natural choice to lead the Conservatives and the government. But his premiership was short. Gladstone’s Liberals returned to power at the end of the year.
After another six years of opposition, Disraeli was prime minister once more (1874–80). “I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole,” he said. This time the Conservatives had a majority. Queen Victoria adored him—in contrast to Gladstone, whom she loathed. He joked that with royalty it was necessary to “lay on the flattery with a trowel.” He flattered Victoria as “we authors, ma’am.” In 1876 Disraeli gave the queen the title of empress of India, and he was created earl of Beaconsfield, describing his presence in the House of Lords as “dead—but in the Elysian Fields!” In foreign affairs he successfully impressed upon Europe and the world that Britain was indeed “Great.” He protected British shipping interests and the route to India by arranging the purchase of a controlling stake in the Suez Canal. In European politics he played a canny hand to contain Russia’s ambitions as the Ottoman Empire, the so-called “sick man of Europe,” declined.
One of Disraeli’s most influential achievements was in creating an imperial ethos for the British empire. He sang the virtues of imperium et libertas (empire and liberty), and he saw Britain’s mission as not just to trade and establish colonial settlements, but also to bring British civilization and values to the diverse peoples of its ever expanding dominions. He was convinced of Britain’s unique and preeminent position in international politics, and to an extent his belief was vindicated at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, where his cunning and flamboyance dominated the attempts to solve the Russo-Turkish problem and the nationalist aspirations in the Balkans, securing peace and resisting Russian territorial ambitions. He also brought Cyprus under the British flag. “The old Jew is the man,” said the German Chancellor, Bismarck. The “old wizard” Disraeli received a hero’s welcome following the congress.
Throughout his political career, Disraeli maintained an intense feud with Gladstone, whom he called “that unprincipled maniac … [an] extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition.” The feeling was mutual. Gladstone compared Disraeli’s defeat in 1880 to “the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle in an Italian romance.” Though Gladstone outlived Disraeli and served as prime minister a total of four times (the last time in 1892–4) he never had the same charm, vision or style.
GARIBALDI
1807–1882
Anyone who wants to carry on the war against the outsiders, come with me. I can offer you neither honors nor wages; I offer you hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Anyone who loves his country, follow me.
Garibaldi to his followers when fleeing Rome, as described by Giuseppe Guerzoni, in Garibaldi (Vol. 1, 1882)
Maverick general of irregular troops and irrepressible liberator of peoples, Garibaldi led an almost incredible life of battle and adventure. But his cause was as heroic as his exploits: the liberation of the long-subdued disparate states of Italy from the shackles of corrupt tyrants and hidebound empires. In this process, known as the Risorgimento, Garibaldi led his Redshirt followers to decisive victories over the Spanish Bourbon and Austrian Habsburg dynasties that still ruled much of Italy.
Garibaldi was born in Nice, which from 1814 to 1860 was part of the Italian kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. He ran away from home in order to avoid a clerical education but was then reunited with his father in the coastal trade, becoming a sea captain in his early twenties. In his midtwenties he joined the Young Italy movement, influenced by the nationalist republicanism of Giuseppe Mazzini, conspiring in an anti-monarchical uprising in Genoa in 1834. The plot was discovered; Garibaldi fled, but, drawn to other liberation causes, he traveled to South America.
There he fought for the rebellious state of Rio Grande do Sul, which was trying to secede from Brazil. He lived a life of hardship and danger. During one campaign he met his beloved Creole partner Anna Maria Ribeiro da Silva (Anita), later mother of three of his children. She followed him when he received command of an Italian legion fighting for Uruguay against Argentina. Leading these first Redshirts, he won a reputation as a masterly guerrilla commander.
In 1848, as Europe caught fire with revolution, Garibaldi returned to Italy to offer his services in the struggle against Austrian hegemony. Spurned by Piedmont (he was, after all, still a wanted man there), he took part in a republican experiment in Rome that saw Pope Pius IX flee the city, and he organized the brave, but hopelessly outnumbered, resistance to the French and Neapolitan forces that restored the pope in 1849.
Garibaldi and several thousand followers retreated across central Italy, evading French and Austrian forces but suffering many losses—including his beloved Anita. Garibaldi himself made it to the coast of Tuscany, going into five years of exile as a trading skipper in New York and Peru.
Finally, in 1854, Garibaldi w
as able to return to his Piedmontese homeland, where he planned a united Italian monarchy (instead of a republic) with King Victor Emmanuel II and his powerful prime minister Cavour. Napoleon III of France backed the plan. In 1859 Garibaldi, now a Piedmontese major general, led Alpine troops into action against the Austrian Habsburgs in northern Italy, capturing Varese and Como. Austria ceded Lombardy to Piedmont.
In early 1860 Piedmont angered Garibaldi by returning Nice and the Savoy region to the French, in return gaining the sovereignty of the central Italian states. Garibaldi’s thoughts turned to the south, the so-called Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, backward, impoverished and ruled by the Bourbons. With a mere 1146 of his Redshirts, and tacitly supported by Emmanuel and Cavour, he landed in Marsala, Sicily in May 1860 and soon captured Palermo. He forced 20,000 Neapolitan soldiers to surrender and declared himself a very popular dictator. He then crossed the Straits of Messina, entered victoriously into Naples and forced King Francis II to flee. Garibaldi handed over his conquests to Victor Emmanuel, recognizing him as king of Italy. He had nearly achieved his vision of a united Italy; only the French-defended Papal States and Austrian-ruled Venetia remained outside the new kingdom.
Two ostensibly private campaigns by Garibaldi to take the Papal States, in 1862 and 1867, came to nothing, the first leaving him injured at the Battle of Aspromante, ironically by troops sent by Victor Emmanuel to intercept him. (In contrast, the 1867 campaign was secretly funded by the king.) But more success came in the north, when Garibaldi led Italian forces—allied to the Prussians in a wider war—against the Austrians at Bezzecca (July 21, 1866). By complex treaty negotiations, Venetia was ceded to the nascent Italian kingdom.
The Papal States finally surrendered to Italian government troops in September 1871, the last piece of the Italian jigsaw, but Garibaldi played no part. His last adventure was in support of the French against the Prussians in 1870–1. Retiring to Caprera, the island he had acquired in the 1850s, he lived peacefully—as politician, memoirist, novel-writer, but always a living legend who, on his death in June 1882, plunged Italy into mourning.
Mazzini had the philosophies, Cavour the strategies and Victor Emmanuel the crown, but it was Garibaldi, the swashbuckling patriot, who created a nation.
NAPOLEON III
1808–1873
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historical facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Karl Marx on Napoleon III
Napoleon III’s reign ended in disaster but for twenty years he enjoyed astonishing success, restoring order in France and then restoring France’s position in Europe, winning the Crimean War in alliance with Britain, defeating Austria, helping to unite Italy, rebuilding Paris. Described by Bismarck as a “sphinx without a riddle” and by Victor Hugo as “Napoleon the Little” in comparison to his uncle Napoleon the Great, he was nonetheless a statesman of talent, and along with his nemesis Bismarck, one of the pioneers of modern politics and electioneering—the quest for the support of the middle classes and the center.
His career was based on the fame of his uncle, Napoleon I. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was the son of Louis Bonaparte and Hortense de Beauharnais, king and queen of Holland, his father being a younger brother of the emperor, his mother a daughter of the Empress Josephine. On the death of the emperor in 1821, his heir was his son, the king of Rome, known as Napoleon II to Bonapartists or the duke of Reichstadt to everyone else, but he died young and never reigned. During the 1820s, Louis-Napoleon became the Bonapartist pretender, a romantic drifting figure whose quixotic attempts to seize power in France, invariably funded by his mistresses and backed by a crew of desperate and inept adventurers, ended in comical disaster. It was probably the comedy that saved his life, for he avoided severe penalties and was instead imprisoned for a while in the fortress of Ham—from which he famously escaped. Even early in his career, the young man showed drive and courage however unsuccessful he may have been.
His prospects remained hopeless until 1848 when the revolutions that shook Europe overthrew the July Monarchy of King Louis Philippe of France. Suddenly Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, a romantic if inscrutable figure and bearer of the magical name, was on everyone’s lips. When presidential elections were held, Louis-Napoleon, who was still relatively unknown in France, was able to appear to be all things to all people and played the election campaign with considerable skill and shrewdness, winning a landslide to become the first president of France. But he wanted more, calling himself the Prince-president. In a coup d’état in December 1851, he ruthlessly seized power, arresting his enemies and shooting down opposition, to become effective dictator of France. A year later, promising that the empire meant peace, he was crowned Emperor Napoleon III.
For his first decade in power, he ruled with authoritarian flamboyance, crushing any dissent but enjoying considerable success in his plans to restore France to a position of pre-eminence amongst the powers of Europe and to secure his own empire. He used tensions over the holy sites in Jerusalem to push the Ottoman sultan for more French influence in competition with Nicholas I of Russia. When the tsar used military force to invade Ottoman territory with a view to overthrowing the Sultanate, Napoleon allied with Britain to declare war: the Crimean War revealed both French and British military incompetence on a vast scale but ended in victory for the allies—and the acceptance of Napoleon III as a legitimate monarch by Queen Victoria, who hosted the emperor at Windsor and found him charming.
Napoleon married a Spanish aristocrat named Eugenie de Montejo who gave him a legitimate heir, the prince imperial. He backed Italian independence and unity, defeating Austria at the Battle of Solferino, thereby helping to expel the Habsburgs from Italy. During the 1860s, he changed his policies at home, fostering the liberal empire, a more constitutional monarchy that allowed greater parliamentary debate. France enjoyed a raging stock market boom, an orgy of new consumerism and ostentatious spending while Napoleon ordered the rebuilding of a glorious new Paris by Baron Haussman.
But the urban poor were discontented by rising prices, and the difference between rich and poor as well as uninhibited corruption, personified by the new property millionaires and the rise of sexual celebrities, the grande horizontales, courtesans. In many ways, the modern world—stock market and property boom and bust, consumerism, celebrity, electioneering, tycoons—started with Napoleon III.
Napoleon himself was notorious for his womanizing: his early career had been funded by an English courtesan called Harriet Howard and he remained an enthusiastic keeper of mistresses: indeed members of his cabinet traveling on the imperial train were once treated to the sight of the emperor in flagrante when his apartment door slid open. His affair with the gorgeous Contessa di Castaglione, a spy-temptress-adventuress who was the cousin of the Italian leader Cavour, was said to have encouraged his embrace of Italian liberation. But he was already committed to Italian freedom—her perfect figure displayed beneath her notorious see-through dresses was irresistible in its own right. For all his fame and flamboyance, Napoleon remained strangely unknowable and mysterious. With his waxed mustache and short legs he was hardly a heroic figure—power exhausted him and ill health undermined his decision-making. His lack of judgment in 1869 allowed him to be manipulated by Bismarck into a declaration of war that proved catastrophic.
The ailing emperor was out of his depth as warlord or even war leader. Defeat at Sedan led to his abdication and exile in England: France’s last monarch died abroad. His son the prince imperial was killed serving in British forces against the Zulus.
The downfall of his glittering, pleasure-loving, modern empire in the defeat, revolution and massacre of the Paris Commune, was best described by Emile Zola in his novel Nana in which the empire is symbolized by a shallow, greedy, wanton courtesan who dies in her hotel room as the crowds overthrow the regime, her beautiful body consumed by worms. Marx described how history repeated itself in the Napoleons:
Napoleon I as a “tragedy,” Napoleon III as a “farce.”
LINCOLN
1809–1865
We here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
From Lincoln’s address at the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg (November 19, 1863)
“Honest Abe,” the president who saved the Union and freed the slaves, is a legend of American history. Truly good as well as truly great, this gaunt, austere figure, who rose from the Kentucky backwoods to lead his nation, evinced a humble charm that has made him loved as much as he is admired.
Though he received almost no formal education—off-and-on schooling “by littles,” as he put it—he educated himself and could quote swathes of the Bible and Shakespeare, becoming a master of the English language. Abraham Lincoln’s journey from the one-room Kentucky log cabin of his birth to the White House is the blueprint for the American Dream. His father and much-loved stepmother were almost illiterate. The lowly one-time rail-splitter taught himself law, established a flourishing Illinois practice, and—defending his well-known nonattendance at church—entered politics. First a Whig, then a founding member of the Republican Party, in 1860 Lincoln became the 16th president of the United States.
Lincoln’s leadership may in the end have kept the states united, but his election was the catalyst for their split. In 1858 Lincoln famously declared: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe the government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.” Lincoln’s preference for freedom was well known, and even before he took office in 1861, seven Southern states declared themselves a new nation—the Confederate States of America. Respecting the Constitution, Lincoln would not open hostilities—it was the Confederates who initiated civil war when they fired on Fort Sumter—but refusing to countenance permanent secession, he was firm in his resolve: the Union would not be broken.
Titans of History Page 34
