By 1857 Pasteur was back at the École Normale Supérieure. Here he continued his research into fermentation and demonstrated with unusual experimental rigor that the process was driven by the activity of minute organisms. In 1867 the French emperor Napoleon III relieved Pasteur of his teaching duties and granted him a research laboratory. With a new freedom of study, Pasteur set about resolving, once and for all, the great scientific debate over spontaneous generation—the question of whether germs and micro-organisms could simply “appear” from nowhere. He found that germs were in fact transported in air and that food decomposed because it was exposed to them.
In 1862 Pasteur first tested the process, now known as pasteurization, by which milk and other liquids are heated to remove bacteria. In time this process would revolutionize the way food was prepared, stored and sold, and so save many people from infection. Pasteur also applied his theoretical work to the French vinegar and wine industries and the British beer industry, allowing the businesses concerned to produce goods that did not perish so quickly. It was as a result of a suggestion from Pasteur that the British surgeon Joseph Lister began in the 1860s to adopt antiseptic methods during operations.
In 1865 Pasteur saved the French silk industry by helping to identify and eradicate a parasite that was killing silkworms. By 1881 he had developed techniques to protect sheep from anthrax and chickens from cholera. He observed that creating a weakened form of a germ and vaccinating animals with it gave them effective immunity. It was an important development of Jenner’s earlier use of cowpox germs to vaccinate against smallpox.
The most important vaccination Pasteur produced was against rabies. By manipulating the dried nervous systems of rabid rabbits, he created a weakened form of the terrible disease and managed to inoculate dogs against it. He had treated only eleven dogs in 1885 when he took dramatic action to save the life of a nine-year-old boy who had been bitten by a rabid dog. It was extremely risky but totally successful. Pasteur remained a hero of the medical establishment until his death, after a series of strokes, in 1895. He was buried in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, then reinterred in a crypt at the Pasteur Institute.
Pasteur was one of many scientists who have performed medical miracles that have done so much to alleviate human suffering. Edward Jenner was one of the first, immunizing a child against smallpox in 1796. From the 1860s Joseph Lister (1827–1912) began his pioneering work on asepsis in surgery, using carbolic acid as an antiseptic to reduce the risk of infection. Operations had already been rendered far safer in the preceding decades by the physician John Snow (1813–58), who had introduced the use of anesthesia to enable pain-free operations. Snow was also responsible for reducing the incidence of cholera by tracing its cause to contaminated water supplies.
In 1895 the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen (1845–1923) discovered X-rays, thereby paving the way for vast improvements in the treatment of internal injuries. In 1928 Alexander Fleming (1881–1955) discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, when he noticed that the mold in a dirty lab dish prevented bacteria from growing. In the 1950s the work of the French immunologist Jean Dausset (b. 1916) led to great advances in our understanding of how the body fights disease. In 1953, Francis Crick (1916–2004) and James Watson (b. 1928) discovered the double-helix shape of DNA. All those who worked on these projects deserve to be remembered as heroes of medicine.
FRANCISCO LÓPEZ & ELIZA LYNCH
1827–70 & 1835–1886
A monster without parallel.
George Thompson, an English engineer who was commissioned as an officer in the army of Francisco Solano López
Francisco Solano López was the vainglorious dictator of Paraguay who, in the name of honor and national prestige, led his country to almost total destruction at the hands of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. López was a deluded popinjay, an inept psychopath and a mass-murdering megalomaniac who was obsessed with dreams of grandeur and believed that he could become the Napoleon of South America.
He was the eldest son of President Carlos Antonio López, a merciless tyrant who ruled Paraguay from 1844 until his death in 1862. The younger López had been groomed to succeed his father, and was promoted to brigadier general at just eighteen. He became an increasingly proud and preposterous young man, and liked to have himself pictured on horseback or in military uniform, with a profusion of ribbons and insignia, his thick black beard covering a somewhat portly face. From his teenage years he was an avid womanizer, capable of oleaginous charm and eloquence, but likely to become forceful if his advances were rejected.
In 1853 young López traveled to France on a diplomatic mission on behalf of his father. In Paris he became intoxicated with the political pomp, imperial ceremony and military showmanship of Emperor Napoleon III. He studied the campaigns of the first Napoleon and believed that he himself had a talent for strategy. While in Paris he also met Eliza Lynch, a beautiful Irish girl whom he took back to Paraguay and who was to become his mistress for the rest of his life.
To this day Paraguayans are divided over the figure of Eliza Lynch. Those who see Francisco López’s presidency as a noble episode in Paraguayan history have placed his Irish moll on a pedestal as Paraguay’s version of Evita Perón—a captivating visionary and a regenerator of the country. On the other hand, for the many who regard López’s presidency as a disaster, brought about by sadism and hubris, Lynch was a gorgeous, profane, blood-spattered seductress, the Latin-Celtic Jezebel who stoked her lover’s ego, encouraging him to embark on his disastrous military adventures, who turned him against his own family and encouraged him to kill.
Eliza Alicia Lynch was born on June 30, 1835 in County Cork in Ireland, to a Protestant physician, John Lynch, and his wife, Adelaide Schnock. In 1847 the family moved to Paris, and in 1850, when she was just fifteen, Eliza married a French military surgeon.
The marriage ended in divorce, and Eliza was already working as a courtesan when she was introduced to López in 1853. To the thickset, chubby-faced López she must have seemed an exotic beauty, with her tall, voluptuous figure, her long red hair, her blue eyes and her porcelain skin. Their love affair developed quickly and by the time that López had to return to Paraguay, Lynch was pregnant. Besotted, López left her funds to follow him to South America. She gave birth to the first of five sons in October 1855, not long after she arrived in Buenos Aires.
Soon settled in Asunción in palatial splendor, Eliza simultaneously delighted and horrified Paraguayan high society with her charm, Parisian affectations and impish behavior—not to mention her importation of French cuisine, music, perfume, fashions and art.
On his father’s death in 1862, López inherited his power, imprisoned potential rivals and was duly elected president by the Paraguayan congress. While on his deathbed, his father was reported to have warned him of the dangers of foreign aggression. But despite growing up so close to the center of Paraguayan politics, López showed little sensitivity to the precarious nature of the balance of power in the region, determined to become the Napoleon III of South America. Foolishly, in 1863, just one year into his reign, he allowed Paraguay to become embroiled in the civil war that was taking place in nearby Uruguay, in which both Brazil and Argentina—the most powerful nations in South America—had a stake.
Puffed up with his own sense of self-importance, López believed that he could act as the arbiter between these contending powers and thereby establish himself as the dominant warlord of South America. Accordingly, in November 1864 he declared war on Brazil, and sent his troops over the border. By December they had taken the province of Mato Grosso, known for its valuable diamond mines, but instead of consolidating his position López then demanded the right to station troops in Corrientes, a province of Argentina that was strategically important in his campaign against Brazil. In April 1865, after Argentina refused, López launched a disastrous invasion.
On May 1, 1865 Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay set aside their differences and united together against Paraguay. A foolish incursi
on into Uruguay in 1865 stretched López’s forces to breaking point, and in May 1866 his army suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the allies at Tuyuti. By July 1867 López was in full retreat, and his enemies chased and harried him back into Paraguay.
As Paraguay’s fortunes in the War of the Triple Alliance rapidly began to decline, López turned his rage on his fellow Paraguayans. By the middle of 1868 he had become convinced that his own family were plotting against him, and ordered the execution of his brothers and brother-in-law, and even had his own mother and sisters flogged. In what became known as the San Fernando massacres, López tortured and slaughtered men and their entire families—many thousands of them—including ministers, judges, senior civil servants and even foreign diplomats. All were executed without trial on suspicion of being deserters or traitors.
Such actions were the signs of a desperate man. As his enemies closed in, López was driven northward with the ragged remnant of his army toward the frontier of Paraguay and Brazil. Here, on March 1, 1870, he was killed by Brazilian troops as he tried to escape by swimming a river.
During the war López made his mistress the largest landowner in Paraguay by handing her huge swathes of land, including a number of profitable ranches and over twenty homes for her personal use. But her fortune was tied in with his, and within days of his death she had all her lands confiscated. She fled to back to Paris—but not entirely empty-handed, as she took with her thousands of pounds’ worth of jewels and cash. When she later returned to Paraguay to reclaim her land, she was swiftly deported back to Paris, where she died in 1886.
TOLSTOY
1828–1910
When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself … this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations invested in literature.
Anton Chekhov
Leo Tolstoy is, in the opinion of many, the greatest novelist of all time. His two masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, certainly rank among the finest novels ever written. He was also a skillful writer of short stories and essays, a powerful historian and a mystical philosopher who developed unusual yet influential Christian ideas about the human condition and moral improvement.
The essence of Tolstoy’s greatness is his masterful grasp of human behavior and motivation, which he combined with a natural gift for storytelling and an astonishing breadth and universality of vision. Though he was a deeply complex man, tormented by his failure to live up to his own standards, he had one of the sharpest and most original minds in the history of literature.
Count Leo Tolstoy was born into a prominent aristocratic family on his ancestral estate, Yasnaya Polyana, some 100 miles south of Moscow. His childhood was upset by the early deaths of both his parents, yet he still remembered it in idyllic terms. He was educated at home by tutors, but when he enrolled at the University of Kazan in 1844, it became apparent that he was neither a willing nor a diligent student, preferring to drink, gamble, womanize and socialize, and he left in 1847 without taking a degree.
He returned to Yasnaya Polyana with the intention of educating himself and improving the lot of his serfs, but his resolve soon weakened. In 1851 he went to the Caucasus, joined the army and used his experiences to write stories such as “Hadji Murat,” his best shorter work. It is a story of nobility, courage and betrayal in the life of a daring Chechen fighter during the thirty-year Russian war to defeat the legendary Chechen/Dagestani commander Imam Shamyl and conquer the northern Caucasus. Tolstoy also served during the combined Anglo-French-Italian siege of the chief Russian naval base in the Crimea, Sebastopol. An eleven-month campaign of appalling slaughter and incompetence ended in 1856 with the Russians sinking their ships, blowing up the garrison and evacuating. The experience was the basis for three literary sketches in which Tolstoy refined his technique of minutely analyzing thoughts and feelings. “The hero of my tale,” the author wrote, “whom I love with all the power of my soul … is Truth.” In 1862 he married Sofia Andreyevna Behrs and again returned to his estate, this time with a plan to teach and learn from the simple peasant children.
Tolstoy’s most productive period came between 1863 and 1877. From 1865 he was working on War and Peace, which he finished in 1869. This vast work is both domestic and political. It consists of three main strands: the monumental struggle of Russia and France, Alexander I versus Napoleon, between 1805 and 1812, particularly the French invasion and retreat from Moscow; the interlinked tales of two aristocratic Russian families, the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys; and lengthy essays on history. It is clear that Tolstoy identified himself with the curious, diffident and doubting, but kind, direct and moral character of Pierre Bezukhov.
Tolstoy has an original view of the wars he describes. He portrays Napoleon as a bungling egomaniac, the Russian tsar Alexander I as a man of fine words, obsessed with his own legacy, and the maligned Russian commander Mikhail Kutuzov as a wily old man of war. Combat itself is seen as chaos, without any overall connection or intrinsic structure. The fictional characters all to some extent see life in the same way and find solace only through what would become Tolstoy’s main philosophy: salvation through devotion to family and the tasks of everyday life.
War and Peace, with its acute understanding of individual motivation and action, may have redefined the novel, but Tolstoy’s next major project, Anna Karenina, was no less influential. Written between 1875 and 1877, it applied the principles of War and Peace to family life. “All happy families resemble each other,” he wrote; “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” At the center of the story lies the tragic affair of Anna with Count Alexei Vronsky, an army officer. In vivid detail Tolstoy paints Anna’s mental contortions under the pressure of society’s hypocrisies and her inner struggles (ultimately in vain) to rationalize her own behavior.
Like War and Peace, Anna Karenina was a vehicle for Tolstoy’s moral convictions. From 1877 he became more and more obsessed with the spiritual side of his life and suffered various crises of faith. He was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church in 1901 for his distinctive reinterpretation of Christianity, in which he emphasized pacifist resistance to evil, love for one’s enemies, extreme asceticism and avoidance of anger and lust. He soon had a growing band of disciples across the world.
Tolstoy continued to write, using the profits from his third major novel, Resurrection (1899), to help the persecuted Doukhobor Christian sect to emigrate to Canada.
Deeply unhappy in his marriage and his divided court of disciples, the ailing Tolstoy escaped from home with one of his daughters and a doctor but collapsed and died in the winter of 1910 in a railway station, refusing to see his wife. He had a simple burial on his family estate. Though frequently eccentric, his moral, ethical and spiritual ideas became highly influential; Gandhi, for one, was impressed by his doctrine of nonviolent resistance. But it is his contribution to literature that towers above all else.
EMPRESS CIXI
1835–1908
After this notice is issued to instruct you villagers … if there are any Christian converts, you ought to get rid of them quickly. The churches which belong to them should be unreservedly burned down. Everyone who intends to spare someone, or to disobey our order by concealing Christian converts, will be punished according to the regulation … and he will be burned to death to prevent his impeding our program.
Boxer poster, 1900
Beautiful, cunning and cruel, Empress Dowager Cixi was the archetypal dragon lady. She rose from obscurity to become the effective ruler of China for forty-seven years, during which time she presided over a humiliating decline in the country’s fortunes. In the second half of the 19th century, the Qing dynasty that had ruled China for more than 250 years struggled to cope with the challenges posed by modernization and increasing pressure from the European powers. Having suffered military defeats at the hands of its foreign ri
vals, and faced with growing internal unrest, China’s last imperial dynasty finally fell in 1911. No one had contributed more to this collapse than the empress dowager herself.
When she entered Emperor Xianfeng’s household as his concubine in 1851, the future empress dowager was known as Lady Yehenara, daughter of Huizheng. She was renamed Yi soon after, and then Noble Consort Yi following the birth of her son Zaichun in 1856. When the emperor died in 1861, Zaichun assumed the throne, and to reflect her new position as Divine Mother Empress Dowager, Yi was given the title Cixi, meaning motherly and auspicious.
Before his death, Xianfeng had charged eight “regent ministers” to govern during his son’s minority, but a palace coup saw power pass instead to the late emperor’s consort, Mother Empress Dowager Ci’an, and the Divine Mother Empress Dowager Cixi. Aided by the ambitious Prince Gong, they were to enjoy a twelve-year period of shared rule, exercising power “from behind the curtain.”
Zaichun, renamed Tongzhi (meaning collective rule), was belatedly allowed to begin his “reign” in 1873, but the two matriarchs, having gained a taste for power, had no intention of quietly slipping into retirement. Cixi in particular continued to dominate the young emperor, cowing him into accepting her authority.
After just two years, Tongzhi died, but the accession of Cixi’s four-year-old cousin, Emperor Guangxu, saw the two women restored as regents. Six years later, in 1881, Empress Ci’an died suddenly, leading to rumors that Cixi had poisoned her. Ci’an’s death opened the way for Cixi to exercise unfettered power, reinforced in 1885 when she stripped Prince Gong of his offices.
Titans of History Page 37
