The House of Rothschild (47 page)

Measures to stop capital flight were, however, the least of Alphonse’s worries. From a remarkably early stage—well before news of reverses at the front—he and his brother feared that war would trigger a revolution in Paris. As early as July 19, Gustave was reminded of 1848; a week later, his brother was detailing the steps being taken to combat the “desperate efforts” of “the Left” to stage a “coup de main” in Paris. At that stage he was still confident that the government had the situation under control; but by the first week of August he felt that in its efforts to combat capital flight the government itself was allowing itself “to be drawn down the revolutionary slope. Once it was the nobles who were regarded as suspect; today it is businessmen.” “The danger comes from the interior rather than from the Prussians,” he wrote sombrely on August 3. “We have no military force here [in Paris], and if by some mischance we were to suffer some reverse, who knows to what excesses the fury of the populace could lead.” The Finance Minister seemed unable to resist “the propensities of certain members of the Cabinet who believe themselves back in the time of the French Republic.” If a military victory did not come soon, warned Alphonse on August 6, “the revolutionary party would gain the upper hand.” Just three days later, revolution no longer seemed merely possible, but distinctly likely in the absence of a military victory. When the Legislative Body met there were calls not just for Ollivier’s resignation but for the abdication of the Emperor, who was frantically trying to mobilise a new army at Châlons. As far as Alphonse could see, the fall of the Empire was now
“a fait accompli.”

This prescience of revolution is easy to explain. To the Rothschilds (as to Metternich), modern history’s most important lesson had always been that a French revolution might lead to a European war, and that conversely a war involving France might lead to a French revolution. This fear had influenced Rothschild calculations time and again since 1815, but had never been exactly fulfilled. In 1830 and 1848 there had been revolutions without wars. In 1855 and 1859 there had been wars without revolutions. In 1870 history at last fitted the Rothschild model. Indeed, that may be why the Rothschilds came out of the 1870-71 crisis so unscathed.

At the same time, there was also a genuine desire on Alphonse’s part for a limited republican revolution to get rid of the Bonapartist regime, which his parents had always viewed with such suspicion and which he himself had overtly opposed during its final liberal phase. Alphonse’s letter to London of August 13 indicates that he was already in contact with moderate republic leaders—“certain persons who under the present circumstances could be called on to exercise an influence on events”—and that they had reassured him of their commitment to maintaining order. At least one member of the new Government of National Defence—Cremieux—was an old Rothschild associate, and Alphonse was quick to reassure his cousins of the new regime’s good intentions. “As the republic has been proclaimed,” he reported on September 4, “it is probable that popular anger will be disarmed and that there will be no serious disorder on the street.” Any possibility of a Bonapartist restoration or regency (something Bismarck would not have been averse to) Alphonse vehemently opposed. There is some evidence, admittedly, that he and Gustave would have welcomed a monarchist restoration, whether of the Bourbon or Orléanist dynasties. But in the immediate crisis of military defeat, they embraced the Republic without equivocation, even if privately they hoped it would be a transitional regime.

The most poignant symbol of the French Rothschilds’ share in the French defeat was without doubt the occupation of the château and park at Ferrières. This was an eventuality which Alphonse had anticipated with trepidation even before Sedan. On September 14, a week after the advance on Paris had begun, it happened.

It was at Ferrières that the first tentative and unsuccessful steps towards peace were taken by the new French government; and at Ferrières that Bismarck and Moltke openly quarrelled over strategy. Therein lies its principal historical importance. Yet the occupation of Ferrières can be seen to have had another significance: the “irony” of having the Prussian King and his Junker Chancellor installed at the château which was the most extravagant statement of Rothschild and therefore Jewish wealth. For Stern, the “raucous” conduct of the Germans was an expression of anti-Semitism with ominous significance. The difficulty is in deciding how improperly by contemporary standards the occupiers actually behaved.

The first Prussians to arrive, according to an account later written by the estate manager Bergman for Alphonse’s wife Leonora, were Generals von Eupling and Gordon and their respective staffs. Relations with the Rothschilds’ domestic staff certainly got off to an unpromising start. On September 17 General Gordon ordered the head butler to arrange dinner for fifteen; when thirty-two guests turned up there was not enough food to go around (though sixty-five bottles of wine were consumed) and Gordon had one of the servants locked up in the stables overnight as a punishment. The next morning Gordon left, and the 19th saw the arrival of William I, accompanied by Bismarck, the Chief of the General Staff Moltke, the Minister of War Roon, numerous other senior officers and around 3,000 men. (Others who stayed there included the Grand Dukes of Baden and Mecklenburg-Strelitz.) To some at least of these uninvited guests, Ferrières was a revelation. With its Mentmorian exterior and exotic interiors, it seemed “fairylike, magnificent”; yet the fact that it was the creation of a Jew—of the “Judenkönig,” as Roon called him—tempered their admiration with disdain. The initials JR—James de Rothschild’s —which recurred on the ornate walls and ceilings were translated with laboured humour as “Judaeorum Rex.”

Perhaps mindful of James’s efforts to thwart his plans in 1866, Bismarck himself seems to have taken an especially malicious pleasure in the situation. “Here I sit under a picture of old Rothschild and his family,” he wrote to his wife on September 21 from what had been James’s suite of rooms. “Negotiators of every sort hang on to my coat-tails like Jews round a market trader”—a significant choice of image. It was Bismarck who threatened to beat a servant who refused to serve him wine from the Rothschild cellars. And it was Bismarck who went out shooting pheasants in the chateau grounds, grumbling that the gun he was given was too small, with too few cartridges and inadequate shot. It was probably also Bismarck who arranged for a complaint about Rothschild inhospitality to be placed in the German press. Later, when asked whether he would be prepared to negotiate peace terms with a republican regime, Bismarck replied snidely that he would recognise “not only the Republic, but, if you want, a Gambetta dynasty... Indeed, any dynasty, whether Bleichröder or Rothschild.”

On the other hand, Bismarck’s feelings of animosity were not shared by his royal master. “Folk like us can’t rise to this,” William was heard to comment on seeing Ferrieres; “only a Rothschild can achieve it.” Anxious not to give offence to the family, he specifically ordered that there should be no requisitioning from the estate and that game and wine cellars should be left intact. As Bergman reported, “The sojourn of the King went off well, he had his own kitchen and kitchen staff, the estate had to provide for everything necessary, game, fruits and flowers; he gave 2,000 francs for the staff of the château.” He also took “good care to obtain a written statement that after his departure nothing was missing in the château” and left seventy-five men behind to guard it. No doubt there were some departures from these royal self-denying ordinances. “The soldiers billeted at La Taffarette [part of the estate],” grumbled Bergman,

After the King’s departure on October 5, several houses and the chateau cellars were “pillaged” and blankets and mattresses were requisitioned for nearby field-hospitals. On January 1, 1871, Bergman lamented:

Yet we should not exaggerate the significance of an old retainer’s hand-wringing. Prussian troops remained at Ferrières until the end of August 1871. Naturally, the French Rothschilds were only too keen to find fault with the conduct of the occupiers. But when Anthony visited the château on September 1, “to see what the Prussians had done [and] whether everything was as it was when the poor Baron left it,” he was pleasantly surprised. According to his account,

Even allowing for his evident impatience at the griping of his French relatives, Anthony’s account would seem to explode the idea of Teutonic depredations. Gustave himself admitted that the estate was “in as fair a state of things as could be expected” when he visited the chateau later the same month.

On reflection, the notion that the Prussians indulged in looting and pillaging may have been a construct inspired by the peace terms outlined by Bismarck at Ferrieres. The French regarded these as excessively harsh; they were therefore inclined to think of the German armies as ruthless plunderers at the local level too. The Rothschilds’ role in the peace negotiations was so important that it was perhaps inevitable that they began to equate the fate of France with the fate of Ferrières, and to exaggerate the burdens imposed on the latter.

We have already seen how quickly Alphonse and Gustave accepted the need for a moderate republican regime in the aftermath of the defeat at Sedan, while continuing to express forebodings about the danger of a full-blown Jacobin revolution in Paris. When reading their letters to London in 1870 and 1871, it is important to remember that their original objective had been to secure swift English intervention to end the war and establish a moderate peace. To some extent, therefore, warnings of impending revolution had a diplomatic purpose. As Alphonse wrote to London on August 8, “If Europe does not want France to become a hotbed of anarchy, it is necessary that it be ready and resolved to intervene seriously and without wasting time after the first big battle.” Five days later, he insisted that effective English peace-making was also the condition of political stability in a new French republic. Even at this early stage Alphonse was unequivocal about the kind of peace which would be acceptable, so much so that it becomes hard to distinguish his own views from those of the moderate Republican leadership. In fact, Alphonse’s first letter to London on the subject predated the fall of the Empire by some weeks. On August 13—in a carefully phrased resume which was obviously intended to relay republican views to Gladstone—he stated the terms which a new republican regime would be willing to accept on the assumption of a French defeat:

He repeated that formulation on September 4, the day the news reached Paris of the débâcle at Sedan: