Titans of History (44 page)

As the French Revolution overturned the strict hierarchy of France's
ancien régime
, he rose up the army ranks. Dumas's daring and skill in campaigns in the Vendée, in Italy and in Egypt had earned him the rank of general by the age of thirty-one. But in 1802 he was ordered to put down the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue, and when he refused, Napoleon made his displeasure all too clear.

Politically disgraced, Dumas retired to the countryside, to the wife he had first met when he was billeted at her father's inn in Villers-Cotterêts in 1789. Dogged by poverty and ill health, in 1806 the giant of a man died, leaving behind a widow and a small son and daughter.

The Black Count died in his forties, leaving his indigent widow to bring up two children on her own. When Dumas finally made his way to Paris, the mixed-race, rambunctious provincial was mocked for his frizzy blond curls and his antiquated dress. His father's erstwhile friends evaded his pleas for patronage. Only a stroke of luck prevented an ignominious return to the countryside. Dumas's beautiful penmanship secured him a position as a clerk in the office of the Duc d'Orléans (later King Louis-Philippe, 1830–48). It gave
him enough money and plenty of time to pursue the writing that he believed would make his fortune. His faith was vindicated. In 1829 his play
Henry III and his Court
made him famous overnight.

The self-styled “king of the world of Romance” provided his audiences with a magical form of escapism. He was the champion of romanticism, seeing the theater as “above all a thing of the imagination” and rejecting the cold orations and philosophical monologues of traditional French drama. His characters fought, wept, made love and died on stage with passion, the triumphant climaxes of his plays rendering his audiences delirious. When Dumas started writing novels, his imagination enraptured Paris. As
The Three Musketeers
and
The Count of Monte Cristo
appeared simultaneously, their daily installments of action and melodrama were instant talking points. Despite their tendency to melodrama, his characters were so exuberant that they still pulse with life today—the musketeers Aramis, Porthos, Athos and D'Artagnan (with their motto “One for all, and all for one”), the sinisterly beautiful Milady de Winter, and Edmond Dantès, the count of Monte Cristo himself.

In
The Three Musketeers
, D'Artagnan, the cocky but charming provincial Gascon swordsman, joins the experienced king's men to fight the sinister intrigues of Cardinal Richelieu and others. In
The Count of Monte Cristo
, an innocent man, Dantès, is imprisoned forever in the Château d'If island prison, where an old prisoner helps him escape—“Death is the escape from the Château d'If”—to claim a buried fortune and mysterious title. Dantès—now Monte Cristo—returns to seek justice in the classic tale of revenge.

At the height of his success Dumas was Paris' literary star. His image was on medallions and etchings. His workrooms were strewn with flowers and bursting with visitors. Extravagant, exuberantly dressed in capes and sporting flashy canes, with a menagerie of outlandish pets and an endless stream of still more glamorous
mistresses, Dumas was the perfect subject for caricature. It was not always kind and it was often racist. But his generosity, his child-like sensitivities and his bombastic naivety earned him as much love as ridicule.

The critics sneered at Dumas's popularity, at his readability, at his prodigious and varied output. He was never elected to the bastion of France's artistic establishment, the Académie française. He was attacked in print for being no more than the foreman of a “novel factory” because he used collaborators. Assistants did indeed research and draft his work, but it was he who brought about the literary alchemy. Furiously scribbling away in his shirtsleeves, he injected the romance, suspense and humor that gave his work its magic. Dumas had no time for academic introspection. The self-styled popularizer wrote to entertain, to enchant and consume, to dispel the mundaneness of life. He succeeded. “It fertilizes the soul, the mind, the intelligence,” wrote Victor Hugo, one of France's other titanic men of letters. Dumas “creates a thirst for reading.”

Dumas was always blithely unconcerned by the sniping of others less successful than himself. He abandoned his tenuous claim to the title of marquis; his name was title enough. He had his motto—“I love those who love me”—carved in huge letters on Monte Cristo, the opulent château he built to celebrate his success.

His lifestyle was precarious. Debts forced him to sell Monte Cristo. On his deathbed he remarked wryly: “I came to Paris with twenty-four francs. That is exactly the sum with which I die.” His action-packed cape-and-sword romances became less fashionable as literary styles changed. But he was undaunted by his oscillating fortunes. Irrepressible and indefatigable, he continued to write. He founded magazines and he lectured. He even participated in Garibaldi's campaign to unify Italy.

When Dumas died, at the home of his devoted son at Puys near Dieppe, it was, in the words of one young journalist, “as
though we had all lost a friend.” The “affectionate and much-loved soul” was also the “splendid magician” who created works that gave “passage into unknown worlds.”

Dumas had a son who would also make his name in literature. In 1822, when he was twenty, Alexandre Dumas had moved to Paris to make his fortune and quickly took up with the first of many mistresses, Marie-Catherine Labay, a dressmaker who lived in the rooms opposite him. Young Alexandre, the child of this affair, was six years old before his father formally recognized him and won custody of him in a vicious legal battle. (Father and son, both Alexandre and both writers, are distinguished as
père
and
fils
.) His father cherished him and gave him the most expensive education possible (although he could not prevent his son's classmates from taunting him for his mixed-race heritage). But his mother's distress at losing her son was an experience that the adult Dumas
fils
would revisit in his work.

The son adored his father but was different from him in almost every way. Dumas
fils
, a member of the Académie française, wrote moralizing novels and plays that made him the darling of the French literary establishment. His love affair as a youth with the young courtesan Marie Duplessis, one of the celebrated beauties of her time, inspired his best-known work,
La Dame aux camélias
(1848), in which a young man falls in love with a beautiful girl of pleasure. His father ends it and she dies of tuberculosis. Verdi made it into the opera
La Traviata
(1853), and there have been eight film versions starring actresses from Sarah Bernhardt to Greta Garbo and Isabelle Huppert.

Father and son both produced great works, but
The Three Musketeers
and
The Count of Monte Cristo
—the father's masterpieces—remain not just timeless but universal, still bestsellers and the subjects of innumerable movies. In 2002, President Jacques Chirac of France presided as Republican Guards dressed
as the Musketeers moved Dumas's body to rest in the Panthéon. “With you,” said the president, “we
were
D'Artagnan and Monte Cristo!”

1804–1881

Mr. Disraeli … has always behaved extremely well to me, and has all the right feelings for a minister towards the sovereign … He is full of poetry, romance and chivalry. When he knelt down to kiss my hand, which he took in both of his, he said “in loving loyalty and faith.”

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.

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.