Mehmed Ali founded Khartoum in Sudan as his southern base, whence his henchmen seized 30,000 slaves of whom two-thirds perished as they were being driven northwards ‘like sheep with the rot’. His rash son Ismail was killed, but Egyptian raids were now delivering 10,000 Sudanese slaves annually. Yet Mehmed Ali, ruler of Arabia, Egypt and Sudan, coveted Europe’s new technologies, cultivating cotton and building mills to process it – the first non-European state to join the industrial revolution. He invited French officers to train his modern army, modelling himself on Napoleon while cultivating a special relationship with Bourbon Paris – where the weary, bloated Louis XVIII struggled to compete with the glory of Napoleon. The legend of the emperor grew. After Waterloo, Napoleon’s Marie Louise set off with Neipperg to rule Parma, where she secretly bore him children, but she was ordered to leave her young son Napoleon in Vienna.
The boy was given a new name: having been both king of Rome and Napoleon II, his grandfather Franz renamed him Napoleon-Franz, duke of Reichstadt.* Worshipping his father, he was shocked to discover his mother’s love life with Neipperg. ‘If Josephine had been my mother,’ he told a friend, ‘my father wouldn’t have been buried on St Helena, and I wouldn’t be in Vienna. My mother is kind but weak … not the wife my father deserved.’
Napoleon-Franz trained as a soldier but his grandfather and Chancellor Metternich were terrified that he could rally Bonapartists in France or revolutions elsewhere. In 1814, Tsar Alexander had conceived a conservative alliance to guide a rules-based Europe – an autocratic version of the UN Security Council – with Metternich and Lord Liverpool’s Britain, to crush the spread of revolutionary spirit. Or at least, as Metternich put it, ‘Events that can’t be prevented must be directed.’
Yet Metternich and his allies struggled to hold the line in Iberia: one of the peninsula’s kings, João, was in Rio, while the other, the inept king of Spain, Fernando, was trying to restore absolute rule. Fifteen years earlier, the sixteen-year-old Fernando had played tennis with a skinny colonial boy from Caracas, Simón Bolívar, aged seventeen, who, losing a point, hit the prince of Asturias over the head. ‘Who’d have guessed that this accident was a harbinger,’ Bolívar later boasted, ‘and I would rip the most precious jewel from his crown?’ The ‘jewel’ was America – and Bolívar, along with two Haitian monarchs and a Brazilian prince, would liberate a continent and open an era.
* The author of the Haitian Declaration of Independence was the first Haitian intellectual, Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, a carpenter’s son who had been educated in France, known as Tonnerre (Thunder) because his cradle had been hit by lightning. He encouraged the massacre: ‘For our declaration of independence, we should have the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen!’ One of the killers was Jean Zombi, whose name spread the spectre of ‘zombies’ in western imaginations. The idea of zombies derived from west Africa, particularly Dahomey, where nothing was so terrifying as the undead deadness of slavery: the enslaved, it was believed, became half dead but still alive. Zombi’s killings reversed the sorcery. The only whites spared were the Poles in the French army, whom Dessalines, aware of the Russian massacres of Poles in Warsaw, called ‘the White Negroes of Europe’.
* Across the world, in Britain’s penal colony in Australia, a military coup had just taken place. Since the foundation of the colony, the Wales Corps had served as a garrison, increasingly trading in ‘rum’ – wheat-based booze from Bengal. With a shortage of coins, this moonshine was used as currency. When a new governor, Admiral Bligh, who had accompanied Captain Cook then survived a mutiny on his ship
* Queen Marie Louise was a half-sister of Cécile Fatiman, the voodoo
