The World полностью

Strapping and handsome with a small beard, agile in dance and war, Dingane, forty years old, executed Mbopha, eighty commanders and all his brothers except one and then crushed Tsonga opposition in southern Mozambique, as well as the Ndebele and Swazis. As for the Europeans at Lourenço Marques and Fort Natal, renamed Durban after the British governor of the Cape, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, he sent impis (Zulu regiments) to punish them, while persuading white hunters to train some of his men with rifles.

Shaka was dead, but in Bogotá, three days later, the assassins coming for Bolívar encountered a force of nature: Manuela.

In the early hours of 25 September 1828, a hit squad burst into the palace. Manuela, awakened, defended the door and, when Bolívar prepared to fight, ordered him to escape. Bolívar jumped out of the window; Manuela held the assassins at bay. Frustrated, they beat her as El Libertador hid under a bridge. Bolívar thanked Manuela, ‘Liberatrix of the Liberator’, but the humiliation had shattered the Genius of the Storm whose state now fell apart as Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Colombia grasped independence. Like Gran Colombia, Bolívar was dying.

In January 1830, Bolivar, still only forty-seven, faced reality: ‘Colombians! Today I cease to govern you … Never, never, I swear, have my thoughts been tainted by lust for kingship.’ Cadaverously consumptive, he retired to his house, La Quinta, near Cartagena, spluttering, ‘How will I get out of this labyrinth?’

There was no way out.

REVOLUTION: PEDRO AND DOMITILA

Bolívar died with a curse: ‘America’s ungovernable; he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea. The country will pass into the hands of an indistinguishable string of tyrants of every colour.’

Just as Bolívar was losing control of Colombia, Metternich was losing control of France, the sparkwheel of revolution. ‘When Paris coughs,’ said Metternich, ‘Europe catches cold.’

On 30 July 1830, revolution returned to the streets of Paris. The last of Louis XVI’s brothers, Charles X, aided by his minister the duc de Polignac, son of Marie Antoinette’s best friend, attacked the liberals in the Assembly, opposed by Lafayette – now seventy and back in France after being voted a fortune of $200,000 by the US Congress. From the start of his reign, Charles had been determined to promote absolutism at home and empire abroad. On 17 April 1825, he dispatched fourteen battleships to force Haiti to pay an indemnity to compensate France for the loss of its slaves and the 1804 massacre – in return for recognition. President Boyer was blackmailed into paying 150 million francs but was forced to take out a loan with a French bank to pay it. The money was sent to France in cash. The double debt impoverished Haiti.^*

As opposition seethed, Charles sought a Napoleonic distraction in an African conquest: it started as a farce but would in the twentieth century almost destroy France itself. When a ruler of Algiers touched a French envoy with his fly-whisk, Charles used this opéra bouffe moment as his pretext to invade the Barbary State, the start of what became the largest empire in Africa. On 5 July 1830, French troops seized Algiers. On the 9th, at Palais Saint-Cloud, Charles announced that he would now rule by ordinance and, as trouble began in Paris, on the 25th he cancelled the free press, dissolved the Assembly and cut the franchise. Two days later, the newspapers defied the king, launching the first media revolution. Crowds built barricades in the streets of Paris, shouting ‘À la guillotine!’ Fighting spread; on the 29th the mob stormed the Tuileries. As Lafayette rushed to the city and assumed the leadership of the National Guard, Charles abdicated. The Assembly invited Lafayette to rule; instead he proposed the king’s liberal cousin, Louis Philippe, as king of the French.

Louis Philippe’s father Philippe Égalité had been guillotined; he himself had fought the Austrians and had then defected from the revolution, travelling through Europe and America, staying with George Washington, teaching geography at a German school and maths at an English one, before returning to France with his Bourbon cousins.^* The duc d’Orléans was bluff, unpretentious and unregal, mocked by Talleyrand who quipped, ‘It’s not enough to be someone – you have to be something.’ But the king had lived an amazing life and even Talleyrand’s mistress-niece, Dorothea de Dino, said, ‘There’s no more interesting conversation than the king.’ But he played the citizen king, eschewing a court, while his friend James de Rothschild funded the regime and supported him in discouraging wars. Rothschild also backed the first railways, launching his Chemins de Fer du Nord by taking 1,700 Parisians to lunch in Lille and dinner in Brussels.