The World полностью

The revolutions were a howl of rage directed at the old hierarchy in a new era of seething cities, billowing factories, careening railways, rollercoasting stock markets, multiplying newspapers, bestselling instalment-novels and news-bearing telegraphs. British railways – in 1840, they had laid 1,498 miles of line, tripling to 6,621 by 1850 – now linked British cities; France was far behind with 2,000 miles. Railway entrepreneurs considered adding a transatlantic route to their networks: in 1840, a Canadian entrepreneur, Samuel Cunard, sailed on his first steamship, Britannia, from Liverpool to his native Nova Scotia in twelve days, launching a service that linked the continents, soon enabling millions of poor people from many countries, from Ireland to Germany, to migrate to seek new opportunities in the settler nations of the Americas and Australia. At the bottom of society, urban working classes toiled in hellish factories that produced goods for the newly confident bourgeois consumers: the first department store, Bon Marché, had opened in Paris in 1838 and its own proprietor was planning a larger version – an age of emporia as well as empires. Workers now confronted industrialists, forming unions and embracing a new ideology that placed the working class at the centre of society: socialism.^*

Twice fleeing their capital, as ministers were lynched and hanged from lampposts, Kaiser Ferdinand and the Habsburgs still possessed the will for power that is essential to keeping it, deploying their loyal armies to crush Italy and then storm Vienna. They held a secret family conference where ‘the only man at court’, Archduchess Sophie, the emperor’s sister-in-law, the Bavarian princess who had flirted with Napoleon’s son in the 1820s, stiffened resolve: she persuaded her husband, the emperor’s brother, to renounce the succession. She had trained their eighteen-year-old son Franzl, fair-haired, blue-eyed, serious and dutiful, for the throne. At Olomouc, the handover was recorded poignantly by the outgoing kaiser. ‘The affair ended with the new Emperor kneeling before his old Emperor and Lord, that is to say, me,’ wrote Ferdinand, ‘and asking for a blessing, which I gave him, laying both hands on his head and making the sign of the Holy Cross … then I kissed our new master … After that I and my dear wife packed our bags.’

Assuming the name Franz Josef, the new emperor resumed the reconquest of the empire, first in Italy, then in Austria. Many dynasties tottered. In Bavaria, one of the oldest, the Wittelsbachs, resembled an opéra bouffe: King Ludwig, at the age of sixty-two, who had ruled for twenty-three years, had recently fallen under the sway of a dazzling Irish courtesan, Eliza James, who claimed to be a Spanish dancer named Lola Montez. ‘I love you with my life, my eyes, my soul, my body,’ he wrote, raving about her ‘black hair, blue eyes, graceful form … I’m young again.’ Lola dominated Munich: ‘I’m on the point of receiving the title of countess!’ she boasted to a friend. ‘I have a lovely property, horses, servants … surrounded by the homage of great ladies, I go everywhere, all of Munich waits upon me,’ and ‘The king loves me passionately.’ But the reign of Lola was short. She amused herself by having affairs with students just as the revolution ignited Bavaria, forcing Ludwig to exile her and accept a constitution. ‘My very beloved Lolitta,’ wrote the cuckolded king, ‘Luis [himself] is no longer loved, only your heart remains to me … I will renounce the crown.’^* His abdication calmed the revolution.

Further north, in Frankfurt, an excited National Assembly promoted a united, constitutional Germany, dispensing with the ‘German Confederation’ chaired by Austria and offering the crown to the timorous Prussian king Frederick William IV. At first a Berlin revolution had forced the Flounderer to agree a constitution. His conservative younger brother, Wilhelm, went into British exile; when he returned, he used gunpowder to restore order in the streets. Now the Flounderer refused to ‘pick up a crown from the gutter, disgraced with the stink of revolution, defiled with filth’. Yet he then flirted with leading a German union. But Austria had recovered and reasserted its power; the Assembly was closed down; the Hohenzollerns had been at once humiliated and shown to be essential.^*

The Flounderer’s performance had infuriated the Junker nobles, none more so than a strapping landowner from Pomerania, Otto von Bismarck, who, provoking liberals with his talk of divine monarchy, fantasized about leading an army to overthrow the king and encouraged the ‘rattling of sabres in their scabbards’. The backlash against the rebellion deeply disappointed two young German radicals planning socialist revolution.

COURTESANS AND DAS KAPITAL: NAPOLEON AND MARX