The World полностью

Napoleon believed in France’s mission civilisatrice as much as any British statesman believed in his own nation’s imperial destiny. In Algeria, now home to over 100,000 French colons, Napoleon’s forces used brutal methods, massacres and deportations. The French were defeated for a while by a mystical sheikh and then on his death by a female leader, Lalla Fatma N’Soumer, until she was captured and died in prison. Napoleon, visiting Algeria, attempted to counter colon racism and envisioned a French colony and an Arab kingdom with him as roi des Arabes: ‘I’m just as much emperor of the Arabs of Algeria as I am of the French.’ As in Britain, aggressive businessmen drove imperial expansion. When Napoleon was canvassed by the Prom family of shipping tycoons from Bordeaux to move into Africa, he ordered his governors to expand from Saint-Louis on the coast into the interior of what became Senegal. Keen to exploit the French presence in east Asia, he grabbed a naval base in China, then sent a flotilla to attack Annam (Vietnam) where Catholic missionaries had provoked a backlash, with the emperor Tu Duc trying to reject Catholic infiltration by executing two Spanish priests. In September 1857, French troops seized Da Nang and Saigon; both were repelled by the Vietnamese, but Napoleon dispatched reinforcements that in June 1862 retook Saigon. Thus was established the French colony of Cochinchina.

Then in 1863 Napoleon turned on Cambodia. Its kings had long since abandoned Angkor, moving their capital to Phnom Penh, but, weak and divided, it was fought over by the emperors of Vietnam and the kings of Siam (Thailand). In 1848 a Cambodian prince Duong expelled the Vietnamese, backed by Siam, and re-established the Khmer kingdom. But he made the mistake of asking for Napoleonic protection in 1853: ‘What would you have me do? I have two masters as my neighbours, and France is far away.’ Not for long. Duong’s son Norodom was forced to accept a French protectorate. Napoleon had established Indochine, a French Asian empire that lasted until 1954.

In Beijing, the debacle broke Xianfeng, who was succeeded in 1861 by his five-year-old son with Cixi, the Tongzhi emperor, and eight regents, led by a Manchu prince, Sushun, and his brother, while Empress Zhen acted as his formal mother and dowager empress. As the funeral neared, Cixi, still officially Consort Yi, persuaded Zhen to canvass for her promotion to joint dowager empress, adopting the name Joyous – Cixi. Secretly gathering support from her husband’s brothers, Princes Gong and Chun, who encouraged her to ‘listen to politics behind the curtains’, and artfully getting control of the royal seals, she manipulated the regents into shouting disrespectfully at her while she and Zhen cradled the boy-emperor. Sushun ordered Cixi’s murder.

At her husband’s funeral, when half the regents accompanied the coffin and half the new emperor, Cixi orchestrated a coup, hiding the decree to dismiss the regents by sewing it into Zhen’s robes. Some of the regents burst into the harem shouting, ‘We are the ones that write decrees.’ Cixi coolly ordered their arrest. Sushun, in charge of the coffin, was arrested in flagrante with two concubines, unbecoming conduct during royal obsequies. As Cixi fixed the trial, blaming the regents for signing the foreign treaties and falsifying her husband’s will, two ‘received silk’ – the white scarf with which to hang themselves; Sushun was beheaded.

After her son’s coronation, wearing yellow brocade illustrated with dragons, on a nine-dragon throne in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, Cixi was ruler of China, rising each day with Zhen (with whom she nominally ruled for twenty years) to sit in their phoenix-patterned robes, pearl-encrusted shoes and gate-towered hairdos behind the little emperor while they discussed matters of state with the Grand Council. Most urgent was the Taiping rebellion, whose leaders now ruled thirty million in an area larger than all of Europe. The Heavenly King, Jesus’ Brother, had died, but the Heaven Worshippers fought on as bubonic plague raged. Cixi mustered a western-supplied Ever Victorious Army under a civil servant, Li Hongzhang, assisted by two extraordinary adventurers, the American Frederick Ward and the Briton Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon.^* Li invited Taiping leaders to a dinner where they were offered a mandarin’s hat, but as they knelt and bared their heads, they were decapitated. The Taiping was, with the eighth-century An Lushan rebellion, the bloodiest civil war in history: thirty million died, maybe more.