The World полностью

Waiting for a chance to unite Germany, Bismarck pivoted like a Krupp howitzer towards France. In April 1867, the world celebrated the apogee of Napoleonic France at the second Exposition Universelle, attended by seven million. The novelist Victor Hugo, usually a Napoleonic critic, wrote the brochure.

On 12 April, Hortense Schneider, the sexual icon of Paris, starred in Offenbach’s La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, a performance attended by Napoleon, King Wilhelm and Bismarck, Tsar Alexander II and Kaiser Franz Josef. Besieged by monarchs, La Snéder would not get into bed for less than 10,000 francs. Bertie, the twenty-five-year-old pinguid prince of Wales, representing his mother, dived into Parisian lubricity.^* But the host would have done better to pay attention to Krupp at the Exposition, where his display of a colossal fifty-ton cannon, 1,000-pound shells and a giant steel ingot of 80,000 pounds was visited by Bismarck and Wilhelm. No wonder that at the theatre Bismarck had laughed at Offenbach’s portrait of power and war: ‘That’s exactly how it is.’

ISMAIL THE MAGNIFICENT AND EUGéNIE: THE EMPIRE IS AN OLD WOMAN

On 17 November 1869, Empress Eugénie opened the Suez Canal, the work of her cousin Ferdinand de Lesseps.^* The project of a canal to link the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, cutting the distance between Europe and India, was an ancient idea but the British role in restraining Mehmed Ali’s conquests led him to favour a French plan. Lesseps was a diplomat, not an engineer, but he had served in Cairo, meeting Mehmed and his successors to pitch a project personally backed by Napoleon. Cairo’s relations with the emperor were so close that the Egyptians had sent a Nubian regiment to fight in Mexico. During the American war, Egyptian cotton supplied British factories; money poured in and thousands of labourers perished building the canal.

Ismail, aged thirty-three, the reigning khedive of Egypt, grandson of Mehmed, son of Ibrahim the Red and his Circassian wife, was a life force who embraced the Suez project, supervised by Lesseps from his villa (still standing) in the new town, Ismailia. Ismail the Magnificent, imaginative, impatient and energetic, was also in the audience for La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein and shopped in Paris, splurging on Krupp’s cannon – and on the Parisian courtesan, Blanche d’Antigny, who joined him in Cairo. Egypt, he said, ‘is no longer in Africa; we’re now part of Europe’, and he built railways, palaces, bridges, theatres.

Eugénie^* and Franz Josef each moored their yachts beside Ismail’s Mahrousa. ‘Magnificent!’ Eugénie telegraphed to Napoleon. At Ismailia, Ismail built a sultanic encampment of 1,200 tents with chandeliers and paintings and commissioned Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, performed at his new opera house. But his real ambition was an African empire and his gambit helped unleash the European carve-up of Africa.

At home, Eugénie found Napoleon suffering from gallstones and exhaustion. His shrewd brother Morny was dead and he tried to appease mounting opposition by conceding some power to ministers and the Assembly – reform is always a dangerous moment.

In February 1870, Spain offered its throne to King Wilhelm’s cousin Prince Leopold von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. Now Leopold consulted King Wilhelm: should he accept Spain? Wilhelm banned it, but Bismarck persuaded him to change his mind, planning to use the offer as bait for Napoleon: ‘Politically a French attack would be very beneficial.’

The French were outraged, forcing Napoleon to react. His sexual energy endured longer than his political will. He had enjoyed a last affair with a circus acrobat but, in agony from his gallstones, he struggled to resist escalation. ‘It’s a disgrace,’ said Eugénie. ‘The empire’s turning into an old woman.’

THE MOUSETRAP: NAPOLEON’S DEBACLE

Harassed by Eugénie, panicked by public war fever, Napoleon allowed his foreign minister to demand that Wilhelm reject the Spanish offer.^* When Wilhelm did so, instead of banking this success his ambassador insisted on a written rejection, possibly seeking a pretext for war. If so, he succeeded only too well: the irritated old king dictated a telegram. Bismarck doctored it to make it positively rude. Napoleon’s honour was impugned. France declared war. In July, the French mobilized an army forged in Algeria and Mexico that had beaten Russia and Austria; many expected it to beat Prussia. Wilhelm mobilized, joined by Bavaria and other kingdoms, 1.1 million men in all. ‘We’ve been shamelessly forced into this war,’ Crown Princess Vicky told her mother Queen Victoria. Both deplored Napoleonic aggression and admired Prussian honour, oblivious to Bismarck’s gambit.