Titans of History полностью

The son adored his father but was different from him in almost every way. Dumas fils, a member of the Académie française, wrote moralizing novels and plays that made him the darling of the French literary establishment. His love affair as a youth with the young courtesan Marie Duplessis, one of the celebrated beauties of her time, inspired his best-known work, La Dame aux camélias (1848), in which a young man falls in love with a beautiful girl of pleasure. His father ends it and she dies of tuberculosis. Verdi made it into the opera La Traviata (1853), and there have been eight film versions starring actresses from Sarah Bernhardt to Greta Garbo and Isabelle Huppert.

Father and son both produced great works, but The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo—the father’s masterpieces—remain not just timeless but universal, still bestsellers and the subjects of innumerable movies. In 2002, President Jacques Chirac of France presided as Republican Guards dressed as the Musketeers moved Dumas’s body to rest in the Panthéon. “With you,” said the president, “we were D’Artagnan and Monte Cristo!”

DISRAELI

1804–1881

Mr. Disraeli … has always behaved extremely well to me, and has all the right feelings for a minister towards the sovereign … He is full of poetry, romance and chivalry. When he knelt down to kiss my hand, which he took in both of his, he said “in loving loyalty and faith.”

Queen Victoria, letter to her daughter Crown Princess Victoria of Prussia (March 4, 1868)

The greatest showman of British leaders, the most literary, and one of the wittiest, Benjamin Disraeli—known appropriately by everyone, even his wife, as Dizzy—matured from an adventurer into a heroic statesman, superb parliamentarian and virtuoso orator. Under him, the Conservative Party developed its guiding ideology, one that was to endure for over a century: fervent support for the monarchy, the empire and the Church of England, but also a commitment to achieving national unity by social reform. And although baptized a Christian in 1817, he remains the only British prime minister to have come from a Jewish background (let alone a Sephardic Moroccan one), a source of pride throughout his career. “I’m the empty page between the Old and New Testaments,” he told Queen Victoria. When he faced anti-Semitic taunts in Parliament, he proudly replied, “Yes I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the Rt. Hon. Gentleman were living as savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”

Most of Disraeli’s political achievements came late in life. The son of the writer Isaac d’Israeli, he was best known in his early years as a rakish literary figure, Byronic poseur and financial speculator. (Indeed, he and Winston Churchill remain the only outstanding literary figures among British leaders.) “When I want to read a book, I write one,” he once said; his books included romantic and political novels—the most famous being Coningsby—which often earned him substantial sums of money. He traveled the Ottoman empire and visited Jerusalem, where he rediscovered and reinvented his exotic persona as a Jewish Tory. He was famed for his extravagant dress sense and bumptiousness, which made him as many enemies as friends. His financial life was rackety, his sex life was shocking and, at one point, he lived in a ménage à trois with the lord chancellor Lord Lyndhurst and their joint mistress, the married Lady Henrietta Sykes. It was all a far cry from the sobriety of his arch-opponent, the Liberal leader W.E. Gladstone, with whom he had a fiery, combative relationship. He married late—childlessly but happily.

Disraeli entered Parliament in 1837, his maiden speech a disaster as the bumptious dandy (in green velvet) was booed: “You will hear me,” he said as he sat down. Before long he was recognized as a brilliant speaker and a tricky character. In 1846 he was instrumental in splitting the Conservative Party, by opposing the repeal of the Corn Laws in defiance of his leader, Robert Peel. When the Conservative Party formed a minority government in 1852, the earl of Derby appointed Disraeli chancellor of the exchequer. But his first budget was rejected by Parliament, and Derby’s government resigned after just ten months. Disraeli served twice more as chancellor under Derby, in 1858–9 and 1866–8.