The House of Rothschild Read Online Free Page B

brothers had started life as railway enthusiasts, with technical visions but without much money to realize them—hence their subordinate relationship with the Rothschilds in the 1830s. In the 1850s they were able to break free, mobilizing the resources of numerous smaller investors in raising the capital of the Credit Mobilier.
    Related to the challenge symbolized by the Pereires was a change in the relationship between state finance and the bond market. The 1850s saw the first serious attempts by states to sell bonds by public subscription, without the mediation of bankers, or with bankers acting as underwriters rather than buying new bonds outright. If nothing else, states began to exploit the growing competition between private and joint-stock banks in order to whittle down commissions. Though still dominant in the bond market, the Rothschilds’ position became less monopolistic. The spread of the telegraph further weakened their grip, bringing to an end the period when their couriers had been able to deliver market-sensitive news ahead of the competition.
    But perhaps the most important threat to the Rothschilds’ financial hegemony was political. The triumph of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in France introduced a new uncertainty into European diplomacy. The possibility that he might seek to emulate his uncle never wholly disappeared until 1870. At the same time, the rules of the international game were subtly altered by the tendency of politicians elsewhere—notably Palmerston, Cavour and Bismarck—to elevate national self-interest above international “balance,” and to place as much trust in cannons as in conferences. Compared with the relatively peaceful thirty-three years from 1815 until 1848, the next thirty-three years would be marked by a succession of wars in Europe (not to mention America): wars that the Rothschilds found themselves unable, despite their best efforts, to prevent.
    In May 1848 Charlotte de Rothschild affirmed her belief “in a bright, European and Rothschildian future.” Her confidence in the waning of the French revolutionary era was well founded. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the threats to monarchical politics and bourgeois economics did indeed recede. But the brightness of the Rothschildian future would depend on the family’s ability to meet new challenges. Of these, nationalism and then socialism would prove the greatest—especially when combined.

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    Uncles and Nephews

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    Charlotte’s Dream (1849-1858)
    I went to sleep at 5 and woke against 6; I had dreamt that a huge vampire was greedily sucking my blood . . . Apparently, when the result of the vote was declared, a loud, enthusiastic roar of approval resounded... throughout the House [of Lords]. Surely we do not deserve so much hatred.
    CHARLOTTE DE ROTHSCHILD, MAY 1849
     
     
    Though they had managed to weather its storms financially, 1848 might still have proved a fatal turning point for the Rothschilds—but for reasons unrelated to economics and politics. For in the years immediately after the revolution the very structure of the family and the firm was called into question. It is easy to forget as one reads their letters that the four remaining sons of Mayer Amschel were by now old men. Amschel was seventy-seven in 1850, Salomon seventy-six and Carl an ailing sixty-two. Only James was still indefatigable at fifty-six.
    Longevity, on the other hand, was a family trait: though their father had died aged sixty-eight, their mother, born in 1753, lasted long enough to see the crown of a united Germany offered to a Prussian king by a national assembly gathered in her own home town. Indeed, Gutle Rothschild had become something of a by-word by the 1840s, as The Times reported:
    The venerable Madame Rothschild, of Frankfort, now fast approaching to her hundredth year, being a little indisposed last week, remonstrated in a friendly way with her physician on the inefficiency of his prescriptions. “Que voulez-vous