By this time the empress dowager had accumulated a huge personal fortune. At a time of growing financial crisis for China, she built a string of extravagant palaces and gardens, and a lavish tomb for herself. Meanwhile, she stifled all efforts at reform and modernization. In 1881, she banned Chinese nationals from studying abroad because of the possible influx of liberal ideas. When proposals were brought forward for a vast new railway that would open up much of China, she vetoed the plans, claiming it would be “too loud” and would “disturb the emperors’ tombs.”
The young Emperor Guangxu was due to assume the reins of power in 1887. At her instigation, various accommodating court officials begged her to prolong her rule, due to the emperor’s youth. “Reluctantly” she agreed, and a new law was passed that allowed her to continue “advising” the emperor indefinitely.
Even after she finally handed over power in 1889—retiring to the massive Summer Palace she had built for herself—Cixi continued to overshadow the imperial court. She forced the new emperor to marry his niece, Jingfen, against his will. When he later snubbed his wife to spend more time with Consort Zhen—known as the Pearl Concubine—Cixi had Zhen flogged.
In the mid-1890s the empress dowager insisted on diverting funds from the Chinese navy to pay for extensive refurbishments to her Summer Palace for the celebration of her sixtieth birthday. When Japan launched a war against China in 1894, the latter’s armed forces were defeated. The reformers won the confidence of Emperor Guangxu, and in 1898 he launched his “first hundred days” of measures.
The empress dowager was unwilling to cede an inch. In September 1898 she organized a military coup that effectively removed Guangxu from power. He nominally continued as emperor until 1908, but was declared not fit to rule the country in an edict she herself authored.
Cixi’s undoing proved to be the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.
In 1900, a clandestine group, the Righteous and Harmonious Fists (the Boxers), which taught its members martial arts (and even claimed it could train them to be immune from bullets) led an uprising in Shandong province and gained a following among the rural poor. It produced mass propaganda accusing Catholic missionaries of acts of sexual abuse and Western immigrants of trying to undermine China. Violent attacks against both became commonplace.
Believing the movement might help her retain power, Cixi endorsed the rebellion as an expression of Chinese popular culture. Thereafter, anti-Western riots and the destruction of foreign property escalated and in the summer of 1900 a Boxer “army” laid siege to Western embassies in Beijing. The Chinese imperial army was complicit in the assault, doing little to relieve the defenders. It took the arrival of international troops to lift the siege (after which the city was looted), and several more months for the rising itself to be quelled.
Ironically, the rebellion increased foreign interference in China. The Boxer Protocol of 1901 not only forced the Chinese government to accede to a huge reparations bill, but also gained Western countries major trade concessions and allowed them to station forces permanently in Beijing—a further insult to the sense of wounded national pride upon which the abortive rebellion had been predicated. Her announcement of support for the Boxer movement, which she saw as a bulwark of traditional Chinese values against Western and liberal influences, prompted the Western powers to march on Beijing and seize the Forbidden City. Cixi was forced to flee, and imperial authority was only restored after the emperor signed a humiliating treaty. Cixi died in November 1908, leaving Puyi as emperor at age two. Overthrown by the Revolution of 1911, briefly reinstated in 1917, set up as puppet emperor of Manchukuo by the Japanese from 1932 until 1945, he was China’s last monarch. Cixi had proved the gravedigger of the Chinese empire.
LEOPOLD II
1835–1909
Many were shot, some had their ears cut off; others were tied up with ropes round their necks and bodies and taken away.
Roger Casement, reporting to the British foreign
secretary on the treatment of the natives in Leopold’s
Congo Free State
Leopold II, king of the Belgians, was the colonist who developed the vast and lucrative central African colony of the Congo at a terrible human cost. He carved himself a colossal personal empire, exploiting and killing millions, to build his fortune—turning the heart of Africa into Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Leopold succeeded his father, Leopold I, in 1865. He avoided involving Belgium in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, realizing that his small country had no influence in the power politics of Europe. But European neutrality did not amount to high-mindedness; instead, Leopold’s ambitions extended beyond Europe, and in 1876 he confided in his ambassador in London: “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.”
Leopold set his sights on the untapped natural resources of the river basin of the Congo, covered in dense rainforest and eighty times the size of Belgium. In 1876 he formed the Association Internationale Africaine to promote the exploration and colonization of Africa, and two years later commissioned the British-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley to explore the Congo region. By buying off local tribes for a pittance and duping them into signing away their lands to European control, Stanley requisitioned massive portions of the Congo for Leopold. Thus was created the Congo Free State, for which Leopold gained international recognition at the Conference of Berlin of 1884–5.
The Congo Free State was free only in name. It was not even a Belgian colony, but rather Leopold’s personal property, from which he squeezed profits as he plundered the area’s rich natural resources, notably rubber and ivory. Leopold never visited the Congo, preferring to govern it through a series of agents, whose own profits were gleaned from commission.
Order in the Congo Free State was maintained by the Force Publique, a notoriously cruel mercenary army of 20,000 men, officered by Europeans but relying on badly paid Africans as foot soldiers. The Force Publique was charged with the collection of the rubber tax, an oppressive levy that effectively required forced labor. Arriving in tribal villages, Leopold’s agents seized the women and children and refused to release them until the men went into the rainforest and brought back the requisite quantity of rubber, which was then sold on, all the time swelling Leopold’s coffers.
In order to stop them wasting ammunition on hunting wild animals, the Force Publique were ordered to account for every bullet they fired by bringing back the right hand of their victim. The hands of thousands of innocent Congolese were cut off by the mercenaries, whether they were dead or alive. Villages were burned down, inhabitants tortured and some reports even suggested that members of the Force Publique engaged in cannibalism. The headquarters of Leon Rom, the barbaric Belgian soldier in charge of the Force Publique, was surrounded by hundreds of severed heads.
These atrocities caused the death of an estimated 10 million people, half the population of the Congo, either at the hands of the Force Publique or through hunger and deprivation. Meanwhile, Leopold presented himself to the rest of Europe as a humanitarian, determined to liberate the area from the scourge of the Arab slave trade, and spreading European “civilization.” But the Christian missionaries who penetrated into the heart of the Congo told a very different story, and reports of awful abuses began to filter back to Europe.
In the first decade of the 20th century there were a number of tribal rebellions. These were brutally suppressed, but they did serve to provoke further scrutiny into conditions in the Congo Free State. In 1900 Edmund Dene Morel, an English trader, began to campaign against the horrific conditions in the territory, and in 1903 the British Foreign Office commissioned the diplomat Roger Casement to go to the Congo to find out what was going on. Casement’s detailed eyewitness report did much to stir up international outrage, and writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad and Mark Twain joined in the campaign. In 1908 the Belgian Parliament finally voted to annex the Congo from their own king, ending his control of the region.
It was not until 1960 that Congo achieved full independence, but the brutal legacy of Leopold II still continues to haunt the country, which has suffered from years of civil war in which millions have been killed. Leopold died on December 17, 1909, a shamed and hated figure, who justified his behavior in the Congo to the very end of his life. Mark Twain wrote that the aging king was a “greedy, grasping, avaricious, cynical, bloodthirsty old goat,” while for Arthur Conan Doyle the rape of the Congo was simply “the greatest crime in history.”
TCHAIKOVSKY
1840–1893
Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.
Tchaikovsky, on the fundamental importance of music to his existence
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is one of the most enduringly popular composers in the Western tradition, whose symphonies and concertos have been recorded more often than those of any other composer, and whose ballet scores are among the most famous in the world.
While weathering the strains of an intensely difficult personal life, Tchaikovsky rejected the folk-based styles of other Russian composers of his age to create soaring, sweeping and heart-breakingly poignant romantic works that contrast vividly with the brilliant but bleak operas of Wagner or the impassioned restraint of Brahms. From the “Romeo and Juliet” Overture and Swan Lake to the “1812” Overture and his great opera Eugene Onegin, Tchaikovsky’s music is as widely loved today as when it was written.
Like Beethoven and Mozart, Tchaikovsky showed early musical talent. He played the piano from the age of five and composed songs for his siblings, as well as reading and writing in French and German. His father was a mining engineer—comfortable but not wealthy—and the young Tchaikovsky was marked down for a career in law, attending the St. Petersburg Imperial School of Jurisprudence from the ages of twelve to nineteen, then going straight into a civil service job at the ministry of justice. As he grew older, his talent for music grew ever more evident. He enrolled at the new St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music in 1862 (resigning his job the next year) and, after maturing astonishingly quickly, left in 1865, already a fully developed musical personality. The following year he moved to Moscow, where he taught musical theory at the Russian Musical Society.
By 1870 Tchaikovsky had produced his first great work, the concert overture “Romeo and Juliet.” It passed almost unnoticed when it premiered in Moscow but had more success in an 1872 revised version in St. Petersburg. It was an abstract orchestral work that nevertheless told a story—one perfectly suited to Tchaikovsky’s tragic and passionate temperament. His life had been affected by tragedy since 1854, when his beloved mother had died of cholera. He later wrote, “I have attempted with love to express both the agony and also the bliss.”
In love lay Tchaikovsky’s personal agony. From the late 1860s he was passionately involved with several young male students, and one of his favorites, Edouard Zak, killed himself in 1873. This had a profound effect on Tchaikovsky. A few years later, perhaps in an attempt to purge himself of homosexual tendencies but more likely to avoid gossip and scandal, he married an obsessive ex-student, Antonina Miliukova. She had plagued him with letters and threatened to kill herself if he did not return her affection. Despite clear warning signs that it was a completely inappropriate match, Tchaikovsky proposed to her in May 1877 and wed her in July that year. By September the marriage was over in all but name.
Despite this tumultuous period in his romantic life, Tchaikovsky was in fluent composing vein. He produced the ballet score Swan Lake in 1875–6. In 1877–8 he composed his outstanding Fourth Symphony and his greatest opera, Eugene Onegin, a musical interpretation of Pushkin’s famous verse story. At first Onegin was not well received, but as time passed it came to be recognized as an operatic masterpiece—and when the piano score was published it sold in hatfuls. A lifelong Francophile, Tchaikovsky’s music shows the clarity and lightness of French models rather than the more somber and introverted tones of his German contemporaries.
With his marriage over, Tchaikovsky entered another important phase of his life: his relationship with the wealthy philanthropist Nadezhda von Meck. Though the pair never properly met, she bankrolled his career with an annual salary of 6000 rubles. This allowed him to quit his job and devote his life to composing. Meck supported him from 1876 until her abrupt severance of links in 1890, the period when Tchaikovsky composed some of his most famous works. In 1880 he wrote his overture “1812,” with its bombastic finale that includes sixteen cannon and the ringing of church bells. It premiered in Moscow two years later. By this time Tchaikovsky’s fame was beginning to peak. He was commissioned to write the Coronation March for Tsar Alexander III in 1883, and his presence as a conductor was sought across Europe.
He wrote his Fifth Symphony in 1888 and followed this with two ballets—The Sleeping Beauty, completed in 1889, and The Nutcracker, completed in 1892. He also composed an opera, The Queen of Spades, unveiled in Moscow in 1890. All these works benefited from a more stable emotional environment, the lack of financial worries, and a strict work regime. By this time his fame had spread to America, where he was asked to conduct his Coronation March at the opening concert in New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Like his mother, Tchaikovsky most probably died from cholera, contracted from drinking contaminated water in a St. Petersburg restaurant in October 1893. It was just days after the premiere of perhaps his most outstanding and tragic work, the Sixth Symphony, the “Pathétique.” Requiem services and tributes were held throughout Russia in his memory. He created a passionate, highly charged, intensely emotional musical world, which still has an immediate appeal to listeners everywhere.
CLEMENCEAU
1841–1929
We present ourselves before you with the single thought of total war.
Georges Clemenceau
Georges Clemenceau was France’s greatest war leader during the First World War. Clemenceau’s bullishness, his lifelong tenacity and his insistence on a punitive settlement with Germany earned him his nickname the Tiger.
Clemenceau was born in a village in the Vendée, in western France, in 1841. He grew up among peasants and received his political education from his father, who shaped his republican views. In 1861 he went to Paris to study medicine, where he became involved in radical republican politics and journalism, critical of the regime of Emperor Napoleon III, and thus attracted the attention of the police.
In 1870–1 France lost the Franco-Prussian War. Clemenceau was involved in the overthrow of Napoleon III and elected to the provisional government. He vehemently but unsuccessfully opposed the imposition on France of a harsh treaty, by which France lost the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the new German empire. In May 1871 Clemenceau tried, but failed, to mediate between the government and the rebels of the Paris Commune.
Throughout the 1880s and 1890s Clemenceau continued to serve in both politics and journalism. One of his triumphs was his support between 1894 and 1906 of the young Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus, a victim of anti-Semitism in the government, army and press, who was wrongly accused of being a German spy. Clemenceau’s newspapers exposed the corruption and injustice in that notorious case. In 1902 he was elected as a senator.
Clemenceau served as prime minister in 1906–9. In the lead-up to the First World War he argued for rearmament against Germany, and after war broke out he became a vociferous critic of successive governments and of the military high command, hurling accusations of ineptitude, defeatism and closet pacifism.
In November 1917, at the age of seventy-six, Clemenceau accepted the invitation to become prime minister. Ruthless and belligerent, he forced through his belief in “war until the end” and dealt severely with those he regarded as traitors and defeatists. He insisted on a unified Allied command under General Foch as the only way to win the war. By November 1918 his views had been proven right.
At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Clemenceau remembered the events of 1870–1, and in negotiations with British Pr
ime Minister David Lloyd George and President Woodrow Wilson he insisted on Germany being disarmed, accepting “war guilt” and agreeing to pay massive reparations. He made sure that the treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the very place where Wilhelm I, having humiliated France, had declared himself German emperor in 1871. Clemenceau’s force of character and decency made him a fighter for justice and a superb war leader, but his vindictive demands at Versailles were a mistake.
Clemenceau lost the presidential election of 1920 and retired. Before he died, nine years later, he published his memoirs, in which he predicted another war with Germany, sometime around 1940.
SARAH BERNHARDT
1844–1923
There are five kinds of actresses: bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, great actresses—and then there is Sarah Bernhardt.
Mark Twain
Born in Paris, the actress famed across the world as the Divine Sarah was as tempestuous in life as she was on stage. With boundless resilience—possibly a result of her insecure childhood as the illegitimate child of a Dutch courtesan—she was first a successful actress in France, before storming the London stage in 1876. Even the loss of her leg in later life posed no major obstacle to her flamboyant acting. And as soon as she had recovered from the amputation, she made a morale-boosting tour of the First World War front, conveyed about in a litter chair. She entertained no thoughts of retirement but just made sure that henceforth her parts could be played sitting down.
Convent-educated but in fact Jewish, as a young girl Bernhardt toyed with the idea of becoming a nun. But her mother’s influential lover, Charles, Duc de Morny (1811–65), apparently decided otherwise. A brilliant French statesman, now undeservedly forgotten, he was the son of Queen Hortense of Holland and Emperor Napoleon III’s half-brother, as well as a natural grandson of Prince Talleyrand. A financier, racehorse owner and aesthete, not to mention an enthusiastic lover, he married a Russian princess. He was the mastermind of Napoleon III’s coup and regime, and president of the Corps Legislatif, but his early death helped doom the Second Empire. It was entirely appropriate that this personification of French power, worldliness and style should have launched (and possibly fathered) the most famous French actress until the era of film.