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Napoleon was an energetic modernizer. He envisioned a modern Paris that would set new standards for the hygiene and layout of cities everywhere, including London. On 23 June 1853, he had appointed a provincial official, Georges Haussmann, as prefect of Paris – ‘one of the most extraordinary men of our time’, said Persigny, ‘big, strong, vigorous, energetic, and at the same time clever and devious, full of ingenuity’. Napoleon ordered Haussmann to ‘aérer, unifier et embellir Paris’. As Napoleon planned the works on a huge model in his office, Haussmann demolished slums and laid out the boulevards, parks, squares and stations of today’s Paris. More important than the beauty was the hygiene. ‘The underground galleries are an organ of the great city, functioning like an organ of the human body,’ the prefect said. ‘Clean fresh waters circulate; the secretions removed mysteriously.’^*

Napoleon promoted railways. Trains encouraged travel and trade, but steam was also about power and conquest – it accelerated the divergence between north-western Europe plus the settler republic of America, and the rest of the world. In Europe, railways facilitated military deployment, pioneered by France but later perfected by Prussia. Abroad, steamships empowered empire, enabling Britain and France to rush troops to Africa or the east.^*

Napoleon’s railway boom was accelerated by his brother Morny but was guided by James de Rothschild. In the railway boom, the Rothschilds prospered greatly, fighting off challenges from rival bankers. By 1870, France boasted 14,000 miles of track.

In 1855, James commissioned a neo-Renaissance palace at Ferrières, built by the same architect who had designed Mentmore for his English cousins. ‘Build me a Mentmore,’ James ordered, ‘but twice the size.’ It was a palace fit for a master of the world, its eighty suites fitted out with every luxury, its colossal hall 120 feet long and 60 feet wide and topped with a glass skylight. It was a ‘fairyland, a palace of Aladdin’, declared his cousin Charlotte de Rothschild, wife of Lionel, while the antisemitic writers, the Goncourt brothers, decried this ‘idiotic and ridiculous extravagance – a pudding of every style’.

At its opening, Napoleon arrived by train, stepped on to a green carpet embroidered with Bonapartist bees and travelled to the palace in carriages fluttering with Rothschild blue and yellow to admire the chateau filled with works by Rubens and Velàzquez. As he left, James joked with his poker face, ‘Sire, my children and I will never forget today. Le mémoire will be dear to us’ – le mémoire also meant the bill.

Napoleon frequently consulted James, who now supervised a global financial empire, raising loans for dynasties from the Brazilian Braganzas to the Ottomans, while his American agent, August Belmont, funded American railways and the US war against Mexico. Yet James discouraged Napoleon from fighting wars. ‘It’s a principle of our house not to lend money for war. It’s not in our power to prevent war,’ he wrote. ‘We at least want to retain the conviction we haven’t contributed to it.’ Antisemites tried to blame Jewish financiers for European wars, yet continental powers had been fighting wars constantly since the Goths, long before the Rothschilds, and would continue long after they ceased to be pivotal players. James mocked Napoleon’s slogan ‘L’empire c’est la paix’, preferring ‘L’empire c’est la baisse’ – The empire means a crash – adding, ‘The emperor was right when he said the empire means peace; but what he doesn’t know is the emperor is done for if we have war.’