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* There was a darker chauvinism within the German revolution. In Dresden, the court conductor of the Saxon king, Richard Wagner, thirty-five-year-old son of a police clerk in Leipzig, where he was brought up in the Jewish Quarter, and already the writer of a successful opera Rienzi, supported a socialistic German nationalism – ‘I, poor artist, swore eternal fidelity to my German fatherland’ – and joined the revolution. Driven into exile, he anonymously wrote a vicious denunciation of ‘Das Judenthum in der Musik’ (Jewdom in Music) that helped invent the new strain of racism, calling the Jews ‘the evil conscience of our modern civilization’. Aiming to ‘explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews, so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike’, he coined a trope that compared Jews to ‘a swarming colony of insect life’ on the noble body of the German nation.

* Since the seventeenth century, most European cities had maternity units within their hospitals, but these had catastrophic death rates from puerperal fever and it remained safer to give birth at home with traditional midwives. Male physicians were increasingly involved in childbirth. For a long time, a few doctors had suspected that they themselves were responsible for the women’s deaths. In 1843, the American professor Oliver Wendell Holmes (father of the judge) identified lack of hygiene as the cause. Three years later, Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor at the Vienna General Hospital, noticed that at its First Clinic, operated by doctors, 10 per cent of mothers died; at the Second Clinic, operated by midwives, only 4 per cent died. When a doctor died after accidentally stabbing himself with a scalpel used in an autopsy, Semmelweis realized that the doctors were constantly going from autopsies to births. Semmelweis’s measures of hygiene at once reduced deaths dramatically. But doctors mocked both the idea that they as gentlemen could be unclean and the very theory of germs. Simultaneously the 1848 revolution, including the Hungarian rebellion, made Semmelweis a suspect figure. He was stymied and forced to resign. He moved to Pest in Hungary, but while the British tentatively welcomed his ideas, German and Austrian doctors attacked him. He went mad, talking incessantly about childbed fever, and died in a lunatic asylum. It was only with germ theory that Semmelweis was proved right and childbed fever and infant mortality sharply reduced.

* Flaubert, a Norman surgeon’s son, escaped the revolutionary chaos by embarking on an aesthetic and sexual tour of Greece, Egypt and Constantinople, sampling boys and girls in exploits recounted in his letters. He disliked both the revolution and its backlash, calling himself a ‘romantic, liberal old dunce’. It was only later in 1857 that he wrote his study of society’s cruel treatment of an unfaithful wife, Madame Bovary.

* In 1849, soon after Napoleon’s election, Faustin Soulouque, the Haitian president, declared himself Emperor Faustin. Born in 1782, of Mandinka descent, he was freed and then fought the French, rising to chief of the presidential guards. On the death of the president, the ‘mulatto elite’ chose the unambitious sixty-five-year-old Soulouque as a frontman. Instead, he formed a militia, the Zinglins, executed any opponents, then founded a new Haitian empire. Since he and Empress Adelina had only a daughter, he chose his nephew as heir. The emperor tried to reconquer the Dominican Republic, independent since 1844. But Haiti was not allowed to keep its conquest. In 1859, the emperor was overthrown by his henchman, General Fabre Geffrard, duc de Tabara, who became president. It was the end of Haitian experiments in monarchy.

* Disgusted by the rise of Napoleon III, ‘the Nephew’, Marx joked grimly, ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ In their letters, in which they vehemently denounced their many enemies and rivals, he and Engels traded racist abuse (‘n——’ was a favourite); Engels called Marx ‘the Moor’ for his swarthiness; Marx called Engels ‘the General’.

* Napoleon was accompanied back to splendour by his uncle Jérôme, whose two children were the heart of the family: the heir, the inept and petty Plon-Plon, thought he should be emperor and consoled himself by stealing Napoleon’s mistresses and demanding money; his sister Mathilde was the opposite, artistic and unpretentious, laughing, ‘If it weren’t for Napoleon I, I’d be selling oranges in the streets of Ajaccio.’ Jérôme, king of Westphalia, commander of a corps in Russia and at Waterloo, was now president of the Senate. Jérôme’s son by Betsy Patterson, Bo Bonaparte, had stayed in America where his son Charles served in Teddy Roosevelt’s Cabinet.