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* Evans was living the Empire life in Paris, with a mansion (Bella Rosa), an art collection and of course a courtesan, Manet’s model Méry Laurent. It was a long way from Philadelphia, but in 1850 the twenty-seven-year-old dentist was called in to treat Napoleon. ‘You’re a young fellow, but clever, I like you,’ the emperor said. Evans became his doctor surgeon, developing the first fillings and the use of laughing gas, and was soon consulted by Tsar Alexander II and the Ottoman sultan. Visiting Napoleon weekly, he admired Haussmann’s plans for Paris, enabling him to buy property that soon made him a fortune. When Eugénie first came to Paris, one of Napoleon’s adjutants spotted her in Evans’s waiting room and reported her arrival to the emperor. The dentist became her confidant. In 1864, Napoleon sent him to America to report on the civil war.

* Maximilian spent the trip writing a detailed Habsburgian court etiquette with Mexican trappings (‘At this point, the Emperor will hand his sombrero to the attending Field-Adjutant …’). He was not the first emperor: Maximilian appointed the grandsons of Emperor Agustín as princes and possible heirs, while selecting a descendant of the last tlatoani as lady-in-waiting.

* He was the first of a modern phenomenon prevalent particularly in Latin America and Asia: the dynastic republic, a hereditary dictatorship founded not on the pre-1789 sacred monarchy but on a cosplay democracy and presidential constitution with rigged elections. The succession was usually father–son but sometimes husband–wife.

* Johnson’s only real achievement was to order Secretary Seward to buy Alaska from Russia for $15 million, a good deal for America.

ACT SEVENTEEN

1.2 BILLION

Hohenzollerns and Krupps, Albanians and Lakotas

THE MAD JUNKER, THE CANNON KING AND THE TOURNAMENT OF MODERN POWER: I’VE BEATEN THEM ALL! ALL!

In 1865 Otto von Bismarck had been minister-president of Prussia for three years, and he had come to the Villa Eugénie to analyse Napoleon and learn his price for not intervening in his planned war against Austria. The Prussian had admired Napoleon’s use of universal suffrage to win conservative support and was now planning to do the same himself. Nationalism had replaced religion to provide a sense of belonging and meaning for millions; nation states, run by impersonal bureaucracies, became awesome organizers of resources; civil societies grew ever more complicated – but dynasties could adapt and provide stability and leadership. Nations were like families, monarchs their fathers and mothers.

Many believed that the shrewd Napoleon would outwit Bismarck and only hindsight can justify the contempt historians show to Napoleon and the respect shown to the minister-president. ‘We can imagine the eccentric volubility with which M. Bismarck would develop his sanguine schemes,’ wrote a British diplomat, ‘and the covert irony and silent amusement of the subtle sovereign.’

Bismarck was subtler than he looked. He was the brilliant, misanthropic son of an archetypical but ineffectual Junker and his intellectual wife, who was the daughter of an adviser to Frederick the Great. Bismarck despised his ordinary father – ‘How often did I repay his … good-natured tenderness with coldness and bad grace’ – and sneered at his mother: ‘As a small child I hated her.’ He grew up boundless in his confidence.

While at Göttingen University, he was nicknamed Mad Junker for his wild hunting, drinking and duelling (he insulted everyone and sought duels, managing to fight twenty-five in three terms), but he was curious and cosmopolitan, multilingual, well read and drawn to foreigners – his best friend was an American and he fell in love with an Englishwoman. After a crush on a friend’s wife, he married the demure Johanna von Puttkamer, with whom he had three children, including a son he bullied horribly, and later consoled himself in a platonic passion for a Russian princess. He delighted in conflict, yet never served in the Prussian army; he was an evangelical Pietist Christian without an ounce of Christian generosity. A soft-voiced but impressive speaker, he was a beguiling wit and a superb writer.