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Politics was stalemated. Everyone looked to the army, whose commander Marshal Deodoro de Fonseca was still devoted to Pedro. On his return, Pedro was jubilantly received, but it did not last. In November 1889, the old emperor held a ball for the visiting Chilean navy. But when Pedro arrived, he tripped. ‘The monarchy stumbles,’ he joked. ‘But doesn’t fall.’ Marshal Fonseca discouraged republican officers – ‘I want to accompany the emperor’s coffin. He’s old; I respect him’ – but they went ahead anyway. A provincial government declared a republic. At the palace, Pedro waited for the marshal, who was too embarrassed to come. The empress panicked. ‘Nonsense, my lady,’ said Pedro. ‘It’s a tempest in a teapot – I know my fellow Brazilians. Monarchies don’t fall that easily.’ But they do.

In the early hours, junior officers arrived to inform Pedro that he had been deposed and banished. ‘I’m not an escaped slave,’ he said as he boarded a ship. ‘I won’t leave in the middle of the night.’ But he did. ‘Gentlemen,’ he exclaimed, ‘you’re all mad!’ As the emperor sailed for Europe, Fonseca became the first president of Brazil.

Pedro had once been celebrated for his modernity, but now in Europe a bumptious young kaiser, who prided himself on his knowledge of technology and ethos of medieval chivalry, was taking centre stage.

In March 1888, on the death aged ninety of Wilhelm I, his son Friedrich III – Fritz, the able commander of 1870 – succeeded to the throne with his British wife Vicky, daughter of Queen Victoria, knowing he was already far too ill to realize their vision of a liberal Germany. When German Jews were attacked in an antisemitic campaign, Fritz and Vicky had supported them by going to a synagogue in Berlin.

Bismarck plotted their destruction, focusing his hatred on Vicky – ‘a wild woman … who terrified him by the unrestrained sexuality which speaks through her eyes’. But the chancellor was fortunate: Fritz was already suffering from throat cancer and filial betrayal. His son Willy, long indulged and funded by his grandfather ‘Wilhelm the Great’, despised his weakened father and liberal mother and could not wait to become absolutist kaiser and arbiter of Europe.

Kaiser Friedrich ruled for just ninety-eight days, dying on 15 June 1888, succeeded by twenty-nine-year-old Wilhelm, whom the ageing Bismarck called ‘the young man’.

Willy’s breech birth damaged his left arm. Educated at a normal school, he was happiest in the Guards, adoring the male companionship and the fetishistic trappings of Prussian virility, uniforms, high boots, eagle helmets. He travelled to Vienna for sexual adventures, having a child with one mistress before embarking on another affair with a Berlin courtesan who called herself Miss Love – both of whom indulged his fetish for women wearing gloves. At twenty-two, Willy married Dona (Augusta Victoria) of Schleswig-Holstein, who likewise indulged his fetish for gloves. ‘I shall see you have all your little pleasures,’ she promised. ‘I always have gloves on at night now … You naughty little husband … You know how awfully much I love you and … how willing I am to do everything. You won’t be disappointed.’ They had seven children, but Willy was bored by her.

Wilhelm inherited Bismarck, creator of the hybrid Reich which only he could truly manage, striving to control the rise of socialists in the Reichstag and the brash young kaiser. Both were challenging: the Supreme Warlord was almost gifted, interested in everything, but also unbalanced, bombastic, impetuous, magniloquent and hyperactive, a manic babbler who scarcely stopped talking and travelling for the next thirty years, telling his entourage, ‘All of you know nothing. I alone know something.’

Willy bullied and persecuted his mother Vicky, who smuggled out her letters to England. ‘W fancies he can do everything himself,’ she wrote to her mother Queen Victoria. ‘He cannot. A little modesty and self-knowledge would show him he’s not the genius or Frederick the Great he imagines. I fear he’ll get into trouble,’ thanks to his ‘love of playing the despot and showing off’. She added, ‘It’s indeed a misfortune for us all that W … is imbued with prejudices, false notions and mistaken ideas … so unripe of character and judgement … Power was put into his hands which he so often abuses.’ Vicky had foresight too: ‘The worst of it is that we shall perhaps all have to pay for his ignorance and impudence.’ She meant war.