Dynasty

In the annals of both high finance at its most feral and of high society at its most opulent, no entry has quite the glow of “Rothschild.” “That family,” the editor of the French edition of Vogue once sighed, “is the true successor to the Bourbons.” In England, the Rothschilds probably matched the fortune, and certainly transcended the flair, of the Windsors. In Austria, they sported a magnificence competitive with the Hapsburgs’. They imprinted their escutcheon on the fastest thoroughbreds, the rarest orchids, the choicest wines, the biggest and toughest bond floatings.

Yet this array of superlatives still does not account for the special luster of their name. “Rothschild” is a spark uniquely ignited by the fusion of what were--until their advent--two bitter opposites: baron and Jew. What other family could produce the sight reported in Frankfurt during the 1820s--of Herr von Rothschild astride a white charger, black caftan flowing in the wind?

After the Napoleonic upheavals early in the 19th century, the Rothschilds leaped in one astounding generation from ghetto to palace. Remarkably, they kept spicing their salons with the tang of Jew Street. They’d stroll into the royal enclosure trading Yiddish jokes. Often as not the claret, pheasant and caviar their butlers served were kosher. Their coronets could out-glisten crowns yet sprouted quite shamelessly from yarmulkes.

It is precisely the dash with which they flaunted their duality that keeps much of their glamour up to date. Each Rothschild’s splendor, however baroque, touches a very modern nerve; it appeals to the democratic-meritocratic obsession with Making It Out of Nowhere. A “Rothschild” is the raw outsider who attains the super-silky inside. What’s more, he keeps his core intact through all the rigors of the metamorphosis. We know that John D. Rockefeller, unstained by his provenance, had a lot more money at the end than he had at the start. But the Rothschild rise to billionairedom transcends the quantitative. It reaches into the extremes of quality.

A “Rothschild” exudes the magic of the pariah become peer, the nabob leapfrogging an arriviste’s embarrassments by making his origins an ornament of his myth. This is the ascendance of a Cinderella so redoubtably self-made that she created the fairy godmother as her own marketing subsidiary. We have here nothing less than the ultimate entrepreneurial fairy tale. And its protagonist does live happily ever after. After all, he is not any one mortal person but a clan, and a fecund one at that.

Small wonder the saga has been told in many books. By the time mine came out in 1962, it was the 31st to be published on the subject in America. Since then, at least a dozen more authors have fed, or tried to feed, off the world’s fascination with the dynasty. But no writer has entered the lists with Niall Ferguson’s advantage. Only he had access, apparently unrestricted, to the family archives (principally those of N.M. Rothschild & Sons, the London house). Bulging, if not bloated, with that privilege, the current tome is the second half of Ferguson’s chronicle, running to more than 600 pages and dealing with the family fortunes from 1849 to the present. The equally ample first volume covered the Rothschild story starting in 1798. This was the year when Mayer Amschel Rothschild began scattering his miraculous seed. From his cramped alley in Frankfurt’s Hebrew quarter, he dispatched one son each to London, Paris, Vienna and Naples. Every one of the striplings, barely into their 20s, was a wizard of finance. Like their eldest brother who stayed in Frankfurt, each proved a virtuoso banker of bonds. Each recruited the government of his country as a client. Thus the brothers became the creditors and sometimes even the confreres, intimates and confidants of the crucial statesmen of the time. Each prospered monumentally into the richest businessman of his adoptive land.

Ferguson’s second volume concerns what happened after that first singular surge. Understandably, the sequel lacks some of the robust color of the first volume. The two world wars were even more cataclysmic than Bonaparte’s campaigns, but the family was less dramatically involved. Further, those five demonic siblings crashed history with a speed so hair-raising, with so awesome a poise, that they kept upstaging their descendants from their very tombs.

Of course, the Rothschild scions lived on a spectacular altitude of wealth and influence. Soon they developed eccentricities befitting great lords. Their names intertwined with others in high places; their actions frequently had historic resonance. On the whole, however, they conducted a summit-level holding operation leading to a partial, gradual, always sumptuous decline.

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Ferguson relates all this in unprecedented detail. For the first time, we get the inside view of how these legends moved the financial universe and shook the social scene in the last 150 years. We become privy to letters, memos and notes that Rothschilds sent each other or their executives, agents and correspondents the world over. We eavesdrop on backstage whispers of history, from the German bank’s dealings with the Prussian power structure (it served as an unofficial conduit of information between Bismarck and Napoleon III) to the English branch’s role in Margaret Thatcher’s economic program (it coordinated the privatization of British Rail, Northern Island Electricity and no fewer than 12 regional electricity boards as well as 10 water authorities).

But as in the first volume, so in the second: The author’s access to the Rothschild archives is a privilege that again and again turns into the reader’s penalty. Ferguson quotes and cites, and cites and quotes, endlessly, excessively, promiscuously. It is understandable that when presented with the opportunity for such voluptuous source-digging, a writer would be tempted to indulge. Ferguson has gorged to the point of research-poisoning. The result is an unwieldy swamp of documentation, with nuggets mired in irrelevancies.

All too typical of Ferguson’s method is his handling of the battle between the French house and its rival, the Credit Mobilier, in the middle of the 19th century. The contest played out in a Europe-wide arena: cunning twists and brute surprises galore, court intrigues and market ambushes. Beyond the theatricality of a giants’ duel loomed historical consequences. The Credit Mobilier raised its capital publicly, as a joint-stock company. Rothschild Freres was a private bank. Rothschild won in the end. Yet the seriousness of its rival’s challenge prophesied the dominance of joint-stock banks that was to come. Ferguson relates the conflict in random fits and starts. He keeps coming down with archivitis. There are constant detours into unrelated Rothschild correspondence (an American agent of the family complaining at length about his homesickness); financial graphs (a minutely plotted curve of the profits of the Naples house); James de Rothschild’s grumblings about the untidy habits of his Austrian cousin. The significance of the episode blurs. The narrative momentum fails. You can’t see the forest for the twiglets.

As for Ferguson’s prose, it serves him best when it’s content to be serviceable. When it aspires to the literary, the strain shows. Example: Ferguson has Nathan Lord Rothschild observing “somewhat otiosely” that the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was an example of Serbian brutality. Now, “otiose” happens to be a word whose meaning the formidable William F. Buckley Jr. once confessed kept escaping him. Does the rather plain context of Ferguson’s passage warrant ransacking the language for a term so arcane that it baffles a Buckley?

And there are disturbing factual inaccuracies that keep creeping into Ferguson’s text. Speaking of Franz Ferdinand, Ferguson describes him as hostile to any compromise in Austria’s Balkan frictions with Russia. Actually, the archduke was the chief dove in Austrian government circles. Speaking of Austria, Ferguson refers to Leopold Kuntschak as “a socialist leader” in that country. Actually, Kuntschak led the Christian Socialists, an opposing party.

But these and occasional other glitches seem trivial against the vast documentary expanse Ferguson has unfolded. Alas, it is a shapeless vista, jumbled in its ramifications, encyclopedically confused, lamentably undynamic. However, Ferguson’s pages, bringing to light so much hitherto hidden material, will no doubt be very useful for future writers touching on the subject. In essaying a biography, Ferguson has produced a valuable reference work. Its most precious feature is its index.