Historia Obscura

On my most recent trip back to my parents in India, I had the opportunity to visit some of the last standing abandoned textile mills in Parel, South Bombay. Scheduled for imminent demolition, with their passing part of Bombay’s hidden, working-class history will be lost forever.

The shuttered mills, overgrown with trees and covered in dust. already have something of the aspect of the ancient fortresses which abound in this country. In a way, it is apt, as these were the sites of a battle of sorts. It was here, in these ruined places, that some of the most powerful and radical unions in the country- the textile workers unions – made their last stand. This was the legendary eighteen month general strike of 1982, which brought the powerful Bombay Mill Owners association to its knees and bought the commercial capital of India to a standstill.

From the 1860s through the 1980’s the textile industry had been at the heart of Bombay’s economy, and huge swathes of the now fashionable south Bombay had then been carpeted by almost 130 textile mills, known then as ‘Giringaon’ – literally, Mill Village. The vast barrack towns of workers that had sprung up around the mills had become a laboratory of left wing and radical politics even in the days before independence. The Communist Party of India had deep roots here, for that party’s founder Shripad Dange cut his teeth organising workers here, and founded one of Giringaos most left wing unions, the Girin Kamgar Union.. A variety of other radical groups, such as the armed anti-caste activists the Dalit Panthers, modelled explicitly on the Black Panthers, also found homes here. These groups were all finally crushed in 1983, by an alliance of mill owners and the government, in a process analogous to the crushing of the miners unions by Thatcher. Just like in England, their destruction paved the way for the rise of neoliberalism and right wing politics in Bombay.

The spectre of Datta Samanth

Breaking the textile unions had not been easy, not least because they had a formidable opponent in the textile workers’ official spokesperson in the strike of 82 – the firebrand Dr. Datta Samant. As the popular refrain of the time had it, “on one word of Datta Samanth, all of Giringao shall come to a standstill.”

Datta Samanth, a veteran trade unionist, known variously as Doctor Saheb and The Burly Man of Ghatkopar, towers over the history of this time. He was quickly named the ringleader of the general strike by the government and the press, to his critics then and now either a power hungry conman who ‘tricked’ the working class into an unwinnable strike for personal political gain, or an obstinate zealot whose blind followers succeeded only in ensuring the destruction of the workers movement. This view however underestimates the well-documented militancy of the grassroots at the time and betrays something of an upper class Indian’s disdain of ‘easily misled’ and ‘naive’ labourers. The journalist Rajni Bakshi, who interviewed many of the striking workers throughout 82, captures the spirit of the times.

“On a bright spring morning [1982], I had first encountered the anger and superhuman determination of the textile workers in the dark hut of Lata Shelke. Lata’s husband, who worked in a nearby textile mill, sat cross-legged on the metal wire bed, which was the only piece of furniture in the one-room home. He talked with emotionally charged conviction about his boycott of the mill where he had spent all his working life. His neighbour, the fiery K.P.Kamble, had walked in and the conversation had soon taken a dramatic turn with his heated, impassioned tirade against the seth log [wealthy men] and neta log [politicians]. The blood ran hot then….The long awaited, bada kranti [great revolution]was at hand. “Let us kill all the big-wigs of old thoughts,” shouted Kamble to his friends, neighbours and sympathizers.”

“..a mother of five children, Lata seemed to do more than echo what was said around her. She did not share the fiery militancy of Kamble but displayed a quiet determination of her own and articulately explained why she stood behind her husband in his decision to strike. “There comes a time” Lata would say, “when you just have to fight (ladnaihich padega)”

A people’s history of Bombay

The story of the Bombay textile industry begins during the height of the British empire. It was the 1860s, and the great uprising of 1857 had long been suppressed. Bombay was an ordinary fort town, until events in- of all places – the United States of America forever changed its destiny. Until the 1860s, the slave plantations in the cotton belt of the American south supplied most of Britain’s cheap textiles. Then the civil war broke out, and the Confederacy cut off the cotton supply to Britain, in the hope that it would force the British to intervene on their side against Washington. This proved a backfire for them but a windfall for the textile merchants of Bombay who made a killing supplying cotton to London for the duration of the civil war and directly led to Bombay’s rise as one of India’s most prosperous cities. The powerful mill owners would become part of the fabric of the city, and mills sprung up all over Bombay, occupying most of the central corridor of the city by the time the 20th century rolled in. Each of these mills had compounds that stretched out over acres, and little townships sprung out around them, with hundreds of workers and their families living in the workers tenements called “chawls”.

Narayan Surve, the former textile worker turned revolutionary poet, writes:

“From the Sahyadris they came, these men, half-farmers still, in search fo work to fill their stomachs – and the number of their settlements grew apace. Money orders from Mumbai would keep home fires burning in the Konkan…After the Quit India Movement of 1942 large numbers began to come to Mumbai from the Deccan plateau..these men never snapped ties with the village. They were still bound to the soil. Their villages were still alive and well in their hearts. After 1960, this class, whom we can refer to as the proletariat, became the real backbone of the city; it was upon their labour that the city depended, the mills, the factories, the showrooms, all of it”

Even before the workers formed their first union in 1923, these labourers had a strong tradition of strikes and work stoppages. The British imperial authorities quickly grew alarmed at the spread of communist ideas among the textile workers and their suspicions were seemingly confirmed when an offshoot of the main union -Comrade Dange’s Giri Kamgar union – explicitly called themselves Marxist Leninist and staged two of the biggest general strikes in Bombay’s imperial history against proposed cuts to wages and the firing of union officials in 1928 and 1929. Dange himself was a notorious figure – who would go on to be convicted in the ‘Meerut conspiracy case’, in which the British government alleged a plot by Indian communists to violently overthrow the imperial government, with support from the Communist International. Dange was sentenced to twelve years for conspiring to “deprive the King Emperor of the sovereignty of British India, and for such purpose to use the methods and carry out the programme and plan of campaign outlined and ordained by the Communist International.” He was out in three years and went straight back into activism. Nehru and Gandhi may have been giants of the independence movement, but Comrade Dange had the ear of the workers.

The workers movement would not find many friends in post independence India. Though the ruling party, the, centre left Congress did hold some sway amongst workers in the heady days leading up to independence, this dropped off entirely by 1950, with the membership of the Marxist Leninist Giri Kamgar Union amongst the workers of Bombay exceeding the membership of Congress by 500%. The textile industry remained one of Bombay’s most strategic industries and needed to be brought under control. Congress moved quickly to designate an ‘official’ workers union – the NMMS, controlled entirely by Congress – and brought in strikebreaking laws which effectively criminalised most strikes. The labour courts refused to recognise any of the unions formed by the workers themselves, mandating that they join an official Congress union if they wanted their grievances to be discussed. The workers patiently fought their battles in the courts and in the streets.

Surve writes of his formative years growing up in the mills and the strong sense of identity amongst the workers

“I belonged to one of Mumbai’s many proud revolutionary worker families..On the eve of Dasshera, the mill workers decorate their machines. Everything is festooned with buntings, garlands made of flowers, balloons and flags. The entire department is decked up. That day, Aai would set me and my sister each on one hip and take us to her workplace. I would have a new shirt and cap embroidered with a gold thread…”

“When we got up in the morning and walked down the streets, the slogans we had chalked on the walls or the posters that had been pasted at night served as information. The posters and the walls were newspapers of the working class. They were also a barometer. “

Though it is true that the left wing unions had fragmented by the 1970s, it is a testament to the spirit of the union workers that they had endured at all despite a concerted effort by the government and the nine families who controlled all of the textile mills to destroy them. In 1974, however, it was clear that the aging Dange was losing his touch, infamously calling off a strike against a majority of the strikers wishes. Into this vacuum stepped Doctor Samant.

Enter Samanth

The great bane of the industrialists, Dr Samanth, was in fact a practising doctor and started his career running a clinic in Bombay’s suburb of Ghatkopar. He quickly found himself spending his time organising Ghatkopar housing association and slum tenants – many of whom were originally his patients – against exploitative slum landlords. He also became known for his campaigns against local corrupt politicians, a crusade that earned him not an insignificant amount of jail time . From here he would go on to defend quarry workers, and won significant concessions for them after a number of strikes, despite the strikers facing some brutal violence from both hired goons and the police.

HIs reputation rose to the point that he did spend some time in the 1970s in the Congress party on invitation from the left of the party- Congress after all was a centre left party and was a popular career move for once radical socialists and trade unionists. However, Samanth refused to be domesticated, spending the 70s representing factory workers in the industrial belt of Thane, on the outskirts of Bombay.

It was during his tenure as head of the factory workers union at a Godrej plant – one of India’s largest refrigeration companies – that he would cement his reputation as a ‘dangerous’ militant amongst Bombay’s middle class. For his tenure saw the Vikhroli riots – a violent clash between communist and socialist union workers affiliated with Samanth and activists for the rising right wing Hindu nationalist group the Shiv Sena, which left some dead. It was Samanth who was blamed for the violence, earning him another stint in prison. This earned him legendary status amongst Bombay workers, who regularly campaigned for his release. When he was released, he was a union representative for almost 300,000 workers. The rise of “Samanthism” was darkly discussed amongst the chattering classes, who went almost hysterical when they learned that employees of the Indian Express, one of India’s most venerable English language newspapers, had unionised under Samanth. Here were the unions coming for free speech!

An incident in 1979, where one of Bombay’s wealthiest industrialists, NP Godrej, his daughter and mother-in-law, were all stabbed by a disgruntled factory worker hours after Datta Samanth gave a thunderous speech in one of his factories didn’t help matters. He was now a serious problem for the Congress party, who disaffiliated with him and his supporters in 1980. He was detained under National security legislation, and it was only after a lengthy court case that the courts ruled that there wasn’t a sufficient nexus between Samanth and these incidents and freed him in 1982.

So when a delegation led by the veteran communist Salaskar approached Samanth to take up the cause of the textile workers in 1982, shortly after his release, they knew exactly what they wanted. His fearsome reputation was their last hope, the only thing which could make the mill owners listen.

Agneepareeksha – the trial by fire

The conditions in the textile mills in 1982 were dire. As the journalist Bakshi describes, most workers lived in dilapidated chawls where 15 to 30 men shared a room about 10 feet by 10 feet in size. Despite the mills generating enormous profits for the owners – less than 1% of the textile industries profits were reinvested in the improvements of working conditions. This led to what a World Bank report in 1975 called conditions of “abominable squalor” – the report went onto describe factories full of ancient machinery, broken floors, smashed windows, poor lighting and people living in what it described as an industrial slum. The number of industrial accidents went up every year, yet it was cheaper for the owners to replace the labourers than address working conditions. Chronic respiratory disease was endemic – any visitor to the mills would find cotton dust settling at the back of their throats, causing violent spasms of coughing within minutes. Against this backdrop, wages were kept so depressed that despite working from morning to night the average textile worker lived in unimaginable poverty.

So it was that the textile workers united under Samanth and declared the beginning of the indefinite strike. Standing before a huge crowd of workers on 17 January 1982, under their red flag displaying their unions symbol – a fist protruding out of a factory chimney – Samanth declared “Continue your struggle peacefully but with grim determination until all demands are met. If I am arrested, do not heed any call to return to work that may be falsely issued in my name.”

The great strike had begun. The next day the spindles were silent, the chimneys blew no smoke. The mill owners predicted the strike would only last a month. But a month passed, and then another, and then another, until the strike stretched to a year. The mill owners began panicking. Police repression soon followed, with gatherings of more than five people in the mill areas now forbidden. It was reported that the mill owners would hand lists of troublemakers to the police, who would arrest them all and put them in lock up. Despite the ever present threat of hunger and homelessness, 250,000 textile workers in a show of solidarity refused to go to work for eighteen months.

In order to survive the workers banded together to organise mutual support committees and fundraising committees to the pay bills and debts of their members, and food distribution committees to provide them food. Thousands of workers returned to their villages to educate their people about their strike and stoke popular support. As one striker said “Workers are even eating half their normal food and living somehow and passing the time fighting for the future – now we are not scared.”

Narayan Surve, the textile-worker turned poet, wrote the poem ‘Four Words’ at the height of the strike – capturing the high passion of the times.

Four Words

The struggle for the daily bread is an everyday
Question
At times outside the gate, at times inside
I’m a worker, a flaming sword
Listen, you intellectuals! I’m going to commit a
Crime.

A little is seen, seen, risked,
There is also the smell of my world in it.
When I missed, missed, learned something new.
As I live I am in words

Always wanting more precious bread,
Bread, which is turned into the covered royal
Seal.
My hands of words hold flowers
My hands of words hold stones

I have not arrived alone, the epoch’s with me!
Beware! this is the beginning of the storm,
I’m a worker, a shining sword
Listen you intellectuals, a crime is about to happen

As the strike dragged on, there were some voices amongst the mill owners regarding coming to some kind of accommodation with the workers. Such was the momentum that the Congress’s Cabinet minister for commerce, Vishwnath Pratap Singh, agreed to meeting with Samanth in 1983 to reach terms. However the prime minister Indira Gandhi herself intervened to demand they take a firm line, and not negotiate with the workers. This militant working class movement, whose roots stretched all the way back into the nineteenth century, was too much of an impediment to the wave of neoliberal “modernisation’ that was sweeping not just India but the world. The scale of the movement spooked the government – Bombay had already been paralysed, and if the strike spread to the dock and port workers, Samanth would become one of the most powerful men in the commercial capital of India.

Aftermath

Ultimately, having preferred a year and a half long stalemate and catastrophic losses to negotiating with the workers, the mill owners took the unimaginable step of closing the mills forever. Although this would mean immense losses in the short run, in the long run this would mean cutting the heart out of the troublesome left wing union movement forever. For their part, though the workers knew it would be a difficult struggle, this outcome had been unimaginable.

The old Marxist Dange, now a happy grandfather and observer from the sidelines, would likely have observed that the workers had come up against the forces of history. The textile industry in Bombay no longer was as central to India’s economy (it only manufactured 30% of India’s textiles in 1982, as opposed to 85% in the early part of the 20th century), and many were already calling for replacing manufacturing with a services based economy.. Unlike most of his left wing colleagues, Dange was not overly enamoured of Dr Samanth, noting the good doctors disdain of Marxist theory in favour of simple, practical demands like wages and improvements in working conditions. Samanth, Dange believed, was no true socialist at all but an ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ – a person who believed they could capture the state by simply capturing one factory at a time – without a broader understanding of the economic and political forces at play, he said, this approach was doomed to fail. (Of course, many would detect some petulance in this ungenerous view of the current champion of the people by the former one.) A big what if in Bombay’s social history is what would have happened if Dange had not been too elderly, as he himself put it, to join forces with Samanth. It was Dange after all who masterminded the strikes of the 1920s which shook the British imperial government almost half a century before..

The mill owners either sold off the mill lands to private developers, or moved their operations outside Bombay to areas with less ‘troublesome’ workers. Most of the 250,000 striking workers found themselves unemployed and on the streets – those that went back to their old mill owners out of desperation had to sign ‘productivity’ agreements – accepting wage cuts and increased workloads, and of course, an understanding that they would be fired as soon as the bosses caught a whiff of organising or union activity.

A big beneficiary of the destruction of the left wing union movement was the right-wing Hindu party the Shiv Sena. The hatred between the communist and socialist textile workers and the Shiv Sena ran deep, as the Shiv Sainiks were built up during the strike years by the government to act as strikebeakers for the mill owners. After the strike, communists were removed one by one from their jobs, with one of the Giri Kamgar unions leaders Prakash Bagave who fought for his job back for 14 years, claiming that Indira Gandhi had paid the Shiv Sena more than 250,000 rupees to break the strikes. By the late 1980s, the Shiv Sena dominated the politics of the city. The collapse of the left union movement not only heralded the arrival of neoliberalism, but the rise of Hindu nationalism.

Many of the old mills were swiftly redeveloped into offices to house the new service industries that were destined to replace manufacturing as the future of Bombay – insurance, trading, investment banking and information technology. The rest were were either developed into high rise apartments, luxury malls or nightlife venues for those same service industry workers. Kamala mills, Shanti mills, Phoenix mills – today these names are still well known in Mumbai, but as shopping centres, cocktail bars, hipster pubs and venues for gigs.

In the morning of 16 January 1997, Dr Datta Samanth left his home in his car in the Powai district of Bombay when his path was suddenly blocked by a cyclist. When he lowered his window to find out what was going on, five unknown men approached his car. They fired seventeen bullets into his head, chest and stomach in broad daylight, before dropping two pistols and melting away into the city. So it was that the last great titan of the working class movement bled out onto the streets of the city he had spent his life defending.

My own home in what is now Mumbai is in an apartment complex built atop one of the demolished mills. It overlooks one of the last standing undeveloped mills, scheduled for imminent demolition. When it is gone, I wonder what will happen to the ghosts of those generations of working class families who toiled there, supplied so much of the revolutionary spirit and conscience of Mumbai. As bleak as the final outcome was, their relentless solidarity and optimism against impossibly powerful forces seems all too relevant for our current time.

The story of One Family who dominated fuedal Europe, and how its epic downfall birthed the modern world

In 1020s,  a minor German nobleman by the name of Rodblat was made a Count, and decided to build himself a castle befitting the fancy new title. He chose the mountain country of Swabia, now in Switzerland. As his stone legacy slowly came into being, he wondered what he would call his new castle. The apocryphal story goes that at this moment a hawk decided to perch on one of the turrets of the castle. So it was that Count Rodblat named his castle “Hawks castle”, or, to translate from the German, Hapsburg. Whatever the truth of the story, his descendants, who would henceforth style themselves counts of Hapsburg, and eventually just Hapsburg, would go onto become one of the most powerful aristocrat families in Europe, irrevocably intertwined with the history of the continent’s aristocracy. While the story of the Hapsburgs is the story of traditional, feudal Europe, their spectacular demise in the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries amidst the great revolutions of the time formed the backdrop to the birth of the modern world. 

Travelling to Vienna in the unseasonably warm spring in the year of our lord 2024, I visited the Hapsburgs summer and winter palaces, the Hofburg and the Schonnbrun. Their relentless opulence brings home the fact that for 650 years these people were the first family of Europe. Whilst, like other aristocrat families, they did engage in the odd territorial conquest, the Hapsburg strength was in their tactical and strategic marriages into almost all of Europes great royal houses.

By the sixteenth century, when a Hapsburg, Charles V, through these marital machinations, became King of Spain by inheriting for the first time the twin thrones of Aragon and Castille, it seemed like there was a Hapsburg on every throne of Europe. Of course, by this time the Hapsburgs had long since abandoned their ancestral homelands in the Swiss Mountains for Vienna, their permanent base since the 1200s.  Until the nineteenth century, the words “Austria” and “Hapsburg” were used interchangeably.

However this particular son of Austria Charles V not only inherited the crowns of Spain but also the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, and as such also ruled over much of modern Germany and Northern Italy. His vast network of marriage alliances didnt just land him those two massive prizes either – they also made him the King of Naples, King of Sicily and of Sardinia, of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, of French Burgundy, of Bohemia (in modern day Czechia) and last but certainly not least, the mighty kingdom of Hungary (which comprises what is now not just Hungary, but Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia). And of course through the crown of Spain, he was also inheritor of Spains vast colonies in the New World. It was under Charles’ Hapsburg banner that Hernan Cortez and the conquistadores brought fire and plague to the cities of the Aztecs and the Incas. The term “the empire on which the sun never sets”, which famously came to be applied to the British empire, was in fact coined for Charles V, and his unprecedented world-spanning dominions.  Not a bad job by the Hapsburg match-makers, about whom the famous hexameter said Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube (“Let others wage wars: you, fortunate Austria, marry”).

The strategy of course did come across some natural restrictions. Intermarrying into every family in Europe and then ensuring the dynastic rewards were kept in the family meant a significant degree of  inbreeding, resulting in many later Hapsburgs being born with a whole host of developmental problems, mental health issues and physical deformities, the most infamous of which is the “Hapsburg jaw”. Inbreeding would actually lead to the Hapsburgs losing Spain about two hundred years after Charles V – as the last Hapsburg king of Spain was so inbred he was infertile and died without an heir (genetic testing of the remains of this last King shows an inbreeding co-efficient on par with someone whose parents are siblings). However this was far from the end of this dynasty, who still retained most of the impressive dominions listed above- this would not be threatened until the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the Age of Revolution.

The Age of Revolution, 1789- 1848

Given that the Hapsburg fortunes were so tied into their dynastic claims, they had a huge interest in safeguarding the old feudal order of Europe, and became the centre of conservative opposition to the new currents rumbling under the surface of the eighteenth century and the age of Enlightenment, with it’s dirty new notions of “democracy” and “popular government”. As Holy Roman Emperors they were also appointed by the Pope to be the guardians of the Catholic church – something which had made them in an earlier age the key opponents of the Protestant reformation, which had exploded right under their noses in their Germanic heartlands. 

Despite all this, when news first reached the Schonbrunn palace in 1789 from France that a Parisian mob had surrounded and burned down the Bastille, the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II was not that worried. He had no reason to believe that this would be anything more than the the average peasants revolt which every king had to contend with at some point or the other, and himself having a  decidedly un-Hapsburg pro-Enlightenment streak, was not unsympathetic to some of the demands of the mob, such as abolition of forced serfdom, and some limited freedom of speech and religion, though of course the stuff about elections and denunciations of the Catholic church was a bit too far. Even the increasingly frantic letters of his little sister, the French Queen Marie Antoinette (of course, a Hapsburg!) about what was starting to be called a “Revolution” did not move him to intervene, and he may even have secretly hoped to profit from the troubles of his long term rival, the King of France. However, when in 1793, one of the most ancient continuous monarchies in the world came to a dramatic end with the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at the guillotine before cheering French mobs, the Hapsburg emperors realised that this “Revolution” heralded something altogether new and more insidious. This was an attack on the concept of monarchy itself, something with potential to extend beyond the borders of France.

“Soon all the Kings of this Earth shall be driven out into the desert, like the wild beasts whom they resemble, and Nature shall resume her rights” – St. Just, French revolutionary

Leopold II Hapsburg, who succeeded Joseph II, was of a more traditionally Hapsburg conservative disposition. He did not have to look far to find a reason to stamp out this “French revolution”, for the revolutionary authorities in Paris themselves declared war on Austria, in what they memorably called, “a war of peoples against kings”. Joined by the Crowns of England and Spain and the Dutch Republic, Austria began a multi-pronged invasion of France. Despite an early, “against the odds” victory by the French revolutionaries at Valmy, the French proved no match for the experienced war hardened troops of the Hapsburg. The revolutionaries for their part had assumed that, inspired by their example, all the “oppressed and enslaved” peoples of Europe, including those in the vast Hapsburg dominions, would rise up against their Kings to assist them in their “crusade of liberty” . This did not happen, and a war that the revolutionaries had assured their supporters would conclude in a matter of months dragged on year after miserable year. Perhaps they would have done well to heed the sole dissenter against the war of liberty, Maximillen Robespierre, who cautioned that, oppressed as they may be, people do not tend to welcome  “armed missionaries”, especially when they are foreigners. The revolutionary authorities in France descended into bitter infighting over the catastrophic state of the war, which then became full blown civil war. Austria and Britain were confident of total victory within months – the French, it seemed, were set about destroying themselves.

Then out of nowhere came Napoleon Bonaparte, who turned everything on its head. In a year Napoleon seized all of Austrias lands in Italy, establishing secular republics in his wake, and as a further snub to Catholicim’s anointed Hapsburg protectors, imprisoned the Pope and stripped him of his titles. Leopold II soon had to contend with the fact that the godless Napoleon’s cannons could be heard in the suburbs of Vienna itself. Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor and heir to one of the most powerful families in Europe,, had to send delegates to bargain a humiliating peace with Bonaparte. One can only imagine the pristine, blue blooded delegates reactions at being dictated terms by a peasant Corsican and his largely commoner troops, with their coarse languae and threadbare coats.  This upside down world would not be a temporary thing either – the Napoleonic wars would last for twenty three years.

Springtime of the Peoples

However, we know that even Napoleon was eventually defeated. The period after Waterloo in 1815 to 1848 was a golden age of conservatism; with the Italian states created by Naopleon disbanded and returned to their traditional rulers, monarchy restored even in France. Humanity’s brief experiment with “democracy” had ended – it was all very good as an ideal, but kings anointed by God had existed from the beginning of humanity in every known culture and was the “natural” state of humankind. The French revolution had shown that “democracy” led either to the violent anarchy and guillotine happy mobs like in 1793, or to to warmongering dictatorship like that of Napoleon. Tradition had emerged triumphant in the war of ideologies and the end of history had been reached. The Hapsburgs were in a new golden age, having actually expanded their territories in Italy after Napoleon’s defeat. This period of over thirty years is actually known as the age of Metternich, after an Austrian diplomat called Klemens Metternich, a nineteenth century Kissinger type figure, who presided over all the great conferences of Western Europe and created a system whereby all the monarchies of Europe would collaborate to ensure the discredited, dangerous ideas of popular government would never ever see the light of day. Censorship and secret police were the orders of the day –  rather than introspect, the monarchs doubled down on absolutism, and none more so than the Hapsburgs.

As we know from our own times though, the end of history is never permanent, and ideas that lie dormant for forty years have a way of exploding again. And so it happened in 1848, when the long awaited “springtime of the peoples” suddenly erupted out of nowhere, surprising most of Europes political class. This was a time when nationalism was associated with the left, as conservatism back then meant feudalism. Imagining an alternative form of government which did not flow from the divine right of kings required the brand new concept of a nation.. Therefore, if you were a nationalist, you also tended to be anti monarchist, pro representative government and anti clerical. As incredible as it seems, nations as we understand them now quite simply did not exist before the eighteenth century

1848 kicked off with the French having another revolution, once again overthrowing their monarchy and creating the second French republic. Inspired by this, Italian nationalists  – who had been engaged in violent armed uprisings against the Hapsburg and their clients kings since the 1820s –  declared the first war of Italian independence from Austria, led on by radical nationalists such as Garibaldi and Mazzini. The fact that Garibaldi had also participated in liberation movements South America for 14 years spoke to the global nature of the revolutionary movements of 1848. The Hapsburg armies under the mighty Count Radizky did eventually prevail to crush the rising, but its ideas were not so easy to stamp out. Much to their dismay, the Hapsburgs had to accept the formation in 1861 of a brand new country called Italy from their former possessions and client kingdoms in the Mediterranean – the first time that land had been united since the fall of the Roman empire 2000 years ago. 

This would have been bad enough, but 1848 also saw a revolution that hit the Hapsburgs closer to home – the Hungarian revolution. Ethnic Hungarians – or Magyars,as they called themselves,  had never quite fully accepted Hapsburg overlordship despite centuries of rule from Vienna,. The Magyars had been a powerful kingdom in the early middle ages, and had only become part of Austria when a devastating battle against the Ottomans had killed the last ethnic Magyar king and much of the Magyar nobility – due to one of their marriage alliances, a Hapsburg became next in line to the throne. The Magyar lands were very much in the heartland of Austria. Budapest and Pressburg (now Bratislava, less than an hours train ride from Vienna) were the most important Austrian cities after Vienna and it was important that the Magyars were always kept on side.

 Though Hungary these days is not seen as a particularly progressive place, Hungary in those days had a strong liberal tradition. In the pre-Hapsburg days, their Kings had actually been elected by the Magyar Diet, a quasi parliamentary body, and they in fact had an old constitutional document akin to England’s Magna Carta, which guaranteed basic rights such as the right to a trial and the right to be consulted on taxation.. Like the Magna Carta, these rights only applied to the nobility of course, and only nobles participated in the Diet, but this was very progressive compared to the otherwise absolutist monarchies of the continent, such as the Hapsburgs, and meant that radicals could point to ancient precedent when declaring completely new democratic ways of government..    

So it was that in 1848 a liberal nobleman and lawyer named Lajos Kossuth declared the formation of a Magyar nation right in the heart of the Austrian empire, which would have a liberal parliamentary government, with a constitution, equality before law, and freedom of religion. This last part was important – Hungary had many breakaway christian groups, but as Holy Roman emperors and defenders of the Catholic faith, the Hapsburgs had traditionally not permitted anything other than the Catholic faith. 

The Hungarian Revolution was crushed only because the Russian Czar, the only person more conservative than the Hapsburg emperor, sent tens of thousands of troops to destroy it. However the Hapsburg emperor had to accede to some of the Hungarian demands for independence,, and in 1867, reached the Great Compromise which saw the throne of Hungary elevated to the equal of Austria, and a rebranding of the Austrian empire to the “Austro-Hungarian empire”. Though the new Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Jospeh sat on both thrones and dictated joint foreign policy,, the Hungarian Diet was given almost complete autonomy over domestic government.

The end of the line 

Franz Joseph would be Hapsburg emperor from this tumultuous year of 1848 all the way to 1916. Franz witnessed new nations built from the bones of his ancestors’ empire. He  lost entire territories of Austria to nationalism and his entire world to the rising tide of liberal Parliamentary democracy. He is remembered fondly in Vienna today, and walking tours extoll his spartan, hard-working, god fearing lifestyle, but if you were fighting for Italian or Hungarian independence, or generally were a person of rebellious disposition in the nineteenth century, Franz Joseph was The Bad Guy, the Arch Reactionary, the very embodiment of the Old World.

Franz Joseph’s personal life was as tumultuous as the times he lived in. It feels fair to end the story of a family which began with Radblot’s castle with the last days of the last great Hapsburg. Franz Joseph is  eclipsed in his posterity by his wife the Empress Elizabeth, lovingly called “Sisi” in Vienna. I did not know about Sisi before I visited Vienna, but if you are on the tourist trail in Vienna, you would think Hapsburg history began and ended with her. She occupies a place in the national imagination analogous to Princess Diana in England. Part of this was the fact that she was one of great beauties of the nineteenth century, a reputation she was well aware of, employing a strict diet and exercise regimen which allowed her to keep her elven looks and famously thin figure well into her fifties. She was most famous for writing melancholy poetry about how stifling court life was, lamenting her marriage to Franz Joseph at fifteen, and, generally chafing against her gilded cage. The doomed princess is believed to have intervened in the cause of Hungary, and is said to have swayed Franz Jospeh to agree to the compromise of 1867, earning her the admiration of liberals as well..

Her poetry had already garnered her fame, but, Sisi’s dramatic death has seemingly won her immortality.The Hapsburg government was already in crisis following the death of Sisi and Franz Joseph’s only son Rudolf,  heir to the Austro Hungarian empire. The prince Rudolf – always a gloomy type – had, after years in an unhappy arranged marriage, ended up shooting himself along with his mistress, in a scandalous murder-suicide pact. This had prompted the already detached empress Sisi to withdraw completely from court life, and embark on a grand tour of Europe. Whilst she was promenading in Geneva, she was suddenly violently bumped into by a strange man in a long black coat. The man rushed off, disposing of a bloody knife in his wake. It was only minutes later, when a spot of blood began growing on her corset, that the Empress realised she had been fatally stabbed. She collapsed soon after, never to wake again.

The assassin was the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni. Lucheni did not offer any resistance when he was arrested by the police for the murder of the Hapsburg empress. When he was questioned about his motive he simply said ‘Because I am an anarchist, because I am poor, because I love the workers and I desire to see the death of the rich.’

Following the deaths of his wife and son, Franz Joseph declared that the heir to the throne would be his nephew Franz Ferdinand. Franz Ferdinand was the archetypal Hapsburg aristocrat straight out of the old world, famous for never smiling in public, spotted in theatres and operas with a cold haughty stare frozen on his face, acknowledging neither the audience or the performance. He had great plans for the revitalisation of Austria, all of which entailed using the army to crush what he saw as the four great problems plaguing his empire “Freemasons, Jews, Socialists and Hungarians.”

He would never have the chance, for it would next be Franz Ferdinand’s turn to be assassinated. This was of course by the Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip, in Sarajevo, 28 June 1914. At his trial, Princip defended his actions saying : “I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be freed from Austria.” Like many nationalists from the Balkans to Italy, he did not know what shape the new world would take, but it would have to be a world without Austria Hungary.

The two bullets fired by Princip into the chests of Franz Ferdinand and his wife famously set off a chain of events that resulted in the First World War, a spectacle of blood in which the modern world was born screaming. In a way, Princip achieved his aim, for it was also a conflict the Austro-Hungarians were destined not to survive. In 1918 the Hapsburg empire would be gone forever, and  the family which had held Europe in the palm of its hand for six hundred and fifty years would vanish into the shadows. 

Ridley Scott’s new historical Napoleon, releases in November 2023. I am a sucker for historical epics, and though I now know Ridley’s Gladiator isn’t exactly historically accurate (spoiler alert: the historical Emperor Commodus wasn’t killed in one on one combat with a rando gladiator) watching it as a child gave me a lifelong obsession with Rome. The ability to generate a pop culture discourse is the value of the long neglected historical epic genre and I am curious to see what conversations this film generates about Napoleon. Ridley, apparently, thinks he’s as bad as Hitler and this has already ruffled feathers. These days, outside of perhaps France, you don’t see much discussion of the emperors legacy, and it is a valuable conversation to have, because to dismiss him just as a dictator is far too simplistic.

In the 20th century Napoleon’s legacy was reduced simply to his military victories and his dictatorship – however in the 19th, a time closer to his, he captured the imaginations of Western Europe’s poets, philosophers, musicians and writers as the representative of a new world age that had emerged from the French Revolution. Balzac kept a bust of him on his writing desk and claimed he was doing with the pen what Napoleon did with the sword, Beethoven dedicated his music to him, the ever controversial Lord Byron courted treason and the fury of the British tabloid press when he openly supported Napoleon whilst his countrymen died in the Napoleonic wars (and wrote no less than five poems about him), Goethe called him the embodiment of the enlightenment and Stendhal claimed that he fell when Napoleon fell. Karl Marx’s favourite philosopher, Hegel, called Napoleon the final manifestation of the sublime Spirit of History, destined to usher in the final age of man, the Age of Liberty. (Seeing Napoleon in person at a distance in 1806, was an experience Hegel likened to seeing “the soul of the world”). Coleridge admired him, as did Simon Bolivar, the future liberator of Venezuela and Colombia. Even grumpy Nietzche concedes Napoleon some greatness. Interestingly, to these men of letters of the 19th century Europe, he was not just a hero but a progressive hero.

What to make of this in 2023? To say Napoleon’s legacy, especially to the left, is complicated is an understatement. This was a man whose rise was only possible because of the Revolution, who then betrayed the Revolution by ending the Republic and becoming emperor, like his personal hero, Julius Caesar. Indeed, the spectre of Napoleon has haunted every revolution since the Revolution, with future revolutionaries always on the lookout for that military strongman destined to overthrow them and turn revolution into personal dictatorship. The brilliant Red Army general Mikhail Tukhachevsky’s fate was sealed, for example, when Stalin ominously started referring to him as Napoleonchik, little Napoleon. Tukhachevsky’s summary execution was a precursor, as every schoolchild knows, to a general purge of the Red Army officers accused of Bonapartism. Of course many of Stalin’s opponents on the Left in turn would accuse him of being the communist Napoleon.

Yet at the same time through Napoleon’s unbroken streak of victories over sixteen years of campaigning he did more to bring the ideals of the Revolution to Europe than any of the more progressive revolutionary leaders before him – an emperor who overthrew monarchs and founded republics.

In the year of our lord 2023, reactions to the film’s trailer and the man himself are simply regurgitations of half remembered factoids from history class – “couldnt defeat Russia’s winter lol”, “he wasnt that short actually”. Where there is any serious discussion of him at all, he is reduced to a despot and just another white conqueror/colonialist – which is of course part of the turth, but ignores the fact that many in his day genuinely saw as a hammer against old feudal caste system of Europe and against religious intolerance. We shall see how this conversation evolves once the movie comes out.

Napoleon is too big a subject for me to write a meaningful blog about – 500 page books have been written about individual battles he fought in a career that spawned more then 80 of them – so, in view here I shall quickly set out a list of four of my own favourite ‘factoids’ from the ‘Little Corporal’’s life, which show the four faces of Napoleon for me – radical, nationalist, liberator and tyrant.

Napoleon the Radical – after the fall of the Bastille, Napoleon began his career on the far-left of the revolutionary government

This is a surprise I find for many of Napoleon’s leftist critics. Given that Napoleon became the ‘sword’ of the Directory – the reactionary coalition that overthrew the left-wing Jacobins and Robespierre in the coup of Thermidor – and then, as emperor, spent much of his time clamping down on neo-Jacobin left wing movements, the 20th perception of him has been more of a conservative leaning centrist, or simply, an apolitical self-interested demagogue. While it is true that later on in his career he proudly declared himself as a man neither of no party but the nation, he entered politics not just as a patron of the Left, but a partisan of Maximillien Robespierre- a man who is synonymous with the most far-left period of the Revolution.Many historians say his association with the Jacobins was opportunistic rather than ideological – but he in fact joined the Jacobins much before their ascent in 1792, when they were firmly on the extreme fringes of the revolution, dominated in those early years by moderate liberals under Lafayette who wanted reform of the monarchy instead of total revolution.

I have spoken about the Jacobins in my blog on women radicals of the revolution. In brief, they were a faction which came to power in the third year of the revolution, primarily supported by the Parisian working class (the sanscullotes). The sanscullotes were by far the most militant interest group of the Revolution, the ones who tore down the Bastille and shouted the loudest for the heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and ultimately all of the French nobility. Napoleon firmly sided with the Jacobins in their vicious civil war against the more moderate French federalists, known as the Girondins, whose supporters were more middle class and favoured free market principles over the centralised redistributive policies of the Jacobins. (To make matters more complicated, both of these factions were simultaneously fighting resurgent royalists seeking to restore the monarchy). Napoleon’s first famous political pamphlet was Supper at Beaucaire, a sort of political dialogue where a Jacobin soldier upbraids a group of merchants from Marseilles, Nimes and Montpellier, the centres of the Girondin revolt, as unwitting agents of the aristocracy. This brought him to the attention of Augustin Robespierre, brother of the Jacobins infamous leader, who read it out to the National Convention. The Convention was so impressed they had it printed and circulated amongst Jacobin supporters – it was the Robespierres who pushed for young Napoleon to have his command at the battle of Toulon, where he helped in defeating a joint force of British, royalists and French federalists. The fact that Napoleon had little battlefield experience at this point in his career mattered little to the Robespierres for whom ideological purity was more important than ability – though Napoleon proved himself more than able at Toulon. Augustin accompanied Napoleon to the battle of Toulon, and eagerly wrote to his brother Maximillein about the genius of the young man, overseeing his rapid promotion to the Army of Italy.

Though Napoleon would later on in life express misgivings about controversial episodes involving the Jacobins, such as the invasion of the Tuileries and the September massacres, he remained loyal to the Robespierre brothers right until they were claimed by the guillotine. The trailer for the film in July 23 almost makes it seem like he was brought in to suppress the Jacobins – in actual history not only did have not anything to do with the coup of Thermidor, but he was actually arrested by the Directory as a supporter of Robespierre in the anti-left purge that followed it. His standing with the Directory changed when he assisted them in putting down a far-right coup, led by royalists who wanted to restore the old Bourbon monarchy. It is perhaps not surprising that he would criticise the Jacobins later on in his life as the political mood in France lurched to the right, but my own view is that his actions in those early days speak louder than his words.

One Jacobin ideal he would privately retain for his entire life even as he abandoned the politics of his youth was his aversion to religion generally and to the Catholic church in particular. He would remain his entire life a strong proponent of secular government, even when reversing bans on Catholic celebrations brought in by some of his more militantly atheist former Jacobin colleagues.

Napoleon the Nationalist – Napoleon was not just Corsican but was a Corsican nationalist in his youth

It is an often commented upon irony that Napoleon, one of history’s most recognisable Frenchmen, was not French at all but Corsican. His childhood hero was Pasquale Paoli, who had spent decades fighting for Corsican independence from the city state of Genoa, ultimately liberating it from Genoan rule, only for the French king to invade and recolonise the island in the 1760s, around the time Napoleon was born. As Napoleon himself put it “I was born when my fatherland died, 10,000 Frenchmen vomited onto its shores”

Napoleon’s father Carlo Bonaparte was a prominent resistance fighter against French rule, staging guerilla attacks from the mountains a full year after Paoli conceded defeat and fled into exile. When Carlo finally surrendered to the French governor, he was able to secure a scholarship for his then nine year old son in a military boarding school at Brienne in Southern France. Napoleon spent his formative years in France alone in this elite boarding school, mercilessly bullied for his foreignness by the children of the French aristocracy – in those pre-revolutionary days, only nobility were allowed to be officers (in fact, you had to show four generations of noble blood). They called him Cadet Paille-au-nez, a word play on his name, which means ‘straw in nose’, because of the heavy accent with which he spoke French. During this time he wrote many romantic stories and bad novels about the Corsicans rising up and expelling the French from Corsica, casting himself as a hostage son of a freedom fighter in a foreign land.

It was only many years later, when he returned to Corsica as a 23 year old representative of the new revolutionary government that he was forced to re-assess his identity. He and his brother Joseph were idealistic in their youth and keen to bring the ideals of the Revolution to their people – for which they were dubbed, likely sarcastically, the “Corsican Gracchi”, after those two famous populist brothers from the Roman republic (about whom I have written another blog). He also met his childhood hero Paoli at this time – the old warhorse had been invited back to Corsica by the revolutionary government- but Paoli remained cold to him as he considered his father Carlo a traitor for having made peace with the French. Napoleon’s revolutionary proclamations against the Church in particular alienated him from the deeply religious Corsicans, and matters came to a head when in Easter 1792 the city of Ajjacio rioted against the Jacobin volunteers. Paoli finally signed a secret pact with the British who intervened in Corsica to chase the French revolutionaries out. Snubbed, Napoleon would return to France and changed his name from the Corsican Napoleone di Bunonaparte to the more Francified name we know him by now.

Napoleon the “Liberator”

The wars of the First Coalition, in which Napoleon won his fame, began long before he was anybody in the army. The war began even before the Jacobins rose to power, when the ‘moderate’ Girondins held sway over the Assembly, in 1792. The Revolution was in its young days, the once-absolute King had been reduced to a constitutional figurehead, feudalism had been abolished together with all noble titles, all men had been declared free and equal in law and rights. The Girondins, giddy with success, declared the time had come to export the Revolution to all of Western Europe, where men still struggled under the yoke of feudal lords, and where science and reason was suppressed by the almighty power of the Catholic Church.

In the words of the Girondin minister Isnard, “We shall unleash against them a war of Peoples against Kings! Let us say to them that ten million Frenchmen, fired with the flame of liberty and armed with the sword of reason shall..make every tyrant tremble on his throne” .

Robespierre interestingly was the lone voice against war, cautioning that no foreign peoples would welcome “armed missionaries” on their soil, but he was drowned out in revolutionary fervour. France declared War on Austria in 1792, followed by Prussia, Spain and finally Great Britain. Whatever the reality of the war was, in theory the war was a liberatory war, the beginning of a hoped for Europe wide revolution.

To say the first of year of war was a catastrophe was an understatement – as it turns out, a desire to rid the world of tyrants, however genuine, was not enough when faced with professional armies. As the rabble rousing journalist Marat sarcastically commented “we had been assured that the very cannonballs themselves would retreat before the Rights of Man”.

By 1793, the position was what I have described above – a brutal civil war within the revolutionary leadership itself, and a royalist uprising spreading like wildfire amongst the more traditional and conservative provinces in the South of France, calling itself the ‘ Royal and Catholic Army’. Britain, Prussia and Austria all stood poised to invade France itself from three different fronts. It was in these circumstances that the Robespierrists took over Paris in an armed insurrection (sometimes dubbed the second French Revolution) and managed to end the civil wars by uncompromising severity to any suspected enemy of the revolution, during the period now known as the Terror. The situation at home stabilised and Napoleon’s victory at Toulon seemed to indicate a reversal in the war. Then Robespierre himself was overthrown by his enemies in Thermidor.

This new regime – the Directory – may have been as short lived as its predecessors, but out of nowhere Napoleon began suddenly began the streak of victories for which he is now best known. He had been hastily promoted to general in the darkest moments of the war, when almost a third of the French officer corps had deserted. His sole task was to guard the mountain passes in the Italian Alps from any invasion from Italy, then a collection of city states and kingdoms who had either allied with the Austrians or were under direct Austrian overlordship. He was given only a small, underpaid and mutinous regiment to do this with – this was always meant to be an obscure defensive command, while more senior generals fought the real war on the continental mainland.

Napoleon, of his own accord, instead took what he called his “naked and underfed” men over the Alps and into Italy. With practically no money or support from Paris, he toppled all of the ancient feudal kingdoms of Italy within a year, ousted their various ruling dukes, counts and kings from their ancestral castles and established secular republics with constitutions and representative governments in his wake. In 1797 the ideological war against the Catholic church came to a head when Napoleon’s men marched into Rome. Pope Pius VI – who had spent decades preaching that all Catholics must renounce the godless Revolution – was asked to renounce all of his titles, and when he refused, was deposed and dragged into custody by the revolutionaries – who only addressed him by his birth name, Giovanni Braschi.

A new secular ‘Roman Republic’ was proclaimed, a thousand years after Caesar snuffed out the last one. Bonaparte then marched into Austria itself, France’s most formidable enemy and the heart of the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon’s men were in artillery range of the suburbs of Vienna when the mighty Hapsburg rulers of Austria finally had to concede the unthinkable and send a delegation to plead for peace with him. The Austrians would discover, when signing the treaty at Campo Formio, that this seemingly omnipotent general who had been running rings around them for years was an “emaciated” pale faced young man of only twenty-eight years of age in a ragged simple black overcoat, whose long shaggy hair was adorned only by a plain tricorn hat and a revolutionary cockade.

The story of how he achieved this is, politics aside, remarkable, and shall be the topic of a separate blog. Though privately the Directory fretted at the young general’s increasing independence, they had to grit their teeth and sing his praises. For Napoleon’s legend had truly captured France – for the first time in the eight years since they had set out to make the tyrants of the world tremble, here was someone finally extinguishing the old aristocracies of Europe and establishing republics.

This is not to say that he was in fact greeted as a liberator wherever he went. Napoleon was able to sustain his year long campaign in Italy without financial support from Paris by ‘living off the land’ – a euphemism for plundering and paying his men in loot. Many of the Renaissance paintings and sculptures ‘liberated’ from the castles and monasteries of Italy by the revolutionaries still sit in the Louvre today and remain a topic of political controversy. However, the republics he established in Italy- the Cisalpine, the Ligurian, Partenopean and Roman Republics, were not puppet states – Italy had a tradition of revolutionary, anticlerical secret clubs and societies long before Napoleon invaded, and in their liberal membership Napoleon found a political class very willing to take advantage of the new settlement – in fact, suppression of these societies in many cases formed the pretext for intervention.

Many enemies of France’s most traditional rival, England, certainly found themselves receptive to Napoleon’s rhetoric”. Radicals in Dublin formed the Society of United Irishmen, explicitly inspired by “the brave and gallant French people” whom they called “the advance guard of the world”. As far north as Donegal and Sligo, British spies reported on meetings where “liberty, equality and fraternity” and the “complete destruction of the British Monarchy” were openly discussed. The United Irishmen pushed in 1798 for total independence for England and were supported in this by Napoleon and the Directory. Sadly, bad weather and logistical considerations impeded a landing of French troops on Irish soil to support the uprising – one of the ‘what ifs’ of history could have seen a free Irish republic 200 years before the Easter Uprising. Many Irishmen went to fight for Napoleon, and chief amongst Napoleon’s inner circle of commanders was the Irishman Edward Jennings, known as “Brave Killmaine”, a deposed son of the old Gaelic aristocracy who had embraced revolutionary egalitarianism.

Napoleon was also in correspondence with Tipu Sultan of Mysore, at the time the most formidable enemy of the British in India. I’ve written about the French revolution and India elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the South Indian sultan Tipu has been interested in an alliance with France against the British for some time. He had sent an embassy to Paris in 1788, before the Revolution, to ask Louis XVI to intervene in India against the British – this was the first formal embassy in history sent by any Indian leader to a European capital. Rebuffed by Louis the XVI, Tipu tried his luck again with the new revolutionary authorities in France.


In 1797 Tipu Sultan sent a messenger, a Frenchman called Ripaud, to the French Governor at Mauritius to relay a message to the Directory, whom he addressed as “the High and Exalted; the magnificent and distinguished in station; the kind refuge of friends; the objects of regard; the gentlemen constituting the Executive Power”.He reminded them of the long hatred the Sultan had nursed against their common enemy England and expressed the keen hope that “the garden of time would ripen.. the fruit of their mutual designs”. The response came not from the Directors but an up and coming general, who was interestingly at that time stationed not in France but in Alexandria in Egypt.

To the most magnificent Sultan, our greatest friend Tipoo Sahib,
You have already been informed of my arrival on the borders of the Red Sea, with an innumerable and invincible Army, full of the desire of delivering you from the iron yoke of England..I would ask that you send some person to Suez or Cairo, bearing your confidences, in whom I may confer. May the Almighty increase your power and destroy your enemies!

Yours C & C,
Napoleon Bonaparte


Napoleon’s grand plan was to overthrow the rule of the Mamluks in Egypt, from where he then hoped to control the sea routes over the Suez to India. From there, French support would reach Tipu and all the rebel kings of India in their fight against the British. East India Company spies worriedly reported that the French mercenaries in Tipu’s service had been allowed to form a Jacobin Club, that the Sultan himself had been seen wearing a revolutionary cockade and referring to himself as ‘Citoyen Tipoo’.

They reported the spread of ‘virulent Jacobinism’ even in allied kingdoms like Hyderabad. Even after Waterloo, decades later, old Napoleonic generals would be seen advising the armies of Indian kings such as Ranjit Singh of Punjab in their own struggles against the English.

The justification for Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt was coated in emancipatory revolutionary language, adopted to the local culture – they were there to liberate the Egyptians from the rule of the Mamluks, in theory servants of the Ottoman Caliph, in practice absolute rulers of Cairo..

“People of Egypt, they have told you that I come to destroy your religion, but do not believe it..I come to restore your rights and punish the usurpers… I respect God, his prophet and the Quran more than the Mamluks. Tell them that all men are equal before God;… Yet who owns the most beautiful land? It belongs to the Mamluks! If Egypt is their personal possession, then let the Mamluks show the lease that God gave them for it! I tell you the French are the only true friends of the Muslims. Wasnt it us who destroyed the Knights of Malta? Wasn’t it us who destroyed the Pope, who used to say that he had a duty to make war on Muslims?”

Napoleon diligently studied the Quran in preparation for the expedition, and the normally athiestic general found a surprising affinity for the religion “I prefer the religion of Muhammad to ours, it is far less ridiculous”. He even openly considered conversion whilst in Alexandria, referring to himself for a time as ‘Ali’ Bonaparte. He was inspired in this not by the call of the soul but the example of another of his personal heroes, the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great, who had adopted the old religion of the Pharaohs during his own conquest of the Nile and had the priesthood declare him an incarnation of Amon Ra. Napoleon was far more taken with the Prophet’s secular achievements than his spiritual ones “Muhammad was a great commander, eloquent, a great statesman, he revived his motherland and created a new power and a new people”

Before his men embarked at Alexandria, Napoleon gave his famous speech to his men, reminding them that they were there not as the crusading knights of old but as representatives of a new enlightened, secular nation:

“The people amongst whom we are going to live are Muhammadens,, The first article of their faith is this: ‘There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His prophet.’ Do not contradict them! .. Pay respect to their muftis, and their Imams. The Roman legions protected all religions. You will find here customs different from those of Europe. You must accommodate yourselves to them. The people amongst whom we are to mix differ from us in the treatment of women; but remember that in all countries the man who commits rape is a monster. Pillage enriches only a small number of men; it dishonours us; it destroys our resources; it converts into enemies the people whom it is our interest to have for friends”

Unfortunately, Napoleon’s grand designs as ‘liberator’ of the East would be undone by Britain’s greatest admiral , Horatio Nelson. Nelson found and single handedly destroyed the French fleet that had borne Napoleon to Egypt, leaving him stranded. The Mamluk Begs were indeed unpopular and crumbled before Napoleon’s forces, but Napoleon was unable to enforce his rule without any reinforcements or supplies from Europe. Napoleon’s hope that the Ottoman sultan would appreciate the French ridding him of his rebellious Mamluk servants was dashed when Selim III issued a fatwa to all the faithful against the European interlopers. Napoleon had to slink back to Europe in defeat, his Eastern dream forever abandoned. The conspiracy with Napoleon was all the pretext England needed to invade Mysore, and within a year of Napoleon’s defeat by Nelson, Tipu Sultan was defeated and bayoneted to death by East India Company soldiers.

Napoleon as Despot

Of course, no discussion of Napoleon can be complete without discussing the greatest stain on his legacy – his brutal suppression of the great slave revolt on the former French colony of Haiti, then known as Saint Domaigne. Apparently Napoleon’s genuine if somewhat orientalist admiration for the people of the Middle East and India did not extend to the black men of the Caribbean. The tragedy of course was that, in contrast to the Egyptians, the leader of the Haitian rebels, Toussiant Louverture, was a huge admirer of the French Revolution. Touissant’s story, as well as of the men whom the great Trinidadian historian CLR James called the “Black Jacobins”, is every bit as remarkable as Napoleon’s, and a blog on this is also coming soon.

For all that conservative and liberal historians alike have branded Jacobin rule in France as the ‘Terror’, for me their greatest achievement was the abolition of slavery not just in France but her colonies, including Haiti. The Jacobins had declared slavery as incompatible with the revolution – in fact, some of the first victims of the guillotine were the great plantation owners of Saint Domaigne, including its royalist governor Blaunchland, Touissant’s old nemesis.. The new Jacobin governor of Haiti, Laveaux, would become genuine friends with Toussiant and name him the commander in chief of Jacobin France’s armies in Haiti. Toussiant, who was normally suspicious of white men, declared Laveuax his only true and intimate white friend and coined the phrase “After God, Leaveaux”. When the Jacobins fell in 1794, this all changed.

The moderate liberals of the Directory were keen to undo the ridiculous, far left policy of slave emancipation, and when Napoleon succeeded them, he agreed wholeheartedly. There were certainly economic reasons for this – Haiti before the revolt had been France’s most profitable colony – the sugar, coffee and tobacco churned out by its slave plantations made up a full third of France’s national economy. Recapturing this colony would go a huge way to financing the wars in Europe. The French Navy under the personal command of Napoleon’s brother in law bombarded the island for days. Napoleon had Toussiant dragged back to Europe in chains, where ‘the Black Spartacus’ would die in a cruel and isolated captivity in the Swiss Alps. Napoleon would come to regret this – Toussaints romantic affection for the Revolution was the only thing holding the Haitians to France, as many of them wanted all hated whites gone from their island forever. One of Toussaint’s old generals, Dessalines, took over the cause of Haitian independence and drove the Bonapartists in a few years. Not sharing Toussiant’s Jacobin ideals, Dessalines expelled all whites from the island and crowned himself Emperor of Haiti, Jacques the First.

Soon after this, Napoleon seized absolute power in France itself, in the coup of 18 Brumaire. By this point he had completely abandoned Jacobinism, writing to his brother that their dreams of a republic were just the “illusions of youth” – if France wanted to survive, it needed an absolute ruler. The senate, even after being purged of its most left-wing radical members, did not take this lying down. Napoleon and his soldiers were attacked by outraged senators when they entered the Senate on the day of the coup, screaming at him ‘tyrant’, ‘dictator’.. Napoleon even claimed, in a strange echo of his hero Caesar, that some of the senators who mobbed him had even concealed daggers on their persons and tried to stab him to death on the Senate floor. This time however, it was Caesar who won – his battle hardened veterans easily manhandled the outraged politicians away from their boss and carried them off in chains. Napoleon however was stunned by the episode- he had long been used to the unquestioning loyalty of his soldiers – and an angry outburst did nothing to allay the fears of his critics “Do not forget that I walk with the God of War, and the God of Victory! Soldiers! If any one of these politicians dare to declare your general an outlaw, let a lightning bolt strike them down”

Napoleon would crown himself first emperor of France, and would rule it for fifteen years as dictator. Most histories of Napoleon would actually begin here, for it was as emperor that Napoleon won the battles for which he is most famous, first among them the battle of Austerlitz, which redrew the map of modern Europe. But the various shifts in his ideology more or less ended here. This is a good point, therefore, for me to end and to take stock of the man himself.

The French Revolution, it is important to remember, was not just about representative government. It was equally about meritocracy. against the old feudal system in which most senior jobs in the military or the government were barred to those not from the high nobility. It was about equality before the law – in the mediaeval system that predated 1789, there were literally different legal codes and systems which applied to the aristocracy. It was about secularism, where people who were not Catholic could practise and profess their faith freely, and indeed, where a person could proclaim himself an atheist without fear of criminal prosecution, a very big deal in the 18th century. Napoleon’s policy of tolerance even led to him eventually reconciling with the Catholic church, ending once and for all the periodic Catholic uprisings by conservative peasants in Southern France. With typical pragmatism, he said “It is in making myself Catholic that I have finished the wars of Vendée; in making myself Muslim, I won the heart of Egypt. If I had to govern a nation of Jews, I should re-establish the Temple of Solomon”

Without Napoleon’s victories, these gains of the revolution would certainly also have been taken away by a restored Bourbon Monarchy. Napoleon may have placed himself and his family at the top of the system for life, but in theory all lesser offices were open to everyone regardless of blood – indeed, Napoleon’s inner circle was dominated by people of common birth. Napoleon himself, as a Corsican immigrant, represented the heights to which a person could rise in this new post revolutionary France. Freedom of religion meant that Protestants and Jews – long persecuted in Catholic France – could return, and that France became a haven for rationalists, free thinkers, agnostics and atheists. As for a legal system that applied equally to everyone – Napoleon’s greatest achievement remains the civil legal code, which still forms the basis of not just France’s legal system but the legal systems of most of Europe.

He suppressed the far-left and broke the power of the sansculottes, but Napoleon’s fiercest and most rabid critics remained conservatives and monarchists, as many on the left feared a restored Bourbon monarchy much more than they did Napoleon. Some on the left in fact argued that in a world of kings and absolute rulers determined to destroy France, having an absolute ruler as an interim measure to safeguard the achievements of the Revolution was a simple political necessity – even some Jacobins, such as Marat, had once advocated for a dictatorship. Napoleon’s secret police for their part spent much more time uncovering right wing aristocrat plots to overthrow Napoleon than left wing ones.

For Marx, Napoleon’s rise was a tragedy, a failure of the Revolution, but historians of the twentieth century have taken a more nuanced view of his legacy, even some Marxist historians like George Le Febvre. In contrast to the traditional historical view of the Napoleonic project being fundamentally an elite one, the historian Sudhir Hazeersingh writes that the transmitters of the Napoleon legend after his defeat at Waterloo were not France’s elites, but “ordinary workers and peasants, from towns and villages; former soldiers and officers; local intellectuals and pamphleteers; doctors and lawyers; schoolteachers and Freemasons”, royalists in 1815 would complain of peasants in the countryside prophesying the return of the “father”, who would bring back bread and jobs. Bonapartism would have a central role to play in the final overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy in 1848. Chateaubriand commented that the world may have slipped from Napoleon’s grasp while he had lived but, in death, he had seized it anew.

For many progressives and liberals of the 19th century, especially to those outside France who were not familiar with the internal politics of the revolution, Napoleon’s armies still were very much the armies of the Revolution. (Royalist propaganda linking Napoleon to Robespierre and Jacobinism much after the man himself had abandoned these ideals did not help!) His victories did more to spread the Revolutions ideas to Europe than all the propaganda of more progressive and democratic revolutionary governments that preceded him. Throughout Italy and Central Europe, his armies wiped out ancient feudal governments so completely that they would never quite recover. The birth of entirely new nation states in these regions, such as Italy and Germany, in what were once personal possessions of counts and dukes, became inevitable. It is hard even for his critics to argue with the fact that before Napoleon’s meteoric rise to the top in 1799, that the French Revolution was looking like a failed experiment, destined to be extinguished by the aristocracy like so many peasant revolts before it. Even to those aware of France’s internal politics, Napoleon still represented the closest they could come to the ideal form of government, in much the same way that many leftists of the twentieth century would idealise the governments of China or the Soviet Union – not perfect, but as close as was possible given the reality of the times. To quote Lefebvre, “His contemporaries always saw him as a soldier of the Revolution, and it was as such that he left his mark on history”.

A strange and star crossed tale of India’s second Mughal emperor

Background

I recently visited the tomb of Mughal Emperor Humayun in Old Delhi. It is built to be close to the tomb of the great Sufi Mystic Nizammuddin Auliya, which still attracts pilgrims as it did back in Humayun’s day, five hundred years ago. Humayun’s serene mausoleum bears the unmistakable template for the great buildings of the Mughals that will one day be perfected in the Taj Mahal. The trademark great marble dome and flutelike minarets are all there, and stand guard over not just Humayun but a veritable inhabitation of spirits. 108 members of the imperial family are buried here. It is here too that the Mughal empire itself died a symbolic death, when, in the sack of Delhi by the British in 1857, the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar took refuge here amongst his dead forbears. He was eventually captured by William Hodgson and sent packing into exile in Rangoon, where he is buried, while his sons were shot by the British, the last lights of an empire that had once been the richest in the world. The restless dead’s spectral aura hangs over the mausoleums gardens, which are surprisingly clean and well preserved, though its many canals and fountains have long stood dry.

Old English travellers reports say said that visitors could once see Humayun’s sword, turban and slippers over his grave, that the massive geometric interiors were once richly furnished with carpets and white sheets of silk and beautifully decorated copies of the Quran. Yet, even without these, there is something about these plain symmetries of the white chambers that soothes the onlookers mind. The mournful, haunted place inspired me to do a short instagram post about this much maligned and overlooked Mughal emperor, and in turn this biography about the emperor’s life.

Humayun was the second of the dynasty somewhat incorrectly known as the ‘Mughals’ – from the Persian word for Mongol. Although they did have Mongol ancestry – Humayun’s grandmother was a direct descendant of Genghis Khan – they identified themselves as Chagatai Turks and considered their progenitor the fearsome thirteenth century Turkic warlord Timur (Tamerlane in the West). The Mughals ruled at their height large swathes of what is now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and even lands which are now in Iran, and the empire persisted in Delhi until its conquest by the British in the late nineteenth century.

Poor Humayun is rarely the first name which springs to mind when people talk about the Mughals – he has had to spend his afterlife in the shadow of his father, Babur, the first Mughal, who established the dynasty, and his son, Akbar, the greatest of all the Mughal emperors, who transformed what was essentially a thin strip of land from Kabul to Delhi into a subcontinent spanning empire, and whose unprecedented religious tolerance and patronage of Hindu art and music set the basis for a uniquely syncretic culture that still forms the backbone of North Indian culture. In contrast to these empire builders,Humauyun is best remembered as the man who almost lost the Mughal empire – an opium addicted dilettante, who preferred his hobbies of astrology, star gazing and wine parties to the business of ruling, And of course, Humayun also now faces the same posthumous demonisation that all Islamic rulers face in contemporary India, with the rise of the Hindu Right and their narrative of ‘thousand years of oppression’ under Islam – a fate which not even the once universally admired Akbar has escaped. A cruel destiny indeed for Humayun, who was famed for his gentleness and generosity in his lifetime. Even amongst his enemies he was called ‘insaan-e-kaamil’ – the perfect gentleman.

The rise of the House of Timur

In addition to the number of unofficial biographies and court diaries that survive from his time, Humayun benefits from two biographies written by people who personally knew him and witnessed many of the incidents they describe – the Humayun Namah, written by his indomitable niece Gulbadan Begum, and the Tezkereh Al Vakiat, the memoirs of his personal valet and water bearer Jauhar.. One incident from Jauhar’s memoirs perfectly captures both Humayun’s personality and his unsuitability for life in the brutal world that was sixteenth century India.. During a victory over the Sultan of Gujarat early on in his reign, the Mughal armies captured a leading enemy general. As the Mughals had been unsuccessfully trying to locate the Gujarati sultans treasury to pay their troops, several of Humayun’s generals counselled him to torture the general to get him to give up the location of the treasure. Humayun refused, saying “If an object can be attained by gentleness, why have recourse to harsh measures? Give ye orders instead that a banquet be prepared, and ply him well with wine, and then ask him the question”.

Humayun was born in 1508 in Kabul, to which his father Babur had been effectively exiled from his ancestral home of Ferghana in modern Uzbekistan. Babur had inherited Kabul from a distant uncle after a youth spent, in his own words, wandering “from mountain to mountain, homeless and houseless, without country or abiding-place” The blood feud between Babur and the man who had ousted him from his throne when he was eleven years old- the Uzbek Shiyabani Khan- was the stuff of legend,. Shiyabani Khan’s men had kidnapped Babur’s beloved sister Khanzada Begum at the same time as he had made him a refugee, and forcibly inducted her into his harem. Babur had spent a lifetime unsuccessfully fighting to get his home and his sister back. Following a number of defeats, he was reduced to hiding from the Uzbek in Kabul,obsessively guarding its mountain passes. Determined to build a legacy for his son after a youth spent in poverty, Babur spent the next ten years setting up a base for himself in Kabul, in those days a rich trading post on the Silk Road, and styling himself Badshah (King). He invited all of the nobility of the house of Timur to seek refuge there from the relentless persecutions of Shiyabani Khan. So in Kabul Babur patiently began training an international army of exiles, mercenaries and fortune seekers loyal to him, enriching himself not just from trade on the Silk Road but from raids into surrounding countries in the style of his Mongol cousins. At the same time, he indulged in his passions for literature and gardening, inviting poets and intellectuals from Persia and Central Asia to Kabul, founding schools, building public gardens, writing his famous diary and even finding time to a develop a style of calligraphy of his own called Baburi. He ensured that Humayun had an education becoming of a young prince of the blood, and from his father Humayun inherited a lifelong love of books.
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Babur began to fear however that his son had inherited little else from him and remarked often about the worrying lack of urgency in the young prince. Humayun’s first test as a teenager was being awarded the governership of Badakshan, and Babur complains about his son’s tardiness. On one occasion, his teenage son had even written to him saying that he had no interest in governing, and wished to retire and become a wandering holy man, and Babur wrote to him, chiding “As for the retirement you mention in your letters…retirement is a fault for sovereignty…rule does not allow retirement”. A keen poet himself, Babur even found cause to disparage his sons writing, informing him his prose took too long to come to the point..

Also concerning was Humayun’s growing reputation as somewhat of a libertine. “In battle he was steady and brave, in conversation ingenious and lively and at the social board, full of wit” wrote a courtier, Mirza Haidar, about the prince, ‘He was kind hearted and generous.. a dignified and magnificent prince who observed much state, but in consequence of having dissolute and sensual men in his service..he contracted some bad habits, such as the excessive consumption of opium..”

By the 1520s, however, there were other things to occupy Babur’s mind. Things were finally looking up for him. Shiyabani Khan had finally overreached and attempted to invade Persia, and ended up getting himself killed by the Persian Shah Ismail. His freed sister Khanzada Begum made her way back to him in a scene of much rejoicing. The Persian king also for good measure also had the skull of Babur’s old Uzbek nemesis hollowed out, plated in gold and made into a drinking cup.

To Babur’s south, the kingdom of Delhi was in turmoil. Then ruled by an Afghani dynasty called the Lodi dynasty, the capable old monarch Sikander Lodi had recently died and his successor, Ibrahim Lodi, was a potent combination of lack of ability with a tendency towards tyrannical absolutism. Ibrahim’s governors were soon in open revolt and finally sensing an opportunity to gain a kingdom to match his self appointed title, after waiting for the auspicious moment when “the sun rose in the sign of the Archer” Babur led his warband into India, toward an all or nothing confrontation with the Lodis at Panipat, near Delhi, in 1526.

The embattled Lodi king met Babur at Panipat with an army four times his size, but Babur had a secret weapon – gunpowder, at the time unknown in the battlefields of India. The win by Babur changed not only the history of India but the entire Islamic world – in which the Mughals would become a rival centre of power to the Persians and the Ottomans. Yet it almost didn’t happen, Babur writes, because Humayun, who was meant to lead the vanguard of the Mughal armies, turned up to the battle three days late.

On balance however, Humayun seems to have acquitted himself well at Panipat,capturing a hundred prisoners and eight elephants. He also fought alongside his father the following year during the great battle of Khanua against a confederacy of Rajput kings led by the one-eyed, one-legged veteran of a hundred battles, Rana Sangha of Mewar.

Eyeing Humayun’s fortunes were his three younger half-brothers, Baburs sons by other consorts – the fierce Kamran, wily Askari and the young but impressionable Hindal, who were all as ambitious as Humayun was languorous. Kamran in particular was a formidable warrior, and chafed at being left in charge of Kandahar in what is today northern Afghanistan while his brother went off to win glory. Then in 1530, Babur fell gravely ill it was Humayun who was summoned to him rather than these more warlike brothers – for all their differences, Humayun remained his favourite son. After extracting a promise from Humayun not to spill the blood of his brothers, no matter how much they may deserve it, Babur died.

The Star King

So it was that Nasiruddin Muhammad Humayun, unlikely descendant of Genghis Khan and Timur, became Badshah of Hindustan. In the tradition of horse lords of the Steppe, Babur’s empire was divided between his sons, with Humayun getting the throne of Delhi and the second eldest Kamran the throne of Kabul. Askari and Hindal got subordinate provinces to each of them. .

Immediately, Kamran came south and seized some of Humayun’s lands in the Punjab for his own. For any other king, this would have been war, but Humayun not only wrote to his brother telling him he could keep the lands, but also offered him some more. A rebellion by Askari during the early 1530s was also similarly forgiven.

In fairness to Humayun, in contrast to his indulgence of his brothers, he pursued a robust campaign in those early years against various cousins and uncles with designs on his throne, and dealt swiftly with the threat of the still numerous Afghani supporters of the old Lodi Kings. Chief amongst this latter threat was the sultan of Gujarat, Bahadur Shah,the very same whose general Humayun had refused to torture, and around whom these Lodi loyalists began to gather. Humayun pounded down Bahadur Shah’s fortress of Mandu with two massive cannons called ‘Laila’ and ‘Majnu’. He siezed another of fortresses in Champaner in a daring action where he scaled a sheer rock face together with three hundred men using handheld spikes. After a year in the saddle, Humayun succeeded in adding almost the whole of Gujarat to the young Mughal empire. Bahadur Shah himself however was allowed to escape, though Humayun chased him to the gulf of Cambay, where he became the first person of his family to gaze upon the sea.

However, after these initial victories, Humayun ‘unfurled the carpet of pleasure’ and gave himself over to opium and wine parties and his arcane intellectual pursuits. It was during this time that Humayun’s lifelong obsession with astrology really overtook him – he constantly gazed at the cold and distant stars through his astrolabe and pored over astrology charts for signs on how to rule his kingdom,. Coming under the influence of two Shattari Sufis – highly respected Hindustani saints – Shaikh Gawth and Shaikh Phul- he took to wearing different coloured clothes on each day according to the ruling planet. He even alllowed the planets to dictate government business – so on Tuesdays, for example, he would wear the red vestment of Mars, and only conduct business of war; Sundays were days dedicated to the sun that “regulated” sovereignty and the day to wear yellow and deal with matters of state; Monday was a day of “joy” and a day to wear green; and so on. He devised a system to reorganise his government departments according to the classical elements – fire for the armed forces, air for the kitchens and the stables, water for the canals and the wine cellars, and earth for agriculture and building projects, with staff members of each department given astrologically appropriate clothing. An oft commented on astrological game designed by Humayun involved a so-called the ‘carpet of mirth’, embroidered with the constellations and where his courtiers were made to stand, sit down, or recline according to rolls of a die and various alignments of the planets.

Historians from Humayun’s time till now have delighted in recounting these incidents as those of a royal opium addict given free reign to indulge in his eccentricites, however some historians have suggested that there was some method to this apparent madness. The stars were serious business in the mediaeval world, and as much as bloodlines, or conquest, the mandate of heaven could be used to legitimise the sovereignty of young dynasties, like the Mughals were then. Humayun’s ancestor Timur had no ancient bloodline to speak of, but he had holy men declare him ‘Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction’ (Sahib Qiran), i.e. a person born under a rare alignment of Jupiter and Saturn, which marked one as a saviour of mankind and a favoured child of the heavens. These traditions harked back to the pre-Islamic pagan roots of Central Asian culture and provided an ancient alternative basis for legitimacy. Humayun would go to great lengths to ensure his eldest son was born under such a conjunction of stars, timing his conception and his birth to ensure he was born under the Auspicious Conjunction.

The association with the Sheikhs Gawth and Shiekh Phul was also in a sense political, in that it represented a break by Humayun from the Nakshabandhi Sufis of Central Asia who his family had traditionally patronised and a reorientation towards an indigenous source of legitimacy. This has been described by the historian Ira Mukhoty as “the first use by the Mughals of Hindustani intermediaries familiar with both Persian and local forms of worship” and a knowledge of “indigenous cosmological forces” Sheikh Phul in particular was believed to be able control the planets with his incantations and claimed, in the words of Mukhoty “the not inconsiderable miracle of being escorted by the angel Gabruel himself through the seven heavens to witness the glory of God”. Humayuns obsession with the mystical,in Mukhoty’s view, was an attempt to build a powerful sacred symbolism for his successors to draw on.

The lines between astrology and astronomy of course were thin those days, and so as byproduct of this obsession Humayun became a patron of mathematics and the nascent scientific movement – in fact, Humayun was quite an accomplished mathematician himself. He also was a keen inventor, designing a floating palace and a transportable bridge. A double barge which he designed cruised down the Yamuna. He also oversaw the construction of a new citadel in Delhi called ‘Dinapanah’. The citadel was later razed but its walls are still visible in Old Delhi today as part of the ‘Puranah Kila’.

The Tiger Lord comes

Humayun’s enemies, however, used this time in gather their power. Humayun chose to ignore rumours that Bahadur Shah had returned, in an alliance with the Portugese and assisted by four thousand Ethiopian mercenaries, and was slowly taking back Gujarat. Worse still in Bihar, an Afghani of the Sur Tribe called Sher Khan (literally, Tiger Lord) was being hailed as a great new war leader of the ever tumultuous Afghanis. Humayun ignored the pleas of all of his vassals in the region about the danger this man posed to him, until the Tiger Lord raised an army and conquered the wealthy region of Bengal, installing himself in its capital Gaur and sending its king to seek asylum in Humayun’s court. In 1537, Humayun was finally roused to put together an army and make a characteristically unhurried journey to Bengal.

In contrast to Humayun, Sher Khan was a man of humble origins, son of a lowly horse trader, who rose up through the ranks through sheer ability. One Mughal ambassador to his camp was surprised to see the Khan stripped naked to the waist and helping his labourers dig a trench with his own hands. This unbecoming man, who addressed the ambassador with a disarming lack of formality, would run rings around Humayun in Bengal.

Humayun’s much larger army originally had some victories and even captured Gaur. However, instead of chasing after Sher Khan and his son, Humayun decided to spend months restoring Gaurs damaged buildings and palaces, and, in the words of Jauhar “unaccountably shut himself in his harem for months”. While Humayun holidayed in his new province, Sher Khan gathered his strength, and went around the Mughal armies back, cutting them off from any retreat. At this crucial time, Humayun’s always duplicitous brothers struck again. Hindal, who was supposed to be guarding Humayun’s rear in case this very thing happened, went back to Agra and declared himself emperor, hoping that Humayun would be killed. Kamran came down from Kabul, ostensibly to punish Hindal, but with his army also did not move to help Humayun either, opting to see how the situation played out. Askari meanwhile did offer to help, but only if his brother paid him in elephants, pretty concubines, eunuchs and gold. .

After a long campaign of guerilla warfare where he whittled down Humayun’s army, Sher Khan finally lured Humayun into battle at Chausa near Varanasi and smashed his army to bits. Humayun barely escaped with his life, jumping into the Ganges and swimming to safety on an air filled water skin. He made his way back to Agra, where, incredibly and much to exasperation of all his well-wishers, he forgave his brothers and let Kamran return home to Kabul. Sher Khan, meanwhile, quickly moved to capture first Agra and then Delhi, again leaving Humayun to flee for his life. Kamran refused to give him asylum in Kabul, knowing that he would be bound to hand the city over to his brother.. It was at this point that Sher Khan revealed that Kamran had been writing to him the whole time to seek an alliance, but that he had refused to enter an alliance with someone who would so willingly betray their own family. Humayun’s supporters confronted him with this, and when they asked why he did not have Kamran killed when he had the chance, Humayun responded “No, never, for the vanities of this perishable world, will I imbrue my hands in the blood of a brother”

So it was that Sher Khan declared himself new emperor of Hindustan ‘Sher Shah Suri’. He and his son would rule for 15 years, while Humayun would spend this entire time a refugee,a king without a kingdom, wandering as his father once had. The Mughal empire, it seemed, had been completely lost, less than a decade after Babur’s death.

The Refugee Prince

So it was that Humayun began his long exile. He sought refuge in the kingdom of Sindh, whose ruler was called Haider. Haider had no intention to annoy Sher Shah, and refused Humayun asylum as well, but Humayun’s followers loitered in his land anyway, roaming from place to place. Hindal too arrived here – the only one of the brothers to remain loyal following Humayun’s general amnesty. It was during the wanderings in Sindh that Humayun first set his eyes upon his future queen consort, Hamida Banu Begum. Hamida would outlive Humayun by decades, and would become one of the most powerful women in Asia as the mother of the mighty Akbar and a shrewd political operator in her own right, but at the time she was only 15 years old. Gulbadan Begum says after that after rejecting Humayun’s proposals for forty days -needless to say, an opium befuddled young king without a kingdom would hardly have seemed a good prospect – she finally relented to marry him.

Hindal himself strongly protested the match, and threatened to withdraw his support if the marriage went ahead – leading many to suggest was in love on Hamida Banu himself. Gulbadan Begum, who would become close friends with Hamida, in fact writes that Hamida had often been seen in Hindal’s apartments. Others say Hindal was simply exasperated by his older brother, who had picked this desperate time to chase after a girl than plan his return to the throne. What was the reason however for Humayun’s sudden desire, in the midst of this desperate fight for his life, to get married, at the cost of his relationship with his only loyal brother?. It may have been lust for a teenage girl, but knowing Humayun, it very well could have been the mandate of his stars.. It cannot be a coincidence that Hamida Banu was a direct descendant of Sheikh Ahmad-e-Jami, a very famous 12th century Shia holy man from Persia known as the ‘His Reverence the Colossal Elephant’, with whom Humayun had a well-documeted obsession What we know for certain is that Humayun insisted on getting married on a specific date personally calculated using his astrolabe,. Hindal gathered his men and departed in a huff, depriving Humayun of one his last sources of support.

Here began the most dangerous parts of Humayun’s journey, through the ‘waterless wastes’ of the Thar desert with his young wife and a handful of men. This involved passing through the lands of hostile Rajput kings, who would be all too glad to get their hands on the son of Babur. One of them, the Rana of Mewar, offered Humayun sanctuary only to attempt to put him in chains and send him to Sher Shah Suri. Humayun and his party barely learned of the plan in time from a servant girl and escaped the Rana’s armies. Another, the raja of Jaisalmer, furiously pursued them, sanding over wells. Villages denied them entry, and soon Humayun’s company, reduced to eating berries, began to dwindle, through starvation and mass desertion. At one point, Humayun had to physically chase after two formerly loyal generals when they tried to escape at night and plead with them piteously to stay. Gulbadan writes that Humayun confessed to her once that his lowest point was when his men rudely refused to lend his heavily pregnant young wife Hamida one of their horses to ride after the queen’s horse collapsed. He had to give up his own horse, and ride behind his own men on a camel. She also recounts Hamida never forgetting having to kill their horses for food, and eating the boiled meat in soldiers helmets for want of bowls

When finally offered asylum by the Rajput ruler of Amarkot, Rana Prasad, the once mighty Mughal emperor had only seven horsemen in attendance on him. He would sheepishly have to confess to the Rana that he had no precious gifts to give him befitting of his station. The Hindu nobleman seems to have taken pity on Humayun, and allowed him to stay for months, emptying a fort for his residence and even providing him with some soldiers and a personal guard .It was during this dark time that, Gulbadan reports, Humayun bounded his household one morning and announced that he had a dream where he had been visited by a “venerable man dressed from head to foot in green”, whose faced burned with light. This man had declared himself none other than His Reverence the Colossal Elephant. A mighty son would be born to Humayun, the Colossal Elephant had propehesised,and then he whispered to Humayun in his dream the heaven’s chosen name for the boy.

Soon after this, at Amarkot, on a night in October ‘with the moon in Leo” Hamida gave birth to Humayun’s long sought after son, whom he would give the name from his dream – Akbar. The impoverished King celebrated the news of Akbar’s birth by breaking a pod of musk in a china bowl, enveloping the room in a rich fragrance, and distributing the pieces amongst his men “This is the only present I can afford to make you on the birth of my son, whose fame will one day spread around the world like this fragrance has spread around this room”

Humayun would soon have to leave Amarkot. For a time it seemed his fortunes were looking up, for along with the troops provided by Rana Prasad, he managed to gather some local tribesmen to him as well as some Rajput warriors, He was even rejoined by Bairam Khan, an old general and friend of his fathers, who had been captured by Sher Shah three years ago but escaped his dungeons. Askari however rode out with a large army to stomp this out, having promised Kamran Humayun’s head. Humayun’s small warband crumbled. Humayun and Hamida, with Bairam Khan’s help, escaped into the Hindukush mountains,but they had to leave their infant son Akbar behind. Akbar fell into Askari’s hands, and spent the first years of his childhood in the court of his father’s most determined enemy, Kamran. Thankfully, the baby had his eleven milk mothers, women from noble families personally chosen by Hamida to nurse the boy, who had elected to stay back with Akbar. Being too well connected to be disposed of without scandal, these ladies, amongst whom were many future grand dames of the Mughal empire such as Maham and Jiji Ananga, formed a fiercely protective ring about the abandoned baby, safeguarding him from harm until Humayun returned.

Humayun and Hamida, bereft at the loss of their son, fled to the court of the Shah of Persia, Shah Tamasp.

They spent the next few years there as distinguished refugees, a fixture in public feasts and dinner parties, constantly petitioning the Shah to help them reclaim their lost lands. The Shah eventually received them in full honours, but as a condition of receiving asylum in Persia, Humayun had to go through the further humiliation of publicly rejecting his Sunni faith and converting to Shia Islam. He also cant have been very heartened by the fact that the Persian Shah met with Sher Shah and Kamran’s ambassadors as well, sent there to persuade the Shah to hand over the false king Humayun. In the end, the Persian Shah was persuaded to support Humayun and Hamida by his sister, Shehzada Sultan, who had taken a liking to the pleasant, down on their luck couple.

The Shah eventually granted Humayun an army of 12,000 men, on the condition that he first use the army to conquer Kandahar and give it to the Persians, after which he could do with them as he willed. After a long siege, Humayun with the help of the experienced, swashbuckling Bairam Khan, captured Kandahar from Askari and marched on his brother Kamran in Kabul. Kamran’s rule in Kabul had been oppressive and tyrannical, and his men promptly defected to Humayun as he approached the city. Humayun finally defeated Kamran and was united with his now three year old son, whom he handed over to his weeping mother..

Restoration

Humayun was determined to show that he had learned from his mistakes and initially made a show of ruthlessness, killing Kamran’s supporters and having his prodigal brother bought to him in chains. However, when Kamran was brought before him, he took a whip from one of Humayun’s courtiers and put it around his own neck, and prostrated himself before Humayun like a common criminal. This was enough to break the soft hearted Humayun who exclaimed ‘there is no need for this,’, strode up to his brother and embraced him and in the words of Abu Fazl ‘wept so violently that all those who were present were touched in the heart”. He had Kamran sit beside him and share a glass of sherbert with him, and unbelievably, pardoned Kamran again. He also eventually reconciled with his other brothers.

Hindal would now remain loyal to Humayun to the end of his life, perhaps having time to gain some perspective in the years after the Hamida affair, where he had given up politics and wandered the wilds as a dervish. Kamran and Askari however were soon up to their old tricks, and within the year had raised armies again in rebellion. Though Askari would be defeated and sent packing into exile, Kamran spent eight years plundering and ravaging Humayun’s lands, even briefly recapturing Kabul twice. Hindal would be killed by Kamran during one of these skirmishes. When Kamran was finally captured,trying to escape Humayun’s men disguised in a woman’s burqah, Humayun’s courtiers all now insisted that the enemy of the state must be put to death, or Humayun would be forsaking his kingly duties.

“Brotherly custom has nothing to do with ruling” Gulbadan quotes his advisors as saying “if you wish to be a good brother, then give up your throne”.

Humayun could not bring himself to do it, but ultimately was persuaded to have Kamran blinded and sent into exile to Mecca. Jauhar, who had been ordered to massage Kamran the night before his punishment, personally witnessed the ‘light of his eyes’ being extinguished and writes that Humayun’s grief was so great that he had sent Jauhar away from his presence. The blinded Kamran went into quiet exile in Mecca, disappearing from history.

Humayun gathered his strength for almost a decade in Kabul, raising his son Akbar, Back in his abandoned lands in India, the stars he worshipped finally began coming through for him. The indomitable Sher Shah, by all accounts a just and competent ruler, came to an untimely end when a cannon exploded in his face while he was inspecting it. His son died a few years later campaigning against Rajputs, and Bahadur Shah of Gujarat was killed in a shoot out during a harebrained scheme to kidnap and ransom a Portuguese Governor. So it was that Humayun, in 1555, fifteen years after he had been chased away by Sher Shah, re-crossed the Indus which just three thousand men. On the banks of the Indus, Humayun had the twelve year old Akbar bathed and brought before him, and under a crescent moon, recited some verses of the Quran, and with each verse breathed on the prince, an old Turko-Mongol way of conferring his blessings, and was “so delighted and happy, that it could be said that he attained all the blessing of this world and the next”. Within months, Humayun troops marched into Delhi .

He did not have long to enjoy his victory. A winter night after his reconquest, he climbed to the roof of the Sher Mandal in Delhi to observe the rising of Venus. On his way back down, he tripped on his long fur robe, and fell down the stairs, hitting his temple and falling unconscious. In three days, he was dead. It had only been six months since he had regained Delhi.

Bairam Khan thundered on his horse to the camp of the thirteen year old Akbar, where he hastily oversaw the princes crowning, but already, the warlords of northern India began sharpening their weapons, sensing the barely re-established Mughal empire was up for grabs. No one would have guessed that this terrified child would have an uninterrupted rule of fifty years and leave the empire incomparably richer than he had found it. But that is another story.

For all his faults – his lack of urgency and ambition, his almost naive soft heartedness, his predilection for opium- Humayun ultimately suffered because he was a gentle man in an age of war. One of our last accounts of him was from the journal of a Turkish Admiral, Sidi Rais, who visited Humayun’s court in the final year of his life, and observed the King engaged in his favourite activities – lying down plans for new astronomical observatories and setting up a huge library. When Rais called his master the Ottoman sultan the greatest emperor since Alexander, Humayun replied “surely no other man is worthy to bear the title of king than the sultan of Turkey, him alone in this world”. Whether humility or a gentle jab, no king anywhere at the time would have tolerated even in jest being compared unfavourably to another, and Sidi Rais sneeringly reports this unkingly humility as proof of the emperors weakness. To modern readers though, Humayun’s self-effacing nature is far more endearing than the self aggrandising bombast of his contemporary peers.

It is common to hear stories of kings who gained kingdoms by murdering their brothers, but rarer to hear a story of kings who lost their kingdoms by refusing to do so. Yet, Humayun in spite of everything persevered, and regained his home on his own terms, and set the foundation on which his son would build an empire. He was buried in his chosen homeland, far from the Steppes of his ancestors, and lies there still , in his cold marble tomb amidst the bustling streets of Old Delhi. Hamida is buried there as well, as are many of their famous descendants, and for now, the government of India still protects and safeguards their resting place. With the rewriting of history to wipe the Mughals names from our past, one can only hope that he is not made an exile once again in his afterlife, though it would be a fate one would imagine he would bear with equanimity.

Amongst young so-called liberals who are my contemporaries, there is a misguided notion that rejection of the ‘classics’ is a form of ‘decolonisation’. Actual figures in the history of decolonisation would consider this foolishness. The liberator of Haiti from the French and organiser of the worlds first and arguably most successful slave revolt, Toussaint Louverture, was a huge admirer of the ancient Romans, irrespective of the fact that he knew as an educated man that they were slavers. It is because Toussaint knews his classics that he could spin revolutionary messages that identified himself and his movement with characters from the ancient world like Lucretia, Hannibal, and of course Spartacus – he bore the eptithet ‘Black Spartacus’ with great pride. It was precisely this which allowed his message to have a global dimension and capture the imaginations of Western Europeans, even in the eighteenth century.

  Similarly, the great Trinidadian Marxist CLR James, that passionate chronicler of Western imperialism and campaigner for West Indian independence from Britain, who witnessed the end of colonialism in his lifetime and celeberated the liberation of Ghana along with Kwame Nkrumah and partied with Leon Trotsky, was a huge admirer of the ancient Greeks, and the very British pastimes of cricket and reading William Makepeace Thackerey. People such as these understood the importance of taking knowledge from where to get it and would not simply reject wisdom of ages and the collective inheritance of humanity because a comprehensive review of everything that a certain ancient had said or done revealed unsavoury points of view that don’t sit well with a respected person of the twenty first century  – indeed, they valued knowledge because their worlds put up so many barriers to their receiving this knowledge. Same with Marx, the Jacobins and the Leninists – for all their rejection of the traditional organisation of society, they knew their classics and strenghtened their own views with the universal messages that can be distilled from these writings. 

Of course, to call ancient Rome and Greece ‘Western’ in the sense we understand now would be somewhat of a misnomer, as the concept of race as we understand it was alien to them. To be a ‘Hellene’ simply meant adopting the language and customs of the ancient Greeks and had no racial dimension-  in this, for all their ‘primitive’ views the ancient Greeks were far more advanced than contemporary Europeans.Such distinctions mattered even less in the ancient world – we say the Roman empire ‘fell’ when Rome fell to the Germans, , but in reality Rome hadnt been the capital of Rome for centuries when this happened and had long been consigned to the periphery while the empire itself had relocated its capital to Constantinople in Anatolia, which incidentally, the Romans considered their mythical homeland as descendents of the legendary Aeneas. Rome thus persisted in Turkey for hundreds of years as the ‘Byzantine’ empire, which however always called itself the Roman empire, because that is what it was, since the time of Constantine. Then, this new Rome ‘fell’ to the Turks, but only from a certain perspective. The Ottoman sultan, after the conquest of Constantinople, took the title Sultan-e-Rum, the Sultan of Rome, and it is by this title that he was known throughout the Muslim world and South Asia. The celebrated Persian poet Jalaluddin Muhammad Balkhi is best known to the world today by his Arabic nickname ‘Rumi’, literally ‘the Roman’.What then does the term east or west mean when applied to Rome, when Rome has been in the middle east for centuries? 
There is of course the very real current problem of the exploitation of the Global South by the institutions of global liberalism, based mostly in Europe and the USA, but this is a completely different discussion to the reality of cultural fact of an ‘east’ and ‘west’. European colonialists created these concepts, but they are given a strange second life by these students of postcolonialism. Indeed, a conspiracy theorist might surmise that these postcolonial theories rejecting Western classics, insofar as they are propagated by liberal institutions, encourage the rejection of knowledge by  the working classes, the traditional aim of the elites. To refuse to read Voltaire because he was an Islamophobe, Aristotle because he believed in slavery and the inferiority of women, to reject the works of the suffragettes becase so many of their leaders in Britain were anti-semites, is a great act of moronism. Woe betide the society in which subjective lived experience is festishised to the extent that it rejects the need entirely of the writings of the thinkers of old, for that society would have shorn itself from the great tree from which it was born.

Or, Reasons to celebrate May 5

Cinco de Mayo! For many, this Mexican holiday is simply an opportunity to guzzle coronas, eat tacos, and stumble around in a beerdrunk rampage wearing stereotypical fake ponchos, borderline racist moustaches and sombreros. The affectionate American name for the holiday is Cinco de Drinko, and that more or less sums up what most people know about it.

The holiday in fact exists to commemorate the battle of Puebla, an important event in the history of Mexico. Puebla was where, on 5 May 1862, a poorly equipped Mexican battalion of six hundred men under one Ignacio Zaragoza defeated a better equipped and technologically advanced French army of six thousand five hundred, sent by the French emperor Louis Napoleon the Third. The young and impoverished Mexican republic was at the time only forty years independent from Spain and reeling from a recent civil war. A progressive party, committed to establishing a republic in Mexico, had emerged victorious, but had no sooner assumed power that it had war declared upon it by the three most powerful empires of the age – Britain, Spain and France.

The official reason for this humanitarian intervention? To restore good government and end the anarchy in Mexico. The real reason probably had more to do with the fact that the new president had declared that that the poor country would not repay its debts to Spanish, British and French creditors for two years, so that it could focus on rebuilding after civil war. It was Louis Napoleon who eventually sent an army to capture Mexico city.

The world expected a quick victory for the French. Zaragosa ‘s desperate stand at Puebla would see that it would not be so. He met the French at Guadalupe and Loreto and manned a stunning defence of the city – only ninety of his men would die, compared to one thousand French soldiers that would lay dead at Puebla, among them members of feared elite French legionnaire corps.

Louis Napoleon, would throw every thing he had at Mexico. Eventually, France would prevail. But Puebla and Zaragosa remained a powerful national memory and rallying point for the Mexican resistance, and by 1867, Mexico was independent again.

5 May is also the birthday of one firebrand political journalist for the New York Tribune by the name of Karl Marx. Marx reported often and passionately on the situation in Mexico.

In a Tribune Article written in London, November 1861, Marx says, ‘The contemplated intervention in Mexico by England, France, and Spain, is, in my opinion, one of the most monstrous enterprises ever chronicled in the annals of international history’. Rubbishing the great powers stated objective that the intervention was meant to end the ‘anarchy’ in Mexico, Marx bluntly states, “There exist in England no people desirous of an intervention in Mexico save the Mexican bondholders’. He says

“The Blue Book on the intervention in Mexico, just published, contains the most damning exposure of modern English diplomacy with its hypocritical cant, ferocity against the weak, crawling before the strong, and utter disregard of international law…The despatches exchanged between Downing Street and the British representatives of Mexico [are] the irrefragable proof that the present imbroglio is of English origin, that England took the initiative in bringing about the intervention, and did so on pretexts too flimsy and self-contradictory to even veil the real but unavowed motives of her proceedings. The infamy of the means employed in starting the intervention is only surpassed by the anile imbecility with which the British government affect to be surprised at and slink out of the execution of the nefarious scheme planned by themselves.”

Zarogosa’s great defeat of Louis Napoleon on his birthday would no doubt have brought Marx some birthday cheer. Marx regarded Louis Napoleon a ridiculous and vapid figure, whose only credit lay in being able to claim to be a descendant of the Napoleon. It was Louis Napoleon’s overthrow of the seconnd French Republic, echoing his ancestors more famous overthrow of the original republic, that had moved Marx to pen one of his most famous sayings, ‘History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’.

Louis Napoleon had spent his youth as a socialite in London before becoming elected president on a campaign of essentially the nineteenth century equivalent of ‘make France great again’. After his win, he promptly suspended the constitution and declared himself emperor. He was keen to cover himself in martial glory worthy of his ancestor, but Ignacio Zaragosa trouncing the French army on 5 May would cover him only in ridicule. But as much as he loathed Louis Napoleon, for Marx Mexico was indicative of the logic of 19th century imperialism. Behind the great civilizing rhetoric of Western Europe lay the interests of bankers and capital.

In his much overlooked career as a political journalist, Marx reported widely on the momentous events of his day – India and the 1857 Sepoy uprising against British rule, the Opium Wars in China, the Crimean War, Turkey, the Anglo Persian War of 1857, the French and Spanish colonialisation of North Africa and of course on Mexico – all of which shaped his views greatly on bourgeoisie capitalist civilisation. For Marx, it would not have been an accident that the age of colonialism began with the birth of capitalism.

In his genuine concern for the rights of non-Europeans, Marx differentiated himself greatly from his contemporary socialists and anarchists like Proudhon, Blanqui and Louis Blanc, who were either indifferent to the rights of non-Europeans or even actively supportive of colonialism as a way of saving the white European working class. Indeed, Marx would move on quite significantly from his own youthful views in the Manifesto, where he had suggested the capitalist mode of development to be relatively beneficial for the lesser developed nations compared to ancient modes of feudalism. There would be none of this in his essays on British Rule in India ten years later :

“A [colonial] government never had more than three departments: finance (plunder at home), war (plunder at home and abroad), and public works (provision for reproduction). The British government in India has administered Nos. 1 and 2 in a rather philistine spirit and dropped No. 3 entirely, so that Indian agriculture is being ruined…The ruling classes of Great Britain have had, till now, transitory interest in the progress of India. The aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the moneyocracy to plunder it, and the millocracy to undersell it.”

For Marx, it was increasingly clear that colonialism was the true reasons why capitalism was successful in the West, and defeating the one went hand in hand with the defeat of the other. When one reads the passage quoted above by Marx on English intervention in Mexico, one is struck by the eerie familiarity of it all.

So, on the next 5 May, let us raise a glass to Marx on his birthday if for nothing else his passionate opposition to colonialism, and to Zaragosa for his immortal victory over the those same forces of liberal humanitarian colonialism, for though the names of the conflicts may be different, their times are still our times.

In the late 1760s, the ageing French King Louis XV made a magnanimous gift to his young courtesan lover Jeanne Becu, the Countess du Barry – the gift of a seven year old ‘African’ slave. The gift was a great hit with his lover – in the memoir attributed to her by the nineteenth century Baron Lamothe Langon, the Countess apparently regarded the young African boy as her third most treasured possession, after her dog Dorine, and serving lady Henriette “In honour of the tragedy of Alzire, I christened my little negro Zamor, to whom by degrees I became attached with all the tenderness of a mother.”

Though the difference between continents may well have been lost on the Countess du Barry, when ‘Zamor’ finally did speak in his own voice, after the French Revolution, he recorded that he was not from Africa at all but from India, born in the Chittagong province of Bengal. It also seems that whatever ‘maternal’ affections that may have been lavished upon him, it was not enough to prevent Zamor from revenging himself on his Mistress during the Revolution. In the days following the fall of the Bastille, Zamor would go on to enthusiastic supporter of the Jacobin party. This is his story, and the story of the Revolutions own relationship with France’s colonial and slave-owning legacy.

I

The erstwhile Bengal subah of the Mughal empire where Zamor was born comprises the modern Indian states of West Bengal and Bihar and the entirety of the country of Bangladesh. The famously wealthy province was conquered in 1757 by the British East India Company. Zamor was trafficked to France by British slave traders via the island of Madagascar. The child ended up being sold as an exotic curiosity to Louis XV, who in turn gifted it to the Countess. Lamothe-Langone records Du Barry’s account of how the child Zamor came into her service “This son of Africa was presented to me by the duc de Richelieu, clad in the picturesque costume of his native land; his head ornamented with feathers of every colour, a short petticoat of plaited grass around his waist, while the richest bracelets adorned his wrists, and chains of gold, pearls, and rubies, glittered over his neck and hung from his ears.”

One doesnt need to be an expert in traditional Indian clothing to know this bears no resemblance to any eighteenth century Bengali ‘costume’, picaresque or otherwise. Zamors origin was irrelevant – the gift was that of a ‘black page’, and any exotic looking child would do. Having a servant with dark skin was a status symbol in Europe, signalling the global reach of an aristocratic household. The affirmation of status from would have been all the more important for the Countess who owed her title and position in society entirely to being the last official royal mistress – Maîtresse-en-titre – to Louis XV.

Whatever the case, Zamor quickly became a favourite accessory to the Countess du Barry, seen everywhere with her,as his primary duty was to ‘carry her robe’ wherever she went. He has continued to accompany her in all of DuBarry’s various portrayals in film and literature – making an appearance as an unnamed page even in Sofia Coppolla’s strangely royalist 2006 Marie Antoinette film.

The Countess du Barry makes much of how well she treated her page. She had him christened at an elaborate ceremony as Louis Benoit Zamor, attended by the King himself. In some accounts Louis XV even consented to be the boys’ godfather. Zamor was given the not incredibly taxing but fairly demeaning position of cupbearer to the Countess’s dog Dorine, who drank coffee from a golden saucer and dined on cakes prepared by professional patisserie chefs. For the Countess’s amusement the King bestowed upon Zamor the title of Governer of Pavillon de Lucienne, with the attendant income and papers complete witn royal seal presented to him by the Chancellor. However, his purpose primarily seems to have been that of jester – the young Louis Benoit spent most of his time entertaining his Mistress with what she referred to as his ‘monkey tricks’. For the amusement of the Countess’s guests, he would juggle, dance and roll on the carpet at her command. Other amusements included making him pronounce difficult words and laughing at his accent, making him dance in his little grass skirt for treats, or threatening to flog him just to watch his terrified reaction, before relenting and ‘forgiving him’. As a boy, he would be dressed as cupid, and carry a a parasol over her and the King XV as they sat in the garden. In her memoirs, her little ‘imp of Africa’s’ tricks are usually mentioned alongside her dog Dorine, between whom, she says with amusement, a mutual dislike existed. Elsewhere, Zamor is condescendingly referred to as a ‘two legged pug’, ‘a human chimera’ and even a ‘sapajou’, a kind of capuchin monkey.

As far as the Countess was concerned, Zamor had the very best of upbringings. “I have never ceased to lavish kindness on him, and to be, in every sense of the word, a good mistress to him”. According to Zamor’s testimony his upbringing to a revolutionary tribunal years later it was anything but – he was nothing more than a pet, a plaything, and had to endure the constant scorn and derision of her household staff, who treated him like an animal.

Perhaps it was this that made Zamor pursue a self-education with vigour. Zamor became an avid reader of Rosseau. Like many enlightenment thinkers whose views were sweeping Europe, Rosseau challenged the divine nature of kingship and believed in equality before the law. What differentiated Rosseau from most enlightenment philosophers was his diagnosis of the reasons behind inequality. Rosseau thought that it would not be enough, as his contemporaries did, to abolish feudalism and the end the arbirtrary rule of princes and popes. As long as differences in wealth existed, there would never be true equality. “The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.“

Unlike Hobbes or Voltaire, Rosseau did not believe that men was innately cruel, but rather that it was a society based on property which had made man brutal. Not only would this make him one of the earliest materialist political philosophers, it also made him prone to idolise cultures he thought untainted by the concept of ‘civil’ society, like the ‘savages’ of America. Though Rosseau is now rightly criticised for being an early adopter of the ‘noble savage’ stereotype, in a time when European superiority over non-white cultures was assumed even by enlightenment thinkers, this would have been refreshing point of view to the young Zamor. It would also have made him more and more disgusted with the ostentatious displays of wealth in his mistress’s household, that were not only normal but expected of the aristocracy.

With the death of her lover Louis XV, the Countess now found herself out of favour and banished to the country side in her estates in Louveciennes. While the Countess’s star fell, the now twenty year old Zamor would have looked at the uncertainty that loomed on the horizon as a vast ocean of possibility.

II

It was in the reign of Louis XVI, of course, that the creaking feudal apparatus of the ancien regime finally came crashing down. By 1788 France was bankrupt and suffering from famine, leading to almost daily protests against the government. In July 1789, the streets of Paris rose up and captured the Parisian fortress of Bastille and the minds of entire generation. Louis XVI had no choice but to agree to recognise the newly constituted ‘National Assembly’ as the supreme authority of France and reduce himself overnight to a figurehead.

This first stage of the revolution was dominated by moderate liberals who had no intention of doing away with traditional heirarchies. The monarchy would be reformed as it had in England, replaced by a modern constitutional monarchy where the king remained the ‘father of the nation’ but a legislative assembly exercised all the power. There would be democracy, but in the oligarchic mould of the ‘democracies’ of England and the United States, where only rich, white, land owning men would have the right to vote and be elected to the National Assembly. The economy would be liberalised, freed from the royal hand and delivered to the the invisible hand of the free market. The church would be reformed but France would remain Catholic

Increasingly more radical views emerged, advocating ridiculous demands– voting rights for all men , a secular state, abolishment of all noble land and titles, redistribution of aristocrat wealth, and, increasingly, the abolishment of the monarchy and the execution of the King. These eventually coalesced around the Jacobin club, which began life as a pretty average political association of liberal thinkers, but which became smaller and more radical by their active involvement with the street associations of thse urban workers, artisans and fishwives that had actually conquered the Bastille while the gentlemen of the National Assembly gave grand speeches about liberty in Versailles. In our politically conservative times, the Jacobins are only remembered for being in power in those two years called by modern liberals and conservatives alike as the Great Terror. My views on the Jacobins and the extent to which they can be held responsible for the bloody internecine struggles in year II and III of the revolutionary era is beyond the scope of this piece. I only mention them beause it was was this side that Zamor joined after the Revolution.

The affiliation of Zamor, and other prominent revolutionaries of colour such as Dumas and the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, to the infamous Jacobin club can perhaps be explained by one story. In the first year of the Revolution, the National Assembly received a surprising delegation from the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti). It comprised of two wealthy men of colour from the said slave colony who happened to be in Paris at the time- Vincent Oge and Julien Raimond. They approached the new National Assembly and asked the simple question – with all this talk of liberte, egalite, fraternite – would the Assembly then pronounce that freed people of colour had the same rights as white men in the colonies, including the right to vote? Though their demands didn’t quite extend to abolishing slavery, it caused a ripple through the National Assembly. The men of commerce and trade who had replaced princes and kings in this new France of course had no intention of disrupting Saint Domingues very profitable sugar trade, which ran entirely on slave labour. The majority in the National Assembly clearly never intended for the Rights of Man to apply to people of colour, and certainly hadn’t contemplated giving France’s colonial subjects the right to vote. Oge returned to Saint Domingue disappointed, but would go on for his part to contribute to what would become the Haitian Revolution.

In revolutionary France however, the question of slavery however began to split the National Assembly in some increasingly fractious debates, culminating in a ten day showdown in May 1791 with delegates from the colonial administration of Saint Domingue, this time representing slave owners. The majority sided with the slave-owners, represented by a wealthy plantation owner called Moreau-de Saint Maury, who assured the National Assembly in no uncertain terms that should they even begin to contemplate extending the Rights of Man to the colonies, the colonies would secede from France. This spooked the head of the Assembly, Barnave. who urged caution to the National Assembly ‘by pronouncing on the status of coloured peoples, you run the risk of losing the colonies’

This caused one then unknown delegate called Maximillien Robespierre – the very same who would became the face of the Jacobin party in the years of ‘the Terror’ – to get up and say “The moment you pronounce, in one of your decrees, the word slave, you will be pronouncing your own dishonour and the overthrow of your constitution…Faugh! Perish your colonies, if you are keeping them at that price. Yes, if you either to lose your colonies or lose your happiness, glory, liberty, I would repeat; perish your colonies”

The slave-owners would win the day and Robespierre would lose. It would be a year before the Jacobin uprising led by Danton and Robespierre would establish the Insurrectionary Commune in 1792. One of the Commune’s achievements would be to proclaim a law abolishing slavery throughout the colonies. These years also saw black revolutionaries like Dumas, Saint-Georges and Raimond volunteer for service in the revolutionary army, with Dumas eventually becoming the first black general of France. After the conservative-moderate counter-revolution in July 1794 against the Jacobins, these people of colour would disappear from the revolution. After this would begin the rise of the French Empire and of Napoleon, one of whose first acts would be to repeal the decree and reintroduce slavery.

III

It was during the Jacobin ‘takeover’ in 1792 to 1794 that Zamor’s revolutionary career blossomed. Zamor came to the attention of Jean-Paul Marat, the infamous journalist and champion of the Parisian working class, whose fiery rhetoric against the aristocracy and the moderates often sees him (arguably unfairly) held responsible for the worst excesses of the Parisian mobs. After the Insurrection saw the rise of his allies Robespierre and Danton, Marat was appointed to head the dreaded Comité de Surveillance Révolutionnaire, the surveillance committee set up by to report on counter-revolutionary activities. Zamor became a willing informant for the revolutionary surveillance committee during this time, delivering reports on the activities of the Countess du Barry, in whose household he continued to be employed. Not only did the revolution give young Zamor purpose, but comradeship as well – it was reported during this time he became very close to the “revolutionary patriots named Blache, Salenave, Fremont and many others..”

Zamor compiled reports on the Countess for the committee documenting her numerous trips to England, with whom France was at war, and her role assisting in the flight of aristocrat emigres from France. Zamor would later claim that he had tried, after one of these trips, to persuade his Mistress not to aid the enemies of the Revolution. The Countess, finally figuring out that Zamor had been collaborating with the Paris Commune, dismissed him from her service, giving him three days to vacate her house. Zamor left immediately. She would see him again when she returned from one of her trips to England, in her own living room in the company of George Grieve of the Committee of Public Safety, with a warrant ordering her immediate arrest and the confiscation of her estates and her wealth.

Zamor’s testimony brought DuBarry before a revolutionary tribunal in December 1793. Zamor also gave evidence at her hearing, looking his former Mistress in the eye as he gave evidence which would lead to her conviction.

On 7^th December 1793 Du Barry was sentenced to death. The next day the Countess was taken in a tumbril to the guillotine in the Place de La Revolution. Her ascent up the guillotine was not pretty- she screamed and snarled, more like a trapped animal than a human being‘, before her last words to the executioner ‘please do not hurt me’.

It was Zamor who signed the death warrant of his former mistress. Zamor used this opportunity to finally reclaim his identity, placidly signing his testimony as “Louis-Benoit Zamor, né au Bengale, dans l’Inde…[Louis-Benoit Zamor, born in Bengal, in India…], finally putting an end to the questions about his background,.

In popular retellings of this time, it is to aristocrats like Du Barry to whom our sympathy is directed – after all, aristocrats and princes are the protagonists of most history. But it is precisely in this time, when people such as the Dubarry’s are treated ‘inhumanely’ that invisible people like Zamor, who in times of peace was treated as subhuman, suddenly became human, a testament to the emancipatory potential of revolutions. For the word of a former slave to be taken over the word of an aristocrat – this was truly a world turned upside down. Zamor found gainful employment after this with the Revolution, serving as secretary to the Revolutionary Surveillance Committee, a full office-holder in the Committee of Public Safety.

Of course, his story, like many in those tumultous years, had a bleak end. The Jacobin party always had less control over events even during their brief ‘rule’ than popular imagination has attirbuted to them. As a partisan of Robespierre, Zamor was arrested by a faction of Robespierre’s enemies, known as the Girondins. The reports say that all he had in his bedroom was hung portraits of Marat and Robespierre and a shelf of books by Rosseau. His friends in the Revolution secured his release months later, but Zamor decided to flee France and the orgy of bloodletting which erupted between Robespierre and the Girondins. After that Zamor fades once again into obscurity. The next mention we have of him is only decades later, on the occasion of his lonely death in Paris in 1820 after some time spent as a schoolteacher. He was buried as an ’emancipated slave’ from India.

Today, when the revolution’s memory is met with derision or presented as a cautionary tale,, and names like Robespierre and Marat uttered with revulsion by any respectable historian, so has Zamor’s remarkable story been forgotten or actively minimised. In fact, there has been much recent fascination with DuBarry – a French national dish is named after her, there have been no less than ten Hollywood films featuring the character, not to mention novels, plays, academic articles, biographies and even a Japanese ‘manga’ comic book – and once again Zamor has been reduced to an irrelevance, a well-treated but faithless servant, even by modern historians. He is once again remembered only as DuBarry’s nameless plaything, bound to her in eternal servitude while she enjoys second life in film and theatre. For a brief moment however, Zamor, went from a nameless slave to a revolutionary living in the full light of history.

On the morning 5th of October, 1789, a young Parisian market woman started banging a drum around La Halle in the fauborg Sant-Antoine in Paris.  Her complaint, about the price of bread, was hardly an uncommon refrain that year. The starving city had seen almost daily riots about bread, and there was not a  bakery in the city that was not under armed guard. What was uncommon was what happened next. By mid-day, about two thousand women had gathered to answer her call.  ‘Your children are dying of hunger; if your husbands are perverted and cowardly enough not to want to look for bread for them, then the only thing left for you to do is to slit their throats.’  The two thousand women resolved to march on City Hall to demand the mayor answer for letting Paris starve.  Their journey would take them all the way to the royal palace at Versailles, an audience with the King Louis XVI and one of the most dramatic episodes of the French Revolution.

On the Revolution

The great historian Hobsbawn once observed  ‘If the economy of the nineteenth century world was formed mainly under the influence of the British Industrial Revolution, its politics and ideology were formed mainly by the French. Britain provided the model for its railways and factories…but France made its revolutions and gave them their ideas.’

It was in the crucible of the French Revolution that both liberalism and socialism in their modern senses were born. Even if now the traditional Marxist analysis of the Revolution as a bourgeois liberal revolution is being challenged, it cannot be denied that when the dust settled its main benefactors were the men of the new liberal capitalist class, typified by their champion the Marquis Lafayette, a liberal reformist aristocrat. The great triumph of these monied gentlemen was the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’ in 1789.  ‘All men are born and remain free and equal in rights’  these words ended the entire basis of feudalism and overthrew Europe’s most traditional aristocracy, who had only yesterday seemed invulnerable to the reforms spreading through Europe. It also allowed the new ‘middle class’ of bankers, merchants and wealthy traders access to the great offices of state traditionally reserved for the aristocracy. 

However this victory was only made possible by a temporary alliance of the liberal gentlemen with those urban labouring classes whose aims were those espoused by the Jacobins during their brief and tumultuous ascendancy in Paris in their decidedly more radical egalitarian ‘constitution of 1793’ – which included amongst other things the unprecedented demand for universal male suffrage and the redistribution of wealth. Before the revolution in Moscow in 1917, the Jacobin Insurrectionary Commune was ‘the Revolution’ to which radical socialists in nineteenth century Europe aspired . Like Hobsbawn would observe, every revolution in Europe prior to 1917 aspired either to the principles of 89 or the more ‘incendiary’ ones of 93.  As we shall see, it was working class market women who were key to bringing about the radical phase of 93.

The revolutionnaires

This historical era generally is not lacking in  remarkable women. There was the giant of the liberal movement, the progressive aristocrat Madame Germaine De Stahl, whose salons in the early years of the revolution were the meeting place of the ages greatest philosophers and thinkers and the centre of all its early intrigues (‘Go hence to Madame de Stahl’s’ wrote the US ambassador to Paris in 1791 in his private journal ‘I meet here all the world’). There was the liberal intellectual Madame Manon Roland, one of the first to call for the overthrow of the king (Mme Roland: ‘I had hated kings since I was a child and I could never witness without an involuntary shudder the spectacle of a man abasing himself in front of another man). Though she was destined to fatally fall out with the insurrectionary commune over her belief in free markets and federalism as the basis of the new Republic, Mme Roland’s immediate circle dominated the politics of the early years of the Revolution.

On the left you had Pauline Leon, a chocolate maker who participated in the storming of the Bastille and who came to be associated with a faction disparagingly called the enrages, the angered ones, so radical they considered Robespierre as ‘too soft’ on the aristocracy. A tomboy fond of sporting her red cap of liberty with a sword and two pistols tucked in her belt, Pauline Leon was a regular sight at the meetings of the National Convention where she would heckle and harangue the liberals she so detested. 

Her closest friend and fellow enrage was the actress Claire Lacombe, with whom she would found the society of Revolutionary Republican Women. Their patrols of pike, sword and pistol bearing all female volunteers were the terror of the respectable classes of Paris. (A troupe of furies, avid on carnage, as one opponent described them.)  Lacombe herself had been in the very front lines of the fighting in the insurrection that established the Insurrectionary Commune. She was shot through the arm while storming the royal palace of Tulierres, and kept on fighting nonetheless, earning her the sobriquet the ‘heroine of August tenth’.

It was Leon and Lacombe who would articulate ideas which only existed on the most extreme fringes of the left– that of women’s complete political emancipation. In this, sadly, they would prove too far ahead of her time, horrifying even their left wing Jacobin colleagues who tripped over themselves to distance themselves from the project of womens political emancipation – women in France would only get the right to vote in 1944.

But beyond all these famous names, it is  working class Parisian market women who are responsible for the urban working class uprising that followed the end of the liberal phase in 1789. After the abolishing of feudalism and the declaration of a constitutional monarchy in the dramatic summer of 89, executive power seemingly passed overnight from the autocratic King to the newly created National Assembly. Little would change however for the ordinary men and women who had propelled this new government to power, and Paris continued to be convulsed throughout August and September 89 by almost daily demonstrations by labourers, artisans and bakers.  The National Assembly came to be dominated by a conservative faction led by Mounier, keen on ensuring the new voting rights be extended only to men of wealth and the king be preserved as head of state with a royal veto over all legislation. The King himself was refusing to sign decrees abolishing noble privileges and the Rights of Man, and ominously gathering troops around his palace of Versailles. With regulation of the market relaxed due to the liberals cherished commitment to the free market, the price of bread skyrocketed, prompting the  rabble rousing journalist Marat to write about their betrayal ‘today, the horrors of dearth are felt once more, the bakeries are under siege,  the people are short of bread, and it is after the richest harvest. Can there be any doubt we are surrounded by traitors who consummated our ruin?’ Demonstrations were met with repression indistinguishable from the autocracy of Louis XVI. (Mirabeau – The people are crying for bread – what monster answers this with gunshots?’) As Michelet says ‘Nobody felt all this more deeply than women. The most extreme sufferings had falled cruelly on the family hearth.’

And so it all came to a head on October 5, 1789. The two thousand women answered the banging of the young market girls alarm drum. They marched to the Hotel De Ville (‘City Hall’) of Paris, loudly shouting for bread.  The Hotel De Ville was surrounded by mounted cavalry and infantry of the National Guard. Undetterred, the ‘housewives of Paris’ charged them , armed only with stones. The order went out to shoot, but the National Guardsmen firmly told their commanders they would not fire on the women. So they simply melted away before the women’s charge.

Forcing the door with pickaxes, hammers and hatchets, the women broke into the Hotel De Ville and ejected every man from the building. ‘Men were cowards.’ they declared ‘They (the women) would show them what courage was.’ As the historian Lucy Moore says “this violent appropriation of previously proscribed places was the first delight of the revolution..walking at ease where one was once forbidden to enter..for women, restricted by their gender as well as status, these new liberties were all the more potent.’ Men were deliberately barred from the occupation of the Hotel De Ville, as “they had failed as providers and as administrators.”

The women then armed themselves with weapons ransacked from the Hotel De Ville, including four cannons.  Realising that there was little the hapless gentlemen of the Paris government could do, they decided to go visit the ‘Baker’ in Versailles – the King – and present their petition to the National Assembly themselves. An eyewitness testimony reads , ‘In the middle of the Champs Elysées, …he saw detachments of women coming up from every direction, armed with broomsticks, lances, pitchforks, swords, pistols, and muskets.’ By evening there was about 7,000 women in a long procession to the royal chateau, dragging behind them the cannons to besiege the palace if the King did not answer them.

 On the way the women sang poissarde (fisherwomen) songs, such as one called the Market Women of La Halle

‘If the High Ups still make trouble,

 then let the devil confront them, 

and since they love gold so much, 

let it melt in their mouths, 

that is the sincere wish, 

of the women who sell fish‘

So the women marched, fourteen miles in pouring rain, to Versailles. When they finally arrived, they were greeted with delighted cries of ‘Vivent Nos Parissiennes!’. They would be joined at Versailles by a former courtesan Theroigne De Mericourt, dramatically attired in a “scarlet riding-habit and… black plume” with a sword by her side and riding a black horse. Always dressed in mens clothes and ready for a fight, Mericourt, like Lacombe, would in later be awarded a civic crown for her role in the uprising of August 10 that established the Insurrectionary Commune – her legend would grow even more when she was imprisoned in Austria for spreading revolutionary propaganda abroad, earning her the title ‘Amazon of Liberty’. For now, she would assist the women by deploying her charms to persuade some of the Royal Bodyguards, alarmed by this filthy army that had descended upon them, into giving up their weapons.

A delegation of fifteen women, drenched and mud splattered, were chosen to present to the National Assembly accusations of price gouging and grain hoarding  by the rich, naming, amongst others, the archbishop of Paris. Their sole ally on the National Assembly, one Maximillien Robespierre, confirmed the accusations to the Assembly and demanded an inquiry into grain hoarding. Before the frightened delegates could respond, the thousands of women gathered outside managed to burst into the National Assembly, alleging they had been fired on by Royal bodyguards.  The alarmed delegates quickly obtained from the King a signed declaration that all excess grain and flour would be sent immediately to Paris for distribution. He would immediately the decrees abolishing artistocratic privileges and ratify the Rights of Man. However, when the women demanded that the King and the National Assembly return with them to Paris, the King dithered. The women refused to concede this point, and set up camp outside the Royal Palace. The situation escalated late at night on the 5th of October. The head of the National Guard and the ‘hero of the revolution’ Marquis Lafayette finally showed up. He had originally hoped to inspire order by his presence, but his own National Guardsmen let him know that they would support the protesting women, some firing shots above his head, some threatening to hang him if he got in their way. Lafayette therefore had to go to the King alone, and assure him that regardless of what happened with his men, he would die protecting the King.

Then, in the early hours of the morning, some women managed to break into the Royal apartments themselves. Panicked bodyguards fired on them, killing one of them. The crowd, enragedd, rampaged through the palace, killing two of the royal guard. The king found himself and his children barricaded in his rooms while the market women shouted for royal blood. The particularly loathed Marie Antoinette was chased  barefoot by a number of these women before finding refuge behind a secret door.  The King had no choice but to agree to return to Paris.

On the morning of 6 October, a shaken Lafayette would escort his king to Paris at the heart of a procession of what was now sixty thousand people.  Behind them trailed a procession of wagons with food from the King’s personal stores. The National Guard who accompanied the king were joined by the market women who marched with green branches tied to their rifles, the cannons wreathed with laurels, singing that they had brought back the baker, the bakers wife and the bakers son. Amongst this ‘at once joyous and  mournful’ procession, the heads of the killed royal bodyguards were brandished on pikes. Royalists and conservatives throughout Europe were outraged. The British Prime Minister Burke decried  them as ‘abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women’, to which Mary Wollenstonecraft contemptuously retorted ‘you mean women who gained a livelihood selling vegetables or fish, who never had the advantages of education’.

Aftermath

The women who sold fish and vegetables had indeed accomplished the unthinkable. As the historian Michelet says ‘Men captured the Bastille, but it was women who captured the King’.  5 Octobers heralded a wave of unprecedented political participation  by women with a new self-confidence. This was a time when all men, royalist or republican, liberal or Jacobin, believed that women were distinct from men by nature and biology. They were ‘designed’ for domestic rather than public life, more susceptible to emotion and less capable of rational thought. One can imagine the general discomfort when, one month after 5 October, a woman journalist writing for Les Etrennes Nationales hailed the Parisiennes march, saying ‘we suffer more then men, who despite their declarations of rights leave us in a state of inferiority, and, lets be truthful, of slavery.’ 

Twenty seven cities saw the formation of left wing womens only political clubs in 1789 to 1790. All female companies of the National Guard were formed across France. Women met at the halls below the Jacobin Club, and addressed the radical Cordeliers Club, frequented by men such as Robespierre and Danton. Marat, despised then and now by liberals for his ‘far left views’, was perhaps because of these views one of these women societies’ most enthusiastic advocates, declaring them a gift of providence, to make up for the Jacobins many faults. 1790 saw a motion being raised to extend civil and political rights to women by the Marquis Condorcet in the National Convention, which though doomed from the start

was remarkable in even being proposed. In 1791 the playwright Olympe De Gouges penned her ‘Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen’ in which deliberately referencing the rights of man she declared that ‘women is born free and equal to men in rights’ and “the only limit to the exercise of the natural rights of woman is the perpetual tyranny of man that opposes  it” 

The apotheosis of the moment came in May 1793 with the formation of the Claire Lacombes and Paulin Leon’s feared society of Revolutionary Republican Women. Madame Petronille Machefer, a street vendor who had now started writing articles under the name La Mere Duschene, wrote ‘let us prove to men that we can equal them in politics. We shall denounce everything that is contrary to the Constitution and above all the rights of women, and we shall teach them there is more spirit and activity in a woman’s little finger than in the whole body of a fat layabout like my very dear husband’

The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women declared their intention that all women from the age eighteen to fifty would form their own seperate army corps, be trained in the use of pistols and swords, and wear a uniform of mens trousers, the bonnet rougue and the revolutionary cockade. They would use their power to safeguard the revolution and strike down ‘the speculators, hoarders and the egoistic merchants’

Even before the conservative reaction of 1794 decisively clamped down on womens activism, more traditional factions of the Jacobin Club became increasingly alarmed at the outspokenness of Lacombe and Leon and their new Society. Women were now asking for the right to be educated, rights of inheritance and right of consent to marriage, which had certainly not been the intentions of the most of the men who began the revolution in 89. 

Pauline Leon drafted the Society’s famous petition to the National Convention demanding the right of all women to bear arms just like the men. Leon stated her only aim was to participate equally in the revolution, and ‘the honour of sharing in the men’s..glorious labours and of making tyrants see that women also have blood to shed’. However:

‘If you refuse our just demands..women who have enjoyed the first fruits of liberty, who have conceived the hope of bringing free men into the world, and who have sworn to live free or die; such women will never consent to give birth to slaves, they will sooner die.’ 

The Society of Revolutionary Women was accused of excessive revolutionary fanaticism,  of administering public whippings, beatings and even lynchings of anyone who they deemed counterrevolutionary, and to women who refused to wear the cockade. There was certainly some truth in some of the allegations, but not inconsiderable political motivation behind many of them either. The Society had been instrumental in the expulsion of the moderate Girondin faction from the Jacobin club. It now began siding with the enrages who regularly took positions to the left of the Jacobin club, with much public support. The enrages demanded a maximum price on all essential goods, compulsory loans from the rich, confiscation all the properties of counterrevolutionaries and the expulsion of all nobility from the offices of the state. Leon began calling her onetime ally Robespierre a ‘coward’ for failing to support them. In response, the revolutionary National Convention passed a motion to ban all women’s organisations, declaring that women did not have ‘the physical and moral strength to debate, deliberate or to resist oppression’.

Yet, for the revolutionnaires betrayal, Leon’s claim that having tasted liberty, they would never again submit to slavery proved true. Market women would remain a powerful political force even after the overthrow of the Jacobins, and it would be women who would be instrumental both in the uprising of 1848 and in raising the Paris Commune of 1871.  Invariably, in these gatherings one would hear the old poissarde song from 5 October

‘To Versailles, like braggarts,

we dragged our cannons,

although we were only women,

we wanted to show a courage beyond reproach

and men of spirit saw, like them,

That we were not afraid ‘

There is perhaps no more important time to tell the story of the Mughal emperors of India. With the rise of Islamophobia in India and the domination of every level of her politics by the RSS-  a once banned right wing  Hindu nativist movement – their legacy has been perhaps irredeemably tarnished . The Mughals have now become ghouls in the official Hindu nationalist version of history’. In pop culture the ‘Muslim invaders’ are now cartoonish bogeymen for crowd pleasing Bollywood entertainments.They are imagined the architects of an ancient oppression of Hindus that had broken the Hindu spirit and paved the way for the coming of the Europeans. Under the Modi government, a programme is underway to excise the three hundred year long reign of the Muslim emperors of pre British India from the public consciousness, renaming Mughal monuments, taking their names off streets and even renaming towns founded by them. In 1992, a small part of this dream to rewrite history was physically realised when a number of Hindu fanatics demolished a five hundred year old mosque built by the first Mughal Emperor Babur, on the basis of a discredited theory that the mosque was built on the birthplace of the Hindu God Rama and on the site of a Hindu temple, of whose existence there is of course no actual historical record. The destruction was condemned by UNESCO, and has been likened to an act of cultural desecration, equal to the shelling of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban. In 2020, the Supreme Court of India nonetheless gave the Modi government permission to ‘re-build’ the Hindu temple over the site of the Mughal mosque. In India, mythological history often trumps factual history. Yet it was not so long ago that the Mughal Empire, despite being Islamic, was almost universally revered throughout the Indian subcontinent

How could it not? It was the first pan-subcontinental empire to appear in the region for almost twenty centuries, ending a dark age that lasted in Northern India at least for almost half a millennium, igniting India’s last golden age. At the height of the empire in the seventeenth century, the ‘Great Mogul’ was the richest man in the world, and presided over the last great flowering of Indian art, music and literature.  

Far from being the oppressive, zealous Islamic theocrats of the modern Hindu imagination, the Mughals famously liberal and religiously tolerant court culture was unique not only to the subcontinent but contrary to the spirit of the time itself, a time when Christendom was convulsed in the wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics and heretics and witches were being burned and tortured across Europe.

In contrast, the third Mughal Emperor Akbar, though a Sunni Muslim, celebrated and propagated Hindu culture, ordering translations of the Hindu epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata from Sanskrit into Persian, introducing them for the first time to the world outside India and to the canon of world literature. In addition to all the major Islamic festivals, the Mughal court celebrated the Hindu festivals of Holi and Diwali.  Akbar was deeply interested not only in Hinduism but the other faiths of his kingdom, inviting Buddhist, Parsi, Jain and even Christian scholars to give lectures in his court. Much to the horror of his more orthodox advisors, he abolished all taxes traditionally imposed by Muslim rulers on non-Muslim subjects, decreeing that none of his subjects would be interfered with on account of their religion. As he declared, ‘He is a Man who makes Justice the guide on the path of Inquiry, and takes from every faith what is consonant with Reason’. With a couple of notable exceptions, the tradition was maintained by all his successors.

The Mughal period saw an explosion of Hindi devotional poetry of the Bhakti school – the great Hindu poets of this time, Surdas, Mirabai and Tulsidas, all enjoyed official Imperial patronage. The times also saw the dominance of the most important musical modes of North India classical music, Thumri, Khayal and Qawwali, all born from the fusing of Persian and South Asian musical styles. 

The backbone of Mughal power lay in their alliance with the Rajputs, ancient Hindu warrior clans from Northwestern India. One of the most successful partnerships in history, the alliance transformed the Rajputs from minor kings to lords over vast dominions across the subcontinent. Rajput princesses were married into the Imperial family, so that later Emperors could claim legitimacy not only through their Timurid Turkic progenitors but through ancient Hindu bloodlines. The totemic power of the Mughal’s Peacock Throne continued to hold sway over the minds of all Indians well after the Mughal’s power had crumbled and the British seized control in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Many, many years later, in the first great uprising against British Rule in 1857, the mostly Hindu and high caste Brahmin soldiers of the British armies in Bengal and Bihar turned on and massacred their white British commanding officers. After this act, they did not flock to the standard of any of the Hindu leaders that had raised their banners against the British.  For them it was a very self-evident truth that if there must be one king to rule over them all, it could be none other than the khalifa, the Padishah Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last of the Mughals, the Shadow of God upon Earth and the Refuge of Islam, King of Kings, Sultan son of Sultan. 

The decision of the mutinous Hindu soldiers in 1857 to proclaim the Muslim Bahadur Shah Zafar their emperor surprised the British, assuming as they did mutual Hindu Muslim hostility which was in fact alien to the syncretic culture of the time. They had also quite reasonably long since written off the Mughal dynasty as a credible power in Indian politics. They  had personally defeated the last Mughal army assembled against them almost a century ago. Zafar was king only of the city of Delhi, and that too in name only, for the septuagenarian poet and famed Sufi mystic was little more than a glorified pensioner of the East India company, under constant watch from his English ‘protectors’. 

The British therefore were unable explain why the generals Tatya Tope and Nana Sahib, whose Hindu Maratha ancestors had been the hereditary adversaries of the Mughals, or the Nawab of Avadh, whose own ancestors had been in rebellion against the Mughals for a hundred years, were suddenly uniting under the ancient Imperial Gurkani banner and the old horsetail standards and proclaiming the restoration of the Mughal Empire. Darymple quotes the memoirs of a surprised British collector in Mathura in 1857, who records the excited chatter of the rebels that had held him hostage, contemplating the Ancient Order that would be restored once they destroyed the power of the hated Angrezi:

They speculated as to who would be Grand Chamberlain, which of the chiefs of Rajpootana would guard the different gates, and who were the fifty-two Rajahs who would assemble to put the Emperor on the throne. As I listened I realised as I never had done before the deep impression that the splendour of the Ancient Court had made on the popular imagination, how dear to them were the traditions and how faithfully, all unknown to us, they had preserved them. There was something weird in the Mogul Empire thus starting into a sort of phantom life after the slumber of a hundred years

The British would not underestimate the glamour of the Mughal name again. The 1857 rebellion was eventually brutally suppressed and Delhi was sacked by British forces. The elimination of the ‘House of Timur’ was a political priority. Sixteen of the sons of Bahadur Shah Zafar II were executed, the eldest three among them made to strip naked before being shot in front of their families. Zafar himself was sent into exile in Rangoon. When he died there, the man whose direct ancestors built the Taj Mahal was buried in an unmarked grave. The British officer responsible proudly reported to his superiors that ‘no vestige will remain to distinguish where the last Mughal rests.’

‘We have smashed the wine cup and the flask,

What is it now to us

If all the rain that falls from heaven 

Should turn to Rose Red wine?

-Former court poet Mirza Ghalib, in 1857

It seems that under assault from Modi, the once Great Mughals must face a second death, where even their memory must be buried and forgotten. Yet their legacy is deeply intertwined with modern India, and it will not be an easy forgetting. The Mughal empire’s administrative infrastructure forms the very bones of modern India. The Mughal Grand Trunk Roads still criss cross her breast. The pidgin language that emerged from its multiethnic military camps, Hindustani, the precursor to both modern Hindi and Urdu, remains the common inheritance of Sotuh Asian Hindus and Muslims, the tongue of her poetry and her dreams. Even the word Hindu is a Persian word. Hindu fanatics talk of an undivided India covering all of modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. that existed in mythological times and must be reclaimed from our Muslim neighbours. Yet the closest India came to that was under the Mughals. If India is possible at all, it is because of a shared history created by them.

This history begins with a single man and impossibly humble beginnings. He is a refugee from Ferghana, a kingdom of the Silk Road, now in Uzbekistan. His name is Zahiruddin Muhammad, but in his own language he is nicknamed Babur, whuch meansTiger. Penniless, he is armed with nothing more than an awesome bloodline, the blood of bothTimur (‘Tamerlane’) and of Genghis Khan. In my next blog, I shall tell his story.

‘In a rich man’s house, there is no place to spit but his face’
Diogenes of Sinope, 404 BCE to 323 BCE

I

Wild Beasts

It is the year 134 BCE. A great public assembly is gathered on the Capitoline Hill in the centre of Rome. A thirty year old politician, Tiberius Gracchus, adjusts his trademark black robes, strides up to the large speakers platform in front of the temple of Jupiter and addresses the immense throng. It takes him no time to silence the crowd, as many of them have travelled for weeks from distant parts of Italy just to hear him speak. He does not know it, but he will go onto deliver a speech which would seal both his fate, and shake the very foundations of the Roman republic.

In his calm, deliberate manner, Tiberius delivered a blistering attack on the Senate, the main legislative body of the Republic and the seat of all power in Rome. He knew his subject well – he, Tiberius Gracchus, was after all one of the two people elected as the ordinary citizens representatives to the Senate – a ‘tribune’ of the non noble class known as the plebeians,or the ‘plebs’. Tiberius speaks of the age of heroes five centuries ago, when their ancestors, alone amongst all the peoples of the world, had done away with kings forever, and had taken a sacred vow that in Rome, only ‘the people’ would rule. Rome had gone in that time from a small village to masters not only of Italy, but of unheard of kingdoms in Africa and Asia. All of that wealth and land had not however gone to the people but into the personal fortunes of the immensely wealthy noble families who made up the Senate

These Senators had not just appropriated for their private fortunes all the wealth from Rome’s endless foreign wars, paid for with plebeian blood. They had used the newly acquired money to buy up all the farming land in Italy, dispossessing en masse the citizen-farmers that had always been the backbone of the Roman republic. The situation had been summed up well by the recently deceased senator Cato the Elder: “Thieves of private property pass their lives in chains; thieves of public property in riches and luxury”

It was in this context that Tiberius Gracchus spoke the words by which he would be immortalised

‘The wild beasts that roam over Italy have every one of them a cave or lair to lurk in…While the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common air and light and nothing else. Houseless and homeless they wander about with their wives and children..they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury..though as Romans they are styled as Masters of the World, they have not a single clod of earth to call their own‘.

The conflict being described by Tiberius would dominate the next one hundred years of the Roman Republic. It would end with the fall of the Republic and the birth of the Empire, where decisions would no longer be made by an elected Senate but by one man, the Emperor. Under its Emperors Rome would grow more powerful than ever and endure for centuries. However it came at a great cost -for the like of the Republic would not be seen again in Western Europe until the great democratic revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nearly two millenia later. The French, British and American anti-monarchists would explicitly model their new ‘republics’ on the lost republic of ancient Rome. Even the word republic was taken from this period (the Latin res publica, ‘our public thing’). Insomuch as the French, British and the Americans would then go onto impose their models of governance on the whole world, the story of the collapse of the original republic and the populism that bought about its end seems timely, even with all the caveats about comparing different historical eras.

After whipping the crowd up into a frenzy with his ‘Wild beasts of Italy’ speech, Tiberius Gracchus delivered his coup de grace. He introduced a bill called the Lex Agraria. The bill stipulated that henceforth, there would be an upper limit on the amount of land a single man could own – anything in excess of it would be become public land and be redistributed to landless citizens. Crucially the bill also said that any land which Rome acquired in her overseas adventures would not go up for sale to the highest bidder but be redistributed to the public as farming lands .

Tiberius told the crowd gathered on the Capitoline Hill how he had of course initially pursued his bill through the normal channels, and had introduced it in the Senate. He told them how the men of the Senate had reacted as rich men have always done when confronted with wealth redistribution. He, the tribune of the plebs, their sacred representative, had been laughed out of the chamber. However, Tiberius declared triumphantly, they did not need the Senate. According to laws unused for centuries a people’s assembly had the power to pass laws without the agreement of those corrupt old men – they could, right now, vote on this bill, and sieze control of their own destinies. To the roars of the audience, he proposed to put the vote to them, the ordinary men of Rome.

This was all too much for one man. Marcus Octavius, the other tribune of the plebeians and Gracchus’s co-leader of the assembly. was every bit a creature of the Senate. He stood up and imperiously shouted ‘veto’ (Latin for ‘I forbid’). It was all Tiberius could do to keep the furious mob from tearing Octavius apart, until his bodyguard were able to push their way through the crowd and shepherd Octavius to safety.

The Senate was horrified to hear of these developments. The once powerful plebeian assemblies had long been subordinatedto them, and by centuries of custom prevented from introducing any bill without the Senates’ prior approval. They commanded Octavius to ensure the bill never became law, and Octavius vetoed every vote on land redistribution that followed in the peoples’ assemblies.

Tiberius finally put it to the assembly that if Octavius would not let them vote on the redistribution bill, then they could vote to remove Octavius from his role as their tribune. This was at the time, unthinkable – the power sharing arrangement between Tiberius and Octavius was one that mirrored at every level in the Roman Republic and was fundamental to it. The way the Romans had protected their democratic traditions in an age of universal autocracy was an almost fanatical adherence to the principle that no single person was allowed to hold too much power. The head of the Republic was the Consul, but even this office was shared by two people, who alternated supreme power every month. This small measure of power was further diluted by laws stating that Consuls, like Tribunes and indeed anyone elected to any senior office in Rome, could only serve in their post for a single year, after which fresh elections were required to be held. The person who had just served in the post could not run for re-election in the same post for at least ten years. These traditions had been preserved without exception for the five hundred years since the overthrow of the last king of Rome. So great was the aversion to kings that it was legal for any citizen to kill, at any time and without reprisal, any other citizen they could prove had sought kingly power.

The people were pissed, however, and the vote to remove Octavius as co-tribune was unanimous. Now sole tribune of the plebs, Tiberius pushed the vote on land redistribution and the Lex Agraria became law. It was Tiberius Gracchus’s finest hour, but he succeeded also in completely alienating the Senate. Even the few reformist backers he had in the Senate abandoned him for his transgression of the Republic’s sacred laws, including his own uncle, the famed Scipio Amelianus, conqueror of Carthage. The Senate still controlled the purse-strings of the government and dominated the judiciary, and went out of their way to make sure that Gracchus’s redistribution laws were not enforceable in practice. Their strategy was to wait out Tiberius’s year as tribune, and once he stepped down, to replace him with a more traditionally pliant tribune of the plebs who would allow this whole thing to die. Tiberius Gracchus however would not be outmanoeuvred. Surrounded by thousands of armed supporters from the lower rungs of society, he made a shocking announcement. He would run for an unheard of second term. The announcement was greeted with jubilation by the plebeian assemblies.

This was too much for the Senate. The Chief High Priest, the Pontifex Maximus of Rome, a senator named Nasica, accused Tiberius of conspiring to make himself king. Nasica rose in the Senate on the day of the controversial election and declared ‘Let those who would save our country follow me’.

Nasica then led a mob of like minded senators to the Capitoline Hill where Tiberius Gracchus was giving a speech in front of his supporters. At Nasica’s command, they descended on the Gracchans and began beating them mercilessly. Finally, they found Tiberius and clubbed him to death on the steps of the Temple of Jupiter in broad daylight, even though as tribune, his body was supposedly sacrosanct. At the end of the day about three hundred people lay dead. All of the bodies, including Tiberius’s, were unceremoniously dumped in the Tiber.

The Senate then set up an extraordinary tribunal to investigate those responsible for the massacre, but the hundreds sentenced by the tribunal were to a to a man low class plebs who had supported Tiberius Gracchus – not a single senator was prosecuted. To make matters worse, Nasica, who had arranged the sacrilegious murder of the tribune of the plebs, openly walked around in his priestly robes, a free man.

The Senate did not care. They were complacent in the knowledge that they had crushed Tiberius’s rebellion. They did not know that a storm was coming – a gathering black cloud of vengeance in the form of Tiberius’s younger brother, Gaius Gracchus.

II

Gaius Gracchus

While Tiberius had been politicking, the young Gaius had been away doing military service in Spain. Returning to Rome the year after his brother’s very public murder, Gaius found himself at the age of twenty two the inheritor of a whole movement. Plutarch says that Gaius was in every way the opposite of his brother. Where Tiberius was calm and dignified, and austere in his personal life, Gaius was passionate and hot headed, with ‘a love for ostentation’. Yet, in oratory, he found himself every bit his brother’s match, inventing a much imitated theatrical form in which he would pace the rostra energetically, gesturing and pulling his toga off his chest as he spoke. The myth of his brother proved a potent source of inspiration for his rabble rousing speeches against the Senate:

“Before your eyes, these men beat Tiberius to death with clubs, and dragged his body from the Capitol though the midst of the city to be dumped into the Tiber. ..Those of his friends who were caught were put to death without trial”

Along with land redistribution, Gauis added two key new demands to Tiberius’s radical reforms. The first was extension of Roman citizenship to all Italians. Rome was by now the supreme power in Italy, but her jealously guarded democratic traditions, which included not just the right to vote but a whole package of basic civil liberties, were restricted only to a small group of residents of the city of Rome. The Senate watched helplessly as once loyal Italian allied cities across the peninsula exploded with violent demonstrations for equal rights. This also gave Gaius an immense base of popular support which dwarfed even that of Tiberius. The second new demand was the creation of a grain dole for poor citizens, gaining him support among non-voting urban poor. Together with his brothers supporters, this was all the coalition he needed to win the fiercely contested elections for the new tribune of the plebs, despite open hostility from the Senate.

The plebeian assemblies under Gaius became a hotbed of radical politics- and even some on the Senate began to come around. The supporters of these new policies became known as the ‘populares‘ – literally, the populists – while the traditionalists in the Senate came to be known as the ‘optimates’ – the ‘best’, or ‘the elites’.

The influence of the populares under Gaius was such that one of their own was elected Consul, the highest office of the Republic – a family friend of Gaius named Flaccus. Through Flaccus, Gaius was able to revenge himself on his brothers’ killers. The High Priest Nasica was finally convicted of Tiberius’s murder and exiled from Rome, never to return. Octavius, who had done so much to block Tiberius’s reforms, was barred from ever standing from political office. High ranking conservative Senators suddenly found themselves the subject of corruption and bribery investigations.

Secure in his untouchability, Gaius Gracchus announced that he would now do the very thing that had killed this brother. Thumbing his nose at the laws of the Republic, he campaigned for and effortlessly won the forbidden second term as tribune of the plebs. Tiberius’s long-neglected land redistribution commission now found itself in funds, and was able to ensure that the lands acquired from the recent conquest of Carthage were allocated to pleb farmers.

III

The Republic Strikes Back

When Gaius travelled away from Rome to personally supervise the commissions work, however, the Senate struck back. They ensured the election of a new Consul called Lucius Opimius, a man with impeccable aristocratic credentials and a streak of bloodthirstiness. Before becoming Consul, Opimius decided to end the Italian citzenship demonstrations once and for all by making an example of an Italian city that had risen in revolt. He oversaw the total destruction of the town of Fregellae, near the modern town of Ceprano in central Italy, and ordered a general massacre of its rioting citizens. Fregellae had been a loyal Roman ally for hundreds of years and her sons had distinguished themselves in the wars against Carthage, and even anti-Italian conservatives balked at the brutal action.

Nonetheless, Opimius became Consul, and did everything he could to dismantle Gaius’ legislation. He declared Gaius a fomenter of rebellion and enemy of the state. Gaius announced in response that he would now run for a manifestly illegal third term, to ensure his important work in service of ‘the people’ could be carried out. In the huge demonstrations that followed, a scuffle broke out between his supporters and Opimius’s, in which one of Opimius’s men was killed. This was all the pretext Opimius needed. He commanded every nobleman in Rome to give him two armed men each. With this army, he marched on Gaius’s home.

Throughout his life, Gauis spoke of having a recurring dream where the ghost of his brother appeared to him, clad in his black robes. Even as his political star rose and he went from success to success, the ghostly figure would tell him, or so he complained, ‘However much you may try to defer your fate, you must die the same death that I did”.

It may have been propaganda concocted to further his political career. Still, that fateful day, as Opimius’s army marched on him, Gaius faced the prospect of this bleak prophecy being realised. Flaccus rushed to defend him, confident that no one would dare lay a hand on a former Consul of the Republic. Opiumius’s men beheaded Flaccus in the street without a second thought, before setting upon Gaius’ followers. Gaius was the only man who escaped the resulting massacre, but he would commit suicide that same day, as Opimius’s men closed in on him. In the days that followed, the Senate ordered the execution of thousands of prominent Gracchan supporters and their families.

• 

IV

Aftermath

The Gracchi brothers were dead, but the populares were far from finished as a powerful political movement, and they hounded the Republic to its last days. Their cause would now be taken up by Rome’s most distinguished general and war hero, a man named Gaius Marius. His career, the story of a soldier of ‘rustic birth, rough and uncouth’ rising to the Consulship of Rome, opposed at each stage by conservative Senators, could be the subject of another blog this size. Suffice to say, with the taboo against consecutive terms now broken, Marius served a positively sacrilegious seven terms as Consul. This gave him the time to enact reforms so far reaching he earned the title ‘the third founder of Rome’. The Senate would have to respond with their own general, a man named Lucius Cornelia Sulla Felix. The fight between Optimates and the Populares, fought in Tiberius’s days by rival mobs on the Capitoline Hill, would now be fought between rival armies as Rome descended into civil war.

Sulla, champion of the Senate, was ultimately triumphant by default as Marius succumbed to old age. Sulla then became the first man to march on Rome with an army and seize power by force. Sulla’s resulting purges of the peoples assemblies were even bloodier than Opimius’s. Every day, proscribed lists of populare supporters would be posted on the Forum, and nine thousand populares were summarily executed as Sulla’s death squads roamed the city. Sulla decreed that the pleb assemblies could no longer pass legislation of their own accord, nor veto legislation from the Senate. When he finally relinquished power, he did so in the knowledge he finally had restored the Senate as the supreme power of Rome.

Sulla’s restoration would in fact not even last a generation. One young boy would escape Sulla’s purges, a teenaged nephew of Marius. Marked for death on Sulla’s proscribed lists, he would spend his youth on the run. With his return to Rome as a young man, he would take up the populare cause begun by the Gracchi brothers, with the familiar battle cries of land redistribution, the grain dole, and an expansion of citizens rights. Sulla was prescient when marking the child for death, for he would certainly go onto become the Senates most formidable enemy.

His name was Julius Caesar, and the rest, of course, is history,

Caesar would cross the Rubicon and crush the Senate. Eager to prevent another Opimius or Sulla ever coming for them again, Caesar’s populare partisans would cheerfully appoint their own champion Caesar Dictator for Life. When a handful of Senators assassinated the Dictator on the Ides of March, they would finally realise how disenchanted people had become with the Republic. Instead of cheering the Senators as liberators, the poor rioted, burned down their estates, and chased them out of Rome. Julius’s successor Augustus Caesar would become the first emperor and would rule on his own for forty years. Though Augustus and his successors were careful to maintain the illusion of republicanism – the official title of the emperors was not ‘Imperator’ (’emperor’) at all but ‘Princeps’, “First Citizen” – Rome would henceforth be a monarchy in all but name. The legacy of the Emperors is complicated – on the one hand, they achieved much of the populare programme. Every citizen of Rome would from the time of Augustus be entitled to a free daily bread ration. They would instute the public work projects and infrastructure for which Rome became famous. The extension of rights continued until the Emperor Caracalla granted every free man in the Roman Empire equal citizenship in 212 AD. On the other hand, the people would never again be able to choose their leaders, vote on their own laws or criticise the government without fear of reprisal. The lost liberty of the Ancestors would become a cherished dream.

The tragedy of the Republic is that it could have been saved, had a few elites prioritised much needed reform over their own selfish interests. Instead, they took the Republic for granted, assured that her centuries old democratic traditions would continue to endure forever, no matter what they did. Even the ‘last defender of the Republic’, the lawyer Cicero, put to death for speaking out against the Dictatorship, had early in his life predicted that the demise of the Republic would come out of the excessive inequality and naked greed that defined its last days:

‘We are silent when we see all the money of all nations have come into the hands of a few men; which we seem to tolerate and to permit with the more equanimity , because none of these robbers conceals what they are doing’
– Cicero