the world of private banking

THE RISE OF tHE ROtHScHILDS 29
it gave them advance knowledge of great power foreign policy as it was being
formed, and this in turn allowed them to make better-informed investment
decisions. It also gave them a chance to pursue their own political agenda (which
generally aimed at averting war between the great powers because of its negative
financial consequences). Given that they dominated the international bond market
and therefore had substantial leverage over most of the major European states
– none of whom could contemplate war without resorting to borrowing – the
Rothschilds were plainly more than mere messengers.
Of course, if the Rothschilds had relied solely on their own five houses for
intelligence, the system would have been very limited. But they soon developed
a ‘reach’ which extended far beyond their original European bases. As none of
Mayer Amschel’s grandsons wished or was allowed to establish a new foreign
‘house’, this was done by building up a select group of salaried agents employed
to take care of the bank’s interests in other markets: principally Madrid, St
Petersburg, Brussels and later New York, New Orleans, Havana, Mexico and San
Francisco. The lines of communication with these agents formed a complex new
intelligence and business network. Men like August Belmont in New York or
Daniel Weisweiller in Madrid inevitably enjoyed considerable autonomy because
of their remoteness and their greater local knowledge; but although permitted to
trade on their own account they always remained Rothschild agents and were not
allowed to forget it. Nor was this network of formal influence all; of comparable
importance was the larger but looser network of links to other banks, as well as to
stockbrokers, central banks and financial newspapers.
In 1826, the liberal Fournier-Verneuil made the first of many claims that
the French government – in this case Villèle’s – was the corrupt puppet of ‘the
aristocracy of finance, the most arid and least noble of all aristocracies’ at whose
head stood none other than ‘M. le baron R...’. 121 Two years later, the Radical MP
Thomas Duncombe complained in the British House of Commons about ‘a new,
and formidable power, till these days unknown in Europe’:
master of unbounded wealth, he boasts that he is the arbiter of peace and
war, and that the credit of nations depends upon his nod; his correspondents
are innumerable; his couriers outrun those of sovereign princes, and absolute
sovereigns; ministers of state are in his pay. Paramount in the cabinets of
continental Europe, he aspires to the domination of our own. 122
In the mid-1830s, an American magazine gave a similar assessment, though in less
pejorative terms: ‘The Rothschilds are the wonders of modern banking . . . holding
a whole continent in the hollow of their hands. . . . Not a cabinet moves without
121
M. Fournier-Verneuil, Paris: Tableau moral et philosophique (Paris, 1826), pp.
51–2, 64f.
122
Hansard, New Series, vol. XVIII, pp. 540–43.