Titans of History (49 page)

Puffed up with his own sense of self-importance, López believed that he could act as the arbiter between these contending powers and thereby establish himself as the dominant warlord of South America. Accordingly, in November 1864 he declared war on Brazil,
and sent his troops over the border. By December they had taken the province of Mato Grosso, known for its valuable diamond mines, but instead of consolidating his position López then demanded the right to station troops in Corrientes, a province of Argentina that was strategically important in his campaign against Brazil. In April 1865, after Argentina refused, López launched a disastrous invasion.

On May 1, 1865 Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay set aside their differences and united together against Paraguay. A foolish incursion into Uruguay in 1865 stretched López's forces to breaking point, and in May 1866 his army suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the allies at Tuyuti. By July 1867 López was in full retreat, and his enemies chased and harried him back into Paraguay.

As Paraguay's fortunes in the War of the Triple Alliance rapidly began to decline, López turned his rage on his fellow Paraguayans. By the middle of 1868 he had become convinced that his own family were plotting against him, and ordered the execution of his brothers and brother-in-law, and even had his own mother and sisters flogged. In what became known as the San Fernando massacres, López tortured and slaughtered men and their entire families—many thousands of them—including ministers, judges, senior civil servants and even foreign diplomats. All were executed without trial on suspicion of being deserters or traitors.

Such actions were the signs of a desperate man. As his enemies closed in, López was driven northward with the ragged remnant of his army toward the frontier of Paraguay and Brazil. Here, on March 1, 1870, he was killed by Brazilian troops as he tried to escape by swimming a river.

During the war López made his mistress the largest landowner in Paraguay by handing her huge swathes of land, including a number of profitable ranches and over twenty homes for her personal use. But her fortune was tied in with his, and within days
of his death she had all her lands confiscated. She fled to back to Paris—but not entirely empty-handed, as she took with her thousands of pounds' worth of jewels and cash. When she later returned to Paraguay to reclaim her land, she was swiftly deported back to Paris, where she died in 1886.

1828–1910

When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself … this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations invested in literature
.

Anton Chekhov

Leo Tolstoy is, in the opinion of many, the greatest novelist of all time. His two masterpieces,
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina
, certainly rank among the finest novels ever written. He was also a skillful writer of short stories and essays, a powerful historian and a mystical philosopher who developed unusual yet influential Christian ideas about the human condition and moral improvement.

The essence of Tolstoy's greatness is his masterful grasp of human behavior and motivation, which he combined with a natural gift for storytelling and an astonishing breadth and universality of vision. Though he was a deeply complex man, tormented by his failure to live up to his own standards, he had one of the sharpest and most original minds in the history of literature.

Count Leo Tolstoy was born into a prominent aristocratic family on his ancestral estate, Yasnaya Polyana, some 100 miles south of Moscow. His childhood was upset by the early deaths of both his parents, yet he still remembered it in idyllic terms. He was educated at home by tutors, but when he enrolled at the University of Kazan in 1844, it became apparent that he was neither a willing nor a diligent student, preferring to drink, gamble, womanize and socialize, and he left in 1847 without taking a degree.

He returned to Yasnaya Polyana with the intention of educating himself and improving the lot of his serfs, but his resolve soon weakened. In 1851 he went to the Caucasus, joined the army and used his experiences to write stories such as “Hadji Murat,” his best shorter work. It is a story of nobility, courage and betrayal in the life of a daring Chechen fighter during the thirty-year Russian war to defeat the legendary Chechen/Dagestani commander Imam Shamyl and conquer the northern Caucasus. Tolstoy also served during the combined Anglo-French-Italian siege of the chief Russian naval base in the Crimea, Sebastopol. An eleven-month campaign of appalling slaughter and incompetence ended in 1856 with the Russians sinking their ships, blowing up the garrison and evacuating. The experience was the basis for three literary sketches in which Tolstoy refined his technique of minutely analyzing thoughts and feelings. “The hero of my tale,” the author wrote, “whom I love with all the power of my soul … is Truth.” In 1862 he married Sofia Andreyevna Behrs and again returned to his estate, this time with a plan to teach and learn from the simple peasant children.

Tolstoy's most productive period came between 1863 and 1877. From 1865 he was working on
War and Peace
, which he finished in 1869. This vast work is both domestic and political. It consists of three main strands: the monumental struggle of Russia and France, Alexander I versus Napoleon, between 1805 and 1812,
particularly the French invasion and retreat from Moscow; the interlinked tales of two aristocratic Russian families, the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys; and lengthy essays on history. It is clear that Tolstoy identified himself with the curious, diffident and doubting, but kind, direct and moral character of Pierre Bezukhov.

Tolstoy has an original view of the wars he describes. He portrays Napoleon as a bungling egomaniac, the Russian tsar Alexander I as a man of fine words, obsessed with his own legacy, and the maligned Russian commander Mikhail Kutuzov as a wily old man of war. Combat itself is seen as chaos, without any overall connection or intrinsic structure. The fictional characters all to some extent see life in the same way and find solace only through what would become Tolstoy's main philosophy: salvation through devotion to family and the tasks of everyday life.

War and Peace
, with its acute understanding of individual motivation and action, may have redefined the novel, but Tolstoy's next major project,
Anna Karenina
, was no less influential. Written between 1875 and 1877, it applied the principles of
War and Peace
to family life. “All happy families resemble each other,” he wrote; “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” At the center of the story lies the tragic affair of Anna with Count Alexei Vronsky, an army officer. In vivid detail Tolstoy paints Anna's mental contortions under the pressure of society's hypocrisies and her inner struggles (ultimately in vain) to rationalize her own behavior.

Like
War and Peace, Anna Karenina
was a vehicle for Tolstoy's moral convictions. From 1877 he became more and more obsessed with the spiritual side of his life and suffered various crises of faith. He was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church in 1901 for his distinctive reinterpretation of Christianity, in which he emphasized pacifist resistance to evil, love for one's enemies, extreme asceticism and avoidance of anger and lust. He soon had a growing band of disciples across the world.

Tolstoy continued to write, using the profits from his third major novel,
Resurrection
(1899), to help the persecuted Doukhobor Christian sect to emigrate to Canada.

Deeply unhappy in his marriage and his divided court of disciples, the ailing Tolstoy escaped from home with one of his daughters and a doctor but collapsed and died in the winter of 1910 in a railway station, refusing to see his wife. He had a simple burial on his family estate. Though frequently eccentric, his moral, ethical and spiritual ideas became highly influential; Gandhi, for one, was impressed by his doctrine of nonviolent resistance. But it is his contribution to literature that towers above all else.

1835–1908

After this notice is issued to instruct you villagers … if there are any Christian converts, you ought to get rid of them quickly. The churches which belong to them should be unreservedly burned down. Everyone who intends to spare someone, or to disobey our order by concealing Christian converts, will be punished according to the regulation … and he will be burned to death to prevent his impeding our program
.

Boxer poster, 1900

Beautiful, cunning and cruel, Empress Dowager Cixi was the archetypal dragon lady. She rose from obscurity to become the effective ruler of China for forty-seven years, during which time she presided over a humiliating decline in the country's fortunes.
In the second half of the 19th century, the Qing dynasty that had ruled China for more than 250 years struggled to cope with the challenges posed by modernization and increasing pressure from the European powers. Having suffered military defeats at the hands of its foreign rivals, and faced with growing internal unrest, China's last imperial dynasty finally fell in 1911. No one had contributed more to this collapse than the empress dowager herself.

When she entered Emperor Xianfeng's household as his concubine in 1851, the future empress dowager was known as Lady Yehenara, daughter of Huizheng. She was renamed Yi soon after, and then Noble Consort Yi following the birth of her son Zaichun in 1856. When the emperor died in 1861, Zaichun assumed the throne, and to reflect her new position as Divine Mother Empress Dowager, Yi was given the title Cixi, meaning motherly and auspicious.

Before his death, Xianfeng had charged eight “regent ministers” to govern during his son's minority, but a palace coup saw power pass instead to the late emperor's consort, Mother Empress Dowager Ci'an, and the Divine Mother Empress Dowager Cixi. Aided by the ambitious Prince Gong, they were to enjoy a twelve-year period of shared rule, exercising power “from behind the curtain.”

Zaichun, renamed Tongzhi (meaning collective rule), was belatedly allowed to begin his “reign” in 1873, but the two matriarchs, having gained a taste for power, had no intention of quietly slipping into retirement. Cixi in particular continued to dominate the young emperor, cowing him into accepting her authority.

After just two years, Tongzhi died, but the accession of Cixi's four-year-old cousin, Emperor Guangxu, saw the two women restored as regents. Six years later, in 1881, Empress Ci'an died suddenly, leading to rumors that Cixi had poisoned her. Ci'an's death opened the way for Cixi to exercise unfettered power, reinforced
in 1885 when she stripped Prince Gong of his offices.

By this time the empress dowager had accumulated a huge personal fortune. At a time of growing financial crisis for China, she built a string of extravagant palaces and gardens, and a lavish tomb for herself. Meanwhile, she stifled all efforts at reform and modernization. In 1881, she banned Chinese nationals from studying abroad because of the possible influx of liberal ideas. When proposals were brought forward for a vast new railway that would open up much of China, she vetoed the plans, claiming it would be “too loud” and would “disturb the emperors' tombs.”

The young Emperor Guangxu was due to assume the reins of power in 1887. At her instigation, various accommodating court officials begged her to prolong her rule, due to the emperor's youth. “Reluctantly” she agreed, and a new law was passed that allowed her to continue “advising” the emperor indefinitely.

Even after she finally handed over power in 1889—retiring to the massive Summer Palace she had built for herself—Cixi continued to overshadow the imperial court. She forced the new emperor to marry his niece, Jingfen, against his will. When he later snubbed his wife to spend more time with Consort Zhen—known as the Pearl Concubine—Cixi had Zhen flogged.

In the mid-1890s the empress dowager insisted on diverting funds from the Chinese navy to pay for extensive refurbishments to her Summer Palace for the celebration of her sixtieth birthday. When Japan launched a war against China in 1894, the latter's armed forces were defeated. The reformers won the confidence of Emperor Guangxu, and in 1898 he launched his “first hundred days” of measures.

The empress dowager was unwilling to cede an inch. In September 1898 she organized a military coup that effectively removed Guangxu from power. He nominally continued as emperor until 1908, but was declared not fit to rule the country in an edict she herself authored.

Cixi's undoing proved to be the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

In 1900, a clandestine group, the Righteous and Harmonious Fists (the Boxers), which taught its members martial arts (and even claimed it could train them to be immune from bullets) led an uprising in Shandong province and gained a following among the rural poor. It produced mass propaganda accusing Catholic missionaries of acts of sexual abuse and Western immigrants of trying to undermine China. Violent attacks against both became commonplace.

Believing the movement might help her retain power, Cixi endorsed the rebellion as an expression of Chinese popular culture. Thereafter, anti-Western riots and the destruction of foreign property escalated and in the summer of 1900 a Boxer “army” laid siege to Western embassies in Beijing. The Chinese imperial army was complicit in the assault, doing little to relieve the defenders. It took the arrival of international troops to lift the siege (after which the city was looted), and several more months for the rising itself to be quelled.

Ironically, the rebellion increased foreign interference in China. The Boxer Protocol of 1901 not only forced the Chinese government to accede to a huge reparations bill, but also gained Western countries major trade concessions and allowed them to station forces permanently in Beijing—a further insult to the sense of wounded national pride upon which the abortive rebellion had been predicated. Her announcement of support for the Boxer movement, which she saw as a bulwark of traditional Chinese values against Western and liberal influences, prompted the Western powers to march on Beijing and seize the Forbidden City. Cixi was forced to flee, and imperial authority was only restored after the emperor signed a humiliating treaty. Cixi died in November 1908, leaving Puyi as emperor at age two. Overthrown by the Revolution of 1911, briefly reinstated in 1917, set up as
puppet emperor of Manchukuo by the Japanese from 1932 until 1945, he was China's last monarch. Cixi had proved the gravedigger of the Chinese empire.