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The Marquis de La Fayette knew that there was more to life than just the minuet and syphilis. Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert Du Motier–as he was known to his friends–wanted to help the American colonists in their heroic struggle for liberty, so long as he could be a major general. However, 19 year-olds were rarely granted that rank–even in an army where competence was irrelevant. Generals usually invested years of fawning sycophancy over some royal dolt or his favorite mistress.

But America was a land of opportunities for the ambitious teenager. He simply had to find the right official to bribe. Of the American emissaries, Arthur Lee was inconveniently ethical. Benjamin Franklin was skeptical although he might have been willing to let Madame Lafayette persuade him. (If historians had to choose”The Father of Our Country“, Franklin would be named in the paternity suit.) However, Silas Deane had an open mind and hand.

Deane was an operator. When the French government wanted to covertly supply the Americans with arms and money, Deane handled the smuggling and the money-laundering. A man with such entrepreneurial skills might be expected to have a few lucrative sidelines. So, if a rich teenager wanted to be a major general, it was just matter of paperwork. The Continental Congress had not given him that authority, but Deane was never one to be stymied by legality. On this day in 1776, Deane conferred on Lafayette the rank of major general.

Of course, the Continental Congress was somewhat surprised when a French teenager arrived in Philadephia and expected command of an army. The Congress was starting to catch on to Deane’s sidelines; it seems that he had issued a number of questionable commissions. Deane was recalled from Paris in November, 1777 and tried for financial irregularities. However, he was too clever to be convicted.

As for Lafayette, he could not be taken seriously but he proved a very likable young man. Congress did not have the heart to be rude. As long as he agreed not to be paid and stayed under the adult supervision of George Washington, Lafayette would be allowed the title of major general. The young marquis could feel like a hero, and George Washington got the world’s fanciest valet.

Congratulations to any French friends (Catherine Deneuve and Carole Bouquet–if only they would let me) on the anniversary of Austerlitz.

Napoleon considered it his greatest victory; it certainly was his most obnoxious one.

To put it in Jeopardy terms, Napoleon allowed Russia and Austria to pick the categories AND ring in first. And he still smashed them.

Napoleon was inviting and begging the Russians and Austrians to attack; in fact, he seduced them. The French line had initially been situated on a plateau, an excellent defensive position that deterred the Austrians and the more competent Russian officers. So the accommodating Corsican withdrew his forces from the plateau. His enemies gratefully occupied the heights and advanced their lines.

Of course, the Austrians and Russians might have been a little wary about Napoleon’s gift. The eastern side of the plateau formed a formidable defense; however, the west side had the kind of gentle, charming slope that is advertised in real estate brochures. The French had little difficulty charging up the plateau, pushing the Russians and Austrians off the heights. Having smashed the center of the Allied line and regained the heights, the French were then very unkind to the exposed Russian left flank; it was driven into a lake.

The Russians and Austrians lost 27,000 men–one third of their army–at Austerlitz. The Emperor of Austria wrote his wife, “things did not go well today.”

Leo Tolstoy was a little more descriptive. His account of Austerlitz in “War and Peace” was probably longer than the battle.

Here is my abridged translation:

Prince Bolkonsky and Count Bezukhov were so preoccupied in a discussion of life, the soul and agricultural management that they had not noticed that their regiments had been massacred.

A furious General Kutuzov rode up to his esoteric officers and shrieked, “Why didn’t your troops occupy the defensive positions?”

Bezukhov waxed, “The Russian soul longs for suffering as a means of redemption. We gave the orders but those sturdy pure peasants stood in a stoic resignation.”

The exasperated commander asked, “Did you give the orders in Russian?”

Prince Bolkonsky shrugged, “Pourquoi?”

Imagine Dick Cheney with sex appeal: as mean, greedy, and dishonest as ever but now with a “come-hither” look that George Bush couldn’t resist. (I will give you a moment to stop retching.) In a previous and more sensuous life, Cheney may have been Hugh Despenser–one of the greatest scoundrels of English history.

Edward II (1284-1327) ruled England as if it were an audition for “A Chorus Line.” He picked out the most alluring–if otherwise untalented–young men to run the kingdom. The king was married–politics can make normal bedfellows–but his preference was quite obvious. Edward bestowed titles and treasures on his special friends. One flagrant favorite was even given the queen’s jewelry–but Mrs. Plantagenet evidently was the lesser queen of the two.

The nobles, embracing medieval family values, murdered that particular favorite. But Edward II did not seem to get the hint. He just found new boy toys and the worst was Hugh Despenser. Hugh was not content being lavished with estates; he stole them as well. He used the king’s infatuation as a royal license to embezzle and extort. If the nobility was already hostile about “the lifestyle”, it really resented being robbed. The nobles organized a coup in 1321 and forced Edward to banish Despenser.

In exile, Despenser found gainful employment as a pirate, and he had time to consider the errors of his ways. He should have terrorized or murdered his victims instead of just robbing them. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. All he needed was a second chance, and that occurred after one year.

The nobles be damned. Edward missed his Hugh and recalled him from exile, fully indulging his favorite’s greedy and vindictive whims. The nobles who had ousted Despenser now were hunted down. The Earl of Lancaster was beheaded; he was lucky enough to be a member of the Royal Family and was spared public disembowelment. The Queen herself had only looked askew at Despenser; so she was merely dispossessed of all her estates. She understandably resented that, went home to France and plotted a rebellion with exiled English nobles. (One of them, the Earl of March, even became her lover. Be fair: the woman was certainly entitled.)

The Queen, her Earl and their army landed in England in 1326. Their public intention was to rid the realm of Despenser. The rebellion also had a more discreet goal: to get rid of the King as well. If the lack of any resistance is any indication, the rebellion was more than welcome. Since Despenser was not of royal blood, his public disembowelment was permissible–and very popular. It occurred on this day in 1326. (The King’s death in 1327 was a private affair–except that his screams could be heard over a considerable distance.)

The throne passed to Edward III; somebody got the Queen pregnant. And the new King was said to look like a Plantagenet. (Perhaps Edward II had closed his eyes and made the effort for England.)

British historians recently compiled an interesting list: the worst Englishmen of the last thousand years. Of course, Hugh Despenser made the list. In fact, he made the top ten and was named the worst Englishman of the 14th century.

Portfirio Diaz was the best President of Mexico that American business ever had. For just a reasonable–if continual–bribe, railroads, Standard Oil, and mining companies could exploit all that Mexico had to offer. Some of Diaz’s amassed fortune was trickling down to the populace, at least to his family, the crew of his yacht and the teenage girls who seemed to rejuvenate the elderly tyrant. However, that was not really a majority of Mexico’s population.

Diaz had been a war hero against the French in the 1860s; but 34 years of corruption seemed a sufficient veteran’s benefit. By 1910, Mexico was ready to overthrow the outrageous rascal, and the hopes and the grievances of Mexico would center around a most incongruous figure. As a revolutionary, Francisco Madero was the soul of well-mannered moderation. As a leader, he was innocuous rather than charismatic. The hope of Mexico’s impoverished masses was a wealthy aristocrat who had been educated everywhere but Mexico. But this education abroad had made him an admirer of societies that were neither feudal relics or shameless kleptocracies. Even if he did look upon Mexico from an Ivory Tower, it was with genuine compassion.

His liberal principles had earned him several bouts in a Mexican prison. However, having the advantage of being rich in the Diaz days, he could always bribe his escape. While in exile in Texas, Madero issued a call for the Mexican people to overthrow Diaz and reestablish democracy; it was on this day in 1910.

Rebellions began throughout Mexico, and even the army seemed loathe to defend the Thief-in-Chief. Six months later, Portfirio Diaz was on his yacht, cruising to Europe with his usual contingent of teenage girls; he lived happily ever after. Francisco Madero was the new President. On his private estates, he had genuinely improved his workers’ standard of living; he imagined that he could do the same with all of Mexico. Unfortunately, Mexico proved a little more difficult. Moderation seemed to please no one.

Revolutionaries wanted more drastic reforms than Madero was prepared to make. Conservatives wanted no reforms at all. Worse for Madero, his innocuous moderation terrified American corporate interests in Mexico. They evidently preferred paying bribes than taxes, and a scrupulous Mexican government might interfere with their business. The American Ambassador Henry Wilson, representing those business interests, initiated his own foreign policy: a military coup to overthrow Madero.

Assuming that everyone had his good intentions, Madero had not tried to purge the Mexican Army of Diaz’s cronies. Unfortunately, a number of generals proved quite nostalgic for the old kleptocracy and were eager to reestablish it. Ambassador Wilson had no trouble orchestrating the coup. Madero had entrusted his security to Gen. Victoriano Huerta. Huerta organized the firing squad.

If you have seen “The Wild Bunch”, “One Hundred Rifles”, or “Viva Zapata” you know what happened next. It was a free-for-all civil war. Any general could claim to be the President, and anyone could claim to be a general. The Conservatives fought the Revolutionaries, and the Revolutionaries fought each other. In hindsight, this probably was not the best environment for American businesses; it was impossible to keep track of whom to bribe.

By 1920, the civil wars had bled themselves dry, and Mexico had arrived at a political compromise that more or less has lasted to this day: a government of moderate thieves.

Her father declared her a bastard and beheaded her mother, her half-sister imprisoned her as a traitor and nearly ordered her execution.  Elizabeth I would seem entitled to a psychosis or two, but she seemed to regard these “episodes” as part of her job description. 

Aside from the obvious dysfunction, the Tudors were unique for a royal family:  they were intelligent and hard-working.  The Tudors actually earned the throne. 

After 85 years of civil war, the English throne had become quite democratic: anyone could seize it. Henry Tudor was a middle-class Welsh adventurer who even lacked the distinction of being legitimate. His claim to royal blood was as the half-second cousin, once-removed, of Henry VI. The successful usurper, proclaiming himself Henry VII, sought immediate respectability by marrying the eldest daughter of the rival royal house. (He then made sure that the rest of her family disappeared: in convents, the Tower of London, you get the idea) The crafty king took nothing for granted. He certainly didn’t trust the nobles, most of whom had better claims to the throne than he did.

To control a restless aristocracy, Henry VII created a force that remains as terrifying now as it was then:  the civil service.  His bureaucracy remorsely taxed the nobility into a passive stupor: nobles could still afford all of their vices but not an armed rebellion.  In dealing with his other subjects–townspeople and small landowners–Henry had a novel approach:  good government.  The King had a most solicitous attitude.   Any proposal or project that would resolve problems and nurture prosperity had his support.  (That’s how the nobles’ taxes were spent.) 

Henry VIII had his father’s political shrewdness.  He may have been a serial husband but he maintained a monogamous romance with Parliament.  That English institution had been founded in 1265 by English barons who realized that the Magna Carta had left a few loopholes. Its assembly of gentry, clergy, and burghers formed a permanent council: no law could be enacted without its consent.  For two centuries, however, the Parliament had acted only like a notary public: approving and filing the royal decrees.

But to the crafty Tudors, Parliament was more than a bureaucratic eccentricity. Its members represented constituencies; the town burghers and small landowners were potential allies against the aristocracy and even the Catholic Church.  Henry VIII applied his seductive skills to wooing Parliament.  If a serenade of Greensleeves was insufficient, a knighthood on a status-starved burgher  or the deed to an estate (freshly confiscated from the Catholic Church) usually proved irresistible.  Of course, Henry’s approach also had an element of menace.   Imagine the choice confronting a member of Parliament: the King’s munificent patronage or being publicly disemboweled. Under those circumstances, you, too, might agree that the King was entitled to a divorce and that Thomas More was just being obnoxious. 

If Elizabeth I could survive her family, she could easily contend with Spain, the Jesuits and her idiot cousin Mary.  She possessed all of the Tudors’ talents, few of their vices (just a bit of her father’s vanity), and a charm uniquely her own.  Unfortunately, a Virgin Queen is bad for a dynasty.

Her glorious reign began this day in 1558. 

What did the Byzantines do for fun? The eunuchs certainly indulged in wishful thinking, and everyone loved debating the correct prepositions in defining the Holy Trinity. But for pure hilarity the medieval Greeks had their own version of MadLibs: the Justinian Code.

The Emperor Justinian was a workaholic and he expected everyone else to be one, too. The legal department was ordered to compile 400 years of imperial edicts and publish them in one handy reference. Tactfully named the Justinian Code, it was a best seller. Every Byzantine bureaucrat bought a copy, if only to learn what laws he would have broken by not buying it.

Now the Byzantine magistrate knew all the legal precedents for judging a merchant who shortweighted anchovies on St. Halitosia’s Day. (That would be the St. Halitosia of Cappodocia, not the one of Epirus.) According to the Code, the correct punishment would be amputation of the right side of the nose. Furthermore, the Code would establish the cost of the surgery. If the amputation was performed by an in-network torturer, the government would cover the cost–after the victim’s initial co-payment. The government would cover only fifty percent of the cost for an out-of-network torturer.

Finally, establishing the definitive standard for government bureaucracy and human resource departments, the Code was in Latin and its audience read Greek.

On this day in 1865 Henry Wirz was hanged. Being born 150 years too soon, he was the only American to be executed for war crimes. The Swiss-born Confederate had no qualifications but a German accent to be the commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp. Under his sadism and neglect, the prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia could have been advertised as Club Dead. Its 45,000 prisoners lacked housing, had only theoretical meals and a trickle of a stream for both drinking and sewage. How could they survive under such conditions? They really were not supposed to; and 13,000 did not. The rest held on until the Union won the war and liberated them.

Among those wretched survivors was my great-grandfather.

George Cohen was not the brightest of my ancestors. Arriving from Danzig, Prussia in 1863, the teenager obligingly signed any paper handed to him by the immigration officials on the wharves of New York. One of those papers was an enlistment in the Union Army: surprise! General Sherman must have felt reassured to have such capable men in his command.

Private Cohen was on picket duty outside of Atlanta when the Confederate forces launched an attack. The Battle of Peach Tree Creek is remembered as an Union victory, but the Confederates had the consolation of capturing Private Cohen. I imagine that he was the only Private Cohen at Andersonville.

Whatever deprivations he suffered there, it did not prevent from eventually fathering 14 children.

Today is the anniversary of Guy Fawkes’ attempt to blow up Parliament and the Royal Family. On this day in 1605 Fawkes and his fellow conspirators believed that a successful explosion would somehow restore Catholic rule to England. Mary, Queen of Scots, literally could have been a figure head.

The conspirators were a little indiscriminate with their targets. The Royal Family also would have been happy to blow up Parliament. If Mr. Fawkes was an attractive young man, James I wouldn’t have turned down the offer.

(The King’s tendencies had a rather depressing effect on his wife, Anne of Denmark. And for solace, the poor neglected woman turned to Catholicism!)

Of course, the plot’s failure did not make Parliament’s Puritans feel any more ecumenical. Guy Fawkes’ Day was long celebrated as an Anti-Catholic holiday. Bonfires throughout England roasted effigies of the Pope, although a real Jesuit would have been a welcome alternative. Today, Fawkes’ religious affiliation is downplayed. The current euphemism is that he was “Pro-Spanish.”

Now, how should we celebrate Guy Fawkes’ Day? In keeping with the holiday’s origins, you could rent Going My Way and make derisive remarks while watching it.

For a politician, Arthur Balfour was surprisingly sincere. Whether he had amusing memories of Benjamin Disraeli or had enjoyed a luxurious weekend at the Rothschilds, he really thought that the Jewish people were entitled to a homeland. On this day in 1917, as the Foreign Secretary of Britain, Balfour issued a declaration expressing the government’s official sympathy with the idea of a Jewish haven in Palestine.

Of course, Britain could afford to be so generous. The land was still under Turkish control. Furthermore, drained by the carnage of the ongoing Great War, Britain would have promised anything to anyone for any support. It would have offered Damascus to the Quakers if that would have added an extra brigade on the Western Front.

And the British Home Office might have a recommended a more practical site for a Jewish homeland: Ireland. The Jews could have served as a buffer between the Catholics and the Protestants. Connacht could have been the land of the Cohens. There was the risk that the Jews would be attacked by both sides, but the Irish were still more charming than Cossacks.

Indeed, who is to say that the Jews wouldn’t have quickly ingratiated themselves? They are nearly as loquacious as the Irish and without imperiling the liquor supply. Even more remarkable, they are the only people who read James Joyce–or at least try to.

Brendan Behan said, “Most people have nationalities. The Jews and the Irish have psychoses.” If only Behan had said it to Arthur Balfour….

On this day in 1790, Edmund Burke was making the rounds of talk shows to plug his new book “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” (Larry King diverted the discussion by recounting the time he played golf with Voltaire.)  Burke contended that the French Revolution, then in its earliest and most gentle stage, would eventually fail for a fundamental reason:  the French weren’t English.

According to Burke, freedom was an English idiosyncrasy.  The English may have been a nation of idiot savants but their savoir happened to be parliamentary government.  Ironically, by the same Anglomaniac standards, Burke was optimistic about America’s democracy.  The Americans might affect an air of independence, but they remained English by heritage and culture.

While Burke was quoting aloud the Magna Carta or singing all forty verses of “Greensleeves”, you might overlook the obvious question:  “Since when is Burke an English name?”  Yes, or should I say “Faith and Begorrah”, Burke’s Anglophilia was based on wishful thinking.  Apparently, when Burke looked in the mirror, he saw Jude Law instead of Barry Fitzgerald.  No one else did, though.

Unkind people–invariably Whigs–might upset Mr. Burke by asking what he had given up for Lent: his brogue or his ancestry?  (Elderly Mother Burke certainly was an ethnic inconvenience, walking around Dublin with her rosary.)

Yet, whatever delusional pathology shaped his opinions, Burke was right about the French Revolution.  It did fail, and the underlying reason was a further justification for Anglophilia.  France’s royalty was even dumber than Britain’s.

Although the French Revolution began in 1789, for the first two years it was a polite affair (except for the hapless guards of the Bastille). The Estates General and then the National Assembly were intent upon establishing a constitutional monarchy: imagine England with a palatable cuisine.

Unfortunately, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were opposed to a constitutional monarchy; in a way, they got their wish. The royal idiots attempted to flee the country; they were caught when they lost time by having a picnic. Furthermore, they had invited–in incriminating letters–the monarchies of Europe to invade France and restore absolutism. Somehow, those gestures did not improve their popularity or lifespans.

In the face of the foreign invasion, France initially was in peril. The army seemed on the point of dissolution; half of the officer corp (more loyal to their aristocratic class than to France) had defected. Of course, the French populace responded by slaughtering any aristocrat in its grasp. Any thought of monarchy was killed, along with the monarchs.

The French army reconstituted itself with a few radical reforms. First, conscription produced massive armies, vastly outnumbering the forces of the invaders. Second, to command the conscripts, officers were chosen for their ability rather than their lineage. (That really was revolutionary!) So, with large armies commanded by competent officers, France defeated the invaders and then proceeded to invade the invaders’ countries. Lieutenant Bonaparte was to have a very exciting career.   

 And Edmund Burke could have said, “I told you so.” (Gloating, however, might have seemed suspiciously Irish.)