Background
The origins of de Lesseps’ family are traceable back as far as the end of the 14th century. His ancestors, it is believed, came from Scotland, and settled at Bayonne during the region’s occupation by the English. One of his great-grandfathers, Pierre de Lesseps (Bayonne, 2 January 1690 - Bayonne, 20 August 1759), son of Bertrand Lesseps (1649 - 1708) and wife (m. 18 April 1675) Louise Fisson (1654 - 1690), was town clerk and at the same time secretary to Queen Anne of Neuberg, widow of Charles II of Spain, exiled to Bayonne after the accession of Philip V, and married on 7 January 1715 his great-grandmother Catherine Fourcade (2 June 1690 - 22 August 1760), by whom he had fourteen children, six of whom died in childhood: Dominique de Lesseps (1715 - 1794), Pierre de Lesseps (1716 - ?), Marie de Lesseps (1717 - 1722), Arnaud de Lesseps (1719 - 1726), Jean-Barthélémy de Lesseps (1720 - 1795), Marcel de Lesseps (1720 - 1730), Jean-Pierre de Lesseps (1721 - 1721), Catherine de Lesseps, Gracy de Lesseps (1725 - 1791), Plaisance de Lesseps (1727 - 1735), Michel de Lesseps (1729 - 1801), married in 1769 to Florence Verdier (1739 - 1822) (parents of Louise Thérèse de Lesseps (1770 - 1866), married in 1788 to Mathieu Belland (1764 - 1817)), Martin de Lesseps (1730 - 1807), married to Anna Caysergues (1730 - 1823) and had issue, Jeanne de Lesseps (1733 - ?), married in 1759 to Alexandre Dubrocq, and Etiennette de Lesseps (1735 - ?), married in 1761 to Pierre Simonin.

From the middle of the 18th century the ancestors of de Lesseps followed diplomatic careers, and he himself occupied several diplomatic posts from 1825 to 1849. His uncle was ennobled by King Louis XVI, and his father was made a count by Napoleon I. His father, Mathieu de Lesseps (Hamburg, 4 May 1774 - Tunis, 28 December 1832), was in the consular service; his mother, Catherine de Grévigné (Málaga, 11 June 1774 - Paris, 27 January 1853, was Spanish on her mother’s side, and aunt of the countess of Montijo, mother of the empress Eugénie. She was a daughter of Henri Grevigné (b. Notre-Dame-aux-Fonts, Liège, 2 June 1744) and wife (m. Málaga, 1766) Francisca Antonia Gallegos (1751 - 1853).

Ferdinand de Lesseps was born at Versailles, Yvelines, in 1805. He had a sister, Adélaïde de Lesseps (1803 - 1879), married to Jules Tallien de Cabarrus (19 April 1801 - 1870), and two brothers, Théodore de Lesseps (Cádiz, 25 September 1802 - Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 20 May 1874), married in 1828 to Antonia Denois (Paris, 27 September 1802 - Paris, 29 December 1878), and Jules de Lesseps (Pisa, 16 February 1809 - Paris, 10 October 1887), married on 11 March 1874 to Hyacinthe Delarue.

His first years were spent in Italy, where his father was occupied with his consular duties. He was educated at the College of Henry IV in Paris. From the age of 18 years to 20 he was employed in the commissary department of the army. From 1825 to 1827 he acted as assistant viceconsul at Lisbon, where his uncle, Barthélemy de Lesseps, was the French chargé d’affaires. This uncle was an old companion of La Pérouse and a survivor of the expedition in which that navigator perished.

Career
Diplomatic
In 1828 Ferdinand was sent as an assistant vice-consul to Tunis, where his father was consul-general. He aided the escape of Youssouff, pursued by the soldiers of the Bey, of whom he was one of the officers, for violation of the seraglio law. Youssouff acknowledged this protection given by a Frenchman by distinguishing himself in the ranks of the French army at the time of the conquest of Algeria. Ferdinand de Lesseps was also entrusted by his father with missions to Marshal Count Clausel, general-in-chief of the army of occupation in Algeria. The marshal wrote to Mathieu de Lesseps on 18 December 1830: “I have had the pleasure of meeting your son, who gives promise of sustaining with great credit the name he bears”.

In 1832 Ferdinand de Lesseps was appointed vice-consul at Alexandria. While the vessel Lesseps sailed to Egypt in was in quarantine at the Alexandrian lazaretto, M. Mimaut, consul-general of France at Alexandria, sent him several books, among which was the memoir written upon the Suez Canal, according to Bonaparte’s instructions, by the civil engineer Lapré, one of the scientific members of the French expedition.

This work struck Lesseps’s imagination, and gave him the idea of constructing a canal across the African isthmus. Fortunately for Lesseps, Mehemet Ali, the viceroy of Egypt, owed his position in part to the recommendations made on his behalf to the French government by Mathieu de Lesseps, who was consul-general in Egypt when Ali was a colonel. Because of this, Lesseps received a warm welcome from the viceroy and became good friends with his son, Said Pasha.

In 1833 de Lesseps was sent as consul to Cairo, and soon afterwards given the management of the consulate general at Alexandria, a post that he held until 1837. While he was there an epidemic of plague broke out and lasted for two years, resulting in the deaths of more than a third of the inhabitants of Cairo and Alexandria. During this time Lesseps went from one city to the other and constantly displayed an admirable zeal and an imperturbable energy. Towards the close of the year 1837 he returned to France, and on 21 December married Mlle Agathe Delamalle (Garches, Hauts-de-Seine, 15 October 1819 - Paris, 13 July 1853), daughter of the government prosecuting attorney at the court of Angers. By this marriage Lesseps became the father of five sons: Charles Théodore de Lesseps (1838 - 1838), Charles Aimé de Lesseps (1840 - 1923), Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps (1842 - 1846), Ferdinand Victor de Lesseps (1847 - 1853) and Aimé Victor de Lesseps (1848 - 1896).

In 1839 he was appointed consul at Rotterdam, and in the following year transferred to Málaga, the ancestral home of his mother’s family. In 1842 he was sent to Barcelona, and soon afterwards promoted to the grade of consul general. In the course of a bloody insurrection in Catalonia, which ended in the bombardment of Barcelona, de Lesseps offered protection to a number of men threatened by the fighting regardless of their factional symapthies or nationalities. From 1848 to 1849 he was minister of France at Madrid.

In 1849 the government of the French Republic sent him to Rome to negotiate the return of Pope Pius IX to the Vatican. He tried to negotiate an agreement whereby Pope Pius could return peacefully to the Vatican but also ensuring the continued independence of Rome. But during negotiations, the elections in France caused a change in the foreign policy of the government. His course was disapproved; he was recalled and brought before the council of state.

He was created on 30 August 1851 the 334th Commander and then the 200th Grand Cross of the Order of the Tower and Sword.

De Lesseps then retired from the diplomatic service, and never afterwards occupied any public office. In 1853 he lost his wife and daughter at a few days’ interval. In 1854, the accession to the viceroyalty of Egypt of Said Pasha gave de Lesseps a new impulse to act upon the creation of a Suez Canal.

Suez Canal
Said Pasha invited Lesseps to pay him a visit, and on 7 November 1854 he landed at Alexandria; on the 30th of the same month Said Pasha signed the concession authorizing him to build the Suez Canal.

A first scheme, indicated by him, was immediately drawn out by two French engineers who were in the Egyptian service, MM. Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds called “Linant Bey” and Mougel Bey. This project, differing from others that were previously presented or that were in opposition to it, provided for a direct communication between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. After being slightly modified, the plan was adopted in 1856 by an international commission of civil engineers to which it was submitted. Encouraged by this approval, de Lesseps no longer allowed anything to stop him. He listened to no adverse criticism and receded before no obstacle. Neither the opposition of Lord Palmerston, who considered the projected disturbance as too radical not to endanger the commercial position of Great Britain, nor the opinions entertained, in France as well as in England, that the sea in front of Port Said was full of mud which would obstruct the entrance to the canal, that the sands from the desert would fill the trenches–no adverse argument, in a word, could dishearten Lesseps.

He had the support of the emperor Napoleon III and the empress Eugénie, and he succeeded in rousing the patriotism of the French and obtaining by their subscriptions more than half of the capital of two hundred millions of francs which he needed in order to form a company. The Egyptian government subscribed for eighty millions worth of shares.

The Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez was organized at the end of 1858. On 25 April 1859 the first blow of the pickaxe was given by Lesseps at Port Said, and on 27 November 1869 the canal was officially opened by the Khedive, Ismail Pacha.

While in the interests of his canal Lesseps had resisted the opposition of British diplomacy to an enterprise which threatened to give to France control of the shortest route to India, he acted loyally towards Great Britain after Lord Beaconsfield had acquired the Suez shares belonging to the Khedive, by frankly admitting to the board of directors of the company three representatives of the British government. The consolidation of interests which resulted, and which has been developed by the addition in 1884 of seven other British directors, chosen from among shipping merchants and business men, has augmented, for the benefit of all concerned, the commercial character of the enterprise.

Ferdinand de Lesseps steadily endeavoured to keep out of politics. If in 1869 he appeared to deviate from this principle by being a candidate at Marseille for the Corps Législatif, it was because he yielded to the entreaties of the Imperial government in order to strengthen its goodwill for the Suez Canal. Once this goodwill had been shown, he bore no malice towards those who rendered him his liberty by preferring Léon Gambetta. He afterwards declined the other candidatures that were offered him: for the Senate in 1876, and for the Chamber in 1877. In 1873 he became interested in a project for uniting Europe and Asia by a railway to Bombay, with a branch to Peking. The same year, he became a member of the French Academy of Sciences. He subsequently encouraged Major Roudaire, who wished to transform a stretch of the Sahara desert into an inland sea to increase rainfall in Algeria.

The King of the Belgians having formed an International African Society, Lesseps accepted the presidency of the French committee, facilitated Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza’s explorations, and acquired stations that he subsequently abandoned to the French government. These stations were the starting-point of French Congo.

A statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps stands at the entrance of the Suez Canal.

Panama Canal attempt
In May 1879 a congress of 135 delegates (including de Lesseps) assembled in the rooms of the Geographical Society in Paris, under the presidency of Admiral de la Roncire le Noury, and voted in favour of the creation of a Panama Canal, which was to be without locks, like the Suez Canal. De Lesseps was appointed President of the Panama Canal Company, despite the fact that he had reached the age of 74. It was on this occasion that Gambetta bestowed upon him the title of “Le Grand Français”. However, the decision to dig a Panama Canal at sea level to avoid the use of locks, and the inability of contemporary medical science to deal with epidemics of malaria and yellow fever doomed the project.

De Lesseps went with his youngest child to Panama to see the planned pathway. He estimated in 1880 that the project would take 658 million francs and eight years to complete. After two years of surveys, work on the canal began in 1882. However, the technical difficulties of operating in the wet tropics dogged the project. Particularly disastrous were recurrent landslides into the excavations from the bordering water-saturated hills, and the death toll from tropical diseases. In the end, insufficient capital and financial corruption ended the project. The Panama Canal Company declared itself bankrupt in December 1888 and entered liquidation in February 1889.

The failure of the project is sometimes referred to as the Panama Canal Scandal, after rumours circulated that French politicians and journalists had received bribes. By 1892 it emerged that 150 French deputies had been bribed into voting for the allocation of financial aid to the Panama Canal Company, and in February 1893 de Lesseps, his son Charles (b. 1849), and a number of others faced trial and were found guilty. De Lesseps was ordered to pay a fine and serve a prison sentence, but the latter was overturned by the Cour de Cassation on the grounds that it had been more than three years since the crime was committed. Ultimately, in 1904 the United States bought out the assets of the Company and resumed work under a revised plan.

Second marriage and issue
In Paris on 25 November 1869 he married his second wife, Mlle Louise-Hélène Autard de Bragard (Les Plaines Wilhem, Mauritius, 1848 - Château de La Chesnay, Guilly, Vatan, Indre, 29 January 1909), daughter of Gustave Adolphe Autard de Bragard, a former Magistrate of Mauritius, and wife Marie-Louise Carcenac (1817 - 1857), daughter of Pierre Carcenac (1771 - 1819) and wife Marie Françoise Dessachis, and eleven out of his twelve children of this marriage survived him. Their children were:

* Mathieu Marie de Lesseps (Paris, 12 October 1870 - Paris, 7 October 1953), married to …
* Ferdinand-Ismaël de Lesseps (1871 - 1915)
* Ferdinande de Lesseps (Paris, 3 December 1872 - Paris, 4 May 1948), married firstly in Paris on 10 May 1890 to Ferdinand de Gontaut-Biron (Paris, 11 November 1868 - Château de Kimpempois, 6 December 1898), of the Marquesses of Saint-Blacard, by whom she had a son Ferdinand de Gontaut-Biron (Paris, 25 January 1892 - Paris, 2 February 1892), and married secondly François-Joseph de Cassagne de Beaufort, Marquis de Miramon (1867 - 1932)
* Eugénie Marie de Lesseps (1873 - 1874)
* Bertrand de Lesseps (1875 - 1918)
* Marie Consuelo de Lesseps (1875 - 1944)
* Marie-Eugénie de Lesseps (1876 - 1958)
* Marie Solange de Lesseps (Château de La Chesnaye, Guilly, Vatan, Indre, 17 September 1877 - ?), married in Paris on 12 January 1910 to Don Fernando Mexía y Fitz-James-Stuart (Biarritz, 22 October 1881 - ?), 6th Duke of Tamames, 3rd Duke of Galisteo and 12th Count of Mora, and had issue
* Paul Marie de Lesseps (1800 - 1955)
* Robert de Lesseps (Paris, 23 May 1882 - k.i.a. World War I, 1916), married to Marthe Josepha Sophie Allard (Ixelles, Brussels-Capital Region, 17 May 1884 - Uccle, Brussels-Capital Region, 19 July 1970), and had issue:
o Martin de Lesseps (Paris, 4 December 1915 - Neuilly-sur-Seine, 24 June 1981), married in London on 11 August 1945 to Beatrice Duggan (22 October 1922 -), and had issue:
+ Claire de Lesseps (b. Paris, 4 July 1956 -), married to Johann, Graf von Gudenus (b. Waidhofen, 10 March 1952 -), and has issue, one son and two daughters
* Jacques Benjamin de Lesseps (1883 - 1927)
* Gisele de Lesseps (1885 - 1973)

Statue of Liberty
On 11 June 1884, Levi P. Morton, the Minister of the United States to France, gave a banquet in honor of the Franco-American Union and in celebration of the completion of the Statue of Liberty. Ferdinand de Lesseps, as head of the Franco-American Union, formally presented the statue to the United States, saying:

This is the result of the devoted enthusiasm, the intelligence and the noblest sentiments which can inspire man. It is great in its conception, great in its execution, great in its proportions; let us hope that it will add, by its moral value, to the memories and sympathies that it is intended to perpetuate. We now transfer to you, Mr. Minister, this great statue and trust that it may forever stand the pledge of friendship between France and the Great Republic of the United States.

In October 1886, de Lesseps traveled to the United States to speak at the dedication ceremony of the Statue of Liberty, attended by President Grover Cleveland.

Death
Lesseps died at Château de La Chesnaye in Guilly, Vatan, Indre, on 7 December 1894. He was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

After his death
His name was used in a speech by Egyptian President Gamal Nasser as the codeword to order the raiding of the Suez Canal Company’s offices on 26 July 1956, the first step to its nationalisation. Tyrone Power played de Lesseps in the very popular movie Suez 1938, a film de Lesseps’ family sued for libel, claiming it was too highly fictionalized.

Victoria, who was of almost entirely German descent, was the granddaughter of George III and the niece of her predecessor William IV. She arranged marriages for her nine children and forty-two grandchildren across the continent, tying Europe together; this earned her the nickname “the grandmother of Europe”. She was the last British monarch of the House of Hanover; her son King Edward VII belonged to the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Through her mother, she was also a first cousin thrice removed of Maria Theresa, Holy Roman Empress.

Early life
In 1817 a concern over succession arose when George IV’s only legitimate child and George III’s only legitimate grandchild, Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales, died in childbirth, leaving no surviving children. George III had twelve surviving children. The younger sons of George III had not expected to figure in the line of succession to the throne of Britain, and therefore showed little interest in marriage. When Charlotte died, the remaining unmarried sons of King George III, now in their 40s and 50s, scrambled to marry and father children to guarantee the line of succession. As such, at the age of 50, The Duke of Kent, fourth son of George III, married a widow, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. The couple’s only child, Victoria, was born in Kensington Palace, London, on 24 May 1819. At birth she was fifth in line to succeed her grandfather George III to the British crown after her father’s three older brothers and her father.

Victoria was baptised in the Cupola Room of Kensington Palace on 24 June 1819 by The Archbishop of Canterbury (Charles Manners-Sutton). Her godparents were The Prince Regent (her paternal uncle); the Russian Tsar (Alexander I, her fourth cousin (in whose honour she received her first name); The Princess Royal (her paternal aunt); and The Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (her maternal grandmother). Although christened Alexandrina Victoria—and from birth formally styled Her Royal Highness Princess Victoria of Kent—Victoria was called Drina within the family.

Victoria’s first language was German, which she was taught from birth. From the age of three she was taught English and French, and became virtually trilingual, though her mastery of English grammar remained incomplete. She was also taught Italian, Greek, arithmetic, music, and history—her favourite subject. Her teachers were the Reverend George Davys and her governess, Baroness Louise Lehzen. When she learned from Baroness Lehzen that one day she could be queen, Victoria replied, “I will be good”.

Her name, originally chosen by the Prince Regent, the future King George IV, was a subject of dispute between close relatives. The future King William IV proposed Elizabeth and objected to naming the princess after her mother, by saying that Victoria was not English enough for an heiress to the throne. Charlotte was considered, in honour of the deceased princess, but it was ultimately decided to leave the name as Alexandrina Victoria; it had become popular in the British Press and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, refused a change.

Victoria’s father, the fourth son and fifth child of George III, died after a brief illness on 23 January 1820—just eight months after Victoria was born. King George III, her grandfather, died six days later on 29 January 1820. At that point, Victoria’s uncle, the Prince Regent, inherited the Crown, becoming King George IV.

George IV died in 1830 and because the second son of George III, Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, had died without issue in 1827, George IV was therefore succeeded by another brother. This was the third son of George III, Prince William, Duke of Clarence, who reigned as William IV. The fourth child of George III, Charlotte, Princess Royal, though not in line for the throne before her brothers, had died in 1817.

Heiress to the throne
William IV was the father of ten illegitimate children by his mistress, the actress Dorothy Jordan, but had no surviving legitimate children. As a result, the young Princess Victoria, his niece, became heiress presumptive.

The law at the time made no special provision for a child monarch. Therefore, a Regent needed to be appointed if Victoria were to succeed to the throne before coming of age at the age of eighteen. Parliament passed the Regency Act 1830, which provided that Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, would act as Regent during the Queen’s minority. Parliament did not create a council to limit the powers of the Regent. King William disliked the Duchess and, on at least one occasion, stated that he wanted to live until Victoria’s 18th birthday, so a regency could be avoided.

Princess Victoria met her future husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, when she was just seventeen in 1836. But it was not until a second meeting in 1839 that she said of him: “…dear Albert… He is so sensible, so kind, and so good, and so amiable too. He has besides, the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance you can possibly see.” Prince Albert was Victoria’s first cousin; his father was her mother’s brother, Ernst. As a monarch, Victoria had to propose to him and in 1840 they married. Their marriage proved to be very happy.

Early reign
Accession
On 24 May 1837 Victoria turned 18, meaning that a regency was no longer necessary. On 20 June 1837, Victoria was awakened by her mother to find that William IV had died from heart failure at the age of 71. In her diary Victoria wrote, “I was awoke at 6 o’clock by Mamma …who told me the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham were here and wished to see me. I got out of bed and went into my sitting-room (only in my dressing gown) and alone, and saw them. Lord Conyngham then acquainted me that my poor Uncle, the King, was no more, and had expired at 12 minutes past 2 this morning, and consequently that I am Queen…” Victoria was now Queen of the United Kingdom. Her coronation took place on 18 May 1838, and she became the first Monarch to take up residence at Buckingham Palace.

Under Salic Law, however, no woman could be heir to the throne of Hanover, a realm which had shared a monarch with Britain since 1714. Hanover passed to her uncle, the Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, who became King Ernest Augustus I. (He was the fifth son and eighth child of George III.) As the young queen was as yet unmarried and childless, Ernest Augustus also remained the heir presumptive to the throne of the United Kingdom until Victoria’s first child was born in 1840.

At the time of her accession, the government was controlled by the Whig Party, which had been in power, except for brief intervals, since 1830. The Whig Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, at once became a powerful influence in the life of the politically inexperienced Queen, who relied on him for advice—some even referred to Victoria as “Mrs. Melbourne”. However, the Melbourne ministry would not stay in power for long; it was growing unpopular and, moreover, faced considerable difficulty in governing the British colonies, especially during the Rebellions of 1837. In 1839, Lord Melbourne resigned after the Radicals and the Tories (both of whom Victoria detested at that time) joined together to block a Bill before the House of Commons that would have suspended the Constitution of Jamaica.

Victoria’s principal adviser was her uncle King Leopold I of Belgium (her mother’s brother, and the widower of Princess Charlotte). Queen Victoria’s cousins, through Leopold, were King Leopold II of Belgium and Empress Carlota of Mexico.

The Queen then commissioned Sir Robert Peel, a Tory, to form a new ministry, but was faced with a débâcle known as the Bedchamber Crisis. At the time, it was customary for appointments to the Royal Household to be based on the patronage system (that is, for the Prime Minister to appoint members of the Royal Household on the basis of their party loyalties). Many of the Queen’s Ladies of the Bedchamber were wives of Whigs, but Sir Robert Peel expected to replace them with wives of Tories. Victoria strongly objected to the removal of these ladies, whom she regarded as close friends rather than as members of a ceremonial institution. Sir Robert Peel felt that he could not govern under the restrictions imposed by the Queen, and consequently resigned his commission, allowing Melbourne to return to office.

Marriage and assassination attempts
The Queen married her first cousin, Prince Albert, on 10 February 1840, in the Chapel Royal of St. James’s Palace, London. Albert became not only the Queen’s companion, but an important political advisor, replacing Lord Melbourne as the dominant figure in the first half of her life following Melbourne’s death.

During Victoria’s first pregnancy, eighteen-year-old Edward Oxford attempted to assassinate the Queen while she was riding in a carriage with Prince Albert in London. Oxford fired twice, but both bullets missed. He was tried for high treason, but was acquitted on the grounds of insanity.Despite the shooting, the first of the royal couple’s nine children, named Victoria, was born on 21 November 1840.

Further attempts to assassinate Queen Victoria occurred between May and July 1842. First, on 29 May at St. James’s Park, John Francis fired a pistol at the Queen while she was in a carriage, but was immediately seized by Police Constable William Trounce. Francis was convicted of high treason. The death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. Additionally, on 13 June 1842, Victoria made her first journey by train, travelling from Slough railway station (near Windsor Castle) to Bishop’s Bridge, near Paddington (in London), in a special royal carriage provided by the Great Western Railway. Accompanying her were her husband and the engineer of the Great Western line, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The Queen and the Prince Consort both complained the train was going too fast at 20 mph (30 km/h), fearing the train would derail off the railway line. Then, on 3 July, just days after Francis’s sentence was commuted, another boy, John William Bean, attempted to shoot the Queen. Prince Albert felt that the attempts were encouraged by Oxford’s acquittal in 1840. Although his gun was loaded only with paper and tobacco, his crime was still punishable by death. Feeling that such a penalty would be too harsh, Prince Albert encouraged Parliament to pass the Treason Act 1842. Under the new law, an assault with a dangerous weapon in the monarch’s presence with the intent of alarming her was made punishable by seven years imprisonment and flogging.Bean was thus sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment; however, neither he, nor any person who violated the act in the future, was flogged.

Early Victorian politics and further assassination attempts
Peel’s ministry soon faced a crisis involving the repeal of the Corn Laws. Many Tories—by then known also as Conservatives—were opposed to the repeal, but some Tories (the “Peelites”) and most Whigs supported it. Peel resigned in 1846, after the repeal narrowly passed, and was replaced by Lord John Russell. Russell’s ministry, though Whig, was not favoured by the Queen. Particularly offensive to Victoria was the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, who often acted without consulting the Cabinet, the Prime Minister, or the Queen.

In 1849, Victoria lodged a complaint with Lord John Russell, claiming that Palmerston had sent official dispatches to foreign leaders without her knowledge. She repeated her remonstrance in 1850, but to no avail. It was only in 1851 that Lord Palmerston was removed from office; he had on that occasion announced the British government’s approval for President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup in France without prior consultation of the Prime Minister.

The period during which Russell was Prime Minister also proved personally distressing to Queen Victoria. In 1849, an unemployed and disgruntled Irishman named William Hamilton attempted to alarm the Queen by firing a powder-filled pistol as her carriage passed along Constitution Hill, London. Hamilton was charged under the 1842 act; he pleaded guilty and received the maximum sentence of seven years of penal transportation.

In 1850, the Queen did sustain injury when she was assaulted by a possibly insane ex-Army officer, Robert Pate. As Victoria was riding in a carriage, Pate struck her with his cane, crushing her bonnet and bruising her. Pate was later tried; he failed to prove his insanity, and received the same sentence as Hamilton.

Ireland
The young Queen Victoria fell in love with Ireland, choosing to holiday in Killarney in Kerry. Her love of the island was matched by initial Irish warmth towards the young Queen. In 1845, Ireland was hit by a potato blight that over four years cost the lives of over one million Irish people and saw the emigration of another million. In response to what came to be called the Irish Potato Famine (An Gorta Mór - Irish for “The Great Famine”), the Queen personally donated 2,000 pounds sterling to the starving Irish people.

However, the policies of her minister Lord John Russell were often blamed for exacerbating the severity of the famine, which adversely affected the Queen’s popularity in Ireland. Victoria was a strong supporter of the Irish; she supported the Maynooth Grant and made a point, on visiting Ireland, of visiting the seminary.

Victoria’s first official visit to Ireland, in 1849, was specifically arranged by Lord Clarendon, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland—the head of the British administration—to try to both draw attention from the famine and alert British politicians through the Queen’s presence to the seriousness of the crisis in Ireland. Despite the negative impact of the famine on the Queen’s popularity she remained popular enough for nationalists at party meetings to finish by singing “God Save the Queen”.

By the 1870s and 1880s the monarchy’s appeal in Ireland had diminished substantially, partly because Victoria refused to visit Ireland in protest at the Dublin Corporation’s decision not to congratulate her son, the Prince of Wales on both his marriage to Princess Alexandra of Denmark and on the birth of the royal couple’s oldest son, Prince Albert Victor.

Victoria refused repeated pressure from a number of prime ministers, lord lieutenants and even members of the Royal Family, to establish a royal residence in Ireland. Lord Midleton, the former head of the Irish unionist party, writing in his memoirs of 1930 Ireland: Dupe or Heroine?, described this decision as having proved disastrous to the monarchy and British rule in Ireland.

Victoria paid her last visit to Ireland in 1900, when she came to appeal to Irishmen to join the British Army and fight in the Second Boer War. Nationalist opposition to her visit was spearheaded by Arthur Griffith, who established an organisation called Cumann na nGaedhael to unite the opposition. Five years later Griffith used the contacts established in his campaign against the queen’s visit to form a new political movement, Sinn Féin.

Widowhood
The Prince Consort died of typhoid fever on 14 December 1861 due to the primitive sanitary conditions at Windsor Castle. His death devastated Victoria, who was still affected by the death of her mother earlier that year.She entered a state of mourning and wore black for the remainder of her life. She avoided public appearances and rarely set foot in London in the following years. Her seclusion earned her the name “Widow of Windsor.” She blamed her son Edward, the Prince of Wales, for his father’s death, since news of the Prince’s poor conduct had come to his father in November, leading Prince Albert to travel to Cambridge to confront his son.

Victoria’s self-imposed isolation from the public greatly diminished the popularity of the monarchy, and even encouraged the growth of the republican movement. Although she did undertake her official government duties, she chose to remain secluded in her royal residences—Balmoral Castle in Scotland, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and Windsor Castle.

As time went by Victoria began to rely increasingly on a manservant from Scotland, John Brown. A romantic connection and even a secret marriage have been alleged, but both charges are generally discredited. However, when Victoria’s remains were laid in the coffin, two sets of mementos were placed with her, at her request. By her side was placed one of Albert’s dressing gowns while in her left hand was placed a piece of Brown’s hair, along with a picture of him. It was learned in 2008 that Victoria’s body wore the wedding ring of John Brown’s mother, placed on her hand after her death.Rumours of an affair and marriage earned Victoria the nickname “Mrs Brown”. The story of their relationship was the subject of the 1997 movie Mrs. Brown.

Later years
Golden Jubilee and an assassination attempt
In 1887, the British Empire celebrated Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Victoria marked the fiftieth anniversary of her accession on 20 June with a banquet to which 50 European kings and princes were invited. Although she could not have been aware of it, there was a plan—ostensibly by Irish anarchists—to blow up Westminster Abbey while the Queen attended a service of thanksgiving. This assassination attempt, when it was discovered, became known as the Jubilee Plot. On the next day, she participated in a procession that, in the words of Mark Twain, “stretched to the limit of sight in both directions”. By this time, Victoria was once again an extremely popular monarch.

Diamond Jubilee
On 22 September 1896, Victoria surpassed George III as the longest-reigning monarch in English, Scottish, and British history. The Queen requested all special public celebrations of the event to be delayed until 1897, to coincide with her Diamond Jubilee. The Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, proposed that the Diamond Jubilee be made a festival of the British Empire.

The Prime Ministers of all the self-governing dominions and colonies were invited. The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee procession included troops from every British colony and dominion, together with soldiers sent by Indian princes and chiefs as a mark of respect to Victoria, the Empress of India. The Diamond Jubilee celebration was an occasion marked by great outpourings of affection for the septuagenarian Queen. A service of thanksgiving was held outside St. Paul’s Cathedral. Queen Victoria sat in her carriage throughout the service; she wore her usual black mourning dress trimmed with white lace. Many trees were planted to celebrate the Jubilee, including 60 oak trees at Henley-on-Thames in the shape of a Victoria Cross. The VC was introduced on 29 January 1856 by Queen Victoria to reward acts of valour during the Crimean War, and it remains to this day the highest award for bravery.

Death and succession
Following a custom she maintained throughout her widowhood, Victoria spent the Christmas of 1900 at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. She died there from a cerebral hemorrhage on Tuesday 22 January 1901 at half past six in the afternoon, at the age of 81. At her deathbed she was attended by her son, the future King, and her eldest grandson, German Emperor William II. As she had wished, her own sons lifted her into the coffin. She was dressed in a white dress and her wedding veil. Her funeral was held on Saturday 2 February, and after two days of lying-in-state, she was interred beside Prince Albert in Frogmore Mausoleum at Windsor Great Park. Since Victoria disliked black funerals, London was instead festooned in purple and white. When she was laid to rest at the mausoleum, it began to snow.

Flags in the United States were lowered to half-staff in her honour by order of President William McKinley, a tribute never before offered to a foreign monarch at the time and one which was repaid by Britain when McKinley was assassinated later that year. Victoria had reigned for a total of 63 years, seven months and two days—the longest of any British monarch—and surpassed her grandfather, George III, as the longest-lived monarch three days before her death. She was subsequently surpassed by her great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth II on 21 December 2007.

Victoria’s death brought an end to the rule of the House of Hanover in the United Kingdom. As her husband belonged to the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, her son and heir Edward VII was the first British monarch of this new house. Later, in 1917, her grandson King George V changed the house name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the (currently serving) House of Windsor.

Victoria outlived 3 of her 9 children, and came within seven months of outliving a fourth (her eldest daughter, Vicky, who died of spinal cancer in August 1901 aged 60. She outlived 11 of her 42 grandchildren (3 stillborn, 6 as children, and 2 as adults).

Legacy
Within Britain
Queen Victoria’s reign marked the gradual establishment of modern constitutional monarchy. A series of legal reforms saw the House of Commons’ power increase, at the expense of the House of Lords and the monarchy, with the monarch’s role becoming gradually more symbolic. Since Victoria’s reign the monarch has had only, in Walter Bagehot’s words, “the right to be consulted, the right to advise, and the right to warn”.

As Victoria’s monarchy became more symbolic than political, it placed a strong emphasis on morality and family values, in contrast to the sexual, financial and personal scandals that had been associated with previous members of the House of Hanover and which had discredited the monarchy. Victoria’s reign created for Britain the concept of the “family monarchy” with which the burgeoning middle classes could identify.

Victoria was the first known carrier of haemophilia in the royal line. Since no haemophiliacs were among her known ancestors, hers was quite possibly an instance of spontaneous mutation, which account for about 33% of all haemophilia A and 20% of all haemophilia B cases. The sudden appearance of haemophilia in Victoria’s descendants has led to suggestions that her true father was not the Duke of Kent but a haemophiliac. This belief is dismissed by geneticists, who consider it more likely that the mutation arose because Victoria’s father was old (haemophilia arises more frequently in the children of older fathers). There is no documentary evidence of a haemophiliac man in connection with Victoria’s mother, and as male carriers always suffer the disease, even if such a man had existed he would have been seriously ill. Evidence indicates Victoria passed the gene on to two of her five daughters: Princess Alice and Princess Beatrice. Her son, Prince Leopold, was affected by the disease. The most famous haemophilia victims among her descendants were her great-grandson, Alexei, Tsarevich of Russia, and Alfonso, Prince of Asturias and Infante Gonzalo of Spain, the eldest and youngest sons of King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Victoria Eugenie (Victoria’s granddaughter).

Queen Victoria experienced unpopularity during the first years of her widowhood, but afterwards became extremely well-liked during the 1880s and 1890s. In 2002, the BBC conducted a poll regarding the 100 Greatest Britons; Victoria attained the eighteenth place.

The design of the Queen’s head on the first postage stamp was based upon the 1837 Wyon City medal engraved by a famous coin engraver William Wyon. The design of Queen Victoria’s head is based on a sitting when she was a princess aged 15. Victoria also started the tradition of a bride wearing a white dress at her wedding. Before Victoria’s wedding a bride would wear her best dress of no particular colour.

Around the world
Internationally Victoria was a major figure, not just in image or in terms of Britain’s influence through the empire, but also because of family links throughout Europe’s royal families, earning her the affectionate nickname “the grandmother of Europe”. For example, three of the main monarchs with countries involved in the First World War on the opposing side were either grandchildren of Victoria’s or married to a grandchild of hers. Eight of Victoria’s nine children married members of European royal families, and the other, Princess Louise, married Marquess of Lorne, a future Governor-General of Canada.

As of 2008, the European monarchs and former monarchs descended from Victoria are: Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom (as well as her husband), King Harald V of Norway, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, King Juan Carlos I of Spain (as well as his wife), and the deposed kings Constantine II of Greece (as well as his wife) and Michael of Romania. The pretenders to the thrones of Serbia, Russia, Prussia and Germany, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Hanover, Hesse, Baden and France (Legitimist) are also descendants.

Several places in the world have been named after Victoria, including two Australian States (Victoria and Queensland), the capitals of British Columbia (Victoria), and Saskatchewan (Regina), the capital of the Seychelles, Africa’s largest lake, and Victoria Falls.

Victoria Day is a Canadian statutory holiday celebrated on the last Monday before or on 24 May in honour of both Queen Victoria’s birthday and the current reigning Canadian Sovereign’s birthday. While Victoria Day is often thought of as a purely Canadian event, it is also celebrated in some parts of Scotland, particularly in Edinburgh and Dundee, where it is also a public holiday.

Queen Victoria remains the most commemorated British monarch in history, with statues to her erected throughout the former territories of the British Empire. These range from the prominent, such as the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace—which was erected as part of the remodelling of the façade of the Palace a decade after her death—to the obscure: in the town of Cape Coast, Ghana, a bust of the Queen presides, rather forlornly, over a small park where goats graze around her. Many institutions, thoroughfares, parks, and structures bear her name.

There is a statue of Queen Victoria in Victoria Square in Adelaide, capital city of the Australian state of South Australia; in Queen’s Square in Brisbane, capital city of the Australian state of Queensland; and in the Domain Gardens in Melbourne, the capital of the Australian State of Victoria. In Perth, capital city of Western Australian a marble statue stands in King’s Park overlooking the city surrounded by canon used at the Battle of Waterloo. A bronze statue of Queen Victoria stands in the main street of the city of Ballarat in Victoria, Australia. At Bangalore, India, the statue of the Queen stands at the beginning of MG Road, one of the city’s major roads. Statues erected to Victoria are common in Canada, where her reign was coterminous with the confederation of the country and the creation of several new provinces. A bas-relief image of Victoria is on the wall of the entrance to the Canadian Parliament, and her statue is in the Parliamentary library as well as on the grounds.

Queen Victoria invited Martha Ann Ricks, on behalf of Liberian Ambassador Edward Wilmont Blyden, to Windsor Castle on 16 July 1892. Martha Ricks, a former slave from Tennessee, had saved her pennies for more than fifty years, to afford the voyage from Liberia to England to personally thank the Queen for sending the British navy to patrol the coast of West Africa to prevent slavers from exporting Africans for the slave trade. Martha Ricks shook hands with the Queen and presented her with a Coffee Tree quilt, which Queen Victoria later sent to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition for display. A mystery remains as to where the Coffee Tree quilt is today.

Titles and styles

* 24 May 1819 – 20 June 1837: Her Royal Highness Princess Victoria of Kent
* 20 June 1837 – 22 January 1901: Her Majesty The Queen
o 1 May 1876 – 22 January 1901: Her Imperial Majesty The Queen-Empress (occasionally)

As the male-line granddaughter of a King of Hanover, Victoria also bore the titles of Princess of Hanover and Duchess of Brunswick and Lunenburg. In addition, she held the titles of Princess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Duchess in Saxony etc. as the wife of Prince Albert.

Coat of arms
Victoria’s coat of arms was not uniform throughout the United Kingdom: Quarterly, I and IV Gules three lions passant guardant in pale Or (for England); II Or a lion rampant within a double tressure flory-counter-flory Gules (for Scotland); III Azure a harp Or stringed Argent (for Ireland). This same coat of arms has been used by every subsequent British monarch.

Royal Cypher
Victoria’s Royal Cypher was the first to be used on a postbox. The letters are VR interlaced, standing for “Victoria Regina”. Although Victoria eventually used the cypher VRI (”Victoria Regina Imperatrix”) when she became Empress, this never appeared on postboxes. Victoria’s cypher was the only one to appear on postboxes without a crown above it.

The term Porfiriato refers to the years when Díaz ruled Mexico.

Early years
Porfirio Díaz was born on September 15, 1830, in Oaxaca, Mexico. With an Indian mother and a European father, Diaz was born into great poverty as an illiterate Mestizo child. His father, José Faustino de la Cruz Díaz was a modest innkeeper and passed away when his son was just an infant.

Diaz began training for the priesthood at the age of fifteen when his mother, Petrona Mori Cortes, sent him to the Seminario Conciliar. In 1850, inspired by Liberal Benito Juárez, Diaz entered the Instituto de Ciencias and spent some time studying law. Diaz’s life took an unexpected turn, however, when he decided to join the armed forces upon the outbreak of war with the United States in 1846. Having dabbled in many different professions, Diaz discovered his vocation in 1855 and joined a band of liberal guerrillas who were fighting a resurgent Antonio López de Santa Anna. Thus, his life as a military man began.

Life as a military man and path to the presidency
When Juárez became the president of Mexico in 1858 and began to restore peace, Diaz resigned his military command and went home to Oaxaca. However, it did not take long before the energetic Diaz became unhappy with the Juarez administration.

Diaz’s military career is most noted for his service in the War of the Reform and the struggle against the French. By the time of the Battle of Puebla (May 5, 1862), General Díaz had become the brigade general in charge of an infantry brigade.

During the Battle of Puebla, his brigade was placed in the center between the forts of Loreto and Guadalupe. From there, he repelled a French infantry attack that was sent as a diversion to distract the Mexican commanders’ attention from the forts that were the main target of the French army. In violation of the orders of General Ignacio Zaragoza, General Díaz and his unit fought off a larger French force and then chased after them. Despite Diaz’s inability to share control, General Zaragoza commended the actions of General Díaz during the battle as “brave and notable”.

In 1863, Díaz was captured by the French Army. He escaped and was offered by President Benito Juárez the positions of secretary of defense or army commander in chief. He declined both but took an appointment as commander of the Central Army. That same year he was promoted to the position of Division General.

In 1864, the conservatives supporting Emperor Maximilian asked him to join the imperial cause. Díaz declined the offer. In 1865, he was captured by the Imperial forces in Oaxaca. He escaped and fought the battles of Tehuitzingo, Piaxtla, Tulcingo and Comitlipa.

In 1866, Díaz formally declared his loyalty to Juárez. That same year he earned victories in Nochixtlan, Miahuatlan, and la Carbonera, and once again captured Oaxaca. He was then promoted to general. Also in 1866, Marshal Bazaine, commander of the Imperial forces, offered to surrender Mexico City to Diaz if he withdrew support of Juárez. Diaz declined the offer. In 1867, Emperor Maximilian offered Díaz the command of the army and the imperial rendition to the liberal cause. Díaz refused both. Finally, on April 2, 1867, he went on to win the final battle for Puebla.

In 1871, Diaz attempted to lead a revolt against the reelection of Juarez. In March 1872 Diaz’s forces were defeated in the battle of La Bufa in Zacatecas. Following Juárez’s death on July 9 of that year, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada assumed the presidency and then offered amnesty to the rebels. Díaz accepted in October and “retired” to the Hacienda de la Candelaria in Tlacotalpan, Veracruz. However, he remained wildly popular among the people of Mexico well after the defeat of the French and the death of Juárez in 1872.

In 1874 he was elected to Congress from Veracruz. That year Lerdo de Tejada’s government faced civil and military unrest, and offered Díaz the position of ambassador to Germany, which he refused. In 1875 Díaz traveled to New Orleans and Brownsville, Texas to plan a rebellion, which was launched in Ojitlan, Oaxaca on January 10, 1876, as the “Plan de Tuxtepec”.

Diaz continued to be an outspoken citizen and led a second revolt against President Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada in 1876. In yet another failed attempt to gain true political power, Diaz fled to the United States of America. His fight, however, was far from over.

Several months later, in November of 1876, Diaz returned to his home country and fought the Battle of Tecoac, where he defeated the government forces once and for all. Finally, in May 1877, Diaz became the formally elected president of Mexico for the first time. His campaign of “no-reelection”, however, came to define his control over the state for more than thirty years.

The campaign of “no-reelection”

In 1870, Díaz ran as presidential candidate against President Juárez and Vice President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. In 1871 he made claims of fraud in the July elections won by Juárez, who was confirmed as president by the Congress in October. In response, Díaz launched the Plan de la Noria on November 8, supported by a number of rebellions across the nation.

After appointing himself president on November 28, 1876, he served only one term—having staunchly stood against Lerdo’s reelection policy. During his first term in office, Díaz initiated a lengthy process of tightening the consolidation of power. In doing so, Díaz constructed a powerful political machine that held immense power of the people of Mexico. He maintained control through manipulation of votes, but also through simple violence and assassination of his opponents, who consequently were few in number. His administration became famous for their suppression of civil society and public revolts. Instead of running for a second term, he handpicked his successor, Manuel González, one of his trustworthy companions.[1] This sneaky side-step maneuver, however, did not mean that Díaz was stepping down from his powerful throne.

The four-year period that followed was marked by corruption and official incompetence, so that when Díaz stepped up in the election of 1884, he was welcomed by his people with open arms. More importantly, very few people remembered his “No Re-election” slogan that defined his previous campaign. During this period the Mexican underground political newspapers spread the new ironic slogan for the Porfirian times, based on the slogan “Sufragio Efectivo, No Reelección” and changed it to “Sufragio Efectivo No, Reelección”. In any case Díaz had the constitution amended, first to allow two terms in office, and then to remove all restrictions on re-election.

Political career
Having created a band of military brothers, Diaz went on to construct a broad coalition (Skidmore 260). He was a cunning politician and knew very well how to manipulate people to his advantage. A phrase used to describe the order of his rule was “Pan, o palo” (”bread, or the stick”), meaning that one could either accept what was given willingly (often a position of political power), or face harsh consequences (often death). Either way, rising opposition to Diaz’ administration was immediately quelled (Crow 670).

Over the next 26 years as president, Diaz created a systematic and methodical regime with a staunch military mindset (Britannica 70). His first goal was to establish peace throughout Mexico. According to Crow, Diaz “set out to establish a good strong paz porfiriana, or Porfirian peace, of such scope and firmness that it would redeem the country in the eyes of the world for its sixty-five years of revolution and anarchy” (Crow 668). His second goal was outlined in his motto—“no politics and plenty of administration” (Crow 667).

In reality, however, his fight for profits, control, and progress kept his people in a constant state of uncertainty. Diaz managed to dissolve all local authorities and aspects of federalism that once existed. Not long after he became president, the leaders of Mexico were answering directly to him (Britannica 70). Those who held high positions of power, such as the legislature, were composed almost entirely of his closest and most loyal friends. In his quest for even more political control, Diaz even suppressed the media and controlled the court system (Britannica 70).

In order to secure his power, Diaz engaged in various forms of co-optation and coercion. He played his people like a board game—catering to the private desires of different interest groups and playing off one interest against another (Britannica 70). In order to satisfy any competing forces, such as the Mestizos, he gave them political positions of power that they could not deny. He did the same thing with the elite Creole society by not interfering with their wealth and haciendas. When in came to the Roman Catholic Church, Diaz proved to be a different kind of Liberal than those of the past. He neither assaulted the Church (like most liberals) nor protected the Church (Skidmore 261). In regard to the dominant Indian population, they were almost entirely ignored. In giving different groups of potential power a taste of what they wanted, Diaz created the illusion of democracy and quelled almost all competing forces.

Diaz knew that it was crucial for him to wield power over the countryside, where the majority of Mexican citizens inhabited. Diaz depended on the guardias rurales, (police of the countryside) to aid him in this matter. In essence, Diaz worked to enhance the control of the government in places that it truly mattered—in military and police power (Skidmore 260).

From 1892 onwards Díaz’s perennial opponent was the eccentric Nicolás Zúñiga y Miranda, who lost every election but always claimed fraud and considered himself to be the legitimately elected president of Mexico.

Economic development under Diaz

Diaz believed that by being president, he was granting Mexico the greatest gift of political stability. Even at the cost of freedom, political stability, he believed, was the key to economic growth. From the moment Diaz became president, the Mexican economy was a problem. In hopes of building up Mexico as fast as possible, Diaz welcomed foreign investors with open arms. Diaz immediately encouraged foreign investment because the country was in serious debt and had minimal savings left over from the previous administration. Because Diaz made the conditions for investors so favorable, local businesses and individual workers greatly suffered.

When it came to the economy, Diaz largely stuck to familiar liberal principles. For example, he decided that a previous 1850s ban on corporate land holding should also be enacted for Indian villages. This freed land for private exploitation and for purchase by his loyal political followers and friends. The crucial source of new money, however, came from outside Mexico’s borders. The growing influence of U.S. businessmen over the Mexican economy was a constant dilemma for Díaz.

Diaz’s two top advisors, Matias Romero and Jose Y. Limantour, were held responsible for the sudden influx of international investments. With the development of nation-wide infrastructure, Mexico began to experience a great deal of new wealth. The problem, however, was not the growth in revenues, but the way it was distributed. The money was not used to improve the lives of the people of Mexico. Rather, the profits ended up the hands of a wealthy few or went overseas. Despite its labor surplus, the wage rates remained very low and the majority of the Mexican population faced devastating poverty. As Crow states, “Mexicans had no money and the doors were thrown open to those who had.” Also, economic progress varied drastically from region to region. The north was defined by mining and ranching while the central valley became the home of large-scale farms for wheat and grain.

His modernization program was also at odds with the owners of the large plantations (haciendas) that had spread across much of Mexico. These rich plantation owners wanted to maintain their existing feudal system (peonage), and were reluctant to transform into the capitalist economy Díaz was pushing towards because it meant competing in a global market and contending with the monetary influence of businessmen from the United States. Though he wished to modernize the country, Díaz by no means opposed the existence of the haciendas, and in fact supported them strongly throughout his rule. He appointed sympathetic governors and allowed the plantation owners to proceed with a slow campaign of encroachment, using the Ley Lerdo, onto collectively owned village land, and enforced such seizure through his well-equipped rural police (rurales).

While Díaz claimed to have realized the positivist governance of “order and progress,” perfection was far from reality. Before the celebrations began for the independence centennial of 1910, the economy that once seemed to have a bright future for Mexico looked out upon a dismal horizon. Due to shrinking national revenues, the Mexican government was forced to borrow money from abroad. As wages on the home front were steadily decreasing, strikes in the streets were common and often difficult to cover up by the administration. With the extremely apparent dept of the farmers, Mexico’s economic troubles were undeniable. Despite the fact that the concept of economic progress was dwindling, Díaz maintained the appearance of prosperity. The magnificent Mexico City became a showcase for the country’s apparent progress.

Because Díaz had created such an effective centralized government, he was able to concentrate decision-making and maintain control over the economic instability. Under Díaz, personal wealth and political power were one and the same.

Collapse of the regime
“     I have no desire to continue in the Presidency. This nation is ready for her ultimate life of freedom.     ”

—Díaz declarations to journalist James Creelman in 1908

On February 17, 1908, in an interview with the U.S. journalist James Creelman of Pearson’s Magazine, Díaz stated that Mexico was ready for democracy and elections and that he would retire and allow other candidates to compete for the presidency. Without hesitation, several opposition and pro-government groups united to find suitable candidates who would represent them in the upcoming presidential elections. Many liberals formed clubs supporting the governor of Nuevo León, Bernardo Reyes as a candidate for the presidency. Despite the fact that Reyes never formally announced his candidacy, Díaz continued to perceive him as a threat and sent him on a mission to Europe, so that he was not in the country for the elections.

According to John A. Crow, “A cautious but new breath entered the prostrate Mexican underground. Dark undercurrents rose to the top.” As groups began to settle on their presidential candidate, Diaz decided that he was not going to retire but rather, allow Francisco Madero, an aristocratic but democratically leaning reformer, to run against him. Although the landowner was very similar to Díaz in his ideology, he hoped for other elites in Mexico to rule alongside the president. Díaz, however, did not approve of Madero and had him jailed during the election in 1910. Despite his former spoken ideas of democracy and change, sameness seemed to be the only reality.

Despite this, the election went ahead. Madero had gathered much popular support, but when the government announced the official results, Díaz was proclaimed to have been re-elected almost unanimously, with Madero gathering only a minuscule number of votes. This case of massive electoral fraud aroused widespread anger throughout the Mexican citizenry. Madero called for revolt against Díaz, and the Mexican Revolution began. Díaz was forced from office and fled the country for France in 1911.

On July 2, 1915, after two marriages and three children, Díaz died in exile in Paris. He is buried there in the Cimetière du Montparnasse.

Sontag grew up in Tucson, Arizona and, later, in Los Angeles, where she graduated from North Hollywood High School at the age of 15. She began her undergraduate studies at Berkeley but transferred to the University of Chicago, where she undertook studies in philosophy, romanism and literature (Leo Strauss and Kenneth Burke among her lecturers) and graduated with a B.A. She did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard, St Anne’s College, Oxford and the Sorbonne.

At 17, while at Chicago, Sontag married Philip Rieff after a ten-day courtship. They were married for eight years before divorcing in 1958. The couple had a son, David Rieff, who later became his mother’s editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He also became a writer.

The publication of Against Interpretation (1966), accompanied by a striking dust-jacket photo by Harry Hess, helped establish Sontag’s reputation as “the Dark Lady of American Letters.” Movie stars like Woody Allen, philosophers like Arthur Danto, and politicians like Mayor John Lindsay vied to know her. In the movie Bull Durham, her work was used as a touchstone of sexual savoir-faire.

In her prime, Sontag avoided all pigeonholes. Like Jane Fonda, she went to Hanoi, and wrote of the North Vietnamese society with much sympathy and appreciation (see “Trip to Hanoi” in Styles of Radical Will). She maintained a clear distinction, however, between North Vietnam and Maoist China, as well as East-European communism, which she later famously rebuked as “fascism with a human face.”

Sontag died in New York City on 28 December 2004, aged 71, from complications of myelodysplastic syndrome which had evolved into acute myelogenous leukemia. The MDS likely resulted from of chemotherapy and radiation treatment she received three decades earlier for advanced breast cancer and, later, a rare form of uterine cancer. Sontag is buried in Montparnasse cemetery, in Paris. Her final illness has been chronicled by her son, David Rieff.

Work
Sontag’s literary career began and ended with works of fiction. After teaching philosophy at Columbia University, Sontag devoted herself to full-time writing. At age 30, she published an experimental novel called The Benefactor (1963), following it four years later with Death Kit (1967). Despite a relatively small output, Sontag thought of herself principally as a novelist and writer of fiction. Her short story “The Way We Live Now” was published to great acclaim on 26 November, 1986 in The New Yorker. Written in an experimental narrative style, it remains a key text on the AIDS epidemic. She achieved late popular success as a best-selling novelist with The Volcano Lover (1992). At age 67, Sontag published her final novel In America (2000). The last two novels were set in the past, which Sontag said gave her greater freedom to write in the polyphonic voice.

It was as an essayist, however, that Sontag gained early fame and notoriety. Sontag wrote frequently about the intersection of high and low art. Her celebrated and widely-read 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” was epoch-defining, examining an alternative sensibility to seriousness and comedy. It gestured to the “so bad it’s good” concept in popular culture for the first time. In 1977, Sontag wrote the essay On Photography, which gave media students and scholars an entirely different perspective of the camera in the modern world. The essay is an exploration of photographs as a collection of the world, mainly by travelers or tourists, and the way we therefore experience it. She outlines the concept of her theory of taking pictures as you travel:

The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic – Germans, Japanese and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.

Sontag suggested photographic “evidence” be used as a presumption that “something exists, or did exist”, regardless of distortion. For her, the art of photography is “as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are”, for cameras are produced rapidly as a “mass art form” and are available to all of those with the means to attain them. Focusing also on the effect of the camera and photograph on the wedding and modern family life, Sontag reflects that these are a “rite of family life” in industrialized areas such as Europe and America.

To Sontag “picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights - to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on”. She considers the camera a phallus, comparable to ray guns and cars, which are “fantasy-machines whose use is addictive”. For Sontag the camera can be linked to murder and a promotion of nostalgia while evoking “the sense of the unattainable” in the industrialized world. The photograph familiarizes the wealthy with “the oppressed, the exploited, the starving, and the massacred” but removes the shock of these images because they are available widely and have ceased to be novel. Sontag saw the photograph as valued because it gives information but acknowledges that it is incapable of giving a moral standpoint although it can reinforce an existing one.

Sontag championed European writers such as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Antonin Artaud, E. M. Cioran, and W. G. Sebald, along with some Americans such as María Irene Fornés. Over several decades she would turn her attention to novels, film, and photography. In more than one book, Sontag wrote about cultural attitudes toward illness. Her final nonfiction work, Regarding the Pain of Others, re-examined art and photography from a moral standpoint. It spoke of how the media affects culture’s views of conflict.

A New Visual Code
In her Essay On Photography Sontag says that the evolution of modern technology has changed the viewer in three key ways. She calls this the emergence of a new visual code. Firstly, Sontag suggests that modern photography, with its convenience and ease, has created an overabundance of visual material. As photographing is now a practice of the masses, due to a drastic decrease in camera size and increase of ease in developing photographs, we are left in a position where “just about everything has been photographed”(Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 3). We now have so many images available to us of: things, places, events and people from all over the world, and of not immediate relevance to our own existence, that our expectations of what we have the right to view, want to view or should view has been drastically affected. Arguably, gone are the days that we felt entitled of view only those things in our immediate presence or that affected our micro world; we now seem to feel entitled to gain access to any existing images. “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notion of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe” (Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 3) This is what Sontag calls a change in “viewing ethics” (Susan Sontag (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 3”).

Secondly, Sontag comments on the effect of modern photography on our education, claiming that photographs “now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present”( Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 4). Without photography only those few people who had been there would know what the Egyptian pyramids or the Parthenon look like, yet most of us have a good idea of the appearance of these places. Photography teaches us about those parts of the world that are beyond our touch in ways that literature can not.

Sontag also talks about the way in which photography desensitizes its audience. Sontag introduces this discussion by telling her own story of the first time she saw images of horrific human experience. At twelve years old, Sontag stumbled upon images of holocaust camps and was so distressed by them she says “When I looked at those photographs something broke… something went dead, something is still crying” (Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 20). Sontag argues that there was no good to come from her seeing these images as a young girl, before she fully understood what the holocaust was. For Sontag the viewing of these images has left her a degree more numb to any following horrific image she viewed, as she had been desensitized. According to this argument, “Images anesthetize” and the open accessibility to them is a negative result of photography (Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 20).

Sontag examines the relationship between photography and reality. Photographs are depicted as a representation of realism. Sontag claimed that “such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image, an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real (Sontag, Susan 1982 The Image World p. 350). It is a resemblance of the real as the photograph becomes an extension of the subject. However the role of the photograph has changed, as copies destroy the idea of an experience. The image has altered to convey information and become an act of classification. Sontag highlights the notion that photographs are a way of imprisoning reality- making the memory stand still. Ultimately images are surveillance of events that trigger the memory. In modern society, photographs are a form of recycling the real. When a moment is captured it is assigned a new meaning as people interpret the image in their own manner. Sontag depicts the idea that images desensitize the real thing, as peoples perceptions are distorted by the construction of the photograph. However this has not stop people from consuming images as there is still a demand for more photographs. Therefore, Sontag has impacted the audiences understanding of reality, as photographs have adapted to a form of surveillance.

Susan Sontag brought out some uses of the photography , “Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation’ (Sontag,1977. P10) , such as memorizing, providing evidences . She also mentioned that ‘to collect photography is to collect the world’. (Sontag,1997.p3)

Sontag believes that photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. She states that photography has ‘become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation’. She refers to photographs as memento mori, where to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability and mutability. The progression from the written word to capturing an image shifts the weight of the interpretation from the author to the receiver. Sontag believes however that ‘photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire’ .It is a slice in time and in effect, is more memorable than moving images for example, videos. It fills the gaps in our mind of the past and present . Even though photography has such effect, there are limits to photographic knowledge of the world. The limitations are that it can never be interpreted ethical or political knowledge .It will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. Our modern day society can be described as a society feeding on aesthetic consumerism. There is an addiction and a need to constantly have reality confirmed and experiences enhanced by photographs .

Activism
In 1989 Sontag was the President of PEN American Center, the main U.S. branch of the International PEN writers’ organization. This was the year when Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa death sentence against writer Salman Rushdie after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. Khomeini and some other Islamic fundamentalists claimed the novel was blasphemous. Sontag’s uncompromising support of Rushdie was critical in rallying American writers to his cause.

A few years later, Sontag gained attention for directing Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot during the nearly four-year Siege of Sarajevo. Early in that conflict, Sontag referred to the Serbian invasion and massacre in Bosnia as the “Spanish Civil War of our time”. She sparked controversy among U.S. leftists for advocating U.S. and European military intervention. Sontag lived in Sarajevo for many months of the Sarajevo siege.

Controversies
Sontag drew fire for writing that “Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.” (Partisan Review, Winter 1967, p. 57.) Sontag later offered an ironic apology for the remark, saying it was insensitive to cancer victims.

In a well-circulated essay entitled “Sontag, Bloody Sontag,” Camille Paglia describes her initial admiration for Sontag and her subsequent disillusionment with the author. Paglia wrote,

Sontag’s cool exile was a disaster for the American women’s movement. Only a woman of her prestige could have performed the necessary critique and debunking of the first instant-canon feminist screeds, such as those of Kate Millett or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, whose middlebrow mediocrity crippled women’s studies from the start. No patriarchal villains held Sontag back; her failures are her own.

Paglia proceeds to detail a series of criticisms of Sontag, including Harold Bloom’s comment on Paglia’s doctoral dissertation, of “Mere Sontagisme!”. This “had become synonymous with a shallow kind of hip posturing.” Paglia also describes Sontag as a “sanctimonious moralist of the old-guard literary world”. She told of a visit by Sontag to Bennington, in which she arrived hours late, ignored the agreed upon topic of the event, and made an incessant series of ridiculous demands.

In 1968 Sontag was criticized for visiting Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, during the Vietnam War.

Ellen Lee accused Sontag of plagiarism when Lee discovered at least twelve passages in In America that were similar to passages in four other books about Helena Modjeska. Those books included a novel by Willa Cather. (Cather wrote: “When Oswald asked her to propose a toast, she put out her long arm, lifted her glass, and looking into the blur of the candlelight with a grave face, said: ‘To my coun-n-try!’” Sontag wrote, “When asked to propose a toast, she put out her long arm, lifted her glass, and looking into the blur of the candlelight, crooned, ‘To my new country!’ ” “Country,” muttered Miss Collingridge. “Not ‘coun-n-try.’”) The quotations were presented without credit or attribution.

Sontag said about using the passages, “”All of us who deal with real characters in history transcribe and adopt original sources in the original domain. I’ve used these sources and I’ve completely transformed them. I have these books. I’ve looked at these books. There’s a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions.”

Sontag sparked controversy for her remarks in The New Yorker (24 September 24, 2001) about the immediate aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. Sontag wrote:

“Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word ‘cowardly’ is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.”

Bisexuality
Sontag became aware of her attraction to women in her early teens and wrote in her diary aged 15, “so now I feel I have lesbian tendencies (how reluctantly I write this).” Aged 16, she had her first sexual encounter with a woman: “Perhaps I was drunk, after all, because it was so beautiful when H began making love to me …. It had been 4:00 before we had gotten to bed … I became fully conscious that I desired her, she knew it, too….”

In the early 1970s, Sontag was romantically involved with Nicole Stéphane (1923-2007), a Rothschild banking heiress turned movie actress.Sontag later had committed relationships with photographer Annie Leibovitz, with whom she was close during her last years; choreographer Lucinda Childs, writer Maria Irene Fornes, and other women.

In an interview in The Guardian in 2000, Sontag was quite open about her bisexuality:

“Shall I tell you about getting older?”, she says, and she is laughing. “When you get older, 45 plus, men stop fancying you. Or put it another way, the men I fancy don’t fancy me. I want a young man. I love beauty. So what’s new?” She says she has been in love seven times in her life, which seems quite a lot. “No, hang on,” she says. “Actually, it’s nine. Five women, four men.”

Many of Sontag’s obituaries failed to mention her significant same-sex relationships, most notably that with Leibovitz. In response to this criticism, The New York Times’ Public Editor, Daniel Okrent, defended the newspaper’s obituary, stating that at the time of Sontag’s death, a reporter could make no independent verification of her romantic relationship with Leibovitz (despite attempts to do so). After Sontag’s death, Newsweek published an article about Leibovitz that made clear reference to her decade-plus relationship with Sontag, stating: “The two first met in the late ’80s, when Leibovitz photographed her for a book jacket. They never lived together, though they each had an apartment within view of the other’s.”

Sontag was quoted by Editor-in-Chief Brendan Lemon of Out magazine as saying “I grew up in a time when the modus operandi was the ‘open secret’. I’m used to that, and quite OK with it. Intellectually, I know why I haven’t spoken more about my sexuality, but I do wonder if I haven’t repressed something there to my detriment. Maybe I could have given comfort to some people if I had dealt with the subject of my private sexuality more, but it’s never been my prime mission to give comfort, unless somebody’s in drastic need. I’d rather give pleasure, or shake things up.”

Annie Leibovitz’s recent exhibit of work in Washington, D.C. at the Corcoran Gallery of Art included numerous personal photos, in addition to the celebrity portraits for which the artist is best known. These personal photos chronicled Leibovitz’s long relationship with Sontag. They featured many pictures of the author, including some showing her battle with cancer, her treatment, and ultimately her death and burial.

Macaulay as a politician
In 1830 he became a Member of Parliament for the pocket borough of Calne. He made his name with a series of speeches in favour of parliamentary reform, attacking such inequalities as the exclusion of Jews. After the Great Reform Act was passed, he became MP for Leeds.

India
Macaulay was Secretary to the Board of Control from 1832 until 1833. After the passing of the Government of India Act 1833, he was appointed as the first Law Member of the Governor-General’s Council. He went to India in 1834. Serving on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838 he was instrumental in creating the foundations of bilingual colonial India, by convincing the Governor-General to adopt English as the medium of instruction in higher education, from the sixth year of schooling onwards, rather than Sanskrit or Arabic then used in the institutions supported by the East India Company.

In the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Macaulay’s criminal law system was enacted. It included the three major codes - The Indian Penal Code, 1860, the Criminal Procedure Code, 1872 and the Civil Procedure Code, 1909. The Indian Penal Code was later reproduced in most other British colonies – and to date many of these laws are still in effect in places as far apart as Singapore, Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

The term Macaulay’s Children is used to refer to people born of Indian ancestry who adopt Western culture as a lifestyle, or display attitudes influenced by colonisers. The term is usually used in a derogatory fashion, and the connotation is one of disloyalty to one’s country and one’s heritage. This frame of mind or attitude is also referred to as Macaulayism

The passage to which the term refers is from his Minute on Indian Education, delivered in 1835. It reads, “ It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.”

Later career
Returning to Britain in 1838, he became MP for Edinburgh. He was made Secretary at War in 1839. After the fall of Lord Melbourne’s government Macaulay devoted more time to literary work, but returned to office as Paymaster General in Lord John Russell’s administration.

In 1841 Macaulay addressed the issue of copyright law. Macaulay’s position, slightly modified, became the basis of copyright law in the English-speaking world for many decades. Macaulay argued that copyright is a monopoly and as such has generally negative effects on society.

In the election of 1847 he lost his seat in Edinburgh. He attributed the loss to the anger of religious zealots over his speech in favour of expanding the annual grant to Maynooth College in Ireland, which trained young men for the Catholic priesthood; some observers also attributed his loss to his neglect of local issues. In 1849 he was elected Rector of the University of Glasgow, a position with no administrative duties, often awarded by the students to men of political or literary fame; he also received the freedom of the city. In 1852, the voters of Edinburgh offered to re-elect him to Parliament. He accepted on the express condition that he need not campaign and would not pledge himself to a position on any political issue. Remarkably, he was elected on those terms. However, he seldom attended the House, due to ill health; indeed his weakness after suffering a heart attack caused him to postpone for several months making his speech of thanks to the Edinburgh voters. He resigned his seat in January, 1856.

Macaulay sat on the committee to decide on subjects from British history to be painted in the new Palace of Westminster. The need to collect reliable portraits of noted figures in British history for this project led to the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery, which was formally established on 2 December 1856. Macaulay was amongst its founder trustees and is honoured as one of only three busts above the main entrance.

He was raised to the Peerage in 1857 as Baron Macaulay, of Rothley in the County of Leicester but seldom attended the House of Lords. His health made work increasingly difficult for him. He died in 1859, leaving his major work, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second incomplete. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Macaulay’s political writings are famous for their brilliant ringing prose and for its confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called the Whig interpretation of history. This philosophy appears most clearly in the essays Macaulay wrote for the Edinburgh Review. But it is also reflected in the History; the most stirring passages in the work are those that describe the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. Macaulay’s approach has been criticised by later historians for its one-sidedness and its complacency. Karl Marx referred to him as a ’systematic falsifier of history’. His tendency to see history as a drama led him to treat figures whose views he opposed as if they were villains, while characters he approved of were presented as heroes. Macaulay goes to considerable length, for example, to absolve his main hero William III of any responsibility for the Glencoe massacre.

Macaulay’s nephew, Sir George Otto Trevelyan, wrote a best-selling “Life and Letters” of his famous uncle, which is still the best complete life of Macaulay. His great-nephew was the Cambridge historian G. M. Trevelyan.

Literary works
During his first period out of office he composed Lays of Ancient Rome, a series of very popular ballads about heroic episodes in Roman history. The most famous of them, Horatius, concerns the heroism of Horatius Cocles. It contains the oft-quoted lines:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods

During the 1840s he began work on his most famous work, “The History of England from the Accession of James the Second”, publishing the first two volumes in 1848, the next two volumes appearing in 1855. At first, he had planned to bring his history down to the reign of George III. After publication of his first two volumes, his hope was to complete his work with the death of Queen Anne in 1714. However, at his death in 1859, he had finished only one further volume. A sixth, bringing the History down to the death of William III, was completed by his sister, Lady Trevelyan, after his death.

He was born at Carla-le-Comte (later renamed Carla-Bayle in his honor), near Pamiers (Ariège), and was educated by his father, a Calvinist minister, and at an academy at Puylaurens. He afterwards entered a Jesuit college at Toulouse, and became a Roman Catholic a month later (1669). After seventeen months, he returned to Calvinism, fleeing to Geneva in order to avoid persecution. In Geneva, he became acquainted with the teachings of René Descartes. For some years he worked under the name of Bèle as a tutor for various Parisian families, but in 1675 he was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the Protestant University of Sedan.

In 1681 the university at Sedan was suppressed. Just before that event, Bayle had fled to the Dutch Republic, where he almost immediately was appointed professor of philosophy and history at the Ecole Illustre in Rotterdam. There he published his famous Pensées diverses sur la comète de 1680 in 1682, as well as his critique of Louis Maimbourg’s work on the history of Calvinism. The great reputation achieved by this critique stirred the envy of Bayle’s Calvinist colleague of both Sedan and Rotterdam, Pierre Jurieu, who had written a book on the same subject.

In 1684 Bayle began the publication of his Nouvelles de la république des lettres, a journal of literary criticism. In 1690 there appeared a work entitled Avis important aux refugies, which Jurieu attributed to Bayle, whom he attacked with great animosity. After a long quarrel, Bayle was deprived of his chair in 1693. However, he was not depressed by this misfortune, especially as he was at the time engaged in the preparation of his massive magnum opus, the Historical and Critical Dictionary, which actually constituted one of the first encyclopedias (before the term had come into wide circulation) of ideas and their originators. Bayle’s attempt at impartial presentation of these ideas was instituted within a non-partisan framework of thoughtful consideration of both sides of any dispute. In his articles on the founder of Islam “Mahomet” and the Italian reforming monk Savonarola, to take but two examples, Bayle displays his penchant for judicious assessment of highly controversial figures and philosophies, while eschewing partisan interpretations. While this striving for objectivity is a standard criterion of scholarship in the modern world, in Bayle’s time he was among the first to implement it in a sustained intellectual endeavor like his “Dictionary,” amidst a sea of contentious ideologies and their zealous proponents.

The remaining years of Bayle’s life were devoted to miscellaneous writings, arising in many instances out of criticisms made of his Dictionary. He remained in Rotterdam until his death on 28 December 1706 and was buried there in the Waalse Kerk where Jurrieu would be buried as well, 7 years later. Already in 1706 a statue in his honor was erected at Pamiers, “la reparation d’un long oubli” (”the reparation of a long neglect”). In 1959 a street was named after him in Rotterdam.

Bayle’s erudition was considerable. As an original thinker, he was not outstanding; but as a critic he was deemed second to none in his own time, and even now the insight and skill with which he handled his subject is notable.The Nouvelles de la république des lettres (see Louis P. Betz, P. Bayle und die Nouvelles de la république des lettres, Zürich, 1896) was the first thorough-going attempt to popularize literature, and it was eminently successful. His multi-volume Historical and Critical Dictionary, however, constitutes Bayle’s masterpiece. The astute English translation of “The Dictionary,” by Bayle’s fellow Huguenot exile, Pierre des Maizeaux, was named by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson as one of the one hundred foundational texts that formed the first collection of the Library of Congress.

János, nicknamed “Jancsi” (Johnny), was a prodigy who showed aptitudes for languages, memorization, and mathematics. He entered the German-speaking Lutheran Fasori Gimnázium in Budapest in the year 1911. Although he attended school at the grade level appropriate to his age, his father hired private tutors to give him advanced instruction in those areas in which he had displayed an aptitude. In 1913, his father was rewarded with ennoblement for his service to the Austro-Hungarian empire. (After becoming semi-autonomous in 1867 Hungary had found itself in need of a vibrant mercantile class.) The Neumann family thus acquiring the name margittai, Neumann János became margittai Neumann János (John Neumann of Margitta), what he later changed to the German Johann von Neumann. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics (with minors in experimental physics and chemistry) from Pázmány Péter University in Budapest at the age of 22. He simultaneously earned his diploma in chemical engineering from the ETH Zurich in Switzerland at the behest of his father, who wanted his son to invest his time in a more financially viable endeavour than mathematics. Between 1926 and 1930 he taught as a privatdozent at the University of Berlin, the youngest in its history. By age 25 he had published 10 major papers, and by 30, nearly 36.

Max von Neumann died in 1929. In 1930 von Neumann, his mother, and his brothers emigrated to the United States. He anglicized Johann to John, keeping the Austrian-aristocratic surname of von Neumann, whereas his brothers adopted surnames Vonneumann and Neumann (using the de Neumann form briefly when first in the U.S.).

Von Neumann was invited to Princeton University, New Jersey in 1930, and, subsequently, was one of four people selected for the first faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study (two of the others were Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel), where he was a mathematics professor from its formation in 1933 until his death.

In 1937 von Neumann became a naturalized citizen of the US. In 1938 von Neumann was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his work in analysis.

Von Neumann married twice. He married Mariette Kövesi in 1930, just prior to emigrating to the United States. They had one daughter (von Neumann’s only child), Marina, who is now a distinguished professor of international trade and public policy at the University of Michigan. The couple divorced in 1937. In 1938 von Neumann married Klari Dan, whom he had met during his last trips back to Budapest prior to the outbreak of World War II. The von Neumanns were very active socially within the Princeton academic community, and it is from this aspect of his life that many of the anecdotes which surround von Neumann’s legend originate.

In 1955 von Neumann was diagnosed with what was either bone or pancreatic cancer, possibly caused by exposure to radiation during his witnessing of atomic bomb tests. Von Neumann died a year and a half following the initial diagnosis, in great pain. While at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., he invited a Roman Catholic priest, Father Anselm Strittmatter, O.S.B., to visit him for consultation (a move which shocked some of von Neumann’s friends). The priest then administered to him the last Sacraments. He died under military security lest he reveal military secrets while heavily medicated. John von Neumann was buried at Princeton Cemetery in Princeton, Mercer County, New Jersey.

Von Neumann wrote 150 published papers in his life; 60 in pure mathematics, 20 in physics, and 60 in applied mathematics. His last work, published in book form as The Computer and the Brain, gives an indication of the direction of his interests at the time of his death.

Logic and set theory
The axiomatization of mathematics, on the model of Euclid’s Elements, had reached new levels of rigor and breadth at the end of the 19th century, particularly in arithmetic (thanks to Richard Dedekind and Giuseppe Peano) and geometry (thanks to David Hilbert). At the beginning of the twentieth century, set theory, the new branch of mathematics discovered by Georg Cantor, and thrown into crisis by Bertrand Russell with the discovery of his famous paradox (on the set of all sets which do not belong to themselves), had not yet been formalized.

The problem of an adequate axiomatization of set theory was resolved implicitly about twenty years later (by Ernst Zermelo and Abraham Fraenkel) by way of a series of principles which allowed for the construction of all sets used in the actual practice of mathematics, but which did not explicitly exclude the possibility of the existence of sets which belong to themselves. In his doctoral thesis of 1925, von Neumann demonstrated how it was possible to exclude this possibility in two complementary ways: the axiom of foundation and the notion of class.

The axiom of foundation established that every set can be constructed from the bottom up in an ordered succession of steps by way of the principles of Zermelo and Fraenkel, in such a manner that if one set belongs to another then the first must necessarily come before the second in the succession (hence excluding the possibility of a set belonging to itself.) In order to demonstrate that the addition of this new axiom to the others did not produce contradictions, von Neumann introduced a method of demonstration (called the method of inner models) which later became an essential instrument in set theory.

The second approach to the problem took as its base the notion of class, and defines a set as a class which belongs to other classes, while a proper class is defined as a class which does not belong to other classes. Under the Zermelo/Fraenkel approach, the axioms impede the construction of a set of all sets which do not belong to themselves. In contrast, under the von Neumann approach, the class of all sets which do not belong to themselves can be constructed, but it is a proper class and not a set.

With this contribution of von Neumann, the axiomatic system of the theory of sets became fully satisfactory, and the next question was whether or not it was also definitive, and not subject to improvement. A strongly negative answer arrived in September 1930 at the historic mathematical Congress of Königsberg, in which Kurt Gödel announced his first theorem of incompleteness: the usual axiomatic systems are incomplete, in the sense that they cannot prove every truth which is expressible in their language. This result was sufficiently innovative as to confound the majority of mathematicians of the time. But von Neumann, who had participated at the Congress, confirmed his fame as an instantaneous thinker, and in less than a month was able to communicate to Gödel himself an interesting consequence of his theorem: namely that the usual axiomatic systems are unable to demonstrate their own consistency. It is precisely this consequence which has attracted the most attention, even if Gödel originally considered it only a curiosity, and had derived it independently anyway (it is for this reason that the result is called Gödel’s second theorem, without mention of von Neumann.)

Quantum mechanics
At the International Congress of Mathematicians of 1900, David Hilbert presented his famous list of twenty-three problems considered central for the development of the mathematics of the new century. The sixth of these was the axiomatization of physical theories. Among the new physical theories of the century the only one which had yet to receive such a treatment by the end of the 1930s was quantum mechanics. QM found itself in a condition of foundational crisis similar to that of set theory at the beginning of the century, facing problems of both philosophical and technical natures. On the one hand, its apparent non-determinism had not been reduced to an explanation of a deterministic form. On the other, there still existed two independent but equivalent heuristic formulations, the so-called matrix mechanical formulation due to Werner Heisenberg and the wave mechanical formulation due to Erwin Schrödinger, but there was not yet a single, unified satisfactory theoretical formulation.

After having completed the axiomatization of set theory, von Neumann began to confront the axiomatization of QM. He immediately realized, in 1926, that a quantum system could be considered as a point in a so-called Hilbert space, analogous to the 6N dimension (N is the number of particles, 3 general coordinate and 3 canonical momentum for each) phase space of classical mechanics but with infinitely many dimensions (corresponding to the infinitely many possible states of the system) instead: the traditional physical quantities (e.g. position and momentum) could therefore be represented as particular linear operators operating in these spaces. The physics of quantum mechanics was thereby reduced to the mathematics of the linear Hermitian operators on Hilbert spaces. For example, the famous uncertainty principle of Heisenberg, according to which the determination of the position of a particle prevents the determination of its momentum and vice versa, is translated into the non-commutativity of the two corresponding operators. This new mathematical formulation included as special cases the formulations of both Heisenberg and Schrödinger, and culminated in the 1932 classic The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. However, physicists generally ended up preferring another approach to that of von Neumann (which was considered elegant and satisfactory by mathematicians). This approach was formulated in 1930 by Paul Dirac.

Von Neumann’s abstract treatment permitted him also to confront the foundational issue of determinism vs. non-determinism and in the book he demonstrated a theorem according to which quantum mechanics could not possibly be derived by statistical approximation from a deterministic theory of the type used in classical mechanics. This demonstration contained a conceptual error, but it helped to inaugurate a line of research which, through the work of John Stuart Bell in 1964 on Bell’s Theorem and the experiments of Alain Aspect in 1982, demonstrated that quantum physics requires a notion of reality substantially different from that of classical physics.

Economics and game theory
Von Neumann’s first significant contribution to economics was the minimax theorem of 1928. This theorem establishes that in certain zero sum games involving perfect information (in which players know a priori the strategies of their opponents as well as their consequences), there exists one strategy which allows both players to minimize their maximum losses (hence the name minimax). When examining every possible strategy, a player must consider all the possible responses of the player’s adversary and the maximum loss. The player then plays out the strategy which will result in the minimization of this maximum loss. Such a strategy, which minimizes the maximum loss, is called optimal for both players just in case their minimaxes are equal (in absolute value) and contrary (in sign). If the common value is zero, the game becomes pointless.

Von Neumann eventually improved and extended the minimax theorem to include games involving imperfect information and games with more than two players. This work culminated in the 1944 classic Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (written with Oskar Morgenstern). The public interest in this work was such that The New York Times ran a front page story, something which only Einstein had previously elicited.

Von Neumann’s second important contribution in this area was the solution, in 1937, of a problem first described by Léon Walras in 1874, the existence of situations of equilibrium in mathematical models of market development based on supply and demand. He first recognized that such a model should be expressed through disequations and not equations, and then he found a solution to Walras’ problem by applying a fixed-point theorem derived from the work of L. E. J. Brouwer. The lasting importance of the work on general equilibria and the methodology of fixed point theorems is underscored by the awarding of Nobel prizes in 1972 to Kenneth Arrow, in 1983 to Gerard Debreu, and in 1994 to John Nash who had improved von Neumann’s theory in his Princeton Ph.D thesis.

Von Neumann was also the inventor of the method of proof, used in game theory, known as backward induction (which he first published in 1944 in the book co-authored with Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour).

Nuclear weapons
Beginning in the late 1930s von Neumann began to take more of an interest in applied (as opposed to pure) mathematics. In particular, he developed an expertise in explosions—phenomena which are difficult to model mathematically. This led him to a large number of military consultancies, primarily for the Navy, which in turn led to his involvement in the Manhattan Project. The involvement included frequent trips by train to the project’s secret research facilities in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Von Neumann’s principal contribution to the atomic bomb itself was in the concept and design of the explosive lenses needed to compress the plutonium core of the Trinity test device and the “Fat Man” weapon that was later dropped on Nagasaki. While von Neumann did not originate the “implosion” concept, he was one of its most persistent proponents, encouraging its continued development against the instincts of many of his colleagues, who felt such a design to be unworkable. The lens shape design work was completed by July 1944.

In a visit to Los Alamos in September 1944, von Neumann showed that the pressure increase from explosion shock wave reflection from solid objects was greater than previously believed if the angle of incidence of the shock wave was between 90° and some limiting angle. As a result, it was determined that the effectiveness of an atomic bomb would be enhanced with detonation some kilometers above the target, rather than at ground level.

Beginning in the spring of 1945, along with four other scientists and various military personnel, von Neumann was included in the target selection committee responsible for choosing the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the first targets of the atomic bomb. Von Neumann oversaw computations related to the expected size of the bomb blasts, estimated death tolls, and the distance above the ground at which the bombs should be detonated for optimum shock wave propagation and thus maximum effect. The cultural capital Kyoto, which had been spared the firebombing inflicted upon militarily significant target cities like Tokyo in World War II, was von Neumann’s first choice, a selection seconded by Manhattan Project leader General Leslie Groves. However, this target was dismissed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who had been impressed with the city during a visit while Governor General of the Philippines.

On July 16, 1945, with numerous other Los Alamos personnel, von Neumann was an eyewitness to the first atomic bomb blast, conducted as a test of the implosion method device, 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico. Based on his observation alone, von Neumann estimated the test had resulted in a blast equivalent to 5 kilotons of TNT, but Enrico Fermi produced a more accurate estimate of 10 kilotons by dropping scraps of torn-up paper as the shock wave passed his location and watching how far they scattered. The actual power of the explosion had been between 20 and 22 kilotons.

After the war, Robert Oppenheimer remarked that the physicists involved in the Manhattan project had “known sin”. Von Neumann’s response was that “sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it”.

Von Neumann continued unperturbed in his work and became, along with Edward Teller, one of those who sustained the hydrogen bomb project. He then collaborated with Klaus Fuchs on further development of the bomb, and in 1946 the two filed a secret patent on “Improvement in Methods and Means for Utilizing Nuclear Energy”, which outlined a scheme for using a fission bomb to compress fusion fuel to initiate a thermonuclear reaction. (Herken, pp. 171, 374). Though this was not the key to the hydrogen bomb — the Teller-Ulam design — it was judged to be a move in the right direction.

Computer science
Von Neumann’s hydrogen bomb work was also played out in the realm of computing, where he and Stanislaw Ulam developed simulations on von Neumann’s digital computers for the hydrodynamic computations. During this time he contributed to the development of the Monte Carlo method, which allowed complicated problems to be approximated using random numbers. Because using lists of “truly” random numbers was extremely slow for the ENIAC, von Neumann developed a form of making pseudorandom numbers, using the middle-square method. Though this method has been criticized as crude, von Neumann was aware of this: he justified it as being faster than any other method at his disposal, and also noted that when it went awry it did so obviously, unlike methods which could be subtly incorrect.

While consulting for the Moore School of Electrical Engineering on the EDVAC project, von Neumann wrote an incomplete set of notes titled the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. The paper, which was widely distributed, described a computer architecture in which data and program memory are mapped into the same address space. This architecture became the de facto standard and can be contrasted with a so-called Harvard architecture, which has separate program and data memories on a separate bus. Although the single-memory architecture became commonly known by the name von Neumann architecture as a result of von Neumann’s paper, the architecture’s description was based on the work of J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, inventors of the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania. With very few exceptions, all present-day home computers, microcomputers, minicomputers and mainframe computers use this single-memory computer architecture.

Von Neumann also created the field of cellular automata without the aid of computers, constructing the first self-replicating automata with pencil and graph paper. The concept of a universal constructor was fleshed out in his posthumous work Theory of Self Reproducing Automata. Von Neumann proved that the most effective way of performing large-scale mining operations such as mining an entire moon or asteroid belt would be by using self-replicating machines, taking advantage of their exponential growth.

He is credited with at least one contribution to the study of algorithms. Donald Knuth cites von Neumann as the inventor, in 1945, of the merge sort algorithm, in which the first and second halves of an array are each sorted recursively and then merged together. His algorithm for simulating a fair coin with a biased coin is used in the “software whitening” stage of some hardware random number generators.

He also engaged in exploration of problems in numerical hydrodynamics. With R. D. Richtmyer he developed an algorithm defining artificial viscosity that improved the understanding of shock waves. It is possible that we would not understand much of astrophysics, and might not have highly developed jet and rocket engines without that work. The problem was that when computers solve hydrodynamic or aerodynamic problems, they try to put too many computational grid points at regions of sharp discontinuity (shock waves). The artificial viscosity was a mathematical trick to slightly smooth the shock transition without sacrificing basic physics.

Politics and social affairs
Von Neumann obtained at the age of 29 one of the first five professorships at the new Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (another had gone to Al