The Waterloo Canard
SUMMARY
The tale of a fortune made on early news of Waterloo was invented in an 1846 pamphlet; historians have repeatedly debunked it. It became the template for two centuries of scapegoating one banking family for everything.
FULL DOSSIER
The Waterloo canard: the story that Nathan Rothschild used early news of Waterloo to crash and corner the London market. Documented: the tale originates in an 1846 antisemitic French pamphlet ('Satan' by Dairnvaell) and grew for a century; financial historians (Ferguson's archival study; a 2015 reassessment) find Rothschild's actual wartime position was overexposed to a long war and the windfall story unsupported by the books. The banking family was genuinely powerful; this specific legend is a traceable fabrication — the map keeps both facts in the same file on purpose.
SOURCES ON RECORD
01Dairnvaell, 'Histoire édifiante et curieuse de Rothschild Ier' (1846) — origin
02Ferguson, The House of Rothschild (1998)
03Cathcart, The News from Waterloo (2015)
CROSS-REFERENCED FILES
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