There was, however, to be no immediate deviation from the progress of a model career, and by any reasonable standard of evaluation, nobody could possibly have prophesied the future the young diplomat had in store. What heights he personally aspired to can only be guessed at. Probably they were of the predictable kind.
Viewed in retrospect, de Lesseps’ life stands out as one of the most extraordinary of the nineteenth century, even without the Panama venture. That he of all men of his time should have been the one to make “the miracle” happen at Suez is in itself miraculous. Suddenly there he was. known after 1869 as “The Great Engineer,” he was no such thing. He had no technical background, no experience in finance. His skills as an administrator were modest. Routine of any kind bored him quickly.
The great turning point, the traumatic personal watershed from which so much history was to flow, came in 1849. That it happened that particular year, the year of the gold rush, when Panama emerged from the shadows once again, seems a play of fate that not even a novelist of his day might have risked.
A French expeditionary force sent to subdue Mazzini’s newborn Roman republic and restore papal rule had been unexpectedly thrown back at Rome by Garibaldi. De Lesseps, then in Paris, was told he was to leave at once to resolve the crisis. “Guided by circumstances,” he was to please all parties and achieve a peaceful accommodation. With all eyes on him he had shown the incredible stamina and single-mindedness he could summon–and especially if all eyes were on him. Convinced that he could succeed, he very nearly had, and apparently quite blind to the fact that he was being used by his own government merely as a means to gain time. A temporary cease-fire was agreed to. But then French reinforcements arrived; Louis Napoleon, the new “Prince-President” of France, gave the order and the French army attacked.
Summarily recalled, de Lesseps was publicly reprimanded before the Assembly for exceeding his instructions. When Rome fell to the French army, he was left with no choice but to resign. The gossip was that the strain of the mission had been too much, that he had temporarily departed from his senses.
So at age forty-three he was without the career his background and natural gifts had so ideally suited him for, and to which he had given himself so wholeheartedly. The future was a blank page. He was in debt. Public disgrace was something he had never experienced. Yet outwardly he remained the man he had always been, jaunty, confident, up at dawn, busy all day. With his wife and three young sons he moved into a flat on the Rue Richepanse and for the next five years divided his time between Paris and a country estate in central France, an ancient, towered chateau in the province of Berri that had once belonged to Agnes Sorel, mistress of Charles VII. Known as La Chesnaye, it had been purchased at de Lesseps’ urging by his mother-in-law, Madame Delamalle, who had recently come into a sizable inheritance. The estate was located near the little village of Vatan on an open plain, mostly wheat country and extremely good land, with a great belt of forest a few miles to the south. His ambition was to create a model farm and he plunged into the role of country gentleman.
To occupy his mind he returned to the old interest in an Egyptian canal, reading everything he could lay his hands on. He was in touch again with Prosper Enfantin, for whom the Egyptian dream still burned. Enfantin generously supplied studies and papers from his files in the belief that he and de Lesseps could join forces. De Lesseps, however, had no such intention. His destiny henceforth, he had decided, would be in his own hands. Once, years before in Egypt, Mo hammed Ali had advised, “My dear Lesseps . . . when you have something important to do, if there are Two of you, you have one too many.”
France, meantime, had been wrenched by still another bloody political turn. The improbable Prince-President sprang a coup d’etat, made himself dictator, and proclaimed the birth of the Second Empire. As Emperor Napoleon III, he would take France into a new age of progress, he said. “We have immense territories to cultivate, roads to open, harbors to deepen, canals to dig, rivers to make navigable, railroads to complete.” The Saint-Simonians were among his strongest supporters.
He established a brilliant court at the Tuileries, and on a bright winter morning at Notre Dame, he married the spectacular Eugenie de Montijo, who was half Spanish, half Scottish, something of an adventuress, and a distant cousin of Ferdinand de Lesseps’. (His mother and her grandmother were sisters.) Young enough to be the daughter of her cousin Fernando, as she called him in Spanish, she had always looked to him for advice. Especially in her new responsibilities would she welcome his views, she wrote the week before the wedding.
A few months afterward, in the spring of 1853, Agathe Delamalle de Lesseps died of scarlet fever and a son, his father’s namesake, died of the same cause. De Lesseps took refuge at La Chesnaye, pouring him self into routine projects and his canal studies. Life, he wrote to his oldest son, Charles, demanded courage, resignation, and trust in Providence. Charles, a bright, attentive boy of twelve, a student in Paris, had become a particular source of pride.
Then quite out of the blue came the news that Egypt’s ruling viceroy had been murdered by Two slaves. De Lesseps was on a scaffold working with some stonemasons on the old house when the postman appeared in the courtyard with the Paris mail. “The workmen passed My letters and papers from hand to hand. Imagine My astonishment when I read of the death of Abbas-Pasha . . . I hurried down, and at once wrote to the new Viceroy to congratulate him. . . .” The new viceroy was Mohammed Said, whom de Lesseps had befriended years before when Mohammed Said was a fat, unattractive, and friendless little boy.
Mohammed Said, for whom de Lesseps was to name Port Said, had since become a walleyed mountain of a man, a great eater and drinker and jovial teller of “French stories,” a ruler who liked to have his pashas wade through gunpowder carrying lighted candles to test their nerve. More important, he was known for his generous impulses and so de Lesseps wasted no time in getting to Egypt. By way of welcome, Said arranged to go on maneuvers in the Western Desert with an army of ten thousand men. They were joined by Bedouin tribesmen and a military band. It was the sort of show de Lesseps adored. He traveled in style–his own private tent, mahogany furniture, quilted silk bedding, ice for his drinking water.
In the pages of his journal one senses a sudden exhilaration, a tremendous feeling of release and adventure.
He joined Said at his desert command post outside Alexandria on November 13, 1854. Both were in top spirits. Said expressed a singular desire to commence his regime with some great enterprise. did Ferdinand have any ideas? But de Lesseps said nothing of the canal; he was waiting for a sign, as he explained later.
At night he searched the desert sky. Before dawn he was up and out of doors and the day was spent galloping miles over the desert on a magnificent Arabian steed. But the following morning, he knew the moment had come. He was standing at the opening to his tent, wrapped in a red dressing gown, looking and feeling for all the world like an Arab sheik. The description that follows is from his journal:
The sun’s rays were already lighting up the eastern horizon; in the west it was still dark and cloudy. Suddenly I saw a vivid-colored rainbow stretching across the sky from east to west. I must admit that I felt my heart beat violently, for . . . this token of a covenant . . . seemed to presage that the moment had come for the consummation of the Union between East and West. . ..
Before breakfast, but with everyone watching, he mounted his horse and went sailing over a high wall, a bit of imprudence, he calls it in the journal, but one “which afterward caused the Viceroy’s entourage to give the necessary approval to my scheme. The generals with whom I shared breakfast congratulated me and remarked that my boldness had greatly increased their opinion of me.”
And thus was launched the great Suez Canal. He broached the subject to Said at the close of day. Said asked a few questions, then declared the matter settled. His staff was summoned to hear the news.
Nothing had been said about cost. That de Lesseps had no experience faintly related
to such an undertaking, that he represented no powerful organization, no combination of interests, that he had neither rank nor office nor any entree to financial sources, seems not to have concerned either of them.
For the next fifteen years he was everywhere at once–Egypt, London, Constantinople, Paris–coaxing, flattering, convincing monarchs and newspaper editors, issuing endless reports, driving the work forward in the desert, watching over every detail, frequently overruling his technical advisers, defying the European bankers, and facing the scorn of the English prime minister, Palmerston, who called him a swindler and a fool and who saw the canal as nothing more than a cheap French grab for power in the Mediterranean.
The engineer Stephenson, builder of the Britannia Bridge, member of Parliament, rose from a bench in Commons to pronounce the scheme preposterous. De Lesseps, whose English was terrible and whose experience as a builder had begun and ended with the restoration work at La Chesnaye, hung a French flag from his hotel window on Piccadilly, and went traveling across England giving more than eighty speeches in a month. “They never achieve anything who do not believe in success,” he loved to say.
When the Rothschilds wanted 5 percent for handling the initial stock subscription, he said he would hire an office and raise the money himself. “You will not succeed,” said Baron de Rothschild, an old friend. “We shall see,” de Lesseps had answered.
Approximately half the money had come from France (from twenty-five thousand small investors), the rest from Mohammed Said. when Said died, in 1863, his replacement, Khedive Ismail, was even more beneficent, so much so that by 1869 he had nearly put Egypt into bank-ruptcy. In the final stages it had been the colossal steam dredges designed by French engineers that made the difference. Nor can the repeated influence of the empress, her faith in her brilliant cousin, be discounted. Yet de Lesseps remained the driving spirit, and in truth he was something new under the sun; he had no historical counterpart. What he was–what he became–was the entrepreneur extraordinaire, with all the requisite traits for the role: nerve, persistence, dynamic energy, a talent for propaganda, a capacity for deception, imagination. He was a bit of an actor and as shrewd and silky a diplomat as anyone of his time.
He had no interest in making money, as he professed. “I am going to accomplish something without expediency, without personal gain,” he once wrote in his quick, sure, upward-sloping hand. “That, thank God, is what has up to now kept my sight clear and my course away from the rocks.” At any time he could have sold his precious concession and realized a fortune, but this he never did; his driving ambition throughout was to build the canal, “pour le bien de I’humanite”
“He persevered, you see,” a grandson would recall. “He was a very stubborn man.” Jules Verne called it “the genius of will.” But de Lesseps spoke of patience. “I wait with patience,” he wrote to a correspondent in the final year of the work, “patience which I assure you requires more force of character than does action.”
On the morning of the Grand Opening, November 17, 1869, tens of thousands of people lining both banks of the canal saw him ride by. Radiant with health, his hair turned nearly white by now, he stood beside the empress on the deck of the imperial yacht, Aigle. She was wearing a big straw hat and waving a white handkerchief.
Khedive Ismail had spared no expense on the inaugural ceremonies. Six thousand invitations were sent, offering to pay all travel and hotel expenses. A Cairo opera house had been built for the occasion and Verdi had been commissioned to write a spectacular new work, Aida* Five hundred cooks and a thousand waiters were imported from Europe. At Lake Timsah, halfway down the canal, a whole town, Ismailia, had been created, trees planted, hotels put up, a palace built.
Behind Aigle steamed an Austrian frigate carrying Emperor Franz Josef, who was turned out in scarlet trousers, white tunic, and a cocked hat with a green feather. There were two Austrian corvettes, five British ironclads, a Russian sloop of war, several French steamers-fifty ships in all. “There was a real Egyptian sky,” Eugenie would remember, “a light of enchantment, a dreamlike resplendence. . . .”
For the next eight months, until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, he was Europe’s reigning hero. The empress presented the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. The emperor hailed his perseverance and genius. He was cause for dozens of banquets in Paris. His name was constantly in the papers, his face in the illustrated magazines. And the fact that he had also become a bridegroom added immeasurably to his hold on the public imagination.
A small, private ceremony had been performed at Ismailia a few days after the opening of the canal. The bride was a stunning French girl of twenty, with large, dark eyes and great spirit, Louise Héléne Autard de Bragard, the daughter of an old and wealthy friend of de Lesseps’ and of a magnificent mother who, in her own youth, had been the inspiration for a sonnet by Baudelaire. She had been raised On the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, where her family, Huguenots, owned large plantations. According to the traditional story, it was love at first sight when she and de Lesseps met at one of Eugenie’s “Mondays. “By this second marriage he was to produce no fewer than twelve children–six sons, six daughters–which in some circles was considered a more notable accomplishment than the canal.
Palmerston was in his grave. In London, a few days after the great Crystal Palace reception, Prime Minister Gladstone informed the hero of Suez that Her Majesty had bestowed upon him the Grand Cross of the Star of India.
Few men had ever been so vindicated or extolled while they lived.
II
The first skirmish of the war, “La Debacle” that overcame France with such appalling fury in 1870, was fought on August 4, the day Ferdi nand de Lesseps returned from London, and the outcome, despite French heroism, was plain almost immediately. Napoleon III was suddenly aged and so ill he could barely sit a horse; yet he insisted on commanding an army in the field. An American observer, General Sheridan, wrote of the “marvelous mind” of Moltke and called the German infantry “as fine as I ever saw.” The steel guns from the Krupp Works had twice the range of the French bronze pieces.
Within Two weeks the main French army was penned in at Metz. On September 2, at Sedan, Napoleon III and 100,000 of his troops surrendered. It was the most stunning, humiliating defeat in French history. The Second Empire collapsed instantly. Sunday, September 4, Léon Gambetta climbed out onto a window sill at the Hotel de Ville to proclaim to a Paris mob the birth of the Third French Republic. The empress, with the help of Ferdinand de Lesseps, escaped from the Tuileries and rushed to the home of her American dentist, a Dr. Evans, who got her to the Normandy coast and arranged for a yacht that carried her to asylum in England.
The war ended with the capitulation of Paris in January, after a siege of four months, during which the beleaguered citizens ate pet cats and elephants from the Paris zoo. The French dead were three times the German casualties, and by the peace terms France lost the rich, industrial provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Further, Bismarck demanded an indemnity of 5,000,000,000 francs-$ 1,000,000,000-enough, he thought, to keep France crippled and subservient for another generation. And as a final humiliation, the despised German troops with their spiked helmets were to be permitted to parade down the Champs Elysees.
Then, with the return of spring, the tragedy was compounded. While a German army of occupation stood idly by, a vicious civil war raged; the savage days of the Commune became a bloodier time even than the infamous Terror.
Yet the Third Republic survived and the sudden resurgence of France after the war was as astonishing as her defeat. It was as if Sedan had released a vital inner resource. Everywhere people doubled their efforts, fired by a spirit of revanche. It was to be a revenge won on battlefields of “peace and progress”–for the while, anyway. In Paris the rubble was carted off and the new government carried on with the grandiose construction programs of Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann. Coal and iron production increased even without Alsace and Lorraine. Money
was plentiful, furthermore, for capitalizing new enterprises, for foreign investments. Amazingly, the German indemnity was paid off in full by 1873, two years ahead of schedule. The days of grandeur were not past; France would be herself again.
For his own part Ferdinand de Lesseps was no more interested in retirement than he had been twenty years earlier. Inspirited by his new marriage and constant public attention, he was openly casting about for new worlds to conquer. He had been untarnished by the war; he was among the few. People spoke of him as the living embodiment of French vitality and the century’s “splendid optimism.” “We have had a lot of other men who have done things perhaps more remarkable and who have been less popular,” a grandson would remember, “but that’s the way he was.” Once, on Bastille Day, when he was on his way to the station to take the train to his country place, a cheering crowd stopped his carriage, unhitched the horses, and pulled the carriage the rest of the way to the station. Gambetta called him Le Grand Français –The Great Frenchman, The Great Patriot–and the name was picked up by everyone.
He kept in excellent physical condition. He exercised regularly-fencing, riding–and with the zest of a man half his age. He looked at least ten to fifteen years younger than he was. An admiring American of the day described him as “a small man, French in detail, with . . . what is called a magnetic presence.” A reporter for the New York Herald provided this description:
He bears his years with ease and grace, showing no sign of age in his movements, which are quick and frequent, though never jerky. . . . His hair is almost white. His eyes are black, large, restless, and fringed by heavy lashes over which are shaggy eyebrows. His face is tanned . . . and ruddy with the evidence of perfect health. A mustache is the only one hirsute adornment on his face. It is small, iron-gray, bristling and has an aggressive look. In stature he is a little below medium height. His bearing is erect, his manner suave, courteous and polished.
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