Since the decision did not apply to the recent sentence by the Court of Assizes, Charles still had the one-year sentence to serve. But the months he had spent in the Mazas were deducted, and after becoming seriously ill, he was moved to a hospital, where he remained for the duration of his sentence. He was released in September 1893.
Charles’s troubles did not end there, however. Because Baïhaut was unable to make good on his fine and indemnity, Charles was ordered in 1896 to pay nearly 900,000 francs in Baihaut’s behalf. Unable to produce any but a small part of that amount and faced with another prison sentence if he did not make full payment, he fled the country and remained in London in self-imposed exile. Not until January of 1899, when the government at last agreed to accept a partial payment, did he return to Paris. By then it had been ten years since the fall of the canal company and Ferdinand de Lesseps had been dead for four years.
With family and friends and in all the remaining years of his life, Charles refused to speak of Panama. “He would not talk about it,” recalled an adoring nephew, “never, never, never, never.” And in the view of those who knew him best, he was regarded no less than ever as the most honest and admirable of men. The Suez company had kept him on its board of directors even during his time in prison. “He was a very honorable man, you know, the old-fashioned sort of thing,” the nephew would say. “And I am absolutely certain–I don’t know about the whole story, it’s very complicated–I’m certain he would never have done anything he thought dishonorable. That’s positive.”
Charles had been with his father at the end. It happened the year following Charles’s release from the hospital. Madame de Lesseps and the rest of the family were also present and death came very quietly for the old adventurer. He died at La Chesnaye, in his second-floor bedroom facing south, late in the afternoon on December 7, 1894, three weeks after his eighty-ninth birthday.
The body was taken up to Paris by train for burial in Pere Lachaise Cemetery. There was no grand funeral procession; there were no crowds at the graveside services, only the family, a representative of the Societe de Geographie, one very old boyhood friend, and the directors of the Suez Canal Company. The Suez company paid all the funeral expenses. In the eulogies the word “Panama” was never mentioned.
IV
The extraordinary venture had lasted more than a decade. It had cost, according to the best estimates, 1,435,000,000 francs–about $287,000,-000–which was 1,000,000,000 francs more than the cost of the Suez Canal, far more in fact than had ever before been spent on any one peaceful undertaking of any kind.
The number of lives lost, a subject that had been strangely avoided throughout the Affair, had not been determined, nor was it ever to be with certainty. Dr. Gorgas, from his analysis of the French records, would conclude that at least twenty thousand, perhaps as many as twenty-two thousand, died. Possibly that is high, but it remains the accepted estimate.
For France to have suffered such a massive financial and psychological defeat so soon after Sedan seemed a cruel, undeserved turn of fate. Even Bismarck lamented that so heavy a tragedy had overtaken so gallant a people. And the surge of anti-Semitism that Edouard Drumont unleashed was soon to spill over into the appalling Dreyfus Affair.
It had indeed been a blunder on such an inordinate scale, a failure of such overwhelming magnitude, its shock waves extending to so very many levels, that nobody knew quite what to make of it; and as time passed, the inclination was to dismiss it as the folly of one man, Ferdinand de Lesseps, about whom markedly different views evolved.
A popular conception was of the flamboyant enthusiast who began with limitless faith in his own omniscience, but reverted to his worst instincts the moment the scheme began to founder. That he had fallen in with the likes of de Reinach and Herz was, by this view, natural enough, since he was as accomplished a swindler as any of them. France, the world, had been taken in, according to a great many attorneys and business people who claimed to regard the Panama effort “by the ordinary rules of financial probity,” no more, no less.
To many American writers he had been the leading performer in a comedy of the absurd–“dancing and pirouetting in the front of the stage blissfully unconscious, apparently, of everything except his own capers.” Later, in Panama, it would be commonly understood among American canal workers that he had died in an insane asylum. For a surprisingly large part of France, he still remained the beloved grandfatherly hero of old; “ancient and honorable,” but sadly lacking the power of sober analysis or even common sense–like all creative geniuses. His submission to the demands of financiers and crooked politicians had been, by this interpretation, as innocent as his disregard for what the engineers called practicalities. His gaze had been on his star, and his star, this time, had failed him. To debate his tragedy was to debate the stars. It was a view that bequeathed innocence by making him something of a simpleton. Monumental naïveté had been both his making and his unmaking. And destruction at the end for such a spirit thus became no less inevitable or blameworthy than it had been for, say, Joan of Arc, such being the real world’s reward for sainted madness.
But as events receded farther into the distance, he became something rather different. He was seen more and more as the tragic victim of earthly forces beyond his control: of the satanic jungle; of ambitious technical advisers willing to say anything, conceal anything, to satisfy their own selfish ends; of unscrupulous financiers (who to many people would be forever regarded as unscrupulous Jewish financiers). The fatal mortal flaw according to this interpretation had been to grow old. Once during the affaire de Panama, a. newspaper had suggested quite sympathetically that it might have been better had Ferdinand de Lesseps died earlier, at the peak of his career, and Madame de Lesseps had written a moving reply that was quoted widely, then and for years to come.
“I will not protest against this unchristian sentiment,” she wrote, “except to say that its author can have given no thought to the wife and children who deeply love and revere this old man and to whom his life, however frail it may be, is more precious than anything in the world. It is no crime to grow old.”
So the corollary assumption was that he would have succeeded had he not grown old, that he would have repeated Suez at Panama had he still been the de Lesseps of Suez, at the height of his manhood and in possession of his famed “powers.”
There was a degree of truth, of course, in all such interpretations. In the main, however, they were delusions. The real man had been infinitely more complex, his motives far more ambivalent, the personality filled with many more contradictions, than implied by any simplistic answers. He was both the most daring of dreamers and the cleverest of back-room manipulators. He was the indestructible optimist, believing to the depths of his soul that goodness and right invariably triumphed in the long run; and he was perfectly capable of deceit and of playing to the vanity and greed in other men. He was a trusting, decent, endearing man who could confide to a reporter several years after the canal was under way that he had known from the start that there would be trouble, who could blithely inform the press that his engineers had redirected the entire course of the impossible Chagres, who could tell his adoring stockholders on the eve of the final, inevitable collapse that success was theirs.
Arteries were hardening in the old system, no doubt, but to argue that age was his undoing is to disregard too many other factors of importance. His age, furthermore, became an apparent problem only toward the end when the cause was already lost. Until then it was the display of youthfulness that so captivated his following, that impressed so shrewd and impartial a close-hand observer as John Bigelow. Indeed, it could be as readily argued that his curse was the failure to decline, his inability to look and act his age. It is no crime not to grow old, Madame de Lesseps might have said. Again and again things could have gone differently, more prudent or realistic views might have prevailed, had he been incapable any longer of playing on his powers–to charm, to flatter, to inspire, to sweep good men
onward, contrary to their better instincts, using nothing but the phenomenal force of personality. Men who did know how to compute realistic excavation schedules, men who had experienced Culebra “in the wet,” serious expert engineers at the top of their form, had listened and agreed and gone ahead as he wished time after time.
The root sources of his downfall had been apparent since the Paris congress of 1879: the insistence on a sea-level passage through country he knew nothing about, the total disinterest in conceptions other than his own, the refusal to heed voices of experience, the disregard for all data that either conflicted with or that appeared to vitiate his own cherished vision; but none of these would have mattered greatly had it not been for that extraordinary ability to inspire the loyalty and affection of individual human beings at every social and intellectual level.
From the technical standpoint the tragedy hung on the decision to cut through at sea level, to make another Suez Canal. Such a task at Panama was simply too overwhelming, if not impossible. The strategy did not suit the battleground.
The handwriting had been on the wall a good three to four years before the money was gone. With the equipment then available, even a lock canal of modest dimensions would have been an enormously difficult and costly task. But had he and his technical advisers decided to make it a lock canal even as late as 1886, at the time of his second tour of the Isthmus, there probably would have been a French canal at Panama, death, disease, jungle, geology, costs, and de Lesseps’ advanced age all notwithstanding. The size of the locks being contemplated would have made the canal obsolete in relatively little time, but the canal would have been built.
As for any possible complicity on his part in the less-than-noble practices that went on behind the scenes, there is no real mystery. He was neither innocent nor a simpleton. He was involved in bribing the press, in the Herz compact, indeed he was the one who crossed that line at the very beginning at the time of the first successful stock issue. His public pronouncements, his Bulletin, were replete with misinformation, misleading statistics, promises that he knew to be beyond realization. In his “dashing, off-hand way [he] lied any amount to interviewers,” as Emily Crawford said. He was determined to build the canal, to succeed again, to be all that his adoring multitude believed him to be. As the situation worsened, he had agreed to desperate measures to gain time, to postpone disaster. When Charles said in court that he himself had done what he thought he had to do, he was undoubtedly speaking for his father as well. “What would you have decided in our place?” Charles had asked.
The fundamental mystery one comes down to in the end is the endlessly trumpeted faith of Ferdinand de Lesseps in success. Was all this the skilled and quite conscious deception of a grand imposter? Or was it the self-deception of a vain old fool who had been captured by his past success? These are the implicit questions in nearly all that has been written about the man.
The evidence is that it was something else again.
At heart, by nature, by every instinct in his body, Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps was a rainmaker. He was, as Masefield said of Shakespeare, “the rare unreasonable who comes once in ten generations.” And it had been on that fundamental ground that Henri Barboux had rested his defense. “Beautiful illusions!” the attorney had exclaimed at the high point of his sonorous two-day oration. “That is what the Attorney General would call all great adventures which do not succeed. But humanity has need of such illusions. And when a great people is no longer kindled by them, then it must resign itself to be but a stolid ox, head bowed to earth.”
But the crucial point is that de Lesseps was a rainmaker to the nineteenth century: he himself was no less bedazzled than anyone by that era’s own new magical powers. An enormous part of his appeal, perhaps the very essence of his appeal, was the fact that he was a nontechnical, nonscientific spirit, the most human of humanists. It made it possible for people to take him to their hearts. And yet it was he who had, at Suez, succeeded in bringing science and technology to bear for one noble, humanitarian purpose; and after that it had been very difficult to doubt his word or distrust his vision. From Suez on, as he himself once said, he enjoyed “the privilege of being believed without having to prove what one affirms.” It was this that made him such a popular force and such a dangerous man.
His was not “the faith that could move mountains,” as was written or said by so many who never troubled to look at what he had been saying repeatedly since the Paris congress. Not at all. His was the faith that the mountains could be moved by technology. He was as much bedazzled by the momentum of progress as by his own past triumph. “Science has declared that the canal is possible, and I am the servant of science,” he had remarked at the Delmonico’s dinner in 1880. Wondrous new machines would save the day, he told his stock-holders again and again. Men of genius would come forth, by which he meant technicians and scientists–workers in physics, mathematics, soil engineering, chemistry, tropical medicine, hydraulics–things about which he knew little or nothing, but which he counted on. He had the nonscientific, nontechnical man’s faith that science and technology would “find a way.” That was his faith; that had been his experience. Of the 75,000,000 cubic meters excavated at Suez, 60,000,000 had been removed by machines in the final four and a half years of the work. In the years since, he had seen the use of dynamite and nitroglycerin become widespread. He had witnessed the miracles achieved by Pasteur. So in the largest sense, his tragic folly had been to misjudge the momentum of progress: he had felt certain the machines, the medicines, whatever it took, would be ready in time and he was wrong. And one cannot help but feel that in the end he drifted into that last dim stage of his life haunted by an awful sense of betrayal.
It can also be said, and with certainty, that nothing whatever would have been attempted or accomplished at Panama had it not been for Ferdinand de Lesseps, a point missing from the postmortems of the 1890’s, largely since the actual work itself had been either forgotten or was assumed to be utterly without value. In France, as Andre Siegfried observed, no one seemed to recall that Panama had had anything to do with the building of a canal. “In the end one almost believed that The Company had hardly done anything at all in the isthmus . . .” The money, declared The Times of London, was “as clean gone” as if it had been sunk in the North Atlantic.
Nobody talked of the hospitals that had been built, the offices, storehouses, and dock facilities, the living quarters and machine shops; the maps, plans, surveys, and hydrographic data that had been assembled; the land that had been acquired or the Panama Railroad. And the fact that more than 50,000,000 cubic meters of earth and rock had been removed from the path of the canal, an amount equal to two-thirds of the total excavation at Suez, was virtually forgotten. All had been in vain was the prevailing, unchallenged attitude; the defeat of the old pioneer had been total.
As it happens, the commission appointed by the liquidator to appraise the work had returned with an encouraging report: the amount accomplished was “very considerable”; the plant was “in a good state of preservation”; the lock canal could be completed in about eight years. With an eye to the future, the liquidator had also arranged an extension of the old Wyse Concession, by sending Wyse back to Bogotá. The concession was declared valid until 1903 on the condition that a new French company should be organized to carry on the work, and on October 20, 1894, just seven weeks before the death of Ferdinand de Lesseps, a Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama had been formally incorporated.
Yet few people took any of this very seriously. The jungle was said to have already reclaimed most of what it had lost to the French engineers, and further, an American canal at Nicaragua was regarded as a certain thing, irrespective of the fact that one American attempt in Nicaragua–by the Maritime Canal Company, which had been chartered in 1889–had already gone down in defeat. It had been an under-financed affair that collapsed with the Wall Street Panic of 1893.
A canal was beyond the capacity of any purely private enterprise; th
at much now was plain. It must be a national undertaking. The United States appeared to be the one nation ready to mount such an effort, and if the American people had drawn one overriding conclusion from the French disaster, it was that the place not to build a canal was Panama. The failure of the French–“the greatest failure in modern times”–was above all a lesson in geography. They had gone down to defeat not merely because they were French (and therefore incompetent, impractical, and decadent) and led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, but primarily because they–he–had chosen the wrong path.
American correspondent Richard Harding Davis wrote in Harper’s Weekly that in all probability Panama had a curse on it. He had gone to see for himself in 1896, and he judged it “unholy ground.” It was, he wrote, as if some evil spirit haunted the Chagres bottom lands. He was astounded to see the care with which French equipment and machinery was still being maintained. The armies of black laborers had since departed–returned home at the expense of the Jamaican government–but locomotives stood safely on blocks, oiled and cared for, he reported, as if on display at the Baldwin Works. In machine shops “each bit and screw in each numbered pigeon-hole was as sharp and covered as thick with oil as though it had been in use that morning.”
Other writers traveling through Panama had found melancholy themes in the hulks of abandoned French machinery lying belly up in wayside swamps. But to Davis such devoted care and attention were more pathetic. “For it was like a general pipe-claying his cross-belt and polishing his buttons after his army has been routed and killed, and he has lost everything, including honor.”
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