But it took more than Lesseps’s imagination and the industry of Europe. The Saint-Simonians dreamed of a marriage between East and West, but no matter how eager the West was for this union, without the active assent of the East the marriage could never have been consummated. To make the canal a reality, Lesseps needed the support of the ruler of Egypt, and he found a willing partner in Muhammad Said Pasha.
Said was the son of Muhammad Ali, an Albanian mercenary who rose to power in Egypt in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat. He was a fat child, fond of food and disinclined to the manly virtues of exercise and martial prowess. His father was determined to make Said into a man who could practice the arts of war and diplomacy with equal skill, and he entrusted Said to the care of the French consul. The young prince and Lesseps forged a bond, and when Said came to power in 1854, he invited Lesseps to celebrate his new fortune. Hoping to convince Said of the virtues of the canal, Lesseps happily accepted the invitation.
Though later generations of Europeans and Egyptians dismissed Said as a corpulent dilettante, he had a dream no less expansive than Lesseps’s, and no less improbable than Enfantin’s. He was intoxicated by the promise of an Egypt restored to prominence, no longer under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and once again thriving on the valuable resources of the Nile Valley and the trade of the eastern Mediterranean. Said’s vision converged with that of Lesseps, and an improbable scheme was transformed into a project that would drain the resources of Egypt, strain the balance of power in Europe, and change the face of the earth.
The list begins with Lesseps, Enfantin, and Said, but there were others: Ismail, Said’s successor, who declared that he was more committed to the canal than anyone could ever be, and without whom the work might still not have been completed; the Emperor Napoleon III and his wife, Eugénie, who set the tone for the twenty-year fantasy known as the Second Empire; the French shareholders who backed the project; the engineers who designed it; the laborers who built it; and the legions in England who defied Her Majesty’s Government and its prime minister, Lord Palmerston, and rallied behind the vision of a world made whole.
East and West, Orient and Occident, were terms of imagination as much as they were geographical designations. Yet, in the nineteenth century, the elites of Europe and the Middle East took those categories seriously. Frenchmen such as Lesseps believed that they were part of a civilization called “the West,” and rulers such as Said perceived themselves as part of another, older civilization called “the East.” Those who governed the Ottoman Empire and Egypt in the nineteenth century understood that the West now had the power, and they recognized, often resentfully, that unless they did something drastic they would be overwhelmed. Their ambitions for a better future depended on adopting the tools of the West to defend themselves against it. They had to learn to fight by different rules and with different weapons, and that meant reorganizing their societies.
For a time, European and Middle Eastern visions of progress converged, and one of the progeny of that union was the Suez Canal. The canal was not just a monumental act of engineering and organization. It was the culmination of ideals and ambitions, and a symbol of all that the culture of the nineteenth century held dear. It was a hundred-mile-long trench that signaled the triumph of science, the creativity of mankind, and the beginning of a wonderful future.
Or so its creators thought. The canal’s inauguration in 1869 was supposed to herald better days, but for Egypt that did not happen. By the grace of Suez, French shareholders and English politicians became rich, powerful, and feared. Situated at the center of the British Empire, the Suez Canal became an excuse for imperial expansion, and then a cause of imperial overstretch. But the dreams of the Egyptians that they would again rule the eastern Mediterranean and reclaim the grandeur of the pharaohs, the glory of the Ptolemies, the power of Saladin, and the vigor of the Mamelukes—those were mirages that tantalized and then evaporated. For Egypt and other states east of Suez, the day the canal opened was not the culmination of a dream but the death of one. While Europe became more dominant in the decades ahead, the Near East and much of the world struggled to maintain a modicum of independence in the face of European expansion. The twentieth century offered more of the same, and Nasser’s moment of glory in 1956 was a false dawn for Egypt, for the Middle East, and for the canal.
The history of East and West seemed to be running on parallel courses in the mid-nineteenth century. Organized religion was in retreat in Europe, and in Egypt and the Middle East, few elites spoke of Islam. Europe had the edge, but individuals like Lesseps believed that, in time, the spread of Western civilization would improve the lives of everyone, everywhere. That creed was taken up by the United States in the twentieth century, but its legacy outside of Europe and the United States is ambiguous. Today, the West continues to grow rich, while the rest continue to play catch-up. Disillusioned, some in the Middle East turn to Islam to do for them what the ideals of the nineteenth century did not: to restore lost pride and past glory, and to improve the quality of life in an overpopulated society. And though many shun radical Islam, few have much appetite for Western ideals. Having placed their hope in those in the nineteenth century, they are reluctant to embrace them in the twenty-first. The Suez Canal today is a reminder of the rift between East and West, and not, as its creators had wished, a symbol of unity.
These are simply historical facts, and ones that would have leavened the enthusiasm of those who came to celebrate the canal in 1869. And had they all been transported, on some magic carpet, to the present, to sit by the banks of the modern canal, they might have wondered whether their vision had been worth the cost. Even had they known, they might have pressed ahead anyway. It seemed the right thing to do at the time, and, after all, it is hard to avoid the law of unexpected consequences, just as no one can determine history’s flow. The Suez Canal is now in its twilight, but it was, for a time, an unequivocal triumph of human will and ingenuity. It is fitting, therefore, that the story of its creation begins with a young, willful general looking for a battlefield, a man of revolutionary France, born in Corsica and named Buonaparte.
CHAPTER TWO
THE FRENCH FALL IN LOVE
THE AGE OF Enlightenment was also a continuation of the age of exploration. The world was shrinking, at least for the inhabitants of Western Europe, and ambitions were no longer confined to the continent. In 1672, Gottfried Wilhem von Leibniz had an idea, and he was so enamored of it that he wrote to the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, lord of France.
Leibniz was twenty-six years old and living in Nuremberg, a cosmopolitan city surrounded by warring German principalities. Though he would later become one of history’s most important philosopher-mathematicians, at the time he was a minor member of the court of a German prince, and he looked at the growing power of the Sun King with considerable alarm. Hoping to deflect the energies of French expansion away from the German states, Leibniz came up with a bold scheme: he would convince Louis XIV to send an army a thousand miles away, to the shores of the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea, to the land of the pharaohs, Egypt.
“This project,” Leibniz wrote, “is the most grand of enterprises, and the easiest to do, exempt from peril even should it fail.” It would, he continued, “procure for France the suzerainty of the seas and of commerce, and it will not require any resources other than those that have already been prepared. It will obtain for the king universal affection and dissipate all old animosities and distrust. It will make him the arbiter of Christianity. It will open the road to posterity, and for the king himself, the opportunity to be compared to Alexander the Great.” It was only necessary, he said, for the king to seize his destiny.
Leibniz detailed how easy it would be for a well-organized French invasion to overcome the Mameluke dynasty, then in control of Egypt. He argued that the conquest of the country would vindicate the failed crusade of Louis IX, who had tried to reclaim the Holy Land by invading Egypt in the thirteenth century and then died of f
ever in Tunis. He assured the Sun King that a new expedition would allow France to exploit the agricultural riches of the Nile, and to extend the hand of the Catholic monarch to protect the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. And, in passing, he mentioned the one thing that would later bear fruit, long after both he and Louis had died.
“There is in Egypt,” Leibniz wrote, “the most important isthmus in the world, that separating its great seas, the Ocean and the Mediterranean: a place that cannot be avoided without circling all the sinuosities of Africa; the connecting point, the obstacle, the key, the only possible door between two areas of the world, Asia and Africa; the meeting-point and marketing-place of India on one side, and Europe on the other.” Louis XIV dismissed the idea, and Leibniz, who would later invent integral calculus along with Newton, was brushed off with barely an acknowledgment from a Versailles courtier. But he had tossed a pebble into a pond and, 125 years later, its ripples reached the shores of Corsica.1
It had not been Napoleon’s life ambition to conquer the Nile Valley, but in the early months of 1798, it was his best course of action. Having emerged victorious from a brutal campaign in Italy, he was a hero to a young French republic that desperately needed one. But although he was wildly popular with his troops and with the crowds of Paris, the oligarchy that clung to power under the name of the Directory eyed him warily. While Napoleon was troubled by unfulfilled ambition, the Directory was troubled by an unanswered question: what should be done with Napoleon, the fiery general with the newly altered surname, Bonaparte?
His preference was to invade England, which was the one power that still threatened to turn back the French Revolution. But when he reviewed the logistics of mounting a cross-channel campaign against the English, he found, as had so many before and so many after, that the risks were too great and the rewards too uncertain. That left Napoleon with an army, an ambition, and no mission. He was not yet popular enough to confront the Directory, yet he was too powerful to sit quietly in some Parisian mansion or suburb while waiting for an opportunity. The men of the Directory knew this, and they too looked for some way to rid themselves of the Corsican. It was here that Leibniz’s vision was revived.
In the intervening decades, travelers to Egypt had written about their adventures. The Comte de Volney born Constantin François de Chasseboeuf, but renamed in honor of the philosophe Voltaire, ventured to the Near East in the 1780s and wrote expansively of the untapped riches that Egypt offered. He concluded that “if Egypt were possessed by a nation friendly to culture… those monuments currently buried under the sand will be preserved as an invaluable resource for future generations.” His book Travels in Syria and Egypt was widely read during the last days of the Ancien Régime. Flush with success, he went to Corsica to buy an estate, and there met a young Napoleon, whom he infused with a dream of conquest. Egypt, Volney hinted to Napoleon, was a chrysalis of greatness, if only there were a great man who could claim it.
Volney also influenced Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the pompadoured foreign minister already growing fat, who was then in the early stages of what would be one of the oddest, most influential diplomatic careers of the era. Talleyrand knew of Volney’s ideas, because Volney was then involved in the politics of Paris. At the time, Talleyrand was jockeying for position in the shifting coalitions of the Directory. He looked at General Bonaparte as a tool and an adversary, and, like many, he wanted to remove Napoleon from Paris and send him to someplace far away. That place was Egypt.
In a series of meetings and memos between Bonaparte, Talleyrand, and the Directory in the spring of 1798, the rationale for an expedition was worked out. A strike against Egypt would be a blow against England, whose maritime expansion France dearly wished to halt. Egypt, said Talleyrand, was a land suffering from the tyranny of the Mamelukes, and what better way for the French Revolution to show that it was indeed ecumenical than to bring freedom to the oppressed? Egypt, said Napoleon, was a land of immense, untapped riches, and what better way to augment the power of France than to harness the wealth of the Nile? The Directory was convinced, and authorized Napoleon to raise a fleet at Toulon under conditions of secrecy and depart as soon as possible for Alexandria.2
Bonaparte was not then, nor would he ever be, a man of limited horizons. Others would have couched the Egyptian expedition in circumspect terms; for Napoleon, it became not just a conquest of a foreign land, but a mission ordained by God and demanded by civilization. On the eve of his departure in May 1798, he told Joséphine that he didn’t know how long his mission would take—“a few months, or six years.” Conquest would be followed by colonization, and colonization by further conquest—of the Holy Land, and perhaps even of India, where the English had recently evicted the French, and where the French maintained faint hopes of returning. Egypt would become an adjunct of French power, just as it had been the key to Roman power thousands of years before. Napoleon would become a new Caesar, or a new Alexander, and his landing at Alexandria would be the first step on that path to posterity.
But Alexandria in 1798 bore scant relation to the famous city of Alexander the Great. Inhabited by fewer than ten thousand people, it was a quiet port; save for a few desultory ruins on the outskirts, there were no signs of past glory. Napoleon landed his troops several miles from the city center. Facing little resistence, the army quickly made its way to Cleopatra’s ancient capital and took control.
Napoleon had given his troops strict instructions. This was not an operation of pillage but, rather, a liberation. With only forty thousand troops, Napoleon planned to occupy a country with a population of more than three million people, hundreds of miles from his nearest supply lines. It would not take long for the expedition to consume the food and money it had brought from France, and if the occupation was to succeed, the assistance of the local population was imperative. Recognizing those constraints, Napoleon ordered his army to refrain from any theft, rape, or insult to the native population and their religion. Speaking on his flagship, L’Orient, Napoleon commanded his men not to contradict the basics of Islam. “Deal with them as you dealt with Jews and with Italians,” he commanded. “Respect their muftis and their imans, as you respected rabbis and bishops. Show the same tolerance towards the ceremonies prescribed by the Koran that you showed towards convents and synagogues.”3
Having occupied Alexandria, Napoleon reiterated this proclamation. He declared that he had come to liberate the people of Egypt from the tyranny of the Mamelukes and that he would be a friend and protector of Islam. He then left his fleet moored off the coast and advanced across the desert to Cairo. It was not the best time of year for an overland advance. Egypt in July is a cauldron, and the French troops wore wool uniforms and were unfamiliar with the terrain. The local Bedouin tribes harassed the soldiers and blocked up the wells, and it was days before the army reached the Nile. That they were able to make the journey at all in scorching heat with insufficient water is remarkable, but they marched on, and soon reached the outskirts of Cairo, at the northwestern suburb of Imbaba, where the Mameluke beys prepared to meet them.
On July 21-22, at the Battle of the Pyramids, Napoleon’s army inflicted a crushing defeat on the mounted horsemen of the Mamelukes, a dynasty of soldiers and slaves that had once, centuries before, kept the Mongol invasion from streaming across North Africa, but were now split into rival factions. Napoleon exhorted his forces, “Go forth, and remember, that from the top of these monuments, forty centuries are watching us.” Whether they were inspired by his words, they performed as he wished. The French lost several hundred men while killing several thousand. The remnants of the Mamelukes fled south, and Napoleon occupied one of the oldest cities in the world.
As he had in Alexandria, Bonaparte issued a proclamation to the people. He said that his only goal had been to liberate the city from the Mamelukes. He assured the citizens that they would not be harmed, that their homes would not be raided, that their women would not be violated, and that their religion would not be dishonored. Ki
nd words notwithstanding, the people of Cairo did what people always do when faced with an alien army marching through their streets: they panicked.
Shaikh Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti was an esteemed member of al-Azhar, the oldest university in the Muslim world. The mosque and school had been founded in the tenth century, and though al-Azhar had long since ceased being a seat of forward thinking, it was still a center of theology, and its shaikhs commanded respect. Jabarti chronicled the French occupation, and he described the terror that descended on Cairo in late July. People fled, and the French soldiers were not nearly as honorable as Napoleon had instructed them to be. “Night fell and the inhabitants of the city were in a great confusion and a fantastic uproar,” Jabarti wrote. French chroniclers routinely portrayed Cairo in 1798 as decrepit, decaying, and declining. In reality, the city of 250,000 was thriving. Nominally under the aegis of the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople, Egypt was essentially independent, and Cairo was a thriving entrepôt of trade and industry. From the precincts of al-Azhar, three thousand students and teachers observed the French, and found them wanting in culture and manners.
Jabarti treated Napoleon’s proclamation with contempt, in part for its content, but mostly for its terrible grammar. As if marking a slow schoolboy’s paper, Jabarti went through the edict clause by clause to correct its many errors of spelling, syntax, and interpretation. He also lambasted the French for their lack of civility. When Napoleon’s inner circle settled into the palace of Alfi Bey in the Ezbekkiyah Gardens, they “entered it, stepping on the carpets with their shoes and sandals as was their custom, since they never take off their shoes with which they tread upon filth, not even when they sleep! Among their repulsive habits also is their practice of spitting and blowing their noses upon the furnishings.” Proud inheritor of more than a thousand years of learning, Jabarti saw the French as upstarts, and arrogant ones as well. They arrived trumpeting their civilizing mission, but from Jabarti’s perspective, it was the French who needed civilizing.
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