Though Muhammad Ali had vetoed the idea of a direct canal, the popularity of the Waghorn route kept the idea of a Suez Canal alive, and Enfantin soon re-entered the scene. Though the Father had moved on to other projects, he had lost none of his messianic zeal, and he had also acquired the patina of a successful entrepreneur as a result of his involvement in the development of railroad lines in France. His new wealth fueled his old ambitions, and in the 1840s, after agitating for French schemes in colonized Algeria, he again turned his energies toward the creation of a canal. In the interim, the field of competitors had grown.
By the 1840s, Egypt was teeming with European businessmen and diplomats. Muhammad Ali’s modernization programs acted as a beacon for thousands of Europeans looking to make a fortune and a reputation in an untapped market. The prospect of a canal meant the possibility of trade of far greater magnitude. The overland route remained costly and time-consuming. Letters and passengers could be transported, but not bulkier, heavier items. Railroads were a distinct possibility, but water transport would be even cheaper, and faster. Along with Frenchmen such as Enfantin, Austrian, Italian, Dutch, Greek, English, Scottish, and German diplomats and merchants began to look more seriously at a canal project.
Like Leibniz before them, a group of Leipzig merchants petitioned Muhammad Ali to allow for a preliminary canal project in 1845. He rebuffed them, but not as forcefully as he had dismissed Enfantin a decade earlier. He said that they should first sound out the great powers of Europe, and if England and the rest agreed that a canal was a good idea, then he would think about it.6 Weakened by the onset of old age and by his bitter defeat at the hands of Palmerston, Muhammad Ali accepted that Egypt’s fate was inextricably linked to European politics. Rather than ruling one way or another on the merits of a canal, he deferred a decision and told the interested parties that the final verdict would come not from Cairo but from the capitals of Europe.
Perhaps perceiving that the climate had changed, Prosper Enfantin revived his dormant ambitions. Using his wealth and connections, he assembled a group of engineers and entrepreneurs and raised 150,000 francs. At the end of 1846, in his apartment in Paris, Enfantin established the Société d’Études du Canal de Suez (Suez Canal Study Group), to conduct further research into the feasibility of a canal linking the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Enfantin now recognized that the canal would have to be a multinational effort, and the society included prominent engineers from England, France, and the German states. Representing England was Robert Stephenson, son of the famed inventor of the railroad and a figure of substance in his own right; from France, Paulin Talabot, an adherent of the Saint-Simonians; and from Austria, Reynaud de Negrelli. Dozens of others (including two of Talabot’s brothers) were involved, but these three, plus Enfantin and the Saint-Simonian François Arlès-Dufour, were the central figures.
The Study Group sent its engineers to Egypt in 1847. They coordinated their plans with Linant de Bellefonds, and his assistance was vital. When Muhammad Ali learned of the Study Group, however, he reacted strongly. Age had made him suspicious to the point of paranoia. He remembered, or one of his ministers reminded him of, Enfantin’s earlier attempts to obtain a canal concession, but because Enfantin did not approach him directly this time, the pasha assumed that the Study Group was part of some plot by the powers of Europe to undermine Egyptian autonomy. Linant, who had served Egypt loyally as director of public works, assured the pasha that the group was what it appeared to be, and that, although a canal might still be a bad idea, it was at least worth further study.
The teams dispersed to their designated regions along the canal. Stephenson, assigned to survey the area around the port of Suez, was the most perfunctory. Owing to his association with railroad developers, he soon lost interest in a canal and became an advocate for rail links between Alexandria and Suez. Representing Austrian interests, Negrelli believed that a canal could make both him personally and the Austrian Empire rich. Goods passing from the Orient through the canal on their way to Central Europe could transform Austria’s Adriatic port of Trieste into a major entrepôt. Stephenson made a desultory pass through the south; Negrelli assiduously surveyed the lands and the coasts around the Bay of Pelusium. That left the interior of the isthmus to Talabot.
The brothers Talabot came from Limoges, and both were immersed in the nexus of business, politics, and ideas that made mid-nineteenth-century France such a churning, chaotic place. In tune with the times and in line with the Saint-Simonians, Paulin saw grand public-works projects not just as puzzles to be solved, but as integral components of the harmonious development of civilization. Like Enfantin, he hitched his career to the development of railroads, and he later was a central figure in the evolution of the French banking system. After trekking across the desert to the Bitter Lakes, at the midpoint of the isthmus, he spent weeks measuring and surveying. He came to a startling conclusion. The survey conducted almost fifty years before by Le Père was wrong. There was no meaningful difference in the levels of the two seas, and thus there was no potential problems of flooding. That was what Linant had been claiming all along, but he had never managed to convince Muhammad Ali to spend the money on a new survey. Talabot was blessed with the latest equipment and ample funds, and after checking and rechecking his data, he announced that a direct route linking the two seas presented no technical obstacles.
Even so, Talabot did not recommend a direct route. In his final report, he said that, though it was feasible, it was not desirable. It would require the construction of a new port in the north, and it faced the difficulty of no fresh water, no supply lines, and no proximate labor. Instead, he suggested the old idea of an indirect link. Personal rivalries shaped this recommendation. Talabot was allied with Enfantin, and Enfantin had a falling-out with Linant. Advocating a direct route would have meant deferring to Linant, who knew the terrain better than any man alive, had long been on record as a defender of the direct canal, and had the confidence of the pasha. Enfantin, however, was not a team player. Whatever the technical merits of a canal cutting the isthmus, taking a back seat just wasn’t his style, and as went Enfantin, so went Talabot.7
For the rest of 1847 and into 1848, the Study Group was active. Plans were drawn and redrawn, and letters passed freely among the capitals of Europe as Enfantin, Talabot, Negrelli, and Arlès-Dufour tried to win friends and influence people. The resistence of the English government and the passivity of the pasha, however, kept the idea from making the transition from a scheme to a project. It was much discussed, but nothing actually happened. Or, at any rate, nothing that was apparent at the time. There was, however, one letter exchanged, between members of the société and the French consul in Spain, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who was enthusiastic but immersed in a promising diplomatic career far from Egypt.
The future of the canal darkened even more when Muhammad Ali died. He had been an opponent, but he had hinted that if the powers of Europe wished it he would be open to persuasion. The same could not be said for his grandson and successor, Abbas, who became viceroy when the pasha finally died in the autumn of 1849.
Though Said was Muhammad Ali’s son, the laws of succession dictated that power be passed to the oldest male descendant, and that was Abbas. Abbas is a murky figure, and most of what is known about him comes from his opponents. Yet even neutral chroniclers, both since and at the time, searched unsuccessfully for good things to say about him. He was portrayed as cruel and reactionary. One Egyptian historian of the late nineteenth century described Abbas as a spoiled child who could be both irritable and threatening. He had been orphaned at a young age, and his education was overseen by Muhammad Ali. As harsh as he had been toward the pudgy Said, the pasha was no gentler with Abbas, who was at best lazy and at worst stupid, or so most people said. When Abbas was a teen, the pasha had dismissed him, saying, “He is incapable of work and shows proof of a crude nature.” Once in power, Abbas wreaked the revenge of a scorned child and rejected the modernizing policies of Muhammad Al
i as misguided and dangerous.8
In decree after decree, he tried to dismantle what his grandfather had so meticulously constructed. Abbas placed restrictions on European merchants, and refused to meet with their consuls. He recalled the Egyptian students studying abroad, shut the schools that taught science, and made it known that Egypt was now closed to business. He did support the completion of the Cairo-to-Alexandria railroad under the auspices of Robert Stephenson, probably because that would allow him to consolidate his control over the Nile Delta without giving up any Egyptian sovereignty. Though Abbas was widely disliked at the time and has been reviled since, he had good reason to distrust modernization. By midcentury, Egypt had become more porous to European influence, but no more able to resist European imperialism. Abbas and his circle may have reacted blindly to the threat, but they gauged it correctly. With the process begun by Muhammad Ali only half complete, Egypt was more vulnerable. The old structures of power had been so weakened that they could no longer effectively resist outside influence, even passively, and new ones weren’t sufficiently in place. Egypt was left betwixt and between, neither modernized enough to achieve Muhammad Ali’s dream nor isolated enough to allow Abbas to retreat from the world without consequences.
With Abbas in control, there was no chance for Enfantin and the Study Group to implement their plans. He refused to meet with them. He exiled, arrested, or executed many of the reform-minded ministers who had been in Muhammad Ali’s employ, and he spent his few years in power trying to change the order of succession so that his son and not his uncle Said would inherit the mantle.
If Abbas appeared to doom the Suez Canal, then the events in Rome in 1849 seemed likely to doom the man who would in time became the canal’s creator. Lesseps was sent to Rome to bring peace to a city that was besieged by multiple armies, with Austrian troops on one side and French infantry on the other. Between them were the forces of the newly declared Roman Republic, led by Mazzini in an uneasy alliance with Garibaldi. The Republic was dedicated to the principles of liberalism that flourished in 1848, and its leaders pressured the Pope to renounce his political power. The Austrians wanted to crush the Republic and restore papal rule. The army of France, meanwhile, answered to the newly elected government of President Louis-Napoleon, and he was unsure whether his interests lay with the Pope or with the Republic.
To make matters worse, General Oudinot of the French expeditionary force intended to resolve the situation by force. He wanted to defeat the Republicans and then eliminate the Austrians as the protectors of the papacy. Lesseps was sent to Rome with minimal instructions. He was told “to deliver the States of the Church from the anarchy which prevails in them, and to ensure that the re-establishment of a regular power is not in the future darkened, not to say imperiled, by reactionary fury.” Other instructions dictated that he do everything he could “to secure genuine and real guarantees of liberty for the Roman States.”9 What that meant in practice was anybody’s guess. Restore the Pope but force him to work in concert with Mazzini and the Republicans? Fight the Austrians? Supersede the French army and overrule General Oudinot? Lesseps could not have known, and he did not ask.
Arriving in Rome in early May, Lesseps found an intransigent Oudinot preparing to invade the city. He spent countless hours shuttling between the general and the leaders of the Republic, and though his relationship with all parties was strained, he eventually hammered out a provisional treaty in late May that allowed for both Roman self-determination and the temporary occupation of the city by French troops. With this compromise in hand, Lesseps decided that it was best to meet personally with the foreign minister. He returned to Paris in a hurried twenty-four-hour journey, not suspecting that his work was about to be repudiated and his good name ruined.
In Paris, he learned that the foreign minister had been replaced, by Alexis de Tocqueville, and that Oudinot had received authorization to invade. Lesseps was left with a useless piece of paper, and an unresponsive Foreign Ministry. Tocqueville may have lauded the democracy of the United States, but that didn’t preclude him from the duplicity of high politics. Though he did not exactly betray Lesseps, Tocqueville did little to prevent him from being sacrificed. The Assembly took only a few days before declaring that Lesseps had exceeded his instructions and that the convention he had negotiated was null and void.
It didn’t stop there. Louis-Napoleon needed someone to take the blame. Lesseps, a career diplomat who had been out of the country for most of the past two decades, was a relatively easy target. At least Ferdinand saw what was coming. He wrote to his wife, “It will not be the first time I have been alone against the world and have won through…. I well know how to ride out a storm.” He then assured her that he was “never so calm as at the very center of troubles.” He had a clean conscience, had done nothing wrong, and was sure that one day he would be vindicated.10
But worse days were ahead. Private remonstrances were not sufficient He was brought in front of the Council of State in a mockery of a fair trial, and assailed for negotiating an agreement that compromised the honor and integrity of the French army and which undermined the dignity of France. He was then officially censured. Though not explicitly ordered to end his association with the Foreign Ministry, he was left in a professionally untenable position, without patronage or hope of a subsequent assignment. He resigned.
Decades later, Lesseps wrote a defense of his Roman debacle, and concluded that it had all turned out for the best: “The vote of blame was a fortunate one for me, as, returning to private life, I have since been absolved by my country.”11 That was easy enough to say after the triumph of the Suez Canal and the impending promise of the Panama Canal had catapulted Lesseps to fame and fortune. But in the summer of 1849, he could not have been so sanguine about his future. However, as his letters attest, he did have a wife whom he loved and who loved him; an eldest son, Charles, whom he was particularly fond of; an ally in his brother-in-law; two younger children; and a close bond with his mother-in-law. Agathe was stalwart in her support of her beleaguered spouse, and Madame Delamalle was more than simply sympathetic. She was rich.
Ferdinand was forty-four years old and unemployed. He had some family money, but he had no salary and no standing. Responding to his need, Madame Delamalle appointed Lesseps her agent for a large estate in central France, near Berry, and he convinced her to pay for renovations to the main house. He then dedicated his energies to turning the estate into a model farm, and he plunged into that work with the same intensity that he would later bring to more grandiose projects.
History then upended his life once again. In the summer of 1853, his son Charles became very sick, probably with scarlet fever. Agathe cared for him, and nudged him toward health. But she caught his fever, and was dead within days. One of her other sons, named Ferdinand after his father, died as well. Within the space of a few years, Lesseps had lost a career, a wife, and a child. He was left with two sons, a farm in central France, and a caring set of in-laws. He also had a deep well of unused energy, which was now augmented by a stream of grief. “I pass my life in the middle of cows, pigs, and lambs,” he wrote in his diary. A solitary life as a yeoman farmer was not a long-term option, yet nothing else had presented itself.12
A canal might have been built without Ferdinand de Lesseps, but not then, and not for many decades. Though the idea had been floating through Europe, no one had been able to solve the Gordian knot formed by political rivalries, competing agendas, economic challenges, and engineering disputes. Lesseps himself would never have devoted himself so single-mindedly to implementing the project had he not suffered loss. In that sense, he was right to look back on this period as a blessing in disguise. Disgrace and the death of his wife propelled him. His pain became the source of his inspiration, and his ambition a way to heal himself.
This man in search of a destiny now received a gift from fate. In July 1854, a postman appeared in the courtyard of an old manor house Lesseps was restoring. The letter was handed to h
im by one of the workmen. Abbas had been assassinated, and Lesseps knew instantly what that meant.13 Power had passed to the eldest male of the house of Muhammad Ali, to a thirty-two-year-old man with a fondness for all things French and a penchant for large plates of pasta.
CHAPTER SIX
A JOURNEY IN THE DESERT
ABBAS WAS MURDERED by two of his slaves, under mysterious circumstances that few had a vested interest in probing. Said assumed the reins of government with little resistance, and within weeks, the word was out: Egypt was again open for business.
Where Abbas had turned the country inward, Said looked to Europe. Where Abbas had tried to reverse the course set by his grandfather, Said intended to honor Muhammad Ali’s legacy. Abbas had made one small concession to Westernization: he granted a group of British businessmen a concession to build a railroad from Alexandria to Cairo. But whereas Abbas had been stingy with such grants, Said was profligate. In almost everything he did, Said went to excess. His appetite for food was a corporeal reflection of his appetite for life. Had he been just a bit more restrained, or had he gathered advisers who encouraged his more spartan instincts, he might have steered a perfect course between opening Egypt to the commerce of the world and guarding Egypt against those who would exploit it. Unfortunately, there was no one cautioning against that next grant, that next party, or that next plate of macaroni. His heart was good, but he didn’t know when to stop.
Of course, that only became clear years later, after his projects began to undermine the Egyptian financial system. His successor, Ismail, did little to reverse course. Said’s decisions helped lead Egypt into a lethal embrace with a more powerful, rapacious Europe, but in his lifetime, he seemed to be making the right choices and doing all that he could to strengthen his country and keep it independent.
Parting the Desert Page 8