A second act of concession; Said’s decrees about native workers; and Lesseps’s statutes of the company. These three documents, dry and legal though they were, set the future course of the canal and the company that would build it. Though the corporate structure was to evolve over the coming years, and the nature of the work would as well, the outlines were established in 1856.
The decrees would not have been issued without the work of the international commission, which was the first of several groups that trekked to the Isthmus of Suez to report on the canal and the engineering challenges it presented. In the early stages especially, the backers of the canal needed the seal that the engineering community could give. Without their approbation, Lesseps could not effectively rebut the naysayers. He could not tell skeptics in England that their objections were not supported by the latest science, and he could not convince bankers and potential shareholders that their money would be well spent. He was not an engineer, and, other than Linant and Mougel, none of the initial partisans were either. That was a weakness that opponents tried to exploit. In England, Robert Stephenson claimed that the canal presented far too many technical problems, while in France, the Saint-Simonians challenged Lesseps’s credentials and competence.
Enfantin should have realized that events had passed him by, but he was not one to fade gracefully. If anything, signs that he was being eclipsed led him to intensify his campaign in the fall of 1855. One of Napoleon’s ministers, the Comte de Persigny, expressed misgivings about the canal and sounded out various influential people in England to scuttle the plan. Allied with Persigny, Enfantin and his followers waged a smear campaign against Linant and Mougel. Lesseps was weakest at the level of his technical expertise, and until that first international commission reported in early 1856, the blueprint for the canal derived primarily from the work of Linant and Mougel. Undermine them, and Lesseps would be crippled.
Enfantin also kept lobbying the imperial court. He reminded Napoleon that the Saint-Simonians had been promoting engineering projects for two decades, whereas Lesseps was a disgraced diplomat who had never overseen anything larger than a country estate. Enfantin also argued that a canal would be in the imperial interests of France and would allow France to counteract the expansion of Russia into the Near East, just as the Crimean War had prevented Russia from expanding into the eastern Mediterranean. But leaving the canal to a naïf like Lesseps and his motley band of Franco-Egyptian civil servants would ensure the premature death of a brilliant idea.
Enfantin then enlisted the support of Robert Stephenson, who was both a member of Parliament and a revered engineer. In addition to his standing in politics and business, Stephenson wielded considerable influence as a leading member of several professional organizations. In the mid-nineteenth century, the last medieval guilds finally disintegrated and gave way to the professional “institutes,” such as the Royal Geographic Society and the Institution of Civil Engineers. Found throughout Europe, these societies were loosely organized, but they served the function of setting standards of what was and was not acceptable in the various professions. They had the de-facto capacity to terminate a nascent project with a negative report, or to guarantee its success with a positive endorsement. Stephenson was respected, and his vote could doom a speculative new endeavor.
While searching for allies, Enfantin alternated his letter-writing to the emperor with missives to his acolytes. With the emperor, he was formal and deferential; to his followers, he could be crude and haughty. In one letter, he went on at length about his realization that Lesseps’s name rhymed with a common mushroom—“le ceps.” He also vented his eschatological paranoia. He said that Lesseps was “the herald who cries from afar and makes the nations take note of our marvelous promise. He makes a new plan, but so what? What does a plan matter? What matters is the dream of building a sainted temple, the temple of the future, not of the past, the Temple of Peace…. We are certain to have a share of glory, in heaven and on earth in the present century and in future centuries, as we now have a share of misery.”
But even in his more politic exchanges, his hatred of Lesseps was apparent. After several such letters, the emperor’s chamberlain finally responded in December 1855, saying that the emperor had been informed of Enfantin’s objections, “but His Majesty instructed me to tell you that he does not believe that he ought to intervene in this question.” With that curt note, Enfantin was dismissed, never to be taken seriously again in the debate over the canal. The emperor had not yet taken a public stand in favor of the Suez Canal; that would come later. But in his response to Enfantin, as well as to others, Napoleon sent subtle signals of his approval.7
Stephenson, however, was just getting started. He did all that he could to impugn the credibility of the project and the motives of its backers. Throughout 1856 and 1857, he emerged as the expert of choice in arguments against the canal. Though there were no “pundits” in mid-Victorian England, Stephenson played the functional equivalent. For those who wished to refute a pamphlet published by those in favor of Suez, invoking Stephenson’s name was an effective tactic. During heated debates in Parliament in 1856 and 1857, he rose to declaim against the canal, and his words were widely discussed.
Like Palmerston, Stephenson was long on bluster; unlike him, he was short on tact. In the summer of 1857, both went too far. Over the previous year and a half, Lesseps had been campaigning for the canal in England, either in person or through proxies. In person, he would speak to the Chamber of Commerce in a city like Liverpool or Birmingham, often after a dinner and lavish reception replete with ceremonial toasts. The speech he gave varied little, and touched on the economic benefits for world trade and for the British Empire above all. He was an adroit propagandist, but in his passionate defense of the canal, he was utterly sincere. Audiences intuitively knew that he was speaking from the heart, and even if they questioned his logic, no one doubted his integrity.
No one, that is, until Palmerston and Stephenson spoke in Parliament in the summer of 1857. Lesseps had been in Britain since April, and this three-month sojourn was his most extensive period in the country. He appeared at dozens of public meetings, and hundreds of thousands of people either met him, heard him, or read about him. Palmerston was unmoved. He remained distrustful of France, and was still unwilling to grant that the canal was technically possible. Lesseps concluded that Palmerston was unlikely to change his position, ever. Rather than fight the prime minister directly, Lesseps had redoubled his efforts to win over the public.
Slowly, British opinion began to shift. Several powerful voices defected from Palmerston and spoke in favor of the canal, including Gladstone, who agreed with the basic contention that the canal would be good for free trade, good for the British, and good for civilization. Each week, Lesseps accumulated more endorsements from chambers of commerce. After a meeting in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the chamber council voted in favor of the Suez Canal and declared “that it would be the most advantageous to the world, and to this country most especially, if the present long and tedious route for shipping between Europe and India could be superseded.”8
But this cascade of support only intensified the determination of Palmerston and Stephenson. Newcastle may have tipped the scales; Stephenson had been born near the city, had built its most prominent bridge, and may well have felt betrayed by the actions of its Chamber of Commerce. For his part, Palmerston had been re-elected by a considerable margin that spring. He believed that he understood British interests better than the democratic rabble, and he was secure enough politically to flout public opinion on this issue. Lesseps’s successful tour of the country convinced the two men that a more aggressive response was necessary, and that summer they mounted their most intense assault. It was Stephenson, however, who bore the brunt of Lesseps’s infuriated response.
Palmerston received Lesseps one more time, and greeted him by saying, “Well! You’re going to make war with us? You’ve stirred up the passions of England, Ireland, and Scotland about th
is Suez Canal question.” The two then rehearsed what had by then become a familiar and tedious discussion, but with a new twist: Lesseps told the prime minister that the public was now in favor of the canal. Palmerston realized that Lesseps was right.
On July 7, 1857, there was a heated debate in the House of Commons on the Suez Canal question. The defenders of the canal were putting pressure on Palmerston to cease his obstruction, and they had called on the government to change its stance toward the sultan. It was common knowledge that Lord Stratford was holding the canal hostage through his private démarches to the Sublime Porte, insinuating that if the sultan affirmed the canal concession there would be a rupture between Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire. That policy looked less wise in light of the grave crisis that the British were facing in India. The Sepoy Rebellion had erupted in the spring, and it was unclear whether there were sufficient numbers of troops in northern India to suppress the revolt. Though the British brutally reasserted control, Palmerston’s arguments against Lesseps suddenly seemed weaker. The Suez Canal would make it possible to send reinforcements to India in half the time, should another disturbance occur. As a result, some who had been ambivalent about the canal now called for its construction.
Palmerston rose and offered a pallid defense. “Her Majesty’s Government,” he began, “certainly cannot undertake to use their influence with the Sultan to induce him to give permission for the construction of this canal, because for the last fifteen years Her Majesty’s Government have used all the influence they possess at Constantinople and in Egypt to prevent that scheme from being carried into execution. It is an undertaking which, I believe, in point of commercial character, may be deemed to rank among the many bubble schemes that from time to time have been palmed upon gullible capitalists.” He went on to deride the practicality of the canal, except at immense and unprofitable expense, and to warn that, even if it could be done, it would lead to a shift in power between Egypt and the Ottomans that would hurt Britain. He also suggested that, while persuasive, Lesseps had ulterior motives, and that “the object which he and some of the promoters have in view will be accomplished even if the whole undertaking should not be carried into execution.” In short, he accused Lesseps of promoting a scheme for profit and forcing the Egyptian government to underwrite the canal company regardless of whether the canal itself was ever constructed.
This speech brought an immediate response from Lesseps, who sent a circular to more than a hundred trade associations, newspapers, journals, and chambers of commerce with a point-by-point rebuttal of Palmerston’s arguments. He called on “the commercial classes of England” to decide whether their prime minister’s stance was in their interest, and he angrily denied that he was motivated by any base interest in profit, or that he had any “designs upon the pockets” of English capitalists.
On July 17, the issue was debated again in the Commons. Palmerston repeated his objections, and once again termed the project “one of those bubble schemes which are often set on foot to induce English capitalists to embark their money upon enterprises which, in the end, will only leave them poorer, whomever else they make richer.” He then turned to Stephenson for support. Stephenson rose and said that “he would not venture to enter upon the political bearings of the subject… but would confine himself merely to the engineering capabilities of the scheme.” He explained that he had surveyed the isthmus many times, and that the canal presented too many engineering obstacles at too great a cost to make it a viable commercial alternative to the rail link.
Though Stephenson had only seconded what Palmerston said, he bore the brunt of Lesseps’s wrath. As a private French citizen, Lesseps could not credibly demand an apology from the prime minister of Great Britain. But he could go after Stephenson. Arguments against the merits of the canal Lesseps could accept, but assaults on his personal honor he would not. Hearing of what had transpired in Parliament, Lesseps fired off an angry letter to Stephenson demanding clarification, either in writing or in person, accompanied “by two of your friends.” In the idiom of the day, this was an ultimatum. Stephen-son could either apologize for his scurrilous remarks or meet Lesseps for a duel, accompanied by seconds, to settle the affair permanently.
For all his bluster, Stephenson had little interest in pistols at dawn. No one dueled in England anymore, and in any event, Stephenson was more committed to preventing the canal from being built than to dismantling Lesseps’s reputation. The next day, he sent a conciliatory reply. “Nothing could be further from my intention,” he said, “in speaking of the Suez Canal the other night in the House of Commons, than to make a single remark that could be construed as having any personal allusion to yourself…. When I said that I concurred with Lord Palmerston’s opinion, I referred to his statement, that money might overcome almost any physical difficulties, however great, and that the undertaking if ever finished, would not be commercially advantageous.” Lesseps pronounced himself satisfied as far as his honor was concerned but still perplexed that Stephenson would take it on himself to disagree with the bulk of the international engineering community that the canal was, in fact, quite feasible.9
This was the most dramatic confrontation between Lesseps and his adversaries in England. Though British antagonism did not abate over the next ten years, all sides understood that the balance shifted in Lesseps’s favor after the summer of 1857. The backers of the canal would have to contend with the dangerous hostility of the British government for years to come, but never again would Lesseps need to attend so assiduously to converting the British public.
Before this denouement, however, the stance of Her Majesty’s Government had forced Lesseps to spend considerable time in Constantinople, and to pay more attention to his relations with Said. In 1856, Lesseps passed another few weeks in the Ottoman capital, attempting to counteract the corrosive influence of Lord Stratford. That was not an easy task. Stratford had kept up a constant drumbeat that the canal would allow Egypt to declare its independence from the empire, and that argument was repeated to other Ottoman officials by other British representatives in other cities.
In Paris, as the treaty ending the Crimean War was being negotiated, the British ambassador, Lord Cowley, met with the Ottoman prime minister, Ali Pasha, in late March 1856. Cowley warned that the real aim of Said was to secure his independence from the Porte. Ali said that he agreed but could find no adequate reason to prevent preparatory work from going ahead. Said could not be refused without good cause, at least not without pushing him further into the arms of Lesseps and France. Instead, Ali told Cowley that he planned to find a way to make the canal so onerous for Said that the viceroy would drop it voluntarily. The idea was to tie the sultan’s approval to conditions that Said would find unacceptable, such as the demand that any fortifications along the canal be manned by Turkish troops dispatched by the sultan. Said would find this an untenable infringement on his autonomy. He would refuse to honor that condition. The sultan would then refuse to permit the construction, and Said would then have no choice but to withdraw his support from Lesseps.10
Ali Pasha’s elaborate trap was clever, but it was never laid. It was also an indication of just how few tools of coercion the Ottomans possessed. On paper, the empire still looked vast, encompassing more territory than most of its European rivals. Looks were deceptive. The sultan’s control over his realm decreased with each passing mile from Constantinople, and though he still received tax revenue from far-flung provinces, the cohesion of the empire depended on a tacit agreement between the capital and the provinces: the sultan would not infringe on the autonomy of provincial governors and they would not challenge his authority.
In the meantime, the imperial city itself was changing. Constantinople in the mid-1850s reflected the cultural schizophrenia of the Ottoman Empire. The metropolis was a patchwork of modern and medieval. There was an old section that had hardly changed since the Ottoman golden age, and there was a new city modeled after Europe. The old city spread out below the Hagia
Sophia, which had been built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian, and the Blue Mosque, which had been constructed by a seventeenth-century sultan to rival it. That city was a maze of narrow lanes and cramped quarters. There was a street of tinsmiths, a street of butchers, and a street of tailors—just as there were centuries before. The new sections across the Golden Horn were laid out in a grid, with regular street-cleaning, lighting, and a municipal administration. The sultan built a European palace in the new city, but his wives were still sequestered in a harem guarded by eunuchs. High officials often wore Western clothes, but sometimes they donned the traditional robes of the Ottoman aristocracy. Yet, though the city presented a chaotic juxtaposition of modern and traditional, coffeehouses were everywhere, offering an escape and a respite. And in the morning, fishing vessels still brought in their catch from the Bosporus, as they had for millennia, and in the evening, the rich and powerful, as they had since the time of Constantine the Great, still opened their windows so that the breezes coming off the water would cool their mansions.11
That was the city that welcomed Lesseps at least once a year, starting in 1855. He returned early in 1856, just before the sultan issued a vital imperial decree committing the Ottoman Empire to a path of reform and to harmonious relations with the European powers. Yet, though the empire was in flux, the stance of Ottoman officials toward the canal was static. Each new visit brought the same results. Each time, Lesseps made the rounds from the Sublime Porte to the various European embassies. Each time, his arrival triggered a flurry of diplomatic exchanges, and by the time he left, the situation would remain unchanged. The British tried to keep the Ottomans from succumbing to French entreaties; the French tried to prevent the British from swaying the sultan; and the sultan managed to satisfy both by doing nothing.
Parting the Desert Page 15