As of the late spring of 1856, therefore, Lesseps still did not have Ottoman approval. That might have weighed on someone else, but he took comfort from the fact that he had not acquired any new liabilities. Personally, he didn’t think that the sultan’s formal approval was necessary. Said, however, was growing uneasy in its absence, and a vacillating Said was something Lesseps could not afford. For long stretches in 1856, Lesseps was absent from Egypt, whether he was in Constantinople, sipping coffee with the vizier; in Vienna, making his case to Prince Metternich; in Paris to meet with the cream of Europe’s diplomats, who were assembled to negotiate the end of the Crimean War; or in England, fighting with Palmerston. All the while, however, Lesseps stayed in touch with the Egyptian ruler, either through direct correspondence or through representatives in Cairo and Alexandria. He was kept informed of the viceroy’s mood, and by the year’s end, it was clear that Said’s support was weakening.
His doubts notwithstanding, Said honored his financial commitments. He had promised his support, and he delivered. He paid for surveys of the isthmus as well as for the publication of L’Isthme de Suez: Journal de l’union des deux mers (Journal of the Union of the Two Seas). At first, the journal was simply an expensive, effective piece of propaganda, but it soon evolved into a professional newspaper that supplied consistent, albeit biased, information about Egypt and the canal to the French public. It was partisan, but no more so than most papers of the time in Paris or London. Journals were expected to take sides, and to be organs for one political party or another. While L’Isthme de Suez was limited in scope, it continually and effectively presented the canal as a noble work blessed by talented engineers and opposed by pernicious forces.
Said’s support, while costly, did not reflect his shifting mood. Granted, it is difficult to know what his mood was. Like his father and like his successors, he left no private papers and no personal record of his approach toward governing. He is known almost entirely through the eyes of others, and the portrait of him derived from British sources is not flattering. British officials in Egypt portrayed the viceroy as a weak-willed dimwit, but their record of him is suspect. Having endorsed the canal within months of assuming power, Said was at odds with the British for his entire reign, and British animosity colored their impressions of him. Lesseps had a more favorable opinion, but neither he in his letters and diaries nor French officials in their memoranda were prone to editorializing about Said’s character.
Reading between the lines of the multiple and incomplete set of letters and dispatches, it seems that Said was more aware of what he was doing than his poor reputation would suggest. While the British depicted him as inept and overmatched, he was hardly passive. He personally went to Constantinople in the fall of 1856 to gain the sultan’s favor, though he came away empty-handed. With or without the sultan, however, he had the power to scuttle the canal. Lesseps understood that. During the winter of 1856-57, Said left for a long journey to the Sudan. Egypt had for centuries claimed control of the northern portion of that vast region to its south, and the viceroy treated the trip as an extended survey of his realm. Lesseps took the opportunity to spend an uninterrupted period of time with Said, hoping perhaps to mimic that glorious week in November 1854. Having enchanted Said once in the desert, Lesseps sought to inoculate the monarch permanently against the canal’s opponents.
This time, Lesseps was not successful, and Said did not embrace Lesseps’s rosy words. The idea of the canal was causing tension between Said and Britain and between Said and the sultan, and those relationships were more important to him than a not-yet-constructed trench through the desert.
Lesseps did not linger in Egypt after the Sudan expedition. In fact, Said’s anxiety about Britain was one reason for Lesseps’s publicity tour of England, Ireland, and Scotland that spring, which in turn led to the imbroglio between Lesseps, Stephenson, and Palmerston. By the fall of 1857, Lesseps was clear about what he had to do next. Though the diplomatic situation was unresolved, the wavering of Said and the animosity of Britain could only be countered by pushing forward. Further delay would be tantamount to defeat. Little movement had occurred after three years of effort, and Lesseps decided to force the issue. He would get the support of the Emperor Napoleon, found the company, sell shares, and begin the work, whether or not Said, the sultan, or Palmerston agreed. It was a risky move. It would take a year, but it would succeed.
CHAPTER TEN
THE EMPEROR AND THE ENTREPRENEUR
THESE YEARS OF constant motion with little to show for it might have dented the confidence of a man more prone to self-doubt or introspection, but Lesseps never flagged. He had set a goal, and until every avenue had been exhausted, he would keep going. Tenacity alone would not have been enough, however. In fact, all the organizational skills and vision in the world might not have been able to combat the hostility of the British, the passive aggressiveness of the Ottomans, and the waxing and waning of Said’s passion. But Lesseps had one other advantage, one that everyone was aware of but to which he did not draw attention. He had good connections in the diplomatic world, yes, but he was also the cousin of the empress of France. Most people knew that, but few knew quite what it meant.
In the 1860s, Lesseps and Eugénie de Montijo became quite close, but before that, their relationship was something of a mystery. He had watched her grow up during his years in Spain, and she wrote him repeatedly during her quick courtship with Louis-Napoleon to seek his advice. After that, they maintained a correspondence, but the few surviving letters do not suggest more than a polite, familial fondness between them.
How close they actually were is less important to the story of Suez than how close people perceived them to be. It would have been gauche for Lesseps to make explicit mention of his relationship to Eugénie, but in truth he did not need to. It was common knowledge. The extent of his influence with her, and, by extension, with the emperor himself, was not. The uncertainty was a boon for Lesseps. Though no one knew whether Eugénie interceded with the emperor on Ferdinand’s behalf, prudence dictated giving Lesseps a wide berth. Uncertain how much hidden power Lesseps possessed by virtue of his familial proximity to the throne, most erred on the side of assuming that he had too much, rather than gambling that he had very little. If they were wrong, at least they would not alienate Napoleon III; and if they were right, they would please the emperor by pleasing Lesseps.
The vague nature of his influence at court also boosted the prospects of the canal away from Paris. Farther removed from the circles of European intrigue, Egyptian elites and Ottoman grandees heard rumors that Lesseps was an emissary of the emperor. They assumed that Lesseps’s ambition was a direct extension of Napoleon’s goals in the Near East. That Lesseps had no official position was taken as a sign that the emperor wanted the canal to be built. Trained in the ancient arts of obfuscation, the aristocrats of Cairo and Constantinople thought they were seeing through a clever ruse. They assumed that, by dispatching a personal emissary who could not be directly linked to the crown, Napoleon was signaling that the canal was dear to his heart and was so important that he did not want to risk sending a high-ranking official who might be publicly rebuffed. Instead, he sent Lesseps. Many officials assumed that a direct snub of Lesseps was the equivalent of slapping the ruler of France in the face, and though they did not always do what Ferdinand asked, neither did they say no.
In 1856, Napoleon III and his empress were in their prime. The Second Empire had become a glittering state, and that spring, Paris welcomed the diplomats of Europe. The primary reason was to settle the morass of the Crimean War, which France, Britain, and the Ottomans had won, but which had hardly left Russia crippled. The gathering of so many diplomats ensured that a whole range of subjects would be canvassed, including the question of Suez. Not high on any country’s agenda, the matter of the canal was relegated to casual discussion. It was talked about not in formal sessions but over dinner or drinks at the emperor’s palace. Though the dispute was not resolved, it
had become a subject for the powers to consider, and that was a victory for Lesseps.
While the conferees restored the balance of power, Napoleon took the opportunity to show off his new city. Paris was in a flurry of construction. Under the direction of Baron Haussmann, wide avenues were being carved through the old city. Thousands of the poor were displaced, and whole districts were razed to the ground. Hundreds of millions of francs were spent. And the Paris of the Rue de Rivoli, the Boulevard Saint-Germain, the Opéra; the Paris of grand railroad stations and equally grand cemeteries; the city of bourgeois boulangeries and uniform building codes, of stately suburbs and parks to stroll through on a Sunday afternoon, began to take shape. Paris had been a filthy place, with sewage emptying into the Seine next to pipes that carried drinking water in the other direction. Cholera was endemic, but the inhabitants of the city had accepted the risk of disease and the chaos as acceptable costs for living in the hub of power and culture, and they disapproved of Haussmann. Yet, though they did not embrace his reforms, they were not allowed to prevent his renovations.
Haussmann conceived of the master plan, but he was only a tool of the emperor. Napoleon III, born Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in 1808, nephew of the Corsican who nearly ruled the world, was an unlikely monarch, except for his illustrious name. Before he turned forty, he had spent most of his life either in exile in Austria, Italy, England, and New York, or in prison for the pathetic coup attempt he staged in 1840 along with his ragtag followers, who thought that the French army would rally to his side at the very mention of the name Bonaparte. After escaping from prison in 1846, he carried on in foreign capitals and developed a reputation for enjoying the nocturnal company of a wide variety of women, many of whom were explicitly seeking a brief encounter with a Bonaparte.
Were it not for the chaos of 1848, Louis-Napoleon would probably have lived the louche existence of a man without a country, seeking a role that was worthy of his dreams but content to play cards, get drunk, and wake up with a new stranger each morning. Europe of the nineteenth century was filled with exiled princes, and though they were figures of pathos, it wasn’t a bad life. Napoleon, however, was enamored of his illustrious name, and, for all of his wastrel appetites, he kept his focus on France. Surrounded by a coterie of loyal retainers, he saw 1848 as an opportunity to revive the Napoleonic ideal.
In a swirl of moves and countermoves, Louis-Napoleon was elected as a deputy in the republican Assembly, and then, stunningly, won a national election in December 1848 as president of the Second Republic. That republic was short-lived, but Louis-Napoleon was only getting started. After three years as prince-president, he transformed his regime into a popular autocracy and staged a coup from above in December 1851 as thirty thousand loyal troops occupied Paris and arrested thousands of opponents. Freedom of the press was drastically curtailed, and political opposition was silenced. He called for a national referendum to ratify his authority, and won more than seven million out of eight million votes cast. Less than a year later, he called for a national referendum to proclaim him not president but emperor. “The Empire is peace,” he announced, “because France desires it, and when France is satisfied, the world is peaceful.” The vote was even more lopsided than it had been a year before. Though three hundred thousand voters disagreed, 7.8 million others voted in favor of making Louis-Napoleon into Emperor Napoleon III, and allowing his heirs to inherit his throne. With that, the Second Republic came to an end, and the Second Empire began.
Louis-Napoleon had power, but he had no coherent program. “The name of Napoleon is a program in itself,” he had said in 1849, and for the eighteen years of the Second Empire, his name was the only constant. As one later writer quipped, “He had been a man of one idea; and when it was accomplished, he was left without one.” It is true that the emperor did not have a detailed blueprint for France’s future. Having spent his life trying to restore the Bonaparte name, he had not wasted much time thinking about what he might do in the unlikely event that he succeeded. Many leaders have a short horizon and find themselves improvising as they go along. Napoleon lacked a comprehensive plan for what he would do with his power, and, to his lasting discredit, he was cursed with a chattering class that despised him for his limitations.
Napoleon may have ruled France, but the scorn of the intelligentsia has forever tarnished him. Though much of that tarnish may be merited, it has been difficult to disentangle Napoleon III as portrayed by the likes of Victor Hugo and Émile Zola from the Napoleon III who was elected by an overwhelming majority of French citizens, and who commanded their loyalty for a considerable portion of twenty years.
Zola was blunt in his disdain. Napoleon had “more imagination and more dreams than judgment.” He had dreamed of reviving the legacy of his uncle, but for a man of Louis-Napoleon’s limitations, that legacy was all form. It meant an empire and titles and palaces and grand projects and an extension of French power abroad. “What an idiot!” Zola concluded. Others were equally harsh, including the towering figure of Adolphe Thiers. “He’s a cretin,” remarked Thiers of the prince-president who would soon become emperor. But perhaps the most acute among his critics was the writer and sometime politician Victor Hugo, who wrote of Louis-Napoleon, “France’s first mistake was to take him for an idiot; her second was to take him for a genius.”
Harsh words, and with no more consequence than lilliputian arrows, at least not at the time. But the subsequent history of France, and the tumultuous collapse of the Second Empire in 1870 followed by the violence of the Paris Commune and the flux of the Third Republic, seemed to vindicate the picture of Napoleon III as a bumbling, fatuous fool play-acting at being emperor. Saturated with such negative images, the Second Empire has been difficult for later generations to approach on its own terms, but in the 1850s, Napoleon seemed on the verge of creating a new dynasty. Whatever people thought of him privately, little of consequence happened in France or Europe during these years without his input.
His stance, however, was often hard to gauge. He was notoriously averse to confrontation. Petitioners were routinely misled into thinking that he had agreed to grant them things that they were subsequently informed he had not. He was reticent in his public statements, and somewhat awkward physically, though he was a superb horseman. According to those close to him, however, his reserve in public did not do justice to his surprisingly active mind.
For much of his life, he clung to the notion that the name Bonaparte would overturn injustice. Judging from his prison writings, he believed that he had been placed on earth for a grand purpose. Detained for six years in the château of Ham, in the northeast of France, he read widely; there was, after all, not much else to do. He studied government and philosophy, and he was particularly entranced by the writing of Henri de Saint-Simon. He fell in love with Saint-Simonian ideas about destiny, progress, and industry, and became ever more convinced that it was his fate to enhance all three. He embraced the notion that history is made by great men: “I believe that there are certain men who are born to serve as a means for the march of the human race…. I consider myself to be one of these.”
Once in power, Napoleon III quickly found an eligible wife in Eugénie de Montijo, and they spent an active few years trying to have a child. That took somewhat longer than planned, but in those barren three years between 1853 and 1856, Napoleon sent French armies to the Crimea and embarked on a successful state trip to visit Queen Victoria. While in England, he was given a tour of the Crystal Palace exhibition in London, which touted the technical marvels of the time, and he was seized with a vision of an even grander exhibition in Paris. Thereafter, his regime was marked by a series of extravaganzas, both at his courts in Fontainebleau and the Tuileries, and in public spectacles, the most glorious and decadent coming in 1867, just in time to celebrate the wonders of Egypt and the Suez Canal.
But in 1856, that lay in the unknown future. As the delegates came to make peace in Paris, Napoleon celebrated not just his new prominence as the g
littering king of France, but the birth of a son who he had every reason to believe would succeed him. The France of Napoleon III became known as a carnival empire, which rivaled even the Versailles of Louis XIV. In spite of the carping of the intelligentsia, Napoleon was popular at home. France, said Napoleon’s half-brother Morny, was “so tired of revolutions that all it wants today is a good despotism.” Self-serving though that observation was, it also seemed true. Many welcomed the stability and order of the Second Empire, even if this came at the cost of curtailed liberties. And Napoleon, oddly enough, spoke with great admiration for those liberties, even as his extensive police force made sure that no one used them against his regime.
Following the muse of his uncle, Napoleon aspired to make France the pre-eminent power in the world. Crimea was one example; the aggressive colonization of Algeria was another. He also supported moves into Syria, Senegal, Mexico, and Indochina, and though he kept his European ambitions in check, he did go to war with Austria and succeeded, in that limited conflict, in aiding the creation of a new Italian state. It was in this spirit of magnifying the role of France in international affairs that Napoleon slowly became a canaliste.1
Napoleon was an ardent devotee of industrialization. His reign coincided with the greatest period of railroad construction in French history. On his watch, France began to emulate the English model of urban factories and cities with industrial suburbs. Although the French remained fond of small industry and local work, the changes were substantial. French society might have been transformed regardless of who held power. Railroads were being built throughout Western Europe in these decades, by entrepreneurs like Stephenson and Enfantin, and they neither looked to nor asked the political class for permission. Still, for industrialization to proceed, a friendly government was a benefit, and a hostile government was a liability. Napoleon was a friend to industry, and a believer in it.
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