It was their imagination that Lesseps had captured, yet they were a class routinely dismissed for their lack of imagination. Writers such as Hugo, Zola, and Balzac took meticulous pains to skewer them, and literary and artistic culture in Paris organized itself in part around the principle of “épater la bourgeoisie”—namely, stomping on the sensibilities of these bankers and doctors and lawyers who formed the acquisitive backbone of society. That tone became even more prevalent later in the century, but it was already apparent during the Second Empire. But for all of their scorn, the literati never could explain how it was that these supposed dullards were willing to risk their hard-earned cash on the filigree promises of Ferdinand de Lesseps.
The bourgeoisie yearned for stability, but they lived in a culture that swirled with romantic images. Literate and engaged in the world of affairs, they could not avoid the whirlwind of new ideas. They may have rejected Enfantin and other outlandish prophets, but they were influenced nonetheless. As conservative as they were in their sense of how society should be ordered, they lived in a sea of conflicting doctrines. Progress battled with a Catholicism resurgent after decades of attack. Theologians argued with secular rationalists such as Ernest Renan, who, having nearly become a priest, instead devoted himself to pillorying traditional religion. Science versus religion was only one of many battles. Demands for the education of women jockeyed with jeremiads that women were becoming too liberated. And the march of industry was greeted in many rural areas as a threat to a way of life that had survived wars and revolutions yet seemed defenseless in the face of the railroad and the telegraph.
But society was also suffused with romantic images in a much more literal sense. The passion for things Egyptian unleashed by Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt never waned. After Champollion and the cracking of the hieroglyphic code, it deepened, and the contest with England over the fate of Muhammad Ali kept France focused on Egypt. Fascination with the Orient was not particular to France; nineteenth-century Germans, Americans, and English had a similar mania. But French “Egyptomania” was more intense. From the time of Bonaparte at the beginning of the nineteenth century, French painters took trips to North Africa, to Turkey, to the Holy Land, and to Egypt. They absorbed what they saw, and transformed those images into paintings. Writers traveled as well, and turned what they saw into poems and novels, which then in turn became source material for painters. By midcentury a new medium had been added, photography. Combined, these photographs, paintings, and books fueled the passion of the French for the East. Without it, the selling of the Suez Canal would have been far more difficult.
The old conflict with the Ottomans, and the rivalry between Islam and Christianity that flared most notably during the Crusades, were part of the romance. In the early eighteenth century, a Frenchman named Antoine Galland published a translation of The Arabian Nights, and European audiences read with glee the titillating tales of Scheherazade and Caliph Harun ar-Rashid cavorting with geniis and bandits in medieval Baghdad. The stories of Sinbad were not much different from Homer’s tale of Odysseus, but educated Europeans were thrilled by the exotic, and erotic, harem. The image of eunuchs guarding the entrance to a world of sexually available women lodged in the collective imagination of Western Europe, and there it remained for the next two hundred years.8
Painters had been using the Bible as a primary subject for centuries. In that sense, attention had always been focused in the Orient. But in the nineteenth century, as religion lost its cultural centrality, painters looked for new subjects in old places. The invasion of Egypt and the subsequent French occupation of Algeria opened these areas to travelers. Even those painters who did not themselves go for extended stays in Algeria, Morocco, Istanbul, or Cairo were influenced by those who did, and when photographs of these areas began to trickle forth in the 1840s, those too were incorporated into paintings.
Some of the most illustrious artists of the age seized on Oriental themes and combined Biblical stories with myths and legends. Eugène Delacroix composed one of his most famous images of the East before he actually went there, and used a poem by Lord Byron as inspiration. The exhibition of his Death of Sardanapalus in the Paris Salon of 1827 was a happening, widely discussed and debated. The painting flowed with naked women surrounding a dark and brooding potentate in a swirl of sex and violence. Later, after a stay in North Africa, Delacroix painted the equally famous Women of Algiers, which depicted three women in their quarters, unveiled, relaxing, dressed in fine garments. While critics argued over the painting’s merits, it unleashed a cascade of discussion and imitation.
It was said of Delacroix (by Baudelaire, no less) that he “was passionately in love with passion.” But Delacroix himself was influenced by the no less passionate poetry of Victor Hugo, who published Les Orientales in 1829. Hugo was the son of one of Napoleon’s generals, and he had studied at the Polytechnic School. Possessed of more than his share of self-assurance and without any direct knowledge of the Near East, Hugo spun a web of magical poems. He emulated Scheherazade. He described the winds rolling off the Sahara and the mysteries of ancient Egypt then being revealed by French archeologists, and he evoked a decadent East that held both promise and peril.
One of Delacroix’s rivals and critics was Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose canvases were more controlled and less flamboyant. Ingres also peered into the harem and tried to expose the sensual pleasures hidden inside. Whereas Delacroix was all color and action, Ingres presented meticulous set-pieces, frozen in time. But he was no less entranced by the Orient. He painted “odalisques,” an archaic word for concubines or harem slaves. His odalisques, statuesque and pale, were graced with translucent skin, and their eyes gazed off, as if they were waiting, not altogether happily, for their lord to arrive for his evening pleasure. In Odalisque with a Slave, which Ingres finished in 1839, the woman lies naked, stretched out on a divan as her female servant plays an instrument and a turbaned Nubian stands guard. The setting is ornate and mournful; the mood is expectant.
Ingres was not simply one of the most successful painters of his day. He was also an arbiter of taste in a world where success as an artist depended on the validation of the Salon, and he was a teacher who schooled others in his craft. Because he enjoyed a place at the pinnacle of the European artistic establishment, his images were not just widely viewed and debated but influenced other, younger painters to take up similar subjects. Soon, images of the Orient became almost commonplace. At any given time, artists tend to gravitate toward similar subject matter, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, dozens of artists and photographers looked to the Near East and North Africa for inspiration. Robed Bedouins, camel caravans, Cairene streets, ruined temples, scenes of tent life replete with sumptuous meals and dark interiors, and the ubiquitous harem guarded by muscled, dark-skinned eunuchs cropped up on canvas after canvas.
The Swiss painter Charles Gleyre, the Scottish draftsman David Roberts, and the French artist Horace Vernet created hundreds of pictures of the Orient. The prolific Roberts, whose drawings and prints were hugely popular in England and on the continent, captured both daily life in Egypt and the ancient temples that lined the Nile. The elaborate paintings of Gleyre and Vernet steered away from mythic narratives and instead depicted everyday life in the Near East. The style was dramatic, but the subject matter was not. Vernet painted a canvas showing an Arab storyteller entertaining a small group relaxing in a desert oasis. Gleyre composed portraits of Egyptian peasants going about their day. Prosaic topics, but for a banker in Lyon, or a clergyman in Bordeaux, it was all deliciously foreign.9
Enchanted by these images, two young men went to Egypt in 1849. One was a rather small, brooding twenty-six-year-old writer and photographer named Maxime Du Camp. The other was a writer and an aesthete, gregarious, twenty-eight, tall, and blond, who had read Hugo and Byron and The Arabian Nights; had penned a novel about St. Anthony’s temptations in the Egyptian desert; and now longed to stand at the foot of the Great Pyramid. “Oh, how
willingly I would give up all the women in the world,” he wrote in one of his more sober moments, “to possess the mummy of Cleopatra!” His name was Gustave Flaubert, and shortly after arriving in Egypt, he and Du Camp decamped to Cairo via a boat on the Nile. Falling asleep while gazing at the brownish water, Flaubert noted simply, “Such rapture!” Observing the world around him, he wrote, “Here, the Bible is a picture of life today.” It was in many ways better than he had imagined. Once in Cairo, and ensconced at the Hôtel du Nil, he complained that there were no longer any good brothels in the city and that all the dancing girls had somehow relocated to Upper Egypt. He managed to find women nonetheless, and he graphically described his many couplings in letters home.
Flaubert was most entranced, however, by a woman who remained unavailable to him—the proprietress of his hotel, Madame Bouvaret. And one day in the spring of 1850, while traveling in the desert in Upper Egypt in the region of Aswan, he had an epiphany for the name of the main character of a story he had been mulling, a story about a sexually liberated woman. Her name, he exclaimed, would be “Bovary! Emma Bovary.” Out of that mélange of heat and sex and sand was born one of the most famous characters of nineteenth-century literature.10
In letters and subsequent writings, Flaubert popularized an exotic portrait of Egypt. The photographs taken by Du Camp on this trip were published and widely disseminated. But life in Egypt was not nearly as exotic for those living it as it was for European visitors observing it. In fact, even the harem was more mundane than what the artists who had never seen the inside of one imagined. As one European woman who spent time visiting a harem observed, there was not much sex and little naked lounging; there were, instead, many cups of coffee and lots of talk about fashion, making the harem not so different from equivalent social scenes in London or Paris.11 But that is not how most Europeans saw Egypt and the rest of the Orient.
As artists and writers offered new windows into these faraway lands, the public became hungry for antiquities, both for objects themselves and for stories about them. From the curious schoolboy to the secretive Masons, many felt the magical allure of ancient Egypt. One of the heirs of Champollion was the young archeologist Auguste Mariette, who arrived in Egypt in 1850 at the age of twenty-eight. He had read all that he could about Egypt, and, having exhausted his book knowledge, he set out on a parcel-post boat from Marseille and headed for Alexandria. Overcome by the heat and the noise and the new smells that met him off the boat, he went on to Cairo and arranged a meeting with Linant Bey who at the time was out of favor with Abbas Pasha and living in an old mansion with his Ethiopian wife. Linant then introduced him to others, and though Abbas had banned European archeologists, Mariette began a clandestine excavation around the Pyramids.
Mariette was perhaps the only person in Egypt in these years who rivaled Lesseps as a self-promoter. In fact, he used Lesseps to advance his own career. Before leaving for Egypt, Mariette had been told by one of Muhammad Ali’s French civil servants that, though the prospects for the canal were doubtful, it was impossible to rule out the possibility. “The Orient is the land of images and miracles,” he was told. “Often, what seems the most improbable happens.” Mariette took this dictum to heart. In 1855, he convinced Lesseps to introduce him to Said, and he then convinced Said to pay for his work and make him director of antiquities. So began a long career in Egypt, one that would frequently intersect with the canal. At several junctures, Mariette helped promote the canal, and in return Lesseps helped ensure that Mariette’s budget would not be cut. The relationship served both men well: the canal was constructed, and Mariette became one of the most influential archeologists of the day.12
Without the legacy of these writers, artists, photographers, and ar-cheologists, Ferdinand de Lesseps might not have been able to convince those thousands of artisans, bankers, clerks, doctors, and lawyers to invest in the canal. One investor wrote Lesseps claiming that, though he had never put money in a speculative venture, he was proud to buy a few shares of the Canal Company as testament to his loyalty to France. But in all likelihood, he and many others were also motivated by reasons that were hard to explain and uncomfortable to admit.
Without question, shareholders were drawn to the idea that money invested in the canal was money used for the good of France and for the good of civilization. The prevalence of “Oriental” themes in France at midcentury made Egypt and Suez seem closer and more familiar, and that in turn probably helped the cause of the Canal Company. Egypt was far away, but it was also everywhere, in books, exhibitions, poems, and journals.
Underneath the surface of everyday life, there was another reality, one that Lesseps himself may have been oblivious to but which pulled investors toward Egypt as much as the Canal Company’s artful propaganda. Society pulsed with images of the Orient, and these acted on people’s hidden desires. In ways that can never be documented, the mystique of Egypt exerted a powerful pull. It doesn’t matter how much those images corresponded to reality. It matters how much they predisposed the public to be seduced. Those bankers and lawyers were portrayed as lacking in imagination, but, like the upright Victorian gentlemen with a healthy, yet secret, appetite for erotica, they had their private longings, and these had outlets. Having been enchanted by lascivious harem scenes, tales of caliphs and maidens, pictures of a life in the desert unfettered by the rules of modern society, and by the mysteries of the ancient artifacts slowly being uncovered in the desert, these doctors and clergymen and clerks saw their shares in the Suez Canal Company as much more than a patriotic investment. They were shares of passion.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE WORK AHEAD
ENTRUSTED WITH THE money of thousands of Frenchmen, hundreds of Turks, Spaniards, Dutch, Austrians, and Italians, and one anxious ruler, Lesseps turned to the next task at hand: parting the desert and uniting the two seas.
As of January 1859, a company existed. Its primary offices were in Paris, at 12 Place Vendôme, and in Alexandria. It had money from the newly purchased shares. Though the British government and much of the English press were hostile, the attitude in France could hardly have been more supportive. “This enterprise,” claimed an editorial in Le Siècle, “will bring eternal honor to M. Ferdinand de Lesseps.” Lesseps, in a formal letter to Said Pasha asking for authorization to commence work, wrote as if the outstanding issues had all been resolved. True, the sultan had not given his consent, but Lesseps did not waver from his position that such approval was not legally necessary. After all, he reminded Said, as part of the landmark Hatt-i Humayun decree of 1856, the sultan himself called for the improvement of land and sea communications throughout the empire and specifically mentioned canals. Therefore, even though the sultan had not yet formally endorsed the Suez Canal, he had, according to Lesseps, endorsed it in principle.
As always, Lesseps was deferential in his correspondence with Said, but though he wrote as though he was making a request, he was actually making a demand. According to Lesseps, Said’s prior decrees were tantamount to an inviolable obligation, and Said’s desire to get permission from the sultan had no bearing on the rights of the company. If Said felt that he needed the sultan’s blessing, then it was his responsibility to obtain it. In the meantime, the company’s board of directors had met; its statutes were formalized; and Lesseps intended to begin.
Yet, even without the political obstacles, there was a gap between what Lesseps wanted to do and what could actually be done. The canal’s partisans had spent four years lobbying for support and establishing the company. Surveys had been conducted; good will had been generated. But Port Said, Suez, Lake Timsah, and the isthmus looked only marginally different in 1859 than they had in 1854. The region was still desolate, uninhabited, and arid. A few huts on the strip of sand optimistically named Port Said marked the extent of the work to date. As far as the canal project had come, it remained a paper plan.
In fact, it was worse than that. There was no corporate structure to oversee the complicated task ahead.
The existing surveys of Linant, Mougel, and others were useful as primers but inadequate as actual blueprints. Lesseps could direct the project, but he was neither a contractor nor an engineer. In short, the Suez Canal Company had been formed to execute an extensive and challenging endeavor, yet the only thing it was capable of doing at this point was issuing shares, and it didn’t even do that very efficiently. In the first months of 1859, Lesseps was barraged with anxious letters from shareholders who complained that they had sent their money but had received no reply, and he was reduced to writing personally to assure them that, though there had been some delay, the certificates were being printed.1
Meanwhile, at the end of 1858, the company’s Works Committee convened for the first time. Lesseps had managed to assemble an impressive collection of engineers from across Europe, and though he nominally had the final say, he knew better than to insert himself too aggressively into the deliberations. Instead, Mougel Bey led the meetings. The simmering tensions between Linant and Mougel had finally crested, and Mougel emerged victorious. Linant, who had been in Egypt longer than Mougel, claimed that he had worked on the canal idea first and that he deserved precedence. Mougel, though junior, had more than twenty years of experience in Egypt. Each had a valid claim to pre-eminence, but only one could be appointed chief engineer and director of works. Forced to chose, Lesseps went with Mougel. Angry and bitter, Linant received a generous payoff from the company.
The Works Committee analyzed the job ahead and calculated how much the actual digging would cost. The initial focus was on the freshwater canal and on the area around Port Said and Lake Manzala, where the first stages of work would be concentrated. The most urgent requirements were to construct huts around Port Said to house two to three thousand workers and to arrange for the transportation and production of drinking water so that these workers could survive. There was no potable water in the vicinity, and the fishermen who trawled Lake Manzala relied on primitive distillation. The committee decided on a two-pronged approach to the problem: one was to build condensation plants, and the other was to transport the water by barges and by caravans from the Nile at Damietta. The other immediate need was to obtain stone for the Port Said jetties. One possible source was a quarry near Alexandria; there were also quarries a hundred miles south, along the isthmus, at Gebel Attaka. Both were to be explored.
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