Words such as these became increasingly commonplace, but Lesseps did not relax. In the summer of 1865, something happened that he had feared all along: there was an outbreak of cholera. From the earliest days of the company, Lesseps had insisted on maintaining an extensive, and expensive, health service. Cholera was always a risk with an inadequate water supply, and the isthmus had no consistent source of fresh water. The completion of the Sweet Water Canal remedied that, but Lesseps understood the danger of a cholera epidemic. It could strike such fear into investors and workers that progress could be crippled. Cholera was a new disease for nineteenth-century Europe. Though it had been common in India for centuries, it wasn’t until 1830 that Europe suffered from its first major outbreak. It killed indiscriminately, and made a lethal pilgrimage from east to west, cutting down the likes of the German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel, the prime minister of France, and dockworkers in Baltimore. For decades, its cause was unknown, and physicians searched for remedies. In London, barrels of tar were burned to purify the air, and in Scotland, people were urged to drink a glass of salt water to replace the salts lost because of the pervasive diarrhea that accompanied the disease. In 1848, Paris was devastated by a cholera epidemic that killed as many as twenty thousand people. Finally, in the 1850s, physicians in London discovered that the cause was contaminated drinking water, and that led most cities to establish rigorous water standards for the first time. But fear of the disease lingered.
The epidemic that erupted in the summer of 1865 stretched from Alexandria to Port Said, and Lesseps, who had just returned to Paris, rushed back to Egypt. There was little he could actually do, but he recognized the symbolic importance of his being on the scene. The outbreak lasted for most of June and into July, and though there were quarantines, there was still loss of life. Given the lethality of the disease, the toll was mild. Several hundred Europeans were killed, including the wife of Voisin Bey. More than fifteen hundred Arabs and Egyptians also perished. The outbreak was the single largest cause of fatalities during the entire decade that it took to construct the canal.
The company’s efforts at damage control yielded mixed results. Although there was no serious delay in the work, Lesseps and company officials were criticized in the French press for failing to supply timely information about the epidemic. One journal used the outbreak to critique the company, and asserted that Lesseps’s opaque account of the severity of the health situation was part of a larger pattern of deception. The journal alleged that the company was substantially over budget and undercapitalized, and that the work had not proceeded nearly as far as had been claimed. Lesseps was called the lead conspirator in this plot, and in response, he sued the editors for libel and defamation.7
Throughout the fall, Lesseps defended his company against accusations of impropriety. It was a painful few months, aggravated by the death of his grandson, also named Ferdinand. For the second time in his life, an offspring named after him had died. His reputation was being sullied in the French press, and there still was no formal ratification of the imperial sentence of 1864. Nubar continued to be a thorn, and no matter how much Lesseps denied it in public, the company was facing a financial crisis. The machines of Borel and Lavalley were brilliantly designed, but they were also costly. The company needed the indemnity payments granted under the emperor’s arbitration. Even though Ismail had terminated the corvée, until the sultan confirmed the settlement the rest of the payments were stalled. Perhaps the only good news for Lesseps was that his adversary Lord Palmerston finally succumbed to old age and died. But Lesseps was not so heartless as to celebrate the passing of such a towering presence. Palmerston had been unyielding and even unreasonable in his opposition to the canal, but he had earned the awe and respect of much of the world. The company printed an obituary honoring the prime minister on the front page of L’Isthme de Suez.8
Momentum shifted once again, however, when Nubar finally secured an agreement with the Porte in 1866. Under its terms, Ismail was given a new title. The question of what title had been a major stumbling block. The sultan wanted one that did not suggest an increase of Egyptian autonomy at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. The viceroy wanted one that did. They compromised by making one up. Under the terms of the sultan’s decree, Ismail would become Khedive Ismail. It was a unique title; no one else in the world had it. The word was a neologism adopted from an archaic Persian honorific meaning “lord” or “master.” As one commentator later said, “For Ismail, it meant everything; for the Sultan, nothing.”9 Ismail had spent a mint in bribes, and in return he had gained only the coveted right to pass his throne to his son while acquiring a title that did not alter his actual status. He had inherited from his father and grandfather a deep desire for direct inheritance, and for that, he had expended energy and money. At the time, he was satisfied with the result, but in retrospect he came to regret that he had fought the wrong fight.
The sultan’s firman in March 1866 confirmed the rights of the company under the 1864 award, and ratified a new convention signed by the company and the khedive. Though it did not depart from the emperor’s arbitration, it was more specific, and it laid out the prerogatives of the Egyptian government in the canal zone. These included setting up a postal-and-telegraph service and appointing administrators for the non-Europeans of the canal cities and settlements. The convention also stipulated that the government would collect customs duties for all non-canal land traffic on the isthmus, and it established procedures for the arbitration of disputes between the Egyptian government and the company.
This issue of legal jurisdiction was not fully resolved by the 1866 convention, however, and for the next decade, Nubar and Ismail fought to reform the entire judicial system of capitulations. In the meantime, the company continued its gradual acquisition of sovereign powers, leaving the Egyptian government to police the non-Europeans. The company governed the Europeans of Port Said, Ismailia, and Suez, while Egypt administered the rest. Two societies evolved on the isthmus. One of these was affluent and European; the other was working-class and Egyptian. One consisted of elegant homes on wide avenues laid out on a grid pattern, the other of mud huts and smaller buildings haphazardly connected by alleys and culs-de-sac. The Europeans of Ismailia lived in grand mansions made from imported materials. The home that Lesseps built for himself near the shores of Lake Timsah looked much like a mid-nineteenth-century French country house, surrounded by trees and cooled during the day by shade and breezes. The Arabs who worked for the company created a ramshackle community that looked much like a Nile Delta town. The two cultures only intermittently overlapped. The Europeans went to church on Sunday mornings, but lived amid the daily calls to prayer. The two communities spoke different languages, and knew different histories, yet both drew their livelihood from the canal and the company. The two worlds coexisted, separate but symbiotic, until the middle of the twentieth century.10
Though Lesseps won his libel suit against the journals that had lambasted him in the summer and fall of 1865, they had drawn attention to a disturbing fact. The company would not be able to complete the canal at its current level of financing. The best-case scenario was that the work would be finished in the middle of 1868, but only if none of the machines malfunctioned and nothing unexpected happened once the excavation reached the southern ridges of Chalufa. That was unlikely. Large projects rarely proceed without delays and glitches, and nothing in the previous years suggested that the Suez Canal would be different. The company had ways to disguise the amount of money it had relative to the amount it was spending, but it could not do that forever. Each annual meeting of the shareholders required an account of what was being spent, on each dredger, on each contract to excavate, and on each block for the jetties at Port Said. At some point in 1867, the company was going to need an infusion of cash. It could issue more shares or bonds, but one way or another, additional money would have to be found. If not, the company would be left with a half-dug ditch, thousands of angry shareholders, and a fiasc
o almost as impressive as the canal itself.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE CANAL GOES TO PARIS
COMPANIES THAT CONTINUALLY promise that their forecasts will be met tend to be punished by investors and the press when that doesn’t happen. For years, Lesseps had indulged in Panglossian optimism. The project was always noble; the work was always proceeding wonderfully; and success was always imminent. Inept contractors, the diehard opposition of the English prime minister, intrigues at the Porte, cost overruns, and cholera were presented as inconveniences, regrettable but not particularly consequential. The onward march of history in the form of the canal was all but inevitable, and though the details were sometimes bothersome, the outcome was certain. This attitude permeated the company and served it well, for a time. Obstacles were brushed off, and the relentless focus on the goal soothed anxious investors. Then the company ran out of money.
Even with the indemnities to be paid by Ismail, the company needed more capital. The question was how to obtain it. The shares were already trading below the offering price of five hundred francs, and issuing more would have further diluted their value. The company’s stockholders had been loyal, but they were also nervous about their investment. An announcement that more capital was needed to finish the project might undermine confidence and send the shares into a tailspin. Rather than penalizing the initial shareholders by allowing newcomers to buy a piece of the Canal Company for a fraction of the original cost, the company elected to raise the money through a public loan.
The goal was to generate an additional hundred million francs in the form of 333,333 bonds. Each three-hundred-franc obligation would pay interest at a variable rate not to exceed twenty-five francs per year, and the bonds themselves could eventually be redeemed at five hundred francs apiece, fifty years from the date of issue. No matter how adroitly the loan was presented, the company was concerned about the potential for bad publicity. More than ever, the Suez Canal Company was linked to national prestige. If it faltered, it would be criticized not just for organizational failures, but for staining the image of France.1
Lesseps recognized that the canal was no longer his own personal grail. It had become a cause célèbre throughout Europe. That is what he had wanted all along, but with the change came a new set of liabilities. Gone were the days when he could just write letters to the directors and patrons of the company and quietly resolve whatever issues there were. Every move was now scrutinized by a domestic and international press that treated the canal as an ongoing story of interest to readers. So many visitors were traveling to the canal zone that any problem would quickly be discovered and word of it would spread. Raising a loan qualified as a major story. Hoping to dilute the impact, Lesseps timed the announcement to coincide with another major story.
In the spring and summer of 1867, Paris was home to the Universal Exposition of Art and Industry. It was the most expensive, elaborate festival of its sort that the world had ever seen. The first of these expositions had been held at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851. That was followed by the Paris Exposition in 1855, and twelve years later, Napoleon III decided to outdo both the English and himself. The Universal Exposition was an early version of what would later become the world’s fair, and it combined elements of a medieval festival, a Greek bacchanalia, and the nineteenth-century cult of progress. The 1867 exposition was several years in the making, and Napoleon wanted the festival to establish France as the leading nation of Europe. He saw England as his rival for that position. England was the leading industrial power—innovative, productive, and energetic. But if Napoleon had paid more attention to his eastern frontier, he would have noticed that Germany was becoming more powerful by the month. The 1867 exposition was designed to show that France rivaled England, but given subsequent events, it wasn’t England that France needed to worry about.
The setting was the Champ-de-Mars, on the Left Bank of the Seine, near where the Eiffel Tower would rise over a much-changed Paris during the exposition of 1889. Covering several acres, multiple pavilions, and thousands of exhibits, the event was a masterpiece of organization. The arts were prominently represented. The Parisian establishment did not know it, but its days were as numbered as those of the Second Empire. Already, Édouard Manet had bolted from the Salon of 1863 when his Déjeuner sur l’herbe, with its naked woman seated amid clothed men on a picnic, was rejected. After that, the emperor permitted the formation of an alternate Salon des Refusés. A disparate group of painters, then dismissed as Realists, began interpreting scenes of daily life in a looser, more impressionistic style. At the academies, meanwhile, Ingres and Jean-Léon Gérôme remained powerful, and they trained their students to scorn the plebeian subjects of the Realists and to produce meticulous tableaus inspired by the Bible, by the Athens of Pericles, by Ovid or The Arabian Nights or the myths of antiquity. Though art sometimes reflects life, the art world rarely does. In this case, in this period, it did: the disintegration of the French art establishment neatly mirrored the fraying of the Second Empire.
But that summer of 1867, the end of the empire seemed distant. Paris appeared to be the capital of the future, and the emperor and the empress presided over the exposition confident that many years of success lay ahead. The theme of the Universal Exposition was simple: science and industry could make anything possible. One observer called the fair “the last success of the Saint-Simonians,” and though it may not have been the last, it was certainly the most extravagant. All of the luminaries of France participated in some fashion. The writer and teacher Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who had famously dubbed Napoleon III “Saint-Simon on horseback,” lent his pen, as did the arch-critic of the empire, Victor Hugo. Alexandre Dumas, Ernest Renan, and Théophile Gautier all wrote paeans, guides, poems, or papers promoting the exposition and France. Each of them had been influenced by images of the Near East or had gone themselves to Egypt, Algeria, or the Holy Land and used what they saw and smelled and heard as fodder for future writings and future works. The exposition worshiped the technology of the West, but its promoters had ingested the culture of the Near East.
Hugo was still in exile on the isle of Guernsey in the English Channel, and he still loathed Napoleon. But love of country trumped disgust at its ruler, and he wrote the introduction to the official guide published by the organizers. Hugo declared the event a triumph for a common European culture. He thought that technology would create a world civilization without war. “France, goodbye,” he wrote. “Just as Athens became Greece, just as Rome became Christianity, you, France, become the world!” Hugo believed that France was greater than its current ruler, just as Rome had been greater than its brutal and ignorant emperors. Whatever Napoleon’s limitations, the country was a light of liberty and industry leading the nations of the world to a better future. Hugo endorsed the exposition and muted his criticisms of Napoleon, while the emperor welcomed the encomium and ignored their past animosity. Enthusiastic about the festival, both men succumbed to naïveté about human nature. Contrary to the hopes and dreams of the day, technological progress meant neither an end to war nor the victory of reason and peace.
Skepticism, however, had no place at an event that lionized the human spirit. People descended on the city to enjoy the pavilions and admire what Baron Haussmann had done. The festival helped foster the modern mystique of Paris. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, few spoke of Paris as the city of light and art and refined beauty. As a result of Haussmann’s renovations and the 1867 exposition, such descriptions became commonplace.
Paris was glorified for its earthly delights, but it was also criticized for them. The conspicuous consumption that Zola and Balzac skewered in their novels of the Second Empire was proudly on display at the Champ-de-Mars that summer. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the English writer and poet who spent many years in Egypt and married Lord Byron’s granddaughter, rhapsodized about the city that the exposition unveiled. “Paris! What magic lived for us in those two syllables! What a picture they evoked of vanit
y and profane delights, of triumph in the world and the romance of pleasure! How great, how terrible a name was hers, the fair imperial harlot of civilized humanity!”2
Eleven million visitors paid a total of twenty-seven million francs to survey the marvels of fifty-two thousand exhibits. The royalty of Europe and the world attended the festivities, including Tsar Alexander II of Russia, fresh from freeing the serfs; the brother of the emperor of Japan, making a novel and much-discussed appearance after Japanese isolationism was shattered in the 1850s; Kaiser Wilhelm of Prussia and his minister Otto von Bismarck, their power growing after Prussia’s defeat of the Austrians in 1866; Prince Metternich and his Austrian lord Franz Josef, whose arrival was delayed because of the execution of his brother Maximilian by a Mexican firing squad; dozens of lesser royalty from around the globe; and, most remarkably the Ottoman sultan and the khedive of Egypt.
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