Parting the Desert

by Zachary Karabell

  The Ottomans had tried to conquer Europe for centuries. The sultan had been feared as a secretive, omnipotent monarch guarded by eunuchs and retainers in his palace by the Bosporus, catered to by an army of servants and the slave girls of the harem. Now the sultan put on a fez and Western clothes and journeyed to Paris. He was, as the French discovered, a man much like any other.

  Abdul Aziz understood that the balance of power had shifted permanently, and that the best he could now strive for was acceptance into the fraternity of European royalty. His hold over his Balkan provinces was tenuous, and becoming more so, but even though it was known as the “Sick Man of Europe,” the Ottoman Empire still ruled the entirety of what later became Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Lebanon, Kuwait, Armenia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, Bosnia, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and, of course, Turkey. The sultan intended to reform the bureaucracy, rebuild the army, and improve the economy in order to participate as an equal in great-power diplomacy. He was young and adventurous, and Paris was the place to go for a wealthy monarch in the summer of 1867. The sultan was joined there by Ismail, who knew the city and combined his visit with a trip to England. Though Ismail attracted a fair share of attention, the sultan’s appearance signified something more extraordinary. Abdul Aziz was the defender of Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of Islam. He took pride in serving as the protector of the pilgrims who made their annual hajj. But in 1867, he did not look to Mecca first. He looked to Paris, the metropolis of Europe, and it was there that he made a pilgrimage, in order to see and be seen.

  He went, and Ismail went, to gaze on the industrial wonders of the day and to listen as Napoleon III declared that “representatives of science, the arts, and industry had raced [to Paris] from every corner of the corner of the earth.” There were paintings to be seen, music at the Opéra by Offenbach and Rossini, and ecclesiastical decorative arts ranging from organ pipes to wax figurines of noted saints. There were livestock exhibits, botany displays, and agricultural specimens. There were restaurants and cafés and booths selling and preparing exotic foods. Gold and silver medals were awarded to honor the best exhibits, but everyone agreed that the stars of the exposition were the machines.

  The German arms manufacturer Krupp assembled a massive fifty-ton cannon made of steel, with its equally massive shells lined up beside it. As children scampered around the weapon, their parents could not have imagined that three years later, similar guns would rain hell on the city. The Americans demonstrated their latest telegraph technology, and both Cyrus Field and Samuel Morse gave lectures. There was a display of Steinway pianos and McCormick reapers. The United States Sanitary Commission exhibited ambulances, and American entrepreneurs brought motorized apple-coring devices and primitive dishwashers. One French inventor presented a device that turned rabbit skins into felt hats. There were displays of guns, coins, perfumes, flowers, furniture, pottery, and clothing. The Ottomans provided a lush display of the riches of their empire, but though the sultan nominally ruled Egypt, at the Universal Exposition his vassal outshone him, mostly because of two small rooms.

  Egypt presented several exhibits. In the main hall, there was a series of rooms decorated in the classical style of medieval Cairo, and filled with cotton, wool made in Alexandria, armor for horses and camels, musical instruments, reclining couches, Nubian tobacco, beans from Sudan, tamarind, lentils, peas, guano, sugar cane, pottery from Aswan, engraved knives, and decorative silks. In the park outside, the Egyptian pavilion was located in the “Oriental” quadrant, near the mini-Ottoman mosque with its minaret and its replica of a Turkish bath, and next to the faux palace of the bey of Tunis. The pavilion was designed by Auguste Mariette. The exterior of the building copied the ancient monuments of Egypt, and was fronted by a hundred-foot-tall plaster-cast copy of the Nile Temple of Philae (which was actually a hybrid of pharaonic and Hellenistic styles), complete with hieroglyphics on the pylon. The path to the entryway was lined with sphinxes. Inside, Mariette assembled a selection of recently discovered antiquities. Visitors walked past statues of Hathor the bull god, and then past Osiris and his sister and lover, Isis. There were sarcophagi, scarabs, jewels, gold, and five hundred mummified skulls. And then there were two small rooms that housed the Suez Canal.3

  For many entrepreneurs, the festival was an opportunity to gain exposure and even patronage. The Canal Company was no different. It used the occasion to present its best face to the public just before it turned to that public for additional financing. If all went well, millions would visit the Egyptian pavilion and be amazed by the magic of the canal, and then, when the company announced toward the end of the exposition that it was seeking a hundred million more francs, it would be buoyed by the recent warm memories of the exhibit and by the outpouring of patriotism that the festival had produced. The company would have mounted an exhibit whether or not it needed a loan, but obtaining the loan might have been far trickier without it.

  The Suez exhibit was divided into two sections: an outer, rectangular room, and an inner, circular one. The outer room was stuffed with drawings, topographical maps, city plans of Port Said and Ismailia, and photographs, as well as geological samples and models of the new dredgers and steam elevators and railroad tracks and jetties. The centerpiece was a large bas-relief map of the maritime canal and the Sweet Water Canal, with raised portions for the plateaus, depressions for Lakes Timsah and Balah and the Bitter Lakes, and miniature replicas of the machines.

  In the inner room, the lighting was dim, and there were no objects. There was only a diorama, but that word doesn’t capture the allure of the exhibit. Though primitive by the later standard of motion pictures, the diorama manipulated light and three-dimensional images to convey an illusion of watching the canal take shape in real time. Devised at great expense by the decorator of the new Opéra in Paris in collaboration with one of the company’s architects, the diorama was a collage of painting, photographs, and figurines. It filled a semicircle, from the Mediterranean on the far left to the Red Sea on the far right. It depicted villages, machines, and cities along with the canal itself, from the harbor at the northern entrance to the lakes along the way. There were figurines of workers, dredgers, buildings, and ships. Visitors emerged from the exhibit exhilarated at the verisimilitude and claimed that they felt transported from the busy parks of Paris to the bustling Isthmus of Suez. In the words of Théophile Gautier, “After leaving the rotunda, it seemed as if one had actually made a voyage to the isthmus, and that one had passed from one sea to the other on one of those steamships that go from Marseille to Calcutta.”4

  The company made sure that a senior executive was always on hand, at least during the first months. Sometimes, Lesseps himself greeted visitors, especially when there were visiting dignitaries. One correspondent, awed by “this work of titans,” and delighted by the site of “Ismailia, a European oasis in the desert of Egypt,” was thrilled to be given a tour of the diorama by the secretary-general of the Suez Canal Company. “No one could have done a better job,” he subsequently wrote, “conveying the efforts, the difficulties overcome, the fears, and the defections, and the obstacles created by nature, or, even worse, by man. As we surveyed the works, we were able to appreciate this odyssey with one of the most energetic actors in this drama.” The diorama also provided an excuse for hyperbolic musings on East and West, on the triumph of science over nature, and on the virtues of Ferdinand de Lesseps. The correspondent for the newspaper Le Soleil commented, “It is Egypt, forward sentinel of civilization, geographically placed as a link between the old Orient and the young Occident, that is in the front line of this peaceful struggle against the workings of nature. And it is because of the intelligence and the energetic will of one man that the project will be a success. This man, as all the world knows, is M. F. de Lesseps, who will achieve a work accomplished long ago by the pharaohs, destroyed by time, and then revived as an idea by Bonaparte.” Such sentiments were commonplace, and others spoke of the canal as the perfect combination of ind
ividual spirit and the “light of science.”5

  Lesseps could not have asked for more favorable coverage. In the midst of a crowded festival, with thousands of exhibits vying for attention, the Suez Canal was given accolades and the diorama was lauded for its technical proficiency and aesthetic artistry. Two of the themes of the Universal Exposition were science and the Orient, but almost all of the exhibits concerned only one or the other. The Egyptian pavilion combined elements of both. Mechanical dredgers were juxtaposed with ancient gods; mummies lay near miniature mosques; and the Suez Canal diorama was installed inside a building that looked like a Ptolemaic temple. Not surprisingly, the Egyptian exhibits were among the most popular and praised aspects of the fair. Eugénie, an arbiter of what was fashionable in the Second Empire, was so taken with the display of a gold diadem and other jewels rumored to have belonged to the wife of Pharaoh Amenhotep that she tried to purchase them from Mariette. She promised him the title of senator-for-life and a stipend. He refused, and the French infatuation with all things Egyptian intensified.6

  The exhibits made the subsequent task of raising the loan easier. When the company announced the subscription, it was treated respectfully by the increasingly independent French press, though several papers questioned the company’s financial statements. The English press was also fair, except for The Times, which remained as scornful as ever. The Standard said that, “The Suez Canal is a grand and sublime undertaking,” but the paper lamented that there was insufficient third-party information about the spiraling costs.

  Other journals rhapsodized. “The stupendous character of the project effecting a maritime communication between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea grows more and more on the comprehension of the world,” ran an English editorial. “All who have visited the works, or examined the splendid panoramic view and models of the cuttings, buildings, ports and towns exhibited by M. Lesseps at the Champ de Mars, must be satisfied that the work draws near its end, and that it is within the range of probability that eighteen months will witness its completion.”7 The diorama had had the desired effect. Unable to bring all interested investors and opinion-makers to the isthmus to see the canal for themselves, Lesseps and the company brought the canal to the center of Paris, where it could be viewed by all.

  But the flurry of attention was not all for the best. For the first time since Napoleon became emperor, the Legislative Corps had begun to exercise real authority. No longer a rubber stamp for the emperor or for Morny (who had died in 1865), the legislature, led by Émile Ollivier, decided to address the issue of the Suez loan on the principle that the affairs of the company directly affected the affairs of France. Ollivier felt that the company was using questionable tactics to make the loan attractive to the public. After an initial offering that closed in September, many of the bonds hadn’t been sold, and the company wanted to introduce a lottery that would offer prizes with the bonds. This controversial gimmick skirted the boundaries of laws from the 1830s that regulated loans. On Ollivier’s initiative, the deputies engaged in a heated debate in 1868. Some wanted the company to disclose a more detailed account of its expenses. Others demanded that it provide a better accounting of its future revenue before it tapped French investors for more money. Echoing questions that had been raised in the press, a number of deputies declared that, although they supported the project, they wanted more transparency from Lesseps and the company.

  Speeches were made, and questions were asked. It wasn’t clear that the legislature had the authority to interfere. For the most part, the deputies did not threaten any legislative action and simply argued about whether the company should seek a public loan. Some members were appalled that the legislative body even bothered to discuss the issue. Viscount Lanjuinais rose to criticize the deputies for wasting time on the question. He claimed, reasonably enough, that the government had neither the power nor any good reason to become involved. The Suez Canal Company, he continued, was a publicly owned firm operating within its rights, and nothing in prior law or precedent suggested that the Legislative Corps possessed the right to tell such a company what it could and could not do in the financial markets. If it were an issue of changing the laws governing public loans, that would be a legitimate debate, but the particular doings of the Suez Canal Company were beyond their purview.

  Another deputy seconded that concern. Jules Favre, an ardent man of the left who would soon rise to the fore of the Third Republic, asked plaintively if he had missed something. Was the question of the Canal Company and its loan a private endeavor, or had it, unbeknownst to him, suddenly become part of the national honor of France? His tone was facetious; the question was rhetorical. Yet Favre was one of the first to identify the changing status of the canal and its company. It had begun as an admirable, improbable dream. As it grew, it became the focus of international rivalries, and it then matured into a substantial but troubled engineering project of a large joint-stock company. And now, it had become the embodiment of French national honor. As one Parisian paper noted, “Public attention is now fixated on the piercing of the Suez Canal, and it is impossible not to consider it a political enterprise as well as an industrial and commercial endeavor.”8 Questions notwithstanding, the canal had the overwhelming support of the French public, and hence of the legislature. After several days of discussion, the Legislative Corps, and then the Senate, passed a resolution permitting the company to use a lottery with prizes in order to market the loan to the public.

  The increasing centrality of the canal in French politics and culture was matched by the growing drift of the Second Empire and an emperor who was succumbing to age, ill health, and stymied ambitions. His adventures overseas had mostly been embarrassments, except for the costly consolidation of French rule in Algeria. His goals to dominate the politics of Western Europe had also fallen short, and he watched as Germany grew at Austria’s expense. The economic expansion of the 1850s had given way to inflation and social unrest in the 1860s, and no matter how much he loosened his grip on power, France needed to do more than let off steam.

  As Napoleon’s star began to fade, Lesseps’s shone ever more brightly. He had always walked among the elite, but he himself had not been in the first tier. The exposition and the loan subtly marked his graduation from entrepreneur to man of affairs, a noble in all but title, which he would acquire soon enough. With success, his ambition actually grew. He began to think about his impact on the future commerce and politics of the world. He accepted more invitations to lecture, and he basked in the applause and the toasts in his honor. Some observers noticed that he was not a man with an ego that could be sated. “The most remarkable man of this era is without question Ferdinand de Lesseps. The tireless and persevering promoter of the piercing of the Suez Canal has only one fault: it is to be so great that his shadow enthralls those who are enveloped by it.” But however many noted this aspect of his personality, many more happily compared him to the pharaohs and placed him in the rarefied air of “superhumans” who change the course of history.9

  And then there was Ismail. The Universal Exposition had a strange effect on the world’s only khedive. Greeted by Napoleon and Eugénie at the Tuileries Palace, he was asked by the emperor what the word “khedive” meant. Before he could say anything, Nubar skillfully answered for him. “It is purely honorific, Sire, but the importance of the firman is that it makes Egypt completely autonomous and gives the khedive the right to make commercial agreements, including the right to negotiate customs rates.” Nubar was only expressing what the khedive himself felt. That summer, in both France and England, he was greeted with great deference and wild enthusiasm. At public events, crowds gathered to cheer for him. He became a celebrity. His every move was covered in the press, and he was praised for his generosity, grace, and poise. He was not the only visiting dignitary to receive such scrutiny—the sultan was also a hit that summer—but he was acutely aware of his escalating fame. And, having observed the new Paris of Napoleon and Haussmann, and having talked to both
of them about what they had done, he returned to Egypt more determined than ever to renovate his own cities and make Cairo into a modern metropolis that could hold its own against any capital in Europe.

  Whereas he had once been cautious in his spending, Ismail now decided that the end was more important than the means, even if that required spending far more than he had. He authorized a new round of public works, including the transformation of Cairo and Alexandria. These projects entailed more foreign loans, both public and private, at a time when cotton revenue was no longer increasing. The end of the Civil War in the United States led to the resumption of American cotton exports. In 1865 and 1866, that caused severe fluctuations in the price of cotton, and though these eventually stabilized, competition kept the price down. Egypt was able to maintain and even boost its revenues in the late 1860s by bringing more acreage under cultivation, but the cotton income was not sufficient to cover the costs of the public works. Ismail also stepped up Egypt’s sugar production, and ordered the construction of costly refineries. That only led the county deeper into debt. Though some of his projects made long-term economic sense, trying to turn Cairo into a Nilotic version of Paris did not. Ismail hungered for the respect that the crowds had shown him that summer in France and England, but Egypt suffered because of his appetite.

  Ismail needed to improve the Egyptian economy and revamp the government. Roads, canals, administrative reform, telegraphs, trains, and bridges—these were imperative if Egypt was to survive as an independent state in a world increasingly at the mercy of European imperial expansion. Palaces, gardens, wide boulevards, and the finery of the world, on the other hand, allowed Ismail to act like a member of the European royalty but did little for Egypt. He took on ever-larger loans at punishing interest rates in order to fund both the imperative and the frivolous. Given the annual revenues his treasury collected, there was only one way to repay these: the Suez Canal. Having tried and failed to gain control of the canal for himself in the first years of his reign, Ismail then linked his future to its success. As of the late 1860s, that seemed reasonable. The canal showed every sign of fulfilling its promise as a waterway that would alter the pattern of international commerce and enrich both Egypt and the company. Ismail was the largest shareholder and would profit handsomely once the shares started to yield dividends. Under the terms of the original concessions, the Egyptian state was also entitled to 15 percent of the net earnings, and the country stood to gain from customs duties as well.10