The conceit of the sonnet was that Shelley had met Diodorus and had been told of the statue. For the passionate, dreamy Shelley, Ozymandias was a metaphor for fate. For him, as for so many of the Romantics, all beauty is transitory, flaring brightly before it is consumed. All that is left is the pain of loss and the poignant memory of a glorious moment. Human beings, weak as they are, always forget that truth. They succumb to the illusion that they can alter history and be immortal, and that sets them up, age over age, and era after era, for the inevitable fall.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
In November 1854, Ferdinand de Lesseps and Said Pasha imagined a canal that would part the desert. They believed it would be a work for the ages. Like the Saint-Simonians, they saw the canal as the fulfillment of human potential, as a bridge between worlds, and as a path to progress. Lesseps had promised Said that “the names of the Egyptian sovereigns who erected the Pyramids, those useless monuments of human pride, will be ignored. The name of the Prince who will have opened the grand canal through Suez will be blessed century after century for posterity.” The canal would increase the wealth of Egypt and strengthen the bonds between civilizations. That vision nurtured Lesseps, and it offered succor to all who dedicated themselves to turning the idea of the Suez Canal into a reality.
As Shelley keenly grasped, human history is littered with statues of Ozymandias. People become convinced that they have found the key to greatness. They create works of art; they conquer; they build invincible armies; and they tame the earth. They construct buildings meant to last forever, and philosophies designed to answer the eternal questions. Ferdinand de Lesseps, Enfantin, Louis-Napoleon, Said, and Ismail constructed the Suez Canal with that same surety. They expected future generations to “look upon their works” in awe at their achievement.
Though he died decades before the canal was built, Shelley could have predicted the outcome. He would have smiled at the hubris, and nodded in empathy, and he would have watched wistfully as Napoleon III went into exile, as Ismail sailed off on his yacht, as Egypt was occupied, Lesseps disgraced, Great Britain triumphant and then humbled, and then, finally, the canal itself, once the apex of the world, receding from history.
Visionaries created the canal, but others actually built it. The fellahin who were brought to the isthmus by the corvée probably did not share the sense that they were involved in a great undertaking. They had a collective memory of forced labor in the past, and they could not see how their lives would be much the better because of a ship canal. Rulers had always had their passions and their follies; the Nile, after all, was littered with such rulers’ remains. After the corvée, the immigrant laborers who worked on the canal in the 1860s came because there were jobs to be had. If the ultimate result improved the world, all the better, but that wasn’t what drew them there. The merchants and shippers who took advantage of the canal were not prone to think in metaphysical terms. If the canal shortened the trip and lessened the cost, they would use it. And as for the marriage between East and West, most of them, it is safe to say, cared little if it ended in divorce.
The Suez Canal was the greatest feat of organization and engineering of its day, and it served, for a brief moment, as a symbol of all that was right in the world. It was created by dreams and by meticulous organization, by brilliant engineers and by workers looking for their next meal. And then, once the fireworks had faded, the canal began to fade as well. Traveling through Suez today, it is tempting to despair. Barbed wire, overpopulation, rusting ships, and dwindling business stand as rebukes to the vision of Lesseps.
And yet Shelley himself never gazed at that colossal statue lying on its side near the tombs of the pharaohs. He never saw that, even in decay, there is something stirring about standing there and staring at the ruin. It is a wreck, true, but it is awesome. Its ability to survive across thousands of years inspires a sense of wonder, and it is made greater by its ruin. Had it been seen in its own time, it would have been a large statue of a king, impressive but not unique. Thousands of years later, it has become a record of human history, its impact magnified by the humility it demands.
The canal sits now, wider than it was, deeper than it was, but still flowing along the same course, from Port Said, past the marshes of Lake Manzala, between the cliffs of El-Guisr, into Lake Timsah and past Ismailia, narrowing through the Serapeum before opening out into the Bitter Lakes, and then funneling through the Chalufa ridge before its last, gentle passage into the Gulf of Suez and the Red Sea. It is polluted, and the landscape is scarred from successive wars. Sitting at the point where the canal ends and the Red Sea begins, watching dilapidated freighters glide past, it is hard not to focus on decline, but that is too easy. The Suez Canal was the inscription of an idea on the face of the earth. As a vision, it was beautiful and inspiring; as a reality, it has sometimes been a blessing, and usually not. In its prime, it offered, at best, power and wealth. In its decay, it is Ozymandias.
Notes
A note on the notes: Rather than clog the manuscript with hundreds of reference numbers, the notes are usually a compilation of several citations. For the most part, there is a clear indication of where quotations have come from, but in many cases, for the sake of simplicity, I have grouped together a series of primary and secondary references, especially for biographical sketches and for the final chapters.
CHAPTER ONE: THE TWILIGHT
1. Account is taken from the journal L’Isthme de Suez, May 15, 1859, in Suez Canal Company Archives (Archives d’entreprise, la Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez), Centre des Archives du Monde du Travail, Roubaix, France 1995060-1522. [Hereafter, all references to the Canal Company archives will be abbreviated as CAMT. In addition, unless otherwise stated, all reference numbers for the papers of the company begin with 1995060, and only the rest of the numbers will be given.] All translations from French sources are the author’s unless otherwise noted.
CHAPTER TWO: THE FRENCH FALL IN LOVE
1. For a general account of Louis XIV, see Pierre Goubert, Louis XIV and Twenty-Million Frenchmen, trans. Ann Carter (New York: Vintage, 1966). Leibniz’s memo to the king was originally written in Latin; see Leibniz, “Consilum Aegyptiacum,” trans. into French by A. Vallet de Viriville, in appendix, Ahmed Yousseff, La Fascination de L’Égypte (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998). For the second Leibniz quotation, see J. M. Thompson, Napoleon Bonaparte (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952), p. 107.
2. For Volney, see Jean-Marie Carré, Voyageurs et écrivains français en Égypte (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie du Caire, 1956), pp. 91–116; Albert Hourani, A Vision of History (Beirut, 1961); Volney quotation from Robert Solé, L’Égypte, passion française (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), pp. 36–37. For Napoleon and Talleyrand, see Robert Asprey, The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 50ff; Alan Schom, Napoleon Bonaparte (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 93ff; Henry Laurens, L’Expédition d’Égypte (Paris: Armand Colin, 1989); Alain Silvers, “Bonaparte and Talleyrand: The Origins of the French Expedition to Egypt in 1798,” American Journal of Arabic Studies, vol. 3 (1975).
3. Napoleon to Josephine quoted in Asprey p. 253; Napoleon to his men, quoted in Thompson, Napoleon, p. 109.
4. Abd al-R
ahman al-Jabarti, Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the First Seven Months of the French Occupation of Egypt, ed. and trans. S. Moreh (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), pp. 43-57; see also André Raymond, Cairo, trans. Willard Wood (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 2000); Darrell Dykstra, “The French Occupation of Egypt,” in The Cambridge Modern History of Egypt, vol. 2, ed. M. W. Daly (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 113-38.
5. figures and description of the expedition as well as monge quotation from schom, bonaparte, pp. 93-96. See also Carré, Voyageurs, pp. 143-65; Lesley and Roy Adkins, The Keys of Egypt: The Race to Read the Hieroglyphs (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 23-37.
6. Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, Journal d’un notable du Cairo durant l’expédition française, 1798-1801, trans. into French and annotated by Joseph Cuoq (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979), pp. 90-95; for al-Azhar pillaging, see Jabarti, Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle, pp. 100-102.
7. Solé, L’Égypte, pp. 54-69; Lord Kinross, Between Two Seas: The Creation of the Suez Canal (New York: William Morrow, 1969), pp. 14-19; Napoleon to Le Père, quoted in French in J. E. Nourse, The Maritime Canal of Suez (Washington, D.C. Philp & Solomons, 1869), pp. 10-12.
8. Yousseff, Fascination, passim; Solé, L’Égypte, PP. 70-80; Michel Dewachter and Alain Fouchard, eds., L’Égyptologie et les Champollion (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1994); Lesley and Roy Adkins, The Keys of Egypt (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).
CHAPTER THREE: INDUSTRY AND THE SAINT-SIMONIANS
1. Frank Manuel, The New World of Henri Saint-Simon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 20-22, 79, and passim; Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945: Politics and Anger (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 66-74, though Zeldin’s account has been widely criticized as unnecessarily scornful; Francis Démier, La France du XIX siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000), pp. 110-11; D. G. Charlton, Secular Religions in France 1815-1870 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 38-66.
2. Quoted in Georg Iggers, trans., The Doctrine of Saint-Simon: An Exposition, First Year, 1828-1829 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p. 203; see also Robert Carlisle, The Proffered Crown: Saint-Simonianism and the Doctrine of Hope (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 45-48.
3. Ghislain de Diesbach, Ferdinand de Lesseps (Paris: Perrin, 1998), pp. 51-52; Robert Solé, L’Égypte, passion française, pp. 126-35.
4. Carlisle, Proffered Crown, pp. 180-82; quotation on the Golden Age from Charlton, Secular Religions, p. 69; Hippolyte Castille, Le Père Enfantin (Paris, 1859), pp. 4-20; quotation about Jesus and Moses from Jean-Noel Ferrié, “Du saint-simonisme à l’islam,” in Magali Morsy, ed., Les Saint-Simoniens et l’orient (Aix en Provence: Édisud, 1989), p. 161.
5. Enfantin to Sainte-Pélagie, JAN. 25, 1833, quoted in Philippe Régnier, “Le Mythe oriental des saint-simoniens,” in Morsy ed., Saint-Simoniens, p. 29.
6. Poem reproduced in Régnier, “Mythe,” P. 40. For more on Enfantin and the trip to Egypt, see Jehan d’Ivray L’Aventure saint-simonienne et les femmes (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1928).
7. Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914 (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1993), pp. 86-88; E. M. Forster, Alexandria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
8. Quoted in Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer, “Le Projet industriel de Paulin Talabot,” in Morsy, ed., Saint-Simoniens, pp. 98-99.
9. Henry Dodwell, The Founder of Modern Egypt (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1931); Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Khaled Fahmy All the Pashas Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1997). There are different accounts of the slaughter of the Mamelukes, and some versions have them being killed en masse in a narrow alley leading up to the Citadel.
10. See Ghislaine Alleaume, “Linant de Bellefonds et le saint-simonisme en Égypte,” in Morsy, ed., Saint-Simoniens, PP. 110-20; Marcel Kurz and Pascale Linant de Bellefonds, “Linant de Bellefonds: Travels in Egypt, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia,” in Paul Starkey and Janet Starkey eds., Travellers in Egypt (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), pp.61-70.
11. Morsy, ed., Saint-Simoniens, passim; Solé, L’Égypte, pp. 130-35; Diesbach, Lesseps, pp. 55-57; Jean-Marie Carré, Voyageurs et écrivains français en Égypte, pp. 263-70.
CHAPTER FOUR: A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL
1. This story is told in Pierre Crabites, Ismail: The Maligned Khedive (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1933), p. 4.
2. George Edgar-Bonnet, Ferdinand de Lesseps: Le Diplomate, le créateur de Suez (Paris: Libraire Plon, 1951), pp. 1-10. Also, for his seeming invincible optimism, see Edwin de Leon, “Ferdinand de Lesseps and the Suez Canal,” Putnam’s Magazine, June 1869.
3. Charles Beatty De Lesseps of Suez: The Man and His Times (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956), pp. 28-29; Duff Cooper, Talleyrand (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2001).
4. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question (London: Macmillan, 1986); L. Carl Brown, International Politics and the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
5. Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali, pp. 90–92.
6. The first quotation is Palmerston to Lord Granville, MAY 27, 1839, in Jaspar Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), p. 222. The second quotation is from Evelyn Ashley The Life and Correspondences of Viscount Palmerston (London Richard Bentley & Sons, 1879), p. 381. See also Vernon Puryear, France and the Levant from the Bourbon Restoration to the Peace of Kutiah (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941).
7. The quotation is from George Macauley Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century and After (New York: David McKay, 1937), p. 292. See also E. J. Hobs-bawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962); Francis Démier, La France du XIX siècle, pp. 214–47.
CHAPTER FIVE: EGYPT AND ROME
1. Quoted in Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 52. Other sketches of Muhammad Ali can be found in Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali; Henry Dodwell, The Founder of Modern Egypt; P. J. Vatikiotis, The History of Egypt, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Khaled Fahmy All the Pasha’s Men; Fahmy “The Era of Muhammad Ali Pasha,” in The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 2, pp. 139–80; Jack Crabbs, The Writing of History in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: A Study in National Transformation (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1984), pp. 62–68; and a contemporary account written in the 1830s, Edward William Lane, Description of Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000), pp. 104–59.
2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1977); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982); Bernard Lewis, The Middle East and the West (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
3. F. Robert Hunter, Egypt Under the Khedives, 1805-1879 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), pp. 10–35; Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914, pp. 65–91; Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (London, 1836); Groupe de Recherches et d’Études sur le Proche-Orient, L’Égypte au XIX siècle (Paris: Éditions du centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1982), passim.
4. Quoted from al-Tahtawi’s chronicle of his time in Paris, in Bernard Lewis, ed., A Middle East Mosaic (New York: Random House, 2000), pp. 46–47; see also Hourani, Arabic Thought, pp. 68–73.
5. Quoted in George Edgar-Bonnet, Ferdinand de Lesseps, p. 156. Other sources on Waghorn include papers in FO 97/411, Public Records Office, Kew, London [hereafter PRO]; John Marlowe, World Ditch: The Making of the Suez Canal (New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 28ff; Dodwell, Founder, pp. 30–40.
6. Marlowe, World Ditch, p. 45.
7. Letters between Enfantin and
Linant, between Enfantin and Negrelli, and from Enfantin to Emperor Napoleon III, Sept. 10, 1855, all in Fonds Enfantin, Group 7836, Arsenal Library, Paris [hereafter Fonds Enfantin]; report from Consul Murray to Lord Palmerston, May 27, 1847, in FO 97/411 PRO; Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer, “Le Projet industriel de Paulin Talabot,” pp. 95-103; Edgar-Bonnet, Lesseps, pp. 170-87; Marlowe, World Ditch, pp. 44-51; Lord Kinross, Between Two Seas, pp. 47-55; Ghislain de Diesbach, Ferdinand de Lesseps, pp. 114-19.
8. Marsot, Egypt, pp. 87-90; Vatikiotis, History of Egypt, pp. 70-73; Emine Foat Tugay Three Centuries: Family Chronicles of Turkey and Egypt (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 98-100. Also see Ehud Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Egypt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) for a discussion of how Abbas got much of his bad reputation after he died.
9. Ferdinand de Lesseps himself wrote an extensive, albeit temperate, account of his mission to Rome: Recollections of Forty Years, trans. C. B. Pitman (New York: D. Appleton, 1888), pp. 3-118. See also Charles Beatty, De Lesseps of Suez, pp. 62-70.
10. Edgar-Bonnet, Lesseps, pp. 80-95; Beatty, De Lesseps, pp. 70-72; Diesbach, Lesseps, pp. 116-22.
11. Lesseps, Recollections, p. 118.
12. Quoted in Diesbach, Lesseps, p. 122.
13. Lesseps, Recollections, pp. 152-55.
CHAPTER SIX: A JOURNEY IN THE DESERT
1. Quoted in Jack Crabbs, The Writing of History in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, p. 92. On Said, see “Said Pacha of Egypt,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 39 (1869), pp. 41-52; F. Robert Hunter, Egypt Under the Khedives, 1805-1879, passim; Edward Dicey, The Story of the Khedivate (London: Rivingtons, 1902), passim; Cambridge Modern History of Egypt, vol. 2, passim; Emine Foat Tugay, Three Centuries, pp. 100-102.
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