His early career followed the same course as those of his father and his uncle. A calling as a diplomat suited a man of even temperament. His father had benefited from the patronage of one of the most astute diplomats of the age, Talleyrand himself. Whether he received Talleyrand’s wisdom directly, Ferdinand de Lesseps was certainly schooled by it. Talleyrand managed to survive and even thrive as successive regimes rose and fell, and he understood as well as anyone that a successful diplomat had to know the details of his environment and adapt accordingly. Having mastered those nuances, the diplomat also had to determine when to speak and when to be silent, when to be direct and when not to be. Duplicity, Talleyrand claimed, was never effective, but keeping one’s tongue often was.3
Ferdinand appears to have followed these guidelines. He was posted to Lisbon in 1825, and that was the first of many years he spent in Portugal and Spain. Like Italy, the Iberian Peninsula was not a stable nation-state with inviolable borders. For more than a century, the French had been meddling in Spanish affairs. Wars had been fought, and the French had tried repeatedly to annex Spain or make it a subsidiary under a Bourbon king. In Iberia, Lesseps entered high society—not just as France’s representative, but as the cousin of the Comtesse de Montijo, who was pregnant with a daughter who became an empress and who would later play a key role in the success of the canal. But that was years away, and before long Lesseps was posted elsewhere, to North Africa, and then to the scene of his father’s success, Egypt.
While France was experiencing rapid changes and occasional turmoil, Lesseps lived thousands of miles away. He identified with France, but he spent a remarkably small portion of his life there. In some sense, he was more a citizen of nineteenth-century Europe than he was of any one country, and he embodied the virtues and vices common among elite Europeans of the era. He could converse in several languages. He wore the latest fashions, though he was not a dandy. He was meticulous in his physical presentation, eventually growing a mustache and sideburns in the style of the day. He knew how to dance and how to conduct himself at a ball or a formal dinner. Like the Saint-Simonians, he believed that never before in human history had any set of people been more graced with intelligence, civility, reason, and creativity than the inhabitants of Western Europe, and he felt certain that the world would be a better place when he died than it had been when he was born. He was confident to the point of arrogance. He sought acclaim because he thought he deserved it, and he was tireless in its pursuit.
For most of the 1830s, Lesseps lived in Egypt, dividing his time between Alexandria and Cairo, and he made regular trips back to Paris. In addition to being a commercial hub, Alexandria was where the pasha and his family spent summers, away from the stifling heat of Cairo. But Cairo remained the political, cultural, and religious center of Egypt, and when Mimaut left as consul in 1835, Lesseps was promoted to replace him. As consul, Lesseps pursued the same policies his father had. He nurtured the relationship with Muhammad Ali, who had become even more crucial to French goals internationally. For his part, the pasha, who was also known by the Turkish title wall (for “governor”), was not satisfied with commanding the Nile. He looked north to Constantinople and sensed that the Ottoman Empire was weakening. Though he paid nominal allegiance to the sultan, Muhammad Ali viewed matters in terms of power. The Ottomans were losing it, and he intended to gain it.
In 1833, his armies had almost toppled the sultan. Led by his elder son, Ibrahim, Egypt conquered what is now Syria and Lebanon and continued north, deep into Turkey, advancing close to Constantinople, until the Europeans rescued the sultan from almost certain defeat and compelled the Egyptians to retreat. The status quo, however, was too unstable to last long. The English had tethered their foreign policy to an independent though feeble Ottoman Empire that kept the Russians from gaining control of the sea-lanes separating the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. The French had other plans. Though the Napoleonic Wars had ended with France humbled, the system established by the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 did not preclude competition and conflict abroad. For the rest of the nineteenth century, European powers fought their wars by proxy, and one arena was the eastern Mediterranean. In fact, the competition over the slowly crumbling Ottoman Empire was a centerpiece of European politics in the nineteenth century. The contest even had its own name: “The Eastern Question.”4
For the rest of the 1830s, Muhammad Ali nursed a sense of grievance at Britain for snatching away his victory. He was allowed to annex Palestine and Syria, but he had been denied the larger prize. The French government fed his anxiety. Though Lesseps never explicitly urged him to challenge the peace brokered by the English in 1833, he did not dissuade him either. The pasha needed no prodding, but he knew that without the support of France he could never succeed. He could fight the sultan on his own, but he could not stand up to both the fading armies of the Ottomans and the increasing might of the British navy.
Muhammad Ali’s fleet had been destroyed by the British in the 1820s in order to prevent the pasha from suppressing the Greek rebellion against the Ottomans. Muhammad Ali then built another fleet, less because he planned to use it against the British than because a navy was something great rulers possessed. He enlisted his thirteen-year-old son, Said, as an ensign in the nascent flotilla. He didn’t expect the boy to do anything, but he did expect him to learn how to do something. The problem was that the young Prince Said was enormously fat. At thirteen, he weighed nearly two hundred pounds, and that was intolerable.
Most of Egypt was desert and had been ruled for centuries by Turkish lords. The government controlled the Nile Valley, its crops, its peasants, and its cities. But the desert was dominated by Bedouin tribes, who divided the sands into large, fluid fiefdoms. They took tribute from villages—though under whatever rubric, it was protection money pure and simple. The Bedouin shaikhs also struck a tacit agreement with the government in Cairo. The Bedouins were left alone, provided that they paid their minimal taxes and that their raids on caravans or on local villages did not get out of hand. The Bedouins profited from the camel trade south to Sudan and the Sahara, and from the pilgrimage route that went from Cairo across the Isthmus of Suez and down into the Arabian Peninsula to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The Turkish Mamelukes, meanwhile, carved up the country into tax farms. The arrangement bore some similarity to what was found in Europe until the early nineteenth century. Lords and religious leaders took profits from land tilled by peasants, who had little more freedom than slaves.
Both the ruling Turks and the Bedouins placed high value on warfare and dismissed corpulence as the effete weakness of a decadent court. Said loved to eat, but Muhammad Ali was determined that he lose weight. He ordered the young prince to undergo rigorous daily exercise, including rides in the desert and climbing ship masts. “I am disgusted at your weight,” his father wrote. “It is in your power to lose that corpulence which offends all people and to acquire a slim body…. Your tutor has tried to conceal your condition and to protect and encourage your hateful corpulence.” The pasha was losing his patience. He was trying to make Egypt European, and that meant re-educating the elite of tomorrow. He worried that Said would be a liability, and that people would look at his son and lose confidence in the father. Muhammad Ali made his feelings clear in another letter to Said: “I will not permit people to humiliate me and say that I am incapable of educating my sons when I educate the sons of all the others.”5
Somewhat desperate at his inability to control Said’s weight, Muhammad Ali turned to an unlikely ally, the French consul. Though the young prince’s girth was hardly a state secret, this was an unusual request to make of the representative of a foreign government. But the pasha had known and trusted Lesseps’s father, and the new consul had obviously made a favorable impression. He was seen as discreet and fair, and Prince Said was apparently fond of him. Implored by the pasha to do something, Lesseps promised that he would try.
As it turned out, however, Lesseps did not have the heart to be Sai
d’s dietician. Already, the prince’s food intake was being carefully policed by other members of the court, as well as by naval officers nominally in command of the thirteen-year-old ensign. Said evidently played an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with his various overseers. He was by all accounts a sweet boy, but when it came to food, he was capable of creative duplicity. Rather than challenge the prince at a game at which he excelled, Lesseps chose the path of least resistance: collaboration. He and Said shared a passion for horseback riding, and he began to ride with the teenager almost daily. And rather than monitor Said’s intake, Lesseps broke every rule and gave him food.
Actually, he gave him macaroni. Said was especially fond of macaroni, and Lesseps became his provider of the fattening pasta. Every now and then, the prince would drop a few pounds, but on the whole, he remained as fat as ever. He became a skilled horseman, but never a slim prince. In later years, the unwillingness of Lesseps to deprive a hungry young boy of the food he craved would prove to be the most valuable act of quiet defiance he ever committed. Some have made too much of the story, and have claimed that a plate of pasta changed the course of history. In any case, the exchange did cement a friendship that had lasting consequences. Muhammad Ali never discovered that the consul was deceiving him, or if he did, he ignored the matter. After all, Said was his son, whatever the boy’s weight.
Lesseps stayed in contact with Said when the prince was sent to Paris to study. Though Lesseps spent most of his time in Egypt, he periodically returned to France, and visited the prince each time. In 1836, on one of these trips, Ferdinand met a wealthy young woman named Agathe Delamalle. He courted her on his next visit, and they were married in December 1837. After a month and a half celebrating his honeymoon and setting up a household, he returned to Egypt. A son was born in November 1838, and Lesseps became close with his mother-in-law, Angélique, and brother-in-law, Victor, both of whom would remain trusted confidants for decades thereafter.
The next years in Egypt were dramatic. Muhammad Ali staged another invasion of Anatolia. He considered himself a legitimate contender for the Ottoman throne, and after years of thwarted ambitions, he was finally pushed to the breaking point by Sultan Mahmud. Allied with the British, Mahmud viewed the power of his supposed vassal with consternation. Muhammad Ali had almost occupied Constantinople in 1833, and the sultan’s army was not much more equipped to resist him six years later. A commercial treaty between the sultan and the British threatened to cut off a vital source of Muhammad Ali’s income while enhancing the rights of British merchants in Egypt. That was the casus belli. After several skirmishes, Muhammad Ali’s army, commanded by his elder son, Ibrahim, annihilated the Ottomans at the battle of Nezib and advanced toward Constantinople in the fall of 1839. The sultan died before he learned of the defeat, and his young successor assumed power in unenviable circumstances.
Though he had the pasha’s trust, Lesseps played only a minor role in the crisis. The important decisions were being made in Paris, London, St. Petersburg, and Constantinople. As had happened in 1833, the British scrambled to prevent Muhammad Ali from overthrowing the sultan and assuming control of the empire. The Russians supported the British, while the French lobbied for Egypt. None of them really knew what Muhammad Ali intended to do. The British believed that the pasha planned to overthrow the sultan and set himself up in his stead. But in conversations with European diplomats such as Lesseps, Muhammad Ali said that he merely wished to preserve his authority in Egypt and Syria, and that military force, though regrettable, was the only way he could make his case to a sultan who was unsympathetic and under the sway of a malevolent Great Britain and its foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston.
For Palmerston and the British government, the equation was simple: “Egyptian civilization,” wrote Palmerston, “must come from Constantinople, and not from Paris, to be durable or consistent with British interests.” That was not all. “France, in protecting Mehemet [sic] Ali,” he continued in another letter, “means to establish a new second-rate maritime power in the Mediterranean, whose fleet might unite with that of France for the purpose of serving as a counterpoise to that of England.”6 These fears of Egypt as a naval power in cahoots with France were absurd. The Egyptian navy could patrol the coast near Alexandria, but it was no threat to England. However, Palmerston not only wanted to contain Egypt, he also wanted to keep the Ottomans weak and prevent France from challenging England in the eastern Mediterranean. If Muhammad Ali, or any Egyptian ruler, supplanted the sultan and allied with the French, these goals would be defeated. For the next two decades, Palmerston never wavered from his policy.
Under instructions from Paris, Lesseps did what he could to support the wali. He also engaged in negotiations with the other European consuls in Egypt. The crisis ended in 1840 with Muhammad Ali humbled once again, though at least he was able to salvage a greater degree of autonomy within Egypt. As a sop to his ambitions, he also secured an agreement from the new sultan that Ibrahim would inherit the governorship of Egypt when Muhammad Ali died. That was a significant concession, for sultans rarely replaced governors with family members. Muhammad Ali wanted to create an Egyptian dynasty, and though the European powers forced him to back down from a military confrontation, he did succeed in laying the foundation for future generations of his family to rule the Nile.
France had been humiliated by Palmerston, and Lesseps would never forget that, in Egypt and in Constantinople, Britain and France were adversaries. Napoleon’s invasion had been the first indication that Egypt would be a theater of French and British competition, and the crises of 1833 and 1839 then formed the backdrop to the intricate diplomacy that characterized the building of the Suez Canal. The mutual suspicion between Britain and France over Egypt was shared by nearly all men of affairs on both sides of the English Channel, and when Lesseps first introduced the idea of the canal to the British public in the 1850s, he was greeted with skepticism and distrust.
But in 1840, all Lesseps knew was that the crisis had been settled and that French interests had not been served. He does not seem to have been deeply troubled. It was only one battle in what promised to be a long and uncertain war for European supremacy. It may have stung to leave Egypt on the heels of this defeat, but Lesseps did not feel personally responsible for the outcome. Events had been determined in Paris by his superiors, and those superiors opted to send him to a new post, one that he found extremely agreeable. He was appointed consul in Barcelona, where he was joined by his wife and his burgeoning family. As attached as he had become to Egypt, he was a professional diplomat. He could not advance his career by remaining in Egypt, and he looked forward to facing the challenges of a region torn not by great power rivalry, but by a nasty internecine struggle between republicans and royalists.
Lesseps spent the next eight years in Spain. He helped negotiate a temporary truce between the rivals, though the problems of Barcelona would continue long after he left and well into the twentieth century. He was comfortable in Spain, having spent considerable time there as a young man, and he had Spanish relatives who welcomed him. His family grew, and his marriage was warm and loving. That was not a given. Many marriages were procreative and economic alliances, and though romantic love was beginning its ascent, it was still neither expected nor necessarily desired. The love between Ferdinand and Agathe was a bonus for them both, as were the tight bonds that developed between Lesseps and his in-laws. In Spain, he matured from a respected young diplomat to a man of stature within the Foreign Ministry, and when the tumult of 1848 suddenly ended the tepid reign of Louis-Philippe, Lesseps was recalled to Paris, not because his star was falling but because it was on the rise.
The revolutions of 1848 affected not just France but all of Europe. In the capitals and major towns of Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Prussia, people took to the streets and demanded change. Their tactics were sometimes planned, and at other times only the reflection of inchoate rage. The French uprising was sparked by a faltering economy, high levels of unemployment
, and a general sense that the regime of Louis-Philippe was incapable of addressing the nation’s problems. The years between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, far from healing the country, had hardened the divisions between those who wanted a strong monarchy, those who wanted a constitutional monarchy, those who yearned for a republic governed by the elite, those who demanded a democratic society of universal suffrage, and those who hoped for a socialist society modeled on the radical days of the early 1790s.
Louis-Philippe’s government collapsed in February, and for the next months, Paris was in a political frenzy. Through the spring, it seemed as though a rough new order—part republican, part conservative—would be worked out. But revolution spread throughout Europe, and the more conservative forces in France looked nervously at what was going on abroad and decided to halt the brief efflorescence of social innovation. General Cavaignac brutally suppressed street demonstrations in Paris at the loss of thousands of lives, but he had the support of fearful conservatives and the provinces. That did not mean he had a mandate to establish a military dictatorship, however, and elections were scheduled for the year’s end. Meanwhile, throughout Europe, the revolutions were defeated, making 1848, in the words of one historian, “the turning point at which modern history failed to turn.”7 Witnessing these defeats, a young Karl Marx so despaired of change that he developed a utopian philosophy that would eventually have considerable success, before it too collapsed. The revolutions of 1848 may have failed in their time, but they led to even more significant uprisings decades later.
Parting the Desert Page 6
