Parting the Desert

by Zachary Karabell

  Toward the end of the day, he mounted his horse and galloped to Said’s tent. The viceroy was alone, save for his servants, and he invited Lesseps to sit for a while. Ferdinand had rehearsed what he planned to say, and he decided that, rather than going into details, he would present Said with a vision. He spun a tale of the ancient canal, of the pharaohs and Alexander, of the Arab conquerors and Napoleon. He told Said that the time had come to fulfill their legacy by cutting a direct canal across the Isthmus of Suez.

  He then presented the reasons: A canal would strengthen the Ottoman Empire and its sultan, who was still Said’s sovereign. A canal in Egypt would guarantee Egypt’s independence, just as the Dardenelles and the Bosporus guaranteed the autonomy of the Ottomans; all European powers would covet access to the canal, just as they did to the Dardenelles straits that connected the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Rather than allow any one power to control these vital waterways, the states of Europe would guarantee the security of a neutral party, and that meant that Said would never have to fear a European invasion. The canal would show that Egypt “still has the capacity to be a potent force in world affairs, and is still capable of adding a brilliant page to the history of world civilization.” He promised that, though the technical obstacles were formidable, they weren’t insurmountable, as Said’s own chief of public works, Linant Bey had demonstrated. The real challenges were political and economic, but Lesseps assured the viceroy that, with effort, both could be met.

  This was only a prelude to the real lure. A canal, continued Lesseps, would set Said apart from other rulers. It would transform him from the governor of an Ottoman province into a potentate admired throughout the world and immortalized as a man who dared to do what others had said was impossible. “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.”9 The canal, Lesseps continued, would secure the passage of pilgrims to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina and make the ruler of Egypt a protector of the faithful. The canal would connect Europe to the lands of India, China, Japan, and Australia, and place Egypt at the center of world trade. It would enrich Egypt and bring it more revenue than cash crops ever could.

  The combination of glory and money was hard to resist. It had, after all, enticed Lesseps, and as good a salesman as he was, he had the advantage of selling a vision that he himself fully believed. At the end of the presentation, Said turned after some thought and said, “I am convinced. I accept your plan; for the rest of the trip, we will figure out the actual means of implementing it. The matter is settled, you have my word.”

  With that late-afternoon conversation, the Suez Canal ceased to be only a dream. After half a century of stops and starts, the impasse was finally broken by two people talking in the desert. Of course, these two were actually in a position to do something other than talk, or at least one of them was. But that was all that was required. The sovereign of Egypt gave his personal word to a private citizen of France, and in that moment, everything changed.

  Of course, there was still the matter of actually building the canal. It was easy enough to spin webs of fancy in the crisp air of the Libyan Desert. If every brilliant idea hatched over drinks came to fruition, the world would have been a perfect place long ago. Said had given his word that night in November, but no one could have held him to it. The dream could have faded the next morning, never to be revived. Said alone would only have pursued the plan so far. He had neither the money nor the expertise to see it to completion. No matter how keen he was on the notion, it required European capital and European engineering, backed up by Egyptian workers. Though we have only Lesseps’s account of their meeting, Said must have been enthusiastic. At first glance, he could see only the upsides and none of the pitfalls. The project would be organized by others and financed by others, while the glory and the influence would go to Egypt and its ruler.

  Said’s father would have scoffed at that thought. Muhammad Ali understood that effortless glory was an oxymoron, and he had refused to sanction the canal because he recognized the risks. Said, more trusting and less experienced, focused on the rewards, as Lesseps knew he would. That became a pattern for the viceroy, and his audience chamber soon teemed with opportunists hoping to obtain promises from Said that they could then record on paper and enforce as contracts. Lesseps himself went back to his tent that evening and formalized his notes into a memorandum that he gave to Said the next day. A tendency to think big without pondering the consequences has cost Said in the docket of history. He has been charged with naïve profligacy and found guilty. It is impossible to absolve him fully, but many of his decisions looked sound at the time. His treasury was stable; his foreign debts were nonexistent; and his sense of how Egypt needed to change was largely accurate.

  Lesseps, on the other hand, seemed to be making things up as he went along. He knew enough about Said’s character and about the vanity of rulers to strike the right notes. In fact, one of Lesseps’s greatest assets in the coming years was his ability to persuade. His language was florid, but that was the style of the day. He spoke in hyperbole, but he lived during a time when words such as “destiny,” “glory,” “progress,” and “civilization” were commonplace. What set him apart was a fierce determination to do something meaningful, combined with astonishing energy, good connections, and a spellbinding ability to convince people that he could change the world for the better if only they would help him.

  From that day in November 1854, it would take fifteen years of ceaseless effort to create the Suez Canal. Had Lesseps flagged for one moment, the project could have collapsed. Not until the early 1860s had enough actual physical work been done on the canal to ensure that it would be finished by someone, even if Lesseps’s venture disintegrated. Said’s support was an imperative first step, but it was only the beginning of a long, uncertain road that time and again looked as if it would end in failure.

  That day also marked the transformation of the Suez Canal from an idea shared by many to a project led by one. From 1854 onward, it became Ferdinand de Lesseps’s canal, and he had no intention of sharing. He was determined to occupy center stage, and he was willing to take the risk of full blame if that meant the possibility of full credit. But the other contenders did not simply move aside when they learned of what had transpired in the desert. Some of them were furious that Lesseps had broken the rules of the game and gone straight to the viceroy rather than consulting with various interest groups in Europe and Constantinople first. And at least one of them was as determined as Lesseps to wear the laurels.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WHOSE CANAL?

  HAVING OBTAINED THE viceroy’s verbal approval, Lesseps spent another week traveling with the royal party to Cairo. The days were filled with military maneuvers designed more to entertain the royals than to drill the army. The regiments were arrayed in full dress. They marched, and shot, and arranged themselves in columns, but there was at least as much precision in the kitchen tents. Lesseps marveled over the dozens of cooks and their elaborately choreographed meals.

  During the trip, Said received the shaikhs of the Bedouin tribes that controlled the desert lands to the west of the Nile and north of Cairo. They galloped around his tent and fired carbines in the air to display their strength, but it was all posture. They were vassals of the viceroy, and they paid him tribute. In return, he made a show of respect and willingly played his part in these elaborate rituals.

  The last days of the trip were completed aboard Said’s Nile yacht, which he had inherited from Abbas, and which had been custom-made of citron wood and oak in England for a rumored cost of one hundred thousand pounds. Inside, there was a dining room forty feet long, and divans lined with gold. Said defensively claimed that he would never have spent so much on such a frivolity, but, seeing as how he had inherited it, he thought it best to put it to good use. Lesseps wisely de
murred, and took advantage of the immense guest-room he was given, complete with divans upholstered with silk and a bathroom of white marble.

  By late November, the party arrived in Cairo, and once there, Lesseps made sure to solidify Said’s agreement in writing. He had already talked up the Suez idea with the viceroy’s staff and inner circle, including Ahmad Pasha, Said’s nephew and heir, and Mustafa Pasha, Ahmad’s brother. The moment he settled in Cairo, Ferdinand wrote to each of the European consuls to inform them of what had transpired on the trip. On November 27, he wrote to Frederick Bruce, the British consul general (and son of Lord Elgin, of the Elgin Marbles), to announce that Said had authorized him to form a company for the purpose of piercing the Isthmus of Suez. He said that there would be a formal concession granting the company lands for income and guaranteeing a supply of labor in the form of the traditional corvée. Lesseps promised that the canal would benefit not just the company but international trade, and therefore England most of all. But, recognizing the legacy of tension between France and England, Lesseps asked Bruce “to consider as a heresy the belief that this enterprise—which is destined to cut in half the distance between the Orient and the Occident—will not benefit England—lord of Gibraltar, of Malta, and of Aden, and of important bases on the east coast of Africa, of India, of Singapore, and Australia.” He concluded by saying that anyone “preoccupied with questions of civilization and progress cannot look at a map and not be seized with a powerful desire to make disappear the only obstacle interfering with the flow of the commerce of the world.”1

  The point about the map was telling. For years, Lesseps sat in his farmhouse in the French countryside and studied plans. He laid out maps on tables, desktops, and floors in order to plot various paths. Until he returned to Egypt in the fall of 1854, the entire scheme had been no more than a map game, and he had not yet gone to the isthmus to see the potential route for himself. It was still a drawing to him, and that is how he described it to Bruce and to others.

  Within days, Lesseps had his much-coveted piece of paper, with the grand label of “concession.” Granted by “His Highness Muhammad Said, Viceroy of Egypt,” it gave “our friend M. Ferdinand de Lesseps… the exclusive power of constituting and directing a universal Company for cutting through the isthmus of Suez and establishing a Canal between the two Seas, with power to undertake or cause to be undertaken, all works and constructions.” Lesseps was made the director of this soon-to-be-constituted company, and the length of the grant was set at ninety-nine years. The company was to be responsible for all costs of the project, but “the Egyptian government is to give up those portions of the public property now uncultivated which would be watered and cultivated at the expense of… the said Company. The Company will enjoy possession of the said property for the term of ten years from the day of the opening of the canal.” For the remaining eighty-nine years of the concession, the company would be required to pay a tithe to the Egyptian government.

  The other major provisions of the concession included an agreement that the Egyptian government would receive 15 percent of the company’s annual net profits, with 10 percent for the company’s founders and the remaining 75 percent going to the company’s shareholders. Linant Bey was designated the official engineer; he would draw up plans for the canal’s route and determine which lands would be granted to the company. Working closely with him was another transplanted Frenchman, Mougel Bey. A hydraulic engineer by training, Mougel had come to Egypt in the late 1830s to oversee construction of the Nile dams, and, graced with a generous salary from the Egyptian government, he had created a comfortable life for himself. Though he had worked closely with Linant for years, the two men had an uneasy relationship, perhaps because they frequently competed for the same projects.

  The concession did not stipulate whether the canal would be a direct line through the isthmus, or whether it would follow the indirect route via the Nile. Linant had always preferred the direct line, but at this juncture the question was left open to further study. Either way, the company was given the right to import any necessary equipment, mine any quarries, and bring in materials free from taxation by the Egyptian government.2

  Even at the time, the concession struck many as a blank check for Lesseps and an act of misguided generosity on the part of Said. Certainly, the agreement had been drawn up quickly, and mostly by Lesseps himself. The concession of land would prove to be the most controversial aspect, though granting an unformed company unirrigated land must have seemed to Said innocuous enough. Only after a freshwater passage had been dug from the Nile to Lake Timsah at the canal’s midsection would those dry sands become some of the most fertile land in Egypt (and indeed the world) and thereby raise the value of those acres immensely. But, much as the United States government granted railroad companies extensive lands on either side of the proposed tracks to be laid, the concession of land to the Suez company was not atypical for the era. And it was economically necessary. Such a vast undertaking could only be partly underwritten by wealthy individuals and shareholders. Other income would have to be found before the project was completed, and in the mid-nineteenth century, it was uncommon for speculative ventures to be funded by bank loans. Banks gave loans to governments and to merchants engaged in trade, but not usually to entrepreneurs.

  That would soon change. One of the innovations in France in the early 1850s was the creation of a new type of finance company, known as the Crédit Mobilier. In the past, there had been joint-venture companies meant to fund speculative projects, but the Crédit Mobilier was one of the first to resemble the modern investment bank. It allowed for the financing of projects that were long on vision and short on collateral, and its investments underwrote a railroad boom in France and the massive renovation of Paris under the direction of Baron Haussmann. As fate would have it, the Crédit Mobilier was a product of the Saint-Simonians, just as the idea for the canal was.3

  The brothers Émile and Isaac Pereire broke with Enfantin in the early 1830s, along with many of the initial followers of Henri de Saint-Simon. But they did not abandon the doctrines of Saint-Simon, one of which held that banking and credit were integral components of industrial progress. In that spirit, they set up the Crédit Mobilier as a vehicle both to enrich its shareholders and to fund grand public works.

  While the Pereires plunged into the world of finance, another wing of the Saint-Simonians continued to follow the now wealthy but still-eccentric Enfantin. Though he had mellowed somewhat with age, he was no less given to flights of rhetoric that placed him at the center of the cosmos, and in dealing with the noninitiated, his loose confederation made sure that others spoke for him. One of these spokesmen was Arlès-Dufour, born François-Barthélemy Arlès. As a young man, he settled in Lyon, then a flourishing industrial center and one of the major cities of France. He lived there the rest of his long life. Physically, he was pleasantly nondescript, and in his various portraits he appears prosperous, kind, and slightly sad.4

  Rising to become head of the Lyon Chamber of Commerce, Arlès-Dufour was involved in countless projects until his death in 1872. For five decades, he was a quiet but staunch follower of Enfantin. But as a moderate soul, he was able to bridge the often considerable distance between the Father and most others. After all, the majority of French and European businessmen agreed that progress, industry, and profit were wonderful, even if they were skeptical about tales of the male and female life-force.

  Under Arlès-Dufour’s initiative, the Lyon Chamber of Commerce made a contribution of five thousand francs to Enfantin’s Study Group, and it was Arlès-Dufour who became the main correspondent of Ferdinand de Lesseps in the years between his disgrace in Rome and his voyage to Egypt. Ferdinand seems to have considered the Lyon businessman a friend, at least judging from the warm enthusiasm of his correspondence with Arlès-Dufour in the flush of success at the end of 1854 and into 1855. But while Lesseps was writing to Arlès-Dufour as a trusted ally, Arlès-Dufour was also carrying on a separate corresponden
ce with Enfantin, and the latter did not share the perception that Lesseps had done a great thing for a project that had long lain dormant.

  The same day that the canal concession was formally awarded, Lesseps sent a letter that began, “My dear friend Arlès-Dufour, Rejoice—you and our friends—Rejoice! I have succeeded today in obtaining everything that I had hoped for.” He told Arlès-Dufour that the document had been signed, and that he was already onto the next stage of plans. Though he didn’t know for certain how much it would cost, he said that the company would be capitalized at two hundred million francs. That figure was predicated on the assumption of a direct route; in theory, all options for possible routes were supposed to be considered open, but Lesseps told Arlès-Dufour that the only thing he was interested in was the direct path. To that end, he had spent many hours with both Linant and Mougel going over plans and preparing for a trip with them to the isthmus in a matter of weeks. The expedition would be paid for by the viceroy in his capacity as one of the founding shareholders.

  Lesseps asked one favor. He wanted Arlès-Dufour to begin contacting the major banking houses of France and Europe, including Benoît Fould and the Rothschilds, and to make overtures to the “great capitalists of England.” For this, Arlès-Dufour would be well rewarded. Lesseps had listed him as a founder, and that was more than just a paper honor. By the act of concession, 10 percent of the canal’s profits would be set aside for the founders, who included Said and multiple members of his family, Lesseps and multiple members of his, Linant, Mougel, the Dutch Consul General Ruyssenaers, the French Consul General M. Sabatier, the brothers Talabot, Benoît Fould, the English free-trade advocate Richard Cobden, members of the chambers of commerce of Lyon and Venice, and Enfantin himself.5