Parting the Desert

by Zachary Karabell

  Finally, Enfantin wanted to know how Lesseps could dismiss the Study Group but make its members founding agents of the company. How could they be founders if Lesseps refused any input? How could they be part of a venture in which they had no say? Perhaps fearing that he had left no room for compromise, Enfantin ended his letter on a measured note and politely asked Lesseps to keep him informed and not to exclude him from these serious deliberations.11

  The gloves now off, Lesseps wrote more forcefully to Arlès-Dufour. Like a juggler, he had to balance multiple concerns, and the opposition of an eccentric millionaire in France was not one of the concerns he really wished to spend time on. He didn’t understand what claim the Study Group could have, especially since Said was now paying for the expense of the new surveys of the isthmus and for Lesseps’s travels. He corresponded with Arlès-Dufour once in mid-February on the day that he arrived in Constantinople, and then ignored the Saint-Simonians until June. The fact that he had gone to Constantinople before first returning to Paris offended Enfantin. He expected Lesseps to return and consult with him before moving ahead. But Lesseps decided that, though Enfantin’s support was desirable, it was hardly essential. Returning to Paris would consume valuable time, and Lesseps worried that unless he obtained the sanction, or at least the partial sanction, of the Ottomans his ability to control the project would be compromised. Either he went to Constantinople to state his case, or his opponents would state it for him.

  As Lesseps entered the labyrinthine world of European diplomacy during the spring, Enfantin continued to fulminate, and Arlès-Dufour wrote Lesseps a series of letters imploring him to respond. Enfantin was able to arrange another interview with the emperor, who he claimed was sympathetic to his case. But Napoleon III would often agree with those meeting him rather than risk the discomfort of contradicting them, and he made no move to impede Lesseps. As it became clear to Enfantin that his opposition was making little headway, his letters to his supporters became more shrill. He saved some of his best vitriol for Linant, whom he called “personally monstrous, egotistical, and capable of any sacrifice to sate his puerile vanity.” He lamented that, though Lesseps had swooped down and appropriated “the old and great dream” of the Saint-Simonians, Lesseps himself “has dreamed far too little about these affairs and has ignored diplomatic, financial, and artistic precedents.”12

  The financial precedents were the moneys invested by the Study Group; the artistic were Talabot’s plans for an indirect route; and the diplomatic were Lesseps’s decision to go first to Constantinople and then not to pay sufficient attention to the problem of England. Yet Lesseps proceeded as if oblivious to Enfantin’s qualms. This inattention infuriated the proud Father, and he vented about Lesseps in a rambling letter: “We want to eclipse him, make him disappear, subordinate him, and rob him.” He predicted that Ferdinand would soon fall, “just as he did in Rome in 1848! If he thinks that having Said as an ally will help him, he’s mistaken.” Enfantin continued, “Lesseps will come to see that to be the door warden of Said … is without prestige among men of state and affairs.”

  Enfantin’s opposition continued throughout the year; he made a final stab at sabotaging Lesseps in the fall, but Lesseps was no longer fighting back. As of February, he was focused on more immediate obstacles. He wrote to Arlès-Dufour one last time in June, expressing astonishment that the Study Group was still objecting. Arlès-Dufour had written a plaintive letter claiming that he had never ceased to be Lesseps’s friend and ally, but Ferdinand did not see it that way. When it came to the Suez Canal, he took Muhammad Ali’s maxim to heart: two were too many, and working with Enfantin and the Saint-Simonians was not acceptable. Though he claimed he had nothing against Arlès-Dufour personally, it is clear from this last letter that, in his mind, one was either for him or against him, and that Arlès-Dufour could not be both an ally of Lesseps and a follower of Enfantin.13

  Lesseps showed that he could abruptly terminate a friendship if he perceived the slightest disloyalty. He also proved an astute judge of which battles required his attention and which did not. In the coming years, he rationed his energy by attending only to those crises that threatened to submerge the project. By the spring of 1855, the dispute with the Study Group did not pose such a threat, and so he ignored it. English opposition to the canal, and the British influence in Constantinople, however, could have been lethal. Having barely celebrated the victory of winning the concession from Said, Lesseps turned to the formidable challenge posed by the British Empire and its ambitions for the Middle East and the world.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE SULTAN’S SHADOW AND THE ENGLISH LION

  ARRIVING IN CONSTANTINOPLE in February 1855, Lesseps arranged an audience with the British ambassador. Constantinople was the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Before becoming the seat of Turkish power, which stretched from Vienna to Persia, it had succeeded Rome in the eastern Mediterranean, and the Byzantine emperor had governed the temporal and spiritual lives of millions. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, the British ambassador was arguably the most important official there.

  Lesseps also hoped to meet with the sultan, the grand vizier, and the foreign minister. The vizier was the equivalent of a European prime minister. While the sultan shuttled between the Topkapi Palace complex in the old city and the nearly completed Dolmabahce Palace on the Bosporus, the vizier and other members of the government were located in a small palace named the Sublime Porte, in honor of its elaborately decorated gateway. Just as the U.S. government is often referred to simply as “Washington” and the British government as “Whitehall,” the Ottoman government was usually called “the Porte,” after the building where its primary offices were located.

  The Ottomans didn’t care deeply about whether the canal was built. They were concerned about the political ramifications. If the construction of the canal could be used to increase the power of the decaying empire, the Ottomans would back it; if it appeared that the canal might further weaken their influence, they would resist. Neither position was entirely satisfactory. The canal could revive the commerce of the eastern Mediterranean and thereby strengthen the Ottomans, but it could also enhance Egypt and turn Said into a dangerous competitor. Preventing construction might placate the British, who would then be more inclined to defend the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. But resistance might also alienate the French, who had been loyal and much-needed allies. The only certainty for the sultan and his ministers was that Russia was an enemy who would annihilate the Ottomans unless Britain or France prevented it.

  It was a humbling period for the Ottomans. In 1453, Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror captured Constantinople and ended the Byzantine Empire. Though Byzantium had been declining for centuries, the fall of the last bastion of imperial Rome by a Turkish dynasty was a wrenching moment in Western history. Europe was deeply shaken. The Ottoman conquest did not stop. In subsequent decades, the armies of the sultan pushed into Eastern Europe, and annexed what are now Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Hungary. The Ottomans kept advancing, all the way to the gates of Vienna in 1529. The siege was unsuccessful, and Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent ordered his troops to return home before the onset of winter. But the empire did not recede. It expanded, throughout North Africa, into the Near East as far as Persia, and around the Black Sea, through Tartary and into the Caucasus, where the Ottomans perennially defeated the soldiers of the Russian tsar.

  For the next two centuries, the Ottomans threatened Europe. They had a reputation for brutality, though they were no more violent than the Hungarians, the Spanish, or the other European powers that they confronted. The only difference was that the Ottomans usually won, and thus were able to slaughter and enslave rather than be slaughtered or enslaved. Having occupied Constantinople, the greatest capital of Christendom, they made it their own, and built mosques to rival the churches of the Byzantines. They also ruled the Arabian Peninsula, and the sultan enjoyed the title of protector of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The O
ttomans constructed a fleet to challenge the Venetians and the Spanish for supremacy in the Mediterranean, and although the Spanish naval victory at the battle of Lepanto in 1571 was heralded in the West as a turning point, the empire was so rich that it soon replaced the lost ships. Not until 1683, when a Polish army saved the desperate Austrian defenders at the gates of Vienna, did the Ottomans cease to challenge Europe. And not until the end of the eighteenth century did the Russians master the Ottomans in battle and begin to reverse centuries of expansion.

  In the first decades of the nineteenth century, after devastating military and territorial losses to the Russians, the sultan realized that changes were necessary. The old military system of slave Janissaries had become corrupt and ineffective, and in 1826 Mahmud II emulated Muhammad Ali and slaughtered the Janissaries after they had rebelled against him. He then built a new military, modeled on the armies of Europe. But he was unable to modernize as quickly as his Egyptian vassal, and without the intervention of England, he would have lost his throne to the pasha. Mahmud died before the crisis of 1839 was resolved, and left his inexperienced son, Abdul Mejid, to deal with the Egyptian invasion, the Europeans, and a declining empire.

  Having been saved by the British, Abdul Mejid and his ministers could no longer deny that they were living on borrowed time. The only thing preventing the Europeans from dismantling the empire was their inability to agree on who would get what. The British didn’t want the Russians to control Constantinople and the Dardanelles; the French wanted to keep the British from becoming the pre-eminent power in the eastern Mediterranean; and the Russians wanted to prevent the Austrians from annexing the Balkans. Unable to defend itself but kept alive by the rivalries of its adversaries, the Ottoman Empire became known as “the Sick Man of Europe.”

  Like Said, Sultan Abdul Mejid lacked grit, cared deeply about the empire’s fate, and followed a reformist path charted by his strong-willed father. But, unlike Said, he was blessed with a group of dynamic reformers who tried to end corruption and untangle the archaic bureaucracy. By the 1850s, imperial policies were largely determined by a triumvirate of high officials. The most influential was Mustafa Reshid Pasha, who before becoming grand vizier had served as ambassador to Paris and spoke fluent French. Along with his younger colleagues and sometime adversaries, Ali Pasha and Fuad Pasha, he was an advocate of a radical reorganization of the Ottoman bureaucracy along European lines. He wanted to transform the sultanate into an enlightened monarchy under a constitution and answerable to the rule of law. Traditionally, the Ottoman state had been a pyramid topped by an absolute monarch who not only had the power of life and death but also acted as both king and pope. His word was law, and religious authorities deferred to him. Now the empire was in flux; tradition was being assaulted from within and without; and the last thing the Ottoman government wanted was a Suez Canal that would upset matters still further.

  Lesseps moved fluidly in the diplomatic circles of Constantinople. He was accorded every courtesy, both in deference to his former position in the French Foreign Ministry and to his current role as the Egyptian viceroy’s emissary. But although he was entertained royally and treated as a visiting dignitary, the more he talked with Ottoman officials, the clearer it became that without the blessing of the British the sultan was not prepared to sanction the canal. Lesseps had hoped that the road to Suez went through Constantinople. He discovered instead that it went through London.

  Even if the Ottoman Empire was a shadow of its former self, it was not without resources, one of which was a legacy of diplomatic intrigues with the Europeans. The men who led the empire in these years understood that they could survive only by keeping European expansion at bay, and the only way to do that was to play one state off another. It was a position of weakness, but the Ottomans used it adroitly.

  The relationship between the sultan’s government and the British Empire was the key to Ottoman survival. Having created the world’s most powerful navy, the British expanded throughout the world in the nineteenth century. When British officials contemplated their strategy, they focused on vital sea-lanes: the English Channel, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Cape of Good Hope, the North Atlantic route to America, the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. Direct control was not necessarily required, but none of those sea-lanes could be allowed to fall to an adversary or competitor, and in the middle of the nineteenth century, the British treated all European states as potential competitors. British imperial strategy, therefore, dictated that there were only two viable options for the Bosporus and the Dardanelles: direct British rule, which would arouse the animosity of the Russians and the French and probably involve the English in a long, costly war, or neutrality under Ottoman sovereignty.

  To maintain the Ottoman Empire and undermine the French, England fought Muhammad Ali in the 1830s. Using similar calculations, Britain opposed the Suez Canal in the 1850s. The English governing class was drawn from a small community of aristocrats in these years, though democracy was starting to encroach on the privileges of the landed elite. The Reform Act had been passed in 1832, significantly increasing the number of men eligible to vote, and the rise of industry had shifted power away from the traditional estates of the countryside and toward the cities of London, Glasgow, Manchester, and Birmingham. Even so, in the 1850s and 1860s, power rotated between a small number of powerful men; few were more powerful than Lord Palmerston, and few diplomats had more influence than the imperious British representative to the Sublime Porte, Lord Stratford Canning de Redcliffe.

  Palmerston was a dominant force in English politics for almost fifty years. Graced with a mop of wild hair and bushy sideburns, he was the very model of a particular sort of English gentleman. He was not the genial father of a Jane Austen novel but rather a stern figure, watchful of the perils that lay on the other side of the English Channel. Among friends, he had a reputation for generosity and good humor, but those qualities were not evident in public. In portraits, his face usually carried an expression of dyspeptic hauteur. He was foreign minister for much of the 1830s and 1840s, during which time he created the mold of the unyielding, jingoistic English bully threatening the world. He was also the single greatest obstacle to the construction of the Suez Canal. An unrepentant Whig, Palmerston was prime minister from February 1855 till 1858, and again from 1859 until his death in 1865. And at no point in that entire time did he soften his opposition to Lesseps.

  “His heart always beat for the honour of England,” Lord Russell eulogized in 1865. Palmerston believed in England and he believed in the British Empire. Whether he believed deeply in anything else is open to question. That set him apart from some of his younger rivals. William Gladstone had a missionary zeal for Christianity; Benjamin Disraeli flirted with writing novels and becoming a man of the mind. Palmerston, however, was not distracted by alternate life-paths. To call him imperious is to understate the contempt he held for much of the non-English world. He rarely uttered a public or private word suggesting self-doubt, and he was not known to concede that there might, perhaps, be more than one side to a story. For Palmerston, there was only one side—his, or, rather, England’s—and it was always the side of right.

  These qualities undoubtedly gave him an edge in politics, both at home and abroad. His certainty allowed him to take swift action in times of crisis. Because he always knew where he stood, the proper course was always evident to him. He had one overarching morality: the health of the British Empire and the sanctity of the English way of life. He expected the rest of the world to act in its own interests; he viewed history not as an expanding pie of happiness, but as a Hobbesian struggle for a limited amount of global wealth and power. Because no one would protect British interests except the British crown, it was his duty as Her Majesty’s representative to guard the empire. Whether that pleased or displeased the other states of the world was not his concern. Under his watch, Great Britain would have no allies, and its policies would be determined by Her Majesty’s Government alone.1

  Pa
lmerston was unusually adamant and extraordinarily consistent, but he reflected widely held beliefs in nineteenth-century England, Scotland, and Wales. The British had been building an empire for centuries, but only in the mid-nineteenth century did they ascend dramatically above the rest of Europe. The late eighteenth century had seen setbacks for the British in North America, and then a prolonged period of war and uncertainty while Napoleon threatened to transform the European continent into a French province. Palmerston was part of a coterie of high officials who championed the idea of Britain alone and Britain supreme. The strategy worked. By the 1850s, the English navy ruled the waves, and English armies governed India, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and, to a lesser extent, Canada. It was not territory that defined British power, however, but trade and industry, and by the time Palmerston became prime minister, both were burgeoning.

  The British were the pre-eminent trading power in the world, and during the years when the Suez Canal was being built, Britain’s economic might increased significantly. Between 1850 and 1870, British exports tripled, from just over eighty million pounds to more than 24c million pounds a year. The process was fairly straightforward. The British imported raw materials from every corner of the globe. They then used those raw materials, transformed them into finished products in factories, and exported those goods throughout the world. Trade and industry were inextricably linked. The United Kingdom needed raw materials to produce finished goods, and it needed markets to absorb those goods abroad. In order to profit from exports, it had to control the trade, and to do that, it had to control the seas. In that sense, the British navy was simply an adjunct to the British merchant marine.