“England will use the full might of her Empire … to teach
the viceroy [Sa’id of Egypt] to see reason.” 1
—THE LONDON TIMES THREATENING AN ENGLISH INVASION OF EGYPT SHOULD SA’ID PASHA REFUSE TO SCUTTLE WORK ON THE SUEZ CANAL, SUMMER 1859
“How is it, M. de Lesseps, that everyone is against
your [canal] enterprise?” 2
—FERDINAND DE LESSEPS, QUESTIONED BY LOUIS NAPOLÉON, ST. CLOUD, OCTOBER 23, 1859
The cry of imperiled French Catholic missionaries in the 1850s in what came to be called Indochina had been answered by the French Imperial Navy. With much pressure from the Catholic Church, Empress Eugénie’s wholehearted support, and growing commercial interests, combined with the loosest of instructions, the Ministry of the Marine and Colonies had authorized naval intervention and the landing of a token force of marines—this the first foothold. Such were some of the pretexts for the acquisition of a new empire that Louis Napoléon had for the most part not even sought. It was senior naval officers, often thousands of miles from Paris, who were destined largely to take it upon themselves as to when and where to plant the French tricolor.
It was financial gain and debt, however, that brought the French, Spanish, and English to Mexico. Auguste de Morny had drawn Louis Napoléon’s attention to the situation in the recently created independent Republic of Mexico, following a visit to the Hôtel de Lassay by the Swiss banker Jean Baptiste Jecker. Owed seventy-five million francs by the Mexican government, or so he claimed, Jecker had offered Morny one-third of anything that could be recovered. Although the French government was owed an additional sixty million francs in its own right, Louis Napoléon was not seriously interested in getting involved in that distant, largely unknown land, although he did order the French navy’s Caribbean squadron to bombard Veracruz briefly, if without results. Mexican investors represented by Señores Almonte and Hidalgo then sailed to France and appealed directly to a sympathetic Empress Eugénie for more persuasive measures, stressing the missionary role of the Catholic Church in that country of hundreds of “heathen” Indian tribes.
In the end, a most reluctant Louis Napoléon was talked into signing the Convention de la Soledad with Spain and Portugal on February 19, 1862. They agreed to send a small joint military force to recover Mexico’s defaulted debts from a defiant President Benito Juárez. Meanwhile, the United States, although hostile to any European intervention in Mexico, was otherwise preoccupied with its convulsive Civil War. The original landing force of a few thousand men proved ineffectual, leading London, Lisbon, and Madrid to withdraw. The amount owed simply did not warrant the military expense or diplomatic headaches. Now alone, but still badgered by his Spanish wife and avaricious half brother, Louis Napoléon agreed to go it alone. It was another “Algerian fly swatter incident,” with the slightest pretext, a national debt, now replacing that diplomatic instrument—France was not to be insulted by a few Mexican banditos!
The substantial costs of a new, larger, entirely French expedition quickly surpassed the amount of the original Mexican debt, but by now the French emperor, prodded by Eugénie, was considering something far more important: a new Roman Catholic monarchy (replacing the Mexican Republic) along the frontier with the “Protestant” United States. The absurd enormity of the size required of such a military undertaking if it were to have a realistic chance of succeeding—Napoléon I had failed to conquer a much smaller Spain with 250,000, and that had not required a powerful fleet and hundreds of transports to land and maintain such a force nearly four thousand miles away from home—simply appeared to escape Louis Napoléon’s historical memory and elementary common sense. Moreover, Louis Napoléon had forgotten another basic history lesson—Uncle Napoléon’s spectacular fiasco in 1803–1805 when devoting the entire French annual budget to his failed attempt to launch 110,000 troops across the mere twenty-five miles of sea separating Calais and Dover. And then of course there had also been his uncle’s earlier catastrophic Egyptian expedition back in 1798.3
In any event, Archduke Maximilian, the brother of the Austrian emperor Franz Josef, was available to assume the Mexican crown for Louis Napoléon’s Mexican venture. And his beautiful if immature young wife, Princess Charlotte—the daughter of Belgium’s king Leopold—was actively encouraging Eugénie during her recent lobbying visit to the Tuileries. This new unexpected relationship with the Habsburg ruler in fact also appealed to Louis Napoléon. Such a political alliance could also, hopefully, facilitate Austria’s evacuation of Venice in favor of Victor Emmanuel. At the same time it would also strengthen the French hand against the increasingly aggressive Prussians.
Of course Mexico would prove a useful satellite kingdom next to Catholic Nicaragua and its proposed interoceanic canal. That project suddenly loomed large again, and was almost as much of an attraction as Mexico itself with its vast mineral wealth, including badly needed silver for the French treasury. With the Spanish, Portuguese, and British now out of the picture, however, it was the French taxpayer who would foot the Mexican bill.
* * *
They were no longer talking about a coastal landing party of six or seven thousand men, but of a full-scale military campaign, of an army marching many hundreds of miles across unknown hostile roadless mountains and deserts to seize the capital of Mexico City. Nevertheless, in defiance of history and over the strongest protests of both War Minister Randon, with his vivid recent memories of Algeria still in mind, and of the aging Finance Minister Achille Fould, not to mention of the legislative body, Louis Napoléon committed France to war. And after hardship and tactical defeat, General Achille Bazaine eventually did bring the thirty-three-year-old “Emperor” Maximilian and his bride, Charlotte, to Mexico City in June 1864, even as a grave new major revolt was raging in the colony of Algeria, requiring additional troops. Louis Napoléon’s total army of 450,000 men could only go so far, because his requests for military reforms and massive new reserves had been rejected.
On the financial side, Maximilian’s emissaries had duly signed the initial draft of the Miramar Convention with France in the autumn of 1863, committing Mexico to reimburse France 270 million francs, and then a minimum of twenty-five million francs annually for the next three years.4 A despairing Fould threw up his hands and predicted disaster. In the meantime a fresh supply of French gold did nothing to reconcile the growing differences between Maximilian and his commanding general, Bazaine. Since allegedly marrying the niece of an earlier president of Mexico, that mediocre general had become more arrogant and more independent. With mixed loyalties and promises of great personal Mexican wealth and power, the fifty-four-year-old Bazaine, a hardened veteran of campaigns in Algeria and the Crimea, was “going native” and could no longer be counted upon. Maximilian and Charlotte suddenly found themselves completely isolated in the center of a hostile country with never more than 50,000 men behind them, including the French Foreign Legion (from Algeria) and one battalion of African slaves from the Egyptian Sudan.5
The young emperor was considered a gracious Viennese dilettante, totally incapable of governing, and as Eugène Rouher remarked, Emperor Maximilian was “simply not doing anything right.”6 With the American Civil War now behind him, in October 1865 President Andrew Johnson demanded the evacuation of all French troops, threatening to send the American army across the Mexican frontier. By now an extremely depressed Louis Napoléon, mired in the Algerian revolt and badly needing the return of his troops from Mexico for that theater, advised his Austrian protégé to abdicate.7 In a panic, Maximilian sent Charlotte back to France and Belgium to plead for help.
Then catastrophe struck. General Benito Juárez defeated the French, captured Maximilian, and executed him by a peasant firing squad on June 19, 1867, while his lovely raven-haired widow went insane, reputedly while visiting Pope Pius IX in the Vatican. The original French government debt of sixty million had cost the French taxpayer 336 million francs, and as for that fabled Mexican silver … In addition to the conservative loss of six thousand French troops, Louis Napoléon’s Mexican adventure had put enormous strain on the already hard-pressed military facing revolt in Algeria.8 As for the role of his brother Auguste de Morny in all this … So ended the Mexican saga, one Louis Napoléon had never wanted in the first place. Nor was Emperor Franz Josef, now in mourning for the death of his younger brother, terribly impressed with the emperor of the French. If this page of imperial history had proved to be disappointing, a very different chapter was now being written in Egypt.
* * *
Ferdinand de Lesseps came from a unique diplomatic family, ennobled by King Louis XVI, and his brother, father, uncle, cousins, and grandfather had served or were serving the French government abroad. His father, Mathieu, had already distinguished himself under Napoléon I by the time Ferdinand was born at Versailles on November 19, 1805, one of the three surviving children. Ferdinand’s half-Spanish mother, Catherine de Grévigné, was the sister of the Countess de Montijo, his aunt and mother of the empress Eugénie, whose two families remained very close. Ferdinand and his elder brother, Théodore, were educated at the Collège Henri IV along with two of their friends, the sons of the future King Louis Philippe, and a younger Georges Haussmann.
Apprenticed in his father’s consular office in Italy, Ferdinand also served as assistant vice consul under his uncle, Barthélemy de Lesseps, in Lisbon, and then in Tunis, where his influential father was now consul general. It was there, in 1830–1831, that his father worked closely with Marshal Bertrand Clauzel, advising him on the establishment of the first French administration of Algeria. Ferdinand was next appointed vice consul at the Egyptian Mediterranean port of Alexandria. His friendship with the sons of the newly enthroned Louis Philippe proved useful, and the young man, who was already fluent in Arabic, next served as consul in Cairo before passing his final years in Alexandria until 1837.
Back in France that December of 1837, Ferdinand married the beautiful eighteen-year-old Agathe Delamalle, who was to give him five sons, of whom only Charles and Victor survived. It was an unusually close and warm family. Ferdinand was later transferred to the consular offices in Rotterdam, then Málaga (his mother’s home), and in 1842 became consul general at Barcelona. Arriving just in time for the bombardment of that city during a violent insurrection throughout Catalonia, he spent much of his time providing medical help and shelter for the victims of both sides of the fighting. Humanity always came first with the Lesseps. In the revolutionary year 1848, he was rewarded with the ministerial post in Madrid, but his work was interrupted in 1849 when he was dispatched to Rome to negotiate the return of Pope Pius IX to Rome. Disobeying the Quai d’Orsay’s instructions, he attempted to reach a compromise solution to that crisis. Having prevented General Oudinot from entering Rome, that angry general had Lesseps recalled to Paris, resulting in an early retirement, but only after being awarded the prestigious Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor.9
Two days before the wedding of Ferdinand de Lesseps’s cousin Eugénie to Louis Napoléon on the twenty-ninth of January, 1853, Lesseps’s mother died. That July, his thirty-four-year-old wife, Agathe, came down with scarlet fever, brought home by her teenage son, Charles, and died on the thirteenth, which was followed by the death of their youngest son, Ferdinand, before the month was out. These deaths left Ferdinand de Lesseps stunned and shattered. Having lived abroad all his life and without any home of his own, his wealthy mother-in-law invited him and his two remaining sons, Charles and Victor, to share her large estate, La Chesnaye, in the Indre. There he remained withdrawn from the vicious world of Parisian politics. Such was the situation in 1854 when he received a telegram from the new khedive of Egypt, Sa’id Pasha, requesting his presence at an urgent meeting.10
* * *
On November 7, 1854, a restored Ferdinand de Lesseps reached Egypt and the port of Alexandria after a ten-day journey by sea from Marseilles. It had been seventeen years since his last sojourn here when he had served as French consul. The openly Francophile and reform-minded Sa’id Pasha had just replaced the previously strongly anti-French khedive Abbas Pasha (assassinated four months earlier). That permitted the Frenchman to deal with the object of his visit, and on the thirtieth of November, Sa’id Pasha issued the firman, or decree, assigning the Suez canal concession to Ferdinand de Lesseps personally. He was awarded “the exclusive power to found and direct a company with the purpose of building a canal through the Isthmus of Suez.”11 At the age of fifty, de Lesseps’s life’s work was only just about to begin. And his old dream, going back more than twenty years, could now be realized … or so it seemed.
* * *
There was nothing new about an interest in building a canal connecting the eastern Mediterranean or the Nile with the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. From possibly as early as 1840 BC the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt had attempted or completed canals, most of them between the Nile and the Red Sea, as did the Persian conqueror, Darius I, some five hundred years BC, and the Khalif Umar in the seventh century AD. It was hardly surprising that another invader, General Napoléon Bonaparte, in 1798, had vaguely considered the possibility of reconstructing such a canal, but surveyors estimated that because of at least a thirty-foot differential between the levels of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea that was impossible. In 1830, however, the English engineer F. R. Chesney calculated that in fact there was little difference between those sea levels, and that a canal without locks was a practical reality. The idea did not interest London, but it did the Egyptian Mamluke ruler, Muhammad Ali, and in 1846 Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin made fresh studies for a canal.12
Muhammad Ali’s grandson, Abbas Pasha, who succeeded him as ruler of Egypt, while hostile to the French, did welcome the British, and in 1851 signed a contract with Robert Stephenson’s engineering firm, which built a wide-gauge railway link connecting the Mediterranean Sea at Alexandria with Cairo and Suez. It was Abbas’s successor, Sa’id Pasha, who inaugurated the opening of that railway at the Red Sea port of Suez in 1858. Anglo-Indian trade and personnel would now be able to pass between the two seas, reducing costs and weeks of travel time. Nevertheless, the rail service was still very restricted, primitive, slow, and the route twice as long as any canal and no substitute for a canal permitting heavy, large-scale commerce and a passenger service.
In 1857 everything changed, the Indian army mutinied, hundreds of thousands were killed, and the very existence of the British in that country was threatened over the following years.13 Taken off guard and overwhelmed, London had to rush tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of thousands of tons of military equipment and supplies to India. Stephenson’s small railway was overtaxed and proved to be completely inadequate, and hundreds of ships were contracted by the British government to carry the troops and the vast bulk of arms and war materiel around the cape of South Africa to India. All this in addition to the normal commercial shipping traffic. The need for a canal, saving the Royal Navy and commercial shipping 4,300 miles of travel one way, was now imperative and obvious. The needs of expanding empires alone demanded it.
* * *
Like the Saint-Simeon leader Prosper “Père” Enfantin, Ferdinand de Lesseps had foreseen the necessity for such a canal long before any mutiny, indeed possibly as early as the 1830s when he was serving as a vice consul in Alexandria. Enfantin’s bid had been rejected by Muhammad Ali years earlier. Now, two decades later, following the news of Lesseps’s canal concession granted by Sa’id Pasha in November 1854, a desperate Enfantin used all his influence with Lord Palmerston to prevent the construction of that canal.14
Enfantin’s opposition was nothing, however, compared to that of the British government, which from the first day attacked Lesseps with a ferocity that bewildered that Frenchman, Viceroy Sa’id, Napoléon III, and just about everyone else. The cornerstone of the French emperor’s foreign policy, however, remained unaltered and unshaken: to do absolutely nothing that would antagonize or undermine good Anglo-French relations, especially after the terrific diplomatic row over the transfer of Savoy and Nice to France.
Although Louis Napoléon had refused any endorsement of or help for Lesseps’s canal, Lord Palmerston pulled out all the stops in his attacks on that project, especially after the groundbreaking ceremony on April 25, 1859, at the site of the new Port Said. A peverse Ambassador Persigny in London now supported Palmerston’s opposition against a French canal.
Literally the entire might, power, influence, and prestige of the British Empire was leveled at the Ottoman ruler, with British ambassador Henry Bulwer-Lytton instructing the sultan to order a halt to all construction or face the consequences. The London Times threatened Sultan Abdülmecid with “the full might of the Empire,” bringing in “our fleets and armies from Malta, Corfu, Aden and Bombay … to teach the Egyptian government to see reason!”15 In the event of a war between England and France, it argued, the French would be in a position to close the Suez Canal to all British shipping. After all, that is precisely what the Turks had done during the Crimean War, closing the Dardanelles to the Russians. An anxious Lesseps then arranged to meet with Prime Minister Palmerston. “I was beginning to ask myself whether I would find myself before a statesman or madman!”16 Lesseps remarked.
Meanwhile Lesseps tried to bolster a by now intimidated Sa’id Pasha, reminding him of his “sacred undertakings, publicly executed before the civilized world.”17 The Royal Navy threatened to bombard Alexandria, and Khedive Sa’id was caught in the middle. What to do? While at 10 Downing Street Palmerston was analyzing a desperate plan submitted by the French consul Sabbatier in Cairo, in which Sultan Abdülmecid would invite Egypt’s Sa’id Pasha to a meeting in Beirut, Lebanon, in July 1859, where he would kidnap that khedive, while the Royal Navy sailed to Egypt’s Port Sa’id to close down Lesseps’s construction site. Outraged, Palmerston rejected the plan out of hand.18
At about the same time, in Paris, Lesseps and his Suez Company administrators came up with a compromise solution—a legal fiction—for Sa’id to submit to Constantinople. The Egyptian workforce would be withdrawn and replaced entirely by Europeans, and Viceroy Sa’id agreed to reimburse Lesseps’s company for all its expenses. But the khedive had no authority to stop the French labor force, he insisted; only the international diplomatic community could do so. The French were on their own, and he could not prevent them, Sa’id informed the British.19
Upon his return to Paris in the summer of 1859, Lesseps met at the Quai d’Orsay with Foreign Minister Walewski, submitting a detailed memorandum listing all the difficulties he and the construction project had encountered since 1854. Total collapse of the prospective canal was now imminent if the government, that is, Louis Napoléon, did not act at once. Although Alexander Walewski personally brought the memorandum over to the Tuileries, days passed and then weeks, but no summons from the palace came.20
Lesseps spent his time impatiently at the imposing offices of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez at 16 Place Vendôme, where he carried out intensive correspondence with his engineers and the companies providing the supplies he needed in Egypt. Under the present adverse circumstances, funding of the construction remained the basic stumbling block. After the creation of this company back in November of the previous year (1858), a subscription had been launched offering 400,000 shares to the public, at five hundred francs a share. Despite all the problems, the entire offering was snapped up within a matter of days. A total of 107,000 shares went to the French, followed by 95,517 to the Ottoman Empire (which, ironically, still had not even authorized construction of the canal they were investing in), and the Khedive Sa’id Pasha put his name down for another 85,506 (but never payed for them); 24,000 shares were acquired in England. That was a year earlier, however, and since then the sultan continued to refuse to lift his ban on construction and Louis Napoléon to give his blessing. The Sphinx of the Tuileries remained silent and inscrutable, and anxious shareholders began reneging on payment, including minor investors like the Americans and Russians, withdrawing completely. Collapse of the Suez Canal company was imminent.21
At his wit’s end, Ferdinand de Lesseps finally swallowed his pride and went to the Tuileries himself to ask his first cousin, the empress, to intercede. Eugénie had an immediate word with Louis Napoléon, who agreed to see Lesseps at St. Cloud on the twenty-third of October (1859). “Monsieur de Lesseps, how is it that everyone is against your enterprise?” he asked his guest. “Sire, that is because everyone believes you are not going to back the Canal.” If Louis Napoléon did not appreciate the implied reprimand, he at least understood. “Very well,” he responded, submitting to the inevitable, “put your mind at ease, you can count on my protection from now on.”22 Once again Eugénie had swayed her husband. After five years of open harassment and even most undiplomatic threats by the British, Louis Napoléon at last acted.
With these official assurances, Ferdinand de Lesseps once again set sail for Constantinople, this time to meet with the new Grand Vizier, Mehmet Rushdi Pasha, who on December 19, 1859, agreed to refrain from any further interference in the construction of the Suez Canal. On the twenty-ninth of December, a much relieved, if by now thoroughly exhausted, Lesseps sailed out of the Bosphorus for Egypt to bring the good news to Sa’id Pasha and his engineers. The Suez Canal would be completed.23
* * *
Simultaneously Louis Napoléon was also creating a completely new empire, one largely unanticipated or planned, as the French navy and marines provided new leaders, some household heroes to this day, taking the initiative in planting the French flag abroad. The western coast of Africa in Senegal was occupied by France in the eighteenth century, but it was only after 1852 that full development of that colony began, with the arrival from Algeria of Louis Faidherbe, its future commanding general, governor, and the founder of its principal port, Dakar. Later exploration along the coast and in the interior would lead to a vast, new unbroken French empire extending from the Atlantic to the Nile. On the eastern side of Africa, the French occupied the strategically important tip of the Horn of Africa at Djibouti in 1862, thereby providing an outlet for colonial trade and a coaling station for the French navy, while sharing England’s Aden Protectorate on the opposite shore. Farther south, off the east coast of that still unexplored continent, France established commercial treaties with Madagascar in 1862 (ultimately a French protectorate) while expanding trade with its long-occupied Comoros Islands. Deep in the Indian Ocean, Louis Napoléon also reinforced the island-colony of Mauritius.
Cutting the last French ties in India by 1859, Louis Napoléon adjusted his sights elsewhere, beginning with the seizure of new territory in Indochina. In 1861 Admiral Bonard landed hundreds of troops to claim and occupy much of the lower part of the country. This resulted in the June 1862 treaty signed aboard that admiral’s flagship, giving France its first protectorates in the southern region of Indochina, around Saigon, though it would take another twenty years of fighting before French troops secured Tonkin in the north. In 1863, the kingdom of Cambodia became the next French protectorate, later joined by Laos. Earlier, in 1853, Louis Napoléon had sent the French navy to the Southwest Pacific, where they seized New Caledonia to serve as a penal colony for France’s worst political desperados.
Between 1852 and 1870, Louis Napoléon would acquire another 700,000 square miles of territory, tripling the size of the Second Empire, along with a new population exceeding that of France itself. In contrast Louis Napoléon’s lifelong hero, Emperor Napoléon I, apart from the Caribbean colonies and St. Pierre-Miquelon, had left a France reduced to her old frontiers, complete with bleak memories of former glories, and a remorseless chancellor Bismarck bent on revenge.