The French reached the apogee of their military power in 1812, their domination of Europe reaching as far as Moscow. After that, their power collapsed, leaving France with a long road to recover great-power status. The French people’s image of themselves was never purely conditioned by military power. They saw their superiority in terms of being bearers of liberty and culture, which might be but did not have to be propagated by cannon or bayonets. But they never lost confidence in themselves as a great power, a major player in Europe and the world. As they travelled, the French judged each nation by the liberty, culture or power to which it could lay claim. Some had culture but no liberty or power, some had power but no liberty or culture. Each nation held up a different image of the French to themselves, and made them think about their own identity, but none in their eyes could achieve that unique blend of liberty, culture and power that was French.
Stendhal began The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) with the entry of General Bonaparte into Milan on 15 May 1796, after his victory at Lodi, expelling the Austrians who occupied Lombardy, and ‘in a few months awoke a people who had fallen asleep’. The French soldiers were all under twenty-five; Bonaparte, at twenty-seven, was said to be the oldest man in the army. Italy was taken by a storm of youth and ‘suddenly found itself inundated with light’. The only opposition to the arrival of the French came from the monks who had preached that learning to read was a waste of time and if the Lombards simply paid their tithes and confessed their sins they would earn their place in heaven.1
This novel was in a sense autobiographical. Stendhal himself ended the account of his painful childhood, The Life of Henri Brulard, during which he had battled against his father and the priests hired to educate him, with his entry into Milan on 10 June 1800, attached to the French army and aged seventeen, when the French army again expelled the Austrians after the battle of Marengo. He later said of the Italians that ‘Marengo moved on the civilization of their country by a hundred years, just as another battle [Waterloo] stopped it for a century’.2 On another occasion he argued that the Italians had known modern civilization only between 17 May 1809, when Napoleon introduced the Civil Code into Italy, and April 1814, when the French were themselves forced to abandon that country and when the Kingdom of Italy, which Napoleon had set up and of which he had been crowned king in 1805, came to an end.3
What Stendhal meant by civilization was something decidedly modern: political unity, a free society under the rule of law, and the Enlightenment. Italy may have been the cradle of ancient civilization, but that was now dead, and the Italians were gripped by political divisions, foreign rule, petty despotisms and the spiritual and temporal domination of the Roman Catholic Church. This perception was not peculiar to Stendhal but was a commonplace among French visitors to Italy. Chateaubriand, who arrived in Rome in June 1803 as secretary to the French legation there, and stood at the other end of the political spectrum from Stendhal, was delighted to find that the pope was reading his Genius of Christianity, but saw the city ‘slumbering in the middle of ruins’. The Tiber, he said, separated two glories that were now past, ‘Pagan Rome, sinking deeper into its tombs, and Christian Rome, descending once more into the catacombs from which it came’. The deadness of the city affected even its inhabitants, who seemed to be dying of hunger but did not work, preferring to live from the charity of the Church.4 Madame de Staël, who went to Italy in 1804–5, wrote in her novel Corinne, or Italy that Italy was a ‘country of tombs’ and ‘tired of glory’. Divided into small states and occupied by foreign powers it had no centre of enlightenment like Paris and liberty was there in mourning. What it did have was artistic genius: the country of Petrarch and Dante and of popular energy manifest at Carnival. ‘Our only glory’, Corinne tells Oswald, the Scottish lord she admires, ‘is the genius of the imagination’, and she herself excels as a poet, musician, actress and dancer, crowned with laurels on the Capitol. Corinne inspires Oswald with her genius, but this does not make her marriageable: Italy is dominated by conservative social conventions, imposed both by Italians and by visiting Britons and Frenchmen, so that Oswald marries her half-sister and does not realize his mistake until Corinne dies broken-hearted.5
After the departure of the French in 1814–15 there were restorations of Austrian rule in the north, Vatican rule in the Papal States in the centre and Bourbon rule in Naples and Sicily. Stendhal, who was out of favour with the French Bourbons, lived from 1814 to 1821 in Milan, for him ‘the most beautiful place on earth’,6 hating the stifling political atmosphere but arguing that there was no better environment for music or love. While France was a nation state dominated by its capital, Italy was divided into a myriad of small states, each with their courts and ‘eight or ten ministers without the workload of a [French] prefect between them’, with nothing better to do than to vex the population. The peoples of the different city states, he said, all spoke different dialects and hated each other. He saw this as a ‘legacy of the tyrannies of the Middle Ages and a great obstacle to liberty’. Rome, under papal rule, was a despotism which refused to countenance any new ideas. There was scarcely any middle class to serve as a vehicle of progressive ideas and the nobility made common cause with the people in their support of reaction. The small number of Italians who desired liberty and unity, members of the carbonari secret society, risked being put to death in the cruellest way in the Papal States if they were caught. And yet for Stendhal La Scala was the greatest opera house in the world. ‘Only music is alive in Italy,’ he said. ‘If you are a citizen you will die of melancholy… the only thing to do in this beautiful country is to make love.’ He estimated that of a hundred French women in the Bois de Boulogne scarcely one was beautiful, whereas in Italy thirty would be over made up, ‘fifty would be beautiful, but with nothing more than an air of voluptuousness, while the twenty others would be of the most ravishing classic beauty’.7
Attempts were made by liberals and patriots to shake off Austrian, papal and Bourbon rule, but without success. An uprising in Bologna, once part of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy but now ruled by the papal bureaucracy, was put down with the help of Austrian troops. Edgar Quinet, visiting Italy in 1836, was horrified to find Austrian troops still occupying Bologna, as well as Milan and Venice. ‘At that moment,’ he confessed, ‘I hated Germany for all the ill it has done to Italy. No, no, it cannot go on. The white uniforms must disappear, the prickly cavalry must go back over the mountains… let them return to the valleys of the Danube, the Elbe and the Spree, and harness their feudal ploughs.’8 Flaubert, travelling in Italy a decade later, in 1845, saw Milan as a place of transition between Italy and Austria, and was fascinated by the variety of uniforms of the Austrian and Hungarian regiments. Like Stendhal, he remarked on the paradox of political lifelessness and clerical despotism on the one hand and cultural life and emotional excitement on the other. ‘I entered La Scala with a religious emotion,’ he wrote, ‘because there human thought… seeks to escape reality and people come to cry, to laugh or to marvel.’ At an open-air theatre in Genoa, he was fixated by ‘the most beautiful woman I have ever seen’ and ‘contemplated her as one drinks a wine of exquisite taste’.9
In 1848 Quinet urged the Italians ‘not to resurrect a nation but TO CREATE ONE’. An Italian nation had to end Austrian domination but could not, as some Italians advised, found one around the reactionary leadership of the Papal States. Although the French had themselves occupied Italy, they should be trusted to liberate it.10 In 1859–60 Italy was duly liberated and united by a French army which, in alliance with Piedmont, drove out the Austrians from Lombardy and triggered a national movement which ultimately deprived the pope of the Papal States and toppled the Bourbons of Naples. At the beginning of the campaign Napoleon III told his troops that as they passed the former battlefields of Lodi and Marengo they would be ‘marching on a sacred road, amid glorious memories’. Liberating the Italians was what the French were good at, and they had little fear that a united Italian nation would turn its force against them. Hippolyte Taine, travelling in Italy in 1864, called it ‘a backward France, like a younger sister who is growing up and closer to its elder sister’.11 Under French patronage, Italy was receiving the gift of modern civilization from the French seventy years after their Revolution, transforming ‘a feudal people into a modern people’, the educated and commercial bourgeoisie on the side of progress, the old nobles and the clergy on the other, fighting for the loyalty of the peasantry. The new Italian state was creating a new army, a national guard, a new system of justice, and above all schools to unite and enlighten the population, with old rivalries between cities and provinces dissolving in the solvent of fraternity. The main area of resistance to change, the former Kingdom of Naples, where monks had been thrown out of their monasteries, where the feudal nobility sulked behind closed doors and where peasants took to the hills as brigands to avoid conscription into the new army, was just like an Italian Vendée, but would soon be brought under control.12
The relationship of the French with Germany was never so easy. While for Stendhal, crossing the Alps to Milan was joy, for Madame de Staël, crossing the Rhine on a cloudy and cold day in 1803, anxious about her small children in tow, was a penance.13 Admittedly, she was going into exile at the command of Napoleon, but Germany was always much stranger to the French visitor than Italy, and the French were much less able to patronize it. Although the French were inclined to use the same rhetoric of bringing liberty and civilization to Germany as they were to the Italians, Germans promptly took it up to use as a weapon against the French, at the service of the German nation and German culture.
Despite her reluctance to go to Germany, in 1813 Madame de Staël published On Germany, the single most influential account of Germany for the French reader in the first half of the nineteenth century. Germany, she explained, was a young civilization, much of it still buried under forests and uninhabited. Whereas France and Italy were marked by the Roman Empire, Germany was shaped by the Middle Ages: it was Gothic, feudal, chivalrous. The ‘spirit of chivalry’ had been destroyed in France by Richelieu and replaced by a ‘spirit of vanity’ which sought to ruin the reputations of women; in Germany, it remained, and the honour of women was safe. The persistence of feudalism meant that ‘the separation of classes was more pronounced in Germany than elsewhere’, but this went along with the ‘pre-eminence of the military state’ and habits of obedience to government. The great difference between France and Germany was thus liberty. ‘The love of liberty has not developed among the Germans,’ said Madame de Staël. ‘They have not learned how dear it is either by enjoying it, or by having to do without it.’ This did not mean that there was no intellectual life in Germany. On the contrary, there was, but the thinking of intellectuals was not directed to calling into question the feudal or militaristic political system, rather it was confined to philosophical speculation and literary creation. There was no German Voltaire or Rousseau, but there was Kant, and there were Goethe and Schiller. She quoted one German writer to the effect that ‘the English had the empire of the sea, the French the empire of the land and the Germans the empire of the air’.14
Like Italy, the Germany that Madame de Staël knew was divided up into a multitude of small states, controlled by secular or ecclesiastical rulers, or cities enjoying a great deal of autonomy. This meant that just as there was little love of liberty, there was little love of the fatherland. Germans were divided among themselves, belonging not only to different states but to different religions, and these divisions were often exacerbated by foreign powers becoming mixed up in German affairs. ‘This division of Germany, fatal for its political strength,’ she explained, ‘is very conducive to all kinds of experiments that genius or imagination might attempt.’ Because there was no capital city where society congregated, like Paris, the pressure to conform to a certain accepted taste was much less powerful. ‘Most writers and thinkers work in solitude, or surrounded only by a small circle that they dominate.’ In that way, though Germany lacked national strength, it was a hive of cultural activity.15
Madame de Staël’s work may have been influential, but it did not agree with the views of Napoleon, whose police minister had the first edition of the work seized in 1810. The explanation given was that the French had no cause to look for models elsewhere and that the book was thus anti-French. Napoleon may have had a point: there is no mention in On Germany of the country’s transformation under French authority after his military victories: the absorption of a mass of free cities and prince-bishoprics into secular states such as Prussia and Bavaria in 1803, the alliance of sixteen German states of western and southern Germany in the Confederation of the Rhine in July 1806, or the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire the following month, as the Austrian emperor realized he had no more authority over the German states. Napoleon may well have taken the view that he had brought liberty and civilization to the feudal, church-encrusted, small-state Germany that Madame de Staël described but which he was busily modernizing. He might also have taken offence at her suggestion that at least in Germany writers were free to write and women were treated with dignity, neither of which, she would claim, obtained in Napoleon’s France.
Whereas the French could claim to be patrons of liberty in Italy after the restoration of 1814–15, the liberty that was appropriated by the Germans in 1813 was turned against French power in an attempt to found a free and united people. The restoration of 1814–15 reimposed Austrian power in Germany through thirty states gathered in the German Confederation, but the dream of a free united Germany now haunted the German educated class. Edgar Quinet, who studied at Heidelberg in 1826–8, noted in 1831 that the Germany of Madame de Staël, ‘a country of ecstasy, a continuous dream… no centre anywhere, no ties, no ambition, no public spirit, no national strength’, was now gone. While the invasion of 1814 had induced a desire for peace and reconciliation in France, in Germany it had created ‘the love and taste for political action’. Austria, traditional and Catholic, based on the Danube and Italy, had lost influence to Prussia, which prided itself on helping defeat Napoleon at Waterloo and was troubled by an ‘irritable and angry nationalism’. The French Revolution of 1830 had echoes in certain German states which were forced to concede constitutional government, but more significant was a growing desire for the ‘territorial unity of the German nation’. The Prussian government had not itself conceded a constitution but the ‘demagogic party’ had made a tacit agreement with the government ‘to postpone liberty, and together augment the fortune of Frederick [the Great]’. Most worrying of all for France, popular nationalism criticized the Prussian government for not having taken Alsace and Lorraine, lost to France in 1648, back again in 1815.16
Earlier than most Frenchmen, Quinet spotted that the Germans, far from being able to sponsor liberty and national sentiment in their own country, would use liberty and nationalism to challenge France for great-power status in Europe. France itself felt constrained by the limits imposed on it by the Treaty of Vienna, and its subordination to British, Russian and Austrian power. Then, in 1840, during the diplomatic crisis in the Near East, demands arose in France for a recovery of the Rhine frontier lost in 1815 and Prussia mobilized its troops on the Rhine, which it had been granted as a barrier to French expansion in 1815. France suffered another diplomatic defeat, and Quinet ranted, ‘The Revolution surrendered its sword in 1815; it was thought that she would take it up again in 1830, but it was not so.’ Now, in 1840, the monarchy had blustered but been humiliated. The only chance, in Quinet’s view, was for France to become a republic, and on that basis assert its national strength against Germany.17
Despite Quinet, there was an enduring sense in France that the Germany of Madame de Staël was not dead, that it was still a country of small states and cosmopolitan ideas. The journalist Edmond About wrote in 1860 that the German philosophy of Kant and Hegel was taught in French schools, that Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Heine were admired writers, that French scientists prided themselves on corresponding with Liebig or Graefe, that Haydn, Gluck, Mozart and Beethoven were considered gods of music. Wagner’s Tannhäuser was booed three performances in a row when it was staged in Paris in March 1861, but less because Wagner was German than because it was felt to be imposed on the Paris Opéra by the wife of the Austrian ambassador, Princess Metternich; if there was a political dimension, it was felt that this was revenge for Austria’s defeat in Italy. Edmond About had no objections to German unification under Prussia, and indeed saw it as a triumph of ‘religious reformation, commercial progress and constitutional liberalism’ over Catholic, feudal, divine-right Austria. The only provisos were that Prussia should itself choose constitutional government over divine-right monarchy, and that it should not claim French territory, in particular Alsace-Lorraine. ‘We keep what belongs to us,’ he said, ‘we ask no more.’18 Unfortunately for the French, Germany under Bismarck, who became Prussian minister-president in 1862, was united by ‘blood and iron’, a series of wars against Denmark in 1864, against Austria in 1866 and, finally to eliminate French influence in south Germany and to recover Alsace-Lorraine, against France in 1870. Liberty and culture were sacrificed to despotism and militarism. ‘Germany was my mistress,’ recalled Renan in 1871. ‘Think how much I suffered when I saw the nation that taught me idealism forsake all ideals, when the fatherland of Kant, Fichte, Herder and Goethe decided to pursue only the goal of an exclusive nationalism… A nation that confines itself to pure self-interest has no further universal role.’19
France, of course, was locked in a struggle for European supremacy with Great Britain long before it had to worry about Germany. Peace almost broke out between France and Britain in 1800, after Bonaparte came to power, and survived for just over a year under the Peace of Amiens in 1802, but mutual suspicion, rivalry, fears for security and the sense that Europe was not big enough for both powers led to the resumption of war in 1803.
With war came propaganda. Napoleon hired a royalist journalist who had rallied to the new regime, Joseph Fiévée, to cross the Channel and write some Letters from England which would blow away the pro-British sentiments that persisted in some liberal circles and among royalist émigrés who had found refuge in England during the excesses of the French Revolution. Fiévée was keen to use England as a foil to exalt French liberty and French civilization. England was not free because there was no representative government, so corrupt was the system. There were three kinds of elections, ‘those that are bought, those that are given, and those that are contested’. The people thought they were sovereign, but only because they were plied with free drink at election time. As for civilization, England was not civilized because money tarnished everything. While France had a warrior nobility, a younger son of an English noble could trade without losing status. The only criterion of status was money: honour was ‘a French idea that had never fully been adopted into English customs’. Englishmen were not civilized because they disliked the company of women. They preferred to drink on their own after dinner, while their wives yawned upstairs in the drawing room. Worst of all, Fiévée unearthed the myth that an Englishman was entitled to put a rope around his wife’s neck and take her to market to sell her.20
The victory of Great Britain in 1815 obliged the French to take the military and naval power of their rival seriously, but observers were quick to point to the price that had to be paid in terms of a Promethean work ethic. The economist Jean-Baptiste Say explained how Britain’s sea-power had enabled it to confiscate the trade of other countries and establish a virtual commercial monopoly, while its wealth enabled it to command vast amounts of credit to supply not only its own armies but those of its allies. On the other hand to create this wealth the British were condemned to ceaseless work. ‘There are no cafés filled with the idle from morning to night, and promenades are deserted every day except Sunday… those who slow down in the slightest are promptly ruined,’ and whereas ‘the greatest shame in France is to lack courage, in England it is to lack money’.21 Stendhal, visiting London in 1821, joked that the ceaseless work to which the English were condemned ‘avenges us for Waterloo’. Though he was enthralled to see Kean playing Othello at Covent Garden he said that most English people were obsessed by the fear of wasting time and reluctant to read anything not related to making money. In this sense the English were ‘the most obtuse, the most barbarous people in the world’.22
Long before Marx and Engels, French visitors were aware that British wealth and power was derived not only from hard work but from the exploitation of one class by another sharpened by the industrial revolution.23 Describing a visit in 1810, Louis Simond reported that while the gun-makers of Birmingham were comfortably off, living in small three-bedroomed houses, Scottish cotton-workers suffered ‘extraordinary distress’, driven off the land by sheep-farming and earning a quarter of what they did twenty years before, while prices had doubled.24 Travelling in Britain in the early 1820s, Édouard de Montulé noted that while Liverpool was booming like an American town, in Manchester there were ‘a hundred thousand slaves of need, who breathe fetid air all the year round’.25 French observers were often keen to enter into dialogue with British experts on the social question. In 1835 Tocqueville debated with Nassau Senior whether the livelihood of the poor had been sacrificed to the wealth of the rich, with Senior defending the wages of industrial workers as adequate and Tocqueville arguing that ‘in England the rich have gradually monopolised almost all the advantages that society bestows upon mankind’.26 In 1843 the French political economist Léon Faucher visited the East End of London with the public health reformer Dr Southwood Smith and found that the French Huguenot weavers of Spitalfields were ‘in some ways the moral aristocracy of the area’ but that the Irish weavers of Bethnal Green had a child-labour market, ‘something not yet seen in a civilized country’.27 In 1840 the feminist and utopian socialist Flora Tristan was particularly struck by the young prostitutes on the Waterloo Road, and calculated that 80,000–100,000 girls were driven by poverty to live by prostitution in London.28 Stendhal, adrift in London in 1821 with a couple of Frenchmen, took a rather different view, visiting prostitutes on the Westminster Bridge Road.29
If working-class poverty and exploitation struck French visitors at one end of the social spectrum, at the other they were impressed by the dominance of the aristocracy, both socially and in political terms. They were keen to draw a distinction between Britain as an aristocracy and France, following the French Revolution which had abolished the corporate privileges of the French nobility and sold much of its land, as a fundamentally democratic society. Baron d’Haussez, a Norman noble who had been navy minister in 1829 but was forced to flee to England after the July Revolution, argued that primogeniture and entails, now unknown in France, ensured the continuity of large landed fortunes, and that these were translated into aristocratic influence and corruption which ensured that the landed classes controlled not only the House of Lords but the Commons too.30 Léon Faucher observed that the Reform Bill of 1832 had made little difference, since the middle class aped the aristocracy and gentry rather than acting as a revolutionary class, as it had in France in 1789, and that 1832 witnessed a compromise between ‘the lower classes, the middle class and a part of the aristocracy’.31
What French observers were not able to fathom, however, given the gross inequalities of British society and the aristocratic nature of its constitution, was why Britain was not more vulnerable to revolution than France. Part of the answer may have lain in the British relationship with sport, something that aroused some confusion in the French. Flora Tristan, for example, noted that social hierarchy was upheld even at the races, with the queen, aristocracy and lower classes all in their rightful places. She went as far as to suggest that whereas in France women were the most honoured creatures, in England it was the horse.32 What she failed to register, however, was that horse-racing was a sport that brought together all levels of British society in a common spectacle. The other British sport that obsessed the French was one unknown in France: boxing. While the upper classes settled differences among themselves with the sword or pistol, an English gentleman who was offended by a man of the people would resort to fisticuffs, so that boxing for Édouard de Montulé was a means to ‘re-establish social equilibrium’.33 The socialist Louis Blanc, in exile in England under the Second Empire, and remarking that it ‘sweated aristocracy from every pore’, attended a boxing match in December 1862 between the American champion John Heenan and the English champion Tom Sayers. He was appalled that men could fight only for money, whether prize money or bets, and that the public included MPs and ministers of the Church, so that the fight brought together ‘the vices of the upper class and the vices of the lower class’. The social significance of the fact that boxing was ‘a passion that has invaded all classes’ and that a colonel told him that he preferred boxing to the opera, however, seemed to pass him by.34
In the spring of 1791, on leave from the French army, Chateaubriand sailed to the United States, landing at Baltimore and visiting Philadelphia, New York, Albany and Niagara Falls before returning to France that winter. On the strength of his acquaintance with the Mohawk country in 1801 he published his novel Atala, about an Indian girl of that name, portrayed as a noble savage, living in the virgin forests of the New World. The following year he published René, the story of a melancholy Frenchman who takes a ship for the French colony of Louisiana in 1725, hears the story of Atala from an old Indian, Chactas, and dies fighting for the Natchez tribe of Louisiana against the French. These hugely popular works conveyed an image of America still in a state of nature, beloved of Romantics fleeing the modern world. Yet they were pure invention. Chateaubriand never travelled down the Mississippi, and the Natchez had long been dispersed by French settlers and soldiers.35
Louisiana itself, a vast area of land west of the Mississippi, stretching west to the Rockies and north to Canada, had been ceded by France to Spain in 1763 in return for Spain’s part in the Seven Years War against the British. Napoleon recovered it from Spain in 1800, hoping to restore France’s colonial empire, but when he realized that he would be unable to defend it he sold it in 1803 to the Americans, 838,000 square miles for 60 million francs, in order to fund the war against Britain.36 Thomas Jefferson, the American president, offered the governorship of Louisiana to his old friend and comrade in the struggle for American independence, Lafayette, but Lafayette turned down the offer, saying that while liberty was safe in America, it was threatened in a Europe under Napoleonic despotism, and it was his duty to remain in the Old World to work for its restoration.37
America, for the French, was thus on one hand the virgin forests peopled by noble savages of Chateaubriand, and on the other the land of liberty to which they themselves, and especially Lafayette, had contributed. America was the model of the free government they craved but had been unable to realize as the Revolution lurched from Robespierre’s Terror to Napoleon’s despotism. Jefferson’s message to Lafayette was always that free institutions needed long maturing and that Lafayette’s sudden switch in the Hundred Days to hope for a ‘national insurrection’ under Napoleon to restore the gains of the Revolution was folly. He had advised Lafayette to compromise with the king to secure constitutional monarchy in 1789 and he proposed the same in 1815. As if to justify French views of liberty, Lafayette constantly reminded Jefferson that slavery in the Southern states, which was spreading out to new states formed after the Louisiana Purchase, such as Missouri, was a ‘wide blot on American philanthropy… ever thrown in my face when I indulge my patriotism’.38
In 1824–5 Lafayette toured the United States at the invitation of President Monroe. He visited twenty-four states in twelve months, including the tomb of Washington at Mount Vernon on the Potomac and the battlefield of Yorktown, and embraced his old friend Jefferson at Montebello. There he was concerned that like all planters in Virginia Jefferson farmed his vast property with slave labour. In the deep South he was also concerned about treaties being forced on the Indians obliging them to withdraw west across the Mississippi, which did not compare with the crimes of violence used by the British against their Asian subjects, but would probably nevertheless result in their destruction. All this, however, was forgotten at the final banquet offered to him in Washington, when Lafayette announced how happy he was ‘to see the American people daily more attached to the liberal institutions which they have made such a success, while in Europe they were touched by a withering hand’.39
Matters of American democracy, the treatment of Indians and slavery were thus not new issues when Tocqueville set sail for the United States with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, in 1831. Aged only twenty-five, he had decided against taking an oath to the July Monarchy required of him as a young magistrate, but secured a commission to study the American prison system. He obtained a letter of introduction from Chateaubriand, to whom he was distantly related, while Beaumont asked for one from Lafayette, whom Tocqueville considered a ‘vain and dangerous demagogue’.40 Tocqueville had been seduced by the idea of the inexorable rise of democracy thanks to Guizot’s lectures on civilization in Europe which he had attended in 1829–30, and was keen to see what must come to Europe working in the democratic laboratory of the United States. He learned English from an American girl on the ship that sailed from Le Havre and arrived in New York on 14 April 1831. He was immediately impressed that ‘the whole of society seems to have melted into a middle class. No one seems to have the elegant manners and the refined courtesy of the high classes in Europe… But at the same time no one is what in France one might call ill-bred.’41
This impression was elaborated in the first volume of Democracy in America, published in 1835, as the ‘equality of conditions’ explained on the one hand by the abolition of the English law of primogeniture in favour of equal inheritance by the American revolutionaries, and on the other by the general level of education enjoyed by all American citizens.42 This equality of conditions helped to sustain democracy as a political principle, by which he meant the sovereignty of the people. But in France the sovereignty of the people had been used in turn to justify popular revolution and Napoleonic despotism. In Boston the Reverend Jared Sparks, a Unitarian minister and newspaper editor, provided Tocqueville with an account of the workings of self-government in Massachusetts. Key to maintaining free government, Tocqueville realized, were free institutions such as administrative decentralization and autonomous town councils, a powerful judiciary and jury system, associations dedicated to civic initiatives and a free press, together with sentiments which underpinned liberty such as the desire to participate in political life, a religious spirit and a willingness of individuals to help each other out. It was not a case of the French copying American laws and morals, but unless they cultivated free institutions and habits they would find themselves under ‘an equal tyranny for all’.43
Tocqueville and Beaumont, however, did not sidestep the two issues that made the American model less glorious than it might be. They visited Albany and Utica in the Mohawk valley, but did not find the noble savages of Chateaubriand, only Indians wearing dirty linen and drunk on liquor, taking, as Beaumont wrote, ‘but the vices of civilization and the rags of Europe’.44 In Democracy in America, Tocqueville chronicled the expulsion of Indian tribes beyond the Mississippi, blaming the greed of white settlers and the tyranny of state legislatures in the South, describing the silent passage of the Mississippi by a troop of Choctaws, dragging with them their children, their sick and their aged.45 Likewise he described the slavery of the South which sustained the only aristocracy that survived in the country, an evil not only for the slaves but for the masters too. Thus on the north bank of the Ohio river the population of the state of Ohio, without slaves, was industrious and prosperous, building roads, canals and factories, while on the south bank, in Kentucky, where slavery existed, the white man ‘living in idle ease, had the habits of idle men… he is less interested in money than in excitement and pleasure, hunting and war are his delights.’46 Southerners, he found, did not talk to outsiders about slavery, but to his mind it was condemned to disappear, attacked by both political economy and religion, and if it were not abolished legally a black revolution would destroy it by force. Beaumont tackled the question head-on in his 1835 novel Marie ou l’esclavage. Ludovic, a French traveller like himself, meets a beautiful girl in Baltimore, who rejects his love. He discovers that she and her brother George have been ‘tainted by a drop of black blood’ and live in fear of being exposed. ‘America is the classic soil of equality,’ reflects Ludovic, ‘but no European country has so much inequality.’ George is thrown out of a New York theatre as a black man and dies in the Carolinas defending Indian tribesmen who have been driven out by land-hungry Southern states. Marie and Ludovic find solace in the virgin forests of Saginaw, on the banks of the Great Lakes, where she too dies. Twenty-five years before the American Civil War Tocqueville and Beaumont acquainted the French public with the deep contradictions of American democracy.47
The most likely contact an ordinary Frenchman had with Russia in the early nineteenth century was as one of Napoleon’s multinational army of 600,000 which invaded Russia in June 1812. Napoleon’s forces entered Moscow in September, abandoning it to pillage and fire, but the most gruelling experience was the retreat from Moscow and the crossing of the River Beresina on 27–28 November 1812, under fire from Russian batteries, which left terrible carnage. But just as the French made up only a part of an army composed of Italians, Poles and Germans, so some French soldiers were serving not the French emperor but the Russian tsar. The Duc de Richelieu, who emigrated during the Revolution, fought for Catherine the Great against the Turks in 1789–92 and then served Tsar Alexander in preference to Napoleon. His younger cousin, the Comte de Rochechouart, also had a commission in the Russian army, and was appointed aide-de-camp to Tsar Alexander in 1810. Having fought against the Turks until 1812 he was with the Don Cossacks on the Beresina, witnessing the carnage, and at the town of Studianska, mostly burned by the French, he occupied a room over the door of which was written the name of his childhood friend, the Baron de Mortemart. The same room, he reflected, ‘had been occupied by a Mortemart, aide-de-camp to the Emperor of the French, and then by a Rochechouart, aide-de-camp to the Emperor of Russia’.48
The relationship of French and Russians was at best ambiguous. Were the Russians to be regarded as allies or enemies, as liberators or oppressors, as Europeans or Asians? The Comte de Rochechouart was with Tsar Alexander, the Prussian king and the Austrian generalissimo Prince Schwarzenberg for their victory parade in Paris on 31 May 1814, the night before they decided not to negotiate with Napoleon but to guarantee the integrity of France. During the parade Rochechouart recalled that ‘a young woman contrived – how I do not know – to raise herself onto the stirrups of the Tsar, and shouted frantically in his ear, Vive l’Empereur Alexandre!’49 On the other hand the historian Lavisse, born in 1842, often heard his grandmother, a native of Picardy, talk of ‘the time of the enemy, escapes into the woods where hiding places had been made ready, of the joy of victories, the rout of Waterloo, and of the arrival of the Cossacks who occupied the country in 1815’.50
The victories of 1814–15 against Napoleon made Russia, as much as Great Britain, the European great power to be reckoned with. Russians occupied large areas of north-west France until 1818. The Russian Empire dominated Europe from St Petersburg, from Poland, of which the tsar was now king, and from Odessa, from which it threatened the Mediterranean. Édouard de Montulé, who visited Russia and published his account of it in 1825, observed that liberty was enjoyed only by serf-owning Russian nobles who defended serfdom by saying that without it the land would remain untilled and packed insubordinate serfs off to serve in the army for decades. And yet, he thought, ‘despite the disasters they have experienced, Russians and French have not contracted a national hatred for each other’. Much of this he attributed to the fact that educated Russians spoke French and cultivated French manners and that Russian noblewomen were charming and better educated than their French counterparts.51
The most influential account of Russia in this period was written by the Marquis Astolf de Custine, whose Russia in 1839 was published in 1843. By the age of four he had lost both his father, French ambassador in Berlin, and his grandfather, a general who had surrendered the city of Mainz to the Prussians in 1793, during the Terror, and his own reputation was gravely affected by a homosexual scandal in 1824. Soon after the publication of Democracy in America he met Alexis de Tocqueville at Madame Récamier’s salon and, envious of the achievements of a man fifteen years his junior, decided to do for Russia what Tocqueville had done for America.52
There was much about Russia that did not seem strange to Custine. The world of the Russian nobility was that of the French nobility before the Revolution. At Yaroslavl, north of Moscow, he found that the wife of the governor had been brought up by a French governess who had followed the Polignac family into exile in Russia during the Revolution. ‘The noble simplicity of her bearing reminded me’, he wrote, ‘of the manners of the old people I knew when I was a child. The traditions of the court and high society were what was most seductive about a time when our social superiority was uncon-tested.’53 But while the pre-eminence of the French nobility had been destroyed by the Revolution, in Russia it had never existed. Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks established a military and bureaucratic hierarchy which recognized not birth but only service to the state as a criterion of nobility. Russia, like France, ‘lacked a social hierarchy’ in the sense of a nobility with its own independent power-base. However, ‘without aristocracy there can only be tyranny in monarchies, as in democracies’.54 Where Tocqueville warned of the danger of the tyranny of the majority in democracies, Custine warned of the danger of autocracy in monarchies. For Custine ‘Russian government was camp discipline substituted for the order of the city, the state of siege become the normal state of society.’55
The lack of an independent nobility in Russia was accompanied by the absence of an independent Church. Custine himself observed that while the Catholic Church was generally a bastion of liberty in western European states, the Orthodox Church prevailing in Russia after the schism had fallen into the hands of the state and thus become just another instrument to enslave the Russian people. All this had consequences for the balance of power in Europe and a forthcoming struggle between civilized Europe and backward Russia. Custine feared that so-called civilized Europe was becoming weakened by democracy which replaced a military aristocracy by self-serving politicians and would not be able to resist a Russia which decided to test its strength. ‘One day the sleeping giant will raise itself and force will put an end to the reign of words. In vain, then, will defeated democracy summon the old aristocracy to defend liberty. The weapon, taken up too late by hands too long inactive, will be powerless.’ Scions of old noble families, excluded from power by the Revolution, would no longer be able to help.56
There was a common perception in France that Russia was an autocratic and arbitrary power, very different from Europe apart from St Petersburg but a real military threat. Alexandre Dumas had an enduring fascination for the noble officers of the Guard, many of whom had imbibed constitutional ideas while frequenting liberal circles in France in 1814–18, and who seized the opportunity of the death of Alexander in December 1825 to impose a constitution and civil code in Russia. The so-called Decembrist revolt was put down with great severity by Nicholas I, and over a hundred officers were sentenced variously to death, forced labour or exile in Siberia. Informed of this by a fencing master who had been in Russia, Dumas published a novel about it, Memoirs of a Master-at-Arms, in 1840. It concentrated on the suffering of one of the noble officers, and of his French wife who made the journey to Siberia through packs of wolves to share his exile.57 The publication came to the attention of Nicholas, and Dumas was denied entry into Russia during the lifetime of the tsar. Nicholas died in 1855 during the Crimean war, when France and Great Britain successfully challenged the ambitions of Russia to undermine the Ottoman Empire from the Danube and the Balkans to the Caucasus, and precipitated a crisis in the autocratic, militaristic state.
In 1858–9, after peace returned, both Dumas and the poet and critic Théophile Gautier undertook tours of Russia. Dumas returned to the question of the Decembrist revolt, and quoted the words of the brother of one of the rebels, interrogated by the tsar: ‘the emperor has complete power of life and death, and the people has no law against him.’ ‘His thirty-year reign was a continuous watch,’ said Dumas, ‘which not only gave the signal that revolutions were approaching, but kept itself at the ready to smother them, whether at home or abroad.’ Dumas reported that hearing of Russia’s imminent defeat Nicholas took poison. He wrote a study of serfdom in Russia, relating that like petty tsars lords made serfs work from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. on their lands, three days a week, thought nothing of giving them a hundred lashes and sent recalcitrant serfs off to the army for twenty-five years. Although Dumas was not present to witness the effects of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, he announced that ‘the Emperor Alexander has signed one of the greatest and most humane acts ever accomplished by a sovereign. He has restored liberty to twenty-three million people.’58
The account of Gautier, who went to Russia to prepare a volume on the treasures of Russian art, which never materialized, was less backward-looking. Like Custine, he found that there was much that was European about Russia. St Peterburg was ‘a northern Venice’. Alexander II, whom he espied at the Winter Palace, was quite unlike his father, with ‘an expression of majestic firmness lit up from time to time by a graceful smile’. Shakespeare was playing at the theatre with the black American actor Ira Aldridge playing Othello and Lear. In some sense the influence of Europe was deleterious. There was no Russian school of painting, and the most famous modern Russian canvas, The Last Days of Pompeii, was by Karl Briullov, who trained in Italy. Observing that the Kremlin was constantly being repainted, Gautier observed that ‘like people who are still naive, the Russians like what is new, or at least seems so.’ Otherwise Russian art was the Byzantine art of the Orthodox Church, ‘a hieratic, priestly, changeless art, where nothing is left to the fantasy or originality of the artist. Its formulae are as rigid as dogma. In this school there is neither progress, nor decadence, nor even period.’ Even then, reflected Gautier, the capital of Byzantine art was not Moscow but Mount Athos.59
The Orient exercised a fascination over the French. Napoleon Bonaparte, pursuing his dream of becoming a new Alexander the Great, invaded Egypt in 1798, defeated the local Mameluke forces at the battle of the Pyramids on 21 July and entered Cairo in triumph. Unfortunately the blow that he hoped to deliver to British and Russian power by taking control of Egypt served only to provoke his rivals into a second coalition against France. Nelson attacked and sank the French fleet in Aboukir Bay on 1 August, the Ottoman Turks and Russians declared war and the Russian fleet entered the Mediterranean. Bonaparte moved north with his army to conquer Syria, but was defeated at Acre by the Turks and a British force under Sir Sidney Smith. The French fell back on Egypt and Bonaparte left almost at once to seize power in France. Under the Treaty of Amiens in 1802 Egypt was evacuated by both British and French.60
The French failed to found an empire in Egypt but the army of archaeologists, antiquarians, historians and scientists who took part in Bonaparte’s expedition presented their findings in a twenty-three-volume Description de l’Égypte, published between 1809 and 1828. Meanwhile, driven by curiosity rather than the thirst to conquer, French writers, poets and artists regularly undertook a journey to the Orient, by which they generally meant that part of the Mediterranean, from Greece and the Balkans to Constantinople, Syria and Lebanon, and to Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria, which was still in the hands of the Ottoman Turks or, more usually, their vassals. They were not always in search of the same things, but in different ways the Orient was always a mirror which reflected what was individual about France and the French identity.
Chateaubriand, having broken with Napoleon and forfeited his diplomatic post in Rome, set off from France in July 1806, sailing from Venice to the Peloponnese and Constantinople, returning via Egypt and Tunis, to see the ruins of Carthage, to Spain and France in May 1807. He was bitterly hostile to the Turkish presence in Europe, and searched in Greece for the relics of Ancient Greek liberty and patriotism, and in Constantinople for the sophistication of the Byzantine Empire, under the yoke imposed by the Turks. The goal of his journey was Jerusalem, which he visited as a pilgrim and as a crusader, recounting the epic of the crusaders’ recovery of the tomb of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem in 1099, which they held on to for eighty-eight years. At stake, he said, was the question of ‘which would triumph on earth, a religion that was the enemy of civilization, promoting ignorance, despotism and slavery, or a religion that had revived the genius of learned antiquity among modern peoples and abolished servitude’. Of the persecution of the Christian monks who guarded the tomb of Jesus Christ he used the term ‘Oriental despotism’.61
Twenty-five years later, in 1832, Alphonse de Lamartine, having resigned from the diplomatic service in opposition to the Revolution of 1830, hired a brig and sailed off with his wife and daughter less, as he put it, like Chateaubriand’s pilgrim and crusader, more as a ‘poet and philosopher’. Greece was now liberated but he was not impressed by the country as it descended into civil war, seeing it as ‘the shroud of a people’.62 What struck him above all was his first encounter with the Lebanon, approached from the sea.
Never did the sight of mountains impress me so much. The Lebanon has a character that I have not witnessed either in the Alps or in the Taurus. It is the combination of the imposing sublimeness of the lines and peaks with the grace of detail and variety of colour. Like its name it is a solemn mountain: the Alps under an Asian sky.63
Lamartine’s view of Jerusalem was completely different from that of Chateaubriand. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre had burned down in 1808 and been rebuilt by the Greek Orthodox Church, but control was contested by the Catholic Church and in the light of their squabbles Lamartine saw the Muslims as ‘the only tolerant people’. At Constantinople he reflected that, far from being despotic and cruel, the Turks were ‘a people of philosophers. They draw everything from nature, they relate everything to God.’ His concern was that politically the Ottoman Empire was crumbling. He foresaw that a congress of European powers might have to divide up the Empire into a series of protectorates, but he was concerned that the role of the Turkish people should be preserved. ‘They are a people of patriarchs, of meditators, of worshippers, of philosophers,’ he said, ‘and when God speaks for them, they are a people of heroes and martyrs.’64
In fact the main threat to the Ottoman Empire was the viceroy of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, who owed allegiance to the Ottoman sultan but wanted to establish himself as an independent, hereditary ruler of Egypt, and secure a hereditary governorship of Syria for his son Ibrahim. In July 1839 he defeated the sultan’s forces and forced the Ottoman fleet to surrender. In some circles Mehemet was vaunted as the creation of Mathieu de Lesseps, sent as consul to Egypt by Talleyrand after 1798 to select someone from the Egyptian army who could bring order to the delta.65 Now the French government under Adolphe Thiers decided to back the cause of Mehemet Ali against the sultan in order to acquire an influence in the region by proxy. Unfortunately the British were unwilling to countenance either the challenge of France’s power or the break-up of the Ottoman Empire that would go with it. They marshalled Prussia, Russia and Austria into a London agreement (15 July 1840) which backed the sultan and gave Mehemet Ali twenty days to accept a hereditary governorship of Egypt as the limit of his ambitions. On 11 September the British made their point by bombarding Beirut and Alexandria. Thiers proposed to reject the treaty and mobilize nearly 100,000 men for war if that was necessary. The nationalist press joined the fray, arguing that this was the moment to throw off the restrictions imposed on France by the treaties of 1815 and to recover its rank among European powers.66 At the last moment, however, the French blinked. King Louis-Philippe was not prepared to risk war and Thiers resigned, to be replaced by his arch-rival François Guizot, French ambassador in London, who smoothed over the situation. France’s dream of an empire in Egypt was again in tatters.67
The only part of the Ottoman Empire in which France was able to build an empire was Algeria, where its ambitions were not contested by other European powers. Algiers had been seized by French forces in 1830, the last gasp of the Bourbon monarchy before it fell, and was inherited by the July Monarchy as something of a poisoned chalice. In 1834 the patriotic press was quick to equate brutal military measures used to quell insurrection in Paris and Lyon with military measures used to quell resistance by Arab forces in Algeria.68 In fact French aggression provoked the emergence of an Algerian leader, Abd-el-Kader, who began to impose a centralized state on the disparate tribal aristocracies, with the ability to raise taxes and troops, and forced the French back to enclaves around Algiers and Oran in 1837. However, a lobby in favour of the conquest of Algeria and its colonization by well-armed settlers gained strength. In 1840 General Bugeaud was appointed governor-general of Algeria by Thiers who, perhaps fearing that the Egyptian adventure might not come off, argued that rather than fighting each other all European powers were now moving in on ‘barbarian peoples’, the British in China, the Russians in the Caucasus.69 After a visit to Algeria in 1841 Tocqueville argued that if France did not hang on to Algeria other powers would move in and France would descend to the second rank of powers, leaving European affairs to be decided by others. The regime of Abd-el-Kader, whom he described as ‘a kind of Muslim Cromwell’, was destroyed by the military force of General Bugeaud, but for lasting domination this had to be backed up by French settlers colonizing the region, grouped in fortified villages.70
While French forces were battling with Abd-el-Kader in Algeria, unable to force his surrender until 1846, French travellers continued to visit the Orient, but at the other end of the Mediterranean, which continued to exercise a historic or aesthetic fascination even though France had no military power there. Those who followed in the path of pilgrims or crusaders to Jerusalem after 1840 were generally more sceptical than their predecessors. Many were less impressed by the natural beauty of the Orient, like Lamartine, than aware of the modernization it was undergoing in response to European challenges. At the same time what was increasingly explicit was the Orient as a site for exotic and erotic fantasies, the Orient of the Arabian Nights.
In January 1843 the poet Gérard de Nerval, recovering from a nervous breakdown, set sail from Marseille to Alexandria, progressing to Beirut and Constantinople. Rather than regarding Arabs as barbarian, he confessed that ‘I am the barbarian, a coarse son of the North.’ In Europe, he said, where modernization meant that physical force was less important, ‘women have become too strong’. He thus came to Cairo to indulge his fantasies about Oriental women, declaring, ‘I am right in the middle of the Arabian Nights.’ However, he soon came face to face with the inaccessibility of Muslim women behind the veil and his travelling companion Soliman-Aga explained that while Muslim men protected their women, European women were anybody’s. Nerval consoled himself with the thought that even behind the veil ‘a few days have taught me that a woman who senses that she is being looked at allows herself to be glimpsed, if she is beautiful,’ but he then succumbed to Soliman-Aga’s advice that he should find a wife. He went to the slave market where Nubian women predominated but bought a Javanese girl, the type familiar from Dutch paintings, for 625 francs. He stayed with her in Cairo for eight months, but she felt humiliated to be with a man Muslims considered to be of inferior race, while when he took her to Beirut the Catholic Maronite clergy were scandalized and he therefore left his wife in the care of a Catholic convent. By this time Nerval had spent all the time and money he should have devoted to a trip to the Holy Land, and was obliged to return to Europe.71
As sexual tourists Gustave Flaubert and Maxime du Camp, who left Marseille for Egypt in November 1849, were more fortunate. Having smoked a pipe contemplating the Sphinx and visited the battlefield of the Pyramids they sailed up the Nile to Wadi Halfa where they were entertained by dancing girls who provided pleasures all night long, while objecting to Flaubert’s moustache. At the same time he wrote to his mother, ‘Every morning I read a little Homer in Greek and Maxime reads the Bible. We go to bed at 9 p.m.’72 At Damascus Flaubert was struck by the beauty of boys aged eighteen to twenty and joked that if he were a woman he would come to the city on a pleasure trip. While Nerval did not even get to Jerusalem, Flaubert did but felt himself ‘emptier than an empty barrel. This morning, in the Holy Sepulchre, a dog would have been more moved than I was.’ He was struck by the rivalry of the churches at Jerusalem, Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Copt, a rivalry that he found repeated in the Lebanon between the Maronites and Druzes. ‘If the Druzes burn two of their villages, the Maronites burn two of theirs and sometimes four.’73 And yet the Orient was becoming rapidly westernized. ‘Soon the Orient won’t exist any more,’ he told Théophile Gautier, ‘perhaps we are its last observers… I have seen harems passing in steam-boats.’74
Flaubert returned to the Orient in 1858, this time travelling alone to Tunis and Carthage to research his new novel Salammbô. ‘Bovary has left me disgusted with bourgeois morals for a long time,’ he wrote to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie. ‘For a few years I am going to find a splendid subject far from the modern world with which I am heartily fed up. What I am undertaking is senseless and will have no public recognition. Who cares? You have to write for yourself first. It’s the only chance to do something beautiful.’75 Salammbô portrays a sumptuous, opulent, decadent Carthage built on war and plunder, turned on by its barbaric mercenary forces. Salammbô, daughter of the Carthaginian commander Hamilcar, representing the mysterious and sensual Oriental feminine, is coveted by the Libyan mercenary chief Mâtho, but both are doomed in a war which sets Carthaginians against mercenaries. Published in 1862, Salammbô in fact generated something of an artistic cult, culminating in the empress’s commanding of a Carthaginian ball at court.
Not all French travellers in the Orient were obsessed by sex and violence. Certainly not Ernest Renan, who came to the Holy Land in 1860 to research his Life of Jesus. He was accompanied by his new wife but also by his elder sister, Henriette, who was in a real sense his mentor and companion, nothing if not jealous of his pretty wife. Édouard Lockroy, who had been with Garibaldi in Sicily, engaged by Renan’s publisher Michel Lévy to accompany them, said that everything about Renan suggested the priest while Henriette, ‘more mother than sister’, was really ‘the man of the family’.76 Henriette was as much struck by the squalor of Beirut as by the beauty of the Lebanon, itself tarnished by the sorry sight of women who had survived the civil war between Maronites and Druzes. She observed that ‘the role of the woman in the Orient is exclusively that of the housewife, and in her house seems to be only the first servant,’ although she recognized that they were charming hostesses and that their real status came from being mothers.77 Henriette remained in the Lebanon with her brother as his secretary after his wife returned to France, and died there in September 1861.
French interest in the Orient seemed to be divided between a military and colonial presence in Algeria and a literary and artistic fascination with Egypt and the Lebanon, where the British and Russians conspired to prevent the French from exercising real power. The way out of this impasse was technology, or technology facilitated by diplomacy. Returning to the East in 1864, Renan was met at Alexandria by Ferdinand de Lesseps and for three days shown the works on the Isthmus of Suez, where thousands of Indians and Chinese labourers were at work ‘right in the desert, in the middle of endless plains of sand’. He even took a railway from Suez to Cairo, unable to comprehend how the Egyptians had adapted to the technology. ‘To see these precision machines in the hands of the Arabs is something extraordinary. It is difficult to see why the thing doesn’t derail or blow up.’78
The Suez canal had been a long time in the making. Ferdinand de Lesseps had first come to Egypt, where his father was consul, as a twenty-six-year-old consular student in 1832. He became the friend of Mehemet Ali’s son Saïd, whom he taught to ride, and also became acquainted with the 1798 plan of Napoleon’s engineer Lepère to build a canal across the Isthmus of Suez. Ferdinand was sent by Lamartine, foreign minister in 1848, to be ambassador in Madrid, then Rome, but when Saïd succeeded as viceroy in 1854 de Lesseps secured a firman from him (30 November 1854) authorizing him to form a company to build the canal. The diplomatic outlook seemed good, with France about to enter the Crimean war in alliance with Great Britain, and de Lesseps enlisted the support of Cobden in London to widen backing for the Suez Canal Company. The British, however, had not forgotten 1840 and were perfectly aware of the military and diplomatic significance of the canal. Britain’s long-serving ambassador in Constantinople, Stratford Canning, who had great influence over Ottoman foreign policy, managed to stonewall ratification by the sultan of the viceroy’s firman until by chance Napoleon III met the Ottoman grand vizir in Marseille in 1865. The canal, on which building work had already begun, was completed in 1869 and was opened in the presence of the Empress Eugénie on 17 November that year.79 De Lesseps realized the dream of Napoleon to establish French influence in Egypt. When in 1884 Renan welcomed de Lesseps into the Académie Française he said, ‘You were king. You had all the trappings of sovereignty. I saw your kingdom in the desert.’80 Ironically, eighteen months before, the British had occupied Egypt and driven out the French.