BOOKS
The Creator of the Suez Canal
BY CHARLES WILSON IT is just a century ago since Ferdinand de Lesseps moved the first cubic foot of earth out of the hundred million that were to make way for the Suez Canal. What had been a stretch of desert between the ports of Said and Suez peopled only by a few tribes of nomads was opened up for work and habitation to a quarter of a million people. Egypt, hitherto a mere chattel of Turkey, was offered the chance to exckange long centuries of poverty and barbarism for a better and more Prosperous future.
Historians nowadays fight shy of committing themselves to the recognition of the unique contributions of genius to history. Yet no one who reads Mr. Beatty's biography of de Lesseps* Can doubt that but for him the Canal would not have been built when it was; perhaps it might never have been built at all. Opposition was ubiquitous and hydra-headed. The resolute malevolence of the politicians against humankind and its real Welfare was widespread. Not one of them—British, French, Turkish or Egyptian—comes out of the affair creditably: a few emerge less disgracefully than others from the futile diplomatic game where the pundits pushed the destinies of Peoples about as though they were playing some particularly idiotic kind of draughts. Napoleon III, Palmerston, the Sultan. Mohammed Said, to say nothing of the scurrying hordes of Arribwadors and advisers, were frightened to death of the Canal and its possible consequences. Together they did their damnedest to dish de Lesseps. Said, a Rabelaisian colossus full of food, drink and a modicum of good intentions, his hands of a size (as an observer said) 'to box the ears of elephants,' stood by his friend until the pressure became too hot : unheroic but understandable. Palmerston was at his Palmerstonian worst, obstinately mistaking his private version of the past for a public vision of the future, prejudiced, malevolent even. Of those in high places only Eugenie behaved Well. She at any rate stuck loyally to her cousin de Lesseps through thick and thin. But then she had courage and was in her way something of an entrepreneur too, wrongheaded. maybe, but decisive. Meanwhile, when all was in a state of motion and flux, the civil servants, the diplomats and the Politicians were reduced to mumbling, bumbling nothingness. Only de Lesseps could cut through the intrigue that called itself grave counsel and the ditherings that passed amongst the wiseacres for prudence and high diplomacy. His uncle was an intrepid explorer, Civil Governor of Moscow in 1812, who survived the retreat of the Grande Armee. His father, Commissary General in the attack on Egypt, stuck no less bravely to his post and left his family, including Ferdinand, suffering for its loyalty. Yet the boy who swam the Seine with one arm, holding his clothes aloft with the other, was not content to be deprived of a career by a sulky opposition. Before long he was following the family tradition in the foreign ser- vice. In Spain, in Egypt and in Palestine men of very different stations in life had reason to be grateful for the courage and sense of duty of this young French official. Neither howling mobs, ferocious tyrants nor cholera epidemics held any terrors for him. In 1849 he was appointed to Rome as Envoy Extra- ordinary and made scapegoat for the criminal muddling of others. It was his first experience of the corruption and ingratitude that marked French public life. Stricken by the death of a beloved wife, he decided to make a clean break with politics, retiring to a country life. It was here, in solitude and grief, that his active mind turned to the* study of the idea of a canal to link the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. The story /of the campaign he waged for the rest of his life is a fascinating mixture of brilliant practical achievement and utter fantasy. He was neither engineer nor financier—he disliked both—but a visionary determined to organise every means to his end. Since kings and politicians betrayed him, he turned to businessmen. In England it was the City merchants and provincial manufacturers who applauded him, and it was in the end the little men of France—waiters, grocers, priests and labourers as they were contemptuously described—who lent him enough money to begin the Canal. Neither betrayals, intrigues, wars nor revolutions blurred his vision or broke his spirit. The scene in November, 1869, when Eugenie opened the Canal, and Aida, specially commissioned, was performed by a cast wearing jewels worth six million pounds, is purest fantasy. Thereafter de Lesseps's star declined: After Suez came Panama, and with Panama confusion, scandals, senility. De Lesseps, nearly ninety years old, was prosecuted for mis- appropriation and condemned. The end is high tragedy indeed.
De Lesseps's vision was, thank God, a Victorian one of
peace and material progress. He so appealed to ordinary people that he managed to prevent the experts and those in high places from strangling his project at birth, as they would have dearly liked to do. Now an hysterical politician has once again thrown the Canal into the whirlpool of politics. What de Lesseps saw as an instrument of peace threatens to become an instrument of war. Well, the Canal survived Arabi; it will certainly survive Nasser. Yet the great powers would do well to preserve a decent humility over the Canal. Its existence owes nothing to the wisdom of governments or politicians. Without the genius of de Lesseps the powers would have had nothing to preserve and Nasser nothing to nationalise. Dictatorships will do less well if Egypt can be given a fair share in the control and profits of the Canal, as its creator always intended.
In spite of some careless slips and obscurities, Mr. Beatty has written an illuminating biography that should be read by every- one interested in the Canal question. His reconstruction of the successive political and business situations is not always as clear or convincing as it might be, but as a biographer he achieves his main object; the ide4lism and vitality of de Lesseps shine through and the reader is left feeling that he has seen something of a real man.
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