Ferdinand de Lesseps

French diplomat and entrepreneur

• Born: November 19, 1805
• Birthplace: Versailles, France
• Died: December 7, 1894
• Place of death: La Chěnaie, France

Lesseps was a career diplomat, but though he never trained as an engineer, he is best known for his entrepreneurial abilities that led to the construction of the Suez Canal and the commencement of the transisthmian Panama Canal.

Early Life

Ferdinand-Marie Vicomte de Lesseps (duh leh-sehps) was born into a family of diplomats, literally within a few meters of the great architectural expression of French monarchism, the palaces of Versailles. For several generations, the men of the family had been distinguished by their cultivation, vigor, belief in progress, extravagant lifestyles, and womanizing. Long before Ferdinand’s birth, his granduncle, Dominique, had been ennobled for his public services, namely for his extraordinary around-the-world adventures that resulted in his presentation to Louis XVI as a national hero; Ferdinand’s grandfather, Martin, had served as a diplomat at the Russian court of Catherine the Great; and his father, Mathieu, a friend of the great statesman Talleyrand, performed with distinction in Franco-Egyptian relations and, while posted to the United States, negotiated France’s first commercial treaty with that country. Thus, there was a firm foundation for adventure, valor, and endurance in the family, all of which characterized Ferdinand’s life and career.

Ferdinand’s mother was the daughter of a prosperous French vintner who had settled in Spain, where she spent her life until her marriage, so that Ferdinand grew up speaking Spanish as well as French. He would later claim that his Spanish temperament led Panama to “seduce” him. Although his family reputedly was wealthy, in fact money was generally scarce. His mother’s jewelry was often pawned, and his father died bankrupt. Ferdinand himself, while later to marry well and affect the high life, never enjoyed real wealth either.

Against this family background, Lesseps moved naturally into a diplomatic career, and while he had studied some law he was apprenticed, when he was nineteen, to an uncle then serving as France’s ambassador to Portugal. Subsequently, he refined his diplomatic apprenticeship, serving with his father until his father died in Tunis in 1832, after which the appointments he received were his own.

Life’s Work

Lesseps’s diplomatic career had come naturally, and he enjoyed it, as did his ravishing Parisian wife, Agnes, who not only bore him five sons (two lived to maturity) but also was a marvelous asset to the sociability expected of her diplomat husband. They were indeed a handsome couple, he well formed and dark eyed, with a memorable smile. The first seven years of his official work were spent in Egypt, then, variously, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands; in Malaga, Spain; and finally as France’s minister to Spain in 1843.

Lesseps’s interest in Suez was not born of interests in engineering; he enjoyed no training whatever along that line. Rather, it emerged from his partial adherence to the philosophy of the comte de Saint-Simon, who believed that private property and nationalism ought to be abolished and the world made over by scientists, engineers, industrialists, and artists.

Lesseps had met a coterie of French Saint-Simonian engineers during his duty in Egypt during the 1830’s. This group, led by Prosper Enfantin, hoped to abolish war, end poverty, and generally reorder the world by great public improvements—railways, highways, and both a Suez and a Panamanian canal. For four years, perhaps with some financial assistance from Lesseps, Enfantin and his group labored to dig the canal but were ultimately defeated; indeed, their ranks were devastated by cholera. Although little had been accomplished, many Europeans continued to hope for a canal.

A career crisis diverted Lesseps once again from Suez. He was dispatched on a diplomatic mission to Italy. Lesseps was reprimanded for exceeding instructions and fired in 1848. By 1850, Napoleon III, by coup d’état, had made himself ruler of the Second Empire, had married one of Lesseps’s distant cousins, and, surrounded by Saint-Simonians, had again urged great projects upon France. Meanwhile, political upheaval in Egypt had brought a new viceroy into power, Mohammed Said, whom Lesseps had befriended when Said was a boy. His diplomatic career finished and with Agnes dead the previous year, in 1854 Lesseps left his home at La Chênaie to join his old friend. Said, hopeful of launching his regime with some great enterprise, asked for Lesseps’s advice: It was to dig a Suez Canal.

Tirelessly, meticulously watching details, and above all incessantly scurrying about the world raising or borrowing funds (half the money came from Frenchmen, the rest from Said and his successor), Lesseps justified a reputation as one of the nineteenth century’s greatest entrepreneurs: patient, untiring, an imaginative propagandist, at times deceptive, and very much a shrewd actor-diplomat. On November 17, 1869, amid lavish fanfare, the 160-kilometer, sea-level canal opened. Although at most stages of its construction, Lesseps could have sold his rights and garnered great wealth, he was uninterested in money: He had the Suez dug for the good of humanity.

While being richly honored, lionized, and feted, Lesseps married the stunning young daughter of a wealthy friend and instantly started two great projects: founding what became a family of six sons and six daughters and planning a number of grandiose undertakings—a railway linking Paris, Moscow, Bombay, and Peking and the flooding of vast areas of the Sahara among them. Before the Parisian Geographical Society in 1875, he proposed elaboration of plans for an interoceanic isthmian canal. To that end, he helped form the Société Civile Internationale du Canal Interocéanique de Darien, the so-called Türr Syndicate.

Both the syndicate and Lesseps’s role in it would be, and remain, controversial. The intent of the Parisian Geographical Society was a binational effort composed of leading international scientists, ensuring an objective analysis of sites and possible problems; however, the Türr Syndicate agreed to handle everything. It did indeed make several expeditions; by 1882, it had contracted with the Colombian government in detail for a ninety-nine-year lease, financing, land concessions, rights of the syndicate to transfer its holdings to other individuals (or syndicates) but not to foreign countries, and distribution of profits.

Meanwhile, an international congress for the study of the isthmian canal convened in Paris in May, 1879. After much disappointing information, some disinformation, and intelligent conjecture, without consensus, Lesseps, who initially had seemed ineffectual, won his audience by declaring that for all insurmountable obstacles there existed men of genius to master them. Later in the day, another genius, a great engineer and the head of France’s famed Corps de Ponts et Chaussées (bridges and highways), the only person present who had experience with construction in tropical America, warned of the deadly menaces of endemic, epidemic disease and of the impossibility of the sea-level canal (one without locks) upon which Lesseps was determined.

Lesseps ultimately carried the day. His victory in the congress would shortly cost tens of thousands of lives, the loss of millions by investors, ruin of the syndicate, scandals that historians have not yet entirely unraveled, judicial probes, and eventually the then-greatest real estate transaction in history when the United States bought the remnants of Lesseps’s efforts under dubious circumstances.

Lesseps was magnificent in pursuit of his great objective: a Panamanian canal. He bought out the Türr Syndicate, created his own company, mesmerized general publics throughout Europe and the United States, and raised funds from a vast range of sources. He visited the Panama site; declared, with aplomb, that there were no insurmountable difficulties; hired a remarkable team of French engineers, whose general repute had been singular for nearly two centuries; mustered the great excavators necessary to gnaw their way through the terrain; provided the best housing and medical facilities then known for the protection of his aides, engineers, and workers; and launched the great dig in 1881.

Before disease and natural obstacles made obvious the impossibility of a sea-level canal, and before Americans undertook construction of a lock canal, Lesseps’s crews had excavated nearly a third of the distance between Colón, on the Caribbean, and Panama City, on the Pacific: if not the most difficult portion, a sterling achievement nevertheless. However, by 1889, Lesseps’s losses in life and money were too great. His grand enterprise was failed, bankrupt. Old and under financial pressures, he remained only vaguely aware of the press and judicial trials with which irate investors were crushing members of his family and colleagues, unaware that “Panama” had become a term of national opprobrium. Through his wife’s protective care, the great adventurer sat at home in a seaman’s peacoat, with his smoking cap and with his knees blanketed, wasting away, oblivious to the storms raging around his devastated enterprise. He died on December 7, 1894, at La Chênaie, and was quietly buried in Paris’s Pére Lachaise Cemetery.

Significance

Ferdinand de Lesseps was the complex scion of a distinguished family. A successful diplomat, he was shamelessly duped by the state he served, only to turn about and become the driving force behind two immensely important undertakings: the Suez and the Panama Canals. At the first he succeeded, at the second he failed. However, his success at Suez, certainly in global economic terms, far outweighed the financial disaster, and perhaps even the thousands of lives lost, in Panama.

For all Lesseps’s deceptions, he was a heroic romantic, an inspired entrepreneur, suffused with the Saint-Simonian urge to remodel the world. In no technical or scientific sense did he qualify as an expert, and in an age in which the engineer and scientist became the forces with which to reckon, he relied upon his own fixations, rhetoric, and manipulations to launch his great enterprises. It had been the wisdom of Lesseps’s father that he forget his great Panama scheme and settle for the undying fame earned at Suez. However, hubris and heroism are usually intertwined. It remains sufficient that his accomplishment, against great odds at Suez, matched his daring but partial failure at Panama—partial because it finally moved the United States to complete that singularly remarkable construction.

Bibliography

Allen, Frederick E. “Panama’s Canal.” American Heritage 51, no. 7 (November, 2000): 21. Describes Lesseps’s role in the canal’s construction.

Beatty, Charles. Ferdinand de Lesseps: A Biographical Study. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956. An eminently readable, well-researched biography of genuine quality on one of the more vital personalities of the nineteenth century. Contains a fine bibliography, a chronology, and a useful double-columned index.

Cameron, Ian. The Impossible Dream: The Building of the Panama Canal. New York: William Morrow, 1972. A competent study that, while focused chiefly on the American effort, deals with Lesseps and the initial French enterprise, though it is less generous than other works on the real difficulties and progress made by the French. Contains a select bibliography and an adequate index.

Farnie, D. A. East and West of Suez: The Suez Canal in History, 1854-1956. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1969. A large scholarly study that helps place the importance of Lesseps’s work in perspective of the canal’s subsequent history. Scholarly and well written, this work has several graphs; statistical tables; maps; a fine, extensive bibliography; and a superb index.

Fitzgerald, Percy. The Great Canal at Suez. Reprint. 2 vols. New York: AMS Press, 1978. Delightful reading, lending an ambience to the creation of the canal that is hard to find elsewhere. Although documentation is inserted in the text, there are no notes, bibliography, illustrations, or index.

Hicks, Bill. “The Great Divide.” Times Educational Supplement, December 20, 2004, p. 8. A brief overview of Lesseps’s career, focusing on the Panama Canal.

Karabell, Zachary. Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. A history of the canal, focusing on Lesseps and Egyptian ruler Muhammad Said. Karabell depicts Lesseps as a shrewd salesperson who viewed construction of the canal as a means of achieving his place in history.

McCullough, David. The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977. Although detailed treatment of Lesseps occupies only a portion of this marvelous work—winner of many prizes—it is easily the most readable and most thoroughly researched study of the wonder that is the canal. Contains great photographs, an extensive and first-rate bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and a useful index.

Schonfield, Hugh J. The Suez Canal in Peace and War, 1869-1969. Rev. ed. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1969. A readable, competent, and scholarly study, with the first six chapters covering Lesseps’s planning and work. Contains seven useful appendixes. The index is full and useful.