Ferdinand de Lesseps

Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805-94) was the French diplomat who obtained the concession to dig the Suez Canal. The Encyclopaedia of Islam has no article on him; it speaks of him inside its articles on Suez, on Port Said, on Sa'id Pasha and on Egypt, and this record is assembled from those passages only. It gives his years but not his birthplace, family or later life, and the museum has not yet consulted other sources for them. ^{1 4}

The Suez article says that in the early 1840s de Lesseps made further investigations into digging a new canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. He built on earlier plans published by J.P. Le Pere in 1808 and by Linant de Bellefonds in 1821. An earlier measurement had put the Red Sea about nine metres higher than the Mediterranean; after it was corrected, he submitted a proposal to the wali of Egypt, Sa'id Pasha. He relied on the view of Bellefonds' Saint-Simonist study group and of an Egyptian-European commission set up in 1846 that a canal across the Isthmus of Suez was possible. ¹

The article on Sa'id Pasha says that the Pasha succumbed to the charm of de Lesseps and gave him the famous concession; de Lesseps received his first concession in 1854, confirmed by the Pasha in 1856. ^{5 6} The article on Egypt gives 30 November 1854 for the grant to this "French diplomat". ⁴ The Suez article says the concession was signed on 5 January 1856. ¹ The sources thus give two dates, and the museum reads them as the first grant and the signed confirmation without being able to prove it from these articles.

After three years of fund-raising and political quarrels, including the question of Ottoman sovereignty, the Suez Canal Company was founded in Paris in 1858 with the support of Napoleon III. Work began on 22 April 1859 according to the Suez article, or 25 April according to the Egypt article, and the canal opened on 16 November 1869 in the Suez article, or 17 November in the Egypt article. ^{1 4}

The Port Said article says that the site of the town was selected by a party of engineers under Laroche and de Lesseps. The site was chosen not because it was the nearest point across the isthmus to Suez but because the depth of the water there suited the projected canal best. ² At the seaward end of the western mole of Port Said stood a colossal statue of de Lesseps by E. Fermiet, unveiled in 1899. In the war of late October to early November 1956, after President Gamal Abd al-Nasser nationalised the canal, the town was badly damaged by air attacks and by the British and French landings, and the statue was among the things destroyed. ³

The bibliography of the Suez article lists his own documentary account of the project, Percement de l'isthme de Suez. Exposé et documents officiels, in five volumes, Paris 1855-60. ⁷ The museum has not seen the work itself.

These articles do not describe his career before the 1840s, his dealings with the Ottoman government in the 1860s, or his life after the opening of the canal. The record is therefore a short stub, to be enriched from other sources.