Lesseps, Ferdinand de

Ferdinand de (1805-1894), a French diplomat and engineer. He was born at Versailles, November 19,1805, and died December 7, 1894. He was influentially connected and well educated. In 1828 he entered the consular service of France. From 1832 to 1838 he was stationed at Cairo. Happening on a report made to Napoleon by one of his engineers, Lesseps evolved the idea of the Suez Canal. In 1848 he was ambassador to Madrid. In 1854 he was invited to Egypt by Said Pasha to formulate plans for the Suez Canal. This work was begun under his supervision in 1859 and was carried to completion in 1869. He also planned a canal across the Isthmus of Panama and formed a company for its construction. The French government voted him large bonuses and shares of stock were sold to the public. Although his management of the Suez Canal was considered a great success, he was less fortunate in the conduct of the latter enterprise. Funds were misappropriated, his workmen fell ill, machinery was abandoned in the ditches, expensive plans involving the expenditure of immense sums of money were carried out in part and then abandoned. In 1889 he was tried for embezzlement of funds and bribery, and was condemned to imprisonment. The sentence was imposed rather to appease the popular mind than from any belief in his actual guilt. It was never carried into effect. He was a member of the French Academy and wrote a number of scientific reports of value. He is regarded still as a man of ability, whose later career became involved in unforeseen misfortunes. See Suez; Panama

Ferdinand De Lesseps was lifted to the pinnacle of world-wide popularity through the pronounced success of the canal. He was called Le Grand Francais--"The Great Frenchman"--and for fifteen years he lived as one of the most envied, respected and admired citizens of the world. No other man seemed better qualified to undertake the next great engineering enterprise that confronted modern genius and ability--the cutting of an inter-oceanic canal at Panama. It was in 1879 that De Lesseps declared himself ready to direct the enterprise. He stood for a sea-level channel, and, seemingly blind to the different and more difficult nature of the problem at Panama, announced that the inauguration of his Panama Canal would take place on October 1, 1887. The first stroke of the first pick was given by little Ferdinande de Lesseps, daughter of the "Father of the Suez Canal," on January 1,1880.

After the work had progressed for six years de Lesseps abandoned the idea of a sea-level canal but declared that the lock canal, constructed according to the revised plans, would be completed within four years and would be opened without fail in 1890. One year before that "opening day" arrived the company was forced into liquidation. There is no need now to go into the details of the great scandal of Panama; suffice it to say that in 1893 the Court of Paris condemned de Lesseps and his son Charles to five years' imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 francs. But the father never knew of his disgrace. For several years he had been living a kind of living death, unconscious of the world about him, unable to hear or understand the story of the wreck of his magnificent career.

It is believed that, personally, he was not to blame for the disaster nor cognizant of the campaign of lies and deceit that preceded it. So confident was France of the integrity of Le Grand Francais that his name has never been stricken from the roll of the "Legion of Honor." He died in 1894, at the age of eighty-nine, his genius lauded, his faults and his great failure forgiven and forgotten. His monument stands today at Port Said, near the Mediterranean entrance to his great canal, which is his real monument. Another monument of bronze or marble will surely some day be erected to his memory at Panama when our canal is finished, for he will be known to posterity not only as the "Father of Suez," but also as the "Grandfather of Panama."--Burton Holmes in The Ladies' Home Journal.