Giant Ditch Digger

DE LESSEPS OF SUEZ (334 pp.)--Charles Beatfy--Harper ($4.50).

A bronze, bigger-than-life statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps. builder of the Suez Canal, stood for 60 years in Port Said. Last December, as Egyptian demonstrators celebrated the withdrawal of the Franco-British invasion force, they expressed their hatred of all things European by blowing up the statue. The great builder would have been neither surprised nor resentful. Irrational violence, betrayal and humiliation dogged him all his long life without dampening his boundless optimism or shaking his firm belief in the essential goodness of man and the basic harmony of nations.

Ferdinand de Lesseps was the ideal 19th century man, a living embodiment of the "poetry of capitalism." His cheerful cry. "Open the world to the people!'' was echoed by the industrialists and investors of his time. The Suez Canal was to be only a beginning: De Lesseps dreamed of making an inland sea in the Sahara Desert, and of uniting Paris, Moscow, Peking and Bombay with a vast intercontinental railway.

Overweight Heir. The idea for the Suez Canal fired De Lesseps' imagination when he was 27 years old. Born into a French diplomatic family in 1805, De Lesseps had arrived in Alexandria as a consular official, and read a memoir on the Suez project written by one of Napoleon's aides during the occupation of Egypt 34 years before. He became a close friend of Said, the overweight heir to the Egyptian throne, by giving him free access to the consulate kitchen while the boy's militant father was trying to starve him into a semblance of manly vigor. Sixteen years were to pass before Said and De Lesseps met again. Then, pudgy Said was the ruler of Egypt and Ferdinand had resigned from the consular service. Said Pasha invited De Lesseps to come to Egypt, was quickly won over to the canal project.

The canal cost 453 million francs to build. More than a hundred million cubic feet of earth were moved in ten years. De Lesseps was accused of employing slave labor by using the corvee (impressment of workers), but when the practice was halted and the fellahin laid down their primitive picks and baskets, the work went on faster than before with free labor and the rapid development of steam-powered excavators. De Lesseps' real roadblocks lay not in the sand and rock of the Sinai desert but in the chancellories and salons of Europe. In France envious rivals--including the Saint-Simonian Socialists--tried to take the canal away from De Lesseps. In London successive British governments first derided the idea, then worked to block construction of the canal, then bought shares in it, and finally occupied Egypt to secure military control of the new route to India. De Lesseps spent as much time rushing about Europe to put out fires as he did in digging. But the canal was built, England placated, and in 1869 the waters of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea were joined directly for the first time--more than 3,000 years after the earliest known attempt, using the Nile as a connecting link, was supposedly made by the legendary Pharaoh Sesostris.

Lockless Canal. De Lesseps was a doer in private as well as public life. He married twice and fathered 17 children (the last when he was 80). At the age of 74 he eagerly met the challenge of Panama, and the result was a fiasco. Age had bred in him not mellowness but arrogance. Yellow fever, corruption and his own stubbornness (he insisted on building a canal without locks despite the mountains and rivers the waterway must cross) ruined the project after ten years of exhausting labor. De Lesseps was forced to admit defeat, and only the selfless courage of his son Charles, who took the burden of responsibility on himself, saved De Lesseps from the ignominy of jail. But 25 years later the Panama Canal became a reality.

In this admiring book Author Charles Beatty, nephew of Admiral Earl Beatty, Britain's World War I naval hero, writes a passionate defense of all the acts of Ferdinand de Lesseps' life. The biographer's adulation prevents the reader from discovering the man beneath the trappings of the hero. But of De Lesseps' effect on his time and on history, there is no doubt. The world still struggles clumsily with the problems he posed, and still has need of men like De Lesseps, who always "expected to meet friends rather than enemies, yet was always sword in hand, ready to defend a personal faith: that men were fundamentally good, that good prevails over evil, that therefore war at last will yield to peace."

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