This article compares the rhetorical justifications surrounding two notorious – and interconnected – episodes of Western imperialism. In 1882, the British occupied Egypt. They acted in opposition to indigenous proto-nationalist forces which appeared (or which were claimed) to threaten Britain's financial and strategic interests. Although the French also had considerable economic interests in the country, and were already acting jointly with the British to control Egyptian finances, France in the end held back from participating in the invasion.Footnote 1 The consequences of this intervention were still being worked out in 1956 when, in the wake of the Cairo regime's nationalization of the Suez Canal, the British again invaded. This time France did participate, both nations being in secret collusion with Israel, which agreed to attack Egypt, thus providing the pretext that the British and French used to intervene, allegedly to ‘stop the conflict from spreading’. This time, although the military operation again achieved success, the political and diplomatic consequences were catastrophic. Global opinion was almost uniformly hostile and the USA asserted political and financial leverage to force the occupiers to withdraw.
Naturally, the 1882 and the 1956 crises generated heated debate in both Britain and France. We suggest that comparing how the British and French argued about these issues, and also examining how the rhetoric of the later crisis contrasted with the earlier one, teaches important lessons about the two nations' respective imperial cultures. Specifically, we argue that the latter-day imperialists Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet couched their actions in internationalist rhetoric reminiscent both of the Gladstone government's justifications for intervention in 1882 and of French official explanations for their takeover in Tunisia a year earlier. Each claimed their actions were taken to uphold better standards of governance and to restore regional order.
Such ‘order’ came loaded with cultural prejudice and political self-interest. The relative weight attached to its constituent parts might vary; more or less importance being ascribed to the writ of Western legal forms and the attendant punishment of transgressions, to the untrammelled reach of European commerce, to the integrity of racial hierarchy, and to the respect accorded to scientific empiricism.Footnote 2 But an essential continuity remained. Ostensibly, at least, the order demanded was held to promote a universal interest in responsible governance, wherever it might be and whether such administration came with British or French accents.Footnote 3 Viewed by its British and French critics, in 1882 and 1956 Egyptian ‘disorder’ was, by extension, all that such ‘order’ was not: legally anarchic, economically forbidding, racially inverted, unscientifically irrational, and – worst of all – dangerously contagious. At least rhetorically, imperialism was eschewed. Yet both powers viewed their Egyptian problems through the lens of wider overseas interests. For Britain, Middle Eastern relationships, Commonwealth connections, and global trading interests were called into question. For France in 1882 and in 1956, the question of whether to intervene or not in Egypt was contingent on other nearby crises that remained unresolved. The first was over France's recent annexation of Tunisia in 1881; the second was over the Egyptian regime's support for nationalist rebels in the colony of Algeria.
As has long been recognized, both Egyptian episodes were seminal moments in the rise and demise of the British and French empires. The year 1882 marked a crucial juncture in the expansion of Britain's global role and also the moment at which the French were overshadowed by their rival across the English Channel, even though their own empire continued to grow as well. The events of 1956 signified their joint symbolic defeat at the hands of the new American quasi-empire and the further mobilization of the world's non-aligned states against the colonialism of Europe's old imperial powers. The ways in which these episodes were discussed by contemporaries are thus ripe for analytical juxtaposition. There are many different ways of carrying out comparative history; as John Elliott has suggested, ‘the nature of the problem should be allowed to determine the nature of the comparison’.Footnote 4 Historians usually choose either to compare similar times (synchronic comparison) or different ones (diachronic comparison).Footnote 5 Here, we attempt both: we wish to establish how far French political rhetoric differed from its British equivalent, and also what similarities and differences there were between 1882 and 1956. But our task is not purely comparative. Our story is in reality an histoire croisée. It is the entanglement of these empires, and the consequent inter-relatedness of imperialist rhetoric, that is the object of our study, as well as the (often unconscious) ways that the language of the Suez affair was shaped by its antecedent historical moment. We are interested not only in ‘the circulation of arguments and their reinterpretation according to national context’ but also in their recirculation and reinterpretation according to temporal context.Footnote 6
Our focus is primarily on elite discourse, with our main sources being newspapers and other contemporary published works, parliamentary debates, and documents that circulated between ministers and officials. Comparing popular responses too would present a severe challenge in the space available. It must be remembered, nonetheless, that politicians in both periods certainly were concerned with public opinion, although the ways in which they attempted to gauge it changed substantially across time. Public meetings and (in 1956) opinion polls are therefore relevant to our story, not because they provide a sure guide to what the public really thought, but because a sense of what the public might be thinking conditioned the rhetoric that elite figures produced.
In certain respects, however, our overall task is relatively straightforward. There are obviously similarities between the trajectories of British and French imperial expansion. Always colonial rivals, the edge was taken from the competition by the entente cordiale of 1904. But, although the two partners entered the two world wars as allies, Middle Eastern arguments fed bitter mésententes in the aftermath of both conflicts. By the 1950s, the emergence of new strains of anti-colonialism, non-alignment, and Third Worldism pushed French and British imperialists closer together once more. The decolonization of the two empires has of course been subject to comparison before.Footnote 7 Furthermore, the nature of the sources available for studying the British and French imperial rhetoric – the high-profile speeches, the archives that lie behind them, and the media reports and reactions they elicited – do not differ radically from one country to the other. Yet naturally there were also important points of Franco-British variation. France's political institutions, its republican ideals, and resultant patterns of government faced intense crises of legitimacy in both the 1880s and the 1950s. The Fourth Republic, in particular, exhibited radical political instability of a kind which never obtained in the United Kingdom, even if complacent national narratives tend to exaggerate British moderation and avoidance of extremism. Furthermore, the French experience of territorial occupation (and latterly defeat) in the two world wars left cultural scars and social divisions far deeper than any British equivalents. Indeed, we suggest that a conspiratorial mentality of resistance to existential political threats shaped French discussions of Suez and affected the ways in which the outcome of the crisis was represented and understood. It is in such differences, and their impact on discourse, that the interest of our story lies.
Our methodology is open to objection, insofar as it might be said to pay insufficient attention to developments in the period between the two crises. By 1956, the world had changed radically from empire's late nineteenth-century heyday. The advent of the United Nations and the growing corpus of international law that underpinned it, the interplay between Cold War and decolonization, the creation of the state of Israel, and the birth of Third World nationalism, prefigured global changes and regional geo-political shifts that weakened British and French imperial capacity to act unilaterally in the Eastern Mediterranean basin. Mounting pressure for colonial reform both within dependent territories and at metropolitan centres was matched by critical alterations to imperial citizenship that helped stimulate unprecedented levels of non-white immigration in post-war Britain and France. Clearly, within an article of this length, we cannot do justice to all these factors, but nor is that our purpose. We want, primarily, to address how the nature of imperial rhetoric – of imperialist worldviews and their articulation – had changed over this three-quarter century: we do not pretend to do more than offer preliminary answers as to why. The comparative method has the potential to answer this how question in a more revealing way than might be rendered with a lengthy description of incremental changes over time. What we really want to bring to light are the special conditions of our two situations, and it is the direct contrast which helps bring out this distinctiveness. Immersion in a given period without attempting contrast may make its ideological and rhetorical features seem like ‘the normal case’, an ideational norm: ‘that was just how these things were talked about then’. But, as Marc Bloch put it, in his classic justification for comparative history: ‘Is there anything more dangerous for scientific inquiry than the temptation to regard all things as natural?’Footnote 8
I
The causes of the 1882 invasion have long been controversial. Was it a reluctant response to local disorder carried out to defend the Suez Canal and the route to India (the Robinson and Gallagher thesis) or were Britain's substantial economic interests combined with political populism the driving factor?Footnote 9 Was it, alternatively, about maintaining prestige?Footnote 10 Were the politicians in London lulled into action by the ‘men on the spot’ in Cairo, or was Gladstone's government so divided and incompetent that it becomes futile to search out the ‘motive’ behind what was in fact an irrational act?Footnote 11 These questions necessarily intersect with that of how the invasion was publicly rationalized, an issue which has generated a modest but valuable literature.Footnote 12 We lack, however, a systematic account of how the arguments for (and against) intervention worked, and of what they tell us about how imperial issues were discussed in the public sphere. In the absence of that, it is all too easy to latch on to particular tropes, such as prestige, character, and attacks on despotism, and to attach excessive explanatory weight to them. Deserving closer consideration are the impact of interparty rivalry on the terms of the discourse, and the role of attitudes towards France in conditioning the British government's approach to Egypt.
During the ‘Midlothian Campaign’ of 1879–80, Gladstone gave a series of thrilling speeches denouncing the immorality of the government's foreign policy.Footnote 13 These helped propel him back to Downing Street at the 1880 general election. The attack on Disraelian ‘Imperialism’ was part of a broader attack on the allegedly sinister and autocratic ‘system of government’ with which it was intimately entwined.Footnote 14 Indeed, the word ‘imperialism’ – that ‘new-fangled term over which there is much unprofitable controversy’ – had gained its negative connotations from its association with the French Second Empire of Napoleon III.Footnote 15 Thus, it was governing style that was at stake in this critique as much as territorial expansion. So, while Gladstone was undoubtedly influenced by the Radical views of John Bright and Richard Cobden, his opposition to ‘imperialism’ did not mean he was opposed to empire as such.Footnote 16 The British were bound not to do away with the empire, but rather to administer it in line with ‘the principles of justice and goodwill, of benevolence and mercy’.Footnote 17 This suggests that Gladstone did subscribe to a cross-party conception of national and imperial interest.Footnote 18
Yet this apparent near-consensus did not prevent bitter public/rhetorical disagreement between the parties: a struggle as it were between different ways of justifying empire.Footnote 19 It was the relationship between morality and national self-interest that marked the fault-line between Gladstonian and Conservative imperial views. For high-minded Liberals, improvements in native welfare, to be worked for as part of a sacred trust that had been bequeathed them, were the only justification for an empire which Britain, in the last analysis, did not actually need for her survival. For the Conservatives, by contrast, the Liberal idea that international relations were subject to the ‘moral laws’ in the same way that relations between individuals were, was absurd. Conservatives did have their own concept of imperial ‘duty’ – albeit a duty to develop British character much more than one to improve native welfare – which lent their empire policy a lofty moral tone and thus helped defend it against Liberal attack.Footnote 20
These conflicting interpretations were reflected in the 1882 debates. The crisis was the culmination of long-standing European interference in Egypt's political and economic affairs. The khedive Tewfik owed nominal allegiance to the Ottoman sultan but his economic overseers were the British and French, whose involvement with Ottoman finances was of long-standing.Footnote 21 In 1876, the two countries had imposed their own ‘Dual Control’ over Egypt's revenues and expenditure. Local resentment against this strengthened Colonel Ahmed ‘Urabi's nationalist challenge to Tewfik's authority. In January 1882, an Anglo-French joint note reasserted the two countries' backing for the khedive, but this only heightened local support for ‘Urabi.Footnote 22 At this stage, Gladstone was prepared to concede that a genuine Egyptian national movement might be coalescing.Footnote 23 But his sympathy for it was fleeting. Susceptible to ministerial pressure, notably from Charles Dilke, Joseph Chamberlain, and Lord Hartington, he cleaved to their aggressive line, a stance more pleasing to the majority of the press.Footnote 24
Meanwhile, Conservative charges against the government over its handling of the crisis during the first part of the year were wrapped up with suspicions of the French. There was concern that Paris politicians were trying to inveigle the British into a joint expedition against Egypt. The objection was not to intervention per se, but rather to undertaking it in tandem with an untrustworthy nation. The Morning Post argued that the British could be relied upon to defend the international right of free passage through the canal, because such freedom was vital to the defence of her Indian empire. Supposedly, it was French, and not British, motives that ‘Urabi and his party mistrusted, given France's occupation of Tunisia the previous year. It would therefore be disastrously provocative for Britain to be thought to be co-operating with the French. Worse, it was Gladstone's casual disregard for ‘the ancient traditions of the country’ that allowed this misperception to gain credence.Footnote 25
The government could retort that although co-operation with France was potentially problematic, it was legally binding on account of the Dual Control of Egyptian finances initiated under Disraeli, a policy that the new government was bound to continue.Footnote 26 Anglo-French co-operation survived as the crisis deepened, although Charles de Freycinet, who had replaced Léon Gambetta as prime minister, caused a stir in early May with a speech which seemed to imply that France might intervene even if England did not.Footnote 27 Speaking in the Lords a few days later, Lord Granville, the foreign secretary, asserted – with no mention of empire, or the safety of the canal – that the government's policy was based on the ‘maintenance of the Sovereign rights of the Sultan, of the position of the Khedive, and of the liberties of the Egyptian people under the Firmans of the Porte [i.e. Ottoman decrees], the prudent development of their institutions, and the fulfilment of all international engagements'.Footnote 28 Granville's position, then, was based on the need to maintain existing rights and interests; a form of quasi-contractual language that Gladstone and other ministers soon adopted. The way in which the government couched its actions in terms of the fulfilment of obligations – some of which, conveniently, had been contracted by the previous Conservative government – helped it avoid the type of explicitly imperial language that Radical critics would have attacked. In his reply to Granville, Lord Salisbury, the Conservative leader in the Lords, claimed to offer patriotic, bipartisan support at a time of crisis. However, he also applied subtle pressure for the use of force.Footnote 29
Liberal opinion was split between those, such as Sir Wilfred Lawson MP, who were shocked that a Liberal ministry should pledge to uphold the Ottoman empire, and more forthright imperialists, like Joseph Cowen MP, who persuaded himself that ‘England, unlike France, was not seeking conquest.’Footnote 30 Egypt was widely thought to be in a state of chaos; justifications for intervention rested to a great extent on the idea that it would bring back ‘order’. At the end of May, Britain and France sent ships to Alexandria to back up their demand that the Egyptian ministry should resign and that ‘Urabi should go into temporary exile. They claimed that their sole interest in Egypt was to maintain the status quo through the restoration of the khedive's authority.Footnote 31 The British also agreed to a French request for an international conference at Constantinople.Footnote 32 The Conservatives could not attack conferences as such – they feted Disraeli on his return from the 1878 Congress of Berlin – but they could warn that an excessive desire to co-operate with other countries could lead to a neglect of British interests.Footnote 33 At the start of June, Gladstone upped the ante by suggesting in the Commons that ‘Urabi had ‘completely thrown off the mask’ and was planning to depose the khedive.Footnote 34 The government had now committed itself so far that it would be difficult for it not to intervene. Yet it still lacked a convincing excuse to do so.
Events in Egypt soon came to its aid. On 11 June, riots in Alexandria culminated in a massacre of Europeans. ‘Urabi was promptly blamed for the violence, probably unfairly.Footnote 35 Retaliation was not immediate, however. In the Commons three days later, Gladstone did not characterize the riots as an Arabist conspiracy and merely repeated that his government supported the ‘general maintenance of all established rights in Egypt’. The latter was predictable enough. But to the rights of the sultan, the khedive, and the people of Egypt the prime minister now added those ‘of the foreign bondholders’.Footnote 36 This was sensational (and would have been more so, had the extent of Gladstone's own holdings been known).Footnote 37 Gladstone's comments sent the markets rising and unnerved some of his Liberal colleagues.Footnote 38 He had set the idea of a ‘bondholders’ war’ running before the conflict even began. But the dissenters were in a minority. Dilke, the Foreign Office under-secretary, wrote in his diary: ‘Our side in the Commons are very Jingo about Egypt. They badly want to kill somebody. They don't know who.’Footnote 39
Whilst Dilke and Hartington upped the pressure within the cabinet for intervention, Conservatives did so from outside. With France's involvement looking less likely, criticism of the risks inherent in a potential joint-Anglo-French expedition was replaced by allegations of pusillanimity against Gladstone's government, which had so far failed to make good on its promises to the khedive.Footnote 40 On 29 June, Salisbury addressed a ticketed meeting in Willis's Rooms, the London club that hosted the Liberal party's inaugural meeting in 1859. It is striking that existing accounts, including that of Robinson and Gallagher, fail to mention this occasion or to consider what its impact on government thinking might have been. Salisbury explained to his audience that the ‘half civilized peoples' of the empire benefited from British rule but were only kept in line by the threat of force: ‘for those vast millions of population your title to rule is the sharpness and readiness of your sword’.Footnote 41 Here was an overt example of ‘dominant-imperialist’ language, and Salisbury was by no means atypical of his party.Footnote 42 There was also some public opposition to intervention, but the recently founded Anti-Aggression League quickly imploded, many of its members proving reluctant to oppose Gladstone.Footnote 43
This is not to say that mainstream Liberals felt no disquiet. How, then, to overcome their doubts? John S. Galbraith and Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot have argued that ‘The “security of the canal” argument as justification for the occupation of Egypt was put forward not because the gravity of the menace justified such weighty action, but because it provided the most palatable explanation to the Liberal party and the general public.’Footnote 44 There is some truth here. In practice, though, the government merely integrated claims about the security of the canal into its arguments, creating justifications for intervention that were distinct from the Salisburyite rationale. Notably, Dilke argued that the government should make clear that it was not opposed to Egyptian nationalism as such, only to the Arabist version of it.Footnote 45
At the beginning of July, Admiral Seymour, the British commander at Alexandria, requested permission to launch a bombardment if the Egyptians did not stop work on improvements to their shoreline forts. The French government, lacking parliamentary support, declined to subscribe to the planned ultimatum.Footnote 46 Ironically, this French decision cleared a path for Gladstone's ministry at home, freeing it of any accusations of being in thrall to Gallic intrigue. Seymour duly launched his bombardment after the Egyptians refused to surrender the forts on 11 July.Footnote 47 Far from cowing the population into submission, anti-European violence resumed. It now appeared that the canal really could be under threat, and the British cabinet agreed to send an expeditionary force to be held ready for operations in Egypt.Footnote 48 The veteran Radical John Bright resigned from the government in protest at the bombardment, prompting a notorious letter from Gladstone in which he described himself as ‘a labourer in the cause of peace’. The prime minister's reasoning may have been twisted, but it is worth noting the letter's broader argument, which stressed the supposed legality of the Alexandria action. By exercising ‘the right & duty of self defence’, the government was contributing to a rule-bound system of international relations, and thus was standing up for ‘peace as against war, & law as against violence & arbitrary will’.Footnote 49
When the Commons debated a vote of credit for the expedition, Gladstone again emphasized law, contractual duty, sovereign rights, and the approval given to British proceedings by the great powers at the Constantinople conference. Britain, he insisted, had contractual obligations arising from the Dual Control system created under the Conservative government. His stress on the canal was minimal. Indeed, securing it would not put things right: ‘The insecurity of the Canal is a symptom only, and the seat of the disease is in the interior of Egypt, in its disturbed and its anarchical condition.’ The British, moreover, would treat it as a sacred duty ‘within the limits of reason, to favour popular liberty’ once the rule of law replaced ‘Urabi's tyrannous reign of ‘military violence’.Footnote 50 Liberal opinion for the most part accepted Gladstone's claims to be upholding international law, fulfilling Britain's obligations, and defending the Egyptian people's liberties.Footnote 51 Intervention could even be presented as consistent with Gladstone's policy of 1876. Then he had urged intervention to prevent massacres in Bulgaria; now he was acting to prevent massacres in Egypt.Footnote 52
Dilke's speech the following day did single out the canal, which, he noted, was a road to Britain's empire in Australia and New Zealand as well as to India. But, in his view, the demands of imperial necessity were supplemented by a legal framework and by Britain's responsibilities towards the Egyptians.Footnote 53 Chamberlain, who shared Dilke's reputation as a Radical, avoided the word ‘empire’, but he too presented the British action as a defence of legality. He could not understand, he said, how the idea of dispute resolution through international arbitration, urged by many pacifically minded Liberals, could ‘ever become a practical policy, unless it is coupled with the idea of an international police’. In the absence of such a force, ‘the duty and burden’ of action fell upon Britain.Footnote 54 The only Liberal parliamentarian who foregrounded empire was Henry Labouchère MP, publisher of Truth and himself a bondholder, albeit one who later turned against intervention.Footnote 55 He put things more bluntly: ‘intervention was absolutely necessary if England was to remain the great Empire she was’.Footnote 56
The government's action took the wind out of the Conservatives' sails. British forces landed on 16 August and within a month had scored a complete victory at the battle of Tel el-Kebir.Footnote 57 Perhaps anticipating this, a few days before the expeditionary force landed, Gladstone gave a speech in which he said that Britain was acting in Egypt ‘in prosecution of great interests of Empire, which it is our duty to cherish and defend’.Footnote 58 The flourish was uncharacteristic; and, as ever, the prime minister faced accusations that he was not speaking up for British interests fervently enough. The speech throws into relief how rarely Liberals chose to defend intervention in explicitly imperial terms. It also illuminates how, although there was a fundamental two-party consensus on the key question of invading Egypt, the language of moral duty that Gladstone used to justify it was very different from Salisbury's ‘dominant-imperialist’ mode, even when he, Gladstone, did choose to invoke empire overtly. Of course, there were also points of overlap. This was by no means the first moment of imperial intervention/expansion to rely on arguments about Britain's legal obligations, which Conservatives were certainly prepared to invoke when it suited them. But the key point of difference was that Tories could not accept that Britain should or could uphold the law in a selfless way. Gladstone's pose of ‘saintly disinterestedness’ was a sham, argued the Saturday Review. ‘Nobody will believe that England undertakes the settlement of Egypt for nothing, and declarations which appear to bind her to do so are useless, and may be dangerous.’Footnote 59
Jonathan Parry has argued that during the 1880s debates over African and Asian issues came to be conducted mainly ‘in terms of simple national interest and prestige’. He suggests that the progressive Liberal patriotic discourse of the previous decades was marginalized.Footnote 60 Yet in the case of Egypt, as we have seen, the position was more complex. Although the language of prestige and British interests did come into play, these themes were integrated into recognizably Liberal languages of contractual duty, international co-operation, hostility to despotism, the aspiration to national freedom, and the rule of (moral and actual) law. If Conservative rhetoric helped drive the policy agenda to a greater extent than has been previously recognized, then the Liberals nonetheless found distinctive ways of justifying their actions that were – if only at the linguistic level – far from completely incompatible with the principles of Midlothian.
II
Ironically, across the Channel remarkably similar rhetorical justifications – of order salvaged from incipient chaos and of worsening internecine violence averted – were invoked to justify the adoption of a more strident French imperialism in Africa and elsewhere.Footnote 61 Asserting France's right to sit alongside Britain at the head of Europe's imperialist table and to enforce its codes of behaviour on supposedly backward, violence-prone societies was politically popular, if not yet overwhelmingly so. Unlike its British equivalent, French ‘popular imperialism’ in the 1880s was more inchoate. Combining strains of cultural ethnocentricity, scientific racism, and resurgent national pride, it had yet to coalesce into a singular political force.Footnote 62 The reading public, young and old, who avidly consumed Jules Verne's imperially themed travelogues and readily agreed that propagating French language overseas represented a universal good, were, in the same breath, hesitant about the potential costs involved.Footnote 63 Even empire enthusiasts mixed positive and negative metaphors, speaking ominously of time running out as much as of opportunities beckoning. On 10 September 1882, Gabriel Charmes, a follower of the republican grandee Léon Gambetta and long-standing advocate of external intervention in Egypt, justified imperial expansion in the same way as his political mentor had done, combining Social Darwinist thinking with an evocation of French global primacy in the Napoleonic age.Footnote 64 Writing in the pro-empire Journal des Débats, Charmes summarized his thoughts thus:
The struggle of races and of peoples has from now on the whole globe as its theatre: each advances towards the conquest of unoccupied territories. Soon all the places will be taken … in the middle of this general expansionist movement, of this universal push, it would be the case that a France which stubbornly chose to take abdication for recueillement [introspection], on the pretext of having lost provinces in Europe, would lose again her prestige and her possessions on the Mediterranean.Footnote 65
Charmes was not, though, voicing mainstream French political thinking about the country's options in Egypt, nor about imperialist expansionism more generally. More typical was the sentiment expressed by French premier Charles de Freycinet immediately after the British bombardment of Alexandria. Reflecting on the inter-ethnic killings and downtown fires that preceded Britain's intervention, the French, he suggested, were justifiably relieved at having avoided involvement in such ‘sorry events’ (lugubres événements).Footnote 66
As more information about the scale of the violence in Alexandria's old city filtered out, Le Temps, the broadsheet voice of official French diplomacy, published uncharacteristically lurid accounts of settlers tortured and massacred.Footnote 67 Blame was entirely ascribed to ‘Urabi. The putative Egyptian leader was condemned as a ‘military dictator’ who unscrupulously unleashed his ‘bandit’ troops in an orgy of killing.Footnote 68 Yet the Paris government chose not to voice its outrage at this affront to French dignity in 1882. Behind-the-scenes complaints were made about Britain's haste in acting unilaterally but, outwardly, de Freycinet's government accepted that the carnage in Alexandria justified an immediate riposte.Footnote 69 It fell to a successor government, Jules Ferry's 1883 ministry, to press compensation claims on the now British-directed Egyptian government from over 900 French settlers and traders in the port.Footnote 70 Their homes and businesses, sometimes even their lives, were destroyed during the preceding year's violence in Alexandria, a heavier proportionate loss than that suffered by their British counterparts.Footnote 71 For Ferry's cabinet colleagues, if not for their predecessors, this was a source of shame. How is such divergent rhetoric to be explained?
In a deservedly influential line of interpretation developed in the 1970s, Christopher Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner explained French colonial expansionism in the early decades of the Third Republic as the result of a paradox. France's late nineteenth-century empire-making, beginning in the Sene-Gambian interior in the 1850s, and accelerating after defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, was neither the product of government design, nor the outcome of popular imperialism. It was, instead, contingent on the opportunities presented by their absence.Footnote 72 Andrew took this analysis further, identifying the volatility of Third Republic politics as conducive to a kind of decision-making vacuum.Footnote 73 His core conclusion was simple: in politics, as in nature, vacuums are abhorred. Enthusiasts for empire filled the void left by government indecision, party ambivalence, and wider public apathy.
The point is relevant to an examination of imperial rhetoric because the lack of central government direction in colonial affairs – a dedicated colonial ministry was still a decade away despite Léon Gambetta's personal enthusiasm for it – left the way open for a looser grouping of empire expansionists to seize the initiative.Footnote 74 A more populist press, although emerging, was not yet setting a tone of imperialist adventurism.Footnote 75 Instead, the key public statements about intervention in 1880s North Africa and, equally significant, their target audience, reflected the elite composition of this diffuse pro-empire coalition. Committed supporters of France's overseas claims in business, academia, the church, the military, and the diplomatic corps aligned with like-minded politicians of firm imperialist credentials.Footnote 76 Together, they comprised the French colonialist movement, or parti colonial (not actually a political party at all). Remarkably successful in the ensuing years before and immediately after the First World War, this cluster of elite interest groups arrogated empire-building to themselves.Footnote 77 In this sense, the Egyptian crisis of 1882 and, still more so, its antecedent – the French takeover in Tunis in the previous year – were critical stepping stones to the emergence of a coherent imperialist bloc in French politics. Co-operation, even collusion, between businesses, financiers, and political leaders over new investment opportunities usually went furthest in consolidating captive markets at home and overseas.Footnote 78 Tunisia, in this scheme of things, was viewed as a lucrative adjunct to Algeria's developing railway network, a relatively simple extension of pre-existing plans for railroad construction in the Maghreb.Footnote 79
Other historians of the early Third Republic have subsumed arguments about who supported what imperial venture and why within broader debates about the fundamental political and cultural directions that France might take after the multiple shocks of 1868–71. If there is consensus that France was changed profoundly by the eclipse of Napoleon III's regime, the speed and humiliation of Prussia's victory, and the crushing of the Paris Commune, their impact on French colonialism is less obvious.Footnote 80 The presumption has been that change at home reverberated overseas; hence, the tendency to read the emergence of a new French imperialism as the by-product of bitter domestic arguments over how France should be rebuilt in the wake of its cataclysmic experiences of war and revolution.Footnote 81 Would bourgeois democracy finally triumph after its false start in 1848? If so, could the Catholic Church and the army be reconciled to a parliamentary system with a republican majority?Footnote 82 The essential question was this. Could the French nation pursue basic constitutional revision, essential economic modernization, and overdue social reforms without turning on itself in the process?Footnote 83 The rhetoric deployed during the intervention in Tunisia and the subsequent non-intervention in Egypt offers answers.
French designs on Tunisia crystallized in early 1881 thanks in large part to four external – and essentially negative – stimuli. First was the mounting concern among politicians, officials, and missionary leaders about the rapid influx of Italian settlers and their growing commercial influence in and around Tunis.Footnote 84 Linked to this was a second fear, namely that France might lose the advantage of European acquiescence in a French takeover, which was effectively promised at the Congress of Berlin in 1878.Footnote 85 Continued delay was expected to mean that not only Italian, but also German and, more especially, Ottoman Turkish objections to French incursion would become harder to ignore. Indeed, as it transpired, both the Italian and German governments turned their frustrations with French intervention in Tunisia into firmer opposition to any further French or British expansionism elsewhere.Footnote 86 This raised the third consideration: that the Ottoman Sultanate – encouraged by Bismarck – might press its claim to indirect authority over Tunis both to pre-empt a French takeover and to drive a wedge between France and Britain over the much greater prize of Egypt.Footnote 87 Unsurprisingly, the French authorities were at pains to avoid justifying action in Tunisia in terms of these three nakedly self-serving grounds. Rhetorically at least, they focused instead on a fourth factor: namely, the abiding problem of disorder along the land frontier between western Tunisia and eastern Algeria. Claims that the Tunisian regime offered sanctuary to Algerian leaders of an 1871 uprising against colonial rule lent a tone of moral indignation to French demands.Footnote 88
Contrary to expectations, devising convincing rhetorical arguments for intervention on the grounds of an allegedly ‘fanatical’ Muslim tribal uprising on the margins of colonial Algeria proved difficult. To be sure, the killing of five soldiers in the disputed Algerian–Tunisia borderland provided the immediate pretext for the formation of a French punishment column. But the violence of the alleged perpetrators, the Khmir tribal confederation, was motivated more by issues relating to land-holding, customary trading rights, and pecuniary gain than by any jihadist impulse.Footnote 89
Redolent of British demonization of ‘Urabi, the French depiction of limited border clashes as indicators of the violence innate in Tunisian society was cynically misleading.Footnote 90 For one thing, the alleged threat posed by the Khmir soon receded from view once the protectorate was in place.Footnote 91 For another thing, Tunisia's beylical administration, in conformity with its numerous international treaty obligations, was remarkably tolerant in its attitude to other faith communities living under its jurisdiction. Tunis in 1881 was neither in cultural nor political meltdown in a manner comparable to Alexandria or Cairo a year later.Footnote 92 There was no threat to existing commercial interests, no dispossession of colonists, no massacres of Christians to compare with events in Ottoman Syria or, more recently, Bulgaria. Even if there had been, there were powerful arguments to suggest that other European powers might immerse themselves in Tunisia's affairs as much as France.Footnote 93 The system of ‘capitulations’ or referential extra-territorial treaty rights that governed Tunisia's external trade and internal juridical regime had already levered open the door to powerful foreign interests. And, whether classical or contemporary, what traces of European colonization there were came with an Italian – not French – flavour.Footnote 94
Perhaps, then, we should return from North Africa to Paris for a better appreciation of the rhetorical devices used to justify French actions. Certainly, the effervescence characteristic of French parliamentary politics in the early years of the Third Republic threatened to boil over in late 1881. This was due, in part, to mounting internal disorder in Tunisia. Violence intensified as summer turned to autumn. The inter-communal aspect to these killings called the ‘order from chaos’ defence of French annexation into question and was instrumental in bringing down Jules Ferry's government in October.Footnote 95 In part, the National Assembly's increasingly febrile atmosphere mirrored the disintegration of the republican bloc into opposing factions. Most remained nominally loyal to Gambetta, but each was exasperated by their patron's reluctance to return to office without a solid electoral mandate for the constitutional reforms he considered necessary to entrench the progressive ‘republicanization’ of France. Reflecting on the situation before he eventually tried and failed to form his Grand Ministère in November 1881, Gambetta told his confidante Léonie Léon, ‘You can hardly decorate the incoherent tumult of the various factions of the left [with the name politics]; it's more a delirium tremens, something like Saint Vitus' dance.'Footnote 96 In the event, Gambetta, terminally ill with intestinal cancer, limped from office never to return in January 1882. The greatest republican rhetorical voice of the early Third Republic was gone. A fraught, unstable coalition under Gambetta's erstwhile colleague, the Protestant senator Charles de Freycinet, was left to step into the breach just as the Egyptian crisis exploded.
The new French government's priorities were largely domestic – and highly contentious. Reforms to the electoral system, restructuring the judiciary, and reducing the military service term consumed most attention.Footnote 97 But there was also an economic stimulus package centred on new commercial tariffs that was bound to antagonize British free traders. For his part, de Freycinet was determined to complete a thorough-going overhaul of the Foreign Ministry's internal organization, making entry and advancement in the French diplomatic corps more transparent, more meritocratic, more republican.Footnote 98 Immensely busy, and conscious of his isolation among a still reactionary Foreign Ministry staff resentful of the new premier's reforms, de Freycinet had no appetite for confrontation with Britain over another contested region of North-East Africa.Footnote 99
Government statements and ministerial speeches made in response to Britain's Egyptian fait accompli were necessarily muted, muffled by these more pressing domestic concerns. Relations between de Freycinet's ministry and the National Assembly were already fractious. It made no sense to offer new causes for antagonism between the republican factions whose backing ensured the government's survival. The French stake in the Suez Canal Company did not disappear overnight. French investors remained the majority shareholders and a French bank, the Crédit Foncier, retained its role as key repository for company profits.Footnote 100 Moreover, Parisian creditors, much like leading republican politicians, judged a British presence in Egypt preferable to an Ottoman one.Footnote 101 Despite the longevity of French imperial connections in Egypt and the extent of Parisian financial interests in Suez, the strident interventionism of Gabriel Charmes, with whom this section began, failed to register inside de Freycinet's administration.
III
By 1956, Britain's troubled relationship with Egypt reflected deeper changes to global geo-politics. Years of imperial occupation had given way to formal independence in 1922, although relations between Britain and Egypt remained profoundly unequal, as British coercion of the Egyptian government during the Second World War demonstrated. The 1952 Egyptian revolution restored the balance somewhat in Egypt's favour. Under the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty agreed in 1954, British troops left the Suez Canal Base two years later. Within a few weeks, President Nasser asserted himself in dramatic style by nationalizing the Egyptian operations of the Suez Canal Company. In military terms, his forces were no match for those of Britain and France. Indeed, world opinion – and in particular American opinion – was more significant, something that was almost unimaginable in 1882. On the British side, the language of Anthony Eden's government was shaped by awareness that a case narrowly and unashamedly based on national self-interest would be indefensible internationally. Eden was of course a Conservative, but at the rhetorical level he was Gladstone's inheritor rather than Lord Salisbury's.
The British cabinet's discussion the day after Nasser's nationalization announcement both prefigured the line the government would take consistently in public and laid bare the inherent tensions within its position. Ministers conceded that Nasser was within his legal rights to nationalize an Egyptian-registered company, particularly as shareholders were promised compensation. A case built on international requirements thus appeared to make more sense:
The Canal was a vital link between the East and the West and its importance as an international waterway, recognized in the Convention signed in 1888 had increased with the development of the oil industry and the dependence of the world on oil supplies. It was not a piece of Egyptian property but an international asset of the highest importance and it should be managed as an international trust.Footnote 102
For all that, the claim that the canal was an international asset over which Egypt could not rightfully take control was equally liable to be judged on legal criteria, this time in relation to international law. The seeming move away from ‘legal quibbles’ thus led back to the 1888 Convention, the applicability of which was contestable.Footnote 103 Disregarding this fact, the government consistently made its case in (pseudo) legal terms, and the perceived need to maintain a façade of legality was the determinant of the specific scenario in which force was actually used.Footnote 104
Yet the government's emphasis on international law served a function beyond the attempt to establish that the use of force would be technically permissible. In his initial Commons statements, Eden did not speak of the empire and made only passing reference to the Commonwealth; rather, he spoke of the canal as ‘this great international waterway’, and to the Canal Company as ‘an international organization of the highest importance and standing’.Footnote 105 After Eden opened the first major Suez debate on 2 August, the Suez Group MP Viscount Hinchingbrooke approvingly described his speech as offering ‘a grand design of the internationalization of the Canal for all time’ to be established by ‘by diplomacy and [by] force if necessary’.Footnote 106 So on the one hand this was a language that was congenial even to the most bellicose; on the other, it allowed Eden to stand somewhat above the fray, and to distance himself from the more overtly hawkish attitude that he was privately encouraging the press to take.Footnote 107 Others followed his lead. Notwithstanding the rather embarrassing activities of the fringe League of Empire Loyalists, it was a rare Tory politician who explicitly invoked the concept of ‘duty to the British Empire’.Footnote 108 Mainstream Conservatives were much more likely to raise the standard of international law or even of ‘international morality’ (a notion that would have induced conniptions in most of their Victorian predecessors).Footnote 109
Eden's language may have reflected his awareness of the trends in British public opinion. Polls in August and September showed large majorities disapproving of Nasser's action and supportive of the government's handling of the crisis. But backing for international, UN-based solutions was also pronounced; economic and political action was preferred to the use of force. While more Conservative voters insisted that Egypt be compelled to accept ‘international control’ of the canal, support for referral of the problem to the UN (at over 80 per cent) did not vary according to party allegiance.Footnote 110 Equally importantly, this type of language was acceptable to many within the Labour party. Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour leader, strongly echoed it in his reply to Eden on 2 August. This speech has been noted for its comparison of Nasser with Mussolini and Hitler, a trope that was to be used freely by Conservatives too.Footnote 111 Equally noteworthy was his acceptance of Eden's stress on ‘international control’; yet at the same time he issued an important reservation. He noted Britain's membership of the UN, warned against taking any action that might breach international law, and her commitment to international law, and said that it would be ‘wrong to get into a position where we might be denounced in the Security Council as aggressors'.Footnote 112 In his own speech, former Labour Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison articulated the Labour case for international control more vividly. He presented Egypt's action as the individualistic and ‘anarchic’ action of a ‘modern nationalist, hysterical State’. Such behaviour could be
just as much an evil and a danger to world well-being as was the old imperialism and the old jingoism. I spent much of my life, when I was young, in denouncing imperialism and I have no reason to regret it; in denouncing jingoism, and I have no reason to regret it; and in denouncing excessive nationalism, and I have no reason to regret it. What worries me is the way in which some people, having spent many years in denouncing that in respect of our own country, and having enjoyed its advantages, are now spending their spare time in praising countries like Egypt, which are doing the very thing that Britain and other imperialist countries were doing a hundred years ago.Footnote 113
In this analysis, then, Nasser's anti-imperialist credentials were phony; international progress required transcending chaotic nationalist impulses that only fomented conflict.
These concerns were shared even by Aneurin Bevan who, like, Morrison, had fought Gaitskell for the leadership in 1955, and was now the party's spokesman on colonial affairs. As a renowned advocate of nationalization of domestic industry, he was almost bound to support Egypt's right to nationalize the canal; and yet he also took the view that ‘all waterways like the Suez Canal should come under international control, and not only the Canal itself’.Footnote 114 Writing in Tribune, a weekly widely seen as a Bevanite mouthpiece, he both asserted that the Egypt's case on nationalization was indisputable and that she would be ill-advised to stand on her sovereign rights in unmodified form.Footnote 115 This, however, was at odds with Tribune's editorial line, and ‘caused a storm’ among Bevan's own supporters.Footnote 116 There was therefore a fault-line between the Labour advocates of international control and those who took a more overtly anti-colonial and pro-Nasser line. Crucially, however, both arguments were cast in terms of anti-imperialism and internationalism. Overall, Eden's language of international control simultaneously secured him substantial support from Labour's most important figures, and sowed confusion in Opposition ranks.
In addition, Eden's language was calculated to play well in the United States. John Foster Dulles, the US secretary of state, was prone to discourse on the role of ‘moral force’ in international politics.Footnote 117 There was also traditional American hostility to British imperialism to be taken into account. Although this attitude was openly criticized by some Tory MPs as a double-standard, Eden needed to be more tactful.Footnote 118 Eden's best hope for winning over US public opinion lay in presenting Nasser as an offender against the international community and Britain as an upholder of that community's rights, not of its own historic imperial interests. In Egypt, by contrast, the concept of international control was strongly rejected.Footnote 119 In Nasser's view, moreover, the type of solution proposed by the British and French was inherently objectionable: ‘I consider the international control they talk about [to be] a new kind of imperialism – collective imperialism.’Footnote 120 ‘Collective imperialism’ (alternatively ‘collective colonialism’) became an important theme of Egyptian propaganda, and Eden's way of proceeding only fuelled suspicions in Cairo and Washington that his efforts at international consultation were a façade. As Dulles commented privately, the ‘essential difference’ between the UK and the US ‘was that, while the United States considered that all possible efforts should be made to reach a satisfactory solution by collective consultation, the United Kingdom regarded such efforts as a matter of form’.Footnote 121 French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau let the Anglo-French cat out of the diplomatic bag when, ignoring such reservations, he waxed lyrical in public about ‘the willingness of the United States to bring about a solution resulting in the internationalization of the Suez Canal, that is to say, a solution contrary to the principles of Colonel Nasser’.Footnote 122 For Eden, as for him, the precise terms of the solution were less important than that it should be objectionable to the Egyptians, and the rhetoric adopted was a means of cloaking the attempted humiliation of the weaker power in the language of internationalism.
The catastrophic diplomatic consequences of the late autumn invasion are well known; and the debacle was of course politically fatal for Eden personally. Yet it seems possible that the government's line – despite the implausibility of its denial of collusion with the Israelis – was persuasive at the domestic level. Tory propaganda insisted that Eden was a man of peace who was determined to uphold international law. One internal party briefing pointed out that approval of the prime minister's handling of the Middle East situation increased from 40 to 53 per cent during the first two weeks of November, during which the invasion and ceasefire occurred.Footnote 123 Although there were, in fact, some contradictions in the polling data, it seems plausible to imagine that a substantial number of voters did accept that Britain had intervened in a moral way to stop the Israel–Egypt conflict from spreading, because the UN was unable to act quickly enough.Footnote 124 This was very similar to what Joseph Chamberlain had argued in 1882: that in the absence of an effective international authority, it was Britain's role to step in. The Conservatives rehashed this interpretation of Suez at the 1959 general election, arguing that they had acted in an emergency to stop war spreading.Footnote 125 Their substantially increased majority suggested that many voters were eager to be so persuaded. Partly as a result of the fact that Tory leaders also persuaded themselves, Suez did not lead to quite as sharp a break in British strategic thinking as is commonly assumed.Footnote 126
IV
Guy Mollet's coalition government reacted to news of the Suez nationalization with predictable outrage. Predictable because Nasser was already a hate-figure for the Republican Front, a left-of-centre administration whose support derived from the Socialists, the Radicals, the UDSR (Union démocratique et socialiste de la résistance), and Jacques Chaban-Delmas's Social Republicans. Outrage even so because, in seizing unilateral control of the canal, Nasser appeared to confirm French characterizations of the Egyptian leader as a dangerous ideological fanatic, kingpin of the Arab world, and master-manipulator of circumstance.Footnote 127 Nasser, so the Parisian rhetoric went, was the real imperialist. His support for pan-Arab solidarity was reverberating throughout north-west Africa. This mattered because the region remained a French sphere of influence, despite Morocco and Tunisia having secured independence earlier in the year. Nasser's political vision, ostensibly anti-colonialist and internationally non-aligned, was, according to Mollet, his foreign minister, Christian Pineau, and others, a new form of Egyptian empire-building, one whose fulfilment depended, in practice, on surreptitious Soviet backing.
The Egyptian leader, then, was a dictator, one whose expansionist ambitions it now fell to France and Britain to expose. As a result, it was what French historians term the ‘Munich syndrome’ (sometimes, rather confusingly, described by the French press as the ‘anti-Munich syndrome’, but meaning the same thing) that completed this rhetorical jigsaw. Eighteen years previously, so the argument went, the Entente partners had failed to their cost either to unite or to react in time to thwart fascist aggrandizement. France, even more than Britain, paid the price, learning that it was fatal to appease dictators who professed only to be reclaiming their sovereign rights. On 29 July, only forty hours after the crisis erupted, Pineau reassured his opposite number Selwyn Lloyd that ‘the French Government were ready to go with us to the end in dealing with Nasser’.Footnote 128 Indeed they were.
By July 1956, the French intelligence services and the Ministry of National Defence had been monitoring Nasser's deepening relationship with Algeria's nationalist fighters for the best part of a year. So the rhetorical flights of fancy that greeted the announcement of canal nationalization were conditioned, above all, by knowledge of Egypt's strengthening influence in Algeria's war of independence. Senior figures in government, in the military, and in the security services were, as a result, predisposed to seize the opportunity for a killer blow. By 3 August, there was talk in the French cabinet of ‘liquidating’ the Egyptian leader.Footnote 129 Similarly ominous pledges to reverse the Suez nationalization figured when French cabinet members spoke in the National Assembly debate on the developing crisis in Egypt later that day.
A dramatic turn of events; a violent, uncompromising use of language: yet also misleading as an evidential source. Why? Because to focus on the French Conseil des ministres, or full cabinet, as the principal source of French governmental discussion – and consequent pronouncements – about the Suez Crisis is to miss an essential point. In narrowly French political terms, the real significance of the way that Nasser's actions were first depicted and then defied was to expose the dysfunction intrinsic to policy-making in the Fourth Republic.
When it came to the management of crises in which French global interests were at stake, decision-making was appropriated by a select few within France's civil–military elite. Repeating the experience of the Indochina War, barely two years after the violent end of France's colonial presence in Southeast Asia, during 1956 imperial policy-making was, yet again, hijacked by a closed group of like-minded insiders within government, the military, and the security services.
The most notable casualty of this bureaucratic in-fighting was the Quai d'Orsay. The Foreign Ministry's principal antagonists were inside the French Defence Ministry. From there, the pre-eminent duo of the defence minister Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury and his secretary-general, Abel Thomas, did more than anyone else to reorient French Middle Eastern policy in 1956.Footnote 130 Senior commanders in Algeria, as well as Interior Ministry staff in Paris and their Algiers government cousins – jointly responsible for managing the war in Algeria day by day – were also eager to strike at Nasser in a bid to transform their Algerian prospects. And it was this inner core of politicians, officials, and military commanders that were taking charge of managing the crisis.Footnote 131
We need, therefore, to frame French decision-making during the Suez Crisis – as well as the rhetorical justifications produced to justify it – within the context of a dysfunctional political system in which secrecy, misinformation, and the exclusion from key decisions, not just of individual ministers, but of entire branches of government, had become the norm. Put differently, historians of Britain's Suez Crisis have criticized both Anthony Eden and a style of government typified by the ‘Egypt Committee’, which served as something between a war cabinet, an inner cabinet, and, on occasion, a sounding board for prime ministerial preferences.Footnote 132 But this proclivity to rule by cabal pales alongside its French iteration, one that was tantamount to political subversion and systematic deception of fellow ministers, overseas allies, and the wider public in France.
Moving beyond the realm of government, at least six other discrete factors conditioned French political debate about the Egyptian regime, the Suez Canal nationalization, and eventual collusion with Israel and Britain. First among them, as we have seen, was the looming presence of the Algerian conflict.Footnote 133 What began in late 1954 as an anti-colonial rebellion mushroomed over the course of 1956 into a massive conflagration, involving the largest deployment of French forces outside Europe since the First World War. The ethical parameters of French political choices and the territorial limits of French military action collapsed in the process. Such is well known. What remains harder to explain is why a Socialist-led government not only acquiesced in this descent into the Algerian abyss, but propelled it forward. Mollet, after all, came into office promising to put a stop to ‘this imbecilic and unending war’.Footnote 134 In fact, his government, the longest-lasting coalition in the Fourth Republic's twelve-year lifespan, pushed France deeper into the Algerian quagmire.
Linked to this was a second factor: the emergence of more militant voices in opposition to French imperial ventures. Typically associated with the anti-imperialist intellectualism of figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the chic ultra-leftism of the Parisian Left Bank was, during 1956, less significant than the widespread public unease over the use of national servicemen on the Algerian frontline.Footnote 135 Where de Freycinet was trying, eight decades earlier, to reduce conscription's burden on the nation, Mollet fatally extended it. The dispatch of conscripts and, equally important, of older army reservists to North Africa was a recent development. It was agreed as part of the ‘Emergency Powers’ legislation passed by the National Assembly on 12 March 1956 by an overwhelming vote of 455 to 76.
The purpose was to crush the Algerian rebellion with the sheer force of French numbers. But Mollet's government rode to electoral victory in January 1956 promising to end the Algerian War through dialogue, not military saturation. As the French premier told a packed Chamber of Deputies in the Special Powers debate on 9 March, adopting such sweeping legislation would change the entire thrust of Algeria policy. But, he insisted, the objective remained the same: peace in Algeria, albeit necessarily after order was restored.Footnote 136 Addressing himself to the government's Socialist supporters, Mollet affirmed that reinforcing the army in Algeria was meant to restore security and public confidence in two absolute certainties: that France would never leave and that, by consequence, a negotiated settlement was the best that Algeria's nationalist fighters could achieve.Footnote 137
The third factor to consider was the government's bitterest opponents, the anti-parliamentary extreme-rightists of Pierre Poujade's Union de défense des commerçants et artisans. Always closer to an anti-republican protest movement than a responsible political party, the Poujadists staged inflammatory demonstrations inside and outside the National Assembly in February during which shots – mercifully, only blanks – were fired from the National Assembly spectators' gallery.Footnote 138 Ostensibly, their complaint was against a constitutional court ruling that invalidated election results involving a dozen of the fifty-six Poujadist deputies elected in January. But the Poujadists' tactics and their vitriolic anti-republicanism were redolent of the well-orchestrated settler demonstrations in Algiers that, famously, compelled Mollet to reverse course over the war a few days beforehand.Footnote 139 Here, the rhetorical parallels with 1881–2 were stronger. Just as Charmes decried de Freycinet's government for its weakness over Egypt, so his Poujadist inheritors saw another French withdrawal looming. Central to Poujadist anger was the suspicion that the Republican Front was intent on an Algerian ‘sell-out’, leaving Algeria's poor white settlers – always an assured reservoir of Poujadist support – to their fate. In was no coincidence that Mollet's final act in the 9 March debate was to focus on the Poujadists' noisiest parliamentary ally, the young deputy and Indochina War veteran, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Algeria's settlers, Mollet told him, would be protected; there would be no repetition of France's recent defeat in Vietnam.Footnote 140
This brings us to a fourth factor: the nature of party political opposition in the Fourth Republic. From its beginnings in 1944 to its suicidal end in May 1958, France's restored democracy was hamstrung by its opponents on the left and right of the political spectrum. At one extreme stood the French Communist party. Nominally Stalinist and avowedly anti-colonial, actually more equivocal on both counts, Party leaders were always ready to exploit signs of government distress to enhance Communist support.Footnote 141 Opposing them was the Gaullist Rassemblement du peuple français (RPF). Intrinsically hostile to what they decried as the Fourth Republic ‘system’, the RPF was a populist movement-cum-party united by its messianic belief in the restorative powers of a de Gaulle presidency. This would culminate eighteen months after the October 1956 invasion of Egypt in an Algiers coup whose ruthless implementation brought the Fourth Republic to its knees. Put differently, the practice of French government in 1956 was not simply a matter of national or even party political interest. It was a struggle to maintain the legitimacy of the republican regime against powerful opponents who vilified not just the government in office but the way the Fourth Republic did – or did not – work.
The issue of legitimacy is central to the fifth factor as well. For the tropes that recurred most frequently in French decision-makers' rhetoric throughout the Suez Crisis related governmental choices to two things: avoiding the mistakes of 1930s appeasement and rekindling the against-the-odds bravery of wartime resistance.Footnote 142 The attempt to tie France's actions in 1956 to a resistance heritage was made easier by the simple fact that the majority of those ‘inside’ the decision-making circles of French government boasted resistance credentials.Footnote 143
And this fifth conditioning factor helps account for the final one, which was France's closer strategic alignment with the state of Israel. What bears emphasis is that, from the French standpoint, the decisive ally in 1956 was neither Britain, nor the United States; rather, it was an Israeli regime of which France had, in the short term at least, become the foremost military backer.Footnote 144 Despite abiding mutual suspicions of one another's motives, on 23 June French and Israeli defence and security service officials met outside Paris to sign off an $80 million arms supply contract. Its headline item was seventy-two Mystère 4A jet fighters, enough to assure Israel's aerial supremacy over Egypt.Footnote 145 Indeed, one could read official approval on 27 July of the Mystère arms sale as the first meaningful French reaction to news of the Suez nationalization.Footnote 146 A cautionary word here: the Franco-Israeli partnership was a strategic marriage of convenience, and a tenuous one at that.Footnote 147 But there was another, less calculable quality that helped sustain the Franco-Israeli cohabitation. Israel's leaders, like their French counterparts, drew their political legitimacy from a resistance heritage of their own, one that was shaped by the struggle against Nazism, against the British presence in Mandate Palestine, and against warring Arab states. What for Britain and the USA were primarily imperial or geo-political calculations were for France and Israel reducible to a more existential question: could French Algeria and the state of Israel survive the consolidation of Nasserism throughout the Arab world?
In light of these existential fears, it is little wonder that signal features of French political debate as the crisis reached its denouement were the low volume and limited impact of the few voices raised in opposition to the government's actions. In marked contrast to the political outcry over the turn of events in 1882, an air of unruffled official calm persisted in November 1956 even as the invasion of Egypt stalled. The government's two most stinging critics were each former Republican Front members who had turned bitterly against it. First was Pierre Mendès France, the self-appointed moral conscience of France's liberal left in matters of empire. Speaking to an 800-strong audience at Bordeaux's Saint-Augustin salle des fêtes, the Radical party politician lambasted intervention as unethical, ineffectual and deeply stupid. The Americans were needlessly antagonized, the UN alienated, and France's residual claims to any ‘right to rule’ in North Africa undermined. These blunt truths did not go over well. In addition to a chorus of boos and whistles, firecrackers, stink bombs, and rotten apples were hurled towards the stage in an effort to shut the outspoken politician up.Footnote 148
If Mendès France's outspokenness hinged on issues of morality and power projection, his fellow critic, André Philip, targeted his attacks on the damage done to French Socialism by the coalition's actions over the preceding year. An acknowledged financial specialist who prided himself in his role in steering French reconstruction as minister of national economy in the immediate post-war years, Philip had been out of sympathy with the Socialist party leadership for years. His definitive break with the Socialists would come in January 1958. But it was clearly foretold in his analysis of the Republican Front's misadventures in Algeria and Egypt during 1956. Having won the January elections promising peace and dialogue in Algeria, Mollet's government not only expanded that war but started another on the banks of the Nile. Leaving the Socialist party morally bankrupt was bad enough, but it also spelt strategic disaster at a time when Socialists should have capitalized on the divisions opened in Communist ranks by the brutality of Soviet actions in Budapest. As it was, the toxic Algeria–Suez cocktail denied the Socialists their best opportunity since the French Communist Party's creation in 1920 to win back Communist supporters disillusioned by their leaders' blind loyalism to Moscow.Footnote 149
For a true Socialist, then, Suez was particularly tragic. Philip had no quarrel with Mendès France's criticism of North African policies that were as ethically reprehensible as they were internationally damaging.Footnote 150 But what stopped Philip short was that the Republican Front's new-found imperialism had ensured that the debilitating rupture within the French left would continue for years.Footnote 151 It was this, he would later claim, that left the door ajar to opponents of the Fourth Republic to overthrow the regime during the May crisis of 1958.Footnote 152
The appearance of a French nation unperturbed by the failure of intervention in Egypt was superficially correct, but it was profoundly misleading all the same. By the end of November, Mollet's Socialist party was in open revolt against the premier. Critics alleged that the disastrous attempt to topple Nasser was the logical consequence of the unethical adventurism that had come to define Republican Front actions in North Africa as a whole. Little wonder that the Algerian public celebrated the against-the-odds ‘victory’ of Nasser, champion of Third Worldism.Footnote 153 Mollet, the convinced anglophile, was cut adrift from London, finding sanctuary in a welcoming West German embrace as the finalization of plans for the European Community offered solace for Middle Eastern humiliation.Footnote 154 More significant in the short term, the French political fallout from Suez rekindled the mistrust between civilian authorities in Paris and professional army commanders in Algeria. Even Christian Pineau, whose memoir of Suez sought to demythologize the supposed French connection between deposing Nasser and winning in Algeria, found it difficult not to place the escalating colonial war at the heart of his narrative.Footnote 155 Mollet's government had begun in 1956 by cementing a new bond between civil government and the officer corps with ‘Special Powers’ legislation that offered military commanders unprecedented means to crush the Algerian rebellion. The civil authorities in Paris ended the year with the prospect of fatal army indiscipline in Algiers only months away.
V
Britain's two Egyptian interventions are typically viewed as embarrassments and betrayals. In 1882, Gladstone betrayed his liberal principles, it is generally considered; almost eighty years later, Eden betrayed his allies. It might be argued, though, that both leaders were only able to go so far because of their rhetorical successes, at least domestically. There were, moreover, links between the two cases. Both prime ministers appropriated the liberal language of international law, which helped them present their respective interventions as necessary for the defence of peace. Uday Singh Mehta has argued that empire was integral to Liberalism.Footnote 156 Being sceptical about ‘essentialist’ interpretations of Liberalism (or any other ideology), we would not go that far.Footnote 157 However, we would agree that Liberal languages often proved useful to those who wished to justify imperial interventions, whether or not the people doing the arguing were identified themselves as Liberals.Footnote 158 Increasingly, Conservatives came to realize this. Indeed, a key purpose of this article has been to draw attention to a long-term shift in Conservative imperial language from a focus on prestige and national self-interest to an emphasis on the need to maintain an ordered, rule-bound community of nations, drawing on an earlier Liberal heritage. Thus, Gladstone and Eden each combined an insistence on the requirement for order, which we tend to think of as conservative, with liberal appeals to the sanctity of contract. The resultant rhetoric was neither one of simple power politics nor of intervention justified on humanitarian grounds. It was instead the rhetoric of ‘liberal order’.
Despite the fact that, in 1881, French ministers justified their own interventionism in Tunisia in similar terms of order salvaged from chaos, a year later Gladstone's rhetoric failed to draw the Paris government into joint action in Egypt. A key reason for this was that in 1882 and in 1956 French governmental reactions to events in Egypt were conditioned by earlier, more proximate crises that demanded further rhetorical justification at home and internationally. Whatever the ethical objections to the occupation of Tunisia, the original case for it was built on alleged local misrule and consequent disorder at the frontier and between communities in Tunis. Continuing unrest within the country not only exposed the hollowness of these arguments but also heightened international criticism of French disregard for the rights of foreign nationals and investors. Telescoping forward to 1956, it was the Republican Front's fatal decision to widen the Algerian War that propelled France into the Suez collusion. Proponents of intervention justified their conspiratorial behaviour in the language of resistance and claimed to be acting against an imperialistic Arab leader, one whose dictatorial actions and consequent threats to regional stability were redolent of 1930s revisionists. For France, then, the two Egyptian crises were connected by their functional relationship with other, bigger North African crises – over Tunisian occupation and a war of decolonization in Algeria. And these wider North African problems were also pivotal to the unfolding crises of legitimacy of two French Republics: the Third and the Fourth, constitutional systems that in the 1880s and the 1950s faced determined challenge from right and left.
France's experience reminds us that, however one reads the rhetoric of empire emanating from Paris and London throughout 1956, it makes more sense to interpret the Suez disaster not just as a crisis of liberal democracies at war, but of very different democratic systems in operation. We are thus contrasting imperial rhetoric in Britain's relatively stable political environment with its French equivalent in a profoundly unstable republican regime. Anthony Eden was ultimately brought down by a parliamentary system that was undoubtedly functional combined with a British public sphere that accommodated harsh criticism of government misdeeds. Britain's imperial presence in the Middle East survived; its all-important transatlantic connections were soon rebuilt. In France, the exact reverse applied. Guy Mollet's Republican Front both survived the Suez humiliation – not least by blaming British inconsistency – and, if poll evidence is to be credited, emerged with stronger public endorsement than before. The Suez Crisis laid bare the dysfunctional core of the Fourth Republic's parliamentary system even so. And wider public engagement with the crisis was skewed by the overwhelming preoccupation with the Algerian War. Thus, where the consequences of Suez for governmental structures and overseas power projection were generally more limited in the British case than is typically assumed, in the French case they were seismic. French international standing in the Arab world hit a low from which it would take many years to recover. Perhaps more significant, the Fourth Republic limped from one Algeria-induced crisis to another until its final unlamented collapse eighteen months later.
In summary, then, the crises Britain experienced in 1882 and 1956 were crises of prestige – not only national prestige, but, perhaps more importantly, prime ministerial and governmental prestige. These could be surmounted politically not by military intervention alone, but by intervention in combination with the rhetoric of liberal order. But what were crises of prestige for Britain were crises of regime for France – neither of which could be overcome through rhetoric – and in the case of 1956 the disease quite quickly proved fatal. In these respects, the late nineteenth-century expansion and the twentieth-century collapse of the two empires were not only surprisingly alike but also mutually entangled in hitherto unsuspected ways.
