Arguing about Intervention
Arguing about Intervention.
A Comparison of British and French Rhetoric surrounding the 1882
and 1956 invasions of Egypt
Abstract
This article compares the rhetorical justifications surrounding two landmark instances of
Western imperialism. In 1882, the British occupied Egypt, ousting indigenous protonationalist forces that supposedly threatened British, and other foreign interests. The
consequences of this intervention were still being worked out in 1956 when, in the wake of
the Cairo regime’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, the British again invaded. France
participated on this occasion, with serious but differing political consequences for both.
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, offers
useful insights into the two nations’ respective imperial cultures. Specifically, we suggest
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 both to uphold better standards of
governance and to restore regional order. The language of imperial domination was
eschewed; but the ends of empire were served by the use of a rhetoric of ‘liberal order’.
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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
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from participating in the invasion.1 The consequences of this intervention were still
being worked out in 1956 when, in the wake of the Cairo regime’s nationalisation of the
Suez Canal, the British again invaded. This time did France 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 both
to uphold better standards of governance and to restore regional order. 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 beholden to 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.
Charles de Freycinet circular to French Ambassadors in London, Berlin, Vienna, St Petersburg,
Rome and Constantinople, 1 August 1882, 77PAAP1, Charles de Freycinet papers: Egypte 18826/D2, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (MAE), La Courneuve,
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As has long been recognised, both Egyptian episodes were seminal moments in the rise
and demise of the British and French Empires. 1882 was 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. 1956 signified their joint symbolic defeat at the hands of the
new American quasi-Empire and the further mobilisation 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.’2 Historians usually choose either to compare similar times (synchronic
comparison) or different ones (diachronic comparison).3 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.4
Our focus is primarily on elite discourse, with our main sources being newspapers and
other contemporary published works, parliamentary debates, as 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
J.H. Elliott, History in the Making (New Haven, CT., 2012), p. 173.
Stefan Berger, ‘Comparative History’, in Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner, and Kevin Passmore
(eds.) Writing History: Theory and Practice (London, 2003), pp. 167-79, at 177.
4 Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann , ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the
Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory, 45:1 (2006), pp. 30-50, at 40.
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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 decolonisation of the two empires has of course been subject to comparison
before.5 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.
Miles Kahler, Decolonization in Britain and France: The Domestic Consequences of International
Relations (Princeton NJ, 1984); Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and their Roads
from Empire (Oxford, 2014).
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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 decolonisation, the creation of the state of Israel, and
the birth of Third World nationalism, prefigured global changes and regional geopolitical 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?’6
I: 1882: Britain
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
Marc Bloch, ‘Toward a Comparative History of European Societies’, in Frederic C. Lane and
Jelle C. Riemersma (ed.), Enterprise and Secular Change: Readings in Economic History
(Homewood, IL., 1953), pp. 494-521, at 515.
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combined with political populism the driving factor?7 Was it, alternatively, about
maintaining prestige?8 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?9
These questions necessarily intersect with that of how the invasion was publicly
rationalised, an issue which has generated a modest but valuable literature.10 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.11 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.12 Indeed, the
Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism
(London, 1961); P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 16881914 (London, 1993), pp. 362-9. See also A.G. Hopkins, ‘The Victorians and Africa: A
Reconsideration of the Occupation of Egypt, 1882’, Journal of African History, 27:2 (1986), pp.
363-391.
8 Dan Halvorson, ‘Prestige, Prudence and Public Opinion in the 1882 British Occupation of
Egypt’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 56:3 (2010), pp. 423-440.
9 Alexander Schölch, ‘The “Men on the Spot” and the English Occupation of Egypt in 1882’,
Historical Journal 19:3 (1976), pp. 773-785; John S. Galbraith and Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot,
‘The British Occupation of Egypt: Another View’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 9:4
(1978), pp. 471-88.
10 John Newsinger, ‘Liberal Imperialism and the occupation of Egypt in 1882’, Race & Class, 49:3
(2007), pp. 54-75; P. J. Cain, ‘Character and Imperialism: The British Financial Administration of
Egypt, 1878-1914, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 34:2 (2006), pp. 177-200;
M.E. Chamberlain, ‘British Public Opinion and the Invasion of Egypt, 1882’, Trivium, 16 (1981),
pp. 5-28.
11 See P.J. Durran, ‘A Two-Edged Sword: The Liberal Attack on Disraelian Imperialism’, Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History, 10:3 (1982), pp. 262-84.
12 ‘Mr. Gladstone’, The Times, 31 March 1880.
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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. 13 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.14 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’.15 This suggests that
Gladstone did subscribe to a cross-party conception of national and imperial interest.16
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.17
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.18
‘Lord Carnarvon on Imperial Administration’, Saturday Review, 9 Nov. 1878; Richard Koebner
and Helmut Dan Schmidt, Imperialism: The Story and Significance of a Political Word, 1840–1960
(Cambridge, 1964), pp. 1-26.
14 For the influence of the Radicals, see Andrekos Varnava, ‘British and Greek Liberalism and
Imperialism in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Matthew P. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Liberal
Imperialism in Europe (Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 219-39, at 226-7.
15 W.E. Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879 (London, 1879),
pp. 203.
16 See John Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion’,
English Historical Review, CXII:447 (1997), pp. 614-642, at 622.
17 See W.E. Gladstone, ‘England’s Mission’, Nineteenth Century, Sept. 1878, pp. 560-84.
18 P.J. Cain, ‘Empire and the Languages of Character and Virtue in Late Victorian and Edwardian
Britain’, Modern Intellectual History, 4:2 (2007), pp. 249-273, at 269.
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These conflicting interpretations were reflected in the 1882 debates. The crisis was the
culmination of longstanding 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.19 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 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.20 At this stage, Gladstone was
prepared to concede that a genuine Egyptian national movement might be coalescing.21
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.22
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 Arabi 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 cooperating with the French.
Varnava, ‘British and Greek’, p. 222.
Michael J. Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead: Government and Society in Alexandria, 1807-1882
(Oxford, 1997), p. 175.
21 H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809-1898 (Oxford, 1997), p. 383; Luisa Villa, ‘A “Political
Education”: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the Arabs and the Egyptian Revolution (1881–82)’, Journal of
Victorian Culture, 17:1 (2012), pp. 46-63; Gladstone to Granville, 4 Jan. 1882, in Agatha Ramm
(ed.), Political Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville, Vol. I: 1876-1882 (Oxford,
1962), p. 326.
22 M.E. Chamberlain, ‘British Public Opinion’.
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Worse, it was Gladstone’s casual disregard for ‘the ancient traditions of the country’ that
allowed this misperception to gain credence.23
The government could retort that although cooperation 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.24
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.25 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’.26 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.27
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,
Untitled editorial, Morning Post, 5 Jan. 1882.
Dilke’s speech, reported in the Daily News, 1 Feb. 1882.
25 ‘The Crisis in Egypt’, The Standard, 12 May 1882.
26 HL Deb 15 May 1882, vol. 269 cols. 647-50.
27 HL Deb 15 May 1882, vol. 269 cols. 651-2.
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unlike France, was not seeking conquest.’28 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 Arabi 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.29 The British also agreed
to a French request for an international conference at Constantinople.30 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
cooperate with other countries could lead to a neglect of British interests.31 At the start
of June, Gladstone upped the ante by suggesting in the Commons that Arabi had
‘completely thrown off the mask’ and was planning to depose the Khedive.32 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. Arabi was promptly blamed for the violence, probably
unfairly.33 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’.34 This was sensational (and would have been more so, had the extent of
Gladstone’s own holdings been known).35 Gladstone’s comments sent the markets rising
HC Deb 26 May 1882, vol. 269 cols. 1711-14, 1721-3.
‘The Egyptian Crisis’, The Standard, 26 May 1882.
30 Matthew, Gladstone, p. 385.
31 ‘Sir Stafford Northcote on Public Affairs’, Birmingham Daily Post, 3 June 1882.
32 HC Deb 01 June 1882, vol. 269, cols. 1780-1. See also Gladstone to Granville [2 June 1882], in
Ramm, Political Correspondence vol. I, p. 378.
33 M. E. Chamberlain, ‘The Alexandria Massacre of 11 June 1882 and the British Occupation of
Egypt’, Middle Eastern Studies , 13:1 (1977), pp. 14-39.
34 HC Deb 14 June 1882, vol. 270, cols. 1143-50.
35 Richard Shannon, Gladstone: Heroic Minister 1865-1898 (London, 1999), p. 303.
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and unnerved some of his Liberal colleagues.36 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.’ 37
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.38 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 benefitted 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.’39 Here was an overt example of ‘dominantimperialist’ language, and Salisbury was by no means atypical of his party.40 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.41
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
‘Commercial & Markets’, Liverpool Mercury, 15 June 1882; ‘Our London Correspondence’,
Liverpool Mercury, 17 June 1882.
37 Stephen Gwynn and Gertrude M. Tuckwell, The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Bart.,
MP, vol. I (London, 1917). p. 460.
38 ‘Epitome of Opinion’, Pall Mall Gazette, 22 June 1882.
39 ‘The Crisis In Egypt’, The Times, 30 June 1882. See also ‘Our London Correspondence’,
Liverpool Mercury, 30 June 1882, and ‘Epitome of Opinion’, Pall Mall Gazette, 29 June 1882.
40 Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain
(Oxford, 2004), pp. 312-4.
41 ‘The Crisis In Egypt’, The Times, 27 June 1882; Chamberlain., ‘Public Opinion’, p. 18; Martin
Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 18541945 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 119-20.
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“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.’42 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.43
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.44 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.45 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.46 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
Galbraith and al-Sayyid-Marsot, ‘The British Occupation’, p. 473. See also Hopkins, ‘The
Victorians’, p. 374.
43 Note by Dilke, 4 July 1882, PRO 30/29/132, TNA; M. E. Chamberlain, ‘Sir Charles Dilke and the
British Intervention In Egypt, 1882: Decision-making in a Nineteenth Century Cabinet’, British
Journal of International Studies, 2:3 (1976), pp. 231-245, at 16.
44 Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, p. 110.
45 Newsinger, ‘Liberal Imperialism’, p. 66.
46 Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, p. 115.
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system of international relations, and thus was standing up for ‘peace as against war, &
law as against violence & arbitrary will’.47
When the Commons debated a vote of credit for the expedition, Gladstone again
emphasised 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 Arabi’s tyrannous reign of ‘military
violence’.48 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.49 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.50
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.51 Chamberlain, who shared Dilke’s
reputation as a Radical, avoided the word ‘empire’, but he too presented the British
Gladstone to John Bright, 14 July 1882, in H.C.G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries with
Cabinet Minutes and Prime Ministerial Correspondence vol. X: January 1881-June 1883 (Oxford,
1990), pp. 298-9.
48 HC Deb 24 July 1882, vol. 272 cols. 1574-91.
49 Jennifer Pitts has argued that during the Nineteenth Century ‘The vision of international law
as an order of purely European origins to be imposed gradually on the rest of the world eclipsed
more pluralistic understandings of possible global legalities’: ‘Legal Universalisms in the
Eighteenth Century’, American Historical Review, Vol. 117, No. 1 (February 2012), pp. 92-121.
Gladstone’s understanding of international law appears to have fallen within that pattern.
50 Editorial, Leeds Mercury, 25 July 1882; ‘Our London Correspondence’, Liverpool Mercury, 25
Jul 1882; ‘Our London Letter’, Northern Echo, 25 July1882.
51 HC Deb 25 July 1882, vol. 272, cols. 1710-25.
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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.52 The only Liberal parliamentarian who foregrounded empire was Henry
Labouchere MP, publisher of Truth and himself a bondholder, albeit one who later
turned against intervention.53 He put things more bluntly: ‘intervention was absolutely
necessary if England was to remain the great Empire she was’.54
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.55 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.’56
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.
HC Deb 25 July 1882, vol. 272, cols. 1799-1805.
Chamberlain, ‘British Public Opinion’, p. 20; Herbert Sidebotham, ‘Labouchere, Henry Du Pré
(1831–1912)’, rev. H. C. G. Matthew, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004);
online edn, Oct 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34367, accessed 31 Oct 2012]
54 HC Deb 27 July 1882, vol. 272, cols. 2044-53.
55 For some trenchant criticisms of the government’s claims that the conflict was not a war, see
‘The Trouble in Egypt’, The Herald of Peace, 1 Sept. 1882, copy in Gladstone Papers, British
Library, Add MS 56450, ff. 51-2.
56 ‘Banquet To Her Majesty’s Ministers’, The Times, 10 Aug. 1882.
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52
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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.’57
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’, and that
the progressive Liberal patriotic discourse of the previous decades was marginalised.58
Yet in the case of Egypt, as we have seen, the position was more complex. Although the
language of prestige and British interests certainly did come into play, these themes
were integrated into recognisably Liberal languages of contractual duty, international
cooperation, 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 recognised, 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: 1881-2: France
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.59 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
Britain equivalent, French ‘popular imperialism’ in the 1880s was more inchoate,
combining strains of cultural ethnocentricity, scientific racism, and resurgent national
‘Official Oratory at the Mansion House’, Saturday Review, 12 Aug. 1882.
Jonathan Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe,
1830–1886 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 393.
59 The same rhetorical ploys depicting military incursion as politically urgent and ethically
imperative were used to justify creeping French imperial control in Vietnam: Ministère de la
Marine et des Colonies, ‘Note sur les affaires du Tonkin,’ no date, April 1880; ‘Note sur
l’exécution des traits de 1874 conclus avec l’Annam,’ May 1880. 77PAAP4, MAE.
57
58
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pride yet to coalesce into a singular political force.60 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.61 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 longstanding 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.62 Writing in the pro-empire Journal des Débats,
Charmes summarised 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.63
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
Martin Staum, ‘Nature and Nurture in French Ethnography and Anthropology, 1859-1914’,
Journal of the History of Ideas, 65:3 (2004), 488-92; Alice L. Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race,
Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (Ithaca, NY, 2013), 44-50; Alfred Perkins, ‘From
Uncertainty to Opposition: French Catholic Liberals and Imperial Expansion, 1880-1885’,
Catholic Historical Review, 82:2 (1996), 207-8.
61
Philip Dine, ‘The French Colonial Empire in Juvenile Fiction: From Jules Verne to Tintin’,
Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 23:2 (Spring 1997), 181-7; François Chaubet,
‘L'Alliance française ou la diplomatie de la langue (1883-1914)’, Revue Historique, 306:4 (Oct.
2004), 763-7.
62 Gabriel Charmes, Cairo letter reproduced in Journal des débats, 20 April 1882; reproduced in
enclosure 6 to Lord Lyons letter to Earl Granville, 20 April 1882, FO 146/2420, TNA.
63 John Chipman, French Power in Africa (Oxford, 1989), p. 50.
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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).64
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.65 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.66 Yet
the Paris government itself 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.67 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.68 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.69 For Ferry’s Cabinet colleagues, if not for their predecessors, this
was a source of shame. How is such divergent rhetoric to be explained?
D. Pasquet, ‘Comment la France a perdu l’Égypte d’après des mémoires de Lord Cromer,’
Revue Historique, 106:1 (1911), 28.
65 Le Temps, ‘Les événements d’Egypte. À Alexandrie’, 15 & 17 July 1882.
66 Le Temps, ‘Bulletin du jour’, Paris, 16 July 1882.
67 Journal de Genève, 11 July 1882, recording conversation between de Freycinet and Lord
Lyons.
68 Président de la Chambre Syndicale des négociants-commissionnaires, 16 January 1883, letter
to M. le Président du Conseil; réponse de Jules Ferry, 7 December 1883, Egypte/Commission
d’Alexandrie, 1882-3, 23ADP8, MAE.
69 Pétition no. 1052, Chambre de Commerce de Saint Malo, [petition no. 1060] Chambre de
commerce de Nîmes (Gard), [petition no. 1092] Chambre de commerce de Toulon (Var),
[petition no. 1131) Chambre de commerce de Pergignan [Pyrénées orientales] ‘Supplient la
Chambre de prendre les mesures nécessaires pour venir en aide le plus tôt possible à nos
compatriotes d’Egypte victimes de la dernière guerre’/Dossier: violences contre les personnes;
dommages matériels’, 23ADP8, MAE.
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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.70 Andrew took this analysis
further, identifying the volatility of Third Republic politics as conducive to a kind of
decision-making vacuum.71 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.72 A more populist
press, although emerging, was not yet setting a tone of imperialist adventurism.73
Instead, the key public statements about intervention in 1880s North Africa and, equally
significant, their target audience, reflected the elite composition of this diffuse proempire coalition. Committed supporters of France’s overseas claims in business,
academia, the church, the military and the diplomatic corps aligned with like-minded
C.M. Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, ‘The French “Colonial Party”: Its composition, aims and
influence, 1885-1914’, Historical Journal, 14:1 (1971), pp. 99-128.
71 C. M. Andrew, ‘The French Colonialist Movement during the Third Republic: The Unofficial
Mind of Imperialism’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 26 (1976), p. 143.
72
Julie D’Andurain, ‘Entre velléité et opiniâtreté: La création du ministère des Colonies en
France (1858–1894),’ French Colonial History, 14 (2013), 34, 38-9.
73 Dominique Pinsolle, ‘Le Matin, les affaires, et la politique, 1884-1897,’ Le mouvement social,
232 (2010), 91-107.
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politicians of firm imperialist credentials.74 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.75 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.76 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.77
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.78
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
For a lively portrait of a leading Parti Colonial player – and one much feared by de Freycinet –
see, Bruce Fulton, ‘France’s Extraordinary Ambassador; Ernest Constans and the Ottoman
Empire, 1898-1909,’ French Historical Studies, 23:4 (2000), 683-706, especially 683-88.
75 Andrew, ‘The French Colonialist Movement’, pp. 143-4.
76 T.W. Roberts, ‘Republicanism, Railway Imperialism, and the French Empire in Africa, 18791889’, Historical Journal, 54:2 (2011), p. 401.
77 General Mustapha ben Ismail, Prime Minister, Tunis, to French premier de Freycinet, 22 July
1880, Charles de Freycinet papers, Tunisie 1880-6, 77PAAP2/Dossier C, Ministère des Affaires
Etrangères (MAE): text of railway concession agreement detailing planned French railway
construction radiating from Tunis.
78 Robert Tombs, The War against Paris, 1871 (Cambridge, 1981); Bertrand Taithe, Citizenship
and Wars: France in Turmoil, 1870-1 (London, 2001), especially chapters 7-9.
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experiences of war and revolution.79 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?80 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?81
The rhetoric deployed during the intervention in Tunisia and the subsequent nonintervention in Egypt offers answers.
French designs on Tunisia crystallised 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.82 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 1878.83 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.84 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
J.P.T. Bury, Gambetta and the Making of the Third Republic (London, 1973), pp. 171-2; James J.
Cooke, French New Imperialism: The Third Republic and Colonial Expansion (London, 1973).
80 Perkins, ‘From Uncertainty to Opposition’, pp. 204-6.
81 An outstanding account of these processes in action is Herman Lebovics, The Alliance of Iron
and Wheat in the Third French Republic, 1860-1914: Origins of the New Conservatism (Baton
Rouge, LA., 1988).
82 Mark I. Choate, ‘Identity Politics and Political Perception in the European Settlement of
Tunisia: the French Colony versus the Italian Colony’, French Colonial History, 8, (2007), pp.
102-4.
83 Mary Dewhurst Lewis, ‘Geographies of Power: The Tunisian Civic Order, Jurisdictional
Politics, and Imperial Rivalry in the Mediterranean, 1881-1935’, Journal of Modern History, 80:4
(2008), pp. 793-5, 800-1.
84 ‘La politique italienne en Egypte’, translation of Italian Foreign Minister’s declaration in Rome
Parliament on 12 June 1882, de Freycinet papers, Egypte 1882-6, 77PAAP1/DB, MAE.
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France and Britain over the much greater prize of Egypt.85 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: 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.86
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 AlgerianTunisia 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.87
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.88 Indeed, 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.89 There
was no threat to existing commercial interests, no dispossession of colonists, no
‘Note sur la politique allemande en Egypte depuis 1882 jusqu’au début du 3e Ministère de M.
de Freycinet, n.d. 1886’, de Freycinet papers, Egypte 1882-6, 77PAAP1/DB, MAE.
86 Alphonse de Courcel, Directeur politique, to de Freycinet, 18 August 1880, 77PAAP2, MAE.
87 Paris Military Attaché letter to Lord Lyons, 26 April 1881, FO 27/2492, TNA.
88
Shauna Huffaker, ‘Representations of Ahmed Urabi: Hegemony, Imperialism, and the British
Press, 1881–1882,’ Victorian Periodicals Review, 37:4 (2012), 375-405.
89 Michael J. Reimer, ‘Colonial Bridgehead: Social and Spatial Change in Alexandria, 1850-1882’,
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 20:4 (1988), pp. 546-9; Sir E. Malet (Cairo) to Earl
Granville, 27 May 1882, no. 33, FO 27/2492, TNA.
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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.90
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 colonisation there were came with an Italian – not French - flavour.91
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.92
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."93 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,
MA, PAAP417, Maurice Bompard papers, vol. I/dossier Tunisie, Paul de Rémusat ‘Rapport,’ no.
271, Sénat séance, 27 May 1881.
91 Lewis, ‘Geographies’, p. 802. In 1900 as much as seven-eighths of Tunisia’s white settler
population had Italian, mainly Sicilian, roots: Choate, ‘Identity Politics’, p. 101.
92 S.A. Ashley, ‘The Failure of Gambetta's Grand Ministère’, French Historical Studies, 9:1 (1975),
pp. 109-13.
93 Ibid, p. 108.
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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.94 But there was also an economic
stimulus package centred on new commercial tariffs that was bound to antagonise
British free traders. For his part, de Freycinet was determined to complete a thoroughgoing overhaul of the Foreign Ministry’s internal organisation, making entry and
advancement in the French diplomatic corps more transparent, more meritocratic,
more republican.95 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.96 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.97 Moreover, Parisian creditors, much like
leading republican politicians, judged a British presence in Egypt preferable to an
Ottoman one.98 Despite the longevity of French imperial connections in Egypt and the
extent of Parisian financial interests in Suez, the strident interventionism of Gabriel
The political volatility of the conscription issue and the Army’s potential disloyalty to the
early Third Republic is well examined by Jean-Charles Jauffet, ‘The army and the appel au soldat,
1874-89’, in Robert Tombs (ed.), Nationhood and Nationalism in France: From Boulangism to the
Great War, 1889-1914 (Routledge, 1991), pp. 238-47.
95 De Freycinet inaugural speech, 31 January 1882, débats parlementaires, Journal Officiel, p. 69.
96 ‘Œuvre administrative de M. de Freycinet au Ministère des Affaires Etrangères en 1880-1882’,
de Freycinet papers, Egypte 1882-6, 77PAAP1/DB, MAE.
94
Caroline Piquet, ‘The Suez Company’s Concession in Egypt, 1854-1956: Modern Infrastructure
and Local Economic Development,’ Enterprise and Society, 5:1 (2004), 111-13, 118.
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Charmes, with whom this section began, failed to register inside de Freycinet’s
administration.
III: 1956: Britain
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 World War II 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
nationalising 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 selfinterest 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 nationalisation 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, recognised in the Convention signed in 1888 had
increased with the development of the oil industry and the dependence of the
98
Pasquet, ‘Comment la France a perdu l’Égypte,’ 39-40.
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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.99
But 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.100 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.101
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 organisation of
the highest importance and standing’.102 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 internationalisation of the Canal for all time’ to
be established by ‘by diplomacy and [by] force if necessary’.103 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
Cabinet Minutes, CM (56) 54th Conclusions, 27 July 1956, CAB 128/30, TNA.
Anthony Eden to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 27 July 1956, PREM11/1098, TNA.
101 On the legal issues surrounding the use of force see Lewis Johnman, ‘Playing the Role of a
Cassandra: Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, Senior Legal Adviser to the Foreign Office’, in Saul Kelly and
Anthony Gorst (eds.), Whitehall and the Suez Crisis (London, 2000), pp. 46-63.
102 HC Deb 30 July 1956, vol. 557, cols. 918-21; HC Deb 02 August 1956 vol. 557 cols. 1602-9.
103 HC Deb 02 August 1956, vol. 557 cols. 1636-40.
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99
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hawkish attitude that he was privately encouraging the press to take.104 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’.105 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).106
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%) did not vary according to party allegiance.107
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.108 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
Shaw, Eden, pp. 24-30. On press attitudes see also Guillaume Parmentier, ‘The British Press
in the Suez Crisis’, Historical Journal, 23:2 (1980), pp. 435-448, and Ralph Negrine, ‘The Press
and the Suez Crisis: A Myth ReExamined’, Historical Journal, 25 (1982), pp. 975-983.
105 Speech of Lord Windlesham: HL Deb 13 Sept. 1956, vol. 199, cols. 816-18.
106 ‘MP Accuses Mr. Dulles of “Betraying” Premier’, Manchester Guardian, 6 Oct. 1956.
107 The key exhibits are polls published in the News Chronicle on 10. Aug. and 11 Sept. 1956;
these, and other valuable material, can be found in PREM 11/1123, TNA. Useful qualitative
evidence, in the form of letters from members of the public, can be found in FO 371/118808118829. See also Anthony Adamthwaite, ‘Suez Revisited’, International Affairs, 64:3(1988), pp.
449-464, at 455-7.
108 Philip M. Williams, Hugh Gaitskell: A Political Biography (London, 1979), p. 422; R. Gerald
Hughes, The Postwar Legacy of Appeasement: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (London, 2014),
pp. 45-6, 51-2.
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denounced in the Security Council as aggressors’.109 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.110
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 nationalisation of domestic industry, he was almost
bound to support Egypt’s right to nationalise 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.’111 Writing in Tribune, a weekly widely seen as a Bevanite
mouthpiece, he both asserted that the Egypt’s case on nationalisation was indisputable
and that she would be ill-advised to stand on her sovereign rights in unmodified
form.112 This, however, was at odds with Tribune’s editorial line, and ‘caused a storm’
HC Deb 2 Aug. 1956 vol. 557 cols. 1609-17. For the genesis of the speech, see Williams,
Gaitskell Diary, pp. 563-70 (entry for 2-3 Aug. 1956).
110 HC Deb 2 Aug. 1956, vol. 557, cols. 1653-61.
111 Williams, Gaitskell Diary, p. 565 (entry for 2-3 Aug. 1956).
112 ‘Mr. Bevan Differs From Bevanites’, The Times, 10 Aug. 1956.
109
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among Bevan’s own supporters. 113 There was therefore a fault-line between the
Labour advocates of international control and those who took a more overtly anticolonial 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.114 There was also traditional American hostility to British
imperialism to be taken into account. Although this attitude was openly criticised by
some Tory MPs as a double-standard, Eden needed to be more tactful.115 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.116 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’.117 ‘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
Ibid; Janet Morgan (ed.), The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman, Book Club Associates,
London, 1981, p. 508 (entry for 5 Sept. 1956).
114 ‘Dulles predicts ‘“Moral Force” Will Solve Suez Canal Crisis Without Use of Troops’, News and
Courier (Charleston, SC), 4 Aug. 1956; Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith:
Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York, 2012), chapters 21 and 23.
115 See, notably, the speech of Sir John Hall: HC Deb 2 Aug. 1956, vol. 557, cols. 1649-53.
116 See Cairo radio’s quotation of an article by Anwar al-Sadat, 1 Aug. 1956, in ‘Summary of
World Broadcasts part IV’, 2 Aug. 1956.
117 Nasser’s broadcast of 12 Aug. 1956, in ‘Summary of World Broadcasts part IV’, 14 Aug. 1956.
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regarded such efforts as a matter of form.’118 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 internationalisation of the Suez Canal, that is to say, a solution
contrary to the principles of Colonel Nasser.’119 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% during the first two weeks of November, during
which the invasion and ceasefire occurred.120 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.121 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
‘Record of a meeting held in the Foreign Secretary’s room, Foreign Office, August 1, 1956’, FO
371/119090, TNA.
119 British Embassy, Paris, to Foreign Office, 3 Aug. 1956, FO 371/119095, TNA.
120 See, for example, ‘Britain’s Action in the Middle East to Stop War – To Keep Peace’,
Conservative Research Department, 5 Nov. 1956, CRD 2/34/29, Conservative Party Archive,
CRD 2/34/29, Bodleian Library, Oxford; Gallup Poll published in the News Chronicle on 14 Nov.
1956, quoted in ‘Notes on the Middle East and Hungary’, Conservative Research Department, 15
Nov. 1956, Conservative Party Archive, CRD 2/34/29.
121 George H. Gallup (ed.), The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls: Great Britain 1937-1975;
Vol. 11937-1964 (New York, 1976), pp. 394-5, 398-9.
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that they had acted in an emergency to stop war spreading.122 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.123
IV: 1956: France
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’ 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.124 Nasser, so the Parisian rhetoric went, was the
real imperialist. His support for pan-Arab solidarity was reverberating throughout
Northwest 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
‘Britain Overseas’, broadcast 2 Oct. 1959, http://pebs.group.shef.ac.uk/britain-overseas
(consulted 24 July 2014).
123 G. C. Peden, ‘Suez and Britain’s Decline as a World Power’, Historical Journal 55 (2012), pp
1073-96.
124 Albert Mousset, ‘FRANCE LE PROGRÈS DE LYON: le début des complications,’ Le Monde, 14
August 1956.
122
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failed to their cost either to unite or to react in time to thwart fascist aggrandisement.
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.’125 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.126 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 policymaking 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
Christopher Brady, ‘The Cabinet System and Management of the Suez Crisis’, Contemporary
British History, 11:2 (1997), p. 84.
126 Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford, 2013), p. 183.
125
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end of France’s colonial presence in Southeast Asia, during 1956 imperial policy-making
was, yet again, hi-jacked 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 Defence Minister Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury and his
Secretary-General, Abel Thomas did more than anyone else to re-orient French Middle
Eastern policy in 1956.127 Senior commanders in Algeria, as well as Interior Ministry
staff in Paris and their Algiers government cousins – together, 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.128
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.129 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.
Maurice Vaïsse, ‘France and the Suez Crisis’, in Wm. Roger Louis and Roger Owen (eds.), Suez
1956: The Crisis and its Consequences (Oxford, 1989), p. 134; Zach Levey, ‘French-Israeli
Relations, 1950-1956: The Strategic Dimension’, in Simon C. Smith (ed.), Reassessing Suez 1956:
New Perspectives on the Crisis and its Aftermath (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 88, 95, 99.
128 Michèle Battesti, ‘Les ambiguités de Suez’, Revue Historique des Armées, 4:1 (1986), pp. 11-12.
129 Christopher Brady argues that the Cabinet Egypt Committee did not represent any
constitutional abuse of Cabinet government but did tend towards ‘tunnel vision’ about Nasser,
see his ‘The Cabinet System’, pp. 87-9. For a harsher view of Committee procedure and,
especially, of Macmillan’s adventurism within it, see Howard J. Dooley, ‘Great Britain’s ‘Last
Battle’ in the Middle East: Notes on Cabinet Planning during the Suez Crisis of 1956’,
International History Review, 11:3 (1989), pp. 486-501.
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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.130 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’.131 In fact, his government, the longestlasting coalition in the Fourth Republic’s twelve-year lifespan, propelled 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.132 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.
Raymond Barrillon, ‘Le gouvernement français lie toujours étroitement la question
algérienne à l'affaire de Suez’, Le Monde, 3 September 1956.
131 Sabine Jansen (ed.), Les grands discours parlementaires de la Quatrième République de Pierre
Mendès France à Charles de Gaulle (Paris, 2006), p. 219.
132 Mireille Conia highlights the depth of local reaction to the dispatch of national servicemen to
Algeria in the context of one provincial département, Haute-Marne. See her ‘La Haute-Marne:
berceau des actions de solidarité envers les soldats’, in Raphaëlle Branche and Sylvie Thénault
(eds.), La France en guerre: Expériences métropolitaines de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne
(Paris, 2008), pp. 58-69.
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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.133 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.134
The third factor to consider was the government’s bitterest opponents, the antiparliamentary 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.135 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.136 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
Martin Thomas, ‘Order before Reform: the spread of French military operations in Algeria,
1954-1958,’ in David Killingray and David Omissi (eds.), Guardians of Empire (Manchester,
1999), pp. 198-200, 207-9.
134 Guy Mollet, ‘La France sans l’Algérie, ce ne serait plus la France’, 2ème séance du 9 Mars 1956,
in Jansen (ed.), Les grands discours, pp. 220-2.
135 Preface and ‘Séance du 10 Février 1956’, in Jansen, Les grands discours, pp. 205-9.
136 Evans, Algeria, pp. 148-51.
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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.137
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.138
Opposing them was the Gaullist 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.139 The attempt to tie
France’s actions in 1956 to a resistance heritage was made easier by the simple fact that
Guy Mollet, ‘La France sans l’Algérie, ce ne serait plus la France,’ 2ème séance du 9 Mars 1956,
in Jansen, Les grands discours, pp. 222-4
138 Jacques Fauvet, ‘L'affaire de Suez offre une nouvelle occasion de conflit entre les
communistes et M. Guy Mollet’, Le Monde, 6 August 1956.
139 Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East, new edition (London, 2011), p.
115; also cited in Hughes, Postwar Legacy of Appeasement, p. 49.
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the majority of those ‘inside’ the decision-making circles of French government boasted
resistance credentials.140
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.141 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.142
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.143 A cautionary word
here: the Franco-Israeli partnership was a strategic marriage of convenience, and a
tenuous one at that.144 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?
The complexities and contradictions of former resisters overseeing the repression of anticolonial resistance in Algeria have been explored by, among others, Martin Evans, The Memory
of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War (1954-1962) (Oxford, 1992); and Bertrand
Hamelin, ‘Les Résistants et la guerre d’Algérie (1954-1962): quelques jalons problématiques’, in
Branche et Thénault, La France en guerre, pp. 138-42.
141 Abel Thomas, Comment Israël fut sauvé: Les secrets de l’expédition de Suez (Paris: 1978), pp.
25-6; also cited in Vaïsse, ‘France and the Suez Crisis’, p. 132.
142 Levey, ‘French-Israeli Relations’, p. 102.
143 Vaïsse, ‘France and the Suez Crisis’, p. 134.
144 Levey, ‘French-Israeli Relations’, pp. 87-9, 103-6.
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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.145
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 action 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
‘M. Mendès-France: Français et Anglais sont intervenus trop tard’, Le Monde, 20 November
1956.
145
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denied the Socialists their best opportunity since the PCF’s creation in 1920 to win back
Communist supporters disillusioned by their leaders’ blind loyalism to Moscow.146
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.147 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.148 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 1958.149
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.150 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.151 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
‘M André Philip reproche au gouvernement sa politique au Moyen-Orient et en Algérie’, Le
Monde, 22 November 1956.
147 Ibid.
148 Maurice Vaïsse, ‘Post-Suez France’, in Louis and Owen, Suez 1956, p. 337.
149 Philip published this fierce critique of his former Party as Le Socialisme trahi (Socialism
betrayed) in 1958. The moral crisis in the French Socialist Party triggered by Algeria, and
exacerbated by Suez, is nicely described by Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli. La mémoire
de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris, 1991), pp. 74-9.
150 Masson, ‘Origines et bilan d’une défaite’, p. 58.
151 Vaïsse, ‘Post-Suez France’, in Louis and Owen, Suez 1956, pp. 336-7.
146
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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.152 Mollet’s government, having begun 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: Conclusion
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.153 Being sceptical about ‘essentialist’
interpretations of Liberalism (or any other ideology), we would not go that far.154
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.155 Increasingly, Conservatives came to realise
this. Indeed, a key purpose of this article has been to draw attention to long-term a 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
See Pineau, 1956/Suez, pp. 25-9, 37-41, 139-47, 189-91.
Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
and Practice (Chicago, 1999).
154 For a helpful discussion, see Duncan Bell, ‘What is Liberalism?’, Political Theory, published
online before print 26 June 2014, doi: 10.1177/0090591714535103.
155 Elías José Palti, ‘The “Theoretical Revolution” in Intellectual History: From the History of
Political Ideas to the History of Political Languages’, History and Theory 53 (October 2014), 387405.
39
152
153
Arguing about Intervention
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, 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
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Arguing about Intervention
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 beginnings and the ends of the two colonial
empires were not only surprisingly alike but also mutually entangled in hitherto
unsuspected ways.
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