Ferdinand de Lesseps

His first marriage was in 1837 to Mlle Agathe Delamalle, daughter of the government prosecuting attorney at the court of Angers. This union produced five children. Agathe unfortunately expired in 1853.

He tied the knot for the second time in 1869 with Mlle Louise-Hélène Autard de Bragard, the daughter of Gustave Adolphe Autard de Bragard, a former Magistrate of Mauritius. He had 12 more children from this marriage.

Ferdinand De Lesseps died at Château de La Chesnaye in Guilly, Vatan, Indre, on 7 December 1894, at the age of 89.

Ferdinand de Lesseps was born in Versailles, Yvelines, on 19 November 1805. His father, Mathieu de Lesseps was in the consular service while his mother Catherine de Grévigné was the daughter of Henri de Grevigné. He had one sister and two brothers.

His father worked in Italy when Ferdinand was a little boy and thus he spent his initial years there. He received his education from College of Henry IV in Paris.

He started working when he was 18 years old. His first job was in the commissary department of the army where he worked for two years.

In 1825, he was made the assistant vice-consul at Lisbon, where his uncle, Barthélemy de Lesseps, was the French chargé d'affaires. He went to Tunis as an assistant vice-consul in 1828.

He was appointed vice-consul at Alexandria, Egypt, in 1832. The vessel he was sailing in was quarantined for some time and during this time he was sent several books by the consul-general of France at Alexandria.

One of these books was a memoir on an ancient abandoned Suez Canal written by Napoleon Bonaparte's civil engineer Jacques-Marie Le Père. De Lesseps was fascinated by this work and he came up with the idea of constructing a canal across the African isthmus.

He was assigned the responsibility of managing the consulate general at Alexandria in 1833 and worked in this position until 1837. During this time he survived an epidemic of plague which wiped out more than a third of the inhabitants of Cairo and Alexandria. He returned to France in late 1837.

De Lesseps’ best known work is undoubtedly the Suez Canal which joins the Mediterranean and Red Seas. The canal reduced to a great extent the sailing distance between Europe and East Asia, drastically bringing down the travel time and costs involved. The opening of the canal led to an immediate surge in world trade and played a significant role in the European colonization of Africa.