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THE ASSOCIATION'S ARCHIVES When Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, the local administration of the Canal and the relevant archives were handed over to the Egyptian government along with the Canal itself and the buildings. However, Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, whose founder and executives were French, was headquartered in Paris, which is where the head office of Compagnie Financière de Suez was later established. Compagnie Financière de Suez found that it had inherited the archives left behind by its predecessor in its offices on rue d'Astorg. In 1977, Compagnie Financière de Suez submitted them to the Archives Nationales (National Archives), where they are listed under collection 153 AQ. This is a significant collection which takes up more than 1,500 metres of shelf space. It is housed on the premises of the Association, and includes documents giving an insight into Ferdinand de Lesseps himself and related to key dates in the history of the Canal. This is a collection of exquisite quality due to its organisation, integrity and the history it reveals. After all, the history of Compagnie de Suez is first and foremost the history of the Suez Canal. The task of operating the Canal had been entrusted to three departments - technical, transit and property - whose archives have revealed a wealth of material. The documents left behind provide a wealth of detailed information about all of the work carried out on the Canal, from its establishment, to its maintenance and subsequent improvements: earthwork, cleansing, construction of ripraps, siting of lights and beacons, the digging of tanks, straightening the route of the canal, as well as the endless mining and the maintenance of telegraph facilities, the outfitting of a workshop and the fencing off of a watchpost. In discovering what work was done, we also learn what equipment was used, which manufacturers supplied it and how the Company's workshops in Port Said operated. However, while the Suez Canal was a permanent worksite, its purpose and therefore its true history has to do with the passage of ships which make the 170-km-long trip separating the Mediterranean from the Red Sea. Here we move on to the archives held by the transit department, whose role it is to ensure that ships travel through the Canal unhindered and as quickly as possible. The transit departFirst of all, the navigation rules were constantly amended and developed as the specifications of the Canal and the ships passing through it changed and in light of accidents which inevitably occurred: every accident, no matter how insignificant, was studied, analysed in reports and included in the regular statistics. The issue of fees was, of course, a subject of ongoing debate with shipowners and governments and is covered in depth in the company's archives. At Port Said and Suez, transit personnel measured and recorded each ship in order to assess the fee it would be charged to pass through the Canal. The documents drawn up at this stage in the process accurately detail the technical specifications of all the ships that passed through the Canal over a period of 100 years, the route they took, the nature of their cargo, the number of passengers aboard and the name of the shipowner: this series of statistical information is an invaluable source for the history of international commercial transactions. Last ltional Archives). And this valuable wealth of information entrusted to French archivists and an account of a period in the history of both France and Egypt certainly provides much greater insight than national accounts alone. |