276. The Biggest Corruption Scandal in French History (Part 4)

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arniman. And me, William Durymple. And today we are joined once again by the brilliant Matthew Parker, author of Hell's Gorge, it is a fabulous book, to discuss the building of the Panama Canal. So you might remember in the last episode we were talking about Panama becoming part of Colombia and how the California gold rush of 1848 brought a huge new wave of wealth to the region, and the building of the Panama Railroad was almost necessitated by that rush.

We left you with um somewhat nutty de Lessops and his extravagant PR campaign to fund a French attempt to build this canal, and his daughter struck the first symbolic blow with a pickaxe, not to the damn site itself, but a champagne box filled with dirt. And carrying on with the story, Matthew, uh can you introduce us to the equally unusual Frenchman with an even more extraordinary moustache, please tell us about Philippe-Jean Banois Barilla. Okay, so he he's a French engineer.

Um he's in his sort of early 20s. He went to the elite engineering school in Paris where you w wear a uniform and the the motto is La Patrie, les sciences et la gloire, the country's science and glory. Brilliant motto. Brilliant motto, the whole French story is so, so 19th century. He's very short, he's five foot four.

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