The Panama Canal: Baron de Reinach, one of the promoters of the canal, is forced to swallow poison. Watercolour drawing by H.S. Robert, ca. 1897.

After the success of the Suez canal, the engineer Ferdinand De Lesseps turned his attention to building a canal through the isthmus of Panama. In 1879 a company was formed for this purpose, the Compagnie universelle du canal interocéanique de Panama, in which De Lesseps, his son Charles, and Gustave Eiffel were involved. The company raised a large amount of capital mainly from small investors, their prospects having been exaggerated by the press, parliamentarians, government ministers, and the banks, all of whom were later alleged to have been receiving bribes from the company's financiers, especially Baron De Reinach and Cornelius Herz (both Jewish). In 1889 the company collapsed and many of the shareholders were ruined. After a period of government cover-up, the scandal was revealed in 1892, an enquiry was instituted and those involved were prosecuted. Baron De Reinach died (either from natural causes or by suicide; the present drawing shows him being forced to swallow poison), Ferdinand and Charles De Lesseps and Gustave Eiffel were sentenced to prison terms (which they never served), and Herz fled to England: the present drawings show him living in Bournemouth and claiming that his diabetes gave him not long to live. The antisemitism to which the matter gave rise contributed to the climate of the Dreyfus Affair, which started in 1894. The enquiry finally issued its report in 1897, which may be the date of the drawings of which this is one: Herz, shown in these drawings as still alive, died in the following year, having suffered cruelly from diabetes (whence the title of this series, "Un diabétique")

Baron de Reinach was found dead on the morning of Sunday 20 November 1892. He had last been seen alive on Saturday night when, accompanied by Maurice Rouvier, Minister of Finance, and Georges Clemenceau, then a physician turned newspaper proprietor, he visited his co-promoter Dr Cornelius Herz in order to ask him to return a large amount of the company's money which Herz had diverted into property acquisitions. Herz refused or was unable to return the funds. De Reinach's body was subsequently exhumed and examined for traces of poison, but no verdict was possible because the body had already decomposed too much. The present drawing shows him strapped to a table and being forced by two men (Herz and Rouvier?) to swallow poison which is being poured down his throat through a funnel

[Paris?], [1897?]

1 drawing : pencil and watercolour ; sheet 14.7 x 10.5 cm.

Un jour arriva où le Baron fut forcé d' accepter certaines ... explications concluantes. H.S. Robert

Author tentatively identified as "H.S. Robert" from indistinct signature on all the drawings, apparently consisting of H and R in monogram with a small s between them, the R being the initial letter of Robert. Noone of this name has yet been identified from other sources

Maron J. Simon, The Panama affair, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, [1971]

Wellcome Collection 532775i