5

Lure of the Orient

The decision to despatch Bonaparte to Egypt, and to concentrate so much of France’s renewed military effort on a colonial war, seemed bizarre to many, especially since the Directory had devoted so much effort during the previous months to planning a full-scale invasion of Britain. Britain had become, for the country’s political leaders, the most dangerous and determined of France’s enemies, a colonial power prepared to use its great wealth to deny French expansion on the continent and to assume the role of paymaster to counterrevolution across Europe. And the circumstances for an assault on Britain had seemed auspicious, with evidence of Radical subversion in London, the naval mutinies at the Nore and Spithead, and constant murmurs of rebellion from Ireland.

The Directors had had good reason to believe, in 1796 and 1797, that their moment had come, and that they might at last hope to break the resistance of France’s most stubborn and affluent enemy. They were already pursuing an economic war against Britain, and they had become increasingly intolerant of what they interpreted as British intransigence over peace-making, a refusal to compromise over French gains in northern Italy and, especially, along the estuary of the Scheldt. This was the context in which Bonaparte hadbeen appointed to head the Army of England, and to prepare invasion plans. But by 1798 there was good reason to fear that that moment – if it had indeed ever existed – had passed, and that a successful invasion of England would require the mobilisation of huge resources that were beyond the capabilities of the French navy.

The condition of the navy gave cause for alarm and Bonaparte, on a tour of inspection of the naval ports, was quick to conclude that the idea of a direct frontal assault from the sea was risky at best, and, at worst, sadly misconceived. On the other hand, as he reported to the Directors in February 1798, there were perhaps more hopeful alternative strategies for attacking the British and their interests. By land, he argued, the more practical policy would be to attack Hanover and Hamburg, which would harm British commercial interests in Germany and Northern Europe; or by sea England’s colonies abroad, where the Royal Navy would be less concentrated and Britain’s armies more stretched. The third strategy, Napoleon suggested, would be to mount an attack on the Levant that would disrupt British command of the Eastern Mediterranean and ‘threaten her trade with the Indies’.¹ At this moment he gave no hint of his own preference, but he had sown the idea in many people’s minds that one way of staunching the flow of wealth to Britain was to cut off its communications with its colonial possessions, especially the richest among them, India. An attack on Egypt could be a mechanism for destroying British power in the Indian subcontinent; it would also provide France with a delicious dose of revenge for the repeated colonial defeats she had suffered at the hands of the British in the course of the century. The Directors – or at least a majority among them – would seem to have been convinced by this argument, especially since the number of ships and mobilisation of resources required for an attack on Egypt was a fraction of what had been discussed for an invasion of England.

Since the reign of Louis XIV the French had periodically dreamed of conquering Egypt. Choiseul had considered it following the loss of French Canada and of colonies in India; Vergennes, though, had opposed the idea, preferring to offer French support to the American colonists against Britain in 1778.² Bonaparte himself was clearly attracted by the idea of leading a military assault on Egypt, whether in order to advance his own interests or to promote a new colonial policy that could be achieved without resort to slavery. His enthusiasm for this policy is attested to by contemporaries, and especially those in his more intimate circle. One of the most faithful of these was Bourrienne, a former classmate at Brienne, who went on to become his personal secretary and who left what he claimed to be a faithful account of his master’s thoughts and utterances, though many of these have been exposed as pure fiction.³ Already in 1797, he has Bonaparte claiming, with apparent prescience, that ‘the time was not far distant when, if we are really to destroy England, we must seize control of Egypt’; and writing to the Directory’s new foreign minister, Talleyrand, reminding him of the strategic value of Egypt and adding that it was a power vacuum waiting to be occupied, a territory that ‘belongs only to God Himself’.⁴ What is certainly true is that Napoleon was an early convert to the strategy of mounting an assault on the Eastern Mediterranean. Even while he was still in Italy, preparing the terms of Campo Formio, he is reported by a much more reliable source, Miot de Melito, to have been discussing a possible invasion of Egypt.⁵

Talleyrand, ever the schemer, was an eager player in this particular diplomatic game, quickly won over to the grand dream of making the Nile into a French-controlled waterway and thus cutting England off from its richest colonial possessions. He realised, too, that for political reasons it must be he himself, and not Bonaparte, who took policy initiatives, since the Directors were jealous to guard political power for themselves and instinctively distrusted the young general who had dictated peace terms at Campo Formio. They were not, of course, so naïve as to be deceived by the political manoeuvres of Talleyrand, which were fairly transparent, nor yet by the two reports he submitted to them exaggerating the threat posed by Turkey to justify a French attack on the Levant.⁶ But they did allow themselves to be convinced of the value of a campaign in North Africa, though, when they finally gave their consent to the expedition, they did so with the deepest misgivings. Napoleon had made no secret of his boredom back in Paris or his impatience for another glorious campaign. The last thing they could afford was to hand the political initiative to their over-ambitious general.

But where did Napoleon’s own dreams of the Orient – and his apparent passion for the idea of an Egyptian adventure – originate? The whole enterprise was far removed from the military world he knew, a world of land armies and long marches, of artillery attacks on towns and fortifications – a world punctuated by Alpine passes and the wide plains of Lombardy. Now his army would face an entirely different and very unfamiliar landscape: a landscape of sand and desert, but also of temples and pyramids, tombs and sphinxes, and marches in a blazing heat that few Europeans had experienced. The Egypt they sailed towards was not just a foreign country. It was a culture of which the French understood little, but which held a unique fascination for them; an ancient civilisation of closely held secrets and strange religious rituals, locked houses and walled courtyards, veiled faces and sweeping robes. It was above all, as Napoleon’s friend and cultural advisor, the engraver Vivant Denon, observed after landing in Alexandria, a land of deep silence. There was, it seemed to the French, no conversation in the streets, no laughter, no scampering children or barking dogs. Egypt seemed profoundly melancholy, unwelcoming and inward-looking, and for many of the French soldiers this was the dominant image they would retain of North Africa – particularly of Islam. ‘The first image that came into view,’ Denon wrote of Alexandria, ‘was of a vast cemetery, covered by countless tombs of white marble against a white soil; a few skinny women, draped in long, torn clothing, were like ghosts as they wandered among these monuments; the silence was broken only by the screeching of kites as they circled over this sanctuary of death.’ It was a bleak image that, in the minds of the French, contrasted starkly with the colour and gaiety of the European cities they had left behind.⁷

But that image only took shape once the French army had reached Egypt and become acquainted with the country and its people. Before they left French soil there is abundant evidence that – like Napoleon himself – they shared the fascination with the Orient that so typified Western Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. They were not talking of a poor society, or an under-developed one: Egypt in mid-century was a rich and artistically sophisticated nation, part of the Turkish Empire of the day, and carried on a flourishing trade with Europe, especially France. The country was famed for its delicate carved woodwork and its skilled craft culture, and visitors from Europe returned home with tales of opulent palaces and bustling markets, most particularly in the cities such as Cairo, Rosetta and Alexandria. Cairo, indeed, was a true southern capital, a great trading city with commercial links all round the Mediterranean. But these privileged conditions were changing rapidly, a consequence of chronic political instability. The old Egyptian empire had long given way to rule as a province of Turkey, with instability a permanent threat. In 1766 the country was rent by the rising of Emir Ali Bey to throw off the Turkish yoke and establish his own autocratic rule. Political crisis followed: he was assassinated in 1773, resulting in further political instability and economic decline, and leading, in 1786, to a short-lived attempt by the Turkish ruler, the Sublime Porte, to re-establish his nation’s control. As a consequence, by the time Napoleon and his men arrived they found not the luxury and general prosperity they had read about in earlier travellers’ accounts, but an economy in tatters and a populace reduced to dire poverty.⁸ Many had nurtured hopes of finding an exotic paradise steeped in precious objects and gilded fabrics; they were to be bitterly disappointed.

Napoleon undoubtedly left France with a romanticised notion of what he would encounter and an imperial vision of the great civilisation he was about to conquer. His reading of history had stood him in good stead: he knew about the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Persia, just as he had read the great classical authors of Greece and Rome, and he was already conscious of the awesome step he was taking in trying to annex an ancient empire to the ascendant star of revolutionary France. Bonaparte was not modest about either his talents or his ambitions. In correspondence he compared himself to Alexander the Great, imposing a new, modern civilisation in place of one that had become decadent and outmoded. Indeed, the belief that Western Europe was an empire in the ascendant, facing the last corrupt vestiges of past civilisations, would seem to have intoxicated him.⁹ When he left for the Orient he took with him an impressive array of the great works of his own century, notably those of Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau, as well as some of the authors of Antiquity. These may have been predictable, the standard texts of any well-read man of the Enlightenment, but it is interesting that he thought to read them on campaign. He also took the Voyages of Captain Cook, one of the most influential texts of exploration and the discovery of the exotic; Goethe’s romantic and melancholy Sorrows of Young Werther; and, significantly, the Koran, with which he sought to familiarise himself before beginning his talks with the Egyptians. All in all, it was a fairly catholic mixture, but one that showed a man immersed in the transnational culture of the late eighteenth century and excited by an encounter with a great, though poorly understood, extra-European civilisation.¹⁰ There was far more to his fascination with Egypt than a desire to cut Britain off from its colonial possessions.

His fascination with the culture of the Orient took other forms, too, and though his critics have often been deeply cynical about his real motives, a thirst for military glory and an enlightened curiosity about one of the world’s great civilisations can sometimes go hand in hand. We know that Napoleon’s youthful reading of the Classics had left a deep mark on him, and that it was not out of character for him to read Livy, Plutarch or Tacitus on campaign. Nor was it so exceptional, in an age when the officer corps of European armies were still moulded with aristocratic values, for army commanders to be cultivated, and sometimes well-read, men. In the Peninsula, for instance, British officers read the most recent novels of Walter Scott; while the most literary of France’s generals, Choderlos de Laclos, is perhaps better remembered as the author of one of the most provocative novels of the eighteenth century, Les Liaisons dangereuses. Laclos may have been a libertine and, in the eyes of his detractors, a pornographer, but he was also, until his death in Napoleon’s service near Naples in 1803, a dedicated artillery officer.¹¹ To his contemporaries there was nothing strange or contradictory about these roles. So, with Napoleon, few would have pointed to any tension between his success as an army officer and his avowed interest in the Ancient World, any more than it would have seemed strange that an artillery officer should claim to be a talented mathematician.

What is clear, however, is that he went to somewhat excessive lengths to ensure that his intellectual gifts were recognised by the public, and to win such esteem and kudos as associations with science could confer. Thus in 1797, following the departure of Carnot – a fellow artillery officer – Bonaparte assumed the seat he vacated at the French Academy; he thereafter took care, when in Paris, to be seen in the company of the most prominent intellectuals of his day. In the eyes of many of his biographers, and some contemporaries, this was a step too far, a distinction that could in no way be justified, but a blatant attempt to win over France’s intellectual elite.¹² Such criticisms counted for little with Bonaparte himself; he flaunted his membership of the Academy and routinely placed ‘Member of the Institute’ first among his various titles and honours, even before his military rank.¹³

For all this though, the main objective of the Egyptian campaign was the conquest of a faraway land, very different from the revolutionary mantra of defending the fatherland, of fighting for la patrie en danger. Some of the more revolutionary of the generals remarked on this, and there is little doubt that those such as Kléber, who still held firmly to republican ideals, were uneasy about the morality of this new development in French diplomacy that condemned them to fight what they saw as imperialistic wars, wars that had no evident significance for the safety of the French civilian population.¹⁴

But Napoleon allowed himself no such doubts. He would talk afterwards of the Egyptian campaign as a war conducted in the interests of civilisation; and in his correspondence at the time he did not conceal his desire to be understood by the Arab world as the saviour of a glorious civilisation. Writing from Cairo to the Governor of Syria, Ahmed Djezzar, in August 1798, he explained, in a passage that recalls the sensibilities of the Revolution, that he was in Egypt not to attack the people or their beliefs but only to punish their rulers. ‘I have not,’ he said, ‘come to make war on Moslems.’ When he had landed in Egypt, he added, ‘I reassured the people and offered protection to the muftis, the imams and the mosques. The pilgrims to Mecca have never been welcomed with greater warmth and friendship, and the Festival of the Prophet has been celebrated with more splendour than ever.’¹⁵ The intended inference was clear: here was a Western leader who did not come with assumptions of innate superiority, who had studied the Koran and would treat Islam as the equal of Christianity, and who could be trusted to respect the cultural treasures of Ancient Egypt. It made for a powerful propaganda offensive, though it did not deceive the Egyptians for long.

There was certainly something mildly exotic about the military expedition that set sail from France on some three hundred ships in the spring of 1798, an expedition which Napoleon had assembled and, in the case of many of its participants, personally inspired.

The thirty-six thousand troops included units drawn from the armies in Germany and Italy, armies which had had very different traditions and whose relations were marked by a degree of rivalry. They were well supplied with officers, over twenty-two hundred in all. Bonaparte’s own entourage, unsurprisingly, was drawn from officers he had come to know and trust in Italy and who continued to operate as an inner circle on this new campaign.¹⁶ They were competent – often brilliant – soldiers, who succeeded in the very challenging task of adapting quickly to the fighting conditions they encountered in North Africa.

But it was not the presence of the army that was most remarked upon in Toulon, but rather the incorporation of around a hundred and sixty of France’s most distinguished scientists, archaeologists and engineers, men whose duties in Egypt had nothing to do with the progress of the military, but who were charged with exploring Egyptian monuments and pyramids, archaeological sites and ancient inscriptions. Their task was to investigate every aspect of Ancient Egyptian culture; to record its splendours and catalogue its remains, to transcribe its languages and identify its species of animals and birds. They were there because of Bonaparte, and Bonaparte alone. It was his idea to adapt the expedition for cultural as well as military goals, and his personal prestige which had led scientists from all over France to agree to participate in the first place. It was his conception, too, that from the outset military conquest and scientific discovery should be closely associated, twin pillars of the same imperial enterprise. The idea was not wholly without precedent. The eighteenth century had been a period of ambitious scientific exploration, including circumnavigations of the world by two great Frenchmen, Bougainville in 1766–69, and La Pérouse in 1785–88.¹⁷ And there were, of course, classical precedents to follow: Napoleon was very conscious of the fact that he was following in the footsteps of a great predecessor, and that in his marches to Egypt, Persia and India, Alexander the Great had taken with him a band of learned men and philosophers to explore the lands they passed through. There is little doubt that Napoleon saw himself as a new Alexander.¹⁸

Not everyone in the army was persuaded of the wisdom of this approach, which they interpreted as a dilution of their military endeavour, especially since their general seemed to favour les savants and their work over the military targets of the expedition, while the costs of archaeological work and hiring artists to record the monuments came out of the military budget. But there was a longer-term political goal here which cannot be overlooked, since it was this that allowed Bonaparte to present himself not just as a military conqueror but as the bearer of civilisation. Indeed, almost his first action on arriving in North Africa was to create an Institute of Egypt in Cairo, a place where scholars could meet and discuss cultural matters, and where a new science of Egyptology could be evolved.¹⁹ There was more than a hint of diplomacy in this, as well as an immediate publicity coup. He came to Africa with an understanding of culture and antiquity, concerned to discover and cherish Africa’s heritage, whereas the British – whose fleet had withdrawn from Egypt only the previous year – were presented as new barbarians, a trading people whose only interest in Africa lay in opportunities for profit and commercial exploitation. Of course, in reality, Napoleon’s own motives were far more complex and in no sense altruistic. For him it was about control, and power: what Edward Said would represent as the European pursuit of the total knowledge of and total control over an Oriental society, as ‘the original sin in the modern nexus of hegemonic Western power and knowledge’.²⁰

The military campaign did not go smoothly; this was to be no repeat of the rapid succession of victories that Napoleon had enjoyed against the Austrians in Lombardy, although the first action of the advancing fleet was an undoubted triumph. The French bullied and bribed the Knights of St John to surrender their fortress city of Valletta and seized the strategically placed island of Malta for France. They then sailed on to the coast of Africa, where they faced a very different army, a force of Mamelukes with traditional battle tactics and little sense of European strategy. They were distinguished in European eyes by their oriental uniforms, their curved scimitars, and their disorganised conduct on the battlefield. Against them the French won some notable battles, fought against memorable and exotic backdrops, most particularly the Battle of the Pyramids in July 1798, where French losses of three hundred contrasted dramatically with the Mamelukes’ two and a half thousand. In open battle the French enjoyed a clear advantage, which they maintained even after the Porte declared war and they had to face Turkish as well as Egyptian forces in the field. In 1799, for instance, they celebrated comprehensive victories at Mount-Tabor and Aboukir, pressing home their advantage in a succession of engagements.

But these were the high points of a campaign that spelt mixed military fortunes for Napoleon. His navy was effectively destroyed by the British under Horatio Nelson when the two fleets met at the Battle of the Nile in the first days of August 1798. As a consequence of these victories the British were handed effective control of the Eastern Mediterranean and denied the French the possibility of getting supplies and reinforcements to their armies, which proved a decisive blow. On land Bonaparte found his tactical options dramatically reduced. He was forced to move north into Syria to face the Turks, but he found his army fatally weakened by fevers and, worst of all, by bubonic plague which struck his troops in Jaffa. Morale plummeted, desperation set in, and they were cut off from supplies of food and water. He besieged Saint-Jean-d’Acre, but this time his temerity and incisiveness were not enough, for the city was supplied by the British from the sea. It was a galling defeat for Bonaparte, and one which led him to renounce his objective of taking Acre and retreat with the remnants of his army across the sun-baked desert to Cairo. An expedition that had started so promisingly had ended in failure, despite the fact that the French had won a series of lightning victories and had destroyed two Turkish armies. In military terms it had been an impressive performance, though the work of the army was undermined by French naval weakness, and by the crushing British naval victory at the Nile. But Napoleon could justly feel that his achievement went beyond the purely military. In his dealings with civil society he had impressed upon Egypt and its people his interest in them and their land, his concern for the ruins of their past, and his evident interest in Islam. Just as importantly, he had built up solid working relations with local people, and had laid the foundations of a French colony in Egypt.

Yet the retreat from Acre was that of a beaten army: stragglers were cut down by Turkish fighters, while many of the men, their bodies weakened by plague or raddled by disease, fell by the wayside. Dying soldiers sought opium to end their sufferings; others, in despair at what they were living through, committed suicide in front of their officers. At Jaffa, some twelve hundred of the most seriously ill were placed on boats to be transported to hospital in Damietta. Those who were able to walk were forced to march on, with the bedraggled and demoralised remnants of the army, blowing up the defences of every town they passed through and taking hostages from among the local population.

When they finally reached Cairo, they were dirty, exhausted, and often mortally weakened by plague, glad only that their hell was over and that food and a change of uniform awaited them. The campaign, it might seem, had ended in disaster, sufficiently so for Bonaparte to order the burning of some of the expedition’s records. But that was not the way it was made to appear. At the approach to Cairo, the French were greeted as conquering heroes: Napoleon had already taken steps to ensure that the impression of victory was maintained whatever the true cost of the campaign might have been, and that the sheiks of Cairo were outside the gates to welcome them with gifts of horses, camels and slaves. His soldiers must have been confused to hear that theirs had been a brilliant triumph, that ‘the enemy army which was marching to invade Egypt is destroyed’; or that the decision had been taken to turn back from the castle of Acre because it ‘is not worth the loss of any more time’.²¹ It was all untrue, of course, but Napoleon had already learned the principal rule of the propagandist: that he should never feel constrained by the truth. His reputation for invincibility was in jeopardy – all the more so when he then abandoned his army, defeated and demoralised, in Egypt to return to France. He understood the importance of winning over opinion back home, of making his fellow Frenchmen aware of what he had achieved in North Africa and proud to count the campaign in Egypt as a notable French success. But to do that he had to conduct another campaign, one shaped in words and images.

As had become clear in Italy, Napoleon was ever aware of the esteem and kudos that could accrue from his military talents, and he had never hesitated to make the most of his achievements, parading them before the army and the French people alike. But in Italy he had had a succession of remarkable victories to present to an admiring public, whereas presenting Egypt in similarly triumphal terms might seem well-nigh impossible. However, the very distance between Paris and Cairo, and the colour and exoticism of the desert, were peculiarities of the Egyptian campaign that he could manipulate, and which ultimately played into his hands. Here he did not need to dwell at length on the outcomes of battles, but could put added emphasis on the cultural mission which he saw himself fulfilling, a mission that ensured France’s place among the great civilisations of the world.

As he had in Italy, he published two news sheets from Egypt, each with a distinct audience in mind. The Courrier de l’Egypte was targeted primarily at the troops, which allowed Bonaparte to present his own version of events and to dismiss damaging rumours. Again, there was a clear emphasis on cultural policy, with historical and cultural articles, pieces about the new improved administration, and articles praising the high quality of the Islamic elites and boasting of their cordial relations with France. But after the initial issues, published in France in the weeks before the fleet sailed to North Africa, poor communications and long distances ensured that the Courrier was little read back home, though excerpts from it were sometimes reprinted in the Moniteur, always to Napoleon’s advantage. His second publication, La Décade Egyptienne, was more uncompromisingly scholarly, its mission to report on the work of Napoleon’s Institut d’Egypte and to discuss Egyptian antiquities with the scientific community in France.²² In both papers Napoleon was depicted as a multi-talented figure, at once soldier and diplomat, religious and cultural leader, and the representative of civilisation in a foreign land. Against exotic backcloths, surrounded by Mamelukes, sphinxes and pyramids, he represented France and the spirit of the Grande Nation, the embodiment of French republican values exported to far-flung lands.²³ Science stood side by side with ancient architecture, religious faith with exoticism. His supporters would even claim that he ‘worked miracles in Egypt’, going so far as to imply that he ‘was close to being talked of as a successor to Mahomet’.²⁴

It is interesting how the strangeness of the landscape and the richness of Egypt’s heritage contributed to the construction of Napoleon’s new identity, and how far he had come since the days when he was seen exclusively as a brilliant general. For already in Egypt it is clear that he was seeking to present himself as a statesman, a diplomat, a man of honour and compassion, and a leader totally at ease in the diverse cultures of the world. He was aided in this by Vivant Denon, whose real interests were always more artistic than military and who confessed that, close-up, he found little in war that was of real beauty. Denon was overwhelmingly grateful for the privilege of accompanying the expedition. The publication of his journal, detailing the wondrous discoveries they had made and the antiquities they had uncovered in their marches across Egypt, was a major literary event in Paris, and played a significant part in popularising Orientalism in Western Europe. Napoleon lavished praise on the ingenuity of the scientists and men of letters who had accompanied the expedition, and by so doing he helped to introduce French readers to a hitherto unknown world of Egyptian antiquities.²⁵ A new generation of Imperial artists would perpetuate the sense that Napoleon had conducted himself in the Levant as a civilised Frenchman: a man of the Enlightenment and a man of reason and sensibility.

The Paris art market, liberalised during the Revolution, was restructured in the early years of the nineteenth century, with government-inspired themes for competitions at the Salons and generous prizes donated by the state. Large-scale history paintings were again in vogue, and artists vied with one another to present Bonaparte’s victory at the Battle of the Pyramids, for instance. Such a subject offered a heaven-sent opportunity to combine a eulogy to the regime with a splendidly exotic backcloth of Arab horses and scimitars, palm trees and camels. Or else they rushed to portray victories at Aboukir and Nazareth. These were battle scenes, but battle scenes enriched by their novel and exotic setting. Napoleon’s artists did not, however, restrict themselves to questions of tactics or military triumph. They also captured moments of generosity, sympathy, or forgiveness that suggested symptoms of true greatness.

Two incidents that were taken from the campaign in the Levant provided striking examples of another side to Napoleon’s nature. One was his readiness to forgive his enemies once they had surrendered to him – a principle to which he did not religiously adhere throughout the campaign, though after the insurrection against the French in Cairo, there was one such moment. It was well captured in Napoleon Pardoning the Rebels of Cairo, a canvas of 1808 by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, which underlines the simple nobility of the pardon, and the power of life and death that had lain in Bonaparte’s hands.²⁶ In a series of pictures, many inspired by Denon’s sketches, Antoine-Jean Gros, a painter who was fascinated by the East and deeply regretted that he had not been asked to take part in the expedition, paid his own tributes to Napoleon. The most memorable focused on a second incident, when Bonaparte had visited the sick and dying in the hospital during the outbreak of bubonic plague at Jaffa, evidencing heroism of a quite different kind. In hisBonaparte Visiting the Plague-stricken in Jaffa, Gros depicts the revolutionary general consoling plague victims, speaking to them about their woes, even touching their wasted bodies. It was an extraordinarily iconic image, which would be repeated many times in popular lithographs and cheap prints. And for Napoleonic art, too, it would have important effects. The enormous popular success of the painting in the 1804 Salon ‘established once and for all the viability of large-scale propagandistic representations of contemporary events depicted in the language of classical history painting’.²⁷ By then Napoleon had become fully aware of the value he could extort from representations of this kind.

But science was about more than propaganda, and there is no reason to suppose that Bonaparte’s interest in Egypt stemmed from nothing more than cheap cynicism. He shared the enthusiasm of his linguists and artists for the treasures of Egypt, the tombs and temples, gates and sphinxes; he expressed curiosity about its languages and inscriptions; and he revelled in the exotic landscape of the Pyramids. The most enduring, and in many ways the most impressive, outcome of the whole campaign was the publication back in Paris of the Description de l’Egypte, a series of twenty-four lavishly illustrated volumes produced by the savants after their return. These detailed the scientific discoveries made during the expedition and unveiled to the world the wealth of the antiquities that had been unearthed by the French in Egypt. Most of the antiquities remained in Egypt, though some were seized by the French and brought back to Paris for exhibition in the Louvre; the most famous of all, the Rosetta Stone, would be plundered for a second time by the British as part of the final peace treaty and would find its home in the British Museum. The Description is a work of breathtaking ambition, introducing to Europe a world of temples and tombs, inscriptions and sculpture, of which they had little knowledge. Of the forty-three authors, only two were specially co-opted after the expedition returned; the others were all veterans of those months in the desert, pioneers who had volunteered to accompany Bonaparte on this great adventure and who had explored ancient Egyptian civilisation from the Mediterranean coast to the desert of the interior, and up the Nile to Luxor and Karnak. They produced hundreds of engravings and entire volumes of plates, dividing the work into three discrete sections on ‘Antiquities’, ‘The Modern State’, and ‘Natural History’, and showing as great an interest in recent change and the modernisation of the Islamic world as they did in the remains of a world long lost.²⁸

The propaganda value of the Description, like that of the artists, would be greatest in future years, when it would help to cement Napoleon’s image once he had already seized political power in France. By then it played on a familiar theme, for it conveyed, in a fuller and more scientific form, the same message that he and his acolytes were sending back to Paris from Egypt at the time, a message that praised his diplomacy as much as his soldiering, his appreciation of ancient ruins and exotic cultures, his tact and understanding and wisdom. This message would have a powerful effect on opinion back home, quite apart from fulfilling the more obvious task of ensuring that he was not forgotten, exiled beyond the furthest extremities of Europe and abandoned to oblivion.

The correspondence from the Army of Egypt could itself be turned to the purpose of glorifying Napoleon’s role, and of emphasising the high level of respect he commanded among the Egyptian elite. On 23 July 1798, for instance, the national newspaper Le Publiciste ran an item on the hymn of praise sung by a Coptic choir in the Grand Mosque of Cairo ‘to celebrate the entry into the city of Bonaparte at the head of the Braves of the West’. The paper obligingly hailed Bonaparte as the ‘new Alexander’ and commented that the style of his letters was as inimitable as that of Julius Caesar himself.²⁹ These, we may safely conclude, are comparisons of which Napoleon would have approved; he may even have suggested them in the first place. They played an important part in preparing the reception that would await him when he disembarked in Fréjus from the ship that bore him and a few selected counsellors back across the Mediterranean. They would also serve a valuable purpose in preparing the Napoleonic myth for future generations.

Though the military expedition ended in defeat – Bonaparte was never able to offset the crippling blow inflicted by Nelson at Aboukir Bay, which left him unable to guarantee the supply of his army – the Egyptian adventure cannot be dismissed as a simple failure. The scientific achievements would ensure that the French and their young general continued to be seen as explorers, humanists, men of science bringing the glories of an ancient civilisation to the notice of the modern world. Administratively he brought to Egypt many of the benefits which he had already bestowed on Italy: laws, courts of justice, ready access to administration, and an administration that was not sapped by corruption. And in the longer term the expedition helped to reshape France’s relations with Egypt long into the nineteenth century. French engineers stayed on after the army pulled out and helped to staff the country’s administrations.³⁰ So, in the short term, did Kléber and Menou, left by Napoleon to maintain French rule in Egypt, and their regime was talked of as bringing progress and modernity. They succeeded in finding Egyptians ready and willing to serve France; but they could not turn around the war, or deter the British from attacking the last remnants of the French army. In all, French rule lasted a mere nine months. Kléber was to die in Egypt, murdered by a patriotic student at the Azhari mosque in Cairo after repressing a popular rising in the city;³¹ Menou, on the other hand, was able to negotiate the safe departure of the last units of the French army before returning to France in 1802.³² They left behind a tradition of administration that was honest and efficient so that, ten years later, when Mehmet Ali ran the Mamelukes out of Egypt and established a strong, authoritarian state, he did not hesitate to borrow from the administrative practices which Bonaparte had established.³³

In this respect Napoleon’s Egyptian legacy was not destroyed along with the remnants of his armies. He helped to establish French interests and government practices in Egypt, and he has some claim to be acknowledged as an innovator and as a pioneer in colonial governance. Some French historians during the first half of the twentieth century went rather further, seeing in the colonisation of Egypt the beginnings of France’s nineteenth-century empire and a prologue to the colonisation of Algeria in 1828.³⁴