BOOK 
THREE
16 RELYING on the memories of old Dermoncourt, the novelist described the period after his father’s greatest triumph, when he was treated like the savior of Rome and celebrated even by Napoleon, as one of his most melancholic.
He had no sooner won his heart’s desires than he conceived a profound disgust for them. When the energy he had expended in obtaining his desires had died down … he sent in his resignation. Happily Dermoncourt was at hand. When he received these letters of resignation to dispatch, he slipped them in a drawer of his desk, put the key in his pocket, and quietly waited.
At the end of a week or two weeks, or even a month, the momentary cloud of disgust which had swept over my poor father’s spirits would disappear, and some brilliant charge or daringly successful maneuver would arouse enthusiasm in his heart, ever eager to aspire after the impossible, and, with a sigh, he would say: “Upon my word, I believe I did wrong to send in my resignation.”
And Dermoncourt, who was on the watch for this, would reply:
“Don’t worry yourself, General; your resignation—”
“Well, my resignation—?”
“It’s in that desk, ready to send off on the first chance; there is only the date to alter.”
After leaving his post as military governor in Italy, Dumas returned on furlough to Villers-Cotterêts for three months, to be with his wife and daughter, and also to perfect his hunting skills at the expense of the wild boars and stags in the Retz Forest. At the end of March 1798, he received orders from the minister of war to report to Toulon, in the south of France, to assume a new command. As happy as Dumas must have been during his time at home, the new assignment probably came as a relief to him, or so his son came to believe: his father, he thought, could not really thrive away from the action (hence his fit of melancholy after the Italian campaign). He now rewrote his will, kissed his family, and rode off for the south. He was thirty-six years old and in vigorous health, with dreams of greater glory.
On coming into Toulon, Dumas found the port in chaos with the provisioning of what appeared to be a great armada in formation. There were thousands of soldiers, sailors, animals, guns, and all the supplies needed not only for a military campaign but for maintaining a small city. (When fully assembled, the armada would consist of thirteen large warships and another forty-two smaller ones, along with 122 transport vessels. On board were 54,000 men, including 38,000 soldiers and 13,000 sailors, who brought 1,230 horses, 171 field guns, 63,261 artillery shells, 8,067,280 rifle rounds, and 11,150 hand grenades.) A military campaign of major proportions was clearly being planned, yet the destination was a closely held secret. Neither Dumas nor the other officers or men in Toulon had any idea what it was.
“The object of this grand voyage is not known,” wrote one of the other participants in an April 11 letter intercepted by British intelligence. “It is … certain that they have an immense amount of printing equipment, books, instruments, and chemical apparatus, which suggests a very long absence.” The identity of this letter writer was a clue to the expedition’s unusual character, for he was neither a soldier nor the sort of civilian who usually accompanied military adventures. Déodat de Dolomieu was one of Europe’s leading geologists. In 1791 he had discovered a mineral, which was named in his honor (dolomite), and later an entire mountain range in north Italy (the Dolomites) would also bear his name.
Yet Dolomieu was not the only eminent scientist and man of letters in Toulon waiting to board the ships. There were dozens of others, including, as he observed, “geographical engineers, military engineers, mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, doctors, artists, and naturalists of every sort; two professors of Arabic, Persian and Turkish.” Drawn from the cream of the French intelligentsia, the sheer number of “savants”—as they were designated on the expedition’s rosters—was as surprising as their renown. “And all have gone aboard without knowing where they are going.”
The mystery of the expedition’s destination had precisely the desired effect: the enemy was flummoxed. Having learned about the massing of the French armada, the British Admiralty had sent their best man to investigate. Rear Admiral Horatio Nelson, though at thirty-nine relatively young for the British navy, had an outsized reputation for tactical brilliance and bravery in harassing and sinking French vessels. He was also an arch-traditionalist who despised the French Revolution.
Nelson had been sent into the Mediterranean commanding a small squadron of just three large warships and three smaller frigates (scout ships) with orders to determine the French armada’s destination. Arriving south of Toulon on May 19—only one day before the armada’s departure—he positioned his squadron “exactly in a situation for intercepting the enemy’s ships.” By chance Nelson captured a small French corvette sailing from Toulon and interrogated the crew. But the French sailors could not tell Nelson anything about the armada’s destination because, like everyone else, they had no idea themselves. They managed instead to provide some bits of misinformation, including that Napoleon was not planning to sail with the expedition himself. Then Nelson’s luck failed him: gale-force winds, careening waves, and driving spray pummeled his warships for nine hours, damaging all three and demasting his flagship. The winds had blown his frigates out of sight. The British squadron was forced to retreat to neutral Sardinia for repairs—sans frigates, which effectively blinded it.
In the meantime, Napoleon’s vast armada had departed Toulon, missed the gale, and was safely cruising down the west coast of Italy. Back near Toulon on June 5, Nelson was overjoyed to see a fleet of eleven British warships arriving to join his command. This new firepower would give him fighting odds, if he could catch the French fleet in a vulnerable position. But where had Napoleon’s armada gone? And where the devil was it going?
The top British admirals surmised that the French expedition was planning to break out of the Mediterranean, sail up the Atlantic coast, and invade Ireland or England. The risk of invasion was seared into British consciousness, part of the heritage of an island nation whose very identity rested on a succession of transformative invasions, such as those of the Romans in AD 53 and the Normans in 1066. But beginning with the failed Spanish armada in 1588, at least a half dozen other attempted foreign invasions, most recently in 1759, had been thwarted by the British navy. In response to rumors the French government had planted of an imminent French assault across the Channel, panic seized the British public.* The Times of London called for emergency preparations—“barricades for each street”—against the Jacobin hordes who would soon swarm the city.
The French actually had been planning to attack England that spring. This was the mission the government had chosen and assigned to General Bonaparte after Italy. Command rolls for the invasion of England were drawn up at the end of 1797: Alex Dumas had been appointed commander of the dragoons and “Chief of Staff of the Cavalry.” His nemesis Berthier—the general Dumas had said would “shit in his pants” if he were exposed to danger—had been appointed chief of staff of the “Army of England.” In February 1798 Napoleon toured Calais and Dunkirk while General Kléber toured the beaches of Normandy. But Napoleon then held secret meetings with the government to dissuade them from the British armada plan. Napoleon was not ready to attack England; he would return to that idea in the following decade. In the spring of 1798, he had another idea. He had set his sights on invading Egypt.
EUROPEANS had always coveted Egypt. It symbolized all the power of the ancient world—an imperium almost three thousand years older than Rome’s. Egypt was thought to be as rich in grain as in mythology; imperial strategists imagined that control of its croplands would feed populations and armies. These are the reasons Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in the fourth century BC to establish his dynasty there. Napoleon dreamed of following in his footsteps and establishing his own.†
Today the Expédition d’Égypte, as the bloody venture is still called in France, is widely seen as among the most delusional of Napoleon’s globe-conquering fantasies. But the French had long viewed Egypt as a land of adventure, opportunity, and riches, and a stepping-stone out of Europe into the wider world. The rise of literacy and the spread of printed books throughout the eighteenth century fed the public a slew of travelogues of the Near East. “The Nile is as familiar to many people as the Seine,” wrote one observer in 1735. The expedition, with the help of the savants, would discover the famed Rosetta Stone, excavate tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and catalog countless ancient artifacts—and, in the name of scholarship, haul many of them away.
In 1769, Louis XV’s foreign minister tried to get him to strike at Egypt—“to replace the [French] colonies in America, in case they should be lost, with colonies offering the same products and a more extensive trade.” Perhaps products like indigo, cotton, and, most important, sugarcane could be grown in Egypt as well as in Saint-Domingue. One of the best sources of information on Egypt was a polemical travelogue by the utopian philosopher “Volney,” who had chosen his name in homage to Voltaire. Volney traveled to the Middle East from 1783 to 1785, where he learned Arabic, adopted native dress, and lived among the Egyptians. His Travels in Egypt and Syria offered a thorough description of the Egyptian economy, society, government, and strategic forces. In Volney’s view Egypt, though ruined by oriental despotism, was full of potential and ripe for conquest—a tempting target for French colonization. France could gain control over a primary sea route to Asia and incredible prestige by resurrecting the ancient Egyptian past.
Volney came to prominence in 1791 as a star philosopher. His book The Ruins: A Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires was the toast of English Romantic poets like Shelley and political activists like Tom Paine; Thomas Jefferson translated it into English. Volney’s writings influenced a generation of radical democrats, but he arguably had the most impact on an altogether different sort of man. Napoleon met the philosopher personally in 1792 when Volney bought an estate on the island of Corsica. Young Napoleon Bonaparte was spending that year back in his native Corsica, avoiding the dangerous turmoil in France. Napoleon served as Volney’s informal guide to the island, while picking his brain about Egypt.
Napoleon had developed an identification with Egypt from the time he was twelve, reading about Alexander the Great. At the end of his life, having gained and lost control of Europe, he would remember his heady time in Egypt. “I dreamed of many things and I saw how I could realize all my dreams,” he mused. “I imagined myself on the road to Asia, mounted on an elephant, a turban on my head, and in my hand, a new Koran that I had written myself for my own purposes. I would have combined in my enterprises the experience of two worlds, scouring the terrain of all world history for my profit.” Though the general had absorbed Volney’s extensive knowledge of Egypt, he ignored his most important lesson: that his dream of a Middle Eastern empire was a mirage.
Almost immediately after describing the riches to be gained in Egypt, Volney warned France’s leaders against trying to seize it. Any invasion would bring on an unwinnable three-front war with the British, the Turks, and the Egyptians themselves. The locals will quickly come to loath us, he told his readers: “Even our officers would take that arrogant, exclusionary, and contemptuous tone that foreigners can’t stand about us.” Volney predicted that a third of French troops would perish from disease, a few venal Arab collaborators would get rich, and eventually, the whole venture would collapse into the desert dust. France would do much better to invest its energies at home.
For Napoleon, this warning only pointed to greater glory if he could pull it off.
After securing the conquest of northern Italy in the summer of 1797, Napoleon began laying concrete plans for his Egyptian expedition. While busy overseeing the transport to Paris of Venice’s artistic treasures—including the bronze horses of St. Mark’s Cathedral, which the Venetians themselves had looted from the Greeks during the Fourth Crusade—Napoleon’s thoughts were already with the upcoming mission. In one of the more memorable bits of secret advance preparation he had done while in Italy, Napoleon sent his agents throughout the peninsula looking to secure an Arabic printing press, so he would be able to print revolutionary tracts and edicts for the Egyptians. (They at last located one to seize in the papal propaganda office at the Vatican.)
In his meetings with the government in Paris to discuss the invasion of England, Napoleon emphasized that by taking Egypt instead, he could cut off the British overland trade routes to India, her most valuable possession. He probably did not reveal the full extent of his dreams of founding a vast Franco-Afro-Asian empire stretching from the Barbary Coast cities of Tunis and Algiers in the west to India in the east: after seizing Egypt, the “Army of the Orient” would conquer Syria, cut across Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, and cross the Khyber Pass into India—all in the name of liberating the despotic East. Napoleon hoped to enlist the support of local insurgents like Tippoo Sahib, the sultan of Mysore, in south India. Tippoo was a great fan of the French Revolution and England’s most formidable enemy in India. He had gone as far as to cofound, in 1792, the Jacobin Club of Mysore and referred to himself as “Citizen Tippoo Sultan.” Napoleon attempted to get a message to the Citizen Sultan promising that the French army would fight side by side with him for a new republican India (once the French had conquered Egypt and marched across Mesopotamia, Iran, and Afghanistan, that is), but Tippoo would fall in battle against the British, in 1799, before he could receive it.‡
On May 10, 1798, Napoleon inspected the troops in Toulon and gave a famous departure speech:
Soldiers, the eyes of Europe are upon you. You have a grand destiny to fulfill, battles to fight, dangers and trials to overcome.… The genius of Liberty that has made the Republic, since its birth, the arbiter of Europe, desires that it also be the arbiter of the seas and of the farthest lands.
He promised each man six acres of land if the mission succeeded. The soldiers, sailors, and engineers still had no idea where the land was to be situated—did he mean an Irish farm, an Indian orchard, or a Levantine olive grove? When the French first laid eyes on the Egyptian desert, they would coin one of the bitter catchphrases of the campaign: “Voilà—the six acres of land they promised us!”
IN his memoir, Alexandre Dumas writes of an encounter between his father and Napoleon before the expedition’s departure. Yet it’s possible the meeting is invented: his father’s relationship with Napoleon as the writer wishes it had been. According to his account, Napoleon ran into General Dumas shortly after arriving in Toulon and invited him to visit the next morning, as early as he wanted. Accordingly, at 6 a.m. the next day, General Dumas met up with his aide, Dermoncourt (the primary source for all of the novelist’s stories about his father, except presumably his mother).
“Where the devil are you off to, General, this early?”
“Come with me,” said my father, “and you’ll see.” They set off together.
Approaching their destination, Dermoncourt said:
“You’re not going to see Bonaparte, are you, General?”
“I am.”
“But he won’t receive you.”
“Why not?”
“Because it is too early.”
“Oh! That doesn’t matter.”
“But he’ll be in bed.”
“Quite likely.”
… In sum, [Dermoncourt concluded] my father must have a special audience scheduled, and followed him.
My father ascended a stair, walked down a hallway, opened a little door, pushed back a screen, and found himself, along with Dermoncourt, who had been following him the whole time, in Bonaparte’s bedroom.
He was in bed with Josephine, and, as the weather was very hot, both of them were covered by no more than a sheet, upon which were drawn the outlines of their bodies.
Josephine was weeping, and Bonaparte was trying to wipe her tears away with one hand, while with the other he laughingly beat a military march on her body.
“Ah! Dumas,” he said, catching sight of my father; “your arrival is well timed; you must help me make this crazy woman listen to reason. Ought she to wish to come to Egypt with us? Would you take your wife there?”
“My word, certainly not,” says Dumas, and the two proceed to have an excruciatingly arch exchange in an attempt to jolly the tearful wife out of her distress, which is only redoubled when Napoleon says the expedition may last several years. He again enlists Dumas, telling Josephine that, if that does turn out to be the case, she and Madame Dumas can both travel by convoy to Egypt together. (“ ‘Does that suit you, Dumas?’ ‘Perfectly,’ replied my father.”) And there, the famously childless Napoleon goes on, the reunited couples can dedicate their efforts to producing male issue, since “Dumas … has only daughters [sic], and I … have not even those.” If successful, he exultantly tells Josephine, they will all be godparents together, and he concludes: “There now, that’s a promise; stop crying, and let’s talk business.”
Then, turning to Dermoncourt, Bonaparte said:
“Monsieur Dermoncourt, you have just heard a word drop which indicates the goal of our expedition. Not a soul knows of this goal: do not let the word ‘Egypt’ escape your lips; you understand, under the circumstances, the importance of a secret.”
Dermoncourt made a sign that he would be as dumb as a disciple of Pythagoras.
In reality, Dumas had never been a confidant of Napoleon, and he had probably not been invited to know the great secret of the expedition, though in a farewell letter to Marie-Louise he guesses correctly (or perhaps gives away the secret he was in fact told?):
In great haste—via Paris
To the Citizeness Dumas, in her home.
… I embark in one hour but I will write to you more at length on board, farewell I am in a terrible hurry, my father [maybe a priest, taking money to her?] left this morning with 115 Louis in gold, I think we are going to Egypt, farewell, eternal friendship to everyone.
Alex Dumas
Dumas and Dermoncourt boarded their vessel, a midsized ship called the Guillaume Tell (the “William Tell”).§ (Napoleon sailed on the Orient, a gargantuan vessel that was the largest ship of any navy on earth, boasting 120 cannons mounted on three decks.) The armada set sail for its first rendezvous point, the island of Malta, off the coast of Sicily. Britain’s Nelson, meanwhile, lost an important tool for tracking them when he became separated from his two main frigates in a sudden storm. The loss of these fast, nimble scouting vessels—the closest thing to radar in those days—meant that Nelson now had little chance of finding the French armada: even on a clear day, intelligence was limited to the twenty miles visible through Nelson’s Dolland telescope, the most advanced available. Naval warfare in the late eighteenth century was the ultimate game of hide-and-seek: it could take days, weeks, or months to locate your enemy at sea.
Malta was a heavily barricaded outcropping that had withstood every invader since the sixteenth century. The Ottomans once lost fifty thousand men besieging Malta before giving up. Napoleon’s plan was to take the island and make off with a king’s ransom in treasure—this, plus the booty from the Italian campaign, would finance the invasion of Egypt.
Since ancient times, Malta had been ruled by a dizzying array of conquerors—Phoenicians, Byzantines, Carthaginians, Romans, and Arabs. But the island’s name is synonymous with its most colorful and enduring conquerors: the Knights of Malta. First banded together as the Order of St. John in Jerusalem in the eleventh century, the Knights were as fundamental to the world of real-life chivalry as King Arthur and his knights were to its legend. In return for support from the pope, the Knights swore to take on the defense of pilgrims and the sick and to defend the Faith in territories that the crusaders had conquered from the Muslims. They began calling themselves “holy knights” and wearing their trademark insignia: an eight-pointed white cross, made up of four V-shaped arms joined in the center, on either a red or a black field.‖
Since the Middle Ages, the Knights had been based in Malta, which they turned into the most impregnable fortress island in Europe. Would-be holy Knights showed up from everywhere, hoping to win fame and glory for God by fighting Islam in a sunny climate. But the island was also a refuge for adventurous scoundrels of every variety, such as the Italian Renaissance painter Caravaggio, who, after committing murder, fled to Malta in 1607 and was made a knight in return for painting his masterpiece The Beheading of St. John the Baptist. (According to some sources, Sir Caravaggio then got into another violent altercation, with a fellow knight, and left Malta in disgrace.)
In spite of the order’s vows, including chastity, Malta also became renowned for the beauty and laxity of its prostitutes, with the best ones going to the Knights and their guests. And fighting the infidel on the high seas, they took in so many galley slaves and so much booty that they began to seem like a Christian version of the Barbary pirates. The pope heard of the Knights’ lax morals and sent an inquisitor to the island in 1574; he set up shop in a mansion in the shopping district.
The Knights had once been swashbuckling crusaders riding the waves for Jesus; now their island bastion was more like some crusaders’ version of Palm Springs, where elderly Knights lived off a carefully fixed income of hoarded treasures, along with taxes and feudal dues collected from their native lands. This latter source of income was the most important, and since many of the Knights were from French noble families, the dues supporting the order’s lavish lifestyle came disproportionately from France. When the French National Assembly abolished feudal dues in the summer of 1789, it hit Malta hard. Aristocrats across Europe were incensed, but the Knights of Malta were ruined. Given their aristocratic and religious heritage, the Knights would have opposed the Revolution in any case, but since it had wrecked their livelihoods, they regarded it with a special loathing. They made overtures to ally with France’s enemies Austria and Russia, as well as plotting with their traditional feudal landlord, the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples.
All this provided the French armada with the perfect justification to intervene. On June 9, 1798, the ships approached the harbor at Valletta, the island’s capital. To the Knights, it must have looked as if the entire world was descending on them. They said they would let four ships into the harbor at a time. It was then that Napoleon learned that the geologist Dolomieu had a special relationship with them: as a young man, he had been a member of the Order of St. John but had gotten into trouble for killing a fellow knight. However, after serving a nine-month prison sentence, Dolomieu attempted to run for a leadership office, an effort that stalled due not to his criminal record but to his liberal politics. In fact, the head of the Knights of Malta, the Grand Master, had been trying to contact him. “The Grand Master wrote to me,…” Dolomieu recorded in a later report, “and asked me to use my good offices with [Napoleon].” Before Dolomieu could do so, Napoleon ordered him to row ashore to carry his terms to the Knights.
“Tell the Knights I will grant them most advantageous conditions,” Napoleon commanded the scientist, “that I will pay what they want, whether in cash or by the treaty I will make with them; that all the French can return to France and enjoy their political rights; that those who wish to remain in Malta will be protected; that the Grand Master can have a principality in Germany and anything he wishes.”
The negotiation was successful, but once the Knights opened up the gates of the harbor and let the armada in, Napoleon announced an entirely different plan. He commanded the Knights to abandon their island in three days, with no compensation. “After demanding that Malta be sold to him,” recalled Dolomieu bitterly, “Bonaparte could not have gotten it cheaper.”
The French were surprised to find themselves suddenly inside the legendary fortress without a fight. “No one who has seen Malta can imagine that an island surrounded with such formidable and perfect fortifications would have surrendered in two days,” wrote Napoleon’s personal secretary, who also recorded that, upon inspecting the fortifications, the expedition’s chief military engineer exclaimed, “Upon my word, General, it is lucky that there is someone in the town to open the gates for us!”
Napoleon sent ashore in Malta the same experts who had appraised the Vatican for him, to catalog the treasures of the order’s monasteries and warehouses. They efficiently inventoried 1,227,129 francs’ worth of loot and had it stowed aboard the Orient.
But the primary thing Napoleon did in Malta was to lay down a new social order dictated by revolutionary principles. He abolished feudal privileges and declared religious freedom and political equality; he closed the Inquisition’s offices and abolished torture. He gave Jews full government protection from persecution and fulfilled the Revolution’s rejection of slavery by freeing more than two thousand North African and Ottoman galley slaves, planning to use this as propaganda in Egypt. He drew up plans for hospitals, schools, police stations, pawnshops, and post offices—not to mention street lights, rent-control regulations, and excise taxes. He treated the island like some medieval Lego set that could be taken apart and rebuilt overnight. He established a legal code that over time he would hone into the Napoleonic Code—an updating of Roman law that would later be established in France and around Europe, and that to this day is the basis for nearly all modern European law and administration.a
The actions Napoleon took here were a dry run for his reshaping of Europe and they foreshadowed his maddeningly contradictory legacy. He betrayed the Knights and pillaged the island, but he also transformed it into a modern meritocracy. He was a dictator, a destroyer, and a harbinger of totalitarian leaders to come; he was also a liberator from a tyranny that had stalked Europe for a thousand years.b
ON board the Guillaume Tell, still anchored in Valletta harbor, Dumas was once again overtaken by a dark melancholy. Perhaps the southerly voyage reminded him of his childhood in the tropics, for he wrote to Marie-Louise that he felt trapped on a journey that felt “more like a deportation than an expedition.” The voyage seemed to him full of bad omens. One of these was that his lackey, Nicolas, fell overboard and drowned (although, in keeping with the ethos of the time, Dumas’s laments are focused as much on the personal inconvenience this causes him as on sorrow for the lost life):
I did not want, my good friend, to afflict you in my letter here by telling you that poor Nicolas, by his imprudence and being drunk while playing with the servant of Lambert, fell into the sea at 9 in the evening and drowned before there was any way to save him. I assure you that I suffered a great deal from this event. One cannot be more distressed. I am without a servant; all my affairs are in disorder and I don’t know what to do.
I cannot tell you what my morale and my body have already suffered. But what does it matter. I always think that it is for the good of my country. This idea will make me patiently suffer everything that I have yet to undergo.… Remember me to my child and our dear parents. As soon as I can send you money, I will do so. When you can, you should give 100 ecus to the father of Nicolas. It is impossible for me at the moment.
Adieu. I cannot recall your attention enough to our interests and the education of our darling child. We are leaving in half an hour for I don’t know where. Tell our neighbor, your cousin and all our parents and friends a thousand sincere wishes. I embrace you all, and above all, I am and will always be your best friend.
Dumas also brooded over the fact that he still had no official command. In fact, unbeknownst to him, Napoleon had dictated to his chief of staff, Berthier, two weeks before: “General Dumas will command the cavalry of the entire army.” Napoleon had evidently decided to reward the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol, though Berthier (who no doubt had not forgotten Dumas’s insults) made no effort to convey this to Dumas.
BY now Admiral Nelson had learned, in Naples, that Napoleon had taken Malta. After Malta, Nelson guessed, Napoleon might attack Sicily, but otherwise the French fleet would be heading for Egypt. Nelson would soon prepare a letter of warning for the British consul at Alexandria: “I think their object is to possess themselves of some Port in Egypt, and to fix themselves at the head of the Red Sea, in order to get a formidable Army into India; and, in concert with Tippoo Sahib, to drive us, if possible, from India.” But guessing at the armada’s destination was not the same as knowing either when it might arrive or where it was at the moment. As it happened, just at the very moment when he was about to stumble upon Napoleon’s fleet, Nelson picked up a false trail.
In his freshly repaired flagship, the Vanguard, Nelson was heading south toward Malta with his squadron in the early morning of June 22—it was 4:20 a.m., according to Nelson’s logbooks—when one of his ships, the Mutine, sailed within shouting distance of a merchant vessel. It was from the Republic of Ragusa (in present-day Croatia), a neutral country enjoying trade with both France and its enemies. Shouting back and forth, the Ragusans informed the British that the French had seized Malta on June 15 and had departed the next day, on the 16th. But the Ragusans were wrong: Napoleon had ordered the armada to depart on the 19th, leaving the messy details of reorganizing Maltese society to a handful of administrators. At the very moment this exchange was occurring, another of Nelson’s ships sighted four unidentified ships in the distance. Nelson sent the Leander to investigate. By 6:30 the Mutine had reported to Nelson the misinformation about when the armada left Malta. Nelson was certain its target could no longer be Sicily; he had just been there on June 20. At 6:46, Nelson got a signal that “the strange ships are frigates”—light warships. The fifty-gun Leander would have had difficulty catching a thirty-six-gun frigate. Should he investigate them further and risk separation from theLeander, or make haste to chase the French, who were apparently already three days ahead of him on the way to Alexandria? Lacking his own fast frigates to pursue the ships on the horizon, Nelson ordered the Leander back into formation.
Nelson had two reasons to choose to ignore the four unidentified frigates: he wanted to keep his vessels together precisely to keep from losing any more of his squadron, and he had also just received word leading him to believe that the armada itself was halfway to Egypt by then. He brought his officers to confer with him on the Vanguard, and by 9 a.m. they had received the mandate to steer for Egypt.
The four strange frigates were the outriders of the French armada, which lay just over the horizon.
On June 23, a day after almost bumping into Nelson’s squadron, Napoleon finally announced to the fifty-four thousand men under his command—sending orders ship to ship—the real object of the expedition. Dumas would now learn of his top command position: he would be supreme cavalry commander of the Army of the Orient.
Dumas’s satisfaction at the seniority of the assignment must have dispelled his gloom somewhat—along with the message Napoleon now imparted, that the French would be liberating Egypt from the tyrannical Mamelukes, a caste of hereditary foreign warriors who were originally slave-soldiers serving the local Egyptians. (Like other “slavs” of the high Middle Ages, the Mamelukes were white, and to this day some of the elite families of Egypt have the pale skin and blue eyes indicative of that ancestry.) The fearsome slave-soldiers had been imported by Egypt’s rulers in the thirteenth century from the lands around the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains to enhance their power. But the Mamelukes had then overcome their masters and seized control, until forced in turn by conquering Ottoman armies a few hundred years later to share power in a kind of uneasy partnership.
The Mamelukes had actually seized power in 1250 as a result of the previous French invasion of Egypt, that of the French king Louis IX, known as “Saint Louis.” They had built a new capital, Cairo, to replace the ancient capital of Alexandria, and by the late eighteenth century, they still held Egypt in an iron grip and lived a life governed by elaborate military rituals. Their primary interactions with the native Egyptians were extracting taxes and using them as servants.
The Egyptians would welcome the French as liberators, Napoleon assured his men, and they would find riches in Alexandria and Cairo to beggar the greatest cities of Italy.
APPROACHING Egypt on July 26, Nelson dispatched one ship to sail ahead of his squadron. It arrived in Alexandria harbor at sunset on June 28 to scout out the town; an officer went ashore for intelligence, but he returned with news that nobody had heard of any French fleet or spotted even a single French ship on the horizon. When the vessel reconvened with Nelson’s flagship the next morning, Nelson regretfully admitted that he’d been wrong—that Napoleon was not invading Egypt after all—and ordered his ships to proceed away from Egypt, toward Turkey. Just three hours after the British left Alexandria harbor, the first advance ship of the French armada arrived there. Somehow, to cap off the string of near misses, the last British ship and the first French ship had passed just within spyglass distance but did not see each other. Nelson would spend the next two months searching the Mediterranean, squinting at the horizon for the French tricolor flag, and cursing the loss of his frigates.
Toward midnight, the longboats from the Orient, the Guillaume Tell, and the other French vessels set out for the Egyptian shore, storm winds whipping them in the darkness. Some longboats capsized, and the screams and shouts of the sailors carried over the howl of the winds and the crash of the waves. Seamen and soldiers of that era generally could not swim. The official report to the Directory said twenty-nine men drowned; other reports put the number at over one hundred. By the predawn hours of July 2, after two days of ferrying, about four thousand Frenchmen stood on the beach outside of Alexandria, while perhaps eight times that number remained on the ships. The men on shore had no artillery, no siege equipment, no horses, little food, and less water. Napoleon gave the order to march.
Slinging his rifle over his shoulder, General Dumas marched to Alexandria by Napoleon’s side. The deputy commander-in-chief of the expedition’s infantry was with them—Jean-Baptiste Kléber, who had briefly been Dumas’s commanding officer in the Rhine campaign. Though Kléber’s native Alsace could hardly be farther removed from Dumas’s Saint-Domingue, the two men were cut from the same rugged republican cloth—fearsome to the enemy, often in trouble with the brass. Dumas would come to admire Kléber and confide in him.
The distance from the landing point to the city’s walls was approximately ten miles. Though he was commander of the cavalry, Dumas marched with no horses—just as the commander of the artillery marched with no cannon. The storm had made it too difficult to unload them. Also, the Army of the Orient had transported only about 1,200 horses to Egypt, and many were in poor shape after a six-week sea voyage; this total number included horses to pull artillery and supply wagons as well as officers’ personal mounts. Only a few hundred horses were left for the cavalry, and each cavalryman normally needed more than one horse. It was the equivalent of the D-day forces arriving without jeeps, trucks, or tanks. Based on travelers’ accounts, Napoleon had believed as many as twelve thousand horses could be easily procured in Egypt, which turned out to be false.
The sheer size of the French force provided some protection. Still, before sunup, a few hundred Bedouin tribesmen attacked the French columns as they marched toward the city. When the French returned fire, the Bedouin retreated quickly, but not before kidnapping a few unfortunate Frenchmen and disappearing with them into the desert.
Inside the city, Alexandria’s sherif—a kind of local nobleman, who controlled the city for the Mamelukes—was panicking. Alexandria was poorly garrisoned. He had only a few scores of Mameluke warriors to rely on for defense. The sherif sent a dispatch to Cairo, to one of his two supreme Mameluke overlords: “My lord, the fleet which has just appeared is immense. One can see neither its beginning nor its end. For the love of God and of His Prophet, send us fighting men.” But Cairo, the Mameluke capital, was more than a day’s ride away.
At dawn Napoleon ordered the bugles sounded and the French charged. Though the city walls seemed imposing at first, when the French began to scale them the old structures crumbled in many places, and soon the attackers poured into the city. Dumas led the Fourth Light Grenadiers over the walls with his rifle. The Alexandrians defended their city fiercely, house to house, but by the next day it was in French hands. General Kléber took a musket ball to the head but survived. Dumas escaped the fighting without a scratch.
DUMAS’S appearance made quite an impression on the Egyptians—a tall black man in a general’s uniform at the head of an army of whites. Napoleon had this in mind when, a few days later, he ordered Dumas to make contact with the Bedouins to try to ransom back the men they had kidnapped. He gave Dumas two dozen of his own elite guard to take along on this mission, telling him, “I want you to be the first general that they see, the first leader they deal with.”
Dumas’s mission was successful. But by the time he arranged the prisoners’ ransom—100 piasters a head—the Bedouins had killed a handful and left the rest in almost worse condition. Napoleon interrogated one soldier who cried and could not bring himself to outline the treatment he’d received, though it was eventually pried out of him—all the men had been raped, a fate the French soldiers would come to know and fear in Egypt, a land where European sex norms did not apply.
General Dumas apparently stood out from the beginning of the campaign—and not in a way Napoleon would have enjoyed. In the rare, unpublished third volume of his memoirs, the expedition’s chief medical officer, Dr. Nicolas-René Desgenettes, vividly recalled the impression the expedition’s top commanders made on the local population:
Among the Muslims, men from every class who were able to catch sight of General Bonaparte were struck by how short and how skinny he was.… The one, among our generals, whose appearance struck them even more … was the General-in-Chief of the cavalry, Dumas. Man of color, and by his figure looking like a centaur, when they saw him ride his horse over the trenches, going to ransom the prisoners, all of them believed that he was the leader of the Expedition.
* Terror over rumors of imminent French invasions would continue to haunt Britons for seventy years. Napoleon seriously planned to conquer the island in the years between 1801 and 1805, but the British naval triumph at Trafalgar finished that hope for good. Invasion panics later returned with a vengeance, especially during the reign of Bonaparte’s nephew, Napoleon III (1848–70). When a unified Germany occupied France in 1871, it also replaced that defeated country as the object of British invasion panics. The German invasion never arrived, but the fear of it proved inspirational for British novelists, whose visions of it eventually produced the modern spy thriller. And when H. G. Wells turned the invaders into Martians in The War of the Worlds, modern science fiction was born.
† Alexander of Macedon’s pharaonic dynasty, the Ptolemies, ruled for the next three centuries. The suicide of Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, marked the end of Alexandrian Egypt in 30 BC.
‡ Tippoo’s plucky army was famous for its “rocket brigades,” which fired special long-range rockets out of steel and bamboo tubes. In one battle in April 1799, Tippoo’s rocket fire disoriented the normally unflappable Colonel Arthur Wellesley, future duke of Wellington, and forced a retreat. (“So pestered were we with the rocket boys that there was no moving without danger,” wrote one British officer.) But the British army gained the upper hand when a shot struck a magazine of Tippoo’s rockets, causing a massive explosion. The victorious British hauled away hundreds of rocket launchers and fire-ready rockets, and four years later they began their own rocket program at the Royal Woolwich Arsenal in England, under the direction of William Congreve. It was the so-called Congreve rockets, improvements on Citizen Tippoo Sultan’s rockets, that provided “the rockets’ red glare” when the British bombarded Washington, D.C., in 1812.
§ William Tell, the national folk hero of Switzerland, loomed large over the French Revolution. The national myth goes that Tell, an uncannily fine marksman, assassinated an Austrian tyrant in the fourteenth century and gave birth to Swiss democracy and independence. It heightened French fascination with him that the tyrant he assassinated was Austrian. During the Revolution, Paris was subdivided into administrative “sections”; one of the more radical was named for William Tell.
‖ When the crusader kingdom fell, the Knights lost their castles in Syria and Palestine, but rather than return to Europe, they relocated to the Greek island of Rhodes, where they built a powerful fleet to fight sea battles with the infidels. They held Rhodes for nearly one hundred years until the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent finally ousted them; it took a fleet of four hundred ships and 200,000 soldiers to do so.
But as the last line of defense between Christian Europe and the world of Islam, the Knights got a new home from the Holy Roman Emperor: a hilly, barren island of olive groves called Malta, which then belonged to the Kingdom of Sicily, itself a possession of the emperor. The only condition was that the Knights of St. John become official vassals of the king of Sicily and pay him annual feudal dues that included one “Maltese falcon.” This was the inspiration for the enigmatic statue that so upends the world of Detective Sam Spade—a treasure that men covet and kill for—just as a different kind of Maltese treasure would soon upend the world of Alex Dumas.
a The Napoleonic Code would impose and codify French revolutionary principles of law, politics, family, and society on the rest of Europe in ways that would never be undone, despite the eventual defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and the reestablishment of the old monarchy. The Code established equality before the law, meritocracy in education and civil service, economic liberalism and modern property rights, and, perhaps most important, the secular control of most institutions of society, such as education and marriage.
b Though the Code would form the basis of modern life in almost every European country Napoleon subsequently invaded, the Maltese quickly threw off the new order. In 1800, the British took Malta from the French and made it the headquarters of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet.
During World War II, Malta withstood another incredible siege—this one by the Nazis. Knights or no Knights, the Maltese showed they could hold out against the fiercest enemy. The king of England awarded the George Cross to “the island fortress of Malta … to honor her brave people,” a rare instance of the British Empire’s highest civilian award for gallantry going to a group rather than an individual. Franklin Roosevelt called Malta “one tiny bright flame in the darkness” of Nazi Europe.