Isegoria

After Ibrahim Bey had been forced out of Egypt into Gaza, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon hoped he and Ahmed Jezzar might destroy him together:

That same day he sent a senior staff officer, Colonel Joseph Beauvoison, to the Holy Land to try to open negotiations with Ahmed Jezzar, the pasha of Acre (discouragingly nicknamed ‘The Butcher’), an enemy of the Mamluks and a rebel against the Turks. Jezzar specialized in maiming and disfiguring people, but also in devising horrific tortures such as having his victims’ feet shod with horseshoes, walling up Christians alive and stripping corrupt officials naked before having them hacked to death. He killed seven of his own wives, but his hobby was cutting flower shapes out of paper and giving them to visitors as presents.

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Jezzar refused to see Napoleon’s envoy Beauvoison and instead made peace with the Ottomans. (Beauvoison was fortunate; Jezzar sometimes beheaded unwelcome messengers.)

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On October 20 Napoleon learned that a Turkish army was gathering in Syria to attack him. He needed to move against it but that night minarets across Cairo rang out with a call for a general uprising against French rule, and by the next morning much of the city was in open revolt. General Dominique Dupuy, the city’s governor, was lanced to death in the street and Sulkowski was killed with fifteen of Napoleon’s personal bodyguard, whose bodies were subsequently fed to dogs.

(Of Napoleon’s eight aides-de-camp who went to Egypt, four died and two were wounded, including Eugène at the siege of Acre.)

Several boats were sunk on the Nile during the uprising, and overall about three hundred Frenchmen were killed, not the fifty-three that Napoleon later claimed to the Directory.

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Napoleon’s most important objective was to retain the Cairo citadel, which then as now commands the city with its high elevation and 10-foot-thick walls. Once secured, the height allowed Dommartin to use his 8-pounder guns to shell enemy positions over thirty-six hours; he did not hesitate to put fifteen cannonballs into the Grand Mosque, which was later stormed by infantry and desecrated. Over 2,500 rebels died and more were executed in the citadel afterwards.

At the time he ordered that all rebels captured under arms should be beheaded and their corpses thrown into the Nile, where they would float past and terrorize the rest of the population; their heads were put in sacks, loaded on mules and dumped in piles in Ezbekyeh Square in central Cairo.

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Napoleon wrote to Reynier on October 27: ‘Every night we cut off thirty heads’, and Lavalette described how the Egyptian police chief ‘never went out but accompanied by the hangman. The smallest infraction of the laws was punished by blows on the soles of the feet’, a technique known as the bastinado, which was especially painful because of the large number of nerve-endings, small bones and tendons there and was even meted out to women.

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Once the revolt was over, on November 11, Napoleon abolished the bastinado for interrogations. ‘The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished,’ he ordered Berthier. ‘Torture produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind that the interrogator wishes to hear.’

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By November 30 Cairo had sufficiently returned to normality to allow Napoleon to open the Tivoli pleasure gardens, where he noticed an ‘exceedingly pretty and lively young woman’ called Pauline Fourès, the twenty-year-old wife of a lieutenant in the 22nd Chasseurs, Jean-Noël Fourès. If the beautiful round face and long blonde hair described by her contemporaries are indeed accurate, Lieutenant Fourès was unwise to have brought his wife out on campaign. It was six months since Napoleon had discovered Josephine’s infidelity and within days of his first spotting Pauline they were having an affair. Their dalliance was to take on the aspect of a comic opera when Napoleon sent Lieutenant Fourès off with allegedly important despatches for Paris, generally a three-month round-trip, only for his ship to be intercepted by the frigate HMS Lion the very next day. Instead of being interned by the British, Fourès was sent back to Alexandria, as was sometimes the custom with military minnows. He therefore reappeared in Cairo ten weeks before he was expected, to find his wife installed in the grounds of Napoleon’s Elfey Bey palace and nicknamed ‘Cleopatra’.

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The affair deflected charges of cuckoldry from Napoleon, which for a French general then was a far more serious accusation than adultery.

When Napoleon left Egypt he passed Pauline on to Junot, who, when injured in a duel and invalided back to France, passed her on to Kléber. She later made a fortune in the Brazilian timber business, wore men’s clothing and smoked a pipe, before coming back to Paris with her pet parrots and monkeys and living to be ninety.

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Napoleon visited Suez in late December, both to inspect fortifications and to trace the route of Ramses II’s canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea, following it for 40 miles until it disappeared into the desert sands. (Little could he have guessed that his own nephew would be involved in building its successor in 1869.) He also announced his wish to visit Mount Sinai ‘through respect for Moses and the Jewish nation, whose cosmology retraces the earliest ages’.

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It was on this sightseeing trip from Suez into Sinai (he never reached Mount Sinai itself) on December 28 that Napoleon appears to have come as close to death as he ever did in any of his battles, after taking advantage of the low tide to cross a section of the Red Sea.* ‘We reached the far shore without difficulty,’ stated Doguereau, and the party visited the so-called Spring of Moses and other antiquarian sites, but having lunched and watered the horses at the Nabah wells, they got lost as night fell and wandered through the low-lying marshy sea-shore as the tide rose:

Soon we were bogged down up to the bellies of our mounts, who were struggling and having great difficulty in pulling themselves free … After a thousand problems and having left many horses trapped in the bog, we reached another arm of the sea … It was nine at night and the tide had already risen three feet. We were in a terrible situation, when it was announced that a ford had been found. General Bonaparte was among the first to cross; guides were situated at various places to direct the rest … We were only too happy not to have shared the fate of Pharaoh’s soldiers.

Napoleon’s campaign to conquer Egypt, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), started with conquering the tiny island of Malta:

Napoleon sent Junot to order the Grand Master of the Knights of St John, Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim, to open Valletta harbour and surrender. When two days later he did, Caffarelli told Napoleon how fortunate they had been, because otherwise ‘the army would never have got in’. Malta had survived sieges before — notably in 1565 when in four months the Turks had fired some 130,000 cannonballs at the forts of the knights — and would do so again during thirty months of bombing during the Second World War. But in 1798 the Knights were in schism — the pro-French knights refused to fight and their Maltese subjects were in revolt.

In his six days at Malta Napoleon expelled all but fourteen of the Knights and replaced the island’s medieval administration with a governing council; dissolved the monasteries; introduced street lighting and paving; freed all political prisoners; installed fountains and reformed the hospitals, postal service and university, which was now to teach science as well as the humanities.

He sent Monge and Berthollet to plunder the treasury, mint, churches and artworks (though they missed the silver gates of the Church of St John, which had cleverly been painted black).

On June 18 he wrote fourteen despatches covering the island’s future military, naval, administrative, judicial, taxation, rental and policing arrangements. In them he abolished slavery, liveries, feudalism, titles of nobility and the arms of the Order of the Knights. He allowed the Jews to build a hitherto banned synagogue and even denoted how much each professor in the university should be paid, ordering that the librarian there should also lecture on geography for his 1,000 francs per annum.

‘We now possess’, he boasted to the Directory, ‘the strongest place in Europe, and it will cost a good deal to dislodge us.’

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While sailing to Egypt from Malta, Napoleon wrote General Orders about how the army was to behave once ashore. Public treasures and the houses and offices of the revenue collectors were to be sealed up; Mamluks were to be arrested and their horses and camels requisitioned; all towns and villages would be disarmed. ‘Every soldier who shall enter into the houses of the inhabitants to steal horses or camels shall be punished,’ he instructed. He was particularly careful to give no cause for a jihad. ‘Do not contradict them,’ he ordered his men with regard to Muslims. ‘Deal with them as we dealt with the Jews and with the Italians. Respect their muftis and imams as you respected rabbis and bishops … The Roman legions protected all religions … The people here treat their wives differently from us, but in all countries the man who commits rape is a monster.’

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Leaving the fleet harboured in Aboukir Bay with orders that it be moored close enough to the land to be protected from attack, Napoleon set off for Cairo at 5 p.m. on July 7 and marched through the moonlit night. It was the first desert crossing by a modern Western army. They reached the first stop on the 150-mile road to Cairo, the town of Damanhour, at eight o’clock the next morning. Thereafter his men marched during the day, which they loathed to do because of the heat, the racking thirst, the flies, mosquitoes, snakes and scorpions, the swirling sandstorms and hostile Mamluks and Bedouin Arab tribesmen riding on their flanks ready to kill stragglers. Many of the wells and cisterns along the way had been poisoned or filled with stones. Berthier recalled that water sold for the same weight as gold on that march. One particular problem was trachoma (granular conjunctivitis or ‘Egyptian’ ophthalmia) whereby the scorching sunshine caused a roughening of the inside of the eyelids, which left at least two hundred men blinded.

Morale suffered badly in the desert. ‘It would be difficult to describe the disgust, the discontent, the melancholy, the despair of that army, on its first arrival in Egypt,’ wrote the contemporary historian Antoine-Vincent Arnault. Napoleon even saw two dragoons rush out of the ranks and drown themselves in the Nile.

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‘We were reduced to living on melons, gourds, poultry, buffalo meat and Nile water.’

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Murad Bey, a tall, scarred Circassian who had co-ruled Egypt for years with Ibrahim Bey, attacked with around 4,000 men. Napoleon formed battalion squares, with cavalry and baggage inside, which the Mamluks merely circled on horseback. They looked magnificent in colourful costumes, medieval armour and riding fine horses, but Boyer was unimpressed with the way they ‘straggled round and round our army, like so many cattle; sometimes galloping, and sometimes pacing in groups of ten, fifty, one hundred etc. After some time, they made several attempts, in a style equally ridiculous and curious, to break in upon us.’

Napoleon’s aide-de-camp Sulkowski used the same word, saying ‘against a disciplined army it was only ridiculous’.

Armed with javelins, axes (which they sometimes threw), scimitars, bows and arrows and antiquated firearms, the Mamluks were no match for trained volleys of musketry. When he had lost around three hundred men, Murad rode off.

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On July 21 Murad Bey appeared again, this time with 6,000 Mamluks and 54,000 Arab irregulars, many of them mounted, at the town of Embaleh on the left bank of the Nile.

The Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, the tallest building in the world until the twentieth century, was clearly visible nearly 9 miles away, and Napoleon referred to it in his pre-battle Order of the Day: ‘Soldiers! You came to this country to save the inhabitants from barbarism, to bring civilization to the Orient and subtract this beautiful part of the world from the domination of England. From the top of those pyramids, forty centuries are contemplating you.’

Napoleon often said thereafter that ‘of all the objects that had impressed him in his life, the pyramids of Egypt and the size of the giant Frion [the tallest man in France] were those that had most astonished him’.

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Napoleon formed his 20,000 men into five division-sized squares with artillery at each corner and the baggage, cavalry and savants inside. The men had quenched their thirst in watermelon fields, and were ready. They knew that if they pointed their bayonets at the Mamluk horses’ heads, in the words of one officer, ‘the horse rears up, unseating his rider’.

The Mamluks attacked Desaix’s and Reynier’s divisions first, which, according to Boyer, ‘received them with steadiness, and at the distance of only ten paces opened a running fire upon them … Then they fell upon Bon’s division, which received them in the same manner. In short, after a number of unavailing efforts, they made off.’

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Many of the three hundred French casualties were due to friendly fire between the squares rather than to the Mamluks, who lost twenty guns, four hundred camels and all their equipment and baggage. Because the Mamluks traditionally went into battle carrying their life savings, a single corpse could make a soldier’s fortune. After the battle, the victorious French measured out gold coins by the hatful. ‘Our brave men were amply compensated for the trouble they had experienced,’ was how Berthier put it in his report to the war ministry, printed in Le Moniteur. Napoleon won the soubriquet ‘Sultan Kebir’ (Lord of Fire) from the Egyptians as Murad fled to Upper Egypt, where Desaix was despatched in pursuit. After one of Desaix’s victories there, the corpses of drowned Mamluks were fished out of the Nile to be picked over.

The day after the battle Napoleon entered Cairo, a city of 600,000 inhabitants, the same size as Paris and easily the largest in Africa. He set up headquarters in the house of Elfey Bey in Ezbekyeh Square and immediately started issuing orders for reforms. Each of Cairo’s sixteen districts was to receive its own diwan (council) made up of local dignitaries who would then send a representative to a Grand Diwan, under the presidency of the pro-French Sheikh al-Sharqawi. Napoleon accorded the diwans some powers over justice and administration, hoping they might eventually ‘accustom the Egyptian notables to the ideas of assembly and government’. His meetings with the Grand Diwan appear to have been jolly: one Muslim historian records that Napoleon was ‘cheerful and sociable with the gathered people and used to joke with them’.

By direct decree Napoleon established a postal system, street lighting and cleaning, a coach service between Cairo and Alexandria, a mint and a rational tax system with lower impositions on the Egyptian fallaheen (peasantry) than the Mamluks’ extortionary demands. He also abolished feudalism, replacing it with rule by the diwans, set up a new French trading company, built modern plague hospitals and produced Egypt’s first printed books (in three languages).

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Napoleon respected Islam, regarding the Koran as ‘not just religious; it is civil and political. The Bible only preaches morals.’ He was also impressed by the way that the Muslims ‘tore more souls away from false gods, toppled more idols, pulled down more pagan temples in fifteen years than the followers of Moses and Christ had in fifteen centuries’. He had no objection to polygamy, saying that Egyptian men were gourmands en amour, and, when permitted, ‘will prefer having wives of various colours’. His flattery of the ulama (clergy), his discussions of the Koran, and his holding out the possibility of his conversion to Islam — as well as his attempts to impress the sheikhs with French science — were all intended to establish a collaborationist body of Egyptians, with mixed results.

As it turned out, no amount of complying with Islamic ceremonies, salutations and usages prevented Selim III from declaring jihad against the French in Egypt, meaning that any attacks upon them were thenceforth blessed.

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Niqula Turk described Napoleon as ‘short, thin and pale; his right arm was longer than his left, a wise man and a fortunate person’. (There is no indication he was correct about the relative length of Napoleon’s arms.) Turk added that many Muslims assumed that Napoleon was the Mahdi (Guided One) who was expected to redeem Islam, and many more would have done so had he appeared in Middle Eastern rather than Western clothing. It was a surprising oversight. Napoleon wore a turban and baggy trousers only once, when it provoked laughter among his staff.

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Napoleon was impressed with the healthy climate and fertile countryside in the regions adjoining the Nile, but contemptuous of its ‘stupid, miserable and dull-witted’ people. He described Cairenes to the Directory, only one day after arriving there, as ‘the most evil population in the world’, without explaining why. Ignorance reigned in the rural areas: ‘They would rather have a button off our soldiers than a six-franc écu. In the villages they don’t even have any idea what scissors are.’

He was shocked that the country had no watermills and only one windmill, and that otherwise grain was milled between stones turned by cattle.

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When Napoleon reached Cairo he sent orders to Admiral Brueys to sail the fleet to Corfu, where it would be better protected and able to threaten Constantinople. But by the time his messenger reached Aboukir Bay, there was no fleet: it had been sunk on August 1 after an exceptionally daring attack by Admiral Nelson.

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‘It seems you like this country,’ Napoleon told his staff at breakfast on August 15, the morning after he heard the news, ‘that’s very lucky, for now we have no fleet to carry us back to Europe.’

In addition to cutting him off from France, with all the problems that implied, the Aboukir Bay catastrophe left Napoleon with a pressing cash-flow problem, since the Maltese ‘contribution’, estimated at 60 million francs, had gone down with L’Orient.

”If I had stayed in the East,” Napoleon said to General Gourgaud on St Helena, “I would have founded an empire, like Alexander.” Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life) Napoleon’s preparations for his campaign in Egypt:

The Ottoman Turks had conquered Egypt in 1517 and still officially ruled it, but de facto control had been long wrested from them by the Mamluks, a military caste originally from Georgia in the Caucasus. Their twenty-four beys (warlord princes) were unpopular among ordinary Egyptians for the high taxes they imposed, and were considered foreigners. After the Revolution, the idea of invading Egypt had appealed both to French radical idealists for its promise of extending liberty to a people oppressed by foreign tyrants, and to more calculating strategists such as Carnot and Talleyrand, who wanted to counter British influence in the eastern Mediterranean.

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Between his secret appointment to command the Army of Egypt on March 5, 1798 and the date set for the expedition to set sail, May 19, there were fewer than eleven weeks for Napoleon to organize and equip the entire enterprise, yet somehow he also managed to attend eight lectures on science at the Institut.

As part of a misinformation campaign he spoke openly in the salons about the holiday he hoped to take in Germany with Josephine, Monge, Berthier and Marmont. To further the ruse, he was officially reconfirmed as commander of the Army of England, based at Brest.

Napoleon described Egypt as ‘the geographical key to the world’. His strategic aim was to damage British trade in the region and replace it with French; at very least he hoped to stretch the Royal Navy by forcing it to protect the mouths of the Mediterranean and Red Sea and trade routes to India and America simultaneously.

The Royal Navy, which had lost Corsica as a base in 1796, would be further constrained if the French fleet could operate from the near-impregnable harbour of Malta. ‘Why should we not seize the island of Malta?’ he had written to Talleyrand in September 1797. ‘It would further threaten British naval superiority.’ He told the Directory that ‘This little island is worth any price to us.’

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His ultimate ambition — or fantasy — may be gauged by his demand for English maps of Bengal and the Ganges from the war ministry, and his request to be accompanied by Citizen Piveron, the former envoy to Britain’s greatest enemy in India, Tipu Sahib, ‘the Tiger of Mysore’.

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As it transpired he had relatively little difficulty in raising the 8 million francs the expedition would cost, through ‘contributions’ extorted by Berthier in Rome, Joubert in Holland and Brune in Switzerland.

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The cavalry was to be under the command of the Haitian-born General Davy de la Pailleterie, known as Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, whose father was a French nobleman and whose mother was of Afro-Caribbean descent, hence the nickname ‘Schwarzer Teufel’ (black devil) which the Austrians had given him when he prevented them from re-crossing the Adige in January 1797.

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Napoleon also took 125 books of history, geography, philosophy and Greek mythology in a specially constructed library, including Captain Cook’s three-volume Voyages, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and books by Livy, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus and, of course, Julius Caesar. He also brought biographies of Turenne, Condé, Saxe, Marlborough, Eugène of Savoy, Charles XII of Sweden and Bertrand du Guesclin, the notable French commander in the Hundred Years War. Poetry and drama had their place too, in the works of Ossian, Tasso, Ariosto, Homer, Virgil, Racine and Molière.

With the Bible guiding him about the faith of the Druze and Armenians, the Koran about Muslims, and the Vedas about the Hindus, he would be well supplied with suitable quotations for his proclamations to the local populations virtually wherever this campaign was finally to take him.

He also included Herodotus for his — largely fantastical — description of Egypt. (Years later he would state that he believed ‘Man was formed by the heat of the sun acting upon mud. Herodotus tells us that the slime of the Nile changed into rats, and that they could be seen in the process of formation.’

Napoleon knew that Alexander the Great had taken learned men and philosophers along on his campaigns in Egypt, Persia and India. As befitted a member of the Institut, he intended his expedition to be a cultural and scientific event and not merely a war of conquest. To that end he took 167 geographers, botanists, chemists, antiquaries, engineers, historians, printers, astronomers, zoologists, painters, musicians, sculptors, architects, Orientalists, mathematicians, economists, journalists, civil engineers and balloonists — the so-called savants, most of whom were members of the Commission des Sciences et des Arts — whose work he hoped would give the enterprise a significance beyond the military.

He failed in his hopes to persuade a professional poet to accompany him, but he did enlist the fifty-one-year-old novelist, artist and polymath Vivant Denon, who made more than two hundred sketches during his travels. Under their leaders Monge and Berthollet, the savants included some of the most distinguished men of the day: the mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier (author of Fourier’s Law concerning heat conduction), the zoologist Étienne Saint-Hilaire and the mineralogist Déodat de Dolomieu (after whom dolomite was named).

The savants were not told where they were going, merely that the Republic needed their talents and that their academic posts would be protected and stipends increased. ‘Savants and intellectuals are like coquettes,’ Napoleon was later to tell Joseph; ‘one may see them and talk with them, but don’t make one your wife or your minister.’

From Toulon on May 10, 1798, Napoleon addressed his Soldiers of the Army of the Mediterranean:

You have campaigned in the mountains, in the plains and before fortresses, but you have yet to take part in a naval campaign. The Roman legions that you have sometimes rivalled, but have yet to equal, fought Carthage on this very sea … Victory never forsook them … Europe is watching you. You have a great destiny to fulfil, battles to fight, dangers and hardships to overcome. You hold in your hands the future prosperity of France, the good of mankind and your own glory. The ideal of Liberty that has made the Republic the arbiter of Europe will also make it the arbiter of distant oceans, of faraway countries.

In the same speech, he promised them 6 arpents (5 acres) of land each:

Denon later recalled that when the soldiers saw the barren sand-dunes of Egypt from the boats before they landed, the men joked to each other: ‘There are the six arpents they promised you!’

It was a grand expedition:

In addition to all the military equipment necessary for his army, he collected astronomical telescopes, ballooning equipment, chemical apparatus, and a printing press with Latin, Arabic and Syriac type.

‘You know how much we will need good wine,’ he wrote to Monge, telling him to buy 4,800 bottles, most of it his favoured red burgundy, but also to find ‘a good Italian singer’.

It was the largest fleet ever to sail the Mediterranean. There were 280 ships in all, including 13 ships-of-the-line of between 74 and 118 guns (the latter, Vice-Admiral François Brueys’ flagship L’Orient, was the biggest warship afloat). Napoleon had assembled 38,000 soldiers, 13,000 sailors and marines and 3,000 merchant seamen. His army was somewhat top-heavy as it included 2,200 officers, a ratio of seventeen to one against the more usual twenty-five to one – an indication of how many ambitious young men wanted to see action under him.

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This gigantic armada was fortunate to make it across the Mediterranean without being set upon by Nelson, who was looking for him with thirteen ships-of-the-line. Nelson’s fleet had been scattered towards Sardinia by a gale the evening before Napoleon set sail, and on the night of June 22 the two fleets crossed paths only 20 miles from each other in fog near Crete. Nelson made an educated guess that Napoleon was heading for Egypt but reached Alexandria on June 29 and left on the 30th, the day before the French arrived.

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Napoleon asked his savants to give lectures for his officers on deck during the voyage; in one Junot snored so loudly that Napoleon had him woken up and excused. He later discovered from his librarian that his senior officers were mostly reading novels. (They had started out gambling, until ‘everyone’s money soon found itself in a few pockets, never to come out again’.) He pronounced that novels were ‘for ladies’ maids’ and ordered the librarian, ‘Only give them history books. Men should read nothing else.’

He was apparently overlooking the forty novels, including English ones in French translation, he himself had brought out.