Bombs are dropping in the Middle East, and I’m reading about the invasion of Egypt. That’s the invasion in 1798, the one that most people know about from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. The conquest of Egypt was the odd and disfigured brainchild of two men, Napoleon, inspired by his fetishist reading about Alexander the Great, and that cunning old fox and consummate survivor, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. The idea had, in fact, been bandied about since the 1770s, since before the Revolution, but it took the overheated atmosphere of the Revolution to bring gravity to the crazy. (We think we live in a time of extremism. Many of us could measure our likely survival in the furnace of 1790s Paris in terms of weeks.)
Napoleon had survived the Terror, his Jacobin credentials bonafide. He had served Robespierre’s regime in suppressing rebellion in the south of France. He had survived the reaction after Robespierre’s fall, although just barely. Then the Directory had entrusted him with the Italian campaign, which had made him a celebrity. Now he schemed with Talleyrand to cut an Alexandrian figure in the exotic East. It didn’t work out so well.
Napoleon and his army were made for the big set pieces, and when they were offered opportunities for those, they won. They ‘conquered’ Egypt. But it was an ephemeral sort of victory. After the artillery went quiet, there was plenty of culture shock to go around. The day-to-day news was awfully modern in tone. Napoleon stepped clumsily all over Muslim sensitivities. The Egyptians proved quite impervious to the grand ideals of the French Revolution. Furthermore, as a people who had been ruled by Greeks, Romans, Turks, and Mamluks for quite a few centuries, they showed a disappointing lack of interest in the romance of a new Alexander. They resisted. Horatio Nelson appeared with the British fleet shut and down the Nile Delta. The French were trapped while the locals rebelled and the Ottomans prepared an offensive. So far from home, the enlightened conquerors turned rather quickly to cruel oppressors. Many people died for the sake of this vanity project.
There was a strategy of sorts behind it. The French had visions of disrupting English trade with the East, of establishing for themselves a trade route along the future course of the Suez Canal, of fomenting resistance to the Brits all the way to India. Napoleon had an image of Alexander on banks the Indus River etched indelibly into his imagination.
But the only waters Napoleon crossed were the Nile and the Mediterranean. He crossed each first in triumph and then in disgrace. His triumphs in the Mediterranean were in Malta and Crete; he swept up these islands like forgotten treasures, as he had gathered ancient cities in Italy several years before.
The Revolution boldly positioned itself as new, as opposed to all things medieval. Napoleon inherited this mission and executed it with a vengeance. He walked the continent as Reaper to all institutions feudal, aristocratic, religious, or mercantile. In the previous year, he had brought down the thousand-year Republic of Venice. In 1798, he invaded the shores of Malta, bringing modern war to the Knights Hospitaller. They couldn’t resist him. After the French took over, the order left the island, many to settle in Russia as guests of the czar.