Napoleon's Egypt: Invading The Middle East - Reenactor.ru

146 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTscientists and administrators in Egypt were made clear at the first session ofthe Egyptian Institute.Bonaparte’s own notes suggest the range of imperial and scientific questionsraised on 23 August. “Can the furnaces providing bread to the military be improved?Is there a replacement in Egypt for hops to make beer? How can Nilewater be purified? Is it better to construct water mills or windmills in Cairo?Can [gun]powder be manufactured in Egypt? What is the situation of jurisprudence,and civil and criminal law, in Egypt? How can it be improved?” 7 Bonapartedid not seem as concerned with equality before the law as he did withmaking the Institute a scientific adjunct to the military enterprise.The Institute was originally intended as a cultural institution as well as ascientific one. Bonaparte shared the view that performance and theater are a“public school for morality and taste.” 8 He later said of public spectacles, “Whata tool, if the government knows how to use it!” Bonaparte that fall wrote the Jacobinjournalist and former parliamentarian he had brought along to Egypt,Jean-Lambert Tallien, saying that, “attaching a great importance to the establishmentof a theater and other festivities in Cairo,” he was commanding that heand some of the other intellectuals “occupy themselves with the means of establishingin Cairo a hall for spectacles, of gathering up actors, and of presentingthe repertoire of pieces that they can perform. That commission will choose agarden where once every ten-day week there will be fireworks, and twice a tendayweek there will be illuminations.”Captain Say’s memoir, which was redacted by the playwright Louis Laus deBoissy (a regular at Josephine’s salon and author of The True Republican Woman),was especially interested in the use of culture to promote civic spirit and revolutionaryideals among Egyptians. He was not alone in these interests. TheEgyptian Institute, he wrote, “named a Commission composed of artists,charged with establishing at Cairo a hall of spectacles, for dance, concerts, andfireworks.” These public civic performances, he hoped, “will be a new means ofelevating the souls of these neophytes in liberty and of forming in this country apublic spirit, the fifth element of a free people.” 9Among the performers who he hoped would play a great role during thesepublic spectacles were the ‘alimas, or what we would now call belly dancers.This group at that time consisted of cultured performers for the martial Ottoman-Egyptianelite. Say was perfectly aware of the sensual nature of thedancers’ repertoire when he made this somewhat outlandish suggestion, and it isworth pursuing the possible reasons for it. He wrote that the professionalsinging girls were called ‘alimas or savantes (learned ones), and admitted that