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

THE FESTIVAL OF THE REPUBLIC167political alliances to keep the state out and maximize their retention of resources.The French were often not meeting new forms of resistance to foreignrule but rather the quotidian resistance of provincials to the central government,any central government. In their rapaciousness, cruelty, and ruthlessness,the French differed little from the beys whom they had displaced. They diddiffer in being more desperate for resources and better armed in extractingthem, a hallmark of the modern state that Egyptian peasants were discoveringfor the first time. Ibrahim and Murad had not found it cost-effective to devoteenormous resources to subduing Hasan Tubar. The French, starved for cashand worried about the security of Damietta, could not afford to leave such localpotentates in power.Back in Cairo, Bonaparte pursued on a symbolic level the imposition of Frenchauthority that his generals in the Delta sought through burning villages and luringvillage headmen. The first of Vendémiaire, marking the first day of the revolutionarycalendar and the advent of Year 7 of the Revolution, coincided with22 September of the Gregorian calendar. It was observed at the time, in CaptainSay’s phrase, “in all the countries of France” as the Festival of the Republic. Asin France itself, the ideal of liberty was celebrated in Egypt by symbols and festivalsand by the arts. 6 A historian of the period describes how, in France, libertyand the Revolution were made the focus of “countless festivals” that were “organizedall over the country for the purpose of commemoration and celebration.”7 In Egypt, the rhetoric of liberation through conquest pioneered byBonaparte and his officers comprised several sets of contradictions, between selfand other, civilization and barbarism, liberty and dominance, public and private,male and female, Great Power diplomacy and local politics. The public celebrationsthemselves, by pulling so many motifs and elements together under thesign of the tricolor, were one way of addressing these paradoxes.Bonaparte ordered festivities to bring in the Year 7 “in both parts” of theFrench Republic of Egypt. 8 He “wanted it to be commemorated with an unequaledsplendor, to show the Egyptians all the opulence and all the force of ourarmy,” wrote Bernoyer to his wife. Troops in Upper Egypt, pursuing MuradBey, held their commemoration at the Pharaonic ruins of Thebes (Luxor).Smaller such festivals, of roughly the same form, were held in smaller cities suchas Rosetta as well. In Cairo, Bonaparte had a canvas pyramid erected atAzbakiya Square and on its four faces had inscribed the names of the soldiers ofthe army who died during the conquest of the country. (In the early 1790s, the