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

THE FESTIVAL OF THE REPUBLIC171and artillery exercises were carried out, struck them forcefully.” While thecrowds may have been briefly intimidated by military spectacle, Bernoyer morerealistically admitted in his letter to his wife, “It would be absurd to believe thatthe Egyptians invited to our festival entirely shared our overflowing joy!” Hesaid that for all their attempts to hide their true spirits, the faces of the Egyptiansbetrayed to their French hosts the signs of sadness as a result of the horriblechastisements Bonaparte had visited on them for their resistance (he called ita revolt) to the French invasion. He admired their courage in putting on a pleasantand smiling countenance, despite their actual sadness. They were not alone.As we have seen, even the French army was unimpressed, and depressed aboutbeing stuck in Egypt without a fleet.The Egyptians had all the less reason to be impressed in that the pyramidand columns were not actually as shiny as the propaganda Bonaparte ran inCairo depicted them. Jollois, the engineer, revealed that “The execution of theproject was dreadful. One had for workers only the people of the country, whodid not know how to put the least thing together. One lacked wood of sufficientheight. The painter Rigault committed blunders.” Since Egyptian handicraftswere sophisticated, Jollois’ remarks about the incompetence of the craftsmenraises suspicions that they were footdraggers and not very enthusiastic abouthelping the French celebrate their conquest.At 4 P.M. the French held horse races at Azbakiya Square. That night, therewere fireworks, dances, fanfares, and artillery salvos, “which offered the Egyptiansa new spectacle that appeared to astonish them.” In Alexandria, the Frenchraised a tricolor flag on Pompey’s Column, on which were inscribed the namesof the soldiers killed before that city. They also employed multicolored lamps toilluminate the obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle.While Bernoyer and others had been struck by the mingling of East andWest at the festival, Say stressed appropriation more than partnership: “It was atruly interesting spectacle for the French to see the tricolor flag, emblem oftheir liberty and of their power, floating above that antique land, from which thegreater part of the nations derived their knowledge and their laws; to see thatfrom Alexandria to Thebes and then from Thebes to the Red Sea, all recognizedthe dominion of their fatherland.” 11 The keywords of his discourse here areknowledge, liberty, power, and dominion, and the tricolor is made to stand forall four. The irreconcilable contradictions among them appear not even to haveoccurred to Say. He saw no impediment to both talking of “liberating” the NileValley from the beys and at the same time referring to the “dominion” of theFrench patrie, or fatherland, over it. Revolutionary France was in some sense the