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

THE FESTIVAL OF THE REPUBLIC173theless, he observed, some Parisians had criticized the Directory’s “noble operation.”These, he complained, were mainly rich young women of the old aristocracy,representatives of a French Mamlukism who spend 20,000 francs on asingle ball and who are “born into a caste that the Mamluk Robespierre annihilated.”These debutantes plead for the “poor beys whom Republican rage pursues,so they say, even into the deserts of Africa.” Laus de Boissy used theMamluks in this passage as a symbol of two separate things. First, he identifiedthem, as an opulent “feudal” class, with the affluent courtiers of the FrenchOld Regime. Second, because they stood for lawless violence, he used them as asimile for the radical Jacobins who implemented the Terror. He painted the entireperiod before the turn away from extremism since the month of Thermidorin 1794 as equivalent to the internecine warfare among various sorts of“Mamluks,” comparable to the conflicts among slave-soldier houses in OttomanEgypt. He made the Republic under the Directory the true heir to theideals of 1789. The Republic continued to face challenges, in his view, bothfrom the remnants of the Mamluks in Upper Egypt and Syria, and from theirsympathizers among the spoiled young heirs of the abolished—but stillwealthy—aristocracy in Paris. He endowed the opposition in France with afeminine gender, making it seem not only heartless and aristocratic but alsofrivolous and unmanly. He identified the class enemies of the Directory’s nobleexpedition as feckless young women, as heiresses and socialites. In this way, healso made the Mamluks, the objects of the compassion of the rich youngParisians, themselves seem effeminate. 15 The largely wealthy or middle-classmemoirists argued for a symmetry between the liberation of France from botharistocratic tyranny and sansculotte terror and the liberation of Egypt from theOriental despotism and internecine squabbling of the Ottoman beylicate. Inthe “family romance” of the French Egyptian colony, the 32,000 male invadersconstituted a band of brothers who saw the beys as analogous to the fathertyrantwho had been the French king, and who thus had to be destroyed. 16 Justas in Directory France a mild form of patriarchal domesticity was reinstitutedafter the excesses of the Terror, so also in Egypt the rule of French males wasconfigured as a form of liberty.Some Republicans, more wedded to the liberalism that was often influentialin the Directory, explicitly condemned the methods of brutality and terror.Bernoyer reported how disgusted he was at having to go out that fall to a pooradobe village to demand taxes, which were extracted from the peasants only by athreat to have the village headman bastinadoed. He complained that it was hard