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

174 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTfor republicans to behave in this manner and blamed Bonaparte for not softeningthe laws so as to provide a “liberal, just, and independent government” insteadof continued slavery. “What mortified us most,” he remarks, “was thatBonaparte used the same methods as the Mamluks.” 17In the prerevolutionary period, many of the French had protested increasinglyvocally against arbitrary arrests and the lettres de cachet (arbitrary royaldecrees ordering an arrest) by appealing in part to a person’s natural right ofproperty, including the property of one’s person. 18 Bonaparte’s methodsseemed to liberal republicans increasingly shameful, a resurrection of the worstabuses of the Old Regime, or a subtle metamorphosis of republicans intoMamluks. Some French memoirists, then, used the beys not only as symbols ofLouis XVI (tyranny) and Robespierre (terror), but even of Bonaparte himself,and by extension of all the French in Egypt. Even some French painters in theRomantic revolutionary tradition later implicitly condemned the expedition toEgypt by depicting French soldiers as Orientals and Bonaparte as willing toplay with lives. 19Bernoyer’s increasing pessimism about the prospects for liberty in Egypt ledhim ultimately to confess Rousseauan sentiments about the inherent harmfulnessof civilization. On the one hand, he felt that were Egyptians to be educated andenlightened, they would never prove thereafter willing to submit to the onerousyoke of oppression. In their present estate of ignorance, he complained, they didnot feel it, and they bore everything with patience and resignation. Both thedecadent ignorance of the peasants and the rebellious enlightenment of the educated,however, were inferior in his eyes to the happiness that could only be enjoyedby the unspoiled savage, as, he said, Jean-Jacques Rousseau maintained. 20Thus, the fellahin did not represent for Bernoyer the noble savage, but rather theignoble bearer of humiliation in a despotic civilization. In the face of the mountingevidence that neither tyranny nor liberty really led to happiness, Bernoyertook solace in resurrecting Rousseau’s romanticism about the virtues of the stateof nature, a state that had the advantage for those who desired an untarnishedideal of not actually existing. Even the ancient Egyptian monuments of civilization,in this reading, speak not of advancement but of “fanaticism and slavery”and stand witness to an Oriental despotism. In the absence of reason and liberty,the pyramids’ tyrannical underpinnings marred their beauty.The French employed public celebrations and spectacle both to commemorateRepublican values and to instill a sense of unity with regard to revolutionaryvictories. Such “festivals reminded participants that they were the mythic