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

THE FESTIVAL OF THE REPUBLIC175heroes of their own revolutionary epic.” 21 The universal wearing of the cockade,the flying of the tricolor, the intricate symbology of columns and banners, theimpressive military parades and cannonades, all were intended to invoke fervorfor the Revolution and the remaking of society as republic. That some of theFrench appear seriously to have expected the conquered Egyptians to join themin these festivities demonstrates how little they could conceive of their own enterpriseon the Nile as a colonial venture. The greatest use of Republican ideologyappears to have been precisely to hide that fact from themselves.The thousands of French soldiers in Cairo, deprived of the military action beingseen by those in the Delta, depressed by the loss of their fleet, and beset byhomesickness, suffered from severe tedium. The civic spectacles favored byBonaparte appear to have left them cold. Doguereau recalled, “The life that weled bored us a great deal, even though we were so many young people together.It was so different from that which we had led in Europe that we had great difficultyin accustoming ourselves to it.” 22 He complained of the considerable heat,which made them reluctant to go out during the day. And where, he asked,would one have gone for a walk in any case? “In the middle of the desert, amidthe rubble, one still needed escorts; at the gates of the city we were assailed byArabs. We had few books. We wanted desperately to return to France.”Soldiers and officers fought their boredom in the capital in various ways,devising social events, gambling like fiends, and seeking out companionship, nomatter how debased. The now abandoned harems of the grandees attracted theattention of some of these young men. Doguereau recounted how, in early August,“a harem, into which two of our colleagues knew how to introduce themselvesand from which they brought out Black women, provided a way ofpassing some moments in those first days. One quickly became bored withthem.” 23 He described how slave caravans, “coming from Darfur, Senar, Dongola,and Borgu,” arrived in the capital several times a year or at least annually.(The physician Louis Frank asserted that only four such caravans were mountedduring the French occupation and that the number of slaves imported annuallyhad already in any case been much reduced by overtaxation, from 4,000 to 6,000a year in earlier decades to 1,000 and less in the late 1790s.) Doguereau said thatthe Ethiopian slave drivers marched them on foot, as European horse merchantsdid their wares. “Males and females are naked, except for a loin cloth.”He added, perhaps to comfort himself, “They seem indifferent to their fate.”