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

THE FESTIVAL OF THE REPUBLIC179anything but their father and I am so satisfied with their services that I dedicateto them the same amity. In past times, only people who were bought had honor.That opinion was so dominant that the beys sent their children far away, havingthem sold by strangers and then buying them with a view to giving them moreconsideration and of being able to elevate them in honor.”These despicable sentiments demonstrate the inability of many French intellectualsto empathize with the loss of individual liberty experienced by slaves.Egypt’s slavery was admittedly a different system than that of Haiti. One reasonfor the difference Saint-Hilaire and others perceived was that Islamic law stipulatedthat the children of slave women were free persons with rights of inheritance,and little or no stigma attached to them, so that they were constantlyabsorbed through intermarriage into the general Muslim population. No exslaveethnic group ever grew up. In addition, plantation slavery was rare becauseof the abundance of peasant labor, and the main form of the institution washousehold slavery. The latter may have been less harsh, but it was still a form offorced labor that denied human beings their liberty, and concubines were sexuallycoerced.In contrast, Niello Sargy expressed abolitionist sentiments:But when one has frequented the bazaars where the traffic is pursued, when onehas seen the excesses they perpetrate on these unfortunates whom they arecharged with exchanging for pieces of gold; when one sees a girl barely into pubertywith a baby already at her maternal breast, and knows that both will soonpass between the hands of an avid man, one cannot avoid feeling a pain that isremedied only by the hope of seeing one day philosophy and humanity obtaintheir triumphs along the Nile, as well. 32Apparently “philosophy and humanity” were not going to get much help in thisregard from the officer corps of the Republic. The contradictions between libertyand coercion in the French Republic of Egypt were nowhere more evidentthan in attitudes toward slavery. Slavery had long been forbidden on French soil,and owners from the colonies who brought slaves back home often regretted itwhen the courts freed them. 33 Before the Revolution, however, it was not illegalfor French citizens dwelling abroad to own slaves or maintain slave plantations.That was a result of a seventeenth-century decree promulgated by Louis XIII,for which the Catholic Church had lobbied (French slave owners in the NewWorld had been required to convert their human chattels to Christianity).French slave traders sent hundreds of thousands of Africans to the NewWorld from Senegal and elsewhere in West Africa through the port of Nantes.