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

THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION213all the persons on the list of condemned had been dispatched. He took him tothe makeshift charnel house where the headless corpses were stacked up, thebetter to convince him. “At that horrific scene, [the general] could not preventhimself from a start of terror, as he cursed a hundred times the order that he hadreceived and transmitted.”Bernoyer’s depiction of Oriental efficiency in bloodletting is not plausible,however picturesque and macabre it may be. The procedure he described, withthe subterfuge and the transport of the body and the cover-up with sand, mighthave been used in some instances. But it would have taken at least ten minutesper execution and no more than six beheadings an hour could have been carriedoff that way. Detroye’s straightforward depiction of French troops bayonetingunarmed, presumably bound prisoners, is more plausible for most of the executions,and really could have been horrifically efficient. Niello Sargy said that 300were executed, including five principal clerics. The others speak of 2,000 killed.If so, the carnage must have gone on for days.That night, Bernoyer said, the corpses were dumped in the Nile, and theCairenes were thereby kept in ignorance of the full extent of the “rigorous justice”that Bonaparte had ordered. One suspects that the crocodiles of the Deltawere fat and lazy that year. To the 3,000 or so Egyptians killed during the threedays of the revolt had been added at least another 300 in a single morning. Thequartermaster’s disgust with the arbitrary and pettily vengeful procedure, moreredolent of the Sun King Louis XIV or of Robespierre’s radicals during the Terrorthan of the careful jurisprudence of the Directory, bespoke a building suspicionamong many of the French invaders that their enterprise was not, after all,about bringing liberty and the rule of law to the Nile Valley.Bernoyer observed that Bonaparte had, for political reasons, spared severalof the more important leaders of the revolt. “Although more guilty, they had agreat influence on the people, either because of their occupation or because oftheir riches.” Bernoyer was implying that some of the wealthy in the city wereamong the foremost organizers of the revolt, an observation that makes sense inretrospect but one which al-Jabarti largely avoided in his account. He did mentionin passing that Sayyid al-Maqdisi (or al-Qudsi), one of the ringleaders, wasboth a minor clergyman and a caravan merchant. (Al-Maqdisi was among thosesentenced to death.) The great merchants of al-Qahira, where eighty percent ofthe commerce in Cairo was done, were most likely Bernoyer’s referent. TheEgyptian chronicler, in contrast, for the most part blamed the uprising onlower-ranking clerics that lacked common sense and on rabble foolish enoughto follow them. Bonaparte likewise in his memoirs suggested that the notables