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

218 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTBonaparte of the very worst sin of all: committing a logical fallacy. In actuality,the proclamation committed so many logical fallacies that it would take a whileto list them all. In contrast, Moiret alleged that some of the Cairo soothsayers,whether they were fooled or perhaps bribed, got behind this image of a feyBonaparte and helped calm the populace. Some fortune tellers predicted thatthe French sultan would soon convert to Islam and “bring along by his examplehis entire army.” 32 The army generally went along with the pragmatic wisdomof appealing to Muslim superstitions if it made for less trouble, he said, but the“philosophers” were outraged at this surrender to superstition.Bonaparte may have overestimated the place of specifically religious feelingsin the opposition he faced from Egyptians. Egyptian leaders deployed therhetoric of Islam as a way of strengthening political alliances, but both al-Jabartiand al-Sharqawi, men of the cloth, blamed the uprising specifically on secularobjections to French taxation policy and on feelings of insecurity among theguildsmen and shopkeepers produced by the tearing down of the gates separatingquarters. Bonaparte also tended to make excuses for the Egyptian middlingand upper classes he still hoped to woo, depicting the notables as terrified of themobs and dragged into the revolt by them. This analysis contrasts with al-Jabarti’s frank admission that Sayyid Badr al-Maqdisi, both a caravan merchantand a lower-ranking cleric, led the crowd in the al-Azhar district. The NorthAfricans from al-Fahhamin, like many other urban ethnic and occupationalgroups, were organized by their guild. There are no spontaneous uprisings, andthe guilds of the merchant, crafts, and security guards are the most likely suspectsin this one.The impact on the morale of the French troops of the sinking of the fleet,the sultan’s declaration of holy war, and the Egyptian uprising was by all accountscrushing. Moiret remembered worrying about being trapped in Egyptfar from France. The officers feared the annual spring outbreaks of plague, andhe could not see how the French could protect themselves from a disease thatmight thin their ranks as effectively as any Muslim arms. He also fretted overthe Ottoman-led second coalition. “If France itself is attacked, if the peace inwhich we left it is violated, how could we assure to her the assistance that shewill need for her own defense?” The phrase “the peace in which we left it” is animplicit critique of Bonaparte’s having risked provoking another internationalanti-French coalition with his attack on a major Ottoman province.The disillusionment with Bonaparte’s methods was also producing somegloom. Not only did he object to extrajudicial executions, but when Bernoyerwent out on a tax-collecting mission to a village and witnessed the brutality of