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

EPILOGUEThe French invasion and occupation of Egypt in 1798–1801 have servedas a litmus test for sentiments about the enterprise of empire amonghistorians and their publics. Bonaparte, having become EmperorNapoleon I, was among the first to recognize that the fiasco along the Nile hadthe potential for undermining his reputation, and he ordered many of the statepapers for the French Republic of Egypt burned. Some military records and dispatcheshave survived, and a great many have been published (notably at theturn of the twentieth century by the invaluable Clément de la Jonquière), but itseems clear that Napoleon intended his own memoir of the invasion and occupationto substitute for the suppressed archive. His hope proved forlorn, inasmuchas scholars have strangely neglected Bonaparte as Orientalist. As ithappened, his account has had to compete with the narratives of a cloud ofother witnesses, Egyptian and French, which often have the virtue of contradictingBonaparte’s propaganda. 1In the first half of the twentieth century, French historians such as FrançoisCharles-Roux read the occupation as a prologue to what they saw as the gloriesof French Algeria. 2 They depicted Egyptian peasants as overjoyed at the Frenchinvasion and they downplayed its brutality and cupidity. Early twentieth-centuryEgyptian nationalists often, ironically enough, also viewed Bonaparte’s expeditionas the irruption into a traditional society of dynamic modernity,bringing with it printing, the press, modern commerce, hospitals, and science,including the archeology that eventually allowed the recovery of Egypt’sPharaonic past through the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone.Subsequent historians pointed out that Egypt had been in intense economicand diplomatic interaction with Europe and the Greater Mediterranean in theeighteenth century and was hardly virgin wilderness to be “discovered” or introducedto modernity by Bonaparte. They argued that, moreover, most of the specificinnovations imported by the Army of the Orient did not survive the Frenchdeparture in 1801, and that on the ground there was little long-term impact, save