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

246 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTperhaps for the killing of tens of thousands and the disruption of Ottoman-Egyptian society. 3 Decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s caused historians toview the incursion with greater skepticism. The earlier Egyptian romantic nationalistview of the French period gave way after the officers’ coup of 1952 to adepiction of it as a mere colonial occupation.Bonaparte would have found it more humiliating for his project to be ignoredthan to be critiqued. With the end of the colonial era in the 1960s,French imperial history declined as a preoccupation of scholars. Historiansanachronistically began to project the postcolonial metropole back into time, sothat they write the history of France, and Britain likewise, within their presentborders, as though these two did not between them rule two-fifths of the worldin the nineteenth century. 4 In most contemporary synthetic treatments of modernFrance, Egypt, Algeria, and Vietnam barely make cameo appearances.François Furet typified this syndrome when he wrote, “I will omit the Egyptianexpedition from this account, because it forms a special history of its own, independentof French events, but essential to an understanding of the Easternquestion in the nineteenth century.” 5 The modern history of countries such asEgypt, for their part, is increasingly written from their own archives in an internalistmanner that downplays crucial colonial and neocolonial interventions.The social historians of the 1970s and after pronounced the French interlude inEgypt trivial in its impact on the secular rhythms of the Egyptian economy andthe distribution of wealth in society, and therefore as unworthy of having wordswasted on it. 6Literary critic Edward Said, in his seminal Orientalism, put Bonaparte’sEgypt back at the center of a scholarly debate about imperialism and postcolonialways of knowing the world. He depicted the invasion as the European pursuitof total knowledge of and total control over an Oriental society, as theoriginal sin in the modern nexus of hegemonic Western power and knowledge.7 Said’s critique was widely influential. When French and Egyptian authoritiesplanned a joint bicentennial commemoration that would focus on thepositive legacy of the invasion, popular outcry forced the Egyptian minister ofculture to cancel Cairo’s part in it. 8 In Paris, the French National Assembly respondedto such severe critiques of colonial policy by attempting, in 2005, topass a law that would have compelled teachers to stress the positive accomplishmentsof the French Empire. President Jacques Chirac found this measureexcessive and vetoed it.Bonaparte’s was the first modern attempt to incorporate a major NearEastern society into a European empire. It was not the last. What we now call