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

12 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTto respect Islam, Muhammad, and Muslim customs, just as they had showntolerance to Jews and Italian Catholics in Europe, and he recalled for themthe religious toleration characteristic of Roman troops. He warned them thatMuslims treated their women differently, and he forbade pillaging. “Alexandria,”he concluded, “will be the first city we shall encounter.” 19The genesis of Bonaparte’s plan to invade Egypt is complex. A few French intellectualsand merchants had entertained the idea of such a project over theprevious century, given the indisputable centrality of Egypt to French commercein the Mediterranean and points east. Bonaparte himself appears to havebegun seriously considering it in the summer of 1797 as a result of his Italiancampaign. The principalities of Italy bordering the Adriatic Sea had long hadinterests in Adriatic islands and in Croatia and Ottoman Albania. Venice andthe Adriatic city of Ragusa provided the leading foreign element among merchantcommunities in the Egyptian port of Alexandria. And revolutionaryFrance, now established as an Italian power, had more interests in the Levantthan ever before—something of which Bonaparte, as the virtual viceroy of theItalian territories, would be well aware.A prominent politician, revolutionary, and former priest, Charles Mauricede Talleyrand, had argued just the previous summer in a speech to the NationalInstitute that Republican France needed colonies in order to prosper. 20(Canada, Louisiana, and many of its Caribbean and Indian possessions had beenlost to it decades before.) He rooted this demand in the revolutionary ethos ofthe new Republic, saying, “The necessary effect of a free Constitution is to tendwithout cessation to set everything in order, within itself and without, in the interestof the human species.” He related that he had been struck, during hisbrief exile to the United States during the Terror, at how their postrevolutionarysituation differed from that of France in lacking intense internal hatreds andconflicts, and he attributed this relative social peace to the way in which settlinga vast continent drew the energies of restless former revolutionaries. Talleyrandrecalled earlier plans for a French colony in Egypt and pointed to British sugarcultivation in Bengal, implying that such imperial commodity productionstrengthened this rival and that France should also seek profits through colonialpossessions that would produce lucrative cash crops. He also suggested that thedays of slavery were numbered, and implied that colonies that generated wealththrough slave plantations should be replaced by satellite French-style republicsdominated by Paris.