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

14 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTto exercise some forethought about the means whereby we can protect ourcommerce with the Levant.” 22 The Old Regime and the early Republic hadsupported the Ottoman Empire as a way of denying the eastern Mediterraneanto its powerful continental rivals. Bonaparte and Talleyrand, in contrast, becameconvinced that the Ottoman decline was accelerating, producing a dangerousimpetus for Britain and Russia to attempt to usurp former Ottomanterritories. If the European powers might soon begin capturing provinces ofSultan Selim III, then Bonaparte and Talleyrand wanted the Republic ofFrance to be first in line. Excluded by the British navy from the North Atlanticand lacking possessions near the Cape of Good Hope, they dreamed of makingthe Mediterranean a French lake and of opening a route to India via the RedSea, and recovering Pondicherry and other French possessions on the Coromandeland Malabar coasts.When Gen. Louis Desaix visited Bonaparte’s headquarters near Venice inSeptember of 1797, the two discussed the possibility of taking Egypt with fivedivisions. The head of the French Commission on the Sciences and Arts inItaly, Gaspar Monge, had a dossier put together for Bonaparte from the Frenchforeign ministry archives, of reports on the chaotic governance of Egypt by putativevassals of the Ottomans and the way local French consular officials inEgypt such as Charles Magallon argued that it hurt French commerce. 23 Talleyrandconvinced himself that the sultan in Istanbul was aware of British andRussian designs on Egypt, and that he would therefore welcome a preemptivestrike by a strong ally to keep the province from falling into enemy hands. Hewas the first, but by no means the last, Western politician to overestimate thegratitude that would be generated among a Middle Eastern people by a foreignmilitary occupation.The French Republic from 1795 until 1799 had a two-chamber legislature:the Council of Five Hundred to propose laws and the Council of Ancients, orsenators, to pass them. The latter elected a five-man joint executive called theDirectory. The Directory swung back and forth politically. When it was established,in November 1795, its members repudiated the excesses of Robespierreand the radicals who had launched a Great Terror in 1793–1794, in which theextremists persecuted anyone they suspected of royalist or church sympathiesand sent many to the guillotine. The new government adopted property requirementsfor participation in politics, strengthened constitutional protectionsfor individual rights, and “imposed an impartial application of the law as one ofthe key notions of personal security.” 24 All this they did, one historian has argued,because they needed to find a way out of the Terror, and then out of the