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

16 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTBritain. The Directory relieved Bonaparte of his Italian command and orderedhim to study the feasibility of his leading the Army of England to Dover.Bonaparte, furious at what he considered a demotion and wary of the notoriousfickleness of French public opinion, wondered whether Europe was bigenough for him and the petty-minded Directors. He pressed them to have the legislatureinstall him as a director, too, but even his old friend and patron Paul Barrastold him such a step would be unconstitutional, given his youth and the prescribedselection mechanisms. He intrigued for another war against Austria. Barras admittedin his memoirs that the members of the Directory began to perceive “all thedangers that the Republic ran” if Bonaparte were not sent on a mission abroad. 26Others in the legislature and the Directory all along favored a new Frenchcolonialism rather than a costly frontal assault on Britain. In response to theBritish naval blockade and to internal tensions, this war party sought to revivethe commanding international position France had enjoyed before 1750. TheCouncil of Five Hundred set up a commission to study the possibility of establishingFrench colonies in West Africa, given its proximity. Some members ofthe French parliament thought that the enterprise “seems worthy of the curiosityof a free, industrious nation whose genius is directed toward discoveries.”That is, they explicitly linked colonialism to scientific exploration and knowledge.Thus did they play on a key value of Enlightenment philosophy even asthey took a position that most of its philosophers disavowed. One source of thisnew belligerence may have been war contracting firms, who were at that timeincreasingly linked to French parliamentarians. 27In April 1798, the commission, led by legislator Joseph Eschasseriaux theElder, reported that their deliberations had taken a surprising turn, away fromCape Verde and Sierra Leone toward the Nile Valley. The report linked modernprogress in the homeland to colonies abroad and worried that the energies recentlyunleashed within France itself might cause instability unless a way wasfound to channel them elsewhere productively. Civilian politicians in the Directoryera worried about popular generals becoming involved in politics, with thebacking of both the people and newly mobilized citizen armies. Eschasseriauxargued that Egypt was at that time only half-civilized, was separated fromFrance only by a little bit of water, and would be easy to conquer. He concluded,“What finer enterprise for a nation which has already given liberty to Europe[and] freed America than to regenerate in every sense a country which was thefirst home to civilization . . . and to carry back to their ancient cradle industry,science, and the arts, to cast into the centuries the foundations of a new Thebesor of another Memphis.”