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

18 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTinstrumental approach to religion, which contrasts with the way the radical partisansof the Enlightenment philosophy of reason in the French Revolution, or Jacobins,rejected it as superstition. That is, Bonaparte felt that people werenaturally religious, and using religion to manipulate them was only good statecraft,whereas the cult of Reason among many revolutionaries and intellectuals ledthem to see faith as irrational and reactionary, to be wiped out before it did moredamage. The antireligious faction was influenced by the French philosopherVoltaire, who in his letters had often used the phrase, “Écrasez l’infame!” (“Crushthe infamous thing!”), referring to fanatical and intolerant forms of religion. 30The knowledge that they were being piloted toward Egypt excited many ofthe French officers. Captain Moiret, who had once studied for the priesthood,sounded more like the intellectuals than the other officers in his musings on thefuture while at Malta, and one suspects from various hints in his manuscript thathe was unusually close to them. He said that he and his friends were excited bythe prospects of this “glorious” enterprise. They would go to this antique land,the cradle of sciences and arts, to rediscover the pharaohs’ indestructible monuments,the pyramids, obelisks, temples, and cities, the valleys where the childrenof Israel had wandered, “the lands glorified by the exploits of the Macedonians,Romans and Muslims, and of the most holy of our kings.” He made Bonaparte’sarmy a successor to the expeditions of Alexander, Octavian, ‘Amr ibn al-’As, andLouis IX himself.It may be argued that Alexander the Great had some success in Egypt, forhis conquest led to the founding of the dynasty of Ptolemies by one of his Greekgenerals and he had had its major port named after him. So, too, did Octavian(later called Augustus), whose invasion provoked the suicide of the last Ptolemy,Cleopatra, and who inaugurated six hundred years of Roman and Byzantine ruleon the Nile. ‘Amr ibn al-’As, who in A.D. 639 spearheaded the Arab Muslim incorporationof Egypt into the new religious civilization of Islam, with its capitalin Mecca, also carried out celebrated military exploits. The same is not true,however, of Saint Louis, the Crusader King. Louis IX took the Egyptian portcity of Damietta on 6 June 1249 and marched on Cairo, but enemies on hisflanks released the water from the Nile reservoirs and trapped his army in theresulting inundation and easily defeated it. Moiret said that the officers flatteredthemselves that they most resembled the more successful of these conquerors,and could reestablish civilization, the sciences, and arts in Egypt. More realistically,he added, “This new colony would reimburse us for the loss of those thatthe wiliness of the English had stolen from us in the New World.”Moiret mused richly on the historical and geopolitical significance of theexpedition. His allusion to the French losses in the New World concerned, of