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

THE FERMENT OF THE MIND47with this state of affairs, the army, finding no resources, believed they couldavenge themselves by destroying it altogether by fire. What a sinister andfrightful spectacle the half-consumed town offered. 4Dealing with recalcitrant populations in this brutal way was not something newfor the French revolutionary army, nor had such violence been aimed since theearly 1790s only at foreigners.Such savage reprisals against uncooperative Egyptian peasants and townspeoplerecalled the way the revolutionary army dealt with the pro-monarchy,pro-Church revolt of the peasants of the Vendée in western France in the period1793–1796. There, too, the revolutionary army had burned towns and villagesand summarily executed rebels. A lower estimate for the number of persons thearmy killed over three years in this region of France (with a population then of800,000) was 40,000, and some historians estimate it at many times that. Contemporaryobservers recognized the parallels. General Kléber’s chief of staff,Adj. Gen. E. F. Damas, later wrote of the battles with the Bedouins and peasantsas the French descended from Alexandria, “It is a more destructive war, on mysoul! than that of La Vendée.” 5 These tactics also recalled the brutal French repressionof peasant revolts during the Italian campaign in 1796–1797.A few historians on the right have argued that the Revolution was intrinsicallydoomed to commit the violence of the Terror and the repression of theVendée because of its collectivist ideology, which ran roughshod over individualrights in the name of social philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conceptionof the general will. 6 That is, they said that the Revolution was from itsinception totalitarian in inclination, because its leaders imagined the politicalgood as unitary, rather than seeing society as pluralistic and made up of multiple,legitimate competing interests. This critique has generally been rejected astoo simplistic a point of view that cannot account for the complexities ofFrench politics in the 1790s. For one thing, the ideals of the Rights of Man andof the Citizen and the prescriptions for the working of political institutionspromulgated in 1789 aimed at protecting individual rights and allowing for apluralistic society. For another, the French state of the early to mid 1790s wasnot in fact centrally directed, as the totalitarian model would suggest. And howwould one account for the relatively calm period between 1789 and 1792, orfor the post-1794 turn toward liberalism by fervent supporters of the 1789Revolution and its ideals, which led to the rise of the Directory? Nor were theleaders of the movements supporting a return to the Old Regime, such as theVendée revolt, less brutal. If the violence of the French in the Vendée or in