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

62 NAPOLEON’S EGYPT“coins.” For peasants, copper coins were in small enough denominations actuallyto be useful in daily shopping. Sewing coins into clothing was a commonpractice among rural and Bedouin women, so they probably assumed that theartillerymen were doing the same. Some have suggested that the villagers fearedthat accepting European coins would mark them as collaborators if the Mamlukscame back. But research in eighteenth-century Egyptian court records hasshown that foreign coins were already circulating in Egyptian provinces, andtheir possession could therefore hardly have been viewed as treasonous. 27The subsequently somewhat disheveled artillerymen smilingly cashed inwithout asking why or wherefore. During this rare day of rest, Bonaparte mixedwith the ranks and spoke familiarly with the troops, allowing them to complainabout their profound misery. He attempted to give them heart by promisingthem feasts in Cairo, once they took it, adding meat, wine, sugar, and mochacoffee to his earlier pledge of bread as inducements. Whether this move frompromising an imagined bakery to evoking the fare in a fine French restaurantwas persuasive is hard to know, though it speaks volumes about what Bonapartethought would motivate his troops. Moiret wrote, “For want of anything better,we contented ourselves with his promises.” 28Two incidents from these days speak to the realities of incipient Frenchpower in Egypt. While at Wardan the French found a cache of manuscriptsclosed up in a pigeon loft. Although the secular, revolutionary army did nothave formal chaplains, somehow there was a Father Sicard among them (perhapshe was simply a soldier or officer who had trained for the priesthood). Heinsisted that these be burned on the grounds that they were books of magic.Also around this time, an army storekeeper was sent to a neighboring village tobuy wheat, and while there he and his servant were attacked by Bedouin andburned at a tree. The French found their bodies still smoldering. Bonaparte wasso enraged that he ordered the village burned and all its inhabitants shot or putto the sword. Like the partial torching of Rahmaniya, this collective punishmentof peasants for the actions of Bedouin was irrational, a simple exercise in terror.The earlier destruction of precious manuscripts, moreover, casts further largedoubts upon the claims Bonaparte had made for the contribution of his assaulton Egypt to the building up of civilizational glory. That a priest should havebeen allowed to engage in such a superstitious auto-da-fé by the Republicanarmy also speaks loudly to the hardy persistence of pre-Enlightenment ways ofthinking among these self-proclaimed worshippers of Reason.Sergeant François wrote of the next day, July 19, “Our generals had sentmany battalions into the villages along the banks of the Nile.” 29 At one of them,