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

76 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTThe Divan’s first charge from Bonaparte when he met with them later onThursday was to stop the widespread looting in the city. The clerics complainedthat they had no means of halting it. Some French troops, al-Jabarti charges,opened some of the locked mansions of the beys and took things, then left themunlocked. The little people of Cairo took away all that was in them. It took theFrench a few days effectively to seal the elite residences and put an end to thelooting. They arrested the guild master of the street singers for his role in it andexecuted him and a number of others.As part of their effort to restore order, the French “began to tear down thegates of the alleys and the connecting gates.” This highly unpopular demolitionwork actually reduced security for ordinary Cairenes, who had the custom ofclosing up their quarter at night or when there was trouble. 15 Since, as theFrench memoirists noted to some astonishment, Egyptian homes lacked lockson their doors, the inhabitants of the quarter had depended on a kind of neighborhoodwatch to guard against strangers and thieves during the day, and on securingthe quarter at night. The Europeans were now allowing thieves tocirculate freely at night.Many of the French took seriously Bonaparte’s proclamations that he intendedto bring liberty to the Egyptians through institutions such as the clericallydominated divan. The French not only interpreted Egypt in terms familiarto their eighteenth-century world, they were also capable of reinterpreting theirown history in light of what they saw in Egypt. Just as the rationalist officerscoded popular Islam as reactionary Catholicism, so the Republican Frenchmapped the defeated beys as analogous to the French Old Regime and saw theiroverthrow and the institution of municipal elections as the advent of liberty.“The people of Egypt were most wretched. How will they not cherish theliberty that we are bringing them?” asked Captain Say. 16 He observed that mostof the land was in the hands of the Ottoman Egyptians, whereas others paid athousand taxes and surcharges, with the peasants left only enough to keep themalive. Private property was at risk of mulcting. “A hundred spies are ready to informon a man who has secret wealth, as are his enemies.” Say described Cairocrowds as wearing rags and filthy. He said that under the slave-soldier regime,executions were common, carried out by a judge and policemen with summaryjustice, and life was cheap. Bernoyer concurred that tyranny and taxes producedmisery among the common people. “Bonaparte,” he wrote confidently back tohis wife in the summer of 1798, “will without doubt end this state of affairs.” 17The implication is that the beys had impoverished the country by grabbingthe lion’s share of resources for themselves. Moreover, they were seen to be only