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

GRAND CAIRO77the latest in a long line of oppressors. Bernoyer criticized the pyramids themselvesas ostentatious works of tyrants seeking to immortalize themselves athuge public expense. The French, by removing the Ottoman Egyptian elite, hadchanged this age-old pattern and opened the way to a more just distribution ofwealth, he maintained. But the lot of the common folk would not be improvedjust by receiving a larger portion of the existing pie. Rather, liberty itself was adynamic force for increasing wealth. In describing their living conditions, hesaid, “Their dwellings are adobe huts, which prosperity, the daughter of liberty,will now enable them to abandon. . . .” Liberty, in the sense of the sweepingaway of the feudal Ottoman-Egyptian ruling caste, the establishment of rightsand the rule of law, and the institution of an elected government under Frenchtutelage, they thought, would actively produce affluence.Despite being the master of a new country and the architect of its liberty,Bonaparte had fallen into a black despair and determined to return to France assoon as possible. Josephine had long been having an affair with one of her escorts,an adjutant to General Charles Leclerc named Hippolyte Charles. Rumorshad reached him of it in Italy, and he had threatened to kill her if it wastrue. He also had Charles discharged from the military. (Corsica was an honorsociety as much as Egypt.) On the march from Alexandria to Cairo, one suspectsthat Bonaparte’s sincerity and love sickness for Josephine became too much tobear for those who cared about him, given that her brazen affair with Charleswas an open secret in Paris.Bonaparte’s younger brother Lucien (a hot-headed Jacobin) and his twoold comrades-in-arms and fellow generals, Jean-Andoche Junot and LouisAlexandre Berthier, staged what we would now call an intervention. Eugène deBeauharnais, Josephine’s seventeen-year-old son from her first marriage and anaide-de-camp of the commander in chief, wrote back to his mother from Giza:“Bonaparte has seemed sad for the last five days, and that came after a conversationhe had with Julien, Junot, and even Berthier. He was more affected thanI could believe by those conversations. All the words that I heard referred toCharles having come in your carriage until three stations from Paris, that yousaw him in Paris, that you were at the theater with him in the fourth privatebox, that he gave you your little dog, and that at that very moment he was withyou. This, amidst indistinct words, was what I could hear. Mama, you knowthat I do not believe it, but what is sure is that the general is very affected.” 18Eugène was careful to assure his mother that Bonaparte was not mistreatinghim, as though the general was determined to show that he would not take hismarital frustrations out on his stepson. Bourrienne, who blamed Junot alone