by Will Durant
When Napoleon reached Paris, December 5, 1797, he found a new Terror operating, aimed at all conservatives, and substituting Guiana for the guillotine. Nevertheless all classes seemed to unite in feting the invincible young general who had added half of Italy to France. He put aside for the present his look of stern command. He dressed modestly, and pleased variously: the conservatives by lauding order; the Jacobins by appearing to have raised Italy from vassalage to liberty; the intelligentsia by writing that “the true conquests, the only ones that leave no regrets, are those that are made over ignorance.”61 On December 10 the dignitaries of the national government honored him with an official welcome. Mme. de Staël was there, and her Memoirs preserve the scene:
The Directory gave General Bonaparte a solemn reception which in some respects marked an epoch in the history of the Revolution. They chose for this ceremony the court of the Luxembourg Palace; no hall would have been vast enough to contain the crowd that was attracted; there were spectators in every window and on the roof. The five Directors, in Roman costume, were placed on a stage in the court; near them were the deputies of the Council of the Ancients, the Council of Five Hundred, and the Institute….
Bonaparte arrived very simply dressed, followed by his aides-de-camp or assistant officers; all of them taller than he, but bent with the respect they showed him. The elite of France, gathered there, covered the victorious general with applause. He was the hope of every man, republican or royalist; all saw the present and the future as held in his strong hands.62
On that occasion he handed the Directors the completed Treaty of Campoformio. It was officially ratified, and Napoleon could for a time rest on his victories in diplomacy as well as war.
After attending a sumptuous party given in his honor by the indestructible Talleyrand (then minister for foreign affairs), he retired to his home in the Rue Chantereine. There he relaxed with Josephine and her children, and for some time kept himself so out of the public eye that his admirers commented on his modesty and his detractors rejoiced over his decline. However, he made a point of visiting the Institute; he talked mathematics with Lagrange, astronomy with Laplace, government with Sieyès, literature with Marie-Joseph de Chénier, and art with David. Probably he was already meditating a sally into Egypt, and thought of taking with him a garnishment of scholars and scientists.
The Directory saw something to be suspected in such uncharacteristic modesty; this youth, who in Italy and Austria had behaved as if he were the government—might he not decide to behave likewise in Paris? Hoping to keep him busy at a distance, they offered him command of the fifty thousand soldiers and sailors that were assembling at Brest for an invasion of England. Napoleon studied the project, rejected it, and warned the Directory, in a letter of February 23, 1798:
We should give up any real attempt to invade England, and content ourselves with the appearance of it, while devoting all our attention and resources to the Rhine…. We must not keep a large army at a distance from Germany…. Or we might make an expedition into the Levant, and threaten the commerce of [England with] India.63
There was his dream. Even amid the Italian campaigns, he had pondered the possibilities of a foray into the Orient: in the soft decay of the Ottoman realm a bold spirit, with brave and hungry men, might forge a career, might carve an empire. England ruled the oceans, but her hold on the Mediterranean could be loosed by taking Malta; her hold on India could be weakened by taking Egypt. In that land, where labor was cheap, genius and francs might build a fleet, courage and imagination might sail over that distant sea to India, and take from the British colonial system its richest possession. In 1803 Napoleon confessed to Mme. de Rémusat:
I do not know what would have happened to me had I not conceived the happy thought of going to Egypt. When I embarked I did not know but that I might be bidding an eternal farewell to France; but I had little doubt that she would recall me. The charm of Oriental conquest drew my thoughts away from Europe more than I should have believed possible.64
The Directory fell in with his proposals, partly because it thought it would be safer if he were at a distance. Talleyrand concurred for reasons still disputed; his mistress Mme. Grand alleged that he did it to “favor his English friends”—presumably by diverting to Egypt the army that was threatening to invade England.65 The Directory delayed consent because the expedition would be costly, would consume men and matériel needed for protection against England and Austria, and might bring Turkey (the indolent sovereign of Egypt) into a new coalition against France. But the rapid advance of the French army in Italy—the subjection of the Papal States and the kingdom of Naples—brought succulent spoils to the Directory; and in April, 1798, with Napoleon’s approval, another French army invaded Switzerland, set up the Helvetic Republic, exacted “indemnities,” and sent money to Paris. Now the Egyptian dream could be financed.
Napoleon began at once to issue detailed orders for a new armada. Thirteen ships of the line, seven frigates, thirty-five other warships, 130 transports, 16,000 seamen, 38,000 troops (many from the Army of Italy), with necessary equipment and matériel, and a library of 287 volumes, were to assemble at Toulon, Genoa, Ajaccio, or Civitavecchia; and scientists, scholars, and artists were happy to accept invitations to what promised to be an exciting and historic union of adventure and research. Among them were Monge the mathematician, Fourier the physicist, Berthollet the chemist, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire the biologist; and Tallien, having surrendered his wife to Barras, found passage among the savants. They noted with pride that Napoleon now signed his letters “Bonaparte, Member of the Institute and General-in-chief.”66 Bourrienne, who had joined Napoleon as secretary at Campoformio in 1797, accompanied him on this voyage, and gave a detailed account of its fate. Josephine too wanted to come along; Napoleon allowed her to accompany him to Toulon, but he forbade her to board ship. However, he took with him her son Eugène de Beauharnais, who had endeared himself to Napoleon by his modesty and competence, and by a loyalty that became an undiscourageable devotion. Josephine mourned this double departure, wondering whether she would ever see her son or her husband again. From Toulon she went to Plombières to take the “fertility waters,” for now she, as well as Napoleon, wanted a child.
On May 19, 1798, the main fleet sailed from Toulon to bring medieval romance into modern history.
VI. ORIENTAL FANTASY: MAY 19, 1798 -OCTOBER 8, 1799
The purpose of the armada had been so well concealed that nearly all the 54,000 men set out with no knowledge of their destination. In a characteristic proclamation to the new “Army of the Orient” Napoleon merely called it a “wing of the Army of England,” and asked his sailors and warriors to trust him though he could not yet define their task. The secrecy served some purpose: the British government was apparently misled into thinking that the flotilla was preparing to fight its way past Gibraltar and join in the invasion of England. Nelson’s ships were lax in their watch on the Mediterranean, and the French argosy evaded them.
On June 9 it sighted Malta. The Directory had bribed the grandmaster and other dignitaries of the Knights of Malta*to make only a token resistance;67 as a result the French took the supposedly impregnable fortress with the loss of only three men. Napoleon dallied there a week to reorganize the administration of the island Gaulward. There Alfred de Vigny, poet-to-be but then a child of two years, was introduced to the conqueror, who raised him and kissed him; “when he lowered me carefully to the deck he had won one more slave.”68 The godlike man, however, was seasick nearly all the way to Alexandria. Meanwhile he studied the Koran.
The fleet reached Alexandria July 1, 1798. The port was guarded by a garrison, and a landing there would be costly; yet an early and orderly disembarkation was imperative if the squadron was not to be surprised by Nelson’s fleet. The neighboring surf was threateningly rough, but Napoleon in person led a landing party of five thousand men upon an unprotected beach. These, without cavalry or artillery, advanced at night upon the garrison, overcame it at t
he cost of two hundred French casualties, took possession of the city, and provided the protection under which the ships deposited the soldiers and their armament upon Egyptian soil.
Armed with this victory and a few words of Arabic, Napoleon persuaded the local leaders to sit down with him in conference. He amused and then impressed them by his knowledge of the Koran and his clever use of its phrases and ideas. He pledged himself and his army to respect their religion, laws, and possessions. He promised—if they would help him with laborers and supplies—to win back for them the lands seized by the Mameluke mercenaries who had made themselves masters of Egypt under indolent dynasties. The Arabs half agreed, and on July 7 Napoleon bade his wondering army follow him across 150 miles of desert to Cairo.
They had never experienced such heat, such thirst, such blinding sand, such indefatigable insects, or such disabling dysentery. Bonaparte partly quieted their complaints by sharing their hardships silently. On July 10 they reached the Nile, drank their fill, and refreshed their flesh. After five more days of marching, their vanguard sighted, near the village of Kobrakit, an army of three thousand Mamelukes: “a splendid body of mounted men” (Napoleon recalled them), “all gleaming with gold and silver, armed with the best London carbines and pistols, and the best sabers of the East, riding perhaps the best horses on the Continent.”69 Soon the Mameluke cavalry fell upon the French line, front and flank, only to be felled by the musketry and artillery of the French. Wounded in flesh and pride, the Mamelukes turned and fled.
On July 20, still eighteen miles from Cairo, the victors caught sight of the Pyramids. That evening Napoleon learned that an army of six thousand mounted Mamelukes, under twenty-three district beys, had assembled at Embaba, ready to challenge the infidel invaders. The next afternoon they fell in full force upon the French in the crucial battle of the Pyramids. There, if we may trust Napoleon’s memory, he told his soldiers, “Forty centuries have their eyes upon you.”70 Again the French met the onslaught with cannon, musket fire, and fixed bayonets; seventy of them died there, and fifteen hundred Mamelukes; many of the defeated, in heedless flight, leaped into the Nile and were drowned. On July 22 the Turkish authorities in Cairo sent Napoleon the keys of the city in token of surrender. On July 23 he entered the picturesque capital without any offensive display.
From that center he issued orders for the administration of Egypt by Arab divans (committees) subject to his control. He prevented pillage by his troops, and protected existing property rights, but he continued and appropriated, for the support of his army, the taxes customarily levied by the Mameluke conquerors. He sat down with native leaders, professed respect for Islamic rites and art, recognized Allah as the one and only god, and asked for Moslem aid in bringing a new prosperity to Egypt. He summoned his scientists to design methods of eliminating plagues, introducing new industries, improving Egyptian education and jurisprudence, establishing postal and transport services, repairing canals, controlling irrigation, and joining the Nile with the Red Sea. In July, 1799, he organized local and French savants into the Institute of Egypt, and set up spacious quarters for it in Cairo. It was these scholars who prepared the twenty-four massive volumes financed and published by the French government as Description de l’Égypte (1809–28). One of these men, known to us only as Bouchard, found in 1799, in a town thirty miles from Alexandria, the Rosetta Stone, whose inscription, in two languages and three scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek) enabled Thomas Young to begin (1814), and Jean-François Champollion to establish (1821), a method of translating hieroglyphic texts, thereby opening up to “modern” Europe the astonishingly complex and mature civilization of ancient Egypt. This was the chief—and the only significant—result of Napoleon’s expedition.
For a while he was allowed to enjoy the pride of conquest and the zest of administration. In later retrospect he told Mme. de Rémusat:
The time which I passed in Egypt was the most delightful of my life…. In Egypt I found myself free from the wearisome restraints of civilization. I dreamed all sorts of things, and I saw how all that I dreamed might be realized. I created a religion. I pictured myself on the road to Asia, mounted on an elephant, with a turban on my head, and in my hand a new Koran, which I should compose according to my own ideas…. I was to have attacked the English power in India, and renewed my relations with old Europe by my conquest…. Fate decided against my dream.71
Fate’s first blow was the information conveyed to him by an aide-decamp, Andoche Junot, that Josephine had taken a lover in Paris. The great dreamer, with all his intellectual brilliance, had neglected to consider how hard it would be for so tropical a plant as Josephine to go for many months without some tangible appreciation of her charms. For some days he mourned and raged. Then, on July 26, 1798, he sent a despondent letter to his brother Joseph:
I may be in France again in two months…. There is plenty to worry me at home…. Your friendship means a lot to me; were I to lose it, and see you betraying me, I should be a complete misanthrope….
I want you to arrange to have a country place ready for me when I return, either in Burgundy or near Paris. I am counting on spending the winter there, and seeing no one. I am sick of society. I need solitude, isolation. My feelings are dried up, and I am bored with public display. I am tired of glory at twenty-nine; it has lost its charm; and there is nothing left for me but complete egotism….
Goodbye, my one and only friend…. My love to your wife and Jerome.
He found some distraction by taking as a mistress a young Frenchwoman who had followed her officer husband to Egypt. Pauline Fourès could not resist the interest that Napoleon took in her gay beauty; she returned his smiles, and made no insuperable protest when he cleared his path by sending M. Fourès on a mission to Paris. When the husband learned the reason for his distinction he returned to Cairo and divorced Pauline. Napoleon too thought of divorce, and played with the idea of marrying Pauline and begetting an heir; but he reckoned without Josephine’s tears. Pauline was solaced with a substantial gift, and survived the mishap by sixty-nine years.
A week after Junot’s revelation, a major disaster imprisoned the Army of the Orient in its victory. On leaving his fleet at Alexandria, Napoleon (according to Napoleon) had ordered Vice-Admiral François-Paul Brueys to unload all matériel useful to the troops, and then to sail as soon as possible to French-held Corfu; every measure must be taken to avoid interception by the British. Bad weather delayed Brueys’ departure; meanwhile he anchored the squadron in the neighboring Bay of Abukir. There, on July 31, 1798, Nelson found him and soon attacked. The opposed forces seemed evenly matched: the English with fourteen ships of the line and one brig, the French with thirteen ships of the line and four frigates. But the French crews were rebelliously homesick and inadequately trained; the British sailors had made the sea their second home; now their superior discipline, seamanship, and courage won the day—and night, for the bloody conflict lasted till dawn of August 1. At 10 P.M. on July 31, Brueys’ 120-gun flagship blew up, killing nearly all men aboard, including the Vice-Admiral himself, aged forty-five. Only two French vessels escaped capture. Altogether the French lost over 1,750 dead, 1,500 wounded; the British lost 218 dead, 672 (including Nelson) wounded. This and Trafalgar (1805) were the last attempts of Napoleonic France to question England’s domination of the seas.
When the news of this overwhelming reverse reached him at Cairo, Bonaparte realized that his conquest of Egypt had been made meaningless. His tired adventurers were now shut off, by both land and sea, from French aid, and must soon be at the mercy of a hostile population and an uncongenial environment. It is to their young commander’s credit that in his own grief he found time to console the widow of his vice-admiral:
Cairo, August 19, 1798
Your husband was killed by a cannon ball whilst fighting on board his ship. He died honorably, and without suffering, as every soldier would wish to die.
Your sorrow touches me to the quick. It is a dread moment when we ar
e parted from one we love…. If there were no reason for living it would be better to die. But when second thoughts come, and you press your children to your heart, your nature is revived by tears and tenderness, and you live for the sake of your offspring. Yes, Madame, you will weep with them, you will nurture them in infancy, you will educate their youth; you will speak to them of their father and your grief, of their love and the Republic’s. And when you have linked your soul to the world again through the mutual affection of mother and child, I want you to count as of some value my friendship, and the lively interest that I shall always take in the wife of my friend. Be assured that there are men … who can turn grief into hope because they feel so intimately the troubles of the heart.72
Adversities multiplied. Almost every day there were attacks upon the French settlements by Arabs, Turks, or Mamelukes unreconciled to their new masters. On October 16 the populace of Cairo itself erupted in revolt; the French suppressed it at some cost to their morale; and Napoleon, abandoning for a time the role of an amiable conqueror, ordered the decapitation of every armed rebel.73