This would not be the last time that Europeans and Egyptians stared at each other across a void of incomprehension. Both carried prejudices from centuries of contact and competition. Islam had emerged in the seventh century in the Arabian Peninsula as a new version of Judaism and Christianity, and though Islam taught tolerance for the other peoples of the book, the faiths coexisted uneasily. In the eleventh century, Western European nobles urged on by the Pope launched a crusade to retake the Holy Land from the Muslim dynasties that ruled Jerusalem, and for the next centuries, control seesawed. The Crusades ended in the thirteenth century with the eviction of the Europeans from the Holy Land, but they left a legacy of distrust and animosity that was rekindled when the Ottomans seized Constantinople in 1453. For the next two hundred years, the Ottoman Empire threatened the Venetians, then the Catholic monarchs of Spain in the sixteenth century, and finally the Austrians in the seventeenth century.
By the time Napoleon landed in Egypt, each culture was riddled with prejudice. The French, with the fervor of revolutionaries heralding a new age of man, saw the Egyptians and all “Orientals” as children in need of uplift; the grandees of Egypt and the Near East regarded Europe as a dangerous, barbarian adversary. When Napoleon occupied Cairo, he saw filthy alleys, crumbling buildings, and ruined monuments crying out for an injection of Western energy and innovation. When Jabarti looked at the French, he saw the latest wave of Western invaders who thought too highly of themselves, ignored the word of God, and were unable to recognize the marks of true culture.4
These impressions were strengthened by one of the odder aspects of the French expedition. In addition to 365 naval ships, hundreds of bottles of wine for Bonaparte’s personal consumption, artillery pieces, blacksmiths, bakers, cooks, and thirty-six thousand troops for the expedition force, Napoleon brought 167 savants.
The mission of the savants was to survey Egyptian life, manners, agriculture, archeology, geography, cuisine, religion, literature, and whatever other desiderata of culture were deemed important. They were also to serve the needs of the expeditionary force, to work on such various tasks as purifying drinking water, finding local materials to manufacture gunpowder, and providing data and plans where needed. The average age of these “men of learning” was twenty-five, and many of them were students from the recently created École Polytechnique. Their specialties ranged from pharmacology to botany, architecture to musicology They were bright and curious, but they were also very young and less learned than their sobriquet suggests. Still, among them were a few of the leading minds of France, including the mathematician and Jacobin politician Gaspard Monge, who at the age of fifty-two was a veritable elder statesman of the group.
Monge had met Napoleon in Italy several years before, and he accompanied the general on the flagship L’Orient. The two men spent many hours discussing the expedition and debating its goals. Monge could romanticize with the best of them. “Here I am,” he wrote to a friend at the outset of the adventure, “transformed into an argonaut! This is another one of those miracles produced by our new Jason… who is going to carry the torch of enlightenment to a country which for such a long time has remained in darkness, and where he is going to spread republican philosophical thought whilst carrying our national glory even farther afield.”5 One of the mandates of the savants was to spread European knowledge to the Egyptians, as if they were missionaries of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Once in Cairo, Monge and the 166 other members of the newly founded Institute of Egypt ensconced themselves in two Mameluke palaces and began to work.
They plunged into the exotic world around them, assembling instruments, hiring translators, and organizing survey parties. Monge initiated a study of the optics of desert mirages; others set up a printing press and published copies of a new journal. Even Jabarti was impressed. He was invited to visit the institute, and the members seemed to take great interest in his ideas. That openness and curiosity surprised him, given his initial opinion of the French. He admired the library they were assembling, and he was struck by the chemistry experiments that they performed for him, as well as the demonstrations of a new force that they called electricity.
Though the savants represented the kinder side of the invasion, Napoleon remained a conqueror, and when several factions in Cairo organized an uprising against his forces, he ordered his troops to shell the city from cannons mounted on the heights of the Citadel. The al-Azhar mosque was plundered, this after Napoleon had promised to respect the rights and religion of his new subjects. “They treated the books and Koranic volumes as trash, throwing them on the ground, stamping on them with their feet and shoes,” Jabarti wrote. “They soiled the mosque, blowing their spit in it, pissing, and defecating in it. They guzzled wine and smashed their bottles in the central court.” Far from friends, said Jabarti, they behaved like “the host of Satan.”6
Jabarti may have exaggerated. He was, after all, a partisan for his country. The French, however, were probably no more brutal than previous regimes. A rebellion had occurred, and Napoleon suppressed it with the same ruthless efficiency he demonstrated throughout his career. Even so, he was left in an untenable situation. His fleet had been destroyed near Alexandria by the English Admiral Horatio Nelson, and his remaining forces were trapped in a hostile country, with few supplies and a dwindling source of money. He needed to secure Cairo and devise a new strategy. Retreat was now impossible, and the only option was to advance into Syria and the Holy Land.
Napoleon had made no provision for this type of incursion. Over the centuries, countless invaders had crossed the desert between Cairo and the Sinai Peninsula and then into the Holy Land. But the French did not know the best routes, and in late 1798, Napoleon went on a scouting mission. A larger force first made sure that there were no hostile troops lingering in the region, and then Napoleon set out, accompanied by several of the savants, a small company of troops, engineers, and a group of surveyors led by Jacques-Marie Le Père. They headed east. Napoleon wanted to get a feel for the terrain before he ordered a full-scale deployment. He also had a special project for Le Père.
Of the many instructions given to Napoleon by Talleyrand and the Directory, there was one that seemed improbable at the time. “The general in chief of the Army of the Orient will seize Egypt; he will chase the English from all their possessions in the Orient; and he will destroy all of their settlements on the Red Sea. He will then cut the Isthmus of Suez and take all necessary measures in order to assure the free and exclusive possession of the Red Sea for the French Republic.” Listed along with several other instructions, this directive made the task seem almost pedestrian—“cut the Isthmus of Suez.” The Directory had wanted Napoleon out of Paris, and, much like the proverbial Labors of Hercules, joining the Red Sea to the Mediterranean should have kept Bonaparte occupied until the members of the Directory had gone to their graves.
To honor the letter of these instructions, Napoleon turned to Le Père. Various canals had existed in antiquity. As Le Père knew, these had been described by ancient geographers, and traces still remained in the desert. But most of those earlier canals were indirect routes. Rather than one immense trench linking the Red Sea directly to the Mediterranean, the old waterways took a circuitous path from the port of Suez to an area near the Bitter Lakes, and from there, west across the desert to the Nile. The Nile was then used for transport to and from the Mediterranean, though ancillary canals were needed to allow navigation through the delta.
At Napoleon’s urging, Le Père began with a blank slate. Rather than trying to copy the ancient routes, he assessed every possible permutation. Starting in December 1798, he made four separate trips. He surveyed the hundred-mile-long stretch of isthmus between the two seas, and he charted the terrain between Suez and the Nile. He judged the port of Suez a depressing place, especially in light of its noble history. The northern part of the isthmus was a wasteland of desert and marsh surrounding the long-abandoned branch of the Nile at Pelusium. In addition, the region was wit
hout fresh water, and in those weeks of December and January, it was freezing cold at night, and dangerous as well. Bedouin tribes had carved up the various regions among themselves, and the French were constantly on alert for attacks.
That made a difficult task almost impossible. The tools for topographical surveys in those years were crude, and often required more legwork than scientific knowledge. Teams of men had to place stakes throughout the survey area, and then compile measurements. That meant time and meticulous deployment. But, with the constant danger of attack and capricious guides, the work was rushed. Hurried and harassed, Le Père made a critical mistake and concluded that the waters of the Red Sea at high tide were more than thirty feet higher than the waters of the Mediterranean.
Le Père’s measurements did not pose a problem for a canal from Suez to the Bitter Lakes. For that southern portion, he reported, there would be no risk that the land would be inundated, because the levels were essentially the same. Except for several topographical obstacles, such a canal would be feasible. But in the north, Le Père decided, there would be an insurmountable problem. Because of the difference in level, the waters of the Red Sea would flood the marshy flatlands to the south and east of Lake Manzala, inundating the area with a thin layer of water and making it difficult to navigate. Even if a route could be created through the flooded region, there was no place for a port. He concluded that a direct canal was impossible, and his findings were accepted—not without some question, but in the end his survey became the official conclusion of the Institute of Egypt. Under the title “Report on the Communication of the Indian Ocean with Mediterranean by Way of the Red Sea and the Isthmus of Suez,” his results were incorporated into the magisterial Description de L’Égypte that the institute began publishing in 1809.
Of course, by that time, Napoleon cared little for the fate of Egypt. His fleet destroyed by a superior English commander, his advance into Syria stymied by a dearth of troops and overextended supply lines, Napoleon slipped out of the country in August 1799, leaving his army and his generals to face an increasingly restive populace and an English invasion. As for the canal, he brushed off Le Père, not harshly but with flattery. “It is a great thing you propose,” he told the chief engineer. “Publish a memoir and force the government of Turkey to see that its glory and its interest will be served by its completion.” Having treated Egypt as a path to greatness, he recommended that Le Père do the same.7
Napoleon had mused to Joséphine that he might be gone six months or six years, and in the end it was closer to the former than to the latter. He returned to Paris at the end of 1799, and within weeks mounted a coup that brought him to power. Somehow, he managed to portray his year in Egypt as a glorious success, and he pointed to the achievement of the savants and the institute as proof that he had brought light to the darkness of the Orient.
Though the French were evicted from Egypt in 1801, the work of the institute continued in France. That was only one of the legacies of Napoleon’s expedition. The vacuum left by the defeat of the Mamelukes was filled by Muhammad Ali, an Albanian mercenary in the service of the Ottoman sultan. Though it would take Muhammad Ali several years to consolidate his hold, he became known as the founder of modern Egypt. Without Napoleon, however, there would have been no Muhammad Ali; and without Muhammad Ali, it might have been many decades before Egypt began the arduous, disorienting, and not entirely successful process of modeling itself along the lines of a European state. Without Napoleon, there would also have been no Institute of Egypt, and no massive nine-volume publication on all aspects of Egyptian culture. And that would have meant no French fascination with Egypt, and no love affair with the land of the pharaohs.
Given that Bonaparte went on to conquer most of Europe, that he was crowned emperor by the Pope himself, that he overturned much of the old order, and that, had it not been for his overreaching in Russia, he might have succeeded in establishing a French imperium stretching from the Atlantic to the Caucasus and from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, the Egyptian campaign can seem relatively insignificant in comparison. But even if it was only a prelude to Napoleon’s career, its effects on the eastern Mediterranean, on Egypt, and on the future were profound.
The expedition instilled in France a passion for all things Egyptian. The well-to-do of Paris and the provinces adorned their homes with vases, candelabra, and linen decorated with ancient Egyptian motifs. Obelisks, sculpture, and public monuments copied Cleopatra’s Needle and the temples of Upper Egypt at Philae, Edfu, and Dendera. Centuries of Christian and Muslim Egypt were of no interest to the French public, but ancient Egyptomania thrived. The lust to uncover the ruins of Egypt reached a fever pitch by the 1820s and captured the imagination not just of the French but also of the British and the Germans. Archeology, which had existed only as a rudimentary science, blossomed, and by the 1820s, when the politics of Egypt had stabilized, European men of learning flooded the country, each trying to claim a piece of glory by unearthing some tomb or temple.
One of the pivotal discoveries of the savants was a large stone found in the coastal city of Rosetta. Inscribed in hieroglyphics and in two forms of Greek, the stone provided crucial clues to European linguists who had been trying unsuccessfully to read the inscriptions of the ancient Egyptians. Even with the stone, however, hieroglyphs did not yield their secrets so easily. In France, the race to crack the hieroglyphic code took on national importance as the precocious linguist Champollion competed against an equally brilliant and ambitious Englishman named Thomas Young. To France’s pride, Champollion made the first breakthrough when he figured out that hieroglyphics were neither purely phonetic nor purely symbolic. That discovery, in 1822, was as dramatic in its way as an archeologist stumbling upon a buried treasure. Suddenly the culture of ancient Egypt was open to inspection, and the flow of new knowledge and new information cemented the passion for things Egyptian.8
With the tumult of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Era now passed, France in the 1820s was stuck in a political limbo. There was a king, but no universally accepted ideology of royalty. There were republicans, but no agreement on democracy. And most of all, there was a culture of progress on the one hand, and romanticism on the other. These forces pulled in opposite directions. Romanticism looked to the natural world, and sadly concluded that beauty and glory were fading as mankind advanced. The cult of progress celebrated the industry of the modern world, and declared that the best was still to come. Egypt offered the chance for reconciliation. The wonders of Egypt, in the eyes of Western Europeans, lay buried by centuries of decay. The country had been great, but it was no longer. Yet Egypt also offered a new horizon. One could idealize its past, and also believe that it could once again shine. It was a land where the cult of progress and the cult of romance could walk hand in hand.
Napoleon’s rapid rise and sudden fall added to the lure of Egypt. Somehow, the notion that France’s destiny was linked to the Nile took hold in the French imagination. That the expansion of the British Empire also seemed to hinge on control of the eastern Mediterranean only intensified the French desire to be the pre-eminent power there. The first great civilization had emerged in Egypt; the Greeks had borrowed from the pharaohs as prelude to their own efflorescence; the Roman conquest of Egypt directly preceded the rise of Augustus; and then Napoleon went there to achieve his destiny. Clearly, or so the French thought, Egypt was a source of grandeur.
But what was to be done about Egypt as it actually was in the first decades of the nineteenth century? That was answered by the Egyptians themselves, or at least by their ruler, Muhammad Ali. He saw Egypt much as the French did: its glories were past, and perhaps they also lay ahead, but if that was to happen, Egypt would have to change. And who better, thought the transplanted Albanian soldier, to assist in that change than the French?
Napoleon was, therefore, an inadvertent matchmaker. He began an affair between France and Egypt that placed Egypt once again at the center of the world. Before that could happen, ho
wever, the courtship needed to become more intimate, and it did, in 1833, when a group of missionaries landed at Alexandria proclaiming the union of East and West.
CHAPTER THREE
INDUSTRY AND THE SAINT-SIMONIANS
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION unleashed a torrent of energy in France. Napoleon Bonaparte was one result; messianic fervor was another. A revolution that declares the old order corrupt and says that the world can be made new rests on a good degree of optimism. It demands a belief that a better life is possible, if only the right formula can be found. Having proclaimed the dawn of a new age, the French Revolution fertilized the imagination. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone had an idea for how to improve life. And one of those ideas came from an aristocrat named Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon.
Scion of the house of the Duc de Saint-Simon, who had written a salacious memoir of the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, the young Henri briefly fought on the side of the Americans in the War of Independence. Reflecting on that experience later in life, he wrote, “I realized that the revolution in America signaled the beginning of a new political era, that this revolution would necessarily bring about major progress in general civilization, and that in a short time it would cause great changes in the social order which then existed in Europe.” That was, in fact, what happened, and when the French Revolution began, the twenty-nine-year-old Saint-Simon eagerly joined the ranks.
But he fell out of favor during the Terror, largely because of ill-timed profiteering. One of his more far-fetched schemes involved a plan hatched with Talleyrand to buy the Cathedral of Notre-Dame and then strip off its roof, melt it down, and sell the metal. He was arrested, but spared execution, and though he kept his head safe from the guillotine and outlived Robespierre, when he was finally freed he had lost most of his credibility as a revolutionary. He prospered nonetheless, dabbling in real-estate deals, until he had a philosophical epiphany and began to write.
Parting the Desert Page 3