The Directory were by no means ready to conclude peace, and chose the last of Napoleon’s three alternatives; on March 5 they gave him carte blanche to prepare for and command a full-scale invasion of Egypt in the hope of dealing a blow to British influence in and trading routes through the eastern Mediterranean. It was in the Directors’ interests for Napoleon to go to Egypt. He might conquer it for France or – just as welcome – return after a defeat with his reputation satisfyingly tarnished. As the pro-Bonapartist British peer Lord Holland put it, they sent him there ‘partly to get rid of him, partly to gratify him, and partly to dazzle and delight that portion of Parisian society who … had considerable influence on public opinion’.76 For Napoleon it represented an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of both his greatest heroes, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and he did not rule out the possibility of using Egypt as a stepping-stone to India. ‘Europe is but a molehill,’ a delighted Napoleon told his private secretary, ‘all the great reputations have come from Asia.’77
Later that month a mini scandal emerged that threatened to drag Napoleon into a vortex of financial corruption and political embarrassment which could have prevented him from ever having a chance to make his reputation on the banks of the Nile. Alongside large-scale army contractors such as the Compagnie Flachat and Compagnie Dijon that accepted deferred, long-term payments from the Treasury for supplying the army’s immediate needs were smaller firms that were regularly accused of short-changing the taxpayer through invoice-manipulation, substandard equipment, rotting provisions and even direct horse-thieving from peasants. One such group of war-profiteers was the Compagnie Bodin, run by the notorious Louis Bodin, among whose investors, Napoleon discovered to his horror from his brother Joseph, were Barras, Hippolyte Charles (who had by then left the army to become a full-time contractor) and Josephine.78 Although Charles had left Italy in August 1796, his relationship with Josephine had remained close.
It was one thing for Barras, Talleyrand and others to make their fortunes through loans, currency speculation and insider-trading, since their murky dealings were virtually taken for granted by the public, but if it emerged that Napoleon’s own wife was also profiting from corrupt army provisioning, one of his strongest appeals to the populace – his integrity – would vanish overnight. Furthermore, his own private war against the Compagnie Flachat in Milan, in the course of which he had chased one of its directors into exile, would now seem like the grossest hypocrisy rather than what it genuinely had been, a burning desire to get the best deal for the Army of Italy.
Napoleon and Joseph subjected Josephine to a tough interrogation on March 17 that left her shaken, angry and vengeful, but as untruthful as ever. They demanded to know exactly what she knew about Bodin, whether she had got him supply contracts, whether Hippolyte Charles lived at the same address as Bodin at 100 Faubourg Saint-Honoré and whether the rumour that she went there almost daily was true.79 Josephine’s panicked letter to Charles immediately afterwards suggests not only that she had denied everything, but that she still loved Charles, hated the Bonaparte brothers, had possibly seen the Bodin speculations as a way out of her marriage as well as of her debts, and that she now desperately wanted to cover her tracks. ‘I replied that I knew nothing about what he was saying to me,’ she told her lover. ‘If he wished a divorce he had only to say; he had no need to use such means, and I was the most unfortunate of women and the most unhappy. Yes, my Hippolyte, they have my complete hatred; you alone have my tenderness and my love … Hippolyte, I shall kill myself – yes, I wish to end a life that henceforth would be only a burden if it could not be devoted to you.’80
She then told him to get Bodin to deny all knowledge of her involvement and say that he hadn’t used her to get Army of Italy contracts; to instruct the doorman at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré to deny all knowledge of Bodin, and to tell Bodin not to use the letters of introduction which she had given him for his business trip to Italy. She signed off with ‘a thousand kisses, as burning as is my heart, and as amorous’.81 A subsequent letter to Charles concludes: ‘You alone can make me happy. Tell me that you love me, and only me. I shall be the happiest of women. Send me, by means of Blondin [a servant], 50,000 livres [1.25 million francs] from the notes in your possession … Toute à toi.’82
As he contemplated a new campaign in Egypt, Napoleon thus had every reason to wish to escape Paris, a place he had come to equate with corruption, disloyalty, heartache, secret malice and the potential for deep embarrassment. He always had a certain idea of himself as a noble knight, like Clisson from his own short story, and the behaviour of both the Directory and Josephine threatened the ideal. It was time to double the stakes once again.
7
Egypt
‘This year the pilgrimage to Mecca was not observed.’
Anonymous Islamic historian on 1798
‘If I had stayed in the East, I would have founded an empire, like Alexander.’
Napoleon to General Gourgaud on St Helena
Although the idea of invading Egypt has been variously ascribed to Talleyrand, Barras, Monge (albeit only by himself), the encyclopaedist and traveller Constantin de Volney and several others, in fact French military planners had been considering it since the 1760s, and in 1782 Emperor Francis’s uncle, Joseph II of Austria, had suggested to his brother-in-law Louis XVI that France annex Egypt as part of a wider plan to partition the Ottoman Empire.1 The Ottoman Turks had conquered Egypt in 1517 and still officially ruled it, but de facto control had been long wrested from them by the Mamluks, a military caste originally from Georgia in the Caucasus. Their twenty-four beys (warlord princes) were unpopular among ordinary Egyptians for the high taxes they imposed, and were considered foreigners. After the Revolution, the idea of invading Egypt had appealed both to French radical idealists for its promise of extending liberty to a people oppressed by foreign tyrants, and to more calculating strategists such as Carnot and Talleyrand, who wanted to counter British influence in the eastern Mediterranean. Napoleon was of the latter group, telling the Directory in August 1797: ‘To destroy England thoroughly, the time is coming when we must seize Egypt.’2 Talleyrand suggested that he would go to Constantinople personally to persuade Sultan Selim III not actively to oppose the expedition. It was the first occasion, but by no means the last or most serious, when he was to mislead Napoleon.
Between his secret appointment to command the Army of Egypt on March 5, 1798 and the date set for the expedition to set sail, May 19, there were fewer than eleven weeks for Napoleon to organize and equip the entire enterprise, yet somehow he also managed to attend eight lectures on science at the Institut. As part of a misinformation campaign he spoke openly in the salons about the holiday he hoped to take in Germany with Josephine, Monge, Berthier and Marmont. To further the ruse, he was officially reconfirmed as commander of the Army of England, based at Brest.
Napoleon described Egypt as ‘the geographical key to the world’.3 His strategic aim was to damage British trade in the region and replace it with French; at very least he hoped to stretch the Royal Navy by forcing it to protect the mouths of the Mediterranean and Red Sea and trade routes to India and America simultaneously.4 The Royal Navy, which had lost Corsica as a base in 1796, would be further constrained if the French fleet could operate from the near-impregnable harbour of Malta. ‘Why should we not seize the island of Malta?’ he had written to Talleyrand in September 1797. ‘It would further threaten British naval superiority.’ He told the Directory that ‘This little island is worth any price to us.’5 The three reasons he gave the Directory for the expedition were to establish a permanent French colony in Egypt, to open up Asian markets to French produce and to establish a base for a force of 60,000 men which could then attack British possessions in the Orient. His ultimate ambition – or fantasy – may be gauged by his demand for English maps of Bengal and the Ganges from the war ministry, and his request to be accompanied by Citizen Piveron, the former envoy to Britain’s greatest enemy in
India, Tipu Sahib, ‘the Tiger of Mysore’. Yet the Directory deflated these dreams; Napoleon was authorized only to invade Egypt and was told to raise the funds himself. He was expected to be back in France in six months.
As it transpired he had relatively little difficulty in raising the 8 million francs the expedition would cost, through ‘contributions’ extorted by Berthier in Rome, Joubert in Holland and Brune in Switzerland. Napoleon chose his senior officers carefully. On March 28 General Louis Desaix, a nobleman who had shown great promise fighting in Germany, brought another noble, General Louis-Nicolas Davout, to the rue de la Victoire to meet Napoleon for the first time. The twenty-eight-year-old Burgundian didn’t make a very good first impression, but Desaix’s assurances that Davout was a highly capable officer won him a place on the expedition. Although Napoleon was impressed with Davout’s performance in Egypt, they never became personally close, to Napoleon’s great disadvantage since Davout was later one of the few of his marshals to shine in independent command. Napoleon predictably took Berthier as his chief-of-staff, his brother Louis as an aide-de-camp after he had graduated from the Châlons artillery school, his handsome stepson Eugène (nicknamed ‘Cupid’) as another, the divisional generals Jean-Baptiste Kléber (a stentorian figure, a whole head taller than the rest of his soldiers and a veteran of the Army of the Rhine), Desaix, Bon, Jacques-François de Menou, Jean-Louis Reynier and fourteen other generals, including Bessières and Marmont, many of whom had fought under him in Italy.
The cavalry was to be under the command of the Haitian-born General Davy de la Pailleterie, known as Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, whose father was a French nobleman and whose mother was of Afro-Caribbean descent, hence the nickname ‘Schwarzer Teufel’ (black devil) which the Austrians had given him when he prevented them from re-crossing the Adige in January 1797.* Napoleon further chose General Elzéar de Dommartin to command the artillery, and the one-legged Louis Caffarelli du Falga the engineers. Lannes was to be quartermaster-general, a surprisingly desk-bound job for one of the most dashing cavalry commanders of the era. The chief doctor was René-Nicolas Desgenettes, who wrote a history of the campaign from a medical point of view four years later, which he dedicated to Napoleon. It was a formidable officer corps, abounding with talent and promise.
Napoleon also took 125 books of history, geography, philosophy and Greek mythology in a specially constructed library, including Captain Cook’s three-volume Voyages, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and books by Livy, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus and, of course, Julius Caesar. He also brought biographies of Turenne, Condé, Saxe, Marlborough, Eugène of Savoy, Charles XII of Sweden and Bertrand du Guesclin, the notable French commander in the Hundred Years War. Poetry and drama had their place too, in the works of Ossian, Tasso, Ariosto, Homer, Virgil, Racine and Molière.6 With the Bible guiding him about the faith of the Druze and Armenians, the Koran about Muslims, and the Vedas about the Hindus, he would be well supplied with suitable quotations for his proclamations to the local populations virtually wherever this campaign was finally to take him. He also included Herodotus for his – largely fantastical – description of Egypt. (Years later he would state that he believed ‘Man was formed by the heat of the sun acting upon mud. Herodotus tells us that the slime of the Nile changed into rats, and that they could be seen in the process of formation.’7)
Napoleon knew that Alexander the Great had taken learned men and philosophers along on his campaigns in Egypt, Persia and India. As befitted a member of the Institut, he intended his expedition to be a cultural and scientific event and not merely a war of conquest. To that end he took 167 geographers, botanists, chemists, antiquaries, engineers, historians, printers, astronomers, zoologists, painters, musicians, sculptors, architects, Orientalists, mathematicians, economists, journalists, civil engineers and balloonists – the so-called savants, most of whom were members of the Commission des Sciences et des Arts – whose work he hoped would give the enterprise a significance beyond the military.8 He failed in his hopes to persuade a professional poet to accompany him, but he did enlist the fifty-one-year-old novelist, artist and polymath Vivant Denon, who made more than two hundred sketches during his travels. Under their leaders Monge and Berthollet, the savants included some of the most distinguished men of the day: the mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier (author of Fourier’s Law concerning heat conduction), the zoologist Étienne Saint-Hilaire and the mineralogist Déodat de Dolomieu (after whom dolomite was named). The savants were not told where they were going, merely that the Republic needed their talents and that their academic posts would be protected and stipends increased. ‘Savants and intellectuals are like coquettes,’ Napoleon was later to tell Joseph; ‘one may see them and talk with them, but don’t make one your wife or your minister.’9
‘Soldiers of the Army of the Mediterranean!’ Napoleon proclaimed from Toulon on May 10, 1798:
You are now a wing of the Army of England. You have campaigned in the mountains, in the plains and before fortresses, but you have yet to take part in a naval campaign. The Roman legions that you have sometimes rivalled, but have yet to equal, fought Carthage on this very sea … Victory never forsook them … Europe is watching you. You have a great destiny to fulfil, battles to fight, dangers and hardships to overcome. You hold in your hands the future prosperity of France, the good of mankind and your own glory. The ideal of Liberty that has made the Republic the arbiter of Europe will also make it the arbiter of distant oceans, of faraway countries.10
In the same speech, Napoleon promised his men 6 arpents (5 acres) of land each, although he didn’t stipulate precisely where they would be. Denon later recalled that when the soldiers saw the barren sand-dunes of Egypt from the boats before they landed, the men joked to each other: ‘There are the six arpents they promised you!’11
Napoleon prepared for the first French military action in the Middle East since the Crusades with his usual mastery of minutiae. In addition to all the military equipment necessary for his army, he collected astronomical telescopes, ballooning equipment, chemical apparatus, and a printing press with Latin, Arabic and Syriac type.12 ‘You know how much we will need good wine,’ he wrote to Monge, telling him to buy 4,800 bottles, most of it his favoured red burgundy, but also to find ‘a good Italian singer’.13 (In all, the expedition took 800,000 pints of wine to Egypt.) Napoleon’s prestige was by now sufficient to overcome most supply difficulties. François Bernoyer, whom he appointed to clothe the army, set about hiring tailors and saddlers and recorded that ‘When I told them that Bonaparte was leading the expedition, all obstacles disappeared.’14
Napoleon’s armada left Toulon for Alexandria in fine weather on Saturday, May 19, 1798 and was joined by fleets from Marseilles, Corsica, Genoa and Civitavecchia. It was the largest fleet ever to sail the Mediterranean. There were 280 ships in all, including 13 ships-of-the-line of between 74 and 118 guns (the latter, Vice-Admiral François Brueys’ flagship L’Orient, was the biggest warship afloat). Napoleon had assembled 38,000 soldiers, 13,000 sailors and marines and 3,000 merchant seamen. His army was somewhat top-heavy as it included 2,200 officers, a ratio of seventeen to one against the more usual twenty-five to one – an indication of how many ambitious young men wanted to see action under him. ‘Have a good bed prepared for me,’ Napoleon – a bad sailor – told Brueys before setting sail, ‘as if for a man who will be ill for the entire duration of the voyage.’15
This gigantic armada was fortunate to make it across the Mediterranean without being set upon by Nelson, who was looking for him with thirteen ships-of-the-line. Nelson’s fleet had been scattered towards Sardinia by a gale the evening before Napoleon set sail, and on the night of June 22 the two fleets crossed paths only 20 miles from each other in fog near Crete. Nelson made an educated guess that Napoleon was heading for Egypt but reached Alexandria on June 29 and left on the 30th, the day before the French arrived.16 To evade Nelson on three occasions was extraordinary; the fourth t
ime they would not be so lucky.
Napoleon asked his savants to give lectures for his officers on deck during the voyage; in one Junot snored so loudly that Napoleon had him woken up and excused. He later discovered from his librarian that his senior officers were mostly reading novels. (They had started out gambling, until ‘everyone’s money soon found itself in a few pockets, never to come out again’.) He pronounced that novels were ‘for ladies’ maids’ and ordered the librarian, ‘Only give them history books. Men should read nothing else.’17 He was apparently overlooking the forty novels, including English ones in French translation, he himself had brought out.
On June 10 the fleet reached Malta, which commanded the entrance to the eastern Mediterranean. Napoleon sent Junot to order the Grand Master of the Knights of St John, Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim, to open Valletta harbour and surrender. When two days later he did, Caffarelli told Napoleon how fortunate they had been, because otherwise ‘the army would never have got in’.18 Malta had survived sieges before – notably in 1565, when the Turks had fired 130,000 cannonballs at Valletta over four months – and would do so again over the course of thirty months during the Second World War, but in 1798 the Knights were in schism – the pro-French knights refused to fight and their Maltese subjects were in revolt.
In his six days at Malta Napoleon expelled all but fourteen of the Knights and replaced the island’s medieval administration with a governing council; dissolved the monasteries; introduced street lighting and paving; freed all political prisoners; installed fountains and reformed the hospitals, postal service and university, which was now to teach science as well as the humanities.19 He sent Monge and Berthollet to plunder the treasury, mint, churches and artworks (though they missed the silver gates of the Church of St John, which had cleverly been painted black). On June 18 he wrote fourteen despatches covering the island’s future military, naval, administrative, judicial, taxation, rental and policing arrangements. In them he abolished slavery, liveries, feudalism, titles of nobility and the arms of the Order of the Knights. He allowed the Jews to build a hitherto banned synagogue and even denoted how much each professor in the university should be paid, ordering that the librarian there should also lecture on geography for his 1,000 francs per annum. ‘We now possess’, he boasted to the Directory, ‘the strongest place in Europe, and it will cost a good deal to dislodge us.’20 He left the island under the direction of his political ally Michel Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély, who as well as being an editor of the Journal de Paris during the Revolution had been the maritime provost of the French harbour of Rochefort.
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