IBRAHIM: May the angels of victory sweep the dust from your path and cover you with their wings . . . O most valiant amongst the sons of Jesus, Allah has caused you to be followed by the exterminating angel, in order to deliver the land of Egypt.59
There was a good deal more in this vein, in the course of which Napoleon referred to ‘the Great Sultan our ally whom God surround with glory’. This might have surprised Selim, who was at that moment raising two armies to expel the French from Egypt. He then quoted the Prophet Mohammed – ‘who passed through all the heavens in a night’ – from memory, and came out with such lines as ‘Evil, thrice evil, to those who search for perishable riches, who covet gold and silver, which resemble dross.’60
Napoleon enjoyed all this mummery, and possibly the imams did too, but it was a serious attempt to elicit support from the Egyptians. When one of them, Suliman, said that he had treated the Pope ‘with clemency and kindness’, Napoleon retorted that His Holiness had been wrong to condemn Muslims to eternal hellfire. His reading of the Koran had led him to believe that ‘the will of Mohammed’ was for Egyptians to join the French in annihilating the Mamluks, and that the Prophet favoured ‘trade with the Franks’, supported their efforts to reach Bramah (that is, India), wanted the French to have depots in Egyptian ports, and apparently also wanted Egyptians to ‘drive out the islanders of Albion, accursed among the sons of Jesus’. For this, Napoleon promised, ‘the friendship of the Franks will be your reward until you ascend to the seventh heaven and sit beside black-eyed houris, always young and always maidens’.61
The three most important Arab witnesses of the French occupation were the historians Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, Hasan al-Attar and Niqula Turk. Al-Jabarti felt that the invasion was God’s punishment on Egypt for ignoring Islamic principles. He saw the French as the new Crusaders, but made no secret of his admiration for French weaponry, military tactics, medical advances, scientific achievements and interest in Egyptian history, geography and culture. He enjoyed his interaction with the savants and was impressed by Napoleon’s lack of ostentation and the way that on his journey to Suez he took engineers and Muslim merchants with him instead of cooks and a harem. Yet still he saw him as a rapacious, untrustworthy, atheistic beast, and was delighted when jihad was declared against the infidels.62
The Revolution’s principle of equality offended against much of the Koran, yet al-Jabarti appreciated how well the French treated local workers in their building projects, and he followed their chemical and electrical experiments with interest. He was unimpressed that French soldiers failed to haggle successfully in the souks, thinking it a way of ingratiating themselves with the populace, and was disgusted by the way the French dhimmis (infidel) allowed ‘the lowliest Copts, Syrian and Orthodox Christians, and Jews’ to ride horses and carry swords, in transgression of Islamic law.63
Al-Jabarti’s friend Hasan al-Attar, by contrast, was so fearful of being seen as a collaborator that he refused the savants’ invitations to visit their library and laboratories. Niqula Turk described Napoleon as ‘short, thin and pale; his right arm was longer than his left, a wise man and a fortunate person’.64 (There is no indication he was correct about the relative length of Napoleon’s arms.) Turk added that many Muslims assumed that Napoleon was the Mahdi (Guided One) who was expected to redeem Islam, and many more would have done so had he appeared in Middle Eastern rather than Western clothing. It was a surprising oversight. Napoleon wore a turban and baggy trousers only once, when it provoked laughter among his staff. Years later he told a courtier’s wife that since the hitherto Protestant Henri IV thought it was worth converting to Catholicism for the sake of ruling France, ‘Do you not think the Empire of the East, and perhaps the subjection of the whole of Asia, were not worth a turban and loose trousers?’, adding that the army ‘would undoubtedly have lent itself to this joke’.65
Napoleon was impressed with the healthy climate and fertile countryside in the regions adjoining the Nile, but contemptuous of its ‘stupid, miserable and dull-witted’ people. He described Cairenes to the Directory, only one day after arriving there, as ‘the most evil population in the world’, without explaining why. Ignorance reigned in the rural areas: ‘They would rather have a button off our soldiers than a six-franc écu. In the villages they don’t even have any idea what scissors are.’66 He was shocked that the country had no watermills and only one windmill, and that otherwise grain was milled between stones turned by cattle. The army hated Egypt because, as he later put it, unlike in Italy there was ‘no wine, no forks, and no countesses to make love to’.67 (He meant no local wine; in December he ordered Marmont to sell 64,000 pints of the wine he had brought from France, writing: ‘Take care to sell only the wine that looks as if it might be going off.’68)
• • •
When Napoleon reached Cairo he sent orders to Admiral Brueys to sail the fleet to Corfu, where it would be better protected and able to threaten Constantinople. But by the time his messenger reached Aboukir Bay, there was no fleet: it had been sunk on August 1 after an exceptionally daring attack by Admiral Nelson. Brueys himself had been killed when L’Orient exploded at 10 p.m. Two ships-of-the-line were destroyed, including L’Orient, and nine were captured; only four ships under Rear-Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve escaped. After spending two weeks at Aboukir convalescing from a wound to his forehead, Nelson sailed to Naples, leaving the Egyptian coast under close watch. ‘If, in this disastrous event, he made mistakes,’ Napoleon later wrote generously of Brueys, ‘he expiated them by a glorious death.’69
‘I feel your pain deeply,’ he wrote in a heartfelt letter to Brueys’ widow. ‘The moment that separates us from the object we love is terrible; it isolates us from the earth; the body feels convulsions of agony. The faculties of the soul are changed; it only communicates with the universe through a nightmare that distorts everything.’70 This was only a month after he had been informed of Josephine’s adultery, and one has to imagine that he had her in mind. To the Directory he wrote more clinically, characteristically distorting the figures, that there had been an ‘inconsiderable’ number killed and eight hundred wounded in the battle, whereas in fact the numbers were 2,000 and 1,100 respectively (against 218 British killed and 678 wounded).71
‘It seems you like this country,’ Napoleon told his staff at breakfast on August 15, the morning after he heard the news, ‘that’s very lucky, for now we have no fleet to carry us back to Europe.’72 In addition to cutting him off from France, with all the problems that implied, the Aboukir Bay catastrophe left Napoleon with a pressing cash-flow problem, since the Maltese ‘contribution’, estimated at 60 million francs, had gone down with L’Orient. But he refused to accept what he called ‘this reverse’ as evidence that Fortune had forsaken him. ‘She has not abandoned us yet, far from it,’ he told the Directory, ‘she has served us during this entire operation beyond anything she has ever done.’73 He even told Kléber the disaster might be beneficial, as the British were now forcing him to consider marching on to India: ‘They will perhaps oblige us to do greater things than we proposed to perform.’74
While Napoleon did what he could to woo the local populace, he made it clear that he would brook no disobedience. On August 1, in one of eight letters sent that day to Berthier, he insisted that exemplary punishments be meted out to the rebellious town of Damanhour, including beheading the five most influential inhabitants, at least one of whom must be a lawyer. But harshness was generally tempered with encouragement. When he discovered that the imams of Cairo, Rosetta and elsewhere were not intending to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday that year, pleading lack of funds and the unstable political situation – but really indicating to the faithful that, in Denon’s phrase, the French were ‘opposed to one of the most sacred acts of their religion’ – Napoleon insisted that France would pay for everything, despite his shortage of funds.75 The celebrations started on August 20 and lasted three days, with coloured lanterns on poles, process
ions to mosques, music, poetry-chanting, sideshows featuring bears and monkeys, magicians who made live snakes disappear, and illuminated representations of the Prophet’s tomb in Medina. Even the former erotic novelist Denon was shocked by the lewdness of the dances performed by some of the male dancers. On the Prophet’s birthday itself, French artillery fired salutes and a regimental band joined the throngs, as the French officers were presented to a cleric, Sayyid Khalil al-Bakri, whom Napoleon decided to declare the most senior of Mohammed’s descendants. At a feast of one hundred clerics at which the French were allowed to drink wine, Napoleon was declared a son-in-law of the Prophet with the name ‘Ali-Bonaparte’. The Egyptians were humouring him and he them; as one French officer recalled: ‘The soldiers were politic in their expressions; when they returned to their quarters they laughed at the comedy.’76
• • •
On the last day of the celebrations, Napoleon inaugurated the Institut d’Égypte, with Monge as its president, and himself vice-president. Its headquarters in Qassim Bey’s former palace on the outskirts of Cairo were large enough to house the Institut’s library, laboratories, nine workshops, an antiquarian collection and menagerie; the hall where the mathematics seminars were held was the former harem. Nicolas Conté, the chief balloonist, was put in charge of the workshops, which among much else produced spare parts for windmills, clocks and the printing press. After Desaix’s conquests in Upper Egypt, various stones and treasures were taken to Cairo, Rosetta and Alexandria intended for the Louvre, as soon as ships arrived that could transport them.
The Institut was divided into four sections – mathematics, physics, political economy and the arts – and met every five days. At its opening session Napoleon suggested very practical subjects as topics for its consideration, such as how the army’s baking could be improved; was there any substitute for hops in the brewing of beer; could Nile water be made drinkable; were watermills or windmills better for Cairo; could Egypt produce gunpowder; and what was the state of Egyptian law and education? He also wanted the savants – who had their own newspaper, La Décade Égyptienne – to teach Egyptians the benefits of wheelbarrows and handsaws. Yet not all the savants’ activities and deliberations were connected to commerce and colonization: there were few practical applications for the studies they undertook of Egyptian flora and fauna, ancient sites, geology and mirages.
Napoleon tried to use Enlightenment science and reason to win over the Egyptians and even suggested the construction of an astronomical observatory.77 The French made full use of their printing press, medical instruments, telescopes, clocks, electricity, balloons and other modern wonders to try to awe them, which al-Jabarti readily admitted did ‘baffle the mind’, but none of it appears to have advanced their cause politically. (When Berthollet demonstrated a chemical experiment at the Institut, a sheikh asked whether it could enable him to be in Morocco and Egypt at the same time. Berthollet replied with a Gallic shrug, which led the sheikh to conclude: ‘Ah well, he isn’t such a sorcerer after all.’78)
On the day he opened the Institut, Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand – whom he believed to have honoured his commitment to go to Constantinople – to say that Egypt would soon be sending rice to Turkey and protecting the pilgrims’ route to Mecca.* That same day he sent a senior staff officer, Colonel Joseph Beauvoison, to the Holy Land to try to open negotiations with Ahmed Jezzar, the pasha of Acre (discouragingly nicknamed ‘The Butcher’), an enemy of the Mamluks and a rebel against the Turks. Jezzar specialized in maiming and disfiguring people, but also in devising horrific tortures such as having his victims’ feet shod with horseshoes, walling up Christians alive and stripping corrupt officials naked before having them hacked to death.79 He killed seven of his own wives, but his hobby was cutting flower shapes out of paper and giving them to visitors as presents. Now that Ibrahim Bey had been forced out of Egypt into Gaza, Napoleon hoped he and Jezzar might destroy him together. Jezzar refused to see Napoleon’s envoy Beauvoison and instead made peace with the Ottomans. (Beauvoison was fortunate; Jezzar sometimes beheaded unwelcome messengers.)
• • •
Napoleon had intended to return to France once the conquest of Egypt was secure, but on September 8 he wrote to the Directory (like all his correspondence, this letter had to run the gauntlet of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean): ‘I can’t possibly return to Paris in October, as I promised, but the delay will last only a few months. All is going on well here; the country is subdued, and is becoming accustomed to us. The rest must be the work of time.’80 Yet again he was misleading the Directory: the country was certainly not ‘becoming accustomed’ to French rule. Much of his correspondence refers to the beheadings, hostage-taking and village-burning that the French had to employ to secure its presence.* Napoleon was content with the army’s clothing and payment, however, and in a letter to Barras all he could think of asking for was a troupe of actors to entertain his soldiers.81
On October 20 Napoleon learned that a Turkish army was gathering in Syria to attack him. He needed to move against it but that night minarets across Cairo rang out with a call for a general uprising against French rule, and by the next morning much of the city was in open revolt. General Dominique Dupuy, the city’s governor, was lanced to death in the street and Sulkowski was killed with fifteen of Napoleon’s personal bodyguard, whose bodies were subsequently fed to dogs.82 (Of Napoleon’s eight aides-de-camp who went to Egypt, four died and two were wounded, including Eugène at the siege of Acre.) Several boats were sunk on the Nile during the uprising, and overall about three hundred Frenchmen were killed, not the fifty-three that Napoleon later claimed to the Directory.83 The rebels took over the Gama-el-Azhar Grand Mosque, one of the largest in the city, as their headquarters. A rumour spread that it was Napoleon himself who had been killed rather than Dupuy, which inflamed the rebellion almost as much as the ulama had, so (as Bourrienne recalled), ‘Bonaparte immediately mounted his horse and, accompanied by only thirty guides, advanced on all threatened points, restored confidence, and, with great presence of mind, adopted measures of defence.’84
Napoleon’s most important objective was to retain the Cairo citadel, which then as now commands the city with its high elevation and 10-foot-thick walls. Once secured, the height allowed Dommartin to use his 8-pounder guns to shell enemy positions over thirty-six hours; he did not hesitate to put fifteen cannonballs into the Grand Mosque, which was later stormed by infantry and desecrated. Over 2,500 rebels died and more were executed in the citadel afterwards. Years later, Pierre-Narcisse Guérin painted Napoleon forgiving the rebels, which he did not do until a long time afterwards.85 At the time he ordered that all rebels captured under arms should be beheaded and their corpses thrown into the Nile, where they would float past and terrorize the rest of the population; their heads were put in sacks, loaded on mules and dumped in piles in Ezbekyeh Square in central Cairo.86 ‘I cannot describe the horror,’ recalled an eyewitness, ‘but I must confess that it had the effect for a considerable time of securing tranquillity.’87 Napoleon wrote to Reynier on October 27: ‘Every night we cut off thirty heads’, and Lavalette described how the Egyptian police chief ‘never went out but accompanied by the hangman. The smallest infraction of the laws was punished by blows on the soles of the feet’, a technique known as the bastinado, which was especially painful because of the large number of nerve-endings, small bones and tendons there and was even meted out to women.88 These brutal measures ensured that, unlike the zealots, ordinary Cairenes did not rise up en masse against the French, who could not have resisted 600,000 people. Once the revolt was over, on November 11, Napoleon abolished the bastinado for interrogations. ‘The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished,’ he ordered Berthier. ‘Torture produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind that the interrogator wishes to hear.’89
• • •
By Nove
mber 30 Cairo had sufficiently returned to normality to allow Napoleon to open the Tivoli pleasure gardens, where he noticed an ‘exceedingly pretty and lively young woman’ called Pauline Fourès, the twenty-year-old wife of a lieutenant in the 22nd Chasseurs, Jean-Noël Fourès.90 If the beautiful round face and long blonde hair described by her contemporaries are indeed accurate, Lieutenant Fourès was unwise to have brought his wife out on campaign. It was six months since Napoleon had discovered Josephine’s infidelity and within days of his first spotting Pauline they were having an affair. Their dalliance was to take on the aspect of a comic opera when Napoleon sent Lieutenant Fourès off with allegedly important despatches for Paris, generally a three-month round-trip, only for his ship to be intercepted by the frigate HMS Lion the very next day. Instead of being interned by the British, Fourès was sent back to Alexandria, as was sometimes the custom with military minnows. He therefore reappeared in Cairo ten weeks before he was expected, to find his wife installed in the grounds of Napoleon’s Elfey Bey palace and nicknamed ‘Cleopatra’.91
According to one version of the story, Fourès threw a carafe of water on her dress in the subsequent row, but another has him horsewhipping her, drawing blood.92 Whichever it was, they divorced and she thereafter became Napoleon’s maîtresse-en-titre in Cairo, acting as hostess at his dinners and sharing his carriage as they drove around the city and its environs. (The deeply chagrined Eugène was excused from duty on those occasions.) The affair deflected charges of cuckoldry from Napoleon, which for a French general then was a far more serious accusation than adultery. When Napoleon left Egypt he passed Pauline on to Junot, who, when injured in a duel and invalided back to France, passed her on to Kléber. She later made a fortune in the Brazilian timber business, wore men’s clothing and smoked a pipe, before coming back to Paris with her pet parrots and monkeys and living to be ninety.93
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