by Susan Jaques
One week after the victory, disaster struck. On the night of August 1, Admiral Horatio Nelson caught the French fleet by surprise at Aboukir Bay, a few miles east of Alexandria. In the ensuing Battle of the Nile, eleven French warships and two frigates were blown to pieces; 1,700 men were killed and another 1,500 wounded (only two warships and two frigates escaped). The victory confirmed Nelson’s status as England’s greatest hero and Napoleon’s greatest nemesis.
Without naval support and reinforcements, Napoleon and his troops were marooned. Food and ammunition would need to come from Egypt. Replicating the political model he’d used in Italy, Napoleon founded the Egyptian republic with provinces headed by generals. He became the benefactor of holidays and festivals—like Muhammad’s birthday and the festival of the Nile. Like Alexander, Napoleon tried to achieve his goals by using religion.
By late October, a mob of several thousand staged a bloody uprising in Cairo. The rebellion ended when Napoleon turned his cannons on the Al-Azhar mosque. Meanwhile, the Ottoman sultan declared war on France. He dispatched two armies, one by sea to Alexandria with British support and a second by land from Syria. In February 1799, Napoleon marched into Syria with twelve thousand soldiers. On March 7, he conquered Jaffa, massacring some 2,400 men.24 After this, Napoleon continued onto Acre. In the ensuing defeats, hundreds of French soldiers were killed; hundreds more were victims of bubonic plague.
After the Battle of the Pyramids, the surviving Mamelukes retreated south with their leader Murad Bey. In August, Napoleon ordered General Louis-Charles Desaix to chase Bey to Upper Egypt where he was raising a new army. With three thousand soldiers, Desaix embarked on a nine-month manhunt up the Nile past Aswan, over to the Red Sea, and back to Cairo. Vivant Denon enthusiastically went along, sketchpad in hand.
At fifty-one, Denon was among the eldest savant. Born in January 1747 at Givry near Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy to a family of minor nobility, Vivant de Non studied drawing in Lyon before moving to Paris to learn etching. There he landed a position as Louis XV’s Gentleman of the King’s Chamber. He was also curator of the medal and gemstone collection of the king’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, to whom he gave drawing lessons. De Non’s charm and wit helped him advance in a series of diplomatic positions. He met Frederick the Great at Potsdam, Voltaire at Ferney, and Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg where he was recalled after a failed attempt to free a jailed French actress. During a posting at Naples, Denon became an avid art collector, filling the French embassy with ancient Etruscan vases, paintings, sculptures, and medals (he sold over five hundred Etruscan vases to Louis XVI).
In the fall of 1788, Denon arrived in Venice where he taught engraving and collected drawings. He also fell in love with the married Greek-born saloniste Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi. When the French Revolution erupted, he was expelled from Venice as a suspected spy. Denon returned to France to try to save his family’s property from government confiscation. Denon himself was saved from the guillotine thanks to painter Jacques-Louis David. He quickly shifted his allegiance to the republican cause, changing the spelling of his aristocratic name to Denon.
While frequenting the Paris Salons, Denon befriended Joséphine de Beauharnais, recently married to the up-and-coming General Napoleon Bonaparte. The former diplomat wangled an invitation to be the official artist of the Egypt campaign. The chance to explore and sketch Egypt’s fabled monuments was the thrill of a lifetime. “I had from my infancy wished to make a voyage to Egypt,” he would write.25
Since the collapse of the Roman Empire, few Westerners had seen the ruins of Upper Egypt. The site of the ancient monuments left Denon completely awestruck. So did Egyptian women, who he compared to statues of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Often Denon would be up by dawn, drawing before the troops marched south. Other times, he worked on a pad held on a drawing board across his saddle, dodging enemy musket balls. “I most often made [drawings] on my knee, or standing, or even on horseback,” he recalled. “I never finished a single one to my satisfaction, as for an entire year I never once had a table straight enough to set a ruler on.”26
Among Denon’s subjects was Antinoöpolis, built by Hadrian on the east bank of the Nile (the well-preserved city was dismantled in the nineteenth century to build a sugar refinery). “At last I have beheld the portico of Hermopolis. Its massive ruins provided me with my first view of the splendour of Egypt’s colossal architecture,” he raved. “On every stone of this edifice, I seem to see the words posterity and eternity engraved.”27
Denon wasn’t the only one impressed. At the ruins of ancient Thebes, he recorded that “The whole army, suddenly and with one accord, stood in amazement at the sight of its scattered ruins, and clapped their hands in delight, as if the end and object of their glorious toils, and the complete conquest of Egypt, were accomplished and secured by taking possession of the splendid remains of this ancient metropolis.”28
The artist’s fascination for the ruins was contagious. “I made a drawing of this first sight, as if fearing that this image of Thebes would elude me,” wrote Denon. “And through their good-natured enthusiasm, the soldiers provided their knees as a worktable and their bodies as protection from the sun’s ardent rays beating down on the scene I intended to paint for my readers, so that they could partake of my emotion in the presence of such great objects, and share the spectacle of an atmosphere charged with the passion of an army of soldiers whose delicate sensibility made me happy to be their companion, proud to be French.”29
Denon discovered another awe-inspiring sight, the Temple of Dendera, half-buried in sand. Begun by the Ptolemies in the first century B.C.E. and finished by the Romans, the massive temple featured columns and capitals representing the goddess Hathor. “I felt that I was in the sanctuary of the arts and sciences . . .” wrote Denon. “Never did the labour of man show me the human race in such a splendid point of view. In the ruins of Tentyra [Roman for Dendera] the Egyptians appeared to me giants.”30 In a small chapel, Denon found a circular zodiac adorning the ceiling.
General Desaix’s troops moved south to Esna, then Edfu, where Denon saw “the sublime temple of Apollinopolis . . . the most beautiful of all Egypt.” In Denon’s opinion, the Egyptians had surpassed the Greeks in architecture. He noted that the capitals on their columns “borrowed nothing from other peoples,” but used local material, like papyrus, lotus, palm, and reed for ornament.
By early February 1799, the regiment arrived at Syene (Aswan), and Denon finally had time to sketch. From Elephantine, the lush island opposite Syene before the Nile’s first cataracts, he saw a nilometer mentioned by the Greek geographer and historian Strabo. Next came the small island of Philae, the ancient entry point into Egypt. After the locals were evicted, Denon drew the island’s temples. “The next day was the finest to me of my whole travels,” he wrote. “I possessed seven or eight monuments in the space of six hundred yards, and could examine them quite at my ease . . . I was alone in full leisure, and could make my drawings without interruption.”
Of all the monuments, Denon was most enamored with Philae’s Kiosk of Trajan. Standing over fifty feet tall, the rectangular pavilion boasted fourteen columns with elegantly carved flower capitals originally supporting a wood roof. Decorations on two screen walls depicted the Roman emperor Trajan making offerings to Isis, Osiris, and Horus (along with the temple of Isis, the Kiosk was relocated in the 1960s from Philae to Agilika Island after construction of the Aswan High Dam).
“If ever the French were to take a monument back to Paris, this would be the one,” Denon wrote, for “it would give a palpable proof of the noble simplicity of Egyptian architecture, and would show, in a striking manner, that it is character, and not extent alone, which gives dignity to an edifice.”31
By late February, Desaix’s soldiers headed back north, with Murad Bey ahead of them. This gave Denon another chance to sketch. In May, Denon revisited Dendera and drew the zodiac. “It would appear to be the lot of Egyptian monuments of every descript
ion to resist alike the ravages of time and man,” he concluded.32
Later that month, Denon ran into a scientific expedition dispatched by Napoleon. Headed by engineer Pierre-Simon Girard, the group was making a hydrographic study of the upper Nile. After a trip over to the Red Sea and other excursions, Denon arrived back in Cairo in July 1799. Napoleon too had retreated to Cairo, after failing to capture Acre in Syria. The general was so impressed with Denon’s sketches and watercolors, he immediately authorized a survey of Upper Egypt.
But as the architects and engineers traveled up the Nile on double-masted boats, their leader was sailing the opposite direction toward France.
While Napoleon was in Egypt, France had returned to war with Austria, Britain, and Russia. In November 1798, Ferdinand IV of Naples had taken advantage of the power vacuum and seized Rome. With its kidnapping of Pius VI, the Directory had managed to turn the elderly pontiff into a martyr. At home, there were rumors of an impending coup against the Directory. On top of the political turmoil, Napoleon was embroiled in a personal crisis. Devastated by word that Joséphine was cheating on him, he had taken up in Egypt with the wife of one of his cavalrymen.
Before leaving Cairo at midnight on August 23, Napoleon left General Jean-Baptiste Kléber a note promoting him to commander of the campaign. It was a very different goodbye than that of Alexander the Great, who after six months in Egypt, reviewed his forces and bid them farewell. Napoleon slipped away, leaving an army decimated by casualties and plague.
After three days on the Nile, Napoleon sailed from the coast in the small ship Muiron. Among the handful of trusted companions were his brother-in-law Joachim Murat, Monge, Berthollet, and Denon who brought with him amulets and ancient fragments. Also onboard was a gift from the Sheikh of Cairo—eighteen-year-old Raza Roustam, a Mameluke kidnapped in the Caucasus and sold in the slave markets of Constantinople. For the next fifteen years, Roustam would be Napoleon’s bodyguard and valet.
In early October, after crossing along the coast of Tunisia, the Muiron arrived in the harbor at Ajaccio, Corsica. An hour later, Napoleon disembarked and visited his family’s home, admiring improvements made by his mother and Joseph. The grape and fig harvest was underway. The weeklong visit to his birthplace would be his last. With English ships near Toulon, the Muiron set a course for Fréjus in Provence.
From the destruction of the French naval fleet, defeats by the Ottomans, and bubonic plague, Napoleon’s fourteen months in the Middle East were an abject military disaster. Yet in an echo of the great military leaders of ancient Greece and Rome, he arrived home to cheering crowds. Like Octavian turning the long standoff at Actium into an epic victory, Napoleon spun his Army of the Orient’s blunders into triumphs over both the Ottomans and the British. As he had after his Italian campaign in 1796, Napoleon ordered commemorative medals struck of the Egypt campaign, portraying himself as Mercury.
The self-promotion was so effective that when Napoleon returned to Paris, he was seen as a national hero, the only person who could save France from invasion, economic disaster, and the corrupt Directory regime. Collaborating with two disaffected Directors, Emmanuel Sieyès and Roger Ducos, Napoleon agreed to supply military force for a coup d’état.
Using the threat of a conspiracy as a pretext, France’s national assemblies were moved from Paris to the formal royal palace of Saint-Cloud; the Council of the Ancients to the Apollo Gallery, and the Council of Five Hundred to the Orangery. On November 9, 1799, Napoleon’s younger brother Lucien Bonaparte, president of the Council of Five Hundred, announced the resignation of Paul Barras, the incompetent head of the Directory since 1795.
Wearing a saber inscribed “Armée d’Égypte,” Napoleon marched into the chambers with four uniformed grenadiers and declared that he was staging a coup. Enraged council members shouted “Down with the dictator! Outlaw!” As men approached him with knives and called for his death sentence, Napoleon was hustled out by his grenadiers. Napoleon ordered his bayonet-wielding soldiers back to the Orangery, causing the legislators to flee, some jumping out of the windows.
With the coup spiraling downward, Lucien took control, delaying a vote against his brother. He managed to turn the attack on Napoleon into a vote of confidence. By the end of the night, Lucien convinced the Elders of the council to replace the Directory with a Consulate. A few hours later, Napoleon accepted the appointment as a consul in a new triumvirate, like Rome’s triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus.
On December 13, over three million voters ratified a new constitution. Drawing on terminology from the Roman Republic, the constitution created a three-man Consulate along with a Tribunate to debate laws and a senate with the power to change the constitution. Consuls Sieyès and Ducos were replaced with legal expert Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès and politician Charles-François Lebrun. The following February, a referendum confirmed Napoleon as first consul. He was the most powerful person in France with complete executive authority.
Meanwhile, the three-year Egypt expedition was coming to a costly, embarrassing end. In August 1801, General Jacques Menou surrendered to the British, handing over all archeological finds. The most important object was the Rosetta Stone, discovered by the French near the town of Rosetta on the Nile river delta. The three-foot gray granite slab was carved with the same text in Greek, demotic (Egyptian script), and hieroglyphics. The French also handed over a sarcophagus from Alexandria, which they believed to be that of Alexander the Great. A rumor spread that Napoleon planned to be buried in the coffin, which was later determined to have belonged to Pharaoh Nectanebo II. With its naval fleet destroyed by Nelson, French forces had to be evacuated on British ships.
In the spring of 1800, when Napoleon was asked by his private secretary Bourrienne to name his favorite ancient commander, he chose Alexander. “I look upon the siege of Tyre, the conquest of Egypt, and the journey to the Oasis of Ammon, as a decided proof of the genius of that great captain. . . . By persevering in the taking of Tyre, he secured his communications with Greece, the country he loved as dearly as I love France, and in whose glory he placed his own. By taking possession of the rich province of Egypt, he forced Darius to come to defend or deliver it, and, in so doing, to march halfway to meet him. By representing himself as the son of Jupiter, he worked upon the ardent feelings of the orientals in a way that powerfully seconded his designs. Though he died at thirty-three, what a name he has left behind him!”33
In his apartment at Saint-Cloud, Napoleon would hang a painting from the Louvre. Stolen from Munich in 1800, The Battle of Alexander at Issus by the sixteenth century German painter Albrecht Altdorfer depicted the Macedonian’s victory over Persia’s Darius III. After Issus, Alexander conquered Egypt.
Napoleon would call his time in Egypt the best years of his life.34 “In Egypt, I found myself freed from the obstacles of an irksome civilization,” Napoleon told Madame de Rémusat, Joséphine’s lady-in-waiting. “I was filled with dreams. I saw myself founding a new religion, marching into Asia, riding an elephant, a turban on my head and in my hand a new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs.”35
THREE
PONTIFEX MAXIMUS
On a brisk December morning with wind whipping his robes, Barnaba Chiaramonti, Bishop of Imola took a seat in the bobbing black gondola. As the boat pulled away from the Riva degli Schiavoni, the diminutive prelate glanced back at the columns of San Todaro, the Lion of St. Mark, and the Doge’s Palace, minus a doge.
Before him lay the stretch of sea known as St. Mark’s basin, between the Doge’s Palace and St. Mark’s square on one side and the islands of San Giorgio Maggiore and Giudecca on the other. Once Europe’s busiest port, all merchant ships headed to and from Europe had to pass through here. Now gondolas and sailing ships dotted the water.
Though many had tried to invade Venice, it had always been saved by its unusual geography and location—islands two and a half miles off the mainland, surrounded by two hundred square miles of water.1 Now behind its
beautiful façade, Venice was crumbling. In April 1797, the French fleet had arrived at the Lido. A month later, after eleven proud centuries, the ancient Republic of Venice surrendered.
That fall, with French troops approaching Vienna, Austria signed the Treaty of Campo Formio. Without consulting the Directory, Napoleon dictated the terms, preserving most of his conquests in northern Italy. To compensate for its losses in Lombardy, the Austrians gained Istria, Dalmatia, and the Republic of Venice less the Ionian Islands. After a millennium, Napoleon Bonaparte had reduced the former naval and commercial power to a Habsburg province.
From the gondola, Barnaba Chiaramonti took in the splendid view of the tiny island of San Giorgio Maggiore. With its classical white stone façade gleaming above the blue water, Andrea Palladio’s church appeared to float on the lagoon. Like the church, San Giorgio Maggiore’s bell tower was also classical—but of a more recent vintage. Rebuilt eight years earlier after the original fifteenth-century campanile collapsed and killed a monk, the tower was said to have the best view in all of Venice. On a clear day, one could even make out the snow-covered Alps. The brick and marble bell tower was a visual counterpart to the more famous campanile of St. Mark’s across the basin. Yet from the start, the abbey’s Benedictines had always operated independently from the Bishop of Venice.
During the reign of Emperor Augustus, small rivers led from the mainland to San Giorgio Maggiore, then called “the island of Memmia” after its Roman owner, the Memmo family. A small church was built here, across from Piazza San Marco, called San Giorgio Maggiore. In the late tenth century, Venice’s doge gave the marshy, cypress-covered island to the Benedictines. Over the next eight centuries, San Giorgio Maggiore became one of the wealthiest Benedictine monasteries with collections of art and manuscripts.
