by Tom Reiss
Volney came to prominence in 1791 as a star philosopher. His book The Ruins: A Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires was the toast of English Romantic poets like Shelley and political activists like Tom Paine; Thomas Jefferson translated it into English. Volney’s writings influenced a generation of radical democrats, but he arguably had the most impact on an altogether different sort of man. Napoleon met the philosopher personally in 1792 when Volney bought an estate on the island of Corsica. Young Napoleon Bonaparte was spending that year back in his native Corsica, avoiding the dangerous turmoil in France. Napoleon served as Volney’s informal guide to the island, while picking his brain about Egypt.
Napoleon had developed an identification with Egypt from the time he was twelve, reading about Alexander the Great. At the end of his life, having gained and lost control of Europe, he would remember his heady time in Egypt. “I dreamed of many things and I saw how I could realize all my dreams,” he mused. “I imagined myself on the road to Asia, mounted on an elephant, a turban on my head, and in my hand, a new Koran that I had written myself for my own purposes. I would have combined in my enterprises the experience of two worlds, scouring the terrain of all world history for my profit.” Though the general had absorbed Volney’s extensive knowledge of Egypt, he ignored his most important lesson: that his dream of a Middle Eastern empire was a mirage.
Almost immediately after describing the riches to be gained in Egypt, Volney warned France’s leaders against trying to seize it. Any invasion would bring on an unwinnable three-front war with the British, the Turks, and the Egyptians themselves. The locals will quickly come to loath us, he told his readers: “Even our officers would take that arrogant, exclusionary, and contemptuous tone that foreigners can’t stand about us.” Volney predicted that a third of French troops would perish from disease, a few venal Arab collaborators would get rich, and eventually, the whole venture would collapse into the desert dust. France would do much better to invest its energies at home.
For Napoleon, this warning only pointed to greater glory if he could pull it off.
After securing the conquest of northern Italy in the summer of 1797, Napoleon began laying concrete plans for his Egyptian expedition. While busy overseeing the transport to Paris of Venice’s artistic treasures—including the bronze horses of St. Mark’s Cathedral, which the Venetians themselves had looted from the Greeks during the Fourth Crusade—Napoleon’s thoughts were already with the upcoming mission. In one of the more memorable bits of secret advance preparation he had done while in Italy, Napoleon sent his agents throughout the peninsula looking to secure an Arabic printing press, so he would be able to print revolutionary tracts and edicts for the Egyptians. (They at last located one to seize in the papal propaganda office at the Vatican.)
In his meetings with the government in Paris to discuss the invasion of England, Napoleon emphasized that by taking Egypt instead, he could cut off the British overland trade routes to India, her most valuable possession. He probably did not reveal the full extent of his dreams of founding a vast Franco-Afro-Asian empire stretching from the Barbary Coast cities of Tunis and Algiers in the west to India in the east: after seizing Egypt, the “Army of the Orient” would conquer Syria, cut across Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, and cross the Khyber Pass into India—all in the name of liberating the despotic East. Napoleon hoped to enlist the support of local insurgents like Tippoo Sahib, the sultan of Mysore, in south India. Tippoo was a great fan of the French Revolution and England’s most formidable enemy in India. He had gone as far as to cofound, in 1792, the Jacobin Club of Mysore and referred to himself as “Citizen Tippoo Sultan.” Napoleon attempted to get a message to the Citizen Sultan promising that the French army would fight side by side with him for a new republican India (once the French had conquered Egypt and marched across Mesopotamia, Iran, and Afghanistan, that is), but Tippoo would fall in battle against the British, in 1799, before he could receive it.‡
On May 10, 1798, Napoleon inspected the troops in Toulon and gave a famous departure speech:
Soldiers, the eyes of Europe are upon you. You have a grand destiny to fulfill, battles to fight, dangers and trials to overcome.… The genius of Liberty that has made the Republic, since its birth, the arbiter of Europe, desires that it also be the arbiter of the seas and of the farthest lands.
He promised each man six acres of land if the mission succeeded. The soldiers, sailors, and engineers still had no idea where the land was to be situated—did he mean an Irish farm, an Indian orchard, or a Levantine olive grove? When the French first laid eyes on the Egyptian desert, they would coin one of the bitter catchphrases of the campaign: “Voilà—the six acres of land they promised us!”
IN his memoir, Alexandre Dumas writes of an encounter between his father and Napoleon before the expedition’s departure. Yet it’s possible the meeting is invented: his father’s relationship with Napoleon as the writer wishes it had been. According to his account, Napoleon ran into General Dumas shortly after arriving in Toulon and invited him to visit the next morning, as early as he wanted. Accordingly, at 6 a.m. the next day, General Dumas met up with his aide, Dermoncourt (the primary source for all of the novelist’s stories about his father, except presumably his mother).
“Where the devil are you off to, General, this early?”
“Come with me,” said my father, “and you’ll see.” They set off together.
Approaching their destination, Dermoncourt said:
“You’re not going to see Bonaparte, are you, General?”
“I am.”
“But he won’t receive you.”
“Why not?”
“Because it is too early.”
“Oh! That doesn’t matter.”
“But he’ll be in bed.”
“Quite likely.”
… In sum, [Dermoncourt concluded] my father must have a special audience scheduled, and followed him.
My father ascended a stair, walked down a hallway, opened a little door, pushed back a screen, and found himself, along with Dermoncourt, who had been following him the whole time, in Bonaparte’s bedroom.
He was in bed with Josephine, and, as the weather was very hot, both of them were covered by no more than a sheet, upon which were drawn the outlines of their bodies.
Josephine was weeping, and Bonaparte was trying to wipe her tears away with one hand, while with the other he laughingly beat a military march on her body.
“Ah! Dumas,” he said, catching sight of my father; “your arrival is well timed; you must help me make this crazy woman listen to reason. Ought she to wish to come to Egypt with us? Would you take your wife there?”
“My word, certainly not,” says Dumas, and the two proceed to have an excruciatingly arch exchange in an attempt to jolly the tearful wife out of her distress, which is only redoubled when Napoleon says the expedition may last several years. He again enlists Dumas, telling Josephine that, if that does turn out to be the case, she and Madame Dumas can both travel by convoy to Egypt together. (“ ‘Does that suit you, Dumas?’ ‘Perfectly,’ replied my father.”) And there, the famously childless Napoleon goes on, the reunited couples can dedicate their efforts to producing male issue, since “Dumas … has only daughters [sic], and I … have not even those.” If successful, he exultantly tells Josephine, they will all be godparents together, and he concludes: “There now, that’s a promise; stop crying, and let’s talk business.”
Then, turning to Dermoncourt, Bonaparte said:
“Monsieur Dermoncourt, you have just heard a word drop which indicates the goal of our expedition. Not a soul knows of this goal: do not let the word ‘Egypt’ escape your lips; you understand, under the circumstances, the importance of a secret.”
Dermoncourt made a sign that he would be as dumb as a disciple of Pythagoras.
In reality, Dumas had never been a confidant of Napoleon, and he had probably not been invited to know the great secret of the expedition, though in a farewell letter to Marie-Loui
se he guesses correctly (or perhaps gives away the secret he was in fact told?):
In great haste—via Paris
To the Citizeness Dumas, in her home.
… I embark in one hour but I will write to you more at length on board, farewell I am in a terrible hurry, my father [maybe a priest, taking money to her?] left this morning with 115 Louis in gold, I think we are going to Egypt, farewell, eternal friendship to everyone.
Alex Dumas
Dumas and Dermoncourt boarded their vessel, a midsized ship called the Guillaume Tell (the “William Tell”).§ (Napoleon sailed on the Orient, a gargantuan vessel that was the largest ship of any navy on earth, boasting 120 cannons mounted on three decks.) The armada set sail for its first rendezvous point, the island of Malta, off the coast of Sicily. Britain’s Nelson, meanwhile, lost an important tool for tracking them when he became separated from his two main frigates in a sudden storm. The loss of these fast, nimble scouting vessels—the closest thing to radar in those days—meant that Nelson now had little chance of finding the French armada: even on a clear day, intelligence was limited to the twenty miles visible through Nelson’s Dolland telescope, the most advanced available. Naval warfare in the late eighteenth century was the ultimate game of hide-and-seek: it could take days, weeks, or months to locate your enemy at sea.
Malta was a heavily barricaded outcropping that had withstood every invader since the sixteenth century. The Ottomans once lost fifty thousand men besieging Malta before giving up. Napoleon’s plan was to take the island and make off with a king’s ransom in treasure—this, plus the booty from the Italian campaign, would finance the invasion of Egypt.
Since ancient times, Malta had been ruled by a dizzying array of conquerors—Phoenicians, Byzantines, Carthaginians, Romans, and Arabs. But the island’s name is synonymous with its most colorful and enduring conquerors: the Knights of Malta. First banded together as the Order of St. John in Jerusalem in the eleventh century, the Knights were as fundamental to the world of real-life chivalry as King Arthur and his knights were to its legend. In return for support from the pope, the Knights swore to take on the defense of pilgrims and the sick and to defend the Faith in territories that the crusaders had conquered from the Muslims. They began calling themselves “holy knights” and wearing their trademark insignia: an eight-pointed white cross, made up of four V-shaped arms joined in the center, on either a red or a black field.‖
Since the Middle Ages, the Knights had been based in Malta, which they turned into the most impregnable fortress island in Europe. Would-be holy Knights showed up from everywhere, hoping to win fame and glory for God by fighting Islam in a sunny climate. But the island was also a refuge for adventurous scoundrels of every variety, such as the Italian Renaissance painter Caravaggio, who, after committing murder, fled to Malta in 1607 and was made a knight in return for painting his masterpiece The Beheading of St. John the Baptist. (According to some sources, Sir Caravaggio then got into another violent altercation, with a fellow knight, and left Malta in disgrace.)
In spite of the order’s vows, including chastity, Malta also became renowned for the beauty and laxity of its prostitutes, with the best ones going to the Knights and their guests. And fighting the infidel on the high seas, they took in so many galley slaves and so much booty that they began to seem like a Christian version of the Barbary pirates. The pope heard of the Knights’ lax morals and sent an inquisitor to the island in 1574; he set up shop in a mansion in the shopping district.
The Knights had once been swashbuckling crusaders riding the waves for Jesus; now their island bastion was more like some crusaders’ version of Palm Springs, where elderly Knights lived off a carefully fixed income of hoarded treasures, along with taxes and feudal dues collected from their native lands. This latter source of income was the most important, and since many of the Knights were from French noble families, the dues supporting the order’s lavish lifestyle came disproportionately from France. When the French National Assembly abolished feudal dues in the summer of 1789, it hit Malta hard. Aristocrats across Europe were incensed, but the Knights of Malta were ruined. Given their aristocratic and religious heritage, the Knights would have opposed the Revolution in any case, but since it had wrecked their livelihoods, they regarded it with a special loathing. They made overtures to ally with France’s enemies Austria and Russia, as well as plotting with their traditional feudal landlord, the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples.
All this provided the French armada with the perfect justification to intervene. On June 9, 1798, the ships approached the harbor at Valletta, the island’s capital. To the Knights, it must have looked as if the entire world was descending on them. They said they would let four ships into the harbor at a time. It was then that Napoleon learned that the geologist Dolomieu had a special relationship with them: as a young man, he had been a member of the Order of St. John but had gotten into trouble for killing a fellow knight. However, after serving a nine-month prison sentence, Dolomieu attempted to run for a leadership office, an effort that stalled due not to his criminal record but to his liberal politics. In fact, the head of the Knights of Malta, the Grand Master, had been trying to contact him. “The Grand Master wrote to me,…” Dolomieu recorded in a later report, “and asked me to use my good offices with [Napoleon].” Before Dolomieu could do so, Napoleon ordered him to row ashore to carry his terms to the Knights.
“Tell the Knights I will grant them most advantageous conditions,” Napoleon commanded the scientist, “that I will pay what they want, whether in cash or by the treaty I will make with them; that all the French can return to France and enjoy their political rights; that those who wish to remain in Malta will be protected; that the Grand Master can have a principality in Germany and anything he wishes.”
The negotiation was successful, but once the Knights opened up the gates of the harbor and let the armada in, Napoleon announced an entirely different plan. He commanded the Knights to abandon their island in three days, with no compensation. “After demanding that Malta be sold to him,” recalled Dolomieu bitterly, “Bonaparte could not have gotten it cheaper.”
The French were surprised to find themselves suddenly inside the legendary fortress without a fight. “No one who has seen Malta can imagine that an island surrounded with such formidable and perfect fortifications would have surrendered in two days,” wrote Napoleon’s personal secretary, who also recorded that, upon inspecting the fortifications, the expedition’s chief military engineer exclaimed, “Upon my word, General, it is lucky that there is someone in the town to open the gates for us!”
Napoleon sent ashore in Malta the same experts who had appraised the Vatican for him, to catalog the treasures of the order’s monasteries and warehouses. They efficiently inventoried 1,227,129 francs’ worth of loot and had it stowed aboard the Orient.
But the primary thing Napoleon did in Malta was to lay down a new social order dictated by revolutionary principles. He abolished feudal privileges and declared religious freedom and political equality; he closed the Inquisition’s offices and abolished torture. He gave Jews full government protection from persecution and fulfilled the Revolution’s rejection of slavery by freeing more than two thousand North African and Ottoman galley slaves, planning to use this as propaganda in Egypt. He drew up plans for hospitals, schools, police stations, pawnshops, and post offices—not to mention street lights, rent-control regulations, and excise taxes. He treated the island like some medieval Lego set that could be taken apart and rebuilt overnight. He established a legal code that over time he would hone into the Napoleonic Code—an updating of Roman law that would later be established in France and around Europe, and that to this day is the basis for nearly all modern European law and administration.a
The actions Napoleon took here were a dry run for his reshaping of Europe and they foreshadowed his maddeningly contradictory legacy. He betrayed the Knights and pillaged the island, but he also transformed it into a modern meritocracy. He was a dictator, a dest
royer, and a harbinger of totalitarian leaders to come; he was also a liberator from a tyranny that had stalked Europe for a thousand years.b
ON board the Guillaume Tell, still anchored in Valletta harbor, Dumas was once again overtaken by a dark melancholy. Perhaps the southerly voyage reminded him of his childhood in the tropics, for he wrote to Marie-Louise that he felt trapped on a journey that felt “more like a deportation than an expedition.” The voyage seemed to him full of bad omens. One of these was that his lackey, Nicolas, fell overboard and drowned (although, in keeping with the ethos of the time, Dumas’s laments are focused as much on the personal inconvenience this causes him as on sorrow for the lost life):
I did not want, my good friend, to afflict you in my letter here by telling you that poor Nicolas, by his imprudence and being drunk while playing with the servant of Lambert, fell into the sea at 9 in the evening and drowned before there was any way to save him. I assure you that I suffered a great deal from this event. One cannot be more distressed. I am without a servant; all my affairs are in disorder and I don’t know what to do.
I cannot tell you what my morale and my body have already suffered. But what does it matter. I always think that it is for the good of my country. This idea will make me patiently suffer everything that I have yet to undergo.… Remember me to my child and our dear parents. As soon as I can send you money, I will do so. When you can, you should give 100 ecus to the father of Nicolas. It is impossible for me at the moment.
Adieu. I cannot recall your attention enough to our interests and the education of our darling child. We are leaving in half an hour for I don’t know where. Tell our neighbor, your cousin and all our parents and friends a thousand sincere wishes. I embrace you all, and above all, I am and will always be your best friend.
