by Tom Reiss
Napoleon would attempt to remake Egyptian society from top to bottom in a manner as extreme as what he had done so quickly in Malta. But the Egyptians would prove much more resistant to their makeover, and in trying to bludgeon them into accepting foreign rule in the name of “rights for all,” the French would unleash storms that are still igniting conflict between East and West to our own day. In a sign of future troubles, when the French tried billeting some of their troops in Alexandria’s old city, a number had their throats slit, so the policy was jettisoned.
THE vast infantry caravan left for Cairo first, dragging their artillery pieces behind them like stones. The thirty-six-mile march from Alexandria to Damanhur crossed brutal, arid desert, filled with Bedouin who made a sport of hunting stragglers, whom they decapitated or kept for ransom and abuse. The French tried to retaliate with artillery but with little effect: the tribesmen merely withdrew to a safe distance and then returned, always taking the opportunity to strike the endless caravan at points where the men looked weak, tired, or crazed from thirst. Despite the dire water shortage on the road to Cairo, Napoleon had made no significant arrangements for water-carrying vehicles.
It was July. Temperatures during the day went over 110 degrees. One of the reasons the British had not thought the French armada was heading for Egypt was the lunacy of invading the country in the middle of summer. But calculated lunacy—the defying of conventional wisdom and prudence in order to gain advantage—was one of Napoleon’s favorite tactics.
The French troops wore dark-colored woolen uniforms and carried forty-pound packs. When not crossing bare ground or desert, they marched on a cragged, rocky camel trail along the abandoned Nile-Alexandria canal that was little better. One of Dumas’s fellow generals captured the deadly conditions of the march from Alexandria: “Leaving that city behind to follow the Nile upriver, you find a barren desert, naked as your hand. Every dozen miles you run into a bad well of bitter, salty water. Imagine an army forced to cross these arid plains, with no escape from their unbearable heat. Dressed in wool and bearing five days of supplies on his back, after an hour’s march the soldier is overcome by the heat and the weight he carries. He unburdens himself, throwing down his rations, focusing only on the present with no thought of tomorrow. When thirst comes, he finds no water. That is why, in the horrors of this scene, you saw soldiers die of thirst, of starvation, of heat, while their comrades, on seeing this suffering, blew out their own brains.”
Dumas, along with Napoleon, had remained in Alexandria for some days, presumably trying to buy mounts for his men. But Alexandria was too poor a town to offer a significant number of horses. On July 4, Napoleon offered all cavalrymen who were unmounted a choice: they could either join the march to Cairo carrying their saddles or they could accept temporary reassignment to infantry brigades and march with less weight. Those who carried their saddles would have first dibs at horses in the future.
On July 7 the cavalry evacuated Alexandria to join the army marching southeast toward Cairo. Only a small contingency force under Kléber remained to garrison the city. Dumas and a small group of officers who, like him, had horses accompanied Napoleon. The rest had to proceed on foot, with or without their saddles. Dumas and Napoleon made the trip from Alexandria to Damanhur in under twenty-four hours. Here they met the army that had suffered the same journey over three hideous days, and here the real troubles for Dumas in Egypt began.
WHEN the first French troops reached the outskirts of the town of Damanhur—“a pile of huts, resembling dovecotes”—only one thing mattered: there was water. The officers and enlisted men fell over one another to get at it. They jumped into the cisterns and doused their uniforms and splashed and danced and laughed and sang. One officer drank twenty cups in a row. That stop by the cisterns, he would recall, “remains etched in the minds of every soldier in my division as one of the good memories of his life.”
Having ignored his generals’ urgent dispatches during their march from Alexandria to Damanhur, Napoleon was hardly embraced when he arrived at the front. Dr. Desgenettes, the chief medical officer, whose job kept him close to everyone, from the general-in-chief to the lowest ranks, recalled the mood: “When someone shouted in distress: There’s no more water!—the army answered with deep sighs or in tones of fury. Despair went so far that men took their own lives, reminding themselves with bitter irony that they had their six acres that Napoleon had promised them. The feeling of collapse that hit the soldiers, or that excited them to fury, also overtook their leaders.” Napoleon himself would recall “seeing two dragoons leave their ranks and, running as fast as they could, drown themselves in the Nile.” One particularly promising young brigadier shot himself out of despair after going on a bitter rant about the expedition’s poor planning and deadly cost so far.* Later, reflecting on the Egyptian campaign while in exile on Saint Helena, Napoleon would put the blame for its failures on the men: “This kind of warfare was even harder on them, because it contrasted the more with the comforts of the Italian piazza and casinos.”
Without mounts, the cavalry felt especially bereft and angry. They resented the haste and the lack of preparedness. Dumas’s mood grew particularly dark, and Dr. Desgenettes remembered how Dumas “threw [his] trimmed hat on the floor, trampled [it] underfoot and, amid a flow of exclamations of frustration, told the troops that the [government] had deported them out of hatred for their leader, because they were afraid of him.” There was certainly some truth to these words—though Dumas may have later wished he had not spoken so freely.
One evening while camped in Damanhur, Dumas procured a few ripe samples of a local fruit so bountiful, delicious, and thirst-quenching that the men had taken to calling it “Saint Watermelon.” He invited some of his fellow generals—Lannes, Desaix, and the young firebrand Joachim Murat—into his tent to share them. The talk turned to the existential problem at hand: What were they doing there? Had the government intended to send them into a trap of disease and privation in the desert? Was Napoleon a victim or an architect of the plot? There was talk about declaring to the general-in-chief that the army would not go any farther than Cairo.
As Dr. Desgenettes would later report in his memoirs, one of Napoleon’s many informants somehow heard everything at this meeting. Alexandre Dumas would piece together a fairly accurate version of the incident, assembling details of the evening from old soldiers who had been there when his father stepped dangerously out of line:
Eating three watermelons was the only purpose of the get-together in my father’s tent, but the gathering quickly took on political overtones when the generals began to air their frustrations.
What had we come to do in this accursed country—a place that had devoured every would-be conqueror from Cambyses II to Saint Louis? Were we here to found a colony? Why leave behind the warm, gentle sun, great forests, and fertile plains of France for this fiery sky, this shadeless desert, these scorched plains? Was Bonaparte hoping to carve himself out a new monarchy, as the ancient Roman governors had done? He might have at least asked the other generals if they would be content as the heads of this new satrapy. That might have appealed to the freedmen and slaves of the ancient armies, but it wouldn’t to the patriots of 1792, who weren’t the satellites of a single man, but the soldiers of a nation.
Was there anything to these criticisms beyond the harmless grumbling that emerges under stress? Or was this already the beginning of a rebellion against the ambitions of the future leader of a coup? The generals themselves might have been hard-pressed to answer, but that is exactly what was reported to Bonaparte as a serious attack on his authority by the general who had been the most vocal in declaring my father’s watermelons delicious and Napoleon’s motives rotten.
THE French army continued southeast toward Cairo. Reaching the Nile the next day, the troops slaked their thirst and were soon beset by dysentery. Worse was the affliction that began to affect their eyes: as they marched over the parched Nile basin, thousands of soldiers began experienc
ing a redness, burning, and swelling in one or both eyes, often with a discharge of pus. This, they realized, was why so many of the locals had one or two opaque, milky eyes. The French called this condition the Egyptian blindness, and it became the most widespread scourge of the expedition, as thousands of soldiers became partially or even fully blind.† Despite Bonaparte’s admonition that “the Mamelukes are your enemy, not the inhabitants,” troops began to ignore the orders against looting. Commanders did not object, since all notion of supply had broken down.
“You cannot imagine the fatigue of the marches,” Dumas would write to his friend Kléber in Alexandria, “most of the time without food, forced to glean what the preceding divisions had left behind in the horrible villages they had pillaged.”
Strangely enough, none of the villagers greeted them as liberators. Everywhere the population seemed prepared to put up resistance. General Berthier himself witnessed a peasant woman, who approached holding her baby, suddenly stabbing an aide-de-camp in the eye with a pair of scissors. Dumas wrote to Kléber that they were “harassed during the whole march by this horde of thieves called Bedouins, who killed our men and officers twenty-five paces from the column. General Dugua’s aide-de-camp, Géroret, was assassinated the day before yesterday in that way, while carrying orders to a platoon of grenadiers, within gunshot of the camp.”
The French army soon encountered the official enemy in a test skirmish on July 13, dispatching some three hundred Mamelukes and chasing off another four thousand. Napoleon imagined that they wouldn’t fight again until after the French seized Cairo. But on July 21, after a thirteen-hour march that began at 2 a.m. and ended the next afternoon around three, the French at last arrived at the place they were to fight their decisive battle: thousands of Mameluke horsemen stood facing them, their sabers flashing in the mid-afternoon sun.
“The Mamelukes have a great deal of spirit,” Dumas would write dryly to Kléber after the battle was over.
The horsemen were clad in an array of brightly colored embroidered silk jackets, the sleeves encrusted with ivory beads and precious stones. Each man carried pistols in his belt, a blunderbuss, daggers, and the renowned Mameluke sword, a curved saber that could cut off a human head at a single blow.‡
One of the French officers present marveled at these men who are “covered in sparkling armor, enhanced with gold and gems, dressed up in varied, brilliantly multicolored suits, their heads adorned with feathered turbans, and some wear gilded helmets. They are armed with sabers, spears, cudgels, arrows, muskets, blunderbusses, and daggers. Each is outfitted with three pairs of pistols … The wealth and novelty of this spectacle made a vivid impression on our soldiers; from that moment on, their thoughts were set on booty.”
The Mamelukes, for their part, could not take this new threat seriously. They had beaten back the Mongols when no other military force could. Every Mameluke warrior had practiced martial arts since childhood, learning a tradition nearly ten centuries old. To them, these French soldiers were nothing more than godless lackeys in matching uniforms.
The French numbered about twenty-five thousand. Estimates of how many Mamelukes faced them vary greatly, though historians often quote the numbers recorded by Napoleon: twelve thousand Mameluke warriors, each with three or four armed servants, eight thousand Bedouin, and twenty thousand janissaries (Ottoman foot soldiers). The Mameluke warrior’s military servants accompanied him into battle, reloading his pistols and passing him appropriate weaponry, rather like a golf caddy selecting his player’s clubs. The warriors were also trailed by musicians playing flutes and tambourines, as well as crowds of women and children following along to watch the unbelievers be dispatched.
The French soldiers formed themselves into squares, six ranks deep; it was a formation designed to resist and frustrate cavalry charges. The rows of infantry formed a kind of human fortress. At the center of each square Dumas and Murat distributed the cavalry, along with the ammunition and supplies. The artillery was placed at the four corners.
The Mameluke riders attacked the French squares in powerful but disorganized charges, each warrior hurling himself like a tank at the enemy. If they had been able to isolate groups of five, ten, or even a dozen French soldiers, one of these ultimate human fighting machines would have easily won. If they had coordinated themselves into a modern cavalry charge, they might have broken the squares. But, as it was, they could not penetrate even one. The French, despite their poor morale and the fact they had not slept all night, showed remarkable discipline in holding their fire as they watched hundreds of terrifying warriors charging at them, legendary blades poised to chop off their heads, waiting for the precise moment when the volley could be loosed to maximum effect. “The flaming wads from our muskets penetrated their rich uniforms, floating and light like gauze, embroidered with gold and silver,” recalled a soldier from one of the squares.
The Mamelukes had never seen one of their cavalry charges fail. Now they failed repeatedly. When French soldiers were hit, they were simply pulled into the center of the square and replaced. The French squares never broke, while the Mameluke horsemen kept attacking with futile bravery. Meanwhile the French artillery shelled their rear with howitzers, and another division attempted to cut the Mamelukes off from their fortifications and any possible retreat.
Realizing that the French were trying to trap them, the Mamelukes determined to make one final all-out charge on two of the five French squares. Thousands of warriors rode at the two at once, but both divisions held. The French countercharged with bayonets and drove the Mamelukes by the hundreds into the Nile, where more than a thousand are said to have drowned. Still, thousands of Mamelukes did ride off into the desert, where, though they were pursued by Dumas and Murat, most escaped south, into Upper Egypt, to regroup. After the French left, the Mamelukes would try to regain their former power over the country, ultimately in vain. Napoleon’s invasion had sounded their death knell—just as, ironically, Saint Louis’s crusader invasion in 1248 had marked the beginning of their reign in Egypt.
The French would call this the Battle of the Pyramids, though the pyramids at Giza were just far enough away that they likely were not visible during the battle at all. (Illustrations that show the Great Pyramid looming over the combat were either propaganda, which Napoleon went to great lengths to encourage, or orientalist fantasies.) Despite the implications of the Mamelukes’ defeat, in the battle’s aftermath Napoleon himself seemed mainly dazzled by the souvenirs they had left on or near the battlefield: “carpets, porcelain, silverware in great abundance. During the days following the battle, the soldiers busied themselves fishing in the Nile for bodies, many of which had two or three hundred gold pieces on them.”
LATE-eighteenth-century Cairo was a city of about 250,000 inhabitants, but the French marched in to find empty streets, since, without the Mamelukes, the people were too scared to come out to face their conquerors. The first to emerge were the Europeans. An Italian pharmacist told a French officer that the Mameluke leaders had warned the inhabitants of Cairo that “the infidels who come to fight you have fingernails one foot long, enormous mouths, and ferocious eyes. They are savages possessed by the Devil, and they go into battle linked together with chains.” Instead, as the Arab chronicler Al Jabarti (whose account of the expedition remains the most reliable non-French source on it) was shocked to discover, “the French soldiers walked the streets of Cairo unarmed and molested no one.” And the French wanted to be welcomed: “They joked with the people and bought whatever they needed at very high prices. They paid one [Egyptian] dollar for a chicken, fourteen paras for an egg—in other words, what they would have paid in their own country … Thus the shops and coffee houses reopened.”
As usual, Napoleon ordered a whirlwind of social and political reforms. Within weeks, the French organized garbage collection, established hospitals, and illuminated the streets by requiring that each house keep a lantern lit outside every night. They constructed mills and bakeries so Egyptians c
ould learn that most basic culinary glory—how to bake French bread. The savants and the engineers set to work mapping the city and making drawings of all the monuments and important buildings. They measured the Sphinx and poked around inside the Great Pyramid, disturbing thousands of sleeping bats.
While in Italy and Malta he had trampled upon religion, in Egypt Napoleon adopted a new strategy. Here Napoleon cynically calculated that he must be seen as an emissary of the Prophet, so he issued his elaborate and peculiar proclamation to the Egyptian people, printed on the Arabic printing press looted from the Vatican. Four thousand copies were printed in Arabic, Turkish, and French; the proclamation went to great lengths to impugn “that gang of slaves,” the Mamelukes, as usurpers, and to prove that Napoleon’s glory and the glory of the prophet Muhammad went hand in hand.
In French the proclamation read: “Tell the people that the French are … true friends of the Muslims! The proof is that they have been to Rome and have destroyed the throne of the Pope, who always incited the Christians to make war on Muslims.” In the Arabic leaflets, however, “true friends of the Muslims” had been rendered simply as “true Muslims”—an audacious provocation that Arabic readers would not fail to condemn.
Napoleon’s proclamation and subsequent communiqués were translated by the Arabist savants, who had trouble because many revolutionary political concepts simply had no equivalent in Arabic. To make matters worse, these intellectuals were assisted in their translations by several Maltese Arabic speakers who had signed on to the expedition. But Maltese Arabic was an anachronistic and unique island dialect that had little in common with the Arabic spoken in Egypt, and various translation quirks and errors rendered the French proclamations ridiculous to Egyptians.
The local Cairo clergy offered to issue a fatwa recognizing Napoleon as the legitimate ruler of Egypt—provided the entire French army formally convert to Islam. Napoleon actually considered the offer, but when it became clear that the muftis’ demand included mass adult circumcision and total abstinence from wine, the conversion plan was scrapped.
