by Tom Reiss
FOR the thousands of French officers and enlisted men occupying Cairo, the situation hardly promised glory. They missed everything about their old life: Europe, the Revolution, the campaigns in Italy and on the Rhine, Malta—all of it was better than being stuck in a disease-ridden city surrounded by unfathomable people who most likely hated you.
“We have arrived at last, my friend, in the land we had so much desired,” Dumas wrote to Kléber. “But for God’s sake, it is so far from what we imagined. This wretched town of Cairo is inhabited by a lazy rabble squatting all day in front of their miserable huts, smoking and drinking coffee or eating watermelons and drinking water. One can easily lose oneself for an entire day in the stinking narrow streets of this famous capital.”
Cut off from wine shipments, the occupying army made beer and distilled spirits from local figs and dates, but many also took to the local custom of smoking hashish and drinking hash-infused juices and teas. The perpetual hash haze would become such a problem for the occupation that the French would eventually impose their own drug laws and begin confiscating and burning bales of hashish.
One day, without warning, the general-in-chief stormed into Dumas’s quarters. Napoleon himself, when he dictated his memoir on Saint Helena at the end of his life, recalled with apparent relish how he’d dressed down the man whose chest was level with his nose: “You have preached sedition. Beware that I don’t fulfill my duty, for your six feet and one inch would not prevent you from being shot in two hours.”
Napoleon never forgot a slight, and he’d been furious about the rumblings against him ever since Damanhur, when he had perceived Dumas to be inciting mutiny. Even in a crowd of cavalry officers, Dumas’s temper and bluster were legendary, and he was the most imposing as well as possibly the most respected of the officers.§ Napoleon may have calculated that bringing Dumas into line would silence the other generals in Cairo. But the fact that he recalled the incident decades later, after his empire had fallen, also suggests that Dumas had gotten under his skin.
In fact, he was wrong to assume the disloyalty of Dumas. Generals like Dumas led by inspiration and, like Washington’s Continental Army, they fought better with a reason to fight. Blind discipline was not necessary when one fought for a righteous cause.
But Dumas’s dedication to his republican ideals, to his nation, and to his comrades left the general-in-chief cold. To him, there was only one kind of loyalty that mattered—loyalty to him. Napoleon was not Cincinnatus—he was Caesar.
Though Napoleon would later abandon Egypt without so much as a warning to his fellow generals—leaving them to face hell in the desert while he returned to France to pursue his destiny—he expected them to achieve a far higher standard of loyalty. The logic of the imperial relationship was taking over, even though Napoleon was still officially only one general among equals.
Some days after Napoleon confronted Dumas, he summoned him to his quarters and bolted the door. Alexandre Dumas gives this account of the scene (related afterward by his father to his confidant, General Dermoncourt):
“General, you conduct yourself poorly with me and you are trying to demoralize the army,” Napoleon told him. “I know everything that happened at Damanhur.… I will shoot a general as soon as a drummer-boy.”
“Possibly, General,” said Dumas, “but I think there are some men whom you would not shoot without thinking twice about it.”
“Not if they get in the way of my plans!”
“Look here, General: a moment ago you spoke of discipline; now, you speak only of yourself,” said Dumas. “Yes, the Damanhur meeting took place … [and] yes, I said that, for the glory and honor of my country, I would go around the world, but if it was for the sake of your whim, for you I would stop at the first step.…”
“Thus, Dumas, you divide your mind into two parts: you put France on one side and me on the other.”
“I believe that the interests of France should come before those of a man, however great this man may be … I believe that the fortune of a nation cannot be subdued to that of an individual.”
“Thus, you are ready to separate yourself from me?”
“It is possible, but I don’t agree with dictators, not Sulla any more than Caesar.”
“And you ask for …?”
“To return to France at the first opportunity that presents itself.”
“I promise to put no obstacle in the way of your departure,” said Bonaparte.
“Thank you, General, it is the only favor I ask of you.”
As Dumas was leaving, Bonaparte muttered, “Blind is he who does not believe in my fortune.”
A different recollection of the conversation comes from Dr. Desgenettes, who had it from Napoleon. Napoleon’s account is interesting for its keen description of the psychological nuances at play, as he figures out quickly how the purity of Dumas’s idealism has made him vulnerable. Dr. Desgenettes recalled that Napoleon had begun their conversation by asking him what he thought of General Dumas.
“That he shows a mixture of the sweetest and kindest nature and all the fierceness that a soldier is capable of,” the doctor answered. To which Napoleon, recalling what he believed was Dumas’s subversion of his plan, said he’d told Dumas that if he “had been unlucky enough to notify me not to go further than Cairo, I would have shot [him] with no further formality.” He went on, “Dumas, in a respectful attitude, took it very well; but I added, ‘When that had been accomplished, I would have had you tried by the grenadiers of the army, and I would have covered your memory with opprobrium.’ Then [Dumas] started to sob and shed floods of tears.” Napoleon told Dr. Desgenettes, however, that he recalled “that beautiful deed of arms where [Dumas] stopped on his own and cut down, at the head of a bridge, a column of cavalry, and I felt at peace right away.” But, Napoleon said, he did not oppose Dumas’s leaving Egypt—“Let him carry elsewhere both the delirium of his republicanism and his passing furies.”
ON the high seas, in the meantime, the mystery of the French fleet’s location had brought Admiral Nelson to a fury of his own. It had made him the laughingstock of England. A London newspaper reflected the mood: “It is a remarkable circumstance that a fleet of nearly 400 sail, covering a space of so many leagues, should have been able to elude the knowledge of our fleet for such a long space of time.” Nelson already despised Napoleon and the revolutionary French, as all good British seamen did, but the harm to his reputation caused by losing the French armada made his desire to locate and destroy it more intense than ever. On July 28, tracking false rumors of a French attack on Crete, the British finally got hold of solid intelligence from Crete’s Ottoman governor: Napoleon was now in Alexandria. Nelson’s fleet set sail at once.
The frigates that had gotten separated from Nelson’s squadron in May had wandered the Mediterranean on their own since then. The French had sighted them off Alexandria just eight days before the Battle of the Nile—an ominous warning that might have saved them had they not ignored it. At 2:30 p.m. on August 1, 1798, as the French army was settling into the daily routine of occupying Cairo, a cheer went up on Nelson’s ships as the men finally caught sight of Napoleon’s fleet, lined up at anchor in Aboukir Bay.
A French lookout had actually spotted Nelson’s ships first, at about 2 p.m., as they began to round the tiny Aboukir Island marking the endpoint of the coastal shoals. Admiral Brueys reasoned that the British would not have enough ships in the bay by sundown to safely mount an attack. Naval warfare still operated at a glacial pace in the late eighteenth century, and ships took long hours to prepare for battle. Among other problems was that, in these last days of square sails, ships were good at sailing across the wind or downwind but bad at sailing into the wind. That was one challenge the British ships faced as they made their way into Aboukir Bay. The other challenge was to line up their ships in an advantageous position in relation to the French fleet. Eighteenth-century naval firepower was concentrated on the sides of each ship, where multiple decks of heavy cannon wer
e arrayed. Ships were measured by the number of heavy guns and also the number of decks that housed them. The biggest ships in Nelson’s squadron had 74 guns; the French ship the Guillaume Tell, on which Dumas had come to Egypt, had 80 guns, about average for the armada; the massive flagship the Orient had 120 guns. To sink or capture the French armada, Nelson’s somewhat outgunned fleet would need to find the best position from which to fire.
As the British ships continued to enter the bay, many of the French officers and sailors were still on shore digging wells to supply water to the fleet. The French admiral had anchored his ships very close to the shoals, sure that the enemy would not risk maneuvering his ships into the shallow, narrow gap between the French ships and the shore, so as to fire from the landward side. Most of the French ships’ guns on the shore side had therefore not even been mounted for battle. Brueys also thought Nelson would not be reckless enough to try anything in treacherous conditions in the failing light. To avoid friendly fire, navies of the era usually delayed combat until dawn. Like Napoleon, however, Nelson cared little for caution and still less about conventional tactics. He called his captains the Band of Brothers and expected them to carry out their mission creatively.
After several hours of tense maneuvering and cannon shots through the smoke-filled sea air, one of Nelson’s captains found a gap between the anchors of two French ships and decided it was the right size to sail through. Several of the lead ships of the French fleet, including the Orient, would find themselves surrounded as British battleships were able to maneuver into position between the French line and the dangerous shoals. Brueys must have realized his mistake, but it was too late.
The French fired first in this particular face-off, and cannon blasts lit the night sky over Aboukir Bay. The formidable French fleet put up a tremendous fight—Nelson himself was nearly killed when a piece of French shot struck his head. But the French position was poor, and the wind had turned in favor of the British, giving them more dexterity than the French, whose sails faced the opposite direction.
After a firefight of several hours, the Leander, Nelson’s smallest ship, moved into a gap opened when the French Peuple Souverain retreated from the British onslaught. The Leander then managed, without running aground, to slip into the narrow strip of water separating the French fleet from the shoals. From there it sent a barrage of cannon fire at the towering 120-gun Orient, battering in the process the French ship that sat between them, the Franklin, named for the electrical ambassador himself. Two other British ships joined the Leander, and together the three surrounded the Orient.
Even with much of its crew absent and half of its cannons unmounted, the Orient was so much larger and more heavily gunned than any of the British ships that it did well against them at first. “The Orient had nearly demolished two of our 74-gun ships, namely Bellerophon and Majestic, and would no doubt have done much more serious mischief,” recalled a British midshipman, but the French sailors “had been painting the ship, and with true French carelessness had left the paint oil jars on their middle deck.” The oil from the paint cans, along with turpentine, caught fire as British shot rained down on the deck. When the British saw the wild flames dancing across the great ship’s stern, they concentrated their blasts toward the flammable target. The fire spread rapidly, and sometime around 10 p.m., it found its way to the great cache of powder and ammunition in the Orient’s magazine.
The biggest ship in the world exploded like a giant bomb. Wood, weapons, and bodies flew so high into the night sky that time seemed suspended before they fell back down. Nine miles away in Alexandria, General Kléber saw a bright flame shoot toward the stars. (“When the Orient went up, we could make out men in the air, covered in flames, the cannons, the sails, the rigging; the whole harbor was on fire; and at the moment of the explosion, Alexandria was lit up,” recalled a French officer with a clear view from a terrace in the city.) And the treasure seized from the Knights of Malta, accumulated over a thousand years—gold bullion, priceless gems, and antiques, riches Napoleon had counted on to fund the expedition—sank to the bottom of Aboukir Bay. Coins and jewels rained down along with the cannon, burning timber, and severed limbs on the decks of the French and English warships as their crews ran for cover. Nothing else of the treasure would be seen again until divers began to bring up coins from Malta, Spain, and France exactly two hundred years later.‖
One of the few French ships to survive the day was the Guillaume Tell, which had carried General Dumas to Egypt. It was later captured by the British off Malta.
* At twenty-eight, General Étienne-François Mireur had been the youngest of Dumas’s cavalry brigadiers and also a doctor. Six years earlier, barely out of France’s finest medical school, Mireur had volunteered for the revolutionary army in Marseilles, where he achieved an odd renown: he’d supposedly been the first to lead his fellow volunteers in renditions of the recently penned French revolutionary anthem, and he sang it so enthusiastically that the song was forever after known for the place where Mireur and those volunteers had sung it—the “Marseillaise.” But whatever remained of Mireur’s enthusiasm had failed him on the march from Alexandria, and one day in early July, as a memoirist of the expedition bluntly described it, Mireur “got on his horse … before dawn, rode into the desert, and blew his brains out.” Other accounts said Mireur had recklessly endangered himself and been shot by Bedouins in a virtually suicidal way.
† Some French doctors mistakenly assumed Egyptian blindness (which they named “Egyptian ophthalmia,” or “ophthalmia militaris”) was caused by the desert climate. The debate over the true cause of the condition—later joined by British doctors—helped found ophthalmology as a separate field of medicine.
‡ The Mameluke sword was considered such a perfectly balanced weapon that, during the fifty years after the Egyptian expedition, it was adopted as the official cavalry weapon by almost all major Western armies and to this day is the official sword of the U.S. Marine Corps.
§ As fate would have it, the leaders of the group opposing Napoleon’s conduct on the expedition were all very tall men: along with Dumas, General Kléber, the geologist Déodat de Dolomieu, and the political savant Jean Tallien were over six feet tall, which was remarkable for the time. Napoleon’s normal sensitivity about height must have been increased by the stature of his opponents.
‖ A limited exploration of the Orient’s wreckage was conducted in 1983, but the first thorough study of the site began on August 1, 1998, precisely two hundred years after the Battle of the Nile. Of the fabled Maltese treasure, marine archaeologists found coins minted in Malta, Venice, Spain, France, Portugal, and the Ottoman Empire, suggestive of Malta’s central place in Mediterranean trade. But there have been no reports of a large trove of riches being recovered. Was it ever there? Although the dominant understanding has long been that Napoleon’s looted Maltese treasure had sunk with the Orient, some scholars hold the dissenting view that much of the treasure had already been moved ashore and melted down before the battle.
18
DREAMS ON FIRE
THE Battle of the Nile was one of the most decisive victories in naval history, and it instantly broke the communications and supply chain between France and Egypt.
When he was informed of the destruction of the French fleet, Napoleon called his fellow generals together and said, “We now have no choice but to accomplish great things … Seas that we do not rule separate us from our homeland—but no sea keeps us apart from either Africa or Asia.”* But survival rather than conquest was on the immediate agenda. Cut off from supplies, the men of the infantry and cavalry suddenly learned a new deference for the two hundred civilians in their midst: the savants. Before, the savants’ special quasi-military uniforms had been mocked by the regular soldiers, but now that they were all marooned in Egypt, the motley crew of scientists, professors, engineers, and artists became the Army of the Orient’s best hope in a hostile land.
Among the most brilliant and dedicated of these m
en was Nicolas Conté, a forty-three-year-old self-taught engineer, physician, painter, and inventor, who, among his many patriotic accomplishments, had founded the world’s first air force—the French army’s “Aerostatic Brigade.” He had converted one of Louis XVI’s old palaces into an air base, from which the brigade launched military balloons that hovered over battlefields on France’s frontiers in the mid-1790s, spying on troop movements. Napoleon had engaged Conté to run the Aerostatic Corps of the Egyptian expedition, but most of its military balloons had gone to the bottom of the bay, along with much of the savants’ other technical equipment, when the fleet sank.
Conté’s trademark look was a scarf that covered one eye, which he had lost in an explosion while experimenting with hydrogen to replace his balloons’ hot air. Undaunted by the current situation, he scurried around Cairo, offering to build the army and the city’s civilians whatever they didn’t have but needed. He built a foundry and recast the tools and instruments they had lost; he built machinery, factories, bakeries, windmills, and metal-stamping equipment for making weapons and minting coins; and he trained local workers to staff all his enterprises. Another savant recalled that Conté “had all the sciences in his head and all the arts in his hands.”
He also constructed new balloons from scratch, as part of Napoleon’s plan to impress the residents of Cairo with grand displays of French technological prowess. Egyptians were curious about the first launch, but were nonplussed to see that it was being used to drop copies of one of Napoleon’s proclamations over Cairo. The second launch left a distinctly poor impression. “The machine was made of paper and had a spherical form; the tapering panels which formed its surface were patriotically colored red, white, and blue,” recounted Le Courrier d’Égypte, the expedition’s official newspaper, describing how, “when [the Cairenes] saw the great globe rise of its own accord, those who were in its path ran away in fright.” Unfortunately, once it was aloft, with a reported 100,000 spectators watching, this cutting-edge piece of technology caught fire—it was, after all, a device made of paper being fueled by an onboard fire—and came crashing back to earth in flames. Luckily it was unmanned. The chronicler Al Jabarti expressed the Arab view: “The French were embarrassed at its fall. Their claim that this apparatus is like a vessel in which people sit and travel to other countries in order to discover news … did not appear to be true. On the contrary, it turned out that it is like kites which household servants build for festivals and happy occasions.”
