by Tom Reiss
Aside from supporting the troops and the colonization effort, the other reason the savants had been brought along—and the main reason the expedition is remembered to this day—was to increase the West’s knowledge of antiquity and Near Eastern culture. Though they were only two hundred among the fifty-thousand-strong French force, Napoleon saw the savants’ ongoing mission as so crucial that in the fall of 1798 he decreed that Conté, Dolomieu, and the rest of the learned men must have a permanent headquarters in the heart of Cairo, dedicated to “progress and the propagation of enlightenment in Egypt.” The Institute of Egypt, as it was called, researched and published works of archaeology, natural science, and historical data. Napoleon, who styled himself an intellectual and was proud of his membership in the French Academy in Paris, showered the Institute with problems both great and small: How do we purify Nile water? Which would be more practical in Cairo, windmills or watermills? What is the civil and criminal law in Egypt and what elements should we keep or throw out? Is there a way of brewing beer without hops?
When I went to Egypt looking for what remained of Dumas and the expedition, I found that while all traces of the vast military enterprise had disappeared into the sands, the legacy of the savants’ cultural and scientific mission was still oddly alive, carrying on quixotically in the heart of modern Cairo. Behind the high iron gates of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, guarded by tricolor-clad soldiers, lay a perfectly groomed garden of Cartesian order and neoclassical architecture. Here, I met young Egyptian men who printed orientalist books on a room-sized press, using movable-type alphabets—which included little lead hieroglyphs—and I watched old men sewing the books together with long needles and spools of thread the size of bowling pins. A few blocks away, I found the Institute of Egypt itself, in its original revolutionary era building, stuffed with nearly 200,000 works of history, geography, science, and art, all of which had survived world wars and revolutions, putting the study of the ancient world above the modern world’s strife, and giving Napoleon’s ill-fated attempt at founding a colony in Egypt a positive legacy—at least until December 17, 2011. On that day, as Arab Spring fighting between protesters and police spilled over from nearby Tahrir Square, the Institute caught fire, the flames fed by thousands of priceless books, manuscripts, and maps. By the end of the day, the most significant legacy of the French expedition in Egypt had been destroyed.†
THERE is no record of how Alex Dumas reacted to the destruction of the French fleet, with the loss of at least two thousand men, but it isn’t difficult to imagine. Concerned with maintaining order in Cairo and dealing with the continuing Bedouin threat, Dumas in the weeks after the disaster concentrated on finding mounts for his men. He dealt with stables and dealers and Bedouin sheikhs, and bought both horses and camels. The dragoons and cavalry were gradually outfitted, and some were given magnificent Arabian steeds abandoned by the Mamelukes.
Napoleon considered the cavalry vital to impressing the Egyptians, who had for centuries been ruled by mounted soldiers. Sometimes Dumas rode far into Upper Egypt chasing Mameluke insurgents or Bedouins. Other times he made forays into the delta, where the roads and paths along the Nile were still treacherous. Anywhere outside the two cities of Cairo and Alexandria, French soldiers and civilians were prey for kidnappers, insurgents, and bandits.
The letters General Dumas wrote in Egypt showed that he felt growing heartache. A letter to Marie-Louise that had been stowed in the safe in Villers-Cotterêts read:
Cairo, the 30th Thermidor, Year VI [August 17, 1798]
Be happy if it is possible for you, because for me all pleasures have died here, unless I can one day see France again, but when?… I deeply desire to tell you everything that is in my heart, but one must be silent and choke on one’s pain. Embrace my dear, dear child, mother, father [his in-laws, the Labourets], and all our relations and friends.
The only other letters from Dumas that I could find from the fall of 1798 were to General Kléber in Alexandria. Kléber—who shared Dumas’s opinion of Napoleon—memorably summed up his command by stating that Bonaparte was “the General who costs 10,000 men a month.” Kléber detested the way he used people as mere instruments and was ready to send thousands to perish if it would give him the smallest advantage. “Is he loved? How could he be?” Kléber scribbled in a notebook. “He loves nobody. But he thinks he can make up for this with promotions and gifts.” Like Dumas, Kléber truly believed in the ideals of 1789. To them Napoleon was leading the great revolutionary French army into the gutter.
But the situation in Egypt—the ersatz “Republic” meant to assuage the economic losses from the abolition of slavery in the sugar islands—must have been especially painful for Dumas. He had overcome the legacy of slavery by embracing an ideal of brotherhood and liberty. Yet walking around Cairo, Dumas would have seen black Nubian slaves laboring in homes and fields and being sold in the markets. Though the Arab trade in black Africans was far older than the European one, it had never been questioned in a society like Egypt’s. “The caravan from Ethiopia arrived in Cairo by land along the Nile, carrying 1200 black slaves of both sexes,” one French corporal wrote. “Humanity is revolted by the sight of these victims of Man’s ferocity. I shook with horror when I saw the arrival of these poor souls, almost naked, chained together, wearing a look of death on their dark faces, reduced to being vilely sold like cattle.”
Egypt had been built on slavery at every level, right up to the top, since even the Mameluke ruling class had originally been brought there as slaves. It was hardly in Dumas’s brief to set free the thousands of African slaves who lived in misery wherever he turned. Yet wasn’t it the army’s stated mission to liberate mankind and enforce the laws of 1794? “We have seen how slavery like a vast cancer covers the globe,” one revolutionary had declared. “We have seen it spreading death shrouds over the classical world and the modern one, but today the bell of eternal justice has rung, the sacramental words have been read out by the voice of a powerful and good people—slavery is abolished!”
And yet here was slavery, alive and well in the new French colony of Egypt, and the general-in-chief had no interest in doing anything about it. Liberating slaves was one thing in Malta, where Napoleon intended to subvert the local order, and the galley slaves were part of that order (it also made a good impression on the Muslim world to free Muslim slaves in advance of the landing in Egypt). It was another thing entirely in Egypt, where he wanted to use the local order to prop up his power. Some French soldiers even bought their own black slaves in the markets here, a violation of the Republic’s law, a law Napoleon flouted with impunity in this remote country. At one point he himself even ordered the procurement of two thousand slaves to be incorporated as soldiers. These slaves could not be obtained, but some 150 black Africans did enter the French military in Egypt as part of a special brigade. They were eventually scattered to diverse postings, and grouped with black soldiers from the Caribbean, a type of racial segregation that also violated the Republic’s constitutional guarantee of racial equality.
IN August 1798, in an episode that could have come straight from one of his son’s novels, General Dumas happened upon a treasure of jewels and gold—but there, alas, the similarity to The Count of Monte Cristo ends.
He discovered the abandoned stash, likely the property of some Mameluke warrior, buried beneath a house whose repair he was supervising in central Cairo. Although Dumas had protested the widespread pillaging of jewels and money in northern Italy, now he took a different sort of principled stand regarding this treasure, whose owner, after all, had fled into the desert, if he was even alive.
There is no evidence that Dumas had compunctions about taking the treasure—to the French, it was easy enough to see the Mamelukes as the aristocratic oppressor class and foreign usurpers of the local Egyptians.‡ But he turned the treasure over to the army in full, and sent, according to his son, the following note to Napoleon:
The leopard cannot change his spots,
nor can I change my character and principles. As an honest man, I must confide to you the fact [of a treasure] I have just discovered.…
I abandon it to your disposition. reminding you only that I am a father and without fortune.
Napoleon was glad to accept the treasure, for that fall the army would urgently need all the funds it could get, with its Malta plunder sunk and the lifelines to France cut. I never found any acknowledgment by him of Dumas’s self-restraint—beyond this brief note, sent to one of the savants, on August 23, 1798:
To CITIZEN POUSSIELGUE
Headquarters, Cairo, 6 Fructidor, Year VI
General Dumas knows the house of a bey where there is a buried treasure. Consult with him to arrange for its recovery.
Bonaparte
The other great service Dumas did Napoleon that fall was to aid him in putting down the Cairo revolt. The revolt centered on the Al-Azhar Mosque, Cairo’s main mosque, where for days the mullahs had been preaching that the French were worse oppressors than the Mamelukes, since they were unbelievers to boot. Revolt was therefore sanctified and indeed required by God and the prophet Muhammad, they said. Despite Napoleon’s pro-Muslim statements and his attempts to write himself and the Revolution’s other deists into the Koran—or perhaps because of them—many average Egyptians were ready to fight the invaders. The revolt ignited on October 22, and for three days terrifying scenes of murder, pillage, and arson bloodied the city.
After rescuing some savants at the Institute, where they had barricaded themselves against the mobs, Dumas set his hand to dispersing the main rebel groups, which had holed up in the Al-Azhar and turned it into their headquarters. In some versions of the events, Dumas charged into the mosque itself on horseback, while scattering rebels cried, “The Angel! The Angel!”—apparently believing the black rider was the Angel of Death from the Koran. Alexandre Dumas repeated the story in his memoirs, along with the following exchange, in which his father was greeted warmly by Napoleon after the rebellion was put down:
“Bonjour, Hercules,” he said. “You have struck down the hydra.” And he held out his hand.
“Gentlemen,” he continued, turning towards his retinue, “I shall have a painting made of the taking of the Grand Mosque. Dumas, you have already posed as the principal figure.”
Yet eleven years later, when Napoleon commissioned the painter Girodet to paint his celebrated picture The Revolt of Cairo, which depicted the epic melee inside the mosque, the “principal figure” of General Dumas was erased—or, rather, it was replaced by a blond, blue-eyed dragoon atop a rearing steed, saber raised, in a mocking echo of Dumas’s trademark heroism. In another painting of the incident, the officer entering the mosque, saber drawn, is Napoleon himself.
NAPOLEON would leave Cairo without notice or fanfare the following summer and would sail back to France, leaving Kléber, who had for so long yearned to return home himself, to assume command and mop up the failed Egyptian operation. Napoleon would not even tell Kléber directly that he was turning over supreme command to him; he sent him instructions by mail. Learning that Napoleon had left in the night and put him in charge, Kléber is said to have responded with the sort of blunt language that endeared him to his friend Dumas: “That bugger has left us here, his breeches full of shit. We’re going to go back to Europe and rub it in his face.” But Kléber did not live to fulfill this oath: he was stabbed to death on a Cairo street by a Syrian student hired by the Ottomans. (The assassin’s skull was taken back to France where generations of phrenology students studied it for indications of “murderousness” and “fanaticism.”)
General Dumas got out of Egypt in March of 1799—no doubt full of grave misgivings at leaving Kléber behind. Reversing the steps of the previous spring, he rode from Cairo to Alexandria, there to find a ship to take him home. By his side was General Jean-Baptiste Manscourt du Rozoy, who had first served with him at the Siege of Mantua. Manscourt was about fifteen years older than Dumas, and an aristocrat, but he was an amiable and good-hearted companion. Together they rode toward the harbor and made inquiries about hiring a ship. There were no military ships going to France, but passage was now considered possible on a civilian ship—the less impressive, the better.
This was how Dumas, Manscourt, and another illustrious passenger, the savant Déodat de Dolomieu, came to hire passage on an old corvette called the Belle Maltaise. The vessel’s condition did not inspire confidence, but it had a reputation as one of the best ships remaining in the Alexandria harbor, and besides, they had little choice. Dumas gave its captain, a Maltese sailor, funds for whatever repairs might be necessary for the journey, but he would later find out that the captain had simply pocketed the money.
In Cairo Dumas had sold most of his possessions and bought eleven Arabian horses; he also bought four thousand pounds of Arabian coffee, which he planned to sell back in France. He loaded his horses and his coffee, along with a collection of Mameluke swords, onto the boat.
Besides the generals, the horses, and the geologist, the ship was packed with Maltese and Genoan passengers, and about forty wounded French soldiers. All the French military men had been beaten down mentally and physically and were looking forward to nothing more than going home. They could not weigh anchor soon enough.
Immediately before sailing, Dumas was approached by four young Neapolitan naval officers who said that their ship had been sunk by the English and that they were trying to find any passage back to Europe. He arranged for them to join the ship’s party.
The Belle Maltaise departed Alexandria on March 7, 1799. In Villers-Cotterêts, I found a note Dumas had written two weeks earlier to “Citizeness Dumas”:
I have decided to return, my beloved, to France. This country, with its rigorous climate, has altered my health a great deal.… I hope to follow [this letter] very closely.
My desire is but to escape the English so as to embrace what will never cease to be dearest in the world to me.
Your friend for life,
Alexandre Dumas
It was the last word anyone would hear from him for over two years.
* The governors of the British East India Company reached a different conclusion about the impact of Aboukir Bay. They awarded Admiral Nelson a large cash bounty after his victory, having concluded that he had just saved India for them.
†A record of the savants’ work was preserved in the monumental twenty-three-volume Description de L’Égypte, published between 1809 and 1828. Its merger of languid orientalist landscapes with Pharaonic renderings and desert battles between revolutionary soldiers and the medieval Mamelukes, all of it bedecked with imperial eagles reminiscent of Rome’s, produces an effect almost of science fiction—as though these tomes had been left by space aliens whose life span traversed both the ancient and the modern periods of humankind. An original copy of the Description was among the books burned in the 2011 destruction of the Institute.
‡ Nevertheless, Napoleon had actually decreed, on September 7, 1798, after the destruction of the fleet, that all young Mamelukes between the ages of eight and sixteen would join the French expeditionary army, along with all Mameluke slaves and servants of the same age, and over the next months some two hundred Mamelukes were integrated into the French army. They wore a rigid red or green hat with a white or yellow turban wrapped around the base, a kind of cross between an infantry hat of the period and a fez; it looked a lot like a birthday cake. Eventually they would follow Napoleon back to France, and in the years of his empire, the immigrant Mamelukes would serve with outstanding valor at the Battle of Austerlitz and during the Russian campaign (where they gave the Cossacks as good as they got). Strangely, the Mamelukes who went to France became fiercely loyal to Napoleon—the man who had destroyed their culture and ended their rule. By the Battle of Waterloo there were only forty-one of these “French” Mamelukes left, yet on that day they made a futile charge at the British cavalry squares—an eerie mirror image of the original charge at the Battle of the Pyramids—to defe
nd “their emperor.”
19
PRISONER OF THE HOLY FAITH ARMY
THE Belle Maltaise departed Egypt on the night of March 7, 1799. The ship seemed to be well armed and well provisioned, and thanks to the pitch-dark night and brisk winds, she avoided British cruisers and made about forty leagues by morning. In the account Dumas later wrote about his ordeal—I found the stained parchment pages in the safe in Villers-Cotterêts, with line after line of his elegant, furious words etched on them with a quill pen—he recalled discovering that in fact “the ship was dilapidated.” This, he noted dryly, “surprised us early on the first night of our navigation as it began taking in water from all sides.” There was one lifeboat on the vessel that could accommodate perhaps twenty people; nearly 120 were registered aboard.
“Having already found ourselves 40 leagues from the Egyptian coast, with the wind absolutely against our returning,” Dumas wrote, there was nothing to do but to jettison everything of weight, including provisions, cannonballs, fresh water, and the ship’s anchors and cables. Dumas sacrificed his four thousand pounds of Arabian coffee to the waves, and even most of his prized Arabian horses. (In a letter, Dolomieu would later blame Dumas for weakening the ship by cutting a beam in order to fit the horses.) “I saw the necessity, so as not to sink, of throwing overboard ten pieces of cannon successively, and nine of the eleven Arabian horses I embarked with,” General Dumas wrote.* “Yet despite this lightening,” he added, “the danger only worsened.” The leaky corvette continued to take on water at an alarming rate, especially after a ferocious storm began, lashing the ship with rain and high waves.
