Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  While sailing to Egypt from Malta, Napoleon wrote General Orders about how the army was to behave once ashore. Public treasures and the houses and offices of the revenue collectors were to be sealed up; Mamluks were to be arrested and their horses and camels requisitioned; all towns and villages would be disarmed. ‘Every soldier who shall enter into the houses of the inhabitants to steal horses or camels shall be punished,’21 he instructed. He was particularly careful to give no cause for a jihad. ‘Do not contradict them,’ he ordered his men with regard to Muslims. ‘Deal with them as we dealt with the Jews and with the Italians. Respect their muftis and imams as you respected rabbis and bishops … The Roman legions protected all religions … The people here treat their wives differently from us, but in all countries the man who commits rape is a monster.’22 He added that the first town they would enter had been founded by Alexander the Great, something that meant much more to him than to them.

  On Sunday, July 1 the fleet arrived off Alexandria and Napoleon landed on the beach 8 miles away at Marabut at 11 p.m. He captured Alexandria the next morning by storm, Menou’s men going over the walls with ease. ‘We began by making an assault upon a place [Alexandria] without any defence,’ General Pierre Boyer, the army’s adjutant-general, wrote to his friend General Kilmaine back in France, ‘and garrisoned by about five hundred Janissaries [elite Mamluk soldiers], of whom scarcely a man knew how to level a musket … We lost, notwithstanding, 150 men, whom we might have preserved by only summoning the town [to surrender] but it was thought necessary to begin by striking terror into the enemy.’23 Napoleon had the dead buried beneath the granite Pompey’s Pillar, and inscribed their names on its sides.*

  Napoleon stayed in Alexandria for a week, overseeing the disembarkation of his army, disarming the local population (except imams, muftis and sheikhs), making contact with the French merchants in Egypt, capturing nearby Rosetta, setting up a lazaretto (plague hospital) and writing an anti-Mamluk letter to the Turkish pasha in Cairo – ‘You know that France is the only ally the Sultan has in Europe’ – as well as producing proclamations on the printing press. One, dated ‘of the month of Muharrem, the Year of the Hegira 1213’, stated of the Mamluks:

  The hour of their chastisement has come. For too long this rabble of slaves, purchased in Caucasus and in Georgia, has tyrannized over the fairest part of the world, but God, on whom everything depends, has decreed that their Empire shall be no more! … People of Egypt! I am come to restore your rights, to punish usurpers. I reverence … God, his prophet Muhammed, and the Koran! … Have we not destroyed the Pope, who made men wage war on the Muslims? Have we not destroyed the Knights of Malta, because those fools believed it to be God’s will to fight against Muslims?24

  Napoleon was not afraid to invoke the deity – even to appear to take the side of the Muslims against the Pope – if it would serve his purpose and win over the population. Probably referring to the 1536 Franco-Ottoman alliance between François I and Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, he then rhetorically asked: ‘Have we not for centuries been the friends of the Grand Signor (may God accomplish his desires!) and the enemy of his enemies?’ His reading had served him well and in his proclamation he echoed the rhythm and style of the Koran.

  Leaving the fleet harboured in Aboukir Bay with orders that it be moored close enough to the land to be protected from attack, Napoleon set off for Cairo at 5 p.m. on July 7 and marched through the moonlit night. It was the first desert crossing by a modern Western army. They reached the first stop on the 150-mile road to Cairo, the town of Damanhour, at eight o’clock the next morning. Thereafter his men marched during the day, which they loathed to do because of the heat, the racking thirst, the flies, mosquitoes, snakes and scorpions, the swirling sandstorms and hostile Mamluks and Bedouin Arab tribesmen riding on their flanks ready to kill stragglers. Many of the wells and cisterns along the way had been poisoned or filled with stones. Berthier recalled that water sold for the same weight as gold on that march. One particular problem was trachoma (granular conjunctivitis or ‘Egyptian’ ophthalmia) whereby the scorching sunshine caused a roughening of the inside of the eyelids, which left at least two hundred men blinded.25 The young artillery staff lieutenant Jean-Pierre Doguereau never forgot how hard it was to move cannon in the soft sand, where they could sink up to their axles. ‘Well, general, are you going to take us to India like this?’ shouted a soldier at Napoleon, only to receive the reply: ‘No, I wouldn’t undertake that with soldiers such as you!’26

  Morale suffered badly in the desert. ‘It would be difficult to describe the disgust, the discontent, the melancholy, the despair of that army, on its first arrival in Egypt,’ wrote the contemporary historian Antoine-Vincent Arnault. Napoleon even saw two dragoons rush out of the ranks and drown themselves in the Nile.27 Captain Henri Bertrand, a talented engineer who became a colonel during this campaign, saw generals as distinguished as Murat and Lannes ‘throw their laced hats in the sand, and trample on them’.28 The soldiers’ major gripe was that in the entire seventeen-day march from Alexandria to Cairo there was no bread and ‘nor a drop of wine’ and, as Boyer told Kilmaine, ‘We were reduced to living on melons, gourds, poultry, buffalo meat and Nile water.’29

  At 8 a.m. on July 13, Mamluks attacked Napoleon’s camp at Chobrakhyt (also known as Chebreis) on the riverbank. Murad Bey, a tall, scarred Circassian who had co-ruled Egypt for years with Ibrahim Bey, attacked with around 4,000 men. Napoleon formed battalion squares, with cavalry and baggage inside, which the Mamluks merely circled on horseback. They looked magnificent in colourful costumes, medieval armour and riding fine horses, but Boyer was unimpressed with the way they ‘straggled round and round our army, like so many cattle; sometimes galloping, and sometimes pacing in groups of ten, fifty, one hundred etc. After some time, they made several attempts, in a style equally ridiculous and curious, to break in upon us.’30 Napoleon’s aide-de-camp Sulkowski used the same word, saying ‘against a disciplined army it was only ridiculous’.31 Armed with javelins, axes (which they sometimes threw), scimitars, bows and arrows and antiquated firearms, the Mamluks were no match for trained volleys of musketry. When he had lost around three hundred men, Murad rode off. It was a useful encounter for Napoleon, giving him a chance to practise tactics he later put to good use. He told the Directory about ‘a new kind of warfare, requiring much patience compared with the usual French impetuosity’, one that relied on steadiness in defence.32 The encounter did nothing to dent Mamluk hubris. ‘Let the Franks come,’ said one bey, possibly Murad himself, ‘we will crush them beneath our horses’ hooves.’33 (Another version was: ‘I will ride through them and sever their heads from their bodies like watermelons.’34)

  On July 19, while they were at Wardan on the way to Cairo, Junot confirmed what Napoleon might have already have suspected: that Josephine had been having an affair with Hippolyte Charles. (Although Joseph Bonaparte had long known it, he seems not to have told his brother at the time of their fraught interview with her.) Junot now showed Napoleon evidence in the form of a letter – we don’t know who it was from, and no post had been received since landing – and added that his cuckolding was the talk of Paris.35 It is a mystery why Junot chose that particular time and place to confront Napoleon. Charles had played a joke on him, gluing his sword into its scabbard, but that had been months earlier.

  ‘I have a great, great deal of domestic sorrow as now the veil has been completely lifted,’ Napoleon wrote to Joseph six days later. ‘Only you remain there for me on this earth. Your friendship is very precious to me: I have only to lose it and see you betray me for me to become a misanthrope … it is my sad condition to have all these feelings for the same person in one heart alone. You understand me!’36 This letter – which recalls parts of Clisson’s final letter to Eugénie – was intercepted by the Royal Navy on its way to France. Part of it was published, but not enough to make it clear to what Napoleon was alluding.37

  Bourrienne states that Napoleon intended to divorc
e Josephine when he returned to France. Napoleon wrote again to Joseph to say, ‘Please try to arrange a country dwelling for me when I arrive, either near Paris or in Burgundy, I intend to confine myself there for the winter. I am so tired of human nature! I need solitude and isolation, grandeur has harmed me; my feelings have dried up.’38 No letters from Napoleon to Josephine survive from the Egyptian campaign, which some historians have taken to mean they were lost or destroyed, but a much more likely explanation is that he simply didn’t write any. The next surviving letter is dated May 11, 1800, by which point he called her, more sedately, ‘ma bonne amie’.39

  To Napoleon’s understandable embarrassment, the British government published annual books of intercepted correspondence, covering 1798, 1799 and 1800. In order to underline what the editors gleefully called the ‘miseries and disappointments’ of his army, they reprinted letters from, among many others, Napoleon himself, Louis Bonaparte, Tallien, Bourrienne, Desgenettes, Menou, Boyer, Dumas, Brueys and Lasalle. (The last, perhaps the most dashing hussar in the army, wrote to his mother complaining that his hair was falling out due to ‘my total want of powder and pomatum’.40) Writing to their friends, families and mistresses, they were honest and, except for Napoleon, uniformly wanted to come home as soon as possible from a country that several described as ‘pestilential’. The collection included letters from Napoleon to Joseph complaining about Josephine’s profligacy – though that was hardly a state secret – and from Eugène to Josephine ‘expressing his hopes that his dear Mamma is not as wicked as she is represented!’ Rear-Admiral Jean-Baptiste Perrée, commander of the Nile flotilla, wrote to a friend: ‘The beys have left us some pretty Armenian and Georgian wenches, whom we have confiscated to the profit of the nation.’41

  On July 21 Murad Bey appeared again, this time with 6,000 Mamluks and 54,000 Arab irregulars, many of them mounted, at the town of Embaleh on the left bank of the Nile.42 The Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, the tallest building in the world until the twentieth century, was clearly visible nearly 9 miles away, and Napoleon referred to it in his pre-battle Order of the Day: ‘Soldiers! You came to this country to save the inhabitants from barbarism, to bring civilization to the Orient and subtract this beautiful part of the world from the domination of England. From the top of those pyramids, forty centuries are contemplating you.’43* Napoleon often said thereafter that ‘of all the objects that had impressed him in his life, the pyramids of Egypt and the size of the giant Frion [the tallest man in France] were those that had most astonished him’.44 The reference to England, which had no plans whatever to interfere in Egypt’s affairs or in any way benefited from Egypt, was entirely hyperbolic, but it presumably went down well with the troops.

  Napoleon formed his 20,000 men into five division-sized squares with artillery at each corner and the baggage, cavalry and savants inside. The men had quenched their thirst in watermelon fields, and were ready. They knew that if they pointed their bayonets at the Mamluk horses’ heads, in the words of one officer, ‘the horse rears up, unseating his rider’.45 The Mamluks attacked Desaix’s and Reynier’s divisions first, which, according to Boyer, ‘received them with steadiness, and at the distance of only ten paces opened a running fire upon them … Then they fell upon Bon’s division, which received them in the same manner. In short, after a number of unavailing efforts, they made off.’46 The battle of the Pyramids was over in two hours. Dommartin’s aide-de-camp Jean-Pierre Doguereau kept a journal of the campaign, in which he recalled that many of the Mamluks ‘threw themselves into the Nile; firing at the thousands of heads appearing above the water continued for a long while; all their cannon were captured by us. The enemy losses were considerable.’47

  Many of the three hundred French casualties were due to friendly fire between the squares rather than to the Mamluks, who lost twenty guns, four hundred camels and all their equipment and baggage. Because the Mamluks traditionally went into battle carrying their life savings, a single corpse could make a soldier’s fortune. After the battle, the victorious French measured out gold coins by the hatful. ‘Our brave men were amply compensated for the trouble they had experienced,’ was how Berthier put it in his report to the war ministry, printed in Le Moniteur. Napoleon won the soubriquet ‘Sultan Kebir’ (Lord of Fire) from the Egyptians as Murad fled to Upper Egypt, where Desaix was despatched in pursuit. After one of Desaix’s victories there, the corpses of drowned Mamluks were fished out of the Nile to be picked over.

  The day after the battle Napoleon entered Cairo, a city of 600,000 inhabitants, the same size as Paris and easily the largest in Africa. He set up headquarters in the house of Elfey Bey in Ezbekyeh Square and immediately started issuing orders for reforms. Each of Cairo’s sixteen districts was to receive its own diwan (council) made up of local dignitaries who would then send a representative to a Grand Diwan, under the presidency of the pro-French Sheikh al-Sharqawi. Napoleon accorded the diwans some powers over justice and administration, hoping they might eventually ‘accustom the Egyptian notables to the ideas of assembly and government’. His meetings with the Grand Diwan appear to have been jolly: one Muslim historian records that Napoleon was ‘cheerful and sociable with the gathered people and used to joke with them’.48 By direct decree Napoleon established a postal system, street lighting and cleaning, a coach service between Cairo and Alexandria, a mint and a rational tax system with lower impositions on the Egyptian fallaheen (peasantry) than the Mamluks’ extortionary demands. He also abolished feudalism, replacing it with rule by the diwans, set up a new French trading company, built modern plague hospitals and produced Egypt’s first printed books (in three languages). None of these reforms were undertaken on orders from the Directory, who were unable to get messages through; they were entirely on Napoleon’s initiative.

  When he invaded Egypt, Alexander the Great visited the Temple of Amon at Siwah in 332 BC to consult the great oracle there. Napoleon considered it ‘a great stroke of policy’ and said, ‘It enabled him to conquer Egypt.’49 As Egypt had been Muslim since the seventh century, Napoleon felt it would be wise to embrace Islam as much as possible, although he never went so far as the general he called ‘that fool Menou’, who married an Egyptian, converted to Islam and took on the middle name Abdallah. (Marmont asked him whether he ‘intended, in the customs of the country’, to practise polygamy as well; Menou indicated not.50) Asked two decades later whether he had ever truly embraced Islam, Napoleon laughingly replied: ‘Fighting is a soldier’s religion; I never changed that. The other is the affair of women and priests. As for me, I always adopt the religion of the country I am in.’51

  Napoleon respected Islam, regarding the Koran as ‘not just religious; it is civil and political. The Bible only preaches morals.’52 He was also impressed by the way that the Muslims ‘tore more souls away from false gods, toppled more idols, pulled down more pagan temples in fifteen years than the followers of Moses and Christ had in fifteen centuries’.53* He had no objection to polygamy, saying that Egyptian men were gourmands en amour, and, when permitted, ‘will prefer having wives of various colours’.54† His flattery of the ulama (clergy), his discussions of the Koran, and his holding out the possibility of his conversion to Islam – as well as his attempts to impress the sheikhs with French science – were all intended to establish a collaborationist body of Egyptians, with mixed results. As it turned out, no amount of complying with Islamic ceremonies, salutations and usages prevented Selim III from declaring jihad against the French in Egypt, meaning that any attacks upon them were thenceforth blessed.

  Napoleon used to joke regularly about how close he had come to embracing Islam. On Elba he ‘described humorously’ to a British MP his theological discussions with the imams and how he procured, ‘after many meetings and grave discussions at Cairo, a dispensation from being circumcised and a permission to drink wine, under the condition of their doing a good deed after each draught’.55 He said that after being excused adult circumcision – or being ‘cut about’ as he
put it – he agreed to pay for the building of a mosque (a cheap price under the circumstances).56 This story grew in the telling, and historians have subjected anecdotes like these to intense analysis and found them exaggerated, concluding that Napoleon was a compulsive liar. But who hasn’t embroidered the details of a good story to improve its effect?

  Of course a good deal of real lying was going on too, in the propaganda sheets that Napoleon set up in Egypt, echoing those of the Italian campaign. Le Publiciste reported that the Copts sang hymns in honour of ‘the new Alexander’.57 The Courrier de l’Egypte, published for the troops, claimed that he ‘was close to being talked of as a successor to Mohammed’.58 One Order of the Day featured a verbatim report of a conversation between Napoleon and three imams, one called Mohammed, which took place after he had climbed the Great Pyramid and seen the Sphinx (whose nose was not shot off by French artillery, as one myth alleged). Even the briefest extract shows it to have been beyond satire: