Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (124 page)

Muslims can escape from their abasement and wretchedness only through enlightenment and revolution. These considerations hardened Volney’s strange but then influential conviction that nothing is easier than to cause “une grande révolution politique et religieuse dans l’Asie” (a great political and religious revolution in Asia). He believed that such a “grande révolution” was not just immanent but urgently required and “easy” to accomplish. Muslim society’s defects were structural and deep-rooted but readily curable, not innate. Arabs can read, contended Volney, as intelligently as Europeans but are prevented by cultural and religious prohibitions and their political institutions. The general ignorance enslaving the Arab mind was rooted in what he called the universal “difficulté des moyens de s’instruire,” especially scarcity of books.
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In all Syria, only two libraries were worth mentioning, those of Djezzar at Acre and the Marhanna at Aleppo; and even the second, the larger, possessed only around three hundred books. Why are books so exceedingly rare in Ottoman lands? Because nearly all books appear
there only in manuscript, printing being practically nonexistent owing to the despotic whims of government and religious authority. Without printing (which Volney afterward tried to establish in Corsica) humanity cannot advance. Volney predicted that a Near Eastern version of the General Revolution would commence among the Bedouin and other nomads but that it would be ultimately driven by the resentment and a profound anger, he predicted, of the downtrodden remainder of the population.
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Robespierristes evinced markedly less interest in spreading the revolutionary creed abroad than Volney, Cloots, Proly, Lebrun, Paine, or the Brissotins. Following the Montagnard victory of June 1793, the Jacobin club at Constantinople hastened to reassure the parent society that it in no way wished to spread their revolutionary ideology among the Turks, Greeks, Armenians, or Jews, as the Brissotins had done. They confined their activities, they explained, to observing republican festivals and nurturing a republican spirit among the French community itself. Nevertheless, the Paris Jacobins remained suspicious because the Republic’s experts and diplomatic staff in Turkey mostly had ties with Roland and Lebrun (and because the wealthier French merchants in the Ottoman Empire opposed the Revolution). Frowned on, because their very existence could readily be exploited by the British and French émigrés to alienate the Turks from France,
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the Constantinople Jacobins, now reduced to just ten members, disbanded in March 1794.

Yet the views and attitudes of Volney and other Brissotin sympathizers had become diffused among the French community in the Ottoman Empire, and in Marseille and Toulon, and this foundation expanded once the Thermidorians gave way to a neo-Brissotin regime in 1795. By the time the new French ambassador, General Aubert du Bayet, settled in at Constantinople in late 1796, Brissotin revolutionary concerns were again fully in the ascendant. The General Revolution needed to be promoted vigorously. Aubert du Bayet (who had been imprisoned during the Terror) brought with him an astoundingly large staff, including no less than seventy artists and architects, besides military experts and naturalists, assigned to all manner of research projects in diverse parts of the empire on behalf of the Republic. But this only fueled Ottoman fears of French activity in the Ionic Islands and the Balkans where the French were directly appealing to Greek national feeling. Napoleon’s treaty of Campo Formio (17 October 1797), partitioning the Venetian Empire between France and Austria, established France as a power in the Levant through her acquisition of the Ionian Islands. By this time
Napoleon, conferring with now foreign minister Talleyrand, was already thinking of breaking with the Turks and seizing Egypt.
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The Ottoman Porte sensed the danger. Since the death of the Turkish Empire’s chief enemy, Catherine II, in November 1796, the Turks were less fearful of having to fight Russia without French aid. The sultan decided to reconsider his close ties with France.
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By the time Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt set sail some months later, the considerable body of French advisers and experts in Turkey, Greece, Syria, and neighboring lands were already under orders to pack their bags and leave.

The strategic and psychological, as well as propaganda, bridge between Napoleon’s Italy and the Levant were the Ionian Islands. The ascendancy of
il democratico governo
there, though brief, is significant in French Revolution history due to its intensely ideological character and its bearing on the wider French vision for the Near East. The French lost no time in suppressing Venetian ways and procedures in Corfu, or attempting to win over Greek Orthodox sentiment by according equal status and more advantages to their clergy than to the Catholics favored by Venice. The Revolution appealed not to rulers or the past but to peoples, urging the Greeks to consider the benefits of allying with France. While church property belonging to the Islands’ eleven Catholic churches and monasteries was immediately confiscated by the revolutionary state, Greek church property was deliberately left untouched. In July 1797, an “anti-aristocracy decree” was published in Greek and Italian, condemning all “aristocracy” as evil and declaring that the peasants throughout the islands were now entirely free of all “feudal” exactions and obligations.
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Outraged by the loss of his revenues, prestige, and authority, and the pilfering of silver crucifixes and plate, the vociferously protesting Latin bishop of the Islands was expelled for inciting the Catholic faithful against the Revolution.

All official letters circulating in the islands, whether in Italian, French, or Greek, were headed “freedom” and “equality.” Citizens were expected to appear in the streets bearing revolutionary cockades, and no one was permitted to disregard the changes the Revolution introduced. The first modern Greek public library was founded in Corfu in May 1798, dedicated to Greek national reawakening, liberty, and enlightenment. In August the first Greek publishing house followed, dedicated to publishing for the Greek people, which, among other items, produced revolutionary calendars in Greek, and soon reports of French victories in Egypt. The Islands’ forts and redoubts were renamed after great revolutionary events or victories in Italy. One of Corfu town’s
quarters was renamed the Quartier du 10 Aoust, another, the Quartier de Mars, where an “altar to liberty” was erected and revolutionary public celebrations were held. The Venetian Fort Salvador became Fort Lodi, and Fort Abram, Fort Rivoli.
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The revolutionaries also replaced some discarded Venetian nomenclature with Greek names, the Gate of the Hospital becoming the Gate of Epirus.
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The local Jewish community received equal rights and freedom of expression alongside Catholics and Greeks. Eager to revolutionize and modernize, the French introduced street lighting, ballet, and printed bulletins (mainly in French and Italian) concerning local affairs.

As elsewhere, the theater became a key resource for reeducating the populace. The first anniversary of the French occupation of Corfu, coinciding with the 10 Messidor (29 June) festival of agriculture, prompted a special effort to impress the inhabitants with what the French termed this “era of the liberty of Greece.”
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It was not easy to impress them. The new rhetoric and freedom of expression provoked various incidents in the theater, where “malicious” individuals hissed and stamped at scenes they were supposed to applaud.
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To ensure better order in the town’s theater, S. Giacomo, Corfu’s police commissaire, in October 1797, published disciplinary rules in Greek, French, and Italian, forbidding swearing, smoking, and bringing arms into the theater.
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Early signs of friction between French and Greeks soon grew into a serious problem. The frequent instances of Corfu inhabitants insulting the revolutionary cockade or other revolutionary symbols provoked arrests. With the ghetto restrictions imposed by the Venetian government dismantled, Corfu’s Greeks now had to rub shoulders with the Jews in public spaces, law courts, and theater, and address Jews in the same way as they addressed each other—as “citizen.” Before long, the thorniest problem in policing revolutionary Corfu, reported the commissaire, was the increasingly “bad humour of the Christian citizens toward the Jewish citizens,” antipathy responsible for numerous ugly incidents that the French commandant repeatedly took up with both Greeks and local Italian Catholics.
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The sultan did not need to be told, even before Napoleon’s invasion armada took shape in Toulon, that sweeping plans for a wider revolutionary intervention in the Near East were evolving in Paris. Before Aubert du Bayet left Paris for Turkey in 1796, he discussed a scheme to overrun Crete, an island closely inspected earlier by an officer attached to the Constantinople military mission. Officers posted in Constantinople regularly spoke of the Ottoman Empire’s military weakness, as
did Napoleon, encouraging the deliberations that led to the Directoire’s decision to invade Egypt. Between the coup of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797) and 11 May 1798, the early phase of the second Directoire, vigorous measures were taken against royalists, émigrés, and refractory priests, and there was a brief revival in Jacobin fortunes. The mood was emphatically republican and the army more saturated than ever with republican ideology. It was in this context, steeped in philosophique ideas and plans, that the Egyptian expedition was conceived and launched. The Directoire’s final decision to invade was made on 5 March 1798. Within two months, the expedition was prepared amid great secrecy to avoid arousing suspicion in London and Constantinople. The revolutionary armada comprised thirteen ships of the line, forty-two lesser warships, 280 transports, 38,000 troops, and 16,000 seamen.
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Leaving Toulon on 19 May, it reached Malta (the seizure of which Napoleon had been advocating for some time) on 9 June, the grand master surrendering without a fight.

The French occupation of Malta continued until September 1800 when the British gained possession of the island (which they were to keep for a century and a half). On Malta, the French abolished nobility and canceled the Church’s power, confiscating a great quantity of silverware and other items from churches and monasteries that was sent back to Paris. Jews, Greek Orthodox, and others were granted religious freedom and equal status to Catholics; the British by contrast afterward restored the privileges of both Church and nobles. Only after departing from Malta did the main expedition’s officers and men learn their true destination. The army was admonished to respect Islam, and especially their muftis and imams, and collaborate with them “as we have done with the Jews and Italians.”
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Accompanying them were 160 savants and scientists (some accounts put the number as high as 187) who were recruited and commissioned by the Directoire and equipped with a wealth of books and scientific instruments.
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While crossing the Mediterranean, not only the scholars but also Napoleon’s officers were required to read Volney, Niebuhr, and other recent accounts of the Near East. Among its aims, the scholarly, scientific section of the expedition intended to carry out a thorough study of the region’s topography, flora, and fauna, and impart new momentum to the disciplines of archaeology, Egyptology, Arabic studies, and deciphering ancient scripts, all then still in their infancy. Science, enlightenment, and emancipation, as well as strategic concerns, thoroughly infused the expedition,
the ultimate goal of which was to threaten Britain’s hold on India and topple Britain’s world hegemony.

French Enlightenment ambition in the Near East extended much further than simply a desire to carry out research. Montesquieu was mistaken, held Volney, like Diderot, d’Holbach, and Raynal, to classify Asia and the Middle East as unalterably “despotic.” These were undoubtedly lands of oppression and despotism, but their people were unnecessarily downtrodden, poor, and wretched. Their wretchedness could be ended swiftly via an ambitious program of enlightenment and emancipation, a general revolution transforming the legal, institutional, and political format of society. By replacing despotism with democratic republicanism based on the Rights of Man, Egypt could be emancipated, the people made happier, and France and Egypt be rendered firm friends and allies. Military and strategic expansionism fused in this way with the Revolution’s Left democratic republican ideology.
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Arriving in the Nile Delta on 1 July 1798, the French were exhorted by their commander not to rape or pillage and to respect Islam for the benefit of their country and the Revolution. They stormed Alexandria, where they lost no time in obliging local inhabitants, records the Egyptian chronicler Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1754–1825), “to sew their emblem [tricolor cockade] on their breasts.”
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The Muslim religious authorities were assured that the revolutionaries were ardent friends of Islam, as was proved by their measures against the papacy, their ending the centuries-long drive of the Knights of Malta against Muslims, and their having “destroyed” the Knights.
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With the Delta secured, the French advanced on Cairo. During the advance, printed proclamations in Arabic denouncing the Turkish Mamluk elite governing Egypt were dispatched ahead, records Al-Jabarti, to many places. For centuries, the Mamluks had exploited the merchants and generally oppressed the people “in the fairest land on the face of the globe,” as well as insulted the French. Cairenes would doubtless be assured by the Revolution’s enemies that the French had come to abolish “your religion.” But this was “pure falsehood” and the Cairenes must not believe it. Slanderers should be told that Napoleon had come solely to restore the people’s rights. Napoleon “served God—may he be praised and exalted—and revered his prophet Muhammed and the glorious Koran” more than did the Mamluks. Egyptians were urged to “tell the slanderers” that “all people are equal in the eyes of God and that the only qualities distinguishing
one man from another are reason, virtue and knowledge.”
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Any village resisting the army’s passage would be burned down.