Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (125 page)

Barely had he crushed the Mamluks at the Battle of the Pyramids (21 July) and captured Cairo than Napoleon, on 22 August 1798, set up the Egyptian Institut pour les Sciences et les Arts in a former Mamluk palace. It was based on the model of the Institute at Paris, of which Napoleon was a keen supporter. Condorcet, Volney, Daunou, and the Idéologues had conceived the Paris Institute as the pivot linking Enlightenment and social and political reform. The Cairo Institute, presided over by the mathematician Monge, its secretary, another mathematician, Jean-Baptiste Fourrier (1768–1830), and especially Claude-Louis Berthollet (1748–1822), a famous chemist and electrical expert, renowned for introducing new techniques of bleaching and dyeing textiles in France (and, with Monge, devising new explosives), was conceived in the same spirit. The new foundation, under its constitution, was directed to spread enlightenment, bring Egypt into a new era, conduct systematic research, and advise the government and army on specific issues where required. The Cairo Institute was divided into four sections (not three, as in Paris)—mathematics with twelve savants, physics with ten, political economy with six, and arts and literature with nine.

The Institute swiftly set up its own printing press, as well as acquiring a library, laboratory, and garden, its impressive rooms and quarters being well suited to treating local Cairo Muslim dignitaries to guided tours.
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The laboratory and library in particular attracted visiting Egyptian notables. The printing press published the Institute’s reports and also Egypt’s first newspapers,
Le Courier de l’Égypte
and
La Décade Égyptienne.
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The Institute and the papers took the lead in Napoleon’s effort to introduce the republican ten-day weeks, the
décade
, and to steer Egypt away from religious observance toward celebrating instead the revolutionary festivals adorned with all the characteristic republican trappings—tricolor flags, cockades, sashes, fireworks, and liberty trees.

Napoleon, having studied the Koran, was convinced that he could work with Islam. The French invaders had arrived with what they considered an all-encompassing regenerative ideology, and this conviction helped guide their entire approach in Egypt throughout. But any illusions the savants harbored that they could pursue science and learning on the banks of the Nile as freely and systematically as on the Seine, propagating new ideas among the public and effecting improvements in education and in the civil and criminal code as Napoleon urged,
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were rudely shattered from the outset. The British destroyed the French
fleet in Aboukir Bay on 1 August, cutting off the army in Egypt from all contact with France, Italy, and the Ionian Islands, and hence from supplies, reinforcements, publications, and scientific instruments. Egyptians, much to their disappointment, seemed entirely unimpressed with their assurances that they immensely respected Islam and medieval Arab achievements. Religion was the main cause of the embittering of relations in almost every way, Egyptians abhorring many aspects of French daily conduct, especially their treatment of women, drinking, permitting non-Muslims of every description to ride horses (forbidden under sharia), and preference for dealing with local Christians. Before long, Muslim Egyptians turned distinctly hostile and confronted the Institute and its savants with all manner of difficulties, especially during and after the Cairenes’ violent uprising against the French occupation in October 1798.

A powerful wave of disillusionment and exasperation soon darkened the Enlightenment in Egypt but did not entirely extinguish the sense of adventure and enthusiasm attending its inception. Efforts were made to achieve rapid, visible amelioration in the conditions of life. As Al-Jabarti notes, the French “announced that lamps should be lit all night in the streets and markets. Each house was required to have a lamp as well as every third shop. The people were to sweep, splash water, and clean the streets of the rubbish, filth and dead cats.” The French also set up a new court, or diwan, for Cairo, to handle commercial and civil disputes, though in doing so they further antagonized local opinion by appointing as many Copts as Muslims as judges, and by according Christians and Jews equal status.
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This diwan became the pivot of French efforts at public reeducation.

On one occasion, all the sheikhs and grandees of Cairo were summoned to a general meeting and assured the “sciences, arts and reading and writing which people in the world have knowledge of at present were learnt from the forefathers of the ancient Egyptians.” The French had come to deliver “Egypt from its sad state and to relieve its people from the Ottomans who dominated it in ignorance and stupidity.” They planned to set the country’s affairs in order and “make the canals which had fallen into oblivion flow with water. For then Egypt would enjoy access both to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, with a resulting massive increase in fertility and income.”
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Contact with India would be restored. All this was grandiose and overly ambitious, but not cynical. Having carefully studied the Koran, Napoleon sincerely nurtured plans for harmonious friendship, as well social, economic, and
technological improvements, rendering Egypt a showcase of enlightened amelioration.
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All manner of expeditions were dispatched into the desert, to the south, and the Delta, over ensuing months. A vast amount of scientific and other research, and numerous topographical, architectural, and archaeological drawings, accumulated. The expedition caused a stir in France from the outset in 1798, and gradually built a wider platform of interest for the project among readers at home. Volney’s
Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte
, observed the
Décade philosophique
when announcing the third edition in April 1799, was a work that had grown in stature and attracted wide interest due to recent developments in the Near East.
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The major scientific and scholarly encyclopedia later to emerge from the efforts of the French enlighteners in Egypt, the
Description de l’Égypte
, one of the most impressive of all monuments to the Enlightenment, a venture commencing already in 1798, was indeed massively impressive, but it was also slow, the first volume appearing only in 1802. The discovery in July 1799 of the Rosetta stone with its three columns of identical text in hieroglyphics, Coptic, and Greek, and the exciting possibility this afforded for deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, was reported to the Institute in Paris, recounts the
Décade philosophique
, already at a meeting on 27 October 1799, by Napoleon himself after his return from Egypt. The projected canal linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, the scheme that would one day become the Suez Canal, Napoleon assured the Paris Institute’s professors, had actually once existed, dug by the Pharaohs, and he did not doubt it was possible to reestablish it.
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Napoleon had often conversed with Volney in Corsica in 1791–92, when he first contemplated waging war for the Revolution against the Counter-Enlightenment (in Corsica).
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He took a keen interest in the Cairo Institute and generally in the idea of spreading Enlightenment in the Near East, being especially eager to show the Egyptians the superiority of Western science and technology. Several meetings attended by elite members of the Cairo community, Al-Jabarti among them, were intended to impress Egyptians with scientific equipment and experiments, including spectacular electrical and chemistry displays put on by Berthollet. But Egyptians construed these proceedings differently from the French, more as magic than science, obdurately refusing to be impressed or interested.
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Their stubborn indifference to science surprised and annoyed the French, not least Napoleon, as he records in his correspondence. Their indifference he deemed yet another instance of the
dismal and deleterious effects of religion that the French seemed totally unable to erase.

The Cairo Idéologues remained obsessed with the contradiction between the astounding misery and destitution of Egypt’s population and the imposing fertility and wealth of the land where irrigated. They hoped to resolve this contradiction through the power of ideas, science, and technology. The Cairo Institute savants may have been part of a military occupation, convinced of their own superiority and scornful of ordinary Egyptians, but they also deliberated on how Egyptian, Palestinian, and Syrian agriculture could be revived, commerce and industry stimulated, Nile hydraulics improved, and how all this should be combined with a general emancipation, commencing with the Greeks, Copts, Armenians, Kurds, Syriac Christians, and Jews. Lectures in French were provided for all wishing to hear them. In all, the Institute held sixty-two lecture and discussion meetings that were mostly well attended, mainly by French officers and savants but also by a few Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Cairene notables.
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Monge and Berthollet, savants with enviable international reputations, whom Napoleon knew from Italy, were the star lecturers, but both returned to France with Bonaparte after a year, in August 1799. Among the Institute’s more topical debates was that concerned with how best to deal with the plague outbreak gripping Alexandria since December 1798. Institute deliberations resulted in a raft of measures and sanitary rules requiring Egyptian city dwellers to fumigate their houses to disperse putrescence, hang out their clothing and bedding for several days on their roofs, and desist from burying their dead in cemeteries close to dwellings.
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The revolutionary Enlightenment brought to Egypt by Napoleon failed entirely with the Muslims. During the Cairo insurrection of October 1798, the rioters pillaged the house occupied by one of Napoleon’s commanders where most of the stock of telescopes, astronomical equipment, and mathematical instruments was stored; everything was destroyed. Yet, there was a sense in which the Cairo Institute and the savants participating in its work succeeded in advancing the Enlightenment in the Near East, even if not along the lines originally intended. Some Egyptian non-Muslims were interested in republican ideas and in the Enlightenment. Greeks living in Egypt, reported the
Décade philosophique
in Paris in January 1799, warmly welcomed the French, as did the large Coptic community (which some Western savants thought larger than it actually was), despite its abject condition and backwardness due to centuries of servile subjection. Armenians were
also interested and, as in Corfu, the Jews too stood to gain from the spread of French power and Enlightenment in Egypt and, in fact, everywhere in the Near and Middle East. Besides, added Joachim Le Breton (1760–1819), an art historian much swayed by Volney, there were the Bedouin, men quite different from other Arabs, and, as d’Argens and Volney stressed, less enslaved to religious authority.
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All this seemingly offered possibilities for expanding French influence and activity. At this point Volney published an article, reiterating his view that reliance on Bedouin, Druze, Kurds, Turkomans, Armenians, and Marionites offered good prospects for consolidating France’s presence in Egypt, Syria, and the Near East generally.
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Le Breton, a defrocked former monk who had entirely rejected his Christian background, also proposed, rather remarkably, encouraging the colonization of persecuted Jews from Central and Eastern European lands in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt as a way of stimulating commerce and industry in the region.
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“There is an assured means to give especially Syria an active, affluent and numerous population—namely, to call in the Jews. We know how much they love their ancient land [i.e., Judaea] and the city of Jerusalem!”
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This, he argued, would be an effective way to permanently entrench French influence. Le Breton devoted several pages to elaborating on how revival of the Near East under French auspices could be advanced by summoning the Jews. The universal hatred and prejudices against the Jews was a problem, but “la philosophie” teaches and urges everyone who is not ignorant to utterly discard all of that, as indeed had Napoleon while the French armada was on its way from Malta.
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Having overrun Egypt, and in December 1798 having occupied the ancient port of Suez on the Red Sea, the main French military expedition set out for Syria in early 1799. The army totalled 12,945 effectives. Napoleon’s partial conquest of Palestine in early 1799 gave rise to speculation that he would proclaim the deliverance of Jersusalem and recall the dispersed Jews of the earth back to “their ancient homeland.”
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In Palestine, then part of Turkish Syria, Napoleon proved victorious at first, capturing Jaffa on 7 March (where an appalling massacre of the inhabitants was perpetrated by the troops over whom their officers lost control) but was defeated eventually, partly by British naval power, partly Turkish tenacity, and partly disease. Marching up the Palestinian coastal plain, Napoleon was halted at the old Crusader stronghold of Acre, a formidable Ottoman base the French besieged in vain for two months in the spring of 1799. Acre, once the last surviving Crusader
stronghold in Arab lands, in Turkish hands withstood no less than thirteen French assaults, resulting in 2,000 wounded and 550 dead. Another 600 men died from the plague, many in the French hospital on Mount Carmel, in what is today Haifa, others at Jaffa. By the time the army extricated itself and marched back from Palestine across the Sinai Desert to Egypt, another 400 had expired from disease, heat, and exhaustion.