IAN COLLER
The story of the French occupation of Egypt from 1798 to 1801, and its failure, has been retold many times over two centuries. It has often served as a touchstone for modernity’s encounter with its ostensible opposite: a Muslim society that has often been painted as isolated, theocratic, deeply conservative, and resistant to change.1 But the arrival of French troops on the shores of Egypt just nine years after the storming of the Bastille should tell us quite the opposite—and something that should be quite self-evident—that Egypt was in every way a part of the world in which these revolutionary transformations were taking place. Once we take the global view of the French Revolution as our starting point, we can begin to see the complex ways in which the societies of France and Egypt were linked, the evolving logic of postrevolutionary politics that gave rise to the failed occupation, and the impact that the attempt to unroll the republic in Egypt ultimately had on both France and Egypt.
The year 1798 was once considered a kind of watershed in the history of Muslim societies in the Middle East and North Africa, and while many historians have rightly criticized this Eurocentric presumption, this should not lead us to neglect the significance of the events unleashed in that year, either for Egypt or for France. The principles under which the French occupied Egypt were as radical and transformative for Egyptians as they had been for French, Italian, or Irish men and women. But the invasion and occupation also provoked bitter conflict and resistance, which itself had complex ramifications in the longer term.2 The French set out to “unroll” the republic in Egypt, while bringing the very birthplace of civilization into the French orbit, and it was for this reason that Bonaparte recruited so many scientists, engineers, technicians, and draftsmen for what some historians have aptly described as the “Egyptian Laboratory.”3 The technocratic nature of this project was one element in the failure of the republican model in Egypt: while Bonaparte and his administrators learned quickly, they were unable to keep pace with the consequences of their early mistakes, particularly in regard to religion and its place in Egyptian society. On the larger canvas, the Directory had miscalculated the Ottoman response and its resonance in Syria and Egypt—whether innocently or disingenuously, it is hard to tell. Bonaparte met insurmountable opposition to the French advance in Palestine, and violent insurrection in Cairo.
In a purely mechanical sense, the consequence of this concatenating disaster was Bonaparte’s departure from Egypt to seize power in France. But the relationship between Egypt and the “ending” of the Revolution was not a wholly aleatory one. Egypt was Bonaparte’s first experience of direct rule and shaped his vision of personal power. In particular he consistently cited his religious policy in Egypt as the precedent for the Concordat. As Louis Bergeron noted, he surrounded himself with the “Old Boys from Egypt” in his imperial administration in Europe. More than a third of French prefects had cut their teeth in Egypt.4 Transforming that defeat into a victory was a preoccupation of the Napoleonic regime. The giant canvases of Gros and Girodet addressed key accusations leveled at the occupation, including poisoning soldiers infected with plague and massacring the insurgent population of Cairo. The emperor kept close by him a Mamluk servant, Roustam, and a praetorian guard (composed in part of Egyptian and Syrian soldiers) dressed in expensive Oriental fabrics. Josephine’s palace at Malmaison was redecorated in the Egyptianizing style he favored during the Consulate.
But such fripperies should not disguise the ongoing strategic significance of a possible return to Egypt, which closed only with the consolidation of Muhammad Ali after 1810. For this reason, the most strategically sensitive parts of the Description de l’Égypte, the great scientific publication on Egypt, did not appear until the Restoration. Egypt would drag France back into international power struggles in 1840, 1880, and 1956, and each time the result would be failure and a major shift in France’s foreign policy. In this sense, the door that opened in 1798 never quite seemed to close.
The story of Egypt in the French Revolution has always been treated as a case apart. If it has been connected to anything beyond rampant exoticism, it has been to France’s later aggressive colonial expansion in North Africa, and certainly not to contemporaneous events in France and Europe. Such colonial connections certainly exist, although they are complex and deserve more nuanced analysis. But the occupation of Egypt was also, and crucially, an event of the French Revolution. It must be understood within the evolving politics of the post-Thermidorean regimes. Egypt can illuminate in important ways some of the key processes at work in this second phase of the Revolution, a phase in which the Revolution was no longer simply “French”—if it had ever really been so. Moreover, that quicksand-like involvement in Egypt would help bring this second phase of the Revolution to a close. By any reckoning, Egypt was the high watermark of the global territorial expansion of the Revolution. The transformations we can observe within the occupation itself conform to the shift within the French regime, away from a set of republican ideals of liberty and equality to the kind of imperial machtpolitik that would predominate under the regime of Napoleon Bonaparte, the former governor of Egypt.
Eighteenth-century Egypt was a society rocked by fierce struggles between different parties competing for power. If there is little evidence that these internecine conflicts bore the hallmarks of what have conventionally been claimed as “democratic revolutions” in the Atlantic context—representative bodies, an expanding print culture demanding liberty from censorship, the push for the enfranchisement of a middle class—we should not be too quick to dismiss them simply as peasant rebellions or opportunistic power struggles.5 Instead they may be considered in terms of what Christopher Bayly has provisionally described as “conjunctural revolutions”—a set of major social changes, expressed in quite different ways, but responding to the same broad set of global conditions across this period.6 The references for revolution in the Muslim world were different: the forms of consultation and legitimacy prescribed by Islam, new theological challenges coming out of the Arabian Peninsula, and a vast Islamic ecumene stretching across Africa and Asia as well as parts of Europe.
Another great difference between Ottoman and western European societies was the toleration—prescribed by Islamic law—of large religious minorities, whose boundaries ran across conventional class lines. Thus, many of those pushing for entry to the privileged upper ranks of Ottoman society were Christians and Jews.7 In Egypt these minorities were principally Copts and Syrian Catholics, but they also included “Franks” or local Europeans. These groups are key in understanding the chain of connections linking France and Egypt. Like the professional classes in France and Europe, they constituted a primary constituency for the revolutionary ideas of the French in Egypt: indeed, their awareness of such ideas preceded the arrival of the French in Cairo, and they quickly demanded from the French regime equality of rights and the removal of traditional restrictions. But local Franks took an even more critical role: like other local revolutionaries in Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands, and like the “Black Jacobins” of the Caribbean too, they played a leading role in both invoking and contesting the aegis of France at a crucial moment in the development of the Revolution, helping to drag the “French” Revolution out onto the world stage, making it a world-historical event. Moreover, there are indications that revolutionary sympathies were considerably more widespread in Egypt (and even beyond) than we have imagined. One result was the formation of a network of independence-minded “patriots” across the religious spectrum in Egypt: the expatriation of a part of that group would have consequences for both Egypt and France, and for their relationship over the following century. It is along these three lines of development—the evolving politics of the sister republics, the role of local revolutionaries, and the development of a prorepublican party in Egypt—that this chapter will trace an initial response to the complex question of Egypt and its role in the French Revolution.
Marc Belissa has compared the period from 1795 to 1802 with the redefinition of the “new world order” after the fall of the Berlin Wall.8 What emerged during this second period of the French Revolution was a profound shock to an ancien régime “world order” based on the relationships between sovereign rulers, and represented a major turning point in world history that would ultimately result in the decisive shift toward an “international” world order of states. But, as Bernard Gainot has written, French revolutionary foreign policy between 1796 and 1799 was not “discreet, specialized, and secondary to the internal issues of the period,” but rather a highly public matter of concern.9 Indeed, it may be considered the defining question facing the republic. Just as the situation of continental war and the terrifying threat of invading armies helped shape the internal emergency conditions of 1793 and 1794, the euphoria of victories in 1795 and 1796 turned the attention of revolutionary leaders, journalists, and the public outward to France’s boundaries. We may distinguish three tiers of this thought: the self-interest of the French state; a limited expansionism to protect smaller republics or fledgling republican movements; and a more radically universalist republicanism that looked beyond the limits of Europe, to Asia and Africa in particular. These questions no longer applied solely to French men and women, but to millions of others whose destinies were now deeply entangled with that of France.
Shortly before the fall of the Jacobin government in 1794, revolutionary France had at last begun to win military successes not only against the counterrevolutionary insurrection in the west of France, but also at its borders with the Netherlands and Italy. Consequently, it found itself in a position to determine the political direction of peoples not considered “French” in any conventional sense. New questions now arose regarding the boundaries of republican France and the French place in a “new world order.” Should the republic simply stabilize its place in a Europe of monarchies, or use its growing military force to republicanize the Continent? Some conservatives pushed for a return to older French boundaries, while others insisted French sovereignty should extend all the way to the Rhine and the Alps, which they called the “natural frontiers” of France. Yet, as Andrew Jainchill has observed, “the history of republics and early modern political philosophy both taught that republican liberty and territorial expansion were fundamentally incompatible.”10 This doctrine of republican constraint was compromised by the existence of vulnerable republics on France’s borders, claiming the ideological aegis of France. The decision to support the “sister republics” created a new ground that helped expand and modify the political understanding of the republic. It is by following this development that we can better understand both the origins of the “expedition” to Egypt and its impact on the political trajectory of the First Republic.
The city of Liège in Belgium had declared itself a republic as early as 1789, long before France became a republic in 1792, and the fledgling Republic of Basel had voted for absorption into France in 1793. The following year Amsterdam was reborn as the Batavian Republic after the defeat of Dutch and British forces. This situation helped the party that insisted France’s security would be best assured by a ring of republics sharing the same political commitments and naturally friendly to France. But other members of the Directory—some hoping for a restoration of the monarchy—were fiercely opposed to any expansion of France’s frontiers or interference in neighboring states.11 Others, particularly those fighting on the eastern boundary of France, felt that the republic should be a unitary and universal principle, regardless of territorial boundaries. With the spectacular success of the French army in Italy under the command of General Bonaparte during 1796 the pendulum swung strongly in the expansionist direction.
Over the three years that followed more than a dozen different republics were created in the Italian Peninsula, including Roman, Parthenopean, and Etruscan republics and a host of others, large and small. Many Italian patriots were deeply disappointed in their hopes for a single national entity, while others quarreled over local rivalries. The French seemed only too happy to tolerate or even encourage this infighting, so long as the new republics provided France and its army with sorely needed funds. Despite the unification of patriots in the northern Italian cities, elections produced a mixed bag of patriots and ancien régime notables. The Directory concluded that the Italians “are not yet ready for liberty, or rather that they have been rotted by slavery and the vices it brings in its train.”12 The Directors allowed their representatives, particularly General Bonaparte, a much greater role in nominating administrations and drawing up constitutions on the model of the French constitution of 1795. The ideological vagueness of these “republics” was demonstrated in the Treaty of Campo Formio of 1797, which handed over to Austrian rule the most ancient republic of all: Venice. Bonaparte was, in Michel Vovelle’s words, “the propagator of new republics, but in the framework of a project which diverged more and more from the aspirations of the patriots it had awakened.”13 If this policy seemed inchoate, there is no indication it was simply the cover for a policy of “divide and rule.” Indeed, the creation of the Helvetic Republic in April 1798 seemed to reflect a significant recalibration toward a unitary republicanism: despite having preserved strict neutrality in the revolutionary wars, the Swiss cantons were abolished, and the confederacy was declared a single republic “one and indivisible.”
What is clear throughout this process is that the reshaping of the political landscape outside France was not taking place simply through the will of one man. Bonaparte’s decisions certainly made reference to his own ideology and ambition, but they were fundamentally shaped by other factors: the context of the internal politics and financial requirements of the regime in Paris, the military situation of the army on the ground, and the desires, ambitions, and conflicts of “patriots” and their adversaries in the newly occupied territories. Many patriots sought to use the French occupation to further the existing cause of reform: in response, large sectors of the population joined bloody revolts, often expressed through the defense of religion and the traditional order of the pope, the Virgin Mary, and the saints, as the Egyptian revolts were energized by Islam and the call to defend the Ottoman caliphate.14
It is perhaps in part as a result of the challenge presented by these European republics that in late 1797 the second Directory began to turn French external policy away from the idea of Républiques Soeurs and toward a new expression—la Grande Nation. The origins of this term are disputed: certainly it appeared in an indefinite form (une grande nation) throughout the revolutionary period, in the writings and speeches of Volney, Robespierre, Constant, and others. The conception of revolutionary France as a vanguard or a liberator of other nations was common both to revolutionary ideologues and to foreign “patriots” seeking French intervention. But with the shift to the definite article this expression acquired a far more specific political content: grande came to mean more than simply “powerful” or “glorious”; it also took on an expansionist geographical connotation.
In 1796, General Bonaparte was established in Milan, previously a key Austrian city, looking east toward Venice and its possessions in the Ionian Sea. In the Treaty of Campo Formio, Bonaparte handed over the Republic of Venice but annexed for France the seven Venetian-ruled islands west of Albania and Greece. Crucially, these islands were not declared separate republics, but rather territorially integral départements of revolutionary France.15 Bonaparte insisted that these new territories “are worth more to us than all of Italy together. The Turkish Empire is collapsing day by day, and possessing these islands will allow us to support it as much as that is possible, or to take our proper share.”16 In his letter to the Directory, he claimed that when General Gentili stepped onto the beach in Corfu, the grateful “pope” of the local religion handed him a copy of Homer’s Odyssey. Bonaparte continued: “The islands of Zante, Cephalonia, and Lefkas share the same desire and express the same wish, the same feelings for liberty: liberty trees are in all the villages; municipalities govern all the communes, and these peoples hope that with the protection of the great nation they will restore the science, the arts, and the commerce they have lost under the tyranny of oligarchs.”17 Henry Laurens has argued that the new expression was in fact suggested to Bonaparte by the Ottoman notables seeking French assistance in their attempts to achieve autonomy from the Porte: he cites the notes of General Desaix, which made reference to “the Pasha of Bosnia who calls the general the strong man of the great nation.” Whether this is indeed the origin of the term is less important than its emergence or resurgence at this crucial moment when the boundaries of the French republic reached the edge of the Muslim world. In his notes, Desaix continued: “The general has a great and shrewd policy, which is to give all of these people a grand idea of the French nation. He has received orders from the Directory to spread this idea across the whole of Africa, and Greece, through pamphlets and proclamations.”18
The idea of la Grande Nation served to reconcile the idea of liberating other peoples from tyranny with the preservation of the interests of the French republic. It was a grandiose rhetorical formulation that resolved none of the underlying tensions but offered an ideological context in which Bonaparte’s authority could move from military into civilian administration, as a natural consequence of the defense of the republic. Two important elements emerged from this synthesis. First, an indigenous revolution or republican movement was no longer necessary in order to “liberate” a country—indeed, such “patriots” could now be a significant source of irritation. Adherence, or even submission, to the “Great Nation,” combined with the fantasy of the reawakening of ancient civilizations, could now substitute for evidence of ideological alignment with revolutionary principles. Second, the vocation of this new policy was global, and no longer confined to the land borders of France. The conception of the “Great Nation,” in its elegant fusion of political virtue with territorial enlargement, offered a space for imagining the extension of the republic not only into Europe, but also into Asia, Africa, and beyond. It was the ideological hinge that connected the politics of the sister republics to the claims of France’s wider geopolitical interests—interests stretching back to the Seven Years’ War and France’s losses to Britain in Asia. Bonaparte made full use of this formula in his letters to the Directory, and it helped a group of key members of the political and military establishment obtain final agreement for the proposal to invade Egypt.
Because Egypt was itself in the throes of internecine struggles, its response to and participation in the early stages of the French Revolution was limited. But as France confronted postrevolutionary stabilization and the challenge of repositioning the republic in a new global order, Egypt became crucial, and was drawn more fully into the Revolution. Although it did not border France like Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, or the German states, Egypt, straddling the isthmus connecting Africa and Asia, represented an important axis of France’s competitive global interests. By the second half of the eighteenth century, although France had been largely pushed out of India and North America, French interests in the Levant trade had become dominant. Egypt was the link between these Mediterranean interests and global empire in Asia, particularly for the British in India.19 The last independent rulers in India sought French aid in resisting British advances, and control of Egypt could offer a means to support Tipu Sultan, who was fighting a war of resistance against the encroachments of the East India Company.20 General Bonaparte maintained a correspondence with Tipu, in the hope of connecting with the insurgent forces in India. Egypt offered further connections with the sharif of Mecca and rulers in Yemen and Oman through the Sudan to Ethiopia and across the northern coast of Africa to Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers. All of these powers maintained consistent neutrality after the Revolution and had shown themselves open to entertaining political alliances with France.
Moreover, although Egypt was neither part of French territory nor on its borders, for historical reasons it was not completely external to French sovereignty. Merchants from Marseille were well established in Egypt even before Provence became a permanent part of France in the fifteenth century. Egypt at that time was ruled by a dynasty known as Mamluk (owned) because they were bought as slaves and trained as warriors. The Provençal merchants concluded a treaty with the Mamluk sultan that ensured them protection and trading privileges. When the Ottomans conquered Egypt in 1517 they maintained the Mamluk ruling institution and continued these arrangements, extending them to European merchants in other parts of the empire through agreements known as “Capitulations.” Extraterritorial sovereignty over French subjects in Egypt was a valuable prerogative of the ancien régime French monarchy. Because of these long-standing arrangements, French merchants mixed with a multiplicity of other categories—including other Europeans or “Franks,” local Christians, Jews, and Muslims—as an element of the Ottoman urban fabric, and never as an isolated and distinct foreign colony.21 Indeed, Raoul Clément suggests that until the reign of Louis XIV the French in Egypt had lived “a life almost independent of [French] royal power,” in their own quarter or “country” of Cairo, and in Alexandria in a walled “okelle” (wakil in Arabic).22
These older liberties played a role in the strong republican tendencies of the French in Egypt. In the course of the eighteenth century, Paris inexorably tightened its grip on the populations of the Échelles, rescinding the traditional authority of the Chamber of Commerce in Marseille and instituting heavy regulation by central committees and royal ordinance.23 The ostensible motivation for imposing increased state control over the Echelles was the threat of an avania or collective retribution against the “nation” by Muslim authorities. But, as Merlijn Olnon has argued, these avanias have been misunderstood as arbitrary exercises of despotic government: in fact they were “negotiations between merchants and local Ottoman officials about how the law could be interpreted, stretched or bypassed to the benefit of both sides.”24 The wiliest of these intermediaries in Egypt was the merchant Charles Magallon, who managed to build close personal relationships with key political figures in Cairo during the 1780s, aided by his wife, who made a fortune selling French fashions to the women of Cairene high society.
French misunderstandings of Egypt were promoted by the sheer complexity of the political situation there, in large part due to the revival of the Mamluk system in the eighteenth century, as a kind of aristocratic resistance to Ottoman government. But no single bey, as the Mamluk lords were known, was able to unite that resistance, and protracted struggles raged on throughout the second half of the century. In France, the Mamluk regime could equally be represented as a tyranny or as a rebellious republic resisting Ottoman imperial domination. In the rapidly changing winds of revolutionary rhetoric, these two contradictory understandings could sometimes coexist.25
In 1785 the Ottoman admiral Hasan Pacha was dispatched from Istanbul to reassert imperial suzerainty and drove the warring beys, Murad and Ibrahim, out of Cairo into Upper Egypt, replacing them with a single sheikh al-Balad, Ismael Bey. Ismael was favorable to the French: in March 1789 he summoned Magallon to a private meeting to request French military assistance against his rivals, and to construct a fleet for the defense of Egypt. Magallon wrote to the minister on Ismael’s behalf, but the events of July 1789 intervened, and Magallon was forced to apologize to Ismael for a delay “founded in the disorders that afflict our government.”26 It is clear, then, that just weeks after the fall of the Bastille, the authorities in Egypt were aware of the situation in France, and that the balance of power in Egypt was affected by its outcome.
But the revolutionary upheaval did not long remain just a distant clamor from metropolitan France. By 1790, the French consul in Alexandria was complaining about a “plague of insubordination and licentiousness” spreading through the French extraterritorial communities.27 Visiting sailors brought with them a fierce attachment to the Revolution, insisting that all French subjects don the revolutionary cockade. In 1790 the sailors revolted en masse against their captains. Jacobins in the Échelle began to call for the abolition of the whole consular regime in the Levant, as a reflection of royal tyranny and privilege. The situation became further embittered as members of the consular staff began to “emigrate,” taking refuge with the British or Austrian consuls. In Cairo, the radical faction purchased weapons and formed a “national guard” that met every day. These Jacobins even sought permission from the authorities to build a temple of Reason.28 But Ismael Bey, the protector of the French, died suddenly during an epidemic in Cairo in 1791, and his rivals Ibrahim and Murad returned in force from Upper Egypt. They blamed the French for provoking the intervention that had driven them from power.
Other powers could now exert a greater influence in Egypt. One French visitor in 1795 wrote: “Since the beginning of the French Revolution, and particularly since the overthrow of the monarchy, the enemies of the French people have worked in Egypt with the same ferocity as in all parts of Europe.”29 The hostile parties suggested that the French no longer had any government at home, and thus had no protection under the former agreement with the sultan. The French merchants, exposed and uncertain, protested their unconscionable neglect by “a Republic that is the lawgiver to Europe, and whose name strikes terror among tyrants,” declaiming: “Oh take from us the title of French citizen, or give us our rights!”30 The envoy Guillaume-Antoine Olivier agreed: “Could we remain in Egypt in such a humiliating position?” he asked. “Should the French Republic, so accustomed to victories, submit to such humiliation?”31
In February 1793, after the execution of Louis XVI, Britain had joined the coalition against the republic, throwing France into a war that was increasingly global rather than continental. The counterrevolution was gaining strength in western France, Federalists were rising in the South, and the British fleet occupied Toulon, the chief French Mediterranean port. Egypt was an important, though not yet central, question for the global geopolitical calculations of the revolutionaries. They were still ill informed about the situation there: Charles Magallon had fled to Paris after Ismael’s death in 1791 and besieged the ministry with demands for compensation of his losses. The decision to send him as consul general to Cairo in 1793 rid them of a nuisance but only aggravated the tensions between the French and the new rulers in Egypt. Magallon was unceasing in his denunciations of the despotism exercised by the beys and his demands for forceful intervention. The authorities in France replied that force was not a possibility “at the moment,” and therefore Magallon should seek a “kind of conversion” in the attitudes of the beys toward the republic. But Magallon’s ideas would eventually find their champion in the form of Talleyrand: François Charles-Roux suggests that the minister effectively cribbed his project for Egypt from a report provided by Magallon.32
In February 1798, the influential republican Charles-Guillaume Theremin wrote a report for the minister of foreign affairs in which he argued that Ottoman power was on the point of collapse, confronting the republic with a difficult question. The Ionian islands, now part of France, demonstrated that France could expand into the Mediterranean without undermining the republic. But Egypt was another matter. “As for Egypt, since the republic cannot have subjects, and since conquest will not make the Egyptians into French citizens, we will have to establish armed trading posts in Alexandria, Rosetta, and Cairo.”33 Thus, the intervention of Magallon on behalf of the French merchants in Egypt helped to broach the apparent contradiction between revolutionary ideals and aggressive conquest, offering the bridgehead of “armed trading posts” that would rapidly expand into a full-blown territorial conquest of Upper as well as Lower Egypt. Less than a year later, reporting in the same register on “the presumed progress of the army of Egypt” another author imagined Bonaparte at the head of an army composed of 30,000 Frenchmen and 60,000 Greek and Arab auxiliaries. Such a picture raised the same concerns about “subjects” and “citizens,” but the report’s author now made it clear that a fundamental difference of rights and privileges could exist between different groups, even in the armies of the republic. The general would be sure to make the sacrifices fall on the auxiliary troops: “This is how the European powers conduct themselves in India in regard to the Sipahis in their pay.”34 This striking statement suggests that even before Bonaparte’s return to France, the French involvement in Egypt was already contributing to the shift away from a conception of republican equality.
The frontispiece of a book entitled Bonaparte au Caire, published anonymously in Paris in 1798–99, shows the general pointing to the projected canal of Suez (which French engineers concluded to be impracticable) in front of the fascia of the republic. The crescent of Islam is depicted on the most prominent of the many flags clustered behind this potent republican symbol (fig. 4).
Figure 4. Image of Bonaparte with a map showing Egypt. Frontispiece of Bonaparte au Caire (1798–1799). Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Estampes.
Figure 5. Earlier image of Bonaparte with a map of Italy and Europe. F. Bonneville, Bonaparte: Dédié aux armées françaises (1798). Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Estampes.
Bonaparte stands straddling the Mediterranean on the map he is unrolling over the symbols of Islam and the republic, as though seeking to wrap them together through technical prowess, while an obelisk stands behind him, adorned with a blank plaque, ready to monumentalize this new stage of “civilization.” The curious thing about this image is that it is a near-exact copy of another image published a year earlier (fig. 5), which showed the same elements in the conquest of Italy: the Muslim crescent now stands where “Arcole” was previously written, and “Suez” in place of “Rastad” (the location of negotiations for the Treaty of Campo Formio). This image suggests at once the parallelism between the “unrolling” of the republican projects in Italy and Egypt, and the difference in their conceptions of the future of the Revolution—one pointing toward a durable place for the republic in Europe, the other gesturing to a global expansionism.
The loss of the French fleet at Aboukir shortly after the arrival of the French in Egypt, which Talleyrand identified as the turning point in cementing the coalition against France, perhaps made the recreation of the republic on Egyptian soil all the more urgent.35 But its provisions had been prepared before departure, like a vast prefabricated republican kit ready to be assembled once victory was assured. Bonaparte had enlisted 167 engineers, technicians, artists, and experts in natural history. These were joined by the French in Egypt, already fiercely republican, and their associates, particularly local Christians, who acted as interpreters and intermediaries. Magallon’s son joined Bonaparte aboard ship before it reached Alexandria, and helped guide the first steps of the expedition.
In the first months of their occupation of Egypt, the French launched an extraordinarily ambitious program of social and political transformation, creating a central consultative body called the Diwan, composed of Muslims, Copts, and Syrian Catholics, to rule the country, with a local equivalent in each province. They began reshaping the urban fabric of Cairo and other cities, demolishing buildings, clearing boulevards, erecting bread ovens, restaurants, and theaters, dredging canals, and constructing windmills. The large body of scholars, along with at least one local participant, was immediately formed into an academy—the Institut d’Égypte—which met regularly. Its reports were printed by a press that also produced Egypt’s first newspapers, Le Courier de l’Égypte and La Décade Égyptienne. As in France, the year was divided up into ten-day weeks, marked not by religious holidays, but by revolutionary festivals. These days were celebrated in Egypt, with all the republican trappings—tricolor flags, sashes and cockades, liberty trees, and fireworks.
On the first day of Vendémiaire, Year 7 (22 September 1798), a festival to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the republic was ordered in Ezbekkiya Square, in a great field “decorated with as many columns as there are departments in the French republic, in the centre of which a pyramid will be erected with seven sides on which the names of those brave soldiers killed in liberating Egypt from the tyranny of the Mamluks will be inscribed.”36 The authorities “both French and Turkish” were ordered to process toward the palace of the general in chief, Bonaparte, who would appear on a platform with an obelisk, to the acclaim of the troops singing hymns and patriotic songs “to the prosperity of the French republic and the friendly republics [républiques amies].”37 The festival was celebrated not only in Cairo but in all the towns and villages where French contingents were stationed. In the town of Atfiéli, the Courier de l’Égypte reported, French officers, members of the Divan, and the aga of the Janissaries gathered with a crowd of inhabitants: “The general read to the Arabs a speech written in their language, containing an account of the principal events of our Revolution and bearing witness to the wish and hope to see these peoples enjoy the same happiness as the French, and return to their former greatness.”38 This was as ambitious an installation as had been attempted in any of the other territories annexed or invaded by the French to that time.
In 1799, Bonaparte departed Egypt in haste on hearing of the shifting political situation in Paris, leaving his army stranded and his “breeches full of shit” according to his successor, General Kléber.39 The republican project quickly disintegrated into its two opposing streams: one deeply republican and insisting on an immediate withdrawal from Egypt, and the other forming a colonial lobby seeking ways to preserve a permanent French presence in Egypt. But as observers noted at the time, these contradictions had existed within the republican project since the very beginnings of French expansion: Bonaparte had held them at bay with his stream of conquests, but they were bound to come unstuck, as they did now in Egypt.
General Kléber was a committed republican: unlike Bonaparte his chief motivation was to remove the French from Egypt as quickly as possible. As he famously declared to the Directory in 1796: “I do not wish to be, nor will I ever be, the passive instrument of any system of conquest that could defer for an instant the happiness of our citizens.”40 Kléber’s opposition to colonialism emanated primarily from his commitment to a republic defined within French borders, despite his origins in Alsace and youthful service in the Austrian army. His primary motive for joining the military expedition to Egypt had been the desire to deliver Britain a blow through its communication with India, and when this goal became unachievable he opposed the attempt to transform Egyptian society by force. Yet he too was caught in the inevitable contradictions of the occupation: Egypt was now already “republicanized” in part, and parties calling for independence, as well as those supporting the Islamic legitimacy of the Ottoman government, were in conflict. Kléber had little choice but to support the republican elements, while working toward a return to France, the true home of the republic.
But with the news of 18 Brumaire from France, Kléber saw that the republic now no longer existed in France any more than in Egypt. He scribbled in the margin of his journal that a republican was constituted more by “moeurs” (moral qualities) than by “connaissances” (knowledge): a kind of opening toward the possibility of an alliance beyond the boundaries of France, or even of Europe. Indeed, betrayed by both France and Britain, he turned to one of the chief Mamluk leaders, Murad, recognizing him as “prince-governor of Upper Egypt” in exchange for support against the Ottoman army—a treaty that was later destroyed and kept a secret, except for a single remaining proof.41 Kléber’s assassination by a young Syrian Muslim, and Murad’s death from plague, ended this brief attempt to forge a different kind of republic on Egyptian soil. The policy of his successor, General Menou—who had converted to Islam in order to marry the daughter of a local notable—was colonial in style, dictated in part by the new policies emanating from France under the Consulate of Bonaparte, and by the predominance of Talleyrand in external policy. But the republican impetus in Egypt continued in clandestine ways, as it did in Italy, Greece, and elsewhere in Europe.
By 1801, the French were packing up what remained of their flags, their libraries, and a not inconsiderable number of looted artifacts to take ship for Marseille aboard British frigates, as the Ottoman governor moved back into his Cairo palace. Along with the troops returning in the British frigates were many hundreds of Egyptians and Syrians of all backgrounds—both Muslim and Christian—who had chosen to leave Egypt for Marseille. Alongside them were “Franks,” French subjects settled in Alexandria and Cairo. Some of Egyptians and Syrians were fleeing Egypt because they had joined the French as soldiers, interpreters, or officials. But others had developed a common political project for the independence of Egypt and hoped to appear at the peace conference in Paris to present their case.42
What the documents left by this group, calling itself the “Egyptian Legation to the European Governments,” suggest is that ideological alignment with the ideals of republican self-determination was not confined to the French subjects in Egypt, nor even to the Christian minorities in Egypt, but was a larger network with connections across all levels of Egyptian society. It is more difficult to gauge from the documents how Egyptians presented this alignment among themselves, but it is clear that it was not a simple calque from either French or British models, since the members of the Legation sought diplomatic contacts with both major powers and expressed their project differently according to the values of each state. To the French they wrote of “civilization” and “science”; to the British, of “commerce” and “stability”: if they avoided direct reference to the republic, it nevertheless permeates their conceptions.
The letters of the “Egyptian Legation” do not present the project of a French colony in Egypt, but rather the creation of an independent republic that would help stabilize the global situation of conflict between the superpowers. In arguing their case, they referred, not to European politicians or political theorists, but to the Mamluk ruler of Egypt, Kléber’s ally Murad Bey: “Egypt was actually so well known by the infidels of the West,” they quoted Murad as saying, “that, because everyone wants to possess it, it would be the object of their eternal discord.”43
The language of these documents demonstrates not only how the ideas and ambitions of the French Revolution had taken root in Egypt, but also how these people brought back their own conceptions to France. They spoke of a “revolution” but one emerging specifically from Egyptian conditions:
The system of government…will not be in this case a revolution made by the spirit of enlightenment or by the fermentation of opposing principles, but a change occasioned by absolute necessity in a community of peace ful and ignorant men…. Let the new government be just, severe and national…as that of sheikh Amam in the Sa’id…and it is certain that it would be respected, obeyed and loved.44
The Legation insisted that it remained in close contact with all the “sects” of Egypt “without partiality,” while taking necessary precautions against “the permanently suspicious despotism which would not hesitate to sacrifice even the last of the independent brothers if it could identify them.”45 It would seem then that a significant party seeking national liberation existed in Egypt by 1801: the members of the Legation were prepared to take the risk of expatriation on the basis of that network.46 In the event, the death of their leader, General Ya’qub, during the crossing to Marseille, and the new conditions of France under the Consulate and Empire, would leave this movement at best clandestine, if not entirely extinguished.
This coda can tell us something crucial about the shift in the trajectory of the French Revolution that the failure of the global strategy in Egypt helped bring about. These Egyptians were among the last “independent brothers” fleeing to republican France. What they found instead was the beginnings of a police state, at the heart of an absolutist empire: there would be no peace conference, and they would not be permitted even to travel to the French capital for almost a decade, as the new regime sought to mend its ruptured alliance with the Ottomans.
Egypt demonstrated the ultimate failure of the project to combine republican freedom and equality with territorial expansion, to which the collapse of the Italian and Swiss republics had already gestured. In suggesting that the Revolution could not be exported, it helped convince those at home that the “manifest destiny” of the Revolution had come to an end, and to accept that personal rule by Bonaparte against which the Egyptians had so violently rebelled. The irony of this lay in the fact that, in a way that few historians have acknowledged, the Revolution was in fact exported, embraced, and taken up by Egyptians of different creeds and classes, and brought back to France with their emigration in 1801. It was Napoleon’s France, however, that now proved a stony ground for the ideas of freedom, equality, and independence that the Egyptians had embraced.