The eagle and the sphinx: Bonaparte in Egypt - Napoleon Bonaparte - 1789: An Idea That Changed the World

The eagle and the sphinx

IN March 1798 the executive Directory of the French Republic decided to despatch a military expedition to Egypt under the command of General Bonaparte.

In a paper presented in support of this plan, French Foreign Minister Talleyrand wrote: "Egypt was once a province of the Roman Republic; she must now become a province of the French Republic. The Roman conquest marked the period of this beautiful country's decadence; the French conquest will herald the era of her prosperity. The Romans seized Egypt from a line of kings renowned in the arts and sciences; the French will rescue her from the hands of the vilest tyrants who have ever existed."

The general in charge of the expedition was therefore instructed both to "cut off the isthmus of Suez and to take the necessary measures to ensure for the French Republic full control of the Red Sea" and "to improve the lot of the native inhabitants of Egypt by all the means in his power."

The army was accompanied by a Commission des Sciences et des Arts, a group consisting of leading figures in the sciences and the arts among whom were such famous men as the mathematician Gaspard Monge and the chemist Claude Berthollet as well as a galaxy of talented engineers, architects, biologists, chemists, writers, painters and sketch-artists. Taken as a whole, the 165 members of the Commission constituted a veritable walking encyclopaedia, a modern administration in embryo and a "centre of excellence" for the promotion of intellectual and material progress.

Make war on the Mamluks

Respect the Egyptians

"Here I am," wrote Monge, "transformed into an argonaut, carrying the torch of Reason in a land where for years its light has ceased to shine...." Bonaparte and his band of scholars were imbued with the notion that they were going to Egypt, not only to establish a military base as a bastion against the British, but also, and above all, to implant the ideals of 1789, by freeing the country from the medieval grip of the Mambuk Beys, reviving agriculture and commerce, establishing new industries, overcoming the scourage of endemic diseases and imposing a modern legal system....

In a message to the soldiers under his command, Bonaparte explained that the objective was not to force the Egyptians into submission, but rather to gain their support by defeating their oppressors, the Mamluks. "You will find that the customs here," he told them, "are different from those in Europe; you must get used to them. The peoples amongst whom we shall find ourselves treat women differently than we do; but in every country the rapist is considered to be a monster.... Pillage enriches only a few and brings dishonour upon all of us..."

"The general officer commanding expressly forbids all Frenchmen, whether soldiers or civilians, to enter mosques or to gather at the entrances to mosques.... It is of supreme importance that each soldier pays for anything he acquires in the city and that they [the Egyptians] be neither cheated or insulted. We must make friends of them and make war only on the Mamluks."

A missed rendezvous

The Mamluks were easily vanquished. But despite this, the Egyptians on the whole did not fraternize with the French. On the contrary, they rose up in protest against the French presence, sometimes even making common cause with their local oppressors. A combination fo reasons explains why this should have been so.

In the first place, despite its revolutionary motives, the French army was an army of occupation which had suddenly burst in upon a social and cultural arena totally alien to it. Furthermore, this army belonged to a country of which the collective Egyptian experience retained the most bitter memory, that of the pitiless confrontation between Christendom and Islam--the Crusades. With the exception of a minority of intellectuals, who were attracted by the secular French approach, the Egypian people saw the French expedition as a new Crusade.

Secondly, the watchwords of liberty, equality and responsibility had too new, too disturbing a ring to minds dominated by the imperatives of custom and of the community and too strongly imbued, over the centuries, with a spirit of submission to Mamluk despotism. When Bonaparte informed leading Egyptian personalities of the creation of a Divan (Council), whose elected members would administer the country's internal affairs, their reply was that the people would only obey the orders of the Mamluks. As for equality, in a country where domestic slavery was still widespread, the concept seemed as bizarre as it was disquieting.

Finally, the measures taken by Bonaparte to rationalize the legal code and to modernize the administration were seen by many as a provocation. In Cairo, the inhabitants lived in family groups or in close-knit trade guilds, in sectors separated from one another by gates which were only open during the day. When the order was given to de-compartmentalize the city and to remove these gates, a general feeling of uneasiness and insecurity resulted. The new consolidated regulations concerning property, inheritance and taxation by-passed the established patriarchial hierarchies and local customs. The limit was reached when soldiers penetrated into the various sectors of the city and even into houses to impose public health precautions against the threat of plague--cleaning of streets and houses, washing of clothing and destruction of the belongings of people whose death were suspected of being due to plague. This was seen as a violation of the privacy of the home.

Too many changes, introduced too rapidly, overturned centuries-old values. Popular discontent, exploited by the Ottomans and the Mamluks and channelled by religious leaders, led to a succession of riots, which were bloodily suppressed. The gulf widened between the deep heart of Egypt and an army decimated by disease, its fleet destroyed by the British, which was finding its position increasingly difficult to maintain and whose only thought was to return home.

Three years after it had set out, the French expedition ended in complete military failure.

The revolutionary backlash

Paradoxically, it was at this moment that revolutionary thought began to exercise a deep cultural, intellectual and political influence. Once the occupier was no longer physically present, once the brutalities of oppression were forgotten and the daily affronts that French behaviour inflicted on believers and on local traditions were a thing of the past, the revolutionary message began to spread insidiously in the minds of men.

An illustrious witness of these events, the chronicler Djabarti, relates that no sooner had the French army left than the former Ottoman and Mamluk overlords, anxious to re-establish their weakened authority over the population, began increasingly to resort to arbitrary measures and acts of cruelty. The people then began to appreciate the difference between a modern administration and despotic power and to regret the absence of laws which, though they had jolted them out of their accustomed ways, at least were universal in their application. They recalled that Bonaparte had had soldiers of his own army shot for stealing a chicken from a peasant, whereas the Mamluks did not hesitate to pillage entire villages.

Some Egyptian intellectuals started to voice the respect inspired in them by the French scholars accompanying the expedition and the admiration they had felt when hearing them explain their discoveries and inventions and, perhaps even more, listening as they spoke of life, society and progress in terms which threw open to them hitherto unsuspected intellectual perspectives.

What the Egyptians discerned in the words of the French was an appeal to overcome their feelings of inferiority, to take charge of their own affairs, to think not only of their duties but also of their rights, to go beyond their present misfortunes and look to the possibility of change, to a future which would be more than a constant repetition of the past. This was a summons to escape from a universe dominated by intangible, revealed truths and to enter a world open to question, to experience, to liberty, in which the mind, guided by reason, could explore an unlimited range of possibilities. The more enlightened spirits of the age began to think that only by following this path could Egypt be awakened from the sleep into which she had sunk for centuries and be given the opportunity to modernize and recover the prestige that had been hers in the heroic age of Saladin.

Muhammad Ali,

enlightened despot

Two of these intellectuals, Djabarti and 'Attar, reflected on how Egyptians could become receptive to this new way of thinking that had reached them from the other side of the Mediterranean. They came to the conclusion that the first thing to be done was to reform the educational system. This they thought could be achieved by creating a new type of school in which a rational approach based on experience would be taught, and by sending Egyptian students to France where they could imbibe the spirit of progress.

Their plans were to be realized thanks to an unforeseen political occurrence, the seizure of power by Muhammad Ali. An Albanian by birth and head of one of the Ottoman brigades sent to regain control of Egypt at the time when the French army was preparing to leave, Muhammad Ali was quick to grasp the radical novelty of the ideas, the organization and the techniques that the French expedition had displayed and the advantages that could be drawn from them by a governor anxious to redress a country rapidly falling apart.

He began by consolidating his political authority by allying himself with the country's spiritual and intellectual leaders and then massacring the leading Mamluk chiefs. With the reins of power in his hands, he obtained the Ottoman sultan's recognition of his status as Governor of Egypt and then launched into an enterprise comparable in scope to that to be undertaken thirty years later by the Meiji in Japan--the modernization, enforced from the top, of a patriarchal society.

He reorganized the central structures of the state, established civil and military manufacturing plants, and set up an army. He took as models the officers and scholars of the French expedition, in all respects except one--the spirit of individual initiative. For it was not a question of strengthening private as against state enterprise, but of reinforcing the state against private feudal power.

The door was cautiously opened to Western science and technology. Scholars and European specialists were summoned to Egypt. Egyptian students were sent to Europe. Schools were created in which learning by heart and recitation gave way to experiment and reasoning.

Agriculture was reorganized and the administrative system reunified. The centralized irrigation system, left in ruins by the Mamluks, was reestablished. A transportation network was formed to link the various regions of the country

to the capital and to the port of Alexandria. A new police structure was established which gave the people a sense of security they had not known for centuries.

Thus, an orderly, enlightened dictatorship replaced the previous corrupt, anarchic despotism. The hand of the state became more strongly felt in the daily life of the people, but, on the other hand, horizons began to widen and a sense of space, movement and change began to permeate a hitherto stagnant existence. For those called upon to work in the factories or to enlist in the army, the whole pattern and setting of life was revolutionized.

Under pressure from the state, the different strata of society supplied the manpower necessary for the modernization programme. From the ranks of the ulemas (the learned of Islam) came the intellectuals who were to learn the lessons of the West. From the artisans, and later even from among the peasantry, came the workers who were to man the state factories.

A great power in the making

Muhammad Ali did not stop there. If Egypt was to become an industrial power, it was so that she could also become an Arab military power. To create an army modelled on that of Bonaparte rather than of the Mamluks, Muhammad Ali took the bold step of introducing conscription. The peasant communities would provide the rank and file recruits; the officer corps would be recruited from among the sons of heads of the richer families.

Prompted by Muhammad Ali, the moral shake-up produced by the French expedition was bringing about a major social upheaval. Starting from the pinnacle of power, the shock-wave of the technological characteristics that had brought about the modernization of the West was now travelling downwards through the structure of a traditional community.

In a quarter of a century, Egypt thus became a great regional power whose armies were on the advance both north and south and whose victories were beginning to galvanize the Arab peoples. Her political and military elan was to be disrupted when London and Paris joined forces to prevent the emergence, around the figure of Muhammad Ali, of a dynamic, conquering Arab nation. From then on, Egypt, like the other countries south of the Mediterranean, was condemned to economic colonization.

Pathways to modernity

New pathways had to be taken if the concepts of the Enlightenment were to suffuse the minds of men. Intellectuals rather than the state became the chosen vehicle and the shackles of despotism were gradually thrown off. The spirit of progress became associated with the spirit of liberty and justice. The ideas of the Enlightenment fertilized trends of thought in which change, reform and the struggle against the arbitrary were to take on increasing importance.

Tahtawi, who towards the end of the 1820s had led the first Egyptian student mission to France, opened the way to a new, rational consideration of a modern Egypt in which all should be equal in the eyes of the law. From then on, a liberal tradition emerged upon whose roll of honour are inscribed such prestigious names as Loutfi Al Sayyed and Taha Hussein, and in the wake of which, in the aftermath of the First World War, the national Wafd party was born.

Religious thought itself came into question. To take up the challenge of the West, reformers such as Afghani and Abduh called for a "Renaissance", which, for them, meant a return to the original sources of the Holy Message and the selective integration of certain European social contributions.

The great debate on the ways and means of coming to grips with the modern world was open. It has continued, on an ever-increasing scale, right up to the present day.

COPYRIGHT 1989 UNESCO
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group