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Napoleon in Egypt

Historians aren�t sure why Napoleon insisted on conquering Egypt. The
ostensible aims were to wrest control of the Indian Empire from the hands of
the British. Napoleon�s own memoirs list the reason solely as �glory? That
Napoleon should commit 38,000 fighting men simply to follow in the footsteps
of Alexander the Great seems quite plausible to today�s historians.

At any rate, from a military point of view, Napoleon�s Egyptian adventure
was little more than a disaster. When French land forces surrendered to the
British on September 2, 1801, they had been cut off in Egypt for some three
years. This posed no problem for Napoleon -- by this time he was already
back in France, had crowned himself Emperor, and was trumpeting the triumph
of his Egyptian campaign to an enthralled French public.



The Little Corporal ponders glory.
News in 1798 that Napoleon was massing a huge force in the Mediterranean
port of Toulon sent shivers through Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
Candidates for invasion included England, Spain Portugal, Sicily, and even
Brazil. However, Bonaparte�s secret objective was to raise the French flag
over the Pyramids of Egypt. �We must go to the Orient,?he was reputed to
have said. �All great glory resides there.?

In July 1798, after a rough six-week trip, nearly 400 transport ships landed
some 34,000 troops near Alexandria. Along with the soldiers came nearly
1,000 civilians, who were to have a more lasting effect on history. These
consisted mainly of administrators, but also included artists and poets,
botanists and zoologists, surveyors and economists. It was they who were to
return to France triumphant, with enough information to swell the 22-volume
Descriptions de L�Egypte, the authoritative tome on Egyptology for
generations.



Napoleon battles the Mamelukes at the Pyramids.
On July 21, 1798, Napoleon�s army met the Mamelukes of Egypt 15 kilometres
north of the Pyramids at Giza. The Mamelukes (which means �white slave?in
Arabic) were a fearsome warrior caste, mostly of Georgian slave descent, who
had ruled Egypt in the name of the distant Turkish sultan for seven
centuries. In a single day, the 29-year-old Corsican ended their rule
forever.

Napoleon�s swift victory may have been due to the way he adapted to the
rigours of warfare in the Near East. He faced a highly developed cavalry
with little of his own, but by organizing his infantry into hollow squares
which faced four directions, he could repel a charge from any side. This
combined with his artillery enabled Napoleon to resist the Mameluke attacks,
though without his own cavalry he was unable to stop most of them from
escaping to fight again.



Napoleon's ill-fated Admiral Brueys, seen here in happier times.
Within a few days, victory would be followed by profound disaster. At the
Battle of the Nile, the ability of the French to realize Napoleon�s
Pharaonic ambitions would be fatally crippled. The transport ships that had
landed the French at Alexandria had sailed away again, but the
line-of-battle ships that had accompanied them had stayed, and were lying
off the Egyptian coast east of Alexandria at Aboukir Bay. The French admiral
Francois-Paul Brueys had arranged the ships in a long crescent close to the
shore, believing that only one side of the line would be exposed to attack.
The British ships soon realized that, with their shallower draughts, they
would be able to slip between the French ships and the shore. They
sandwiched the French, raking them with fire while the hapless defenders
struggled frantically to move cannons to the vulnerable sides of their
ships. It was a decisive victory. Only two of the French ships escaped, the
rest either sunk or captured. Not a single British vessel was lost, and only
218 British were killed. The French losses were estimated at around 1,700
lives.



Bonaparte at Cairo, by Peter Aitken.
Historians (and Napoleon himself, in his memoirs) have long blamed Brueys
for faulty strategy. By anchoring his ship in a line, but neglecting a
margin by which the enemy could slip by, he ensured defeat. New historical
evidence, however, suggests that Napoleon was also to blame. Brueys was
forced to fight at anchor, say some historians, because his ships were
undermanned. Napoleon had taken hundreds of sailors and forced them ashore
to forage for water and supplies.

The disorganization that marked the Battle of the Nile also characterized
the Egyptian campaign, which was on the brink of mutiny before the battle of
the Pyramids, and was marked throughout by rivalry among Napoleon�s
generals. The problem, modern historians feel, was a lack of a goal in the
Egyptian campaign more concrete than glory alone.

Napoleon chose to ignore the demolition of his fleet, and the castaway
status it brought his army. He continued with his plans to pacify Egypt, and
to preempt an Ottoman attack he marched on Palestine, sacking Jaffa and
besieging Acre, which held out against him. The bulk of his army, meanwhile,
forced its way up the Nile to Aswan, revealing to the stunned soldiers the
magnificence of Thebes, Karnak and Luxor.



Coronation of Napoleon I, 1807 by Jean-Louis David. Click on the image to
see a larger version.
On August 23, 1799, Napoleon abandoned his army in Egypt, and slipped off
with a small crew on a swift vessel to France. Upon arrival, he took
advantage of political turmoil to stage a coup d�etat, ultimately crowning
himself Emperor. His army in Egypt fared less well. While largely met by
military success, their numbers steadily dwindled through lack of supplies
and illness. By the time they surrendered to the British, one man out of
every three had died.



The Pelt Merchant of Cairo, by Leon Gerome.
The real winners of Napoleon�s Egyptian campaign were the artists,
historians and other savants who accompanied him, and carried back numerous
treasures (including the Rosetta Stone, inscribed in both Greek and
hieroglyphics, which would later enable linguists to decipher the
hieroglyphs). Astounded by the depth of Egypt�s previously unknown
splendours, they opened the eyes of France and the West to the mysteries of
that country. So enchanted were the French by their role in the �conquest?of
Egypt, as Napoleon succeeded in convincing them, that for a century French
art and culture would continue to glorify it.