“Europe is a molehill,” Napoleon is said to have exclaimed. “We must set off for the Orient; that is where all the greatest glory is to be achieved.” The French invasion of Egypt in 1798 was one of the most audacious military and political undertakings in history. Commanding a fleet of 335 ships carrying 40,000 soldiers—not to mention 167 handpicked savants—a 28-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte embarked on an expedition of conquest that would rival the exploits of his hero, Alexander the Great. His expeditionary force was larger than the one Britain had dispatched to suppress the American rebellion in 1776. Napoleon’s ambition was nothing less than to carve out a new empire in the East. In Napoleon in Egypt, acclaimed novelist and historian Paul Strathern recounts this extraordinary adventure, and does so extraordinarily well.
There are many surprising aspects to the French conquest of Egypt and its broader military operations across the Middle East in the late 1790s. The first is the flimsy pretext upon which the entire invasion was justified: the “liberation” of the Egyptian people from their Mameluke overlords and the protection of French merchants operating in Alexandria. Never mind that Egypt was technically Ottoman territory and that the Sublime Porte was ostensibly an ally of France; Talleyrand could be counted upon to sort out those inconvenient diplomatic details. The real impetus for the expedition was considerably less altruistic. The ambitious young Napoleon dreamed of conquests in the East, culminating in an overland invasion of British India. “His primary aim in coming to Egypt was to found an empire – one that would extend to encompass Asia, but would also include Africa,” Strathern writes. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s political superiors—the increasingly unstable Directory in Paris, in which his mentor Paul Barras was a leading figure—were only too happy to see the celebrated hero of the recent Italian campaigns safely out of France. They readily approved the expedition. After all, Napoleon assured them he would be gone for only six months.
Much like the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq two centuries later, Napoleon portrayed himself as a triumphant liberator, a true friend of Islam, and a champion of progressive reforms in government. Following his decisive victory over the Mamelukes under Murad Bey at the Battle of the Pyramids on July 21, 1798, Napoleon marched triumphantly into Cairo, a city whose population exceeded that of Paris, and embarked upon an ambitious program of reform. His initiatives ranged from establishing half a dozen new hospitals and poisoning the city’s swarms of stray dogs to creating locally administered councils responsible for policing and the general governance of the city. “Although this was hardly democracy,” Strathern writes, “any more than it represented a truly liberated Egypt, it is worth noting that it was the nearest thing to popular rule the country had experienced throughout its five millennia of history.”
Nevertheless, Napoleon’s efforts to mollify the local population through enlightened generosity and cultural sensitivity proved largely unsuccessful (much as the Americans would discover in Iraq). Resentment and hostility simmered just beneath the surface, and French soldiers risked attack by local inhabitants whenever they ventured beyond the city. Then, on August 1, disaster struck. Admiral Horatio Nelson, whose British squadron had failed to intercept the French expedition en route to Egypt, launched a surprise attack on the French fleet anchored in Aboukir Bay and virtually annihilated it. With its fleet destroyed and its lines of communication and supply severed, Napoleon’s Army of the Orient was now stranded in Egypt.
To make matters worse, the French soon found themselves isolated not only militarily but diplomatically as well. By September, the Ottoman Sultan Selim III had issued a firman calling for a holy war against the infidel invaders and entered into an alliance with Britain and the Porte’s traditional rival, Russia, in what has been described as “one of the most improbable alliances in the history of international relations.” On October 21, Cairo erupted in a violent uprising that Napoleon managed to suppress only with considerable difficulty. Meanwhile, the remnants of Murad Bey’s Mameluke army continued to lurk menacingly to the south. With hostile forces gathering on every side, the French expedition appeared to be teetering on the brink of catastrophe.
Yet, against all odds, Napoleon held firm and gradually succeeded in pacifying the Nile Delta. He dispatched one of his most capable commanders, General Louis-Charles Desaix, with 3,000 men to pursue Murad Bey and his Mameluke forces southward along the Nile and drive them out of Egypt. The resulting 600-mile campaign was, in Strathern’s estimation, “one of the most brilliantly conducted military campaigns of its times, [Desaix’s] generalship second only to that of his young commander-in-chief.”
Meanwhile, in early 1799, Napoleon personally led a major expedition into the Levant, determined to defeat the Ottoman forces commanded by the notorious Ahmad Pasha “the Butcher” Djezzar at the ancient fortified city of Acre. It would prove perhaps the most consequential operation of the entire campaign. Napoleon’s disciplined army of 13,000 men marched north along the coast, capturing enemy-held towns and cities as it advanced. At Jaffa, the French massacred some 4,000 Ottoman prisoners of war, whom Napoleon believed he lacked the resources to feed or guard. According to Strathern, it was “the most cold-blooded atrocity he would ever commit.” Then, after sixty-two days of besieging Acre, whose defenders were supported by a British naval squadron, Napoleon reluctantly abandoned his attempt to capture the city. “This was the first setback, the first hint of defeat, that Napoleon had suffered on the field of battle,” Strathern writes. With that failure, his grandiose dreams of carving out an empire in the East—capturing Constantinople and marching on British India, triumphantly following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great—effectively collapsed. “If only Acre had fallen,” Napoleon later reflected in his memoirs, “I would have changed the face of the world.” His battered, plague-ravaged army limped back to Cairo, where Napoleon sought to salvage his prestige by proclaiming the Syrian campaign a victory.
After decisively repulsing a sizable Ottoman invasion at the Battle of Aboukir on July 25, 1799, Napoleon learned of the rapidly deteriorating political and military situation back in France. He promptly resolved to return home and seize control of the government. “I will arrive in Paris,” he boasted. “I will chase out that bunch of lawyers [i.e., the Directory] who are making a mockery of us and who are incapable of governing the Republic. I will install myself at the head of the government, and I will rally all parties to my support.” His prediction proved remarkably prescient. Napoleon slipped away from Egypt, leaving his army behind, and after 47 days at sea landed in France on October 9. He returned, Strathern writes, “with visions of a personal future such as no other sane man would have dared to contemplate.” Barely a month later, on November 9–10 (18–19 Brumaire in the French Revolutionary calendar), the 30-year-old general successfully orchestrated a coup d’état that overthrew the Directory and established him as First Consul of France.
The French would remain in Egypt for another two years, finally evacuating in October 1801 following an agreement with the British and Ottomans. “What had begun with such high hopes just over three years previously had ended in barely concealed humiliation and farce,” Strathern concludes. All told, an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Frenchmen lost their lives in the ill-fated expedition, either in battle or from disease.
In closing, Napoleon in Egypt is popular history at its finest—engaging, illuminating, and wonderfully written. Strathern draws extensively upon primary sources to construct his masterful narrative, quoting liberally from contemporary memoirs, soldiers’ correspondence, and the firsthand observations of the Arab historian al-Jabarti. The result is a richly detailed and thoroughly engrossing account of one of the most extraordinary military adventures of the Napoleonic era. Whether you are a devoted student of Napoleon or simply enjoy history told on a grand scale, this is a book not to be missed.
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