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several times in letters to the Directory - and it was undoubtedly to this end that he suddenly proposed that France should seize Malta. Why, though, should he have decided to take the Ionian islands - the most notable are Corfu, Zante and Cephalonia - as France’s share in the rape of Venice? Like Malta, they were useful naval bases, but, unlike Malta they were also birds in the hand - an important consideration given the need to find an immediate home for the Venetian navy (which Napoleon had been careful to secure for France). At the same time they were useful territories that might be ceded to Constantinople in return for the surrender of Egypt, or, alternatively, employed as a focus for Greek nationalism that might put pressure on the Turks. Then again, their acquisition allowed Napoleon once more to play the liberator, while ensuring that Austria was denied unrestricted access to the Adriatic and guaranteeing France a share in the Ottoman Empire should it be partitioned. Yet another argument, and one advanced by Napoleon himself, was that they were important to France’s trade as stepping stones for the importation of Egyptian cotton. And, finally, they were simply there: presented with the opportunity to bait the Russian bear, the French commander could not resist the opportunity to do so.

Whatever the reason for Napoleon’s actions with regard to the Ionian islands, there is no doubt that they deeply upset Russia. In themselves, however, they were not sufficient to persuade Paul I to go to war. What counted here was the Egyptian campaign of 1798. In some accounts this too has been laid at the door of Napoleon, but in fact this is unfair: the future emperor was not the scheme’s only backer, and in some ways not even its most important one. Nevertheless, the usual pride and ambition played a part. Ordered to take command of preparations for the invasion of Britain favoured by the Directory as its next move in the conflict, early in 1798 Napoleon took one look at the scheme’s prospects and refused point-blank to have anything to do with it, there being no way that he was prepared to risk seeing his reputation lost with all hands in some watery grave in the English Channel; or, for that matter, cool his heels in Calais or Boulogne for the long months that would pass before an invasion could even be attempted. Eager for some sphere of action, at this point he promptly revived the scheme for the invasion of Egypt which he had mentioned the previous summer: ‘An expedition could be made into the Levant which would threaten the commerce of India.’59

In acting in this fashion, Napoleon was in part responding to some romantic lure of the East. To quote Bourrienne, ‘The east presented a field of conquest and glory on which his imagination delighted to brood. “Europe”, said he, “is but a molehill - all the great reputations have come from Asia.” ’60 Yet Napoleon’s own words suggest something rather different:

The seductions of an oriental conquest turned me aside from thoughts of Europe more than I would have believed . . . In Egypt I found myself freed from the obstacles of an irksome civilization. I was full of dreams . . . I saw myself founding a religion, marching into Asia, riding an elephant, a turban on my head, and in my hand the new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs. In my undertakings I would have combined the experiences of the two worlds, exploiting for my own profit the theatre of all history . . . The time I spent in Egypt was the most beautiful of my life.61

In short, the dreams of becoming a new Alexander the Great came only after Napoleon had arrived in Egypt and not before. What mattered in the first weeks of 1798 were rather more mundane considerations, as chronicled by Germaine de Staël:

Bonaparte was always looking for means of engaging men’s imagination, and so far as this was concerned he knew exactly how they may be governed when one is not born to a throne. An invasion of Africa, a war waged in a country that was almost fabulous, as was the case with Egypt, could not but work on every