• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2480 0

spirit. Meanwhile, it would be easy to persuade the French that they would derive great benefit from a Mediterranean colony, and that one day it would offer them some means of attacking the establishments of the English in India. As for the project, it was laden with glory, and would add further lustre to the name of Bonaparte. If he had stayed in France, by contrast, the Directory would have hurled . . . calumnies without number at him and tarnished his reputation . . . Bonaparte would have been broken to smithereens before the thunderbolt had even struck him. In consequence, he had good reason to want to make himself the stuff of poetry rather than leave himself exposed to Jacobin tittle-tattle.62

On top of all this, Napoleon was desperate for action for its own sake. ‘This city of Paris,’ he complained, ‘weighs down on me as if I was covered by a lead blanket.’63 As he later told Claire de Rémusat, ‘I do not know what would have become of me had I not had the happy idea of going to Egypt.’64

But was going to Egypt really a ‘happy idea’? If the country could have been run by France for her own benefit as some sort of dependency, then the gains would doubtless have been enormous. Equally, choosing Egypt as his goal was a clever stroke on Napoleon’s part, as it allowed him to pose as a patron of the arts: with interest growing in Egypt’s ancient past, this fresh adventure from the start had a veneer of cultural respectability that the Corsican general was careful to strengthen by drafting the services of a select band of intellectuals. From a tactical point of view, however, getting a large army from one end of the Mediterranean to the other would be some task: the British might not have had any ships in the Mediterranean at the beginning of 1798 (they had withdrawn their squadron from the theatre in 1796), but they were present in strength at Gibraltar and could get a powerful fleet to the area around Malta and Sicily within a few days. But supposing the French reached Egypt, what then? Should the British choose to do so, they could easily cut the invaders off from France: the French record at sea was less than spectacular, and there was no reason to suppose that the Toulon fleet’s thirteen ships of the line would be able to fight off a substantial British attack (several of the ships were in poor condition and there was a serious shortage of trained crewmen). And if this was so, how could Egypt be exploited as a source of cotton and other colonial produce? In any event, the country would first have to be conquered and this would not be easy. The troops would be operating in a climate to which they were utterly unaccustomed and would be exposed to the ravages of disease of every sort. In addition, Egypt was an enormous country composed in large part of barren deserts and mountains, while its defenders, however pitifully armed and organized by European standards, heavily outnumbered Napoleon’s forces. Alexandria and Cairo could be taken easily enough, but what about Upper Egypt or the Red Sea coast? At risk was a long and costly campaign in which the French could expect little in the way of reinforcements.

Let us say, however, that conquest was achieved. What then? As Egypt was of no importance to Britain in commercial terms the mere fact of seizing her was not much of a blow to her trade. What mattered was India, but this simply raised fresh problems. A march on India in the style of Alexander the Great’s advance to the Indus was hopelessly impractical, but other schemes made little sense either. A maritime invasion, for example, would have required the construction of a fleet of warships and transports on the other side of Egypt on a coast that lacked adequate port facilities and in a sea whose only exit could easily be blockaded by the Royal Navy (it is pointless here to talk of the Suez Canal avant la lettre that was spoken of by Napoleon’s instructions: even if the country was pacified overnight, such a project would have required years to complete). Then there was the possibility of commerce raiding. However, in