Napoleon in Egypt (42 page)

Each according to his own plan, the savants sporadically took potshots at the increasingly indignant crowd, whilst in the distance the detonations of the cannonade from the Moqattam hills continued through the sultry, overcast afternoon. The crowd, encouraged by the armed rebels, was becoming increasingly angry, and it appeared only a matter of time before they stormed the Institute. Ironically, it would be superstition that saved the day for these enlightened intellectuals. Thunder was rare in Cairo, and when the distant rumble of the guns was suddenly drowned out by a deafening crash and a long, heavy roll of thunder overhead, the crowd outside the Institute panicked and scattered in fright. Before they could reassemble, the situation was relieved by the opportune arrival of two columns of French soldiers.
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By the night of October 22 the insurrection was over. Most French sources support Napoleon in his claim that the French “suffered 300 casualities, amongst whom were 100 dead.”
²⁶
On the other hand, his claim that 1,000 citizens of Cairo died was a gross underestimate: a figure of 3,000, including Christians and Jews slaughtered by the mob, would seem to be closer to the truth. This was by any measure a massacre.

Napoleon recalled in his memoirs: “At dawn next morning 60 sheiks and imams of the El Azhar mosque presented themselves at my headquarters. They had not slept for three days. Their expressions were those of guilty men consumed with anxiety. However, I had no reproaches for them: they had been loyal, but they had not been able to struggle against the torrent of public opinion.”
²⁷
He assured them: “I know that many of you have been weak, but I like to believe that none of you have committed any criminal act.” Upon being pardoned, the sheiks and imams fell to their knees. Napoleon then told them that they should set about the task of burying their dead, and promised that their holy books would be returned to Al-Azhar after the necessary purification of the desecrated mosque had been carried out.

Napoleon had decided to be magnanimous. He knew that he had little choice if he wished to continue ruling Egypt with the apparent consent of its leaders. This clemency was not popular amongst the members of the expedition. From the generals to the men, including the savants, all believed it to be a sign of weakness, which would certainly be seen as such by the Egyptians, and would only lead to further danger. But this leniency was only for public appearances. On that very same day, Napoleon sent word to General Berthier: “Please, Citizen General, give the order to the governor to cut off the heads of all the prisoners who were captured bearing arms. . . . Take them by night to the banks of the Nile and cast their headless bodies into the river.”
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Napoleon was most intent upon discovering the ringleaders behind the insurrection: those who had dispatched the fanatical students from the Al-Azhar mosque to rouse the people, those who had made speeches inflaming the mob, and those who had encouraged the insurgents to continue with their resistance, thus ensuring a bloodbath. It was several days before his intelligence managed to identify these leaders and discover their whereabouts. He learned that after the insurrection had been put down, a number of sheiks had taken sanctuary under the protection of Sheik El-Bekri in his palace, where they had remained under virtual house arrest—amongst these were the ringleaders. Napoleon ordered that for their own protection these sheiks should be removed from El-Bekri’s palace and taken to the Citadel. Here they were summarily tried, and those found guilty were condemned to death. Six of the leaders of the insurrection were beheaded on November 3, and Napoleon would later justify this action by declaring them to be “men of a violent and intractable character.”
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Despite this, nine of the men identified as leading insurgents managed to escape. As Napoleon noted in his memoirs: “Almost 4,000 men fled, crossing the desert and taking refuge in Suez.”
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However, the accuracy of Napoleon’s memory cannot always be trusted here, as is shown by his absurd assessment of the damage caused by the bombardment during the uprising: “Only three houses were consumed by the flames, twenty were damaged, and the Al-Azhar mosque suffered little.” As it happened, the main structure of the historic mosque did miraculously remain intact, but this was only because General Bon disobeyed Napoleon’s orders. As for the houses, the hours of howitzer bombardment from the Moqattam hills certainly hit more than two dozen of these—many of which were collapsible mud-brick constructions, while even the stone buildings were frequently in a ramshackle state.

To ensure that Napoleon’s apparent leniency was not misinterpreted by the population, he ordered the sheiks and
ulema
to sign, and read out in the mosques, a warning against any further revolt, or any further incitement against the French: “Sedition has been put to sleep. Let him be accursed who destroys its slumber.”
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This seemingly innocuous spiritual threat was backed by distinctly secular force, in the form of chief of police Barthelemy and his unscrupulous band of retainers. El-Djabarti described their effect:

Barthelemy was charged with disarming the citizens of Cairo. He went all over the city with his men, and arrested whoever he wanted as well as whoever had been denounced to him by Christians. Barthelemy did what he wanted with these people; he imposed large fines on them and kept the money; he bound them and threw them in prison. There he tortured them to obtain confessions, or to discover the hiding places of looted goods and weapons. Many of these unfortunates denounced other people, who were then arrested and had to submit to the same treatment. In a word, this Barthelemy committed the same horrors as those condemned by the authorities. Many people had their throats slit and were thrown into the Nile. God alone knows how many people died during these few days. In this way the Christians avenged themselves on the Moslems.
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As part of Napoleon’s continuing propaganda campaign, he announced that the sultan’s
firman
declaring war on the French was a fake document issued by Djezzar as an act of treason. It could not possibly be true because the French remained friends of the sultan.

At the outset of the Cairo insurrection the general
divan
had dissolved of its own accord, an event which Napoleon had been content to let pass. But several weeks after the disturbances were over, he realized that he would have to restore the
divan
if he wished to continue with the pretense that Egypt was being ruled with Arab consent. The reopening of the
divan
would also provide him with the opportunity to address publicly the Egyptian leaders, outlining to them his wishes for the country and how he felt things were progressing. Napoleon certainly made full use of this occasion, yet once again it was about himself that he was most revealing. In a truly astonishing speech he warned against any repetition of the Cairo insurrection, promising:

Those who declare themselves my enemies will find refuge neither in this world nor the next. Is there here a man blind enough not to see that destiny itself directs all my operations? Is there here a man incredulous enough to doubt that everything, in this vast universe, is subject to the power of destiny?

Make known to the people that since the creation of the world, it is written that after destroying the enemies of Islam, and defeating the Christians, I would come to the heart of the Orient to fulfill the tasks which have been imposed upon me. Make the people see that in the holy book of the Koran, in more than twenty passages, what has come to pass has been prophesied, and what shall come to pass is set down equally clearly. . . . The day will come when all the world will bear evidence that I am guided by orders from above and that all human efforts are powerless to stop me.
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This was just the official French version. The Arabic translation which was read out to the general
divan
goes even further, including such claims as: “The power of God passes through me so that I defeat the enemies of Islam and crush the Christian cross. . . . All I have done was inspired by God . . . [it is] the design of God; no one can prevent the execution of his will, and it is I who have been charged with this execution.”
³⁴

It would appear that El-Djabarti saw through all the rhetoric right away: “This speech had no other aim than to make a powerful impression on its audience. . . . It was full of pretension . . . inspired by a false imagination.” But was this really the case? It would be easy to claim that Napoleon was merely trying to put the fear of God into his audience, that he did not believe a word of what he was saying, but circumstances and his character strongly suggest otherwise. As we shall see, he remained obsessed by his fantasy of establishing an Oriental empire; meanwhile, he was for the first time coming to a full realization of his exceptional powers. He was both beginning to exercise them, and beginning to believe in them, and their extent had begun to appear limitless—he could do anything he chose. It was in Italy that he first “saw the world recede beneath me, as if I was being borne up into the sky.”
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Now his excessive ambition, megalomania, sense of destiny, call it what you will, was entering a new stage of its evolution. Isolated in Egypt, his power unchecked and under no supervision at all, the twenty-nine-year-old general was beginning to believe that he could achieve whatever he wished. He could even rewrite religion, with himself in the leading role. Here in this address to the reconvened general
divan
of Egypt was the first public manifestation of the man who dreamt of “marching to Asia, mounted on an elephant . . . in my hand a new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs.”
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XVI

Love and Dreams

O
N
November 21, 1798, Napoleon wrote yet another of his regular reports to the Directory—which needless to say never reached its destination. In it he blithely informed his masters: “We have had a pretty lively insurrection here, but all is now more peaceful than it has ever been.”
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With this behind him, he decided to embark upon a program of modernization for Cairo. Ambitious ideas that he had discussed with General Caffarelli and his engineers were now to be put into practice. A number of wide boulevards would be driven through the city, in order to aid transport and the swift movement of troops in case of future troubles. One boulevard would run from Ezbekiyah Square down to the Nile at Boulac, another would run alongside the northern city wall to bolster the defenses of the city, and a third would pass directly through the teeming central Abdin quarter. Ramshackle dwellings, houses, mosques, nothing was to stand in the way of these essential first steps towards turning Cairo into a modern city. At the same time, a pontoon bridge was to be constructed across the Nile from Rodah Island to the Giza shore, the first to span the Nile in its long history. Conté’s windmills on Rodah Island were to be extended, and more were to be built on the Moqattam hills, while Conté himself was set to work reconstructing as far as possible the scientific and surveying instruments that had been destroyed or pillaged from Caffarelli’s house during the insurrection.

As Napoleon embarked upon this new bout of frenetic activity, he insisted that the reluctant Kléber should be at his side, at least for the more important meetings and inspections. He was determined that Kléber should acquire firsthand some of his administrative skills, but he also insisted that Kléber should relax, encouraging him to visit the pyramids and the savants out at the Institute. Napoleon made every effort to be encouraging and friendly—showing his “love” for his fellow general—but the ebullient Kléber appeared uncharacteristically cool. Although he soon recovered from what appears to have been a mild nervous breakdown in Alexandria, beneath his surface equanimity he remained distinctly disgruntled. Watching Napoleon at work only increased his antipathy towards his commander, and he continued to jot down his private opinions in his pocketbook: “He knows nothing about organization or about administration, and yet, wanting to do everything himself he organizes and administers. Hence the chaos, the waste in every department, hence the absolute destitution, this lack of anything in the midst of plenty.”
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Yet once again he could not avoid grudgingly noting Napoleon’s qualities: “Is he evil? No, but that is because vices come from stupidity, and he is not stupid.” But what most irritated this most military of generals was Napoleon’s ever-increasing pretentiousness, his growing sense of his own destiny. Kléber recorded with disgust how at one meeting Napoleon let drop the remark: “For my part, I am playing with history. . . .”

Kléber was not the only one to notice this expanding gap between dreams of glory and the chaos of administrative reality. Things were hardly running smoothly in Cairo, but in the other cities under French rule the situation was often dire. The normally tolerant Menou soon became so exasperated with Napoleon that he fired off to him an eight-page letter outlining his situation: “While I have been at Rosetta, devoid of everything, I have had no other way of supplying my troops than with daily requisitions.”
³
After complaining at length about his complete lack of money and all other essentials, he continued, “As for wine, there’s not so much as a couple of pints left in the entire place. I haven’t even had a glimpse of any for two months.” Menou had now simply had enough of the whole chaotic business. “If this is what is known as administration, then all the knowledge that I have acquired during a lifetime of military service amounts to nothing, and I must therefore implore you to relieve me of my post.” Such was his disgust that his letter pointedly ended with no greeting, or even the common courtesy of his signature.