Napoleon in Egypt (59 page)

In his memoirs, Napoleon described how after the battle he “ascended the mountain, which rises like a sugar loaf, dominating this part of Palestine. This was where the Devil had tempted Christ by offering him worldly power.” He stood for a while contemplating the scene of his great victory, which he decided to call the Battle of Mount Tabor. The battle itself may not have burnished Napoleon’s glory quite so brilliantly as he suggests in his memoirs (though his critics only disagree with him on minor points), but there is no denying that this was a victory which reflected his superlative military instincts. Back in Acre, he had sensed from Kléber’s overconfident report that he was out of his depth, and had immediately set out at the head of Bon’s division to march overnight and relieve the situation, arriving in the nick of time. Realizing that his men were too fatigued to fight a serious battle against overwhelming numbers after their thirty-mile forced march, he had maneuvered them cannily and struck at the enemy camp with the hope of gaining some respite—a move that had proved even more decisive than he had hoped.

After descending from the mountain, Napoleon followed his troops into Nazareth, where a community of monks known as the Fathers of the Holy Land invited him to set up his headquarters in their monastery, opening up their cloister as a hospital for the wounded and the dying, who were still being carried in from the battlefield. The following evening the monks celebrated a solemn
Te Deum
in honor of the French and their victory, which was attended by Napoleon and his senior officers, despite the fact that France was now officially “de-Christianized” and most of his officers were hardened disbelievers. Napoleon and his staff were also given a conducted tour of the site of the Annunciation, where the Angel Gabriel had announced to the Virgin Mary that she would give birth to Jesus. Napoleon’s aide Captain Lavallette recalled how the prior, who was Spanish, showed them the famous black marble column beside the altar: “The prior told us with due solemnity that when the Angel Gabriel had come to announce to the Virgin Mary her glorious and holy destiny, he had brushed the column with his heel and broken it. Laughter broke out amongst us, but Napoleon gave us a stern look, forcing us to mask our derision with serious faces.”
¹⁰

The troops were equally disrespectful. Desgenettes relates how “a soldier had lost his finger in combat, but managed to pick it up and kept it. When he saw the cemetery, he made a little hole in the ground and buried it, telling his comrades: ‘No matter where the rest of my body goes when I die, at least I’ll always have a finger in the Holy Land.’”
¹¹

The following day Napoleon drew up his historic yet curiously little-known Proclamation to the Jews, in which he announced:

Bonaparte, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the French Republic, in Africa and Asia, to the rightful heirs of Palestine—the unique nation of the Jews, who have been deprived of the land of your fathers by thousands of years of lust for conquest and tyranny, which even so has never been able to destroy your name or your existence as a nation . . . Arise then, with gladness, ye exiled [and take unto yourselves] Israel’s patrimony.

The young army, which Providence has called upon me to command, supported by justice and accompanied by victory, has made Jerusalem my headquarters and will, within a few days transfer them to Damascus, from whence David’s city will feel no threat.

Rightful heirs of Palestine!

My great nation, which does not trade in human beings or in countries, as did those who sold your fathers into slavery in other nations, herewith calls upon you, not to conquer your inheritance, but to receive only that which has already been conquered, so that you can remain there as ruler, under our guarantee, and will defend it against all foreigners.
¹²

This proclamation was headed: “General headquarters, Jerusalem 1 Floréal Year 7 of the French Republic, 20 April 1799.” By an auspicious coincidence this also happened to be the first day of the Jewish celebration of Passover.

Napoleon’s astonishing Proclamation to the Jews is of such import in the history of the region that it warrants a short digression from the main events of his Syrian campaign. This document is indeed historic: it was the first in which a leading international figure offered a homeland for the Jews. But the proclamation itself is fraught with controversies. Perhaps the least of these is the fact that it certainly could not have been issued in Jerusalem, which was never taken by Napoleon. On the day in question he was at Ramla, twenty-five miles from Jerusalem. However, such anticipation of events is not unknown in the writings of Napoleon. On the other hand, many serious historians have argued that he never in fact wrote such a document. In support of this claim they point out that no original of this proclamation has ever been discovered, nor even has a French copy of it come to light.

The only contemporary evidence of its existence comes in two references that appeared in the official French gazette
Le Moniteur
, published by the Directory. The first appeared on May 22, 1799, and stated: “Bonaparte has published a proclamation in which he invites the Jews of Asia and Africa to join his army in order to re-establish ancient Jerusalem. He has already armed a great number of them and their battalions are menacing Aleppo.”
¹³
Even more intriguingly, the dateline given for this message is “Constantinople 28 Germinal,” which is April 17—in other words, three days
before
Napoleon issued the proclamation 1,000 miles away near Jerusalem. Was this piece of news merely a propaganda ploy, with no message from Constantinople, and no basis whatsoever in fact? Were the Directory simply guessing, making use of tidbits of news they had received concerning Egypt and plans which Napoleon had outlined before he set out? This would seem to be the only, rather unconvincing, answer.

A few weeks later, on July 27,
Le Moniteur
reported: “Bonaparte has not conquered Syria simply to return their Jerusalem to the Jews; he has much wider plans . . . to march on Constantinople, in order to spread terror in Vienna and St. Petersburg.” This coda to the previous message would seem to confirm the propaganda aspect, for France was now threatened by Austria and Russia. It would also accord with the ambitions that Napoleon had revealed to the Directory. So perhaps all this really was inspired guesswork by the Directory, after all. Such a view is confirmed by the absurd report which appeared in the May 24 edition of
Le Moniteur
, under the heading “Army of the Orient”: A courier has arrived with a message from Bonaparte in Jerusalem dated 22 Pluvôise [February 11]. The climate has had no effect on the general and very little on the army, which was in an excellent state and through local recruiting has increased its number up to 100,000 men. Berthier is cured of the deafness from which he has been suffering for the last three months. Our cavalry is now fully mounted on Arab steeds. Bonaparte is understood to have appointed to serve under him an ancient Mameluke chief named Barthelemy, and as a result has acquired great influence amongst the Eastern Greeks.

Such a mélange of fact, guesswork and pure imagination may appear laughable, but it does all point to one significant fact: Napoleon had certainly mentioned to the Directory before he set out that he planned to issue a Proclamation to the Jews. This suggests that he may well have prepared his proclamation in Cairo, before he set out on his Syrian campaign. In which case, he would almost certainly have consulted the rabbis of the Jewish community in Cairo, and intriguingly he may even have had it printed in Hebrew. (There has long been a rumor that the Jewish community of Cairo possessed a small Hebrew printing press prior to Napoleon’s invasion.)

The existence of a copy of Napoleon’s proclamation might have helped to clear up such questions, but for almost a century and a half no copy came to light, with the result that its very existence began to recede into the realms of mythology. Then in 1940 a sensational discovery was made in Vienna, when a copy in German on “strong old paper in a well-conserved handwriting” was found in the archives of a Viennese family with a rabbinical tradition. An eighteenth-century ancestor of this family was known to have been an authority to whom “questions of religious law were submitted for his ruling from remote parts of the world including Palestine and Morocco.”
¹⁴
The discovery of such a document in Vienna, two years after the Nazis had taken over Austria and were persecuting the Jews, as well as destroying their property, was miraculous enough, but a copy was then somehow smuggled to wartime Britain, where it was translated into English and appeared in September 1940 in the now defunct magazine
New Judaea
.

Inevitably, all this was regarded with skepticism by some historians, who suspected that this German translation was either a forgery or a complete hoax. All the internal evidence in this document points against such a view. The somewhat bogus “Oriental style” of the proclamation precisely echoes that which Napoleon’s orientalist savants used when putting together other proclamations that he made to the people of Egypt and Syria. The 500-word proclamation, which incorporates several Biblical allusions—one to the Book of Isaiah, another to Maccabees, and two to Joel—bears many of the hallmarks of the fifty-six-year-old Orientalist Jean-Michel de Venture. He is known to have been one of the savants who accompanied Napoleon on the Syrian expedition, and in fact died on May 16, 1799, just a month after the proclamation was published, officially having succumbed to dysentery, but in fact almost certainly dying of the plague.

Others have pointed out that this German version of Napoleon’s Proclamation to the Jews contains a number of glaring mistakes; but if anything these very mistakes would seem to confirm its authenticity. Why would any forger claim that it was written in Jerusalem, when this was so evidently impossible? This has the authentic ring of Napoleonic exaggeration. Lastly, and perhaps most convincingly, what would be the motive for such a forgery, which has brought neither money nor renown to its purported forger? Yet the unavoidable fact remains that no French (or Hebrew) version of this document has yet been found, either in the Middle East or in France, and even more damningly there is no reference whatsoever to such a proclamation in any of Napoleon’s countless dispatches and voluminous memoirs. Despite this, I am inclined to believe that Napoleon did issue this Proclamation to the Jews, for at the same time he issued proclamations to the Christians, the Druze, and even various Arab leaders. He had high hopes of attracting all these people to his cause, and getting volunteers from amongst them to join him, thus swelling the dwindling ranks of French soldiers on his Syrian campaign—which we now know was intended to be just the beginning of a far greater enterprise.

XXIV

“That man made me lose my destiny”

N
ow
that Napoleon had dispatched the Army of Damascus, the way ahead lay open, but although he certainly considered the option of marching north immediately to take Damascus and Aleppo, he resisted this temptation. Instead, he returned to Acre to complete the task at hand. By now word had reached him that Admiral Perrée had eluded the British naval blockade and landed at Tantura, fifteen miles south of Haifa, with three frigates bringing three twenty-four-pound cannons and four eighteen-pounders, as well as ammunition. These now had to be hauled twenty-five miles overland, but were expected at Acre within a matter of days.

The siege itself had by this stage become a succession of slogging artillery exchanges, which resulted in some heavy French casualties in the sappers’ trenches, whose operations were directed in person by the indefatigable one-legged engineer Caffarelli. One night, whilst demonstrating his plans, Caffarelli inadvertently raised his arm above the parapet of the trench and it was shattered by a cannonball. He was quickly rushed to the field hospital, where Surgeon-in-Chief Larrey was forced to amputate in order to save his life. When the general’s condition deteriorated, Napoleon ordered Bourrienne to remain at Caffarelli’s side, though it soon became clear that he was dying: “A little before his final moments he said to me: ‘My dear Bourrienne, please read to me that preface by Voltaire to [Montesquieu’s]
The Spirit of Laws
.’”
¹
Bourrienne told Napoleon about Caffarelli’s request, and he guessed what this meant: for the atheist Caffarelli this great work of political theory was his Bible, and having it read to him was his equivalent of the last rites. Napoleon went to see him, but he had slipped into sleep; later that night the forty-three-year-old Caffarelli died “with the utmost tranquility. His death was mourned by both the soldiers and the savants.”
^*

Napoleon had lost the one general to whom he felt particularly close. At the same time, his confidant the aging mathematician Monge succumbed to dysentery, which he had caught whilst touring the hospital wards with Chief Medical Officer Desgenettes, whom he was assisting in a much-needed rationalization of the overstretched facilities. Monge quickly became delirious with the fever, and Napoleon had his camp bed moved into his commander-in-chief’s tent, where he personally supervised Monge’s treatment. On one particularly cold night, he even went so far as to get up and lay his own blankets over Monge’s body as he lay shivering with fever. (He thought that Monge was asleep, but the savant would remember this incident with deep gratitude, even claiming that Napoleon had saved his life.)

Undercover of the artillery barrages, the French sappers were attempting to burrow up to the walls and mine the large central keep, the tower that appeared to be the linchpin of the city’s defenses. According to Napoleon’s intelligence, behind the tower lay open ground, the gardens of Djezzar’s palace, with only a narrow wall between them and the streets of the city. The sappers finally succeeded in inserting a mine beneath the central tower, and Napoleon decided to launch his attack at once, without waiting for the heavy siege guns. On April 24 at nine
A.M.
, the mine was exploded, but this merely blew a small hole in the side of the tower, causing one corner to crumble. Even so, the French were confident that the explosion had driven the enemy soldiers from the tower, and that there would be a way through the collapsed wall into the city. According to Paymaster Peyrusse, who witnessed the ensuing assault: