Napoleon in Egypt (64 page)

General Dugua, assisted by Napoleon’s chief financial officer Poussielgue, had maintained the French administration of Lower Egypt as best he could. The financing of the Syrian expedition had left the exchequer all but empty, and Poussielgue had done his best to raise an early tax on the harvest estimates. This, combined with Napoleon’s four-month absence, had led to a certain amount of grievance-airing and opportunistic unrest, which had resulted most notably in two uprisings. The first of these had been led by Mustafa, the Turk whom Napoleon had appointed Emir el-Hadj in place of the fugitive Murad Bey. Mustafa had been amongst the Cairo dignitaries whom Napoleon had ordered to accompany him into Syria, but he had lagged behind and finally slipped away on the pretext of organizing the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. In fact, he had remained in secret contact with Djezzar, and in late March a courier from Djezzar informed him that Napoleon had been killed at Acre and that his army was fleeing in disarray. Mustafa had immediately ridden through the eastern delta issuing a call to arms and distributing bribes, which had resulted in 2,000 Bedouin and other Mameluke supporters joining him. But significantly the local
fellahin
had not rallied to his cause, some doubtless through fear of the French, but others because their conditions had improved during French rule. This was a serious setback for Mustafa, who had planned to march on Cairo and overthrow French rule. Instead he now took to guerrilla tactics, ambushing French military convoys and attempting to pillage Napoleon’s supply lines into Syria. With Mustafa’s main objective aborted, the insurrection had turned into a scramble for booty, with greed over the distribution of the spoils causing infighting amongst the Bedouin. Dugua had dispatched General Lanusse from Cairo to put down the insurrection, and on April 3 Lanusse reported back to Cairo that “the emir hadj [Mustafa] was abandoned by all the Arabs whom he bribed, as well as his supporters, as soon as word spread that our troops were marching on the center of the uprising.”
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When Mustafa realized that the insurrection was sure to be defeated, he gave one of the Bedouin leaders a large bribe to escort him safely out of the country and across the Sinai desert. But no sooner had the Bedouin chief caught sight of the approaching French troops than he and his followers fled into the delta. “Mustafa had been abandoned, almost alone, and he had immediately ridden off towards Syria tearing at his beard in despair.”

The other uprising had taken place to the west of the delta at Damanhur, and had been a rather more serious affair. This was inspired by a Libyan called Ahmed who claimed to be the Mahdi, the long-awaited Messiah whom the Koran promised would be sent by the Prophet to lead the faithful in a final destruction of the infidels. Part inspired holy man, part charlatan, Ahmed el-Mahdi, as he came to be known, was soon attracting huge crowds of
fellahin
to his cause with his

promises for this world and the next, his power over glory and religion, his solemn prophecies, ecstasies, revelations, miracles . . . He claimed that his body was immaterial . . . all he required in the way of food was to dip his fingers into a jug of milk and pass them lightly over his lips. Naked as a Muslim fakir, he declared that the heat had no effect on him, that the French bullets would bounce off his skin without harming him, that his breath would put out the fire of the cannons, that a grain of dust thrown from his hand would stop a cannon ball in its flight.
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Soon thousands of
fellahin
and Bedouin were flocking to his call—one contemporary estimate puts the number of his followers as high as 15,000 on foot and 4,000 on horseback. During the night of April 29–30 these all attacked the French garrison at Damanhur, which was forced to take refuge in a mosque. The Mahdi gave his blessing and the mosque was set on fire; no one escaped. Once again, General Lanusse was dispatched by Dugua from Cairo, and reached Damanhur on May 9. At the sight of the French troops the insurgents began to flee in terror, but the French soldiers were incensed at the burning to death of their comrades, and, according to Lanusse, “wreaked their vengeance on the town and the inhabitants of Damanhur. Around 200 or 300 of its inhabitants were killed as they fled; after that I abandoned this wretched town to the horrors of pillage and carnage. Damanhur no longer exists, and between 1,200 and 1,500 of its inhabitants have been burnt or shot.”
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Ahmed el-Mahdi was either killed or fled, and was never seen again.

Lower Egypt was pacified, but this was hardly the way to win friends. Despite this, when Napoleon returned to Cairo in the following month, his main concern remained external enemies. Writing to Desaix in Upper Egypt, he congratulated him on his success in driving out Murad Bey, but then went on to tell him: “Down here we are approaching the season when an invasion could well take place. I am losing no time in preparing for this.” Though he added optimistically: “In all probability there will not be any enemy landing this year.”
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Even so, he told Desaix: “We are spending 2 to 300,000 francs each month building up our northern coastal defenses. You have sufficient money; be generous enough to send us 150,000 francs.”

At the same time he wrote to the Directory: “We are masters of the entire eastern desert, and have foiled any invasion plans from that quarter for this year.”
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For the first time he made mention of the plague, giving details which were in fact not details at all: “The plague began six months ago in Alexandria, with the most severe symptoms. At Damietta it has been more benign. At Gaza and at Jaffa it made more ravages. It has not struck at Cairo or at Suez or in Upper Egypt.” He used this as a partial excuse for his army having “lost 5,344 men since the beginning of the campaign.” For this reason he was in need of reinforcements, but he promised: “If you could send us in excess of 15,000 men, we would be able to go anywhere, even Constantinople.”

Owing to the British blockade, the French army was by this stage beginning to suffer from all kinds of shortages. With regard to the shortage of men, Napoleon instructed Dugua to “revise” the sentences of all French soldiers locked up in the Citadel on various charges, ranging from insubordination to murder. By now the Citadel also held a large number of Arab prisoners, many of whom were awaiting the death penalty, and Dugua wrote to Napoleon: “With the firing squads becoming more frequent at the Citadel, I suggest,
mon général
, that we replace these with a machine for cutting off heads.
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This would save on our bullets and make much less noise.”
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The sound of gunfire echoing over the rooftops of Cairo at dawn was evidently not winning over the hearts and minds of the local population. In the margin of Dugua’s report, Napoleon wrote simply “Agreed.”

The Army of the Orient was by now running short on weapons and ammunition, despite the valiant efforts of Conté and his savant-engineers to manufacture replacements out of local materials. In an attempt to make good this deficiency, Napoleon now wrote to the commandant of the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, asking him to send “3,000 rifles, 1,500 pairs of pistols and 1,000 sabers.”
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He assured the commandant that the Red Sea was under French control now that Suez was fortified and Desaix’s forces in Upper Egypt had taken Kosseir, some 300 miles down the coast. Here he was being disingenuous. A few weeks earlier a British frigate and another vessel had arrived off Suez on an exploratory mission, but had been repelled by the French battery. There was no doubt that the British would be back. Indeed, writing on the same day to the French commandant of Mauritius, Napoleon asked him to try and keep a line of communication open between them “despite the battle cruisers which infest the Red Sea.” Napoleon may well have been trying to deceive himself as much as the commandant of Réunion when assuring him of a safe passage for the shipment of weapons.

Under such circumstances, the morale of many of the French troops remained almost as low as it had been following the retreat from Acre. In an attempt to remedy this, Napoleon resorted to his customary round of promotions, dispatches singling out the exemplary conduct of particular soldiers, and rewards for bravery in the form of jewelencrusted pistols, engraved sabers and the like. These rewards came from the booty seized after the flight of the Mamelukes at the Battle of Mount Tabor. And the increased wages bill resulting from the round of promotions made no difference to the exchequer, as the pay of the men was already in deep arrears. This distribution of carrots was reinforced by applications of the stick: senior officers were instructed to draw up lists of well-known troublemakers and barrack-room lawyers in their regiments, who were to be punished more severely than others when found guilty of misdemeanors.

French life in Cairo had quickly returned to normal, and just two weeks after Napoleon’s return from Syria the Institute renewed its regular meetings, with the recovered Monge taking the presidential chair. The opening meeting was to witness an extraordinary scene between Napoleon and his chief medical officer Desgenettes. Relations between the two were already at a low ebb after their clashes during the Syrian campaign over giving opium to the plague victims, and matters were only made worse when Desgenettes discovered that Napoleon had written over his head to the Directory: “We need 18–20 physicians and 60–80 surgeons; many are dying out here. All the diseases prevalent in this country need to be studied, as they are all virtually unknown; but the more we know about them, the less dangerous they will become.”
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Desgenettes understandably saw this as a slight on the widespread researches he had already carried out into ophthalmia and the plague, and was outraged that Napoleon should have appealed to the Directory in this manner without consulting him.

The Institute meeting got off to a bad start when Napoleon proposed the setting up of a commission to report on the outbreak of bubonic plague which the army had suffered in Syria. Desgenettes was not given a seat on this commission, and quickly began to suspect that he was to be blamed for the severity with which the disease had taken hold in the army, which in turn would then be given as the reason for the failure of the entire Syrian campaign. In confirmation of his suspicions, during the ensuing discussion Napoleon “let slip a number of sarcastic remarks about medicine in general and the medical profession in particular. Desgenettes rose, and before the entire assembly, which was astonished at his anger, responded to the sarcasms of the general with a few rather more bitter and biting sarcasms of his own. He wished it to be known that he had honorably refused to take part in what he regarded as criminal acts [a reference to the poisoning of plague victims].”
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He then launched into a long diatribe against the leadership of his commander-in-chief, making reference to the “mercenary adulation” of his subordinates, and his “oriental despotism.” When Napoleon, and then Monge, tried to silence him, Desgenettes concluded, “I know, general—for when you attend these meetings you are more than just an ordinary member of the Institute, you insist upon being commander-in-chief even here—I know that I was carried away in the heat of the moment and said things that will have repercussions far from here, but I do not retract a single word. . . . I take refuge in the army’s gratitude for what I have done.”
¹²

Desgenettes may have committed an unforgivable blunder in attacking Napoleon, but he knew that he was on firm ground with his final remark: the soldiers held him in high esteem, and he knew it. Word of this unprecedented row at the Institute quickly spread throughout the army, and when some days later Desgenettes happened to walk past several battalions which were being drilled outside the city gates, “the doctor was acclaimed by the soldiers with cheers and cries of support.”
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Napoleon, for his part, responded ambivalently to this man who had risked everything by standing up to his authority. Few men were brave enough to do this, and Napoleon could not help but admire Desgenettes, even if he did not like him. When Desgenettes honorably offered to resign and be sent back to France, Napoleon refused. He knew that such a move would have been widely construed as Desgenettes being sent home in disgrace.

Other business at the Institute meetings proved less stormy. During Napoleon’s absence the engineer-savants had pressed ahead with implementing the new street plan, with its wide main thoroughfares passing through Cairo’s maze of alleyways. They had also supervised the completion of the bridges crossing the Nile. The pontoon bridge linking Rodah Island and Giza was complete, with an additional pontoon linking Rodah to the Cairo shore in readiness for the Nile flooding. Even the citizens of Cairo seem to have been impressed by these advanced technological projects, which gave many employment. El-Djabarti remarked: “All this work was completed in a short time. There was no forced labor, and everyone was well paid; the instruments which the French used were of great assistance to them. For cutting stone and sawing wood they had tools which were much better made than those in Cairo.”
¹⁴
Other engineers had been busy building the ring of forts which acted as the city’s defenses; Napoleon decreed that these should be named after generals and leading officers of the Army of the Orient who had fallen in battle in Egypt and Syria.

Other savants had set up a topographical committee to collate all the maps being made of Lower Egypt, together with those being sent to Cairo by Desaix’s engineers in Upper Egypt. This would result in a detailed atlas of the entire country, the first of its kind in the whole of Africa. Yet it would prove of little benefit to the world’s geographers, as it was designated a state secret and would be kept under lock and key in Paris for many years to come.