The Bloodless Guillotine:Napoleons Revolution in Egypt - Essay Example

Your Your The Bloodless Guillotine: Napoleon's Revolution in Egypt Most people associate the French Revolution with bloodthirsty images: the thousands of heads chopped off by the guillotine after the most summary of trials; the swift conversion of the stones of the Bastille, a former political prison used by the Bourbon monarchs, into a bridge. Perhaps Charles Dickens' images from A Tale of Two Cities are the most gripping: poor men, women and children greedily scooping red wine off the filthy streets, even from the gaps between cobblestones, when a cask falls off a cart and bursts; the semiconscious, primeval rapture of the Carmagnole, as it rolled through the streets of Paris; the feeble voices of children starving to death, while their parents leave them to watch executions. However, the French Revolution did not begin this way. It began with ideals, and it began peacefully. King Louis XVI yielded to many of the initial demands of the Third Estate, and before the name of Robespierre became associated with such dark terrors, there was a time when peaceful transition to democracy seemed possible. However, by 1791, and especially 1792, the country had spilled into chaos. This violence would rage for almost a decade, before Napoleon Bonaparte emerged, promising to restore order to a tired France, if he could only be endowed with enough power. And so, barely ten years after the French deposed their last monarch, they installed another. In 1806, Napoleon caused a religious document to be produced, entitled The Imperial Catechism. Written in the same question-and-answer style as the catechism used by the Roman Catholic Church, the Imperial Catechism taught its readers how (and why) to venerate their new emperor, who had been "raised up in trying times to re-establish the public worship of the holy religion of our fathers[and to re-establish]public order by his profound and active wisdom" ("The Imperial Catechism"). After the years of uncontrolled bloodletting known as the Reign of Terror, though, the French were happy to accept just about any regime as long as it would provide order. The memoirs of Madame de Rmusat demonstrate just how easily Napoleon found it to take control of the exhausted country. From the beginning, he held an almost magical power over those under him. His soldiers became "rapturous" when he came to review them. His uncanny ability to memorize soldiers' names, and even personal details about their respective battles, or injuries they had suffered, made him especially beloved. According to Madame de Rmusat, Napoleon would "[pore] over the list of what are called the cadres of the army at night before he slept" ("Madame de Rmusat"). And while Napoleon would later be known for his attempted conquest of all of Europe, one of his most influential expeditions occurred even before he ruled France, when he led an expedition to conquer Egypt. Once in power, Napoleon would work to consolidate his own authority, which would often work at odds with the erstwhile goals of the Revolution. He would utilize a band of collaborators, spread throughout the major French political and social institutions, to make the entire country organizationally accountable to him, which made it simple for him to move from consul to emperor, as Julius Caesar did so many centuries before (Woloch, p. 118). But just like the French Revolution was not always bloodthirsty and tyrannical, neither was Napoleon always dictatorially minded. In 1798, the Directory of the French Republic decided to send a military expedition to Egypt under Napoleon's command. While this might seem a foolhardy campaign in our own time, the consequences of losing a war like this were significantly less in the 1800's. The weaponry was less sophisticated; the logistics of the Egyptians returning to France and adding insult to injury would have been difficult to surmount. For those who mock the American motives for the invasion of Iraq, the French motives for invading Egypt would sound downright farcical: French Foreign Minister Talleyrand wrote that "Egypt was once a province of the Roman Republic; she must now become a province of the French Republicthe Romans seized Egypt from a line of kings renowned in the arts and sciences; the French will rescue her from the hands of the vilest tyrants who ever existed" (Hussein). Not only was Napoleon assigned to take control of the Red Sea, but also to "improve the lot of the native inhabitants of Egypt by all the means in his power" (Hussein). Accordingly, not only did the army travel with infantry and cavalry, but also a 165-member Commission of Arts and Sciences, which was made up of every sort of thinker from mathematicians to chemists to painters. The idea of including this group in the expedition was to work toward increasing intellectual and material growth in Egypt. Mathematician Gaspard Monge wrote that he had been "transformed into an argonaut, carrying the torch of Reason in a land where for years its light has ceased to shine" (Hussein). Reason had been one of the primary ideals of the 1789 revolution in France. This had taken not only the form of the seizure of the Catholic church, and the elimination of the calendar that popes had put in place centuries before, but in the idea that logic should govern political decision-making, not the inertia of dynastic succession. The Mambuk Beys ruled over Egypt in those days, a similar dynastic family, and one of the reasons for this invasion had been to give to Egypt what France had already given to itself. As Napoleon explained it, the objective at hand was not "to force the Egyptians into submission, but rather to gain their support by defeating their oppressors" (Hussein). The expected manners of the soldiers were incredibly sensitive, especially given the time period. Napoleon forbade all of the French "to enter mosques or gather at the entrance to mosquesit [was] of supreme importance that each soldier [pay] for anything he [acquired] in the city and that [the Egyptians] be neither cheated nor insulted" (Hussein). However, despite this great care that Napoleon took to befriend the common Egyptians, and focus the attention of the military action on the ruling Mambuks, the Egyptians merely responded by protesting the very presence of the French in their country. There were several reasons for this hostile response. First, no matter how kind the soldiers behaved, they still represented an army of occupation, and no matter how much sensitivity training Napoleon attempted to instill in his men, the French simply came from a culture opposite in too many ways to Egyptian mores for the commoners to welcome their "liberators." Second, France was a country that, in the Egyptian consciousness, still held associations with the Crusades - after all, the last major force from Western Europe to enter these lands had been the Crusaders themselves. While there were some intellectuals in Egypt who could appreciate the secular approach that the Revolutionary government had brought to France, and sought to spread around the world, most Egyptians saw this as a modern-day Crusade. Third, while the slogans of liberty, equality, and brotherhood sounded wonderful to the downtrodden masses in Paris, it rang harshly against Egyptian ears, which were accustomed to such virtues as the demands of custom, the importance of honoring the community, and submitting to the rule of those over oneself. In Egypt, domestic slavery was a common custom, and so the idea of individual liberty was beyond foreign. Finally, Napoleon's legal changes were enacted too swiftly and too precipitately for the Egyptians to understand their benefit. For example, Cairo had broken down into small sectors, in which small family groups or trade guilds lived, for centuries, and the small sectors were gated off from one another. When Napoleon ordered these gates to be removed, the whole city felt a loss of security. When soldiers began cleaning streets and even the insides of houses to help avoid the spread of plague, this was the last straw - the soldiers were seen as invading the privacy of the home (Hussein). Riots spread; Napoleon's army put them down in bloody fashion. The Egyptians began to hate, rather than merely to dislike, their liberators, whose ships had been destroyed in the Mediterranean by the British, and so the French returned home, three years after they had left with such high hopes, but in utter failure (Hussein). However, after the French had left, a highly ironic development took place (and one wonders if a similar move by the Bush Administration in the United States might not have a similar effect!). Once the French Army left, and the daily, visible reminders that the French were foreign oppressors with roots back to Richard Lionheart, the ideas of the French Revolution began to take hold in Egypt. After the French left, the Mamluk and Ottoman leaders quickly began to reassert their power, often using cruel measures to subjugate the Egyptians to the old way of life. Then (and only then) the Egyptians noticed the differences between their former Mamluk rulers and the French way of governing. While both systems were fairly dictatorial, the more modern rule of the French had a few advantages. While both the French Army and the Mamluks could be cruel, Napoleon's administration tried to be just in ways that the Mamluks did not even attempt to emulate. Just as they had for the downtrodden French after centuries of Bourbon rule, the words of the French Revolution encouraged the Egyptians. Ideas like overcoming a sense of inferiority that came with submission, thinking about rights as well as duties, taking responsibility for their own destiny, trying to create a future that was more than just a repetition of the past, all gripped the common imagination of the Egyptian and made him yearn for more than the Mamluks could provide (Hussein). Into this window of opportunity stepped Muhammad Ali. Born in Albania, and leader of one of the Ottoman brigades sent in to restore order after the French Army withdrew, Ali realized the potential of the ideas in the French Revolution, and saw the opportunities for someone who wanted to fill the vacuum of power as a governor who could bridge the gap between the Egyptian cultural mores and the ideas of modern France. And so he made alliances with the spiritual and intellectual leadership of Egypt, then slaughtered all of the primary Mamluk chiefs. The Ottoman sultan recognized him as the Governor of Egypt, freeing him to usher in an era of modernization in Egypt. Western scientists and technology were brought in, and Egyptian students were sent to Europe. Manufacturing plants began to sprout up, and Egypt formed its own army (Hussein). And so the mission that the French had set out to accomplish did, in its own way, come to pass. In our own time, there is a lot of commentary about the motives for going to war. The ideas of regime change are anathema in the modern political climate. However, there were times in history when the Western powers saw it as their responsibility to instill the allegedly superior values of Western culture throughout the world, and Napoleon's expedition was one of these attempts. Coming from an era when so much of the history of France consisted of bloodthirsty violence, this attempt to bring some good to another country is just one of the untold stories that lurk in the shadow of the guillotine. Works Cited Hussein, Mahmoud. "The Eagle and the Sphinx: Napoleon Bonaparte - 1789: An Idea that Changed the World." UNESCO Courier June 1989. Accessed 20 March 2007 online at http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1989_June/ai_7839491/print "Madame de Rmusat: Remembrances of Napoleon." Readings in European History, J.H. Robinson, ed. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1904-1906, vol. 2, pp. 487-489. "The Imperial Catechism." Readings in European History, J.H. Robinson, ed., Boston: Ginn and Company, 1904-1906., vol. 2, pp. 509-510. Woloch, Isser. Napoleon and his collaborators. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001, 281 pp. Dear Customer, The Hussein and Woloch sources are secondary sources. The two sources from Readings in European History are primary even though the copyright of the BOOK is 1904-1906, those are sources from Napoleon's time so the Madame de Remusat and Imperial Catechism are dating to Napoleon's time. And yes, the words are original in the essay. Kind Regards, Muhammed Read More