French invasion of Egypt and Syria
The French invasion of Egypt and Syria left its most vivid record not in French dispatches but in the pages of an Egyptian scholar. Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, born in Cairo in 1753, watched the French arrive and wrote down what he saw. He described the invasion as the beginning of "fierce fights and important incidents; of the momentous mishaps and appalling afflictions." Napoleon Bonaparte saw it quite differently. Landing at Alexandria on the 1st of July 1798, he told his troops that every soldier who returned would receive six arpents of land, roughly 7.6 acres. He also instructed them to respect Egyptian muftis and imams just as they had respected rabbis and bishops in Italy. Napoleon brought not only an army but a contingent of scholars and scientists embedded within the invasion force. That pairing of sword and pen produced consequences that outlasted the campaign by centuries.
The Peace of Campo Formio ended France's war with Austria, leaving Britain as the only major European power still at war with the French Republic. After naval defeats at Cape St Vincent and Camperdown, a direct invasion of Britain was no longer feasible. France needed another strategy to weaken its enemy. The idea of taking Egypt had circulated since 1777. In that year, Francois Baron de Tott conducted a secret reconnaissance mission to the Levant to assess its feasibility. His report was favorable, but no action followed for two decades. The concept resurfaced in correspondence between Napoleon and Talleyrand during Napoleon's Italian campaign. In August 1797, Napoleon wrote directly to the Directory laying out the case. Control of Egypt would place France across the eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea. That position would cut severely into British trade with India. Napoleon also hoped to join forces with Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore and an active opponent of British rule in India. France had diplomatic cover. Since 1536, France and the Ottoman Sultan had been formal allies, and France could argue it was restoring Ottoman authority over the Mamluks. Those Mamluk rulers had turned against the French trading community. The trouble began after the death of Ismail Bey, the pro-French Shaykh al-balad, during a Cairo epidemic in 1791. His rivals, Ibrahim Bey and Murad Bey, took power and actively persecuted French merchants. France thus had two public justifications for intervention: restoring Ottoman order, and liberating Egyptians from Mamluk feudalism. In March 1798, the Directory formally appointed Bonaparte commander-in-chief of the Armee d'Orient and authorized an expedition of 36,000 men. Preparations spread across Toulon, Marseille, Genoa, Corsica, and Civitavecchia, organized chiefly by Napoleon's chief of staff Louis Berthier. He was also authorized to draw three of the eight million francs held in the Bernese treasury.
On the 6th of July 1798, the French army set off from Alexandria toward Cairo. They wore thick woollen uniforms and carried full knapsacks but very little water. The soldiers crossed 72 kilometres of desert to reach the staging town of Rahmaniyyah. Dysentery spread through the ranks. Eye inflammation struck widely. Villages marked on French maps turned out to be abandoned, and Bedouins had filled in the wells. By the 20th of July, the army had advanced to Umm Dinar, 29 kilometres north of Cairo. A force of around 6,000 Mamluk cavalry attacked at roughly 3:30 in the afternoon. Formed into squares, the French held off the charge and then counter-attacked. The Mamluks lost around 1,500 dead and wounded; the French barely a hundred. On the 22nd of July, the notables of Cairo came to Giza to offer the city to Bonaparte. Three days later, he moved his headquarters there.
The naval disaster arrived on the 1st of August. Horatio Nelson's British Mediterranean fleet found the French squadron under Francois-Paul Brueys d'Aigalliers anchored in the shallows of Aboukir Bay, near Alexandria. The French assumed the British would wait until morning to attack. They were wrong. The British found a gap in the French defensive line and poured through it, attacking from both sides simultaneously. At around ten in the evening, the French flagship L'Orient exploded. By morning, only two of Brueys's ships of the line and two frigates had escaped destruction or capture. Napoleon, traveling back to Cairo from his pursuit of Ibrahim Bey, received the dispatch without visible alarm. According to one account, he said: "We no longer have a navy. Well! We'll have to stay here, or leave as great men just as the ancients did." The army cheered. The Egyptians saw the defeat at Aboukir as fortune turning in their favor. Within months, they would put that project of expulsion into execution in the streets of Cairo.
Bonaparte organized a celebration of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday shortly after returning from his pursuit of Ibrahim Bey. He directed the military parades himself, wearing oriental dress and a turban. The divan granted him the title Ali-Bonaparte after he proclaimed himself a "worthy son of the Prophet" and "favourite of Allah." He also wrote personally to the governor of Mecca to protect Egyptian pilgrim caravans. For the anniversary of the founding of the French Republic on the 22nd of September, he ordered an immense circus built in Cairo's largest square. It had 105 columns around the edge, each flying a flag bearing the name of a French departement. A colossal inscribed obelisk stood at the centre. The Genoese artist Michel Rigo decorated a triumphal arch with scenes from the Battle of the Pyramids. That painting flattered the French and deeply offended the Egyptians they were trying to win over.
None of it worked. The taxes Napoleon levied to support his army made the Egyptians skeptical of every proclamation of friendship. In October 1798, discontent broke into open revolt. While Bonaparte was in Old Cairo, the population spread weapons and fortified strongpoints, particularly at the Al-Azhar Mosque. A French commander, Dominique Dupuy, was killed. Bonaparte's aide-de-camp, Joseph Sulkowski, was also killed. Bonaparte responded by placing cannons in the Citadel and ordering them to fire on rebel-held areas. He then pursued resisters street by street into the Al-Azhar Mosque and ordered his cannon to open fire on the building. French forces stormed the gates and massacred the inhabitants. By the revolt's end, between 5,000 and 6,000 Cairenes were dead or wounded.
Al-Jabarti received Napoleon's Arabic proclamations with a combination of amusement, bewilderment, and outrage. He mocked the grammatical errors throughout. The French Orientalist Jean Michel de Venture de Paradis was responsible for translating Napoleon's proclamations into Arabic. He had lived in Tunis and understood Arabic grammar, but could not use it idiomatically. His Maltese assistants' language was only distantly related to the Egyptian dialect. The error that most offended Al-Jabarti was Napoleon's claim that the French were Muslims: the proclamation used the wrong noun case, rendering the word in lower case and altering the meaning entirely. Al-Jabarti also noted that words like "republic" and "democracy" had no Arabic equivalents whatsoever. Though deeply critical of Napoleon, Al-Jabarti preferred French rule to Ottoman rule. He found French judicial proceedings fair. Both he and his disciple Hassan Al-Attar were struck by French technological achievements. In a letter to a local sheikh, written in August 1798, Napoleon had put his broader ambition into words. He wrote: "I hope... I shall be able to unite all the wise and educated men of all the countries and establish a uniform regime based on the principles of the Quran which alone are true and which alone can lead men to happiness."
On the 10th of February 1799, Napoleon left Cairo heading north with around 14,000 soldiers. They were organized into divisions under generals Reynier, Kleber, Bon, Lannes, and Murat. The threat was clear. Sultan Selim III had declared war on France after news of the Aboukir naval defeat reached Constantinople. One Ottoman army of 12,000, under Jezzar Pasha, was advancing through Syria, reinforced by troops from Damascus, Aleppo, Iraq, and Jerusalem. A second army was assembling on Rhodes. Rather than wait to be encircled, Napoleon attacked. El-Arish fell after an unexpected siege on the 19th of February. Gaza surrendered without resistance on the 25th of February. By the 3rd of March, the French had reached Jaffa.
Jaffa surrendered on the 7th of March after a successful assault on the city walls. A French officer had persuaded 3,000 Turks in the citadel that amnesty awaited them if they laid down their arms. Bonaparte then ordered every man executed, along with a further 1,400 prisoners. He later claimed military necessity: he had no food for so many prisoners and could not spare them an escort. He also argued that some had been paroled at El-Arish and returned to the fight. None of these explanations have survived scrutiny.
The campaign stalled before Acre. The British reached Acre on the 15th of March and stiffened its defenses. The Royal Navy seized the French flotilla carrying Napoleon's heavy siege artillery, forcing him to rely on slower methods. French forces performed well in battles away from the walls. On the 11th of April, Kleber led 1,500 men to rout 6,000 Turks at Canaan. At Mount Tabor, Napoleon drove around 20,000 Ottomans into a trap, attacking from multiple directions and leaving 5,000 dead on the battlefield. But Acre itself did not fall. Among the defenders was Phelippeaux, a French emigre engineer who had been Bonaparte's classmate at the Ecole Militaire. He directed cannon placements and dug new trenches behind captured ruins. After 63 days of campaigning, with plague spreading through the army, Napoleon finally ordered a retreat.
The retreat was physically brutal. Bonaparte and his officers handed their horses over to the transport officer Daure and walked through the desert alongside their men. Napoleon also proposed euthanizing his terminally ill plague soldiers with opium, arguing it was more merciful than leaving them to be captured and tortured. His doctors refused to carry out the order. Whether the euthanasias took place anyway remains disputed. On the 29th of June 1799, he sent a dispatch to Paris acknowledging the loss of 5,344 men. He requested 6,000 reinforcements, already knowing none would be forthcoming.
A young engineering officer named Pierre-Francois Bouchard discovered the Rosetta Stone in July 1799. That stone would eventually allow scholars to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, though that breakthrough lay decades ahead. Bouchard was one of 167 scientists and scholars Napoleon had embedded within the invasion force. The geologist Dolomieu was among them, as was the mathematician Gaspard Monge, a founding member of the Ecole polytechnique. The chemist Claude Louis Berthollet and the artist Henri-Joseph Redoute were also part of the group. The naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and the botanist Alire Raffeneau-Delile also made the voyage. The mathematician Jean-Joseph Fourier conducted empirical work in Egypt that later formed the foundation of his analytical theory of heat. The engineer Nicolas-Jacques Conte of the Conservatoire national des arts et metiers was also on board.
Their original mandate was practical. They were to help open a Suez Canal, map roads, and build mills to supply the army. They founded the Institut d'Egypte to propagate Enlightenment values through interdisciplinary research. The institute operated laboratories, libraries, and a printing press. A scientific review called the Decade egyptienne was established. The scholars observed and drew Egyptian flora and fauna. Some of their discoveries were not fully catalogued until the 1820s.
Conte and Monge built a hot air balloon from paper, coloured in the red, white, and blue of the French tricolour. They launched it above Azbakiyya Square before a crowd of spectators. The balloon fell quickly to earth, causing panic in the crowd. An earlier plan to fly a balloon during the September Republic anniversary celebrations had already collapsed. The scientists had lost their equipment at the Battle of the Nile.
The expedition's research produced two major publications. The 4-volume Memoires sur l'Egypte appeared between 1798 and 1801. A larger work, the Description de l'Egypte, was published on Napoleon's orders between 1809 and 1821. These publications established Egyptology as a field of study in Europe and ignited wide fascination with ancient Egyptian culture. When General Menou surrendered in 1801, he signed the Rosetta Stone over to the British. All other Egyptian antiquities the French had collected went to General John Hely-Hutchinson under the surrender terms.
On the 23rd of August 1799, the army of Egypt learned that Bonaparte had gone. Kleber received a brief communique: "Only extraordinary circumstances have persuaded me, for the benefit of my country and its reputation and in obedience, to pass through the enemy lines and return to Europe." Bonaparte had left Cairo quietly, telling the army he was making a voyage in the Nile Delta. With him went the scholars Monge and Berthollet, the painter Denon, and generals Berthier, Murat, Lannes, Marmont, Andreossy, and Bessieres.
Kleber faced a nearly impossible situation. In January 1800, he signed the Convention of El Arish with Ottoman commander Kor Yusuf Ziyauddin Pasha in the presence of Sidney Smith. The deal would have allowed the French army to evacuate Egypt with honor. But the British government had already forbidden any such agreement. When Kleber learned the British demanded unconditional surrender, he attacked. At Heliopolis on the 20th of March 1800, he routed an Ottoman army of 40,000 men. Kleber returned to Cairo and suppressed another insurrection. On the 14th of June, a Syrian theology student named Suleiman al-Halabi stabbed Kleber in his garden. Command passed to General Jacques-Francois Menou on the 3rd of July.
Menou held on until August 1801. A British expeditionary force landed near Aboukir in March of that year. The British and their Ottoman allies captured Fort Julien, El Rahmaniya, and Cairo between April and June. British forces began besieging Alexandria on the 17th of August. Menou surrendered on the 2nd of September. The Army of the Orient was repatriated to Europe in British ships. A preliminary peace was reached at Al Arish on the 30th of January 1802. The Treaty of Paris, signed on the 25th of June, formally ended all hostilities between France and the Ottoman Empire. Egypt returned to Ottoman rule.
The campaign's toll was immense: 15,000 French soldiers killed in action, another 15,000 dead from disease. Napoleon's reputation nevertheless survived largely intact, and that was not accidental. His newspaper the Courrier de l'Egypte managed information throughout the campaign. News of the naval defeat at Aboukir Bay and the failure in Syria was suppressed. Blame for failures could fall on the assassinated Kleber. Napoleon returned to France in the autumn of 1799 with his reputation enhanced. He used it to engineer the coup d'etat of 18 brumaire, becoming First Consul of France.
The campaign's broader consequences proved harder to contain. The French invasion demonstrated the military and organizational superiority of Western European powers in a way the Ottoman world could not ignore. It introduced the printing press and ideas of liberalism and incipient nationalism to the Middle East. Muhammad Ali, who had witnessed the French campaign in Egypt, eventually declared Egyptian independence from the Ottomans. He reshaped Egypt in the first half of the 19th century. Professor Edward Said argued that the Napoleonic expedition established the intellectual framework through which Europeans would interpret the Muslim world for generations. Said wrote that Napoleon's occupation set in motion processes between East and West. In his words, these "still dominate our contemporary cultural and political perspectives." On the 27th of September 1800, while the war still raged, Colonel Barthelemy Serra wrote a letter from Cairo to the First Consul. Serra reported that Mamluk fighters wished to become Bonaparte's personal bodyguard. These were the same cavalry Napoleon had broken at the Battle of the Pyramids, now offering to serve as his living shields.
Common questions
What was the purpose of the French invasion of Egypt in 1798?
Napoleon Bonaparte aimed to undermine British trade routes and sever Britain's connection to its colonial holdings in India. He hoped to ally with Tipu Sultan of Mysore and use Egypt as a base for a future expedition to India. The Directory formally authorized the 36,000-man expedition in March 1798 and appointed Bonaparte commander-in-chief of the Armee d'Orient.
What happened at the Battle of the Nile during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign?
On the 1st of August 1798, Admiral Horatio Nelson's British Mediterranean fleet found the French squadron anchored in Aboukir Bay near Alexandria and attacked that same night. The British exploited a gap in the French defensive line, firing from both sides; at around ten in the evening, the French flagship L'Orient exploded. Only two ships of the line and two frigates escaped destruction or capture.
Who discovered the Rosetta Stone during Napoleon's Egyptian expedition?
Pierre-Francois Bouchard, a young French engineering officer, discovered the Rosetta Stone in July 1799. When General Menou surrendered to British forces in 1801, he signed the stone and all other Egyptian antiquities the French had collected over to the British under General John Hely-Hutchinson.
Why did French forces fail to capture Acre during the 1799 Syrian campaign?
Napoleon besieged Acre beginning in March 1799 but failed to capture it after 63 days of campaigning. The Royal Navy had seized his heavy siege artillery, and British forces under Sidney Smith reinforced the city's defenses. Plague also spread through the French army during the siege, and Napoleon ultimately retreated to Egypt.
How did Napoleon use the Egyptian campaign to seize power in France?
Napoleon's newspaper the Courrier de l'Egypte suppressed news of defeats at Aboukir Bay and in Syria throughout the campaign. He returned to France in the autumn of 1799 with his reputation largely intact. He then engineered the coup d'etat of 18 brumaire, making himself First Consul of France.
What was the Description de l'Egypte and why was it significant for the legacy of Napoleon's Egyptian expedition?
The Description de l'Egypte was a comprehensive scholarly publication issued on Napoleon's orders between 1809 and 1821. It documented the findings of 167 scientists and scholars who had accompanied the French expedition and established Egyptology as a discipline in Europe. The preceding 4-volume Memoires sur l'Egypte had appeared between 1798 and 1801, while the campaign itself was still under way.
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