Jean-Baptiste Kléber

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Jean-Baptiste Kléber was stabbed four times in a garden in Cairo on the 14th of June 1800 by a theology student who had pretended to beg from him. The assassin drove a dagger into his heart, his stomach, his left arm, and his right cheek, then fled to hide near the palace walls. He was caught still holding the blade.

  What makes this death remarkable is not just its violence but the life it cut short. Kléber was the son of a master builder from Strasbourg who had spent time as an architecture student, a brawler's benefactor in a Munich tavern, an officer under two separate emperors, a suppressor of revolt, a signer of surrender treaties he had no intention of honoring, and the man Napoleon left in charge of Egypt without so much as a conversation. He was also, in a distant garden in Cairo, the founder of a Masonic lodge.

  How a builder's son from Alsace came to command sixty thousand Ottoman enemies with only ten thousand men at his back, and what happened to his body in the decades after his death, are the questions this story sets out to answer.

• 2. A Builder's Son

  ›

  Strasbourg in 1753 was a city shaped by its borderland character, and Jean-Baptiste Kléber was born there on the 9th of March of that year, the son of a master builder. His first enlistment, in 1769, was in Bercheny's Hussar Regiment of the French Royal Army. He resigned just a year later to study architecture, spending part of those four years in Paris under Jean-François Chalgrin.

  The turn that redirected his life happened in a tavern. Kléber stepped in to help two German nobles during a brawl, and in gratitude they arranged his nomination to the military school of Munich. From there he obtained a commission in the Kaunitz Infantry Regiment Nr. 38 of the Imperial Army of the Holy Roman Emperor.

  He took part in the War of the Bavarian Succession without seeing major engagements. Posted in rotation through the garrisons at Mons, Mechelen, and Luxembourg in the Austrian Netherlands, he ran into a ceiling that no amount of ability could break through. His birth was too humble to allow promotion beyond the rank of unterleutnant. In 1783, after seven years in the Austrian service, he walked away.

• 3. Architect of Alsace

  ›

  Returning to France, Kléber took up an appointment as inspector of public buildings at Belfort. Between 1784 and 1792 he produced a body of architectural work on both public and private commission.

  The most prominent survivor is the Hôtel de Ville at Thann, in Haut-Rhin, designed between 1787 and 1793. It was conceived as a hospital, but before it was finished its purpose had shifted and it became an administrative building instead. A château at Grandvillars, often misspelled as Granvillars, was built around 1790. The canoness houses of the Benedictine abbey of Masevaux were planned between 1781 and 1790; nine houses were designed, but the French Revolution meant only seven were completed.

  The Musée historique de Strasbourg now devotes a dedicated room to Kléber that holds a collection of his architectural sketches and designs. That room is a reminder that the general who would later shock Napoleon's enemies in Egypt had once spent his working hours calculating walls and drafting facades in Alsace.

• 4. Rising Through Revolution

  ›

  When the French Revolutionary Wars began in 1792, Kléber enrolled in the 4th Battalion of Volunteers of Haut-Rhin. His prior military experience was immediately useful: the battalion elected him adjutant on the spot, and he was soon lieutenant-colonel.

  At the defense of Mainz in July 1793, he performed well enough that even after the garrison was disgraced and imprisoned, he won reinstatement and was promoted to brigade general in August of that year. He was then sent west to help suppress the Revolt in the Vendée.

  He lost at the Battle of Tiffauges on the 19th of September 1793, but managed to preserve his standing with the political representatives on mission and kept his command. A month later he helped deliver a Republican victory at Cholet, and on the 17th of October 1793 he became a divisional general. Working alongside General François Marceau, with whom he had forged a close friendship during these campaigns, he helped defeat the Royalists at Le Mans and Savenay in December 1793.

  When Kléber argued openly that the Vendéans should be treated leniently, the authorities recalled him. Reinstatement came again in April 1794. He distinguished himself at Charleroi and at the victory at Fleurus on the 26th of June 1794. His action at the bridge of Neuwied on the 13th of October 1795 became one of the more celebrated rearguard fights of the period. His victory at Siegburg on the 1st of June 1796 allowed General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan to move the bulk of the French force across the Rhine. He twice held temporary chief command of the army in 1795 and 1796, and twice declined the permanent appointment.

• 5. Egypt and Abandonment

  ›

  Kléber joined Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, part of the Army of the Orient. In the very first engagement at Alexandria, he took a wound to the head severe enough to keep him out of the Battle of the Pyramids, and he was appointed governor of Alexandria instead.

  By 1799 the Syrian campaign gave him a chance to lead in the field again. He commanded the vanguard, took El-Arish, Gaza, and Jaffa, and won the Battle of Mount Tabor on the 15th and the 16th of April 1799.

  Then Napoleon left. He withdrew to France toward the end of 1799 without consulting Kléber before going, and simply appointed him commander of all French forces in Egypt. Kléber found himself holding an army he could not reinforce, in a country he could not comfortably hold, with no obvious route home. He negotiated the Convention of El Arish with Kör Yusuf Ziyaüddin Pasha on the 24th of January 1800, in the presence of Commodore Sidney Smith. The convention would have allowed the Army of the Orient to return to Europe.

  Britain refused to accept it. The Pitt ministry had already forbidden British commanders from agreeing to any such arrangement, and both Smith and his superior, Admiral Lord Keith, wrote to Kléber that only an unconditional French surrender would be accepted. Kléber's response was to take his 10,000 men and attack an Ottoman force of 60,000 at the Battle of Heliopolis. On the 20th of March 1800, he destroyed them.

• 6. The Isis Lodge

  ›

  Kléber was the son of an operative freemason and was himself a prominent mason. While he was negotiating with Sidney Smith in January 1800, he opened a masonic temple in Cairo and founded what became the Isis Lodge, La Loge Isis, serving as its first master.

  The lodge adopted as its motto the slogan of the French Revolution: Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Kléber's role in bringing freemasonry to Egypt is considered well-attested by those who have studied the period.

  This side of Kléber rarely makes it into accounts that focus only on the military campaigns. Yet here was a general negotiating surrender conventions by day and presiding over ritual proceedings by night, in an occupied city far from Alsace, carrying a tradition his father had observed.

• 7. The Assassination

  ›

  Suleiman al-Halabi was a Kurdish or Arab Syrian theology student living in Egypt when he approached Kléber in the garden of the palace of Alfi bika. He appeared to be begging. When Kléber reached out his hand, al-Halabi took it and drove a dagger into him four times.

  He was caught nearby, still holding the weapon. He was later executed. His right arm was burned off, and he was impaled in a public square in Cairo and left there for several hours. His skull was shipped to France, where phrenologists used it to instruct medical students in what they claimed were the cranial features characteristic of criminality and fanaticism.

  The date was the 14th of June 1800. That same day, Kléber's close friend and fellow general Desaix was killed at the Battle of Marengo, in northern Italy, thousands of kilometers away.

• 8. An Unquiet Burial

  ›

  Kléber's body was embalmed and brought back to France. Napoleon feared that a tomb for the general might become a rallying point for Republicanism, so he ordered the remains held at the Château d'If, a fortress on an island off the coast of Marseille.

  They stayed there for eighteen years. It was Louis XVIII who finally allowed Kléber to be buried in his home city of Strasbourg. His interment took place on the 15th of December 1838 in the Strasbourg Cathedral, and in 1840 his remains were moved again, this time to beneath the statue of Kléber at the center of the Place Kléber. His heart was placed separately, in an urn, in the caveau of the Governors beneath the altar of the Saint Louis Chapel at Les Invalides in Paris.

  Napoleon, for all the difficulties between them, had said of Kléber that there was no sight so splendid as watching him go into battle, and likened him to the God of War, Mars. Kléber himself held a considerably less reverential view of his superior, reportedly cursing at Napoleon and drawing mocking caricatures of him. His name appears in column 23 on the southern pillar of the Arc de Triomphe, a monument he did not live to see.