Siege of Acre (1799)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Siege of Acre in 1799 was Napoleon Bonaparte's first major strategic defeat. It was, alongside the Battle of the Nile, the turning point of his invasion of Egypt and Syria.

  He had been defeated in battle before. At the Second Battle of Bassano and the Battle of Caldiero, both fought three years earlier during the Italian campaign, French forces had suffered setbacks. But those were tactical reverses, the kind any successful commander eventually weathers. Acre was different. It stopped an entire design, one that reached thousands of miles from France. Who defended that city? What resources did they draw on? And why did Napoleon insist, years later, that its fall would have changed the history of two continents?

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• 2. The Eastern Gambit

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  On the 20th of March 1799, French forces first attempted to lay siege to Acre, approaching the city with infantry alone.

  Napoleon had invaded Egypt the year before. Acre occupied a commanding position on the route between Egypt and Syria. Whoever held it could move armies freely northward through the Levant. Napoleon wanted Syria next. He also hoped that a successful drive through Ottoman territory would inspire the Syrian population to rise against Ottoman rule. A successful eastern campaign might, in time, allow him to threaten British India.

  In a letter to one of his officers, Napoleon stated that capturing Acre would take no more than two weeks. After that, his army would march on Jerusalem. He saw no reason to expect serious resistance. This was the outlook of a general who had moved through Italy and then Egypt with remarkable speed.

  The Ottoman governor holding Acre, Jezzar Pasha, had decided otherwise from the start.

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• 3. The Men Who Refused

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  Jezzar Pasha's forces withstood the French siege for one and a half months, refusing to yield from the first assault.

  After Napoleon's forces had taken Jaffa, French troops spent two days and nights in massacre and rape of the city's population. Napoleon then ordered thousands of Albanian prisoners of war to be killed on the sea-shore before his army continued north. Many of the soldiers defending Acre were Albanian. They knew what had happened at Jaffa, and that knowledge made surrender unthinkable.

  Haim Farhi, al-Jazzar's Jewish adviser and right-hand man, took direct charge of the military defense. He supervised the fighting from within the city, directing Acre's response to each French assault. Farhi was not an adviser who worked from a distance. He was present at the battle, managing the defense under fire.

  A Royal Navy flotilla under Commodore Sidney Smith was also reshaping the material conditions of the siege from the sea.

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• 4. Commodore Smith's Flotilla

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  Commodore Sidney Smith commanded the Royal Navy flotilla that reinforced Acre's defenses and transformed the course of the battle.

  Smith used his command of the sea to intercept Napoleon's supply line. Napoleon had been shipping his siege artillery from Egypt by a flotilla of gunboats. Smith's fleet captured those vessels. The captured boats included the Marie-Rose, sold in 1801, and the Torride, last listed in British records in 1802. Another was lost in a gale in May 1799; one was recaptured and scuttled that same month. The artillery they carried was now in British hands.

  A French émigré serving with Smith's fleet, the artillery expert Antoine de Phélippeaux, then turned those captured guns against Napoleon's forces. De Phélippeaux redeployed the seized artillery to strengthen Acre's defenses. Smith anchored his ships, including the Theseus, so their broadsides could directly support the Ottoman garrison. British gunboats sat lower in the water than the larger vessels. They could move in close to help repel the French assaults on the walls.

  On the 16th of April, an Ottoman relief force fought off a French effort at Mount Tabor. Smith also bombarded the coastal road from Jaffa, trying to cut Napoleon's access to land-based reinforcement. French replacement artillery would eventually find an overland route, but the delay had already cost the besieging army weeks.

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• 5. The Second Wall

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  By early May 1799, French replacement siege artillery had arrived overland, and a breach was forced in Acre's defenses.

  Napoleon's soldiers pushed through the gap, expecting to be inside the city. They were not. In the space of al-Jazzar's garden, Haim Farhi and Antoine de Phélippeaux had built a second wall. It stood several feet deeper into the city than the outer breach. The discovery stopped the assault. Napoleon and his commanders concluded that the probability of taking Acre was now minimal. Ottoman reinforcements from Rhodes then arrived, landing after the assault was repelled, and the balance shifted further.

  About 2,000 French soldiers had died of plague by the time Napoleon gave the order to retreat. Throughout the siege, Jezzar Pasha and Napoleon had both tried to win over Bashir. Bashir was the Shihab leader who ruled much of what is now Lebanon. Bashir stayed neutral. The French suffered more from his neutrality than the Ottomans did. His support, had it come, might have shifted the course of the campaign.

  Napoleon ordered a final assault on the 10th of May 1799. When it failed, he retreated on the 21st of May and withdrew to Egypt.

  In 1805, six years later, Napoleon would still be talking about Acre. What he said made clear that he regarded it as the hinge of history.

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• 6. Emperor of the East

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  In 1805, Napoleon told his companions exactly what he believed the capture of Acre would have meant.

  "If I had been able to take Acre," he said, "I would have put on a turban, I would have made my soldiers wear big Turkish trousers, and I would have exposed them to battle only in case of extreme necessity. I would have made them into a Sacred Battalion, my Immortals. I would have finished the war against the Turks with Arabic, Greek, and Armenian troops. Instead of a battle in Moravia, I would have won a Battle of Issus. I would have made myself emperor of the East, and I would have returned to Paris by way of Constantinople."

  The references in that speech drew on classical antiquity. The Sacred Band of Thebes was an elite force of the ancient Greek city-state of Thebes. The Persian Immortals were the elite corps of the Achaemenid kings. The Battle of Issus was where Alexander the Great had decisively defeated those same Persians. Napoleon was placing himself alongside the great conquerors of the ancient world. Though Acre was not conquered, Napoleon's Imperial Guard did come to be called "the Immortals" informally. That was the very name he had imagined for his eastern Sacred Battalion.

  Taking Acre might have kept Napoleon in the East long enough to miss the political opening that arose in France in late 1799. It was in 1799 that he staged the coup establishing him as First Consul. Without that coup, his rise to power might have taken a different form. Someone else might have moved first against the shaky Directorate.

  Napoleon showed considerable interest in winning over the Jewish population during his eastern campaign. A statement attributed to him promised to return the land to the Jews if he succeeded in conquering Palestine. Some historians read this as an attempt to persuade Haim Farhi, a Syrian Jew, to switch sides. Farhi defended Acre with the Ottoman forces regardless. The account of Las Cases in the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène records what Syrian Jews at the time believed. They expected Napoleon, if victorious, to go to Jerusalem and restore Solomon's Temple. In French-controlled Egypt, decrees had already been passed in favor of Jews and Coptic Christians and women.

  The Ottoman city Napoleon could not breach has kept his name in its landscape.

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• 7. Napoleon's Hill

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  Napoleon's Hill, south-east of the city walls of Acre, marks the site where Napoleon's camp stood during the siege.

  Acre also has a Napoleon Bonaparte Street. It is the only city in Israel with a street carrying that name.

  Among the Arab residents of Acre's Old City, the siege of 1799 is a source of civic pride. Their forebears had held the city against a general who had swept through Italy and Egypt before reaching their walls. A folk tale circulated in the community tells what Napoleon did as he withdrew. He had a cannon fire his hat over the city walls, "so that at least a part of him would enter into Acre."

  The folk tale is still told in Acre. It is the story of a siege that stopped Napoleon, carried by the people who live where it happened.

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