The Black Count by Tom Reiss

Author:Tom Reiss [Reiss, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-95295-0
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

Napoleon had developed an identification with Egypt from the time he was twelve, reading about Alexander the Great. At the end of his life, having gained and lost control of Europe, he would remember his heady time in Egypt. “I dreamed of many things and I saw how I could realize all my dreams,” he mused. “I imagined myself on the road to Asia, mounted on an elephant, a turban on my head, and in my hand, a new Koran that I had written myself for my own purposes. I would have combined in my enterprises the experience of two worlds, scouring the terrain of all world history for my profit.” Though the general had absorbed Volney’s extensive knowledge of Egypt, he ignored his most important lesson: that his dream of a Middle Eastern empire was a mirage.

Almost immediately after describing the riches to be gained in Egypt, Volney warned France’s leaders against trying to seize it. Any invasion would bring on an unwinnable three-front war with the British, the Turks, and the Egyptians themselves. The locals will quickly come to loath us, he told his readers: “Even our officers would take that arrogant, exclusionary, and contemptuous tone that foreigners can’t stand about us.” Volney predicted that a third of French troops would perish from disease, a few venal Arab collaborators would get rich, and eventually, the whole venture would collapse into the desert dust. France would do much better to invest its energies at home.

For Napoleon, this warning only pointed to greater glory if he could pull it off.

After securing the conquest of northern Italy in the summer of 1797, Napoleon began laying concrete plans for his Egyptian expedition. While busy overseeing the transport to Paris of Venice’s artistic treasures—including the bronze horses of St. Mark’s Cathedral, which the Venetians themselves had looted from the Greeks during the Fourth Crusade—Napoleon’s thoughts were already with the upcoming mission. In one of the more memorable bits of secret advance preparation he had done while in Italy, Napoleon sent his agents throughout the peninsula looking to secure an Arabic printing press, so he would be able to print revolutionary tracts and edicts for the Egyptians. (They at last located one to seize in the papal propaganda office at the Vatican.)

In his meetings with the government in Paris to discuss the invasion of England, Napoleon emphasized that by taking Egypt instead, he could cut off the British overland trade routes to India, her most valuable possession. He probably did not reveal the full extent of his dreams of founding a vast Franco-Afro-Asian empire stretching from the Barbary Coast cities of Tunis and Algiers in the west to India in the east: after seizing Egypt, the “Army of the Orient” would conquer Syria, cut across Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, and cross the Khyber Pass into India—all in the name of liberating the despotic East. Napoleon hoped to enlist the support of local insurgents like Tippoo Sahib, the sultan of Mysore, in south India. Tippoo was a great fan of the French Revolution and England’s most formidable enemy in India.

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