Napoleon in Egypt by Paul Strathern Read Free Book Online Page B

the nearest thing to popular rule the country had experienced throughout its five millennia of history.
    On August 13 Napoleon set off back for Cairo. Before he reached Bilbeis he was met by a military courier who had left Alexandria thirteen days previously, but whose speed had been hampered by his need for a military escort through the countryside of the delta, which remained treacherous. The courier delivered to Napoleon some catastrophic news which would transform his entire Egyptian expedition.

XII
    The Institute of Egypt
    C ENTRAL to Napoleon’s dream was to be the creation of an Institute of Egypt in Cairo. This was to be modeled upon the Institute of France in Paris, of which Napoleon was so proud to have become a member that even in Egypt he still headed his dispatches “Member of the Institute and Commander-in-Chief”—in that order. Indeed, it is his pride on becoming a member of the Institute in Paris that may well have crystallized his vision of himself as more than just a general, more even than a conqueror of foreign countries; rather as a bringer of civilization.
    The Institute in Cairo was created by a decree issued as early as August 22—that is, just ten days after Napoleon had heard that his fleet had been destroyed and his army was stranded in Egypt. Its proclaimed objectives were:
     
    1. Progress and the propagation of enlightenment in Egypt.
    2. Research, study and the publication of natural, industrial and historical facts concerning Egypt.
    3. To give advice on the different questions on which its members will be consulted by the government. 1
     
    Intellectuals were thus to play a central role in the creation of the new Egypt from the very outset. The Institute would consist of four sections: mathematics, physics, political economy, and culture (literature and the arts). Each of these was to have a maximum of twelve members, not all of whom would be drawn from amongst the ranks of the savants. This was partly because Napoleon did not wish the Institute to be seen as something separate from his military administration, yet also because some of his senior military officers were genuinely interested in learning, and had sufficient knowledge to contribute to the proceedings. Thus, the mathematics section contained Monge and Fourier, both major mathematicians of their time, as well as the astronomers Nouét and Quesnet, but also Napoleon himself, Horace Say, chief of staff of the engineers (and brother of the renowned economist after whom Say’s Law is named), General Andréossy, and the twenty-three-year-old Captain Malus of the engineers, who was in fact already a scientist in his own right through his original studies of light. The physics section included members of all but the most mathematical of sciences, * such as the major chemist Berthollet, the renowned geologist Dolomieu, the pioneer biologist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the engineer and balloonist Conté, as well as the army’s chief medical officer General Desgenettes. The political economy section inevitably included Poussielgue (though pointedly not the unfortunate paymaster-general Estève, despite the fact that six positions in this section remained vacant: someone had to be scapegoat for the lack of wages being paid to the army). Also in this section was the one-legged engineer General Caffarelli, presumably on the strength of his “communist” speech on the voyage out.
    Another place in the political economy section was filled by Citizen Jean-Lambert Tallien, one of the more desperate characters to emerge in the aftermath of the Revolution, whose life history provides an exemplar of unscrupulous survival at all costs during this turbulent period. As such, he was something of a rarity on the Egyptian expedition, whose members for the most part were decent men who had not been party to the excesses and corruptions of recent French political life. Tallien, on the other hand, had played a leading role in these proceedings: after