Napoleon in Egypt: The Greatest Glory

By Paul Strathern

Jonathan Cape ₤20, 496 pages

FT bookshop price: ₤16

In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte set out on perhaps the biggest ”secret invasion” ever attempted. A French revolutionary fleet twice the size of the Spanish armada set sail towards a destination known only to a handful of the general’s top commanders. Admiral Nelson feared the worst: that the French were attempting an invasion of England. Indeed, that was the mission given to Bonaparte by France’s political rulers - but he abandoned it as unreasonably risky.

Instead, he hatched a plot to invade Egypt, topple the Ottoman empire, reconquer the holy lands, bring popular democracy to the Middle East, march 3,000 miles to capture India and rule over a vast new eastern empire modelled on that of Alexander the Great. Invading England looks pretty reasonable by comparison.

Although Napoleon in Egypt sports the subtitle ”The Greatest Glory”, Paul Strathern makes it clear throughout his ambitious and wonderfully detailed saga that this was a defeat and bloodbath of colossal proportions, foreshadowing the worst of what Napoleon would inflict later on Europe. It was also a dry run for imposing the Napoleonic Code and a host of positive reforms.

Strathern’s original subtitle, ”A Clash of Cultures”, might have been more apt. Napoleon informed the religious authorities of Cairo that the French victory was foretold in the Koran and that the French were ”true Muslims”. They responded with a fatwa recognising the French as legitimate rulers of Egypt - provided they proved their Islamic faith by abstaining from alcohol and undergoing adult circumcision. (They declined.)

Napoleon’s force included 167 of the top mathematicians, inventors, scientists, artists and writers in France - the ”savants” - who composed a ”Legion of Culture” to bring the benefits of western civilisation to the Orient. They attempted to modernise Cairo, mapping the city, illuminating the streets and building hospitals and modern bakeries. They poked around inside the great pyramid, disturbing thousands of sleeping bats. They found the Rosetta stone.

A polymath who has written books on science, philosophy, literature and economics, Strathern admirably balances the various legacies of the expedition while keeping the focus on its military character. Napoleon tried to introduce the rudiments of representative government, but Egypt had been ruled for centuries by a fierce parasitic military dictatorship of foreign mercenaries - the Mamelukes - and what they knew of good government was head hacking and full-body impaling. (When reading ”Mamelukes”, try substituting ”Ba’ath party”, just for fun.)

Even as Napoleon and the savants were remaking Cairo, Nelson destroyed the French fleet near Alexandria. Napoleon tried to overcome the disaster by throwing his cut-off army into conquering Syria and Palestine. When that didn’t work, his abandonment of his army to disease, decimation and humiliating retreat foreshadowed his conduct in Russia. General Kleber, the expedition’s second-in-command, described his boss as ”the kind of general who required an income of 10,000 men a month”.

It is hard not to see Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition not only as a dress rehearsal for the 1812 Russia campaign but for Iraq in our time. It’s a just shame Strathern didn’t finish this book five years earlier.

Tom Reiss is author of ”The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West” (Vintage).