Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte was the French general who led the expedition that occupied Egypt from 1798 to 1801. The Encyclopaedia of Islam has no article under his name, so what follows is gathered from its articles on Egypt, Cairo, Jaffa and other subjects, and each statement is attributed to the article that makes it. His life before and after Egypt lies outside those articles and is not told here.

In the night of 1-2 July 1798 a French expeditionary corps under General Bonaparte disembarked west of Alexandria, with the aim, the article on Egypt says, of threatening the British position in India by occupying Egypt. ¹ The Mamluk army under Murad Bey was defeated at the battle of the Pyramids on 21 July, and the same article says Mamluk rule was thereby ended. ¹ The museum's record of the battle is the battle of the Pyramids, and the wider campaign is the French campaign in Egypt. The article on Abukir adds that Nelson's naval victory there on 1 August 1798 and the destruction of an Ottoman army on 25 July 1799 made the place famous in the period of Bonaparte's expedition. ²

The French set up a new administration and sought the cooperation of the Egyptians through councils of notables, called diwans, in Cairo and the provinces. Even so, the article records, the people of Cairo revolted on 21 October 1798 and there were risings afterwards, so that French rule was never consolidated. ¹ The article on the Copts reports that a notable Copt, Girgis al-Jawhari, petitioned Bonaparte to lift Coptic disabilities, that the French leaders, in its words, feigned conversion to Islam to win the Muslim majority, and that they overlooked the petition while still choosing administrators without regard to religion. ³

An expedition of scholars accompanied the army. The article on the Institut d'Egypte says Bonaparte founded it in Cairo under the presidency of Monge on 20 August 1798, meeting in the palace of Hasan Kashif, with four sections and members drawn almost entirely from the expedition. ⁴ The article on Egypt gives the founding date as 23 August 1798; the two articles differ by three days and both are reported here. ¹ The same article credits the scholars with an encyclopaedic survey of the country, the Description de l'Egypte. ¹

The article on printing says printing came to Egypt with the expedition in 1798, with Arabic type from the French Republic's press and from the Propaganda press in Rome; the first French and Arabic works were printed on board the flagship Orient, and presses were later set up in Alexandria and Cairo. ⁵ The article on the press adds that the expedition's printers produced mainly proclamations and communiques in Arabic, and that after Kleber's assassination the first Arabic newspaper, al-Tanbih, was founded under Menou. ⁶

The article on Jaffa states that the French behaved worse than earlier conquerors after Napoleon captured the town on 6 March 1799, that 4,000 prisoners were shot on the shore, and that plague then broke out in the French army. ⁷ The article on Egypt says a campaign into Syria achieved no decisive result, and that Bonaparte returned to France on 23 August 1799, leaving the command first to Jean-Baptiste Kleber, who was assassinated on 14 June 1800, and then to Abd Allah Menou, a convert to Islam. ¹

The same article sums up that the expedition did not set in motion all of modern Egypt, as is sometimes claimed, but brought the country into direct contact with European culture and drew it into the power-play of European politics. ¹ The Copts article credits it with opening Egypt to western influences. ³

An article on a Syrian poet notes that he wrote an ode glorifying Napoleon's military power in Egypt. ⁸ Another records that in 1810 a French agent of Napoleon, Lascaris, travelled in Syria and Iraq with the Aleppo-born Fath Allah Sayigh, on a journey that the article says concealed a political plan about the desert tribes and the route to India. ⁹

The articles read do not give his birth, death or career outside the Middle East, and no article of his own was found. The years 1769 and 1821 are those of the Wikidata description.