THE FRENCH OCCUPATION OF EGYPT

THE FRENCH OCCUPATION of Egypt between 1798-1801 was the first colonial conquest which endeavored to bring the Enlightenment to the Orient. The invasion was justified exclusively by the assumed superiority of the Western value system, liberating the Orient from the yoke of Barbaric despots. Before this expedition, colonization was rationalized with religious arguments; now reason, rationality, and scientific thought justified the conquest of an extra-European country. The French expedition to Egypt therefore defined colonialism and provided the blueprint of all succeeding colonial undertakings in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Theories about how an allegedly inferior society, dominated and abused by despotic tyrants, could be improved by bringing it up to Western standards of civilization and industry were used to prop the invasion plans ideologically. When the French occupiers set out to colonize Egypt, they considered themselves both liberators and saviors of the native Egyptians.

After a successful campaign in Italy at the end of the eighteenth century, France’s military focus was turned toward a more powerful enemy, England. The Directory government of post-revolutionary France was completely surrounded by anti-republican monarchies, which did not want revolutionary ideas to spread to their own territory. The campaign to Egypt was supported by Napoleon Bonaparte, who, inspired by theories of the writer and philosopher Volney, was enamored of the idea of conquering Egypt. Western stereotypes of the eighteenth century portrayed Orientals as idle and unproductive. In Western eyes, the Orient had fallen into a dark age, in which men and women literally resided in the crumbling ruins of past empires, deprived of ambitions and visions for their nation. Beneath this pretext of good intentions, the Directory pursued the objective of crippling England by cutting her off from her profitable colonies in India.

For the first time in military history, an army set forth with martial as well as academic intentions. For this purpose, more than 160 scholars were selected to accompany the army to Egypt; they would later form the Institut dgypte in Cairo. Printing presses and type for Western and Oriental languages were obtained from the Vatican store rooms. A library of 215,000 books was carefully chosen from the Vatican Library. For the scientists, every instrument they could possibly need was acquired and shipped, including entire labs of various types. The idea of conquering and retaining power through a complete knowledge and understanding of the country and its population had never before been pursued to this depth. This context made the campaign unique, because never before had an invading country shown such meticulous interest in the object of its conquest. The Description de l’gypte a huge multi-volume collection compiled by the scholars of the Institut d’gypte upon order by Napoleon Bonaparte, later became the principal resource for documenting and commemorating the French expedition to the Near East.

On the May 10, 1798, Napoleon’s army of more than 30,000 men and women set sail from Toulon, France. On the way to Egypt, Napoleon conquered the island of Malta, to be used as a strategic base between Egypt and France.

On June 1, 1798 the French army landed in Egypt near Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile. Although the city was fortified, it quickly fell to the French. From Alexandria, Napoleon’s troops marched on to conquer the whole of Upper Egypt. The country, although formally part of the Ottoman Empire, was primarily under the control of the Mamelukes, an eclectic group of marauding slave warriors, who fiercely resisted the French occupiers. The French considered them to be violent despots who suppressed women and indulged habitually in crimes such as murder, kidnaping, and sodomy.

At the pyramids, a short distance from Cairo, the French found an army of 50,000 warriors laying in wait for them. This army was made up of Mamelukes, Arabs, Bedouins, and Egyptians. The battle was easily won by the French, due to their technologically superior weaponry. Yet, the French soldiers admired the bravery and ferocity of their Oriental enemies. After his defeat, the Mameluke leader Mourad-bey and his remaining army fled into the desert, pursued by the French troops.

Just after Napoleon entered Cairo on July 24, 1798, the English were spotted on the horizon at Aboukir. General Nelson ordered the British fleet to surround the French ships, which were not near enough to the land fortifications to be protected by the battery. This way the British were able to destroy the French ships one by one. The destruction of the French fleet was a military disaster that sealed the fate of the French expedition to Egypt. The European occupiers could no longer communicate with, or receive supplies from France. The English took advantage of this situation and sent exaggerated propaganda reports about the impending French defeat to Europe.

When news of the Battle at Aboukir reached Cairo, Napoleon Bonaparte decided to extend his conquests into Syria, hoping to destroy the Ottoman Empire. The army was split into two parts. One contingent, lead by General Desaix, occupied Upper Egypt and pursued Mourad-bey into the desert; the other soldiers, lead by Bonaparte, embarked for the Holy Land.

Lacking ships, Napoleon’s army traveled from Cairo to Palestine on camels and mules. The first major battle in the Holy Land occurred near Jaffa. It was there that the French army received its most crippling blow. The Ottoman Turks joined forces with the British, while the French army was incapacitated by a deadly outbreak of the plague.

The remains of Napoleon’s army marched on to Acre. Here a final battle stalled the French advance. When Napoleon passed through Jaffa on his retreat, he ordered the doctors to poison his soldiers which were afflicted with the plague. According to Napoleon’s rationale, they were terminally ill and hence a burden to the army.

In August 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte and a select few of his generals departed secretly from Alexandria to return to France, where they were celebrated and shortly thereafter overthrew the Directory government. The French Expedition to Egypt ended in disaster. However, it proved to be a powerful influence upon nineteenth-century European culture. France embraced a fashion for all things Egyptian, which only deepened the Orientalist stereotypes held by the West and shifted attention away from the abandoned soldiers and the failure of the Egyptian expedition. This enthusiasm for Egyptian paraphernalia became known as Egyptomania..

Bonaparte realized the political potential of Egyptomania and decided to use it to recast the outcome of the expedition. He ordered a large-scale project to publish all the recorded findings of the scientists and scholars who had accompanied him to Egypt. All of these documents were collected into a huge luxury edition, which appeared between 1809 and 1822 under the title Description de l’gypte. The Description was made up of some twenty volumes, containing mostly oversized engravings, which were explained in accompanying text volumes. Although a monument to Napoleons power, the Description was completed under his successor, the Bourbon King Louis XVIII.

The British occupation and the Protectorate(1822-1922)

The British occupation marked the culmination of developments that had been at work since 1798: the de facto separation of Egypt from the Ottoman Empire, the attempt of European powers to influence or control the country, and the rivalry of France and Britain for ascendancy in the country. Because of the last-minute withdrawal of the French, the British had secured the sole domination of Egypt. William Ewart Gladstone’s liberal government was reluctant, however, to prolong the occupation or to establish formal political control, which it feared would antagonize both the sultan and the other European powers. But the British were unwilling to evacuate Egypt without securing their strategic interests, and this never seemed possible without maintaining a military presence there.

An incident at the outset of the occupation was a sign of future tensions. On British insistence, the khedive’s government was obliged to place ʿUrābī and his associates on public trial and then to commute the resulting death sentences to exile. Tawfīq’s prestige, slight enough at his accession, and diminished in the three years before the occupation, was still further undermined by this intervention of the British government. Meanwhile, Lord Dufferin, the British ambassador in Constantinople, visited Egypt and prepared a report on measures to be taken for the reconstruction of the administrative system. The projects of reform that he envisaged would necessitate an indefinite continuation of the occupation. The implications of this for British policy were slowly and reluctantly accepted by the ministry in London, under pressure from its representative in Cairo, the British agent and consul general, Sir Evelyn Baring, who in 1892 became Lord Cromer.

Two principal problems confronted the occupying power: first, the acquisition of some degree of international recognition for its special but ambiguous position in Egypt, second, a definition of its relationship to the khedivial government, which formed the official administration of the country. The main European opponents of recognition of the British position were the French, who resented the abolition of the Dual Control (December 1882). The Caisse de la Dette continued to exist, and until 1904 the British had to set their policies to deal with French opposition in this institution. In the early years of the occupation, when Egyptian finances were in disarray, French hostility posed an obstacle, but from 1889 onward there was a budget surplus and consequently greater freedom of action for the Egyptian government. A moderate degree of international agreement over Egypt was attained by the Convention of London (1885), which secured an international loan for the Egyptian government and added two further members (nominated by Germany and Russia) to the Caisse de la Dette. In 1888 the Convention of Constantinople (Istanbul) provided that the Suez Canal should always be open to ships of all countries, in war and peace alike. This was, however, a statement of principle rather than fact; without British cooperation it remained a dead letter.

In matters concerning Egypt’s international status, the decisions were made in London, but where the internal administration of the country was concerned, Cromer usually set the policies. Although throughout the occupation the facade of khedivial government was retained, British advisers attached to the various ministries were more influential than their ministers, while Cromer himself steadily increased his control over the whole administrative machine.

Tawfīq himself gave little trouble, but his prime ministers were more tenacious. Sharīf, premier at the beginning of the occupation until 1884, and his successors, Nūbār Pasha (1884–88) and Muṣṭafa Riyāḍ (Riaz) Pasha (1888–91), resigned because of clashes over administrative control. From then until November 1908, with a break in 1893–95, the prime minister was Muṣṭafā Fahmī Pasha, who proved to be Cromer’s obedient instrument.