Saturday, December 08, 2007

Napoleon in Alexandria

The Shock of the Old By KATHERINE BOUTON NYT SBR: December 9, 2007
Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt in 1798 was among history’s more memorable military fiascos. A side skirmish in his drawn-out colonial competition with the British, by any measure the invasion went badly. The British promptly sank much of the French fleet, stranding the forces. A march across the desert from Alexandria to Cairo without so much as canteens, as Nina Burleigh tells us in “Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt,” left “untold hundreds” dead.
A Muslim uprising at Cairo resulted in more deaths and, not insignificantly, the loss of any remnant of civility on the part of the French who, invading the Azhar mosque in an effort to crush an insurgency, desecrated the Koran and, as an Egyptian contemporary wrote, “soiled the mosque, blowing their spit in it ... and defecating in it.” And then there was the plague, which, together with dysentery and other diseases, may have killed as many as 10,000 of the French soldiers.
MIRAGE Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt. By Nina Burleigh.
Illustrated. 286 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.95. Related
Times Topics: Egypt
Napoleon himself beat a retreat back to France after just a year, but his troops remained as uneasy and unwilling occupiers. Some historians see this venture as an exploratory expedition gone wrong. Others, including the historian Juan Cole in his recent book “Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East,” call it a brutal invasion. In an article in The Nation in August, Cole drew a parallel with our current situation in Iraq.
In “Mirage,” Burleigh’s description of a young army overdressed for the sweltering heat (in Alpine wool uniforms), afraid and unable to communicate with the increasingly hostile locals, also has echoes of the present.
Her principal subject, however, is not the military but the 151 “savants” Napoleon took along — geologists, mapmakers, naturalists, artists, even a musicologist. Most signed on enthusiastically, though they (like a majority of the troops) had no idea where they were going until shortly before they arrived in Alexandria. Burleigh focuses on 10 of the most prominent, organizing her chapters around an inventor, a mathematician, the engineers and so on. The artist Dominique-Vivant Denon, a “lace-cuffed” aesthete, as Burleigh tells us more than once, traveled widely throughout the country, making sketches on the fly, sometimes calmly drawing at his easel as bullets flew around him. The book he produced on his return became the first best seller of the 19th century, and he became the first director of the Louvre. The “revolutionary fanatic” Gaspard Monge, a geometer, was one of Napoleon’s closest companions (“Monge loved me as one loves a mistress,” Napoleon once said). Most significant, perhaps, were the contributions of the inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté, who had developed the prototype for the modern pencil; short on supplies, the scientists “relied on salvage, severe economies and Nicolas Conté.”
Burleigh, a journalist and the author of “A Very Private Woman,” a well-received account of the 1964 murder of the prominent Washington figure Mary Meyer, hurtles in less than 250 pages through the three grueling years the savants spent in Egypt, peppering her tale with multitudes of facts, digressions and anecdotes, recounted in a slightly encyclopidic tone. One longs to dwell a bit longer on a character like Savigny, who went to Egypt as a botanist but became obsessed instead with the country’s insect life. His catalog of Egyptian beetles and butterflies, which in some ways anticipated Darwin, was completed long after his return, by which time a mysterious eye ailment (probably picked up during the expedition) had left him so intolerant of light that he sometimes wore a steel mask and covered his head in black netting.
The most famous artifact the scholars discovered was the Rosetta stone, which soon wound up in British possession. The French military leadership, ever impatient with the scientists left in their care, bargained it away, along with all the scientists’ notes, drawings and specimens, in the truce that finally allowed them to return home. To this day it sits in the British Museum despite Egypt’s request for its return, with a label that says only “Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801, presented by King George III.” Perhaps it was historic justice that a Frenchman eventually cracked the code (working from copies), in 1822.
In the end, the notes and specimens were retrieved by the zoologist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a hero in France ever since, who argued that only the savants could decipher their own jottings, and threatened to destroy them rather than give them up. The British conceded, and crates of material were shipped to France. Over the next 26 years, the scientific veterans compiled the magnificent “Description de l’Égypte,” an oversize 24-volume encyclopedia published serially for wealthy subscribers, encompassing not only the natural history of Egypt but a history of its people, descriptions of the Pyramids and other monuments, and details of daily life, commerce and agriculture.
The book’s legacy — and the legacy of Napoleon’s Egyptian adventure — was enormous, prompting the half-century of Egyptomania that swept Europe. The resulting decades of plunder brought Cleopatra’s Needle to New York, the Luxor obelisk to the Place de la Concorde, and room after room of mummies to the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum and the Louvre. Two hundred years later, a new struggle over national cultural heritage may in the end restore at least some of this magnificence to its country of origin. Katherine Bouton is the deputy editor of The Times Magazine.

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