Napoleon in Egypt (70 page)

XXIX

Aftermath

T
HE
Egyptian expedition resulted in failure, but Napoleon refused to see it as such, and since his arrival back in France in October 1799 coincided with news of his great victory at the Battle of Aboukir, this delusion would be shared by his fellow countrymen. By the time the Army of the Orient returned, and the truth became evident, Napoleon was on his way to declaring himself Emperor of France. The dream of one empire had given way to another.

Napoleon’s experience in Egypt was in so many ways embryonic of his later rule in France. Here, at the meeting of Africa and Asia, his megalomania had been able to flourish, unrestricted by the everyday realities of Europe; his ambition thus nurtured, he returned to France with visions of a personal future such as no other sane man would have dared to contemplate. The man who sought to reform Egypt would end up by reforming France. The young general who attempted to bring modern civil justice to the ancient ways of Egypt would become the emperor who reformed France’s medieval legal system and introduced the Napoleonic Code, whose principles remain to this day the foundation of legal systems throughout Europe. The ambitious ruler of Egypt who was willing to convert to Islam in order to receive the backing of the sheiks and
ulema
of Al-Azhar would be the ruler of “de-Christianized” France who in 1801 made a concordat with the pope. The warrior who dreamed of following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and conquering Asia would instead settle for following his other classical hero Julius Caesar and conquering Europe. Napoleon’s crowning of himself as emperor in 1804, and his dream of a continent-wide empire, would seem to have grown directly out of his dreams in Egypt.

Then there were the other less glorious parallels. The defeat by Nelson at the Battle of the Nile would be followed seven years later by Nelson’s victory over the French fleet at Trafalgar, and Napoleon’s reaction to both would be the same. Neither of these was a disaster at all: they would not prevent him from building his empire on land. His setback at Acre, and the consequent disastrous retreat of his army, would be uncannily paralleled in his setback at Moscow and his retreat across Europe; instead of desert, plague and death, there would be snow, typhoid and death. After Acre, Napoleon deserted the Army of the Orient, leaving Egypt to pursue his dreams of glory in France; thirteen years later he would similarly abandon the Grand Army after Moscow, heading for Paris to secure his position. Even his return from Egypt, and his rapturous reception in France as the savior of the Republic, would have its echo in his return from exile in Elba and the ecstatic welcome he received at the beginning of the “100 Days.”

Those who had served Napoleon well in Egypt would also rise with him. Marmont, who had so ably governed Alexandria, would achieve the highest military honors, becoming a marshal of France, and consequently Napoleon’s most trusted lieutenant—until finally, unable to accept Napoleon’s despotism, he would turn against his master. The brave cavalry leader Murat would also become a marshal, and in 1808 Napoleon made him King of Naples. Another to achieve royal status was Napoleon’s young aide and stepson Eugene Beauharnais, whom he made a prince in 1804; a year later Prince Eugene would be appointed Viceroy of Italy.

But not all of Napoleon’s “Egyptians” would achieve such stellar status. His aide Junot, who had already fallen from favor after revealing Josephine’s infidelity, would nonetheless pursue a valiant military career, capturing Lisbon in 1807, in recognition of which Napoleon made him Duke d’Abrantès. Later Napoleon would become exasperated by the crass and spendthrift behavior of Junot, and took a particular dislike to his wife (which, however, did not prevent him from attempting to seduce her). Junot himself developed the habit of eating 300 oysters of a morning to keep in shape; later such behavior developed into full-blown insanity, and he eventually committed suicide by leaping from a window in 1813.

The hapless Menou would return to France with his young wife Zobeida and their infant son, whereupon Napoleon made him governor of the province of Piedmont in northern Italy. Menou soon tired of his administrative duties, and when he left the post his desk was found to contain 900 unopened letters. Napoleon’s faithful secretary Bourrienne also failed to live up to his promotion. In 1805 he was made envoy to Hamburg, but had to be dismissed five years later when he was found guilty of selling forged passports and embezzlement to the tune of two million francs. Napoleon eventually pardoned him his debts, and he settled down to write his memoirs. But after two volumes he asked a ghostwriter to piece together the rest from his scraps of notes; hence their unreliability. After these were published in 1829–31, Bourrienne too became insane and was confined to a lunatic asylum at Caen, where he died in 1834.

Napoleon was also to forgive his old enemy Sir Sidney Smith, of whom he would later say: “I am sorry I spoke ill of Smith. They tell me he is a good fellow. His government does not appreciate his services in Egypt and Syria.”
¹
Smith would continue to live up to his reputation as a larger-than-life character, again and again incurring the wrath of his superiors and the affectionate admiration of his men. In 1807 he succeeded once more in thwarting the French, this time at Lisbon, managing to rescue the entire Portuguese fleet, as well as all the gold in the treasury vaults, just as Junot’s cavalry charged into the city. In 1815, he would on his own initiative turn up at the Battle of Waterloo, charging onto the battlefield in civilian clothes, commandeering a sword from a fallen officer and entering the fray. Later he would ride up to congratulate the Duke of Wellington, who was distinctly unimpressed by this civilian who had the temerity to shake his hand. Smith would die in his beloved Paris in 1840, being buried amongst the worthies in the Père Lachaise cemetery wrapped in a Union Jack.

Napoleon regarded the discoveries of the Egyptian expedition as its most lasting contribution, and was determined that these should be seen as one of his own great triumphs. He always had the highest regard for achievements of the intellect, and often insisted: “The real conquests, those that leave behind no regrets, are those made over ignorance.”
²
To this end, he would in 1802 set up a commission which would include Monge, Conté and many of the savants from Egypt, to gather together the work of the Institute in Cairo, as well as all the explorations, drawings and discoveries of the other savants. These were to be published in a vast multi-volume work entitled
Description of Egypt
. It was to be consciously modeled upon the great French
Encyclopedia
of the previous century, the work that was seminal in spreading the knowledge, ideas and culture of the Enlightenment. The first volume of the
Description
would appear in 1809 and the entire work would not be completed until 1828, by which time it contained nine volumes of text and thirteen of plates, maps and engravings. As Fourier wrote in his introduction: “No other country has been subjected to researches so extended and so varied. No other was more worthy of being the object.”
³
In fact, the
Description of Egypt
is now the sole source we have for several temples and ruins which have subsequently been destroyed. Even so, this work is far from being entirely accurate—many of the scenes are exaggerated, and in some cases the ruins have been imaginatively “reconstructed,” showing how it was thought they might have appeared when they were built. Worst of all, some of the hieroglyphs recorded on the columns and temples were inaccurate, or simply invented, which would only add to the difficulties of those who later attempted to decipher this ancient script. Curiously, it was the artist-savants who tended to be guilty of this particular misdemeanor, rather than the engineer-savants, whose less accomplished drawings were invariably accurate in such details.

But it was Vivant Denon who would play the initial role of publicizing the discoveries of ancient Egypt, when in 1802 he published his
Travels in Lower and Upper Egypt
. This was illustrated with many of the drawings he had made, and quickly became a best-seller, being translated throughout Europe. Along with the
Description
, it would transform our knowledge of the origins of Western civilization, and even the age of the world itself.

On a more popular level, these works would also give rise to a fashionable craze for Egypt and all things Egyptian. When Napoleon moved into his palace at Malmaison in 1801, Josephine had many of the rooms decorated in the “Egyptian style,” Damietta roses were planted in the garden, and the park contained Egyptian gazelles. This craze quickly spread from Parisian high society throughout the fashionable centers of Europe, where such things as Egyptian-style evening dress, pyramids, and the pastel shade
eau de Nil
became all the rage. This craze would penetrate to the very heart of the Republic. When Napoleon decided to dispense with the fleur-de-lis as the national symbol, on account of its Royalist associations, he asked Denon to design a new symbol, and the artist came up with a striking but simple design of a bee (intended to portray industry and sweetness, but with the power to sting). This was copied directly from the hieroglyph of an ancient Egyptian temple.
^*

But in many ways this was just the beginning. Despite the British claiming the Rosetta Stone as one of the spoils of war, and exhibiting it to the public in the British Museum (where it still remains), scholars all over Europe soon became intrigued by the mysterious ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs on this stone, which they were able to study on the plaster casts and rubbings which had been made and distributed by the French. These scholars soon agreed that the Rosetta Stone, with its three parallel texts, held the clue that could unlock the hidden secret of the ancient Egyptian language, but for the moment the task of deciphering these hieroglyphs proved beyond all who attempted it.

It was another of the savants who would play a decisive role in solving this mystery. The mathematician Fourier, former president of the Institute in Cairo, was rewarded by Napoleon on his return from Egypt with the post of governor of the Isère region in southeastern France. He would have preferred to continue with his mathematical researches, but reluctantly settled in Grenoble, where he proved an efficient and go-ahead administrator.
†
In the course of his work, he came across the eleven-year-old prodigy Jean-François Champollion, who exhibited an exceptional talent for languages. Fourier showed Champollion his collection of antiquities brought from Egypt, some of which contained ancient hieroglyphs, and the young genius was intrigued when he learned that they remained a mystery.

In the years to come Champollion became obsessed with the idea of deciphering these hieroglyphs, even going so far as to learn Coptic, which he correctly surmised was a late form of ancient Egyptian. By this time several scholars in Britain, Germany and France had begun to work on the hieroglyphs. Most suspected that they were like Chinese ideograms (some even thought that they might have been precursors of Chinese).Champollion’s great insight was that the hieroglyphs were a complex mixture of ideograms and alphabet: some hieroglyphs stood for a letter, others for a syllable, others for an idea, and yet others for an object or entity. In the 1820s he began publishing his sensational discoveries, and his eventual solution to the mystery of the hieroglyphs. With this, the academic aspect of Egyptology was launched, and scholars were able to translate the many different texts. Far from being an indecipherable code, the hieroglyphs now became a window into the 6,000-year-old world of ancient Egypt—its history, its customs, its rulers all sprang vividly to life, and humanity began to understand for the first time the mysteries of one of the first great civilizations to emerge from prehistory.

Having set Champollion on his path, Fourier would go on to write the historical introduction to the
Description of Egypt
, but by this stage he had begun to suffer from a strange disease, whose main effect was to render him extremely sensitive to cold. This caused him to wrap up in many layers of heavy clothing, and live in a highly overheated room from which he seldom ventured forth, even during the midst of summer heatwaves. His colleagues mistook this behavior for hypochondria or eccentricity, but it is now thought that he must have contracted myxedema (a malfunction of the thyroid gland), or possibly malaria, during his time in Egypt with Napoleon. By a quirk of fate he would at the end of his life occupy a house in Paris on the Rue d’Enfer—Street of the Inferno, or Hell Street.

However, one “Egyptian” would outlive them all: Pauline Fourès, Napoleon’s Cleopatra, would not die until the age of ninety in 1869 (precisely a hundred years after Napoleon’s birth). After her adventure in Egypt, Pauline would blossom into a remarkable woman. On her arrival back in France in 1801 with the rest of the Army of the Orient, she was officially informed that Napoleon did not wish to see her again; instead she was quietly granted a pension and a country house outside Paris. Still an attractive young woman, she soon married Henri de Ranchoup, who had served as a major in the Ottoman army.
^*
Through Pauline’s influence, Ranchoup managed to obtain a number of minor diplomatic posts. Meanwhile his wife published a romantic historical novel, and then ran off to South America with another French officer, whom she soon dropped. In Brazil Pauline set up a successful business exporting rare woods to France, to which she returned some years later a changed woman, dressing in men’s clothing, smoking a pipe, and living at home amongst her free-ranging menagerie of pet parrots and monkeys.

Pauline Fourès maintained that she never met Napoleon after her return from Egypt, but Napoleon claimed otherwise. During his exile in St. Helena he reminisced one day about encountering her at a masked ball in Paris. Although she was wearing a mask he recognized her, and suggested to her that she had once been “Cleopatra.” According to Napoleon, she feigned not to remember such a thing, though she did recall having once had some affection for a “Caesar.”