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TWO

The French, the Plague Encore, and Jihad

1798–1801

In 1798, when Napoléon Bonaparte’s army landed in Egypt, its declared goal was to liberate the country from the despotic rule of the Ottomans. Granting freedom to the country’s minority of Orthodox Christians, the Copts, was the second task of the French colonial troops. Upon arriving in Egypt, the soldiers advanced from Cairo into the south, Upper Egypt, where the Coptic population was concentrated. As expected, Christian inhabitants received the French with admiring eyes and tender hearts. The Copts provided the French with extensive logistical support until the French triumph over the tyrannical Mamluks—the Turkic ruling elite appointed by the Ottomans. An Egyptologist who accompanied the troops to the south, Vivant Denon, depicted scenes in Qina Province of passionate Copts aiding the French, crying at the sight of their forces leaving for the battlefields. Of one incident, Denon wrote, “I was struck with the sincere interest which the sheik [chief Copt] expressed for our fate, who, believing that we were marching on to a certain death, gave us the most circumstantial advice, without concealing from us any of the dangers to which we were exposed, advised us with great judgment on every particular which could render the encounter less fatal to us, followed us as far as he could, and parted from us with tears in his eyes.”¹

Nevertheless, after the French won the wars and established a colony in Egypt, the romantic image of supportive natives awaiting their liberators was soon shattered. The Copts, in fact, were manipulating and exploiting the French for their own interests. As soon as the new administration hired them to run the taxation system, Coptic accountants controlled the colony’s finances and denied the French access to files. Copts were not the only native group that acted in this manner or that manipulated the French with false impressions of welcoming locals. Many Arab tribes, as oppressed by the Mamluks as the Copts had been, similarly showed a friendly, hospitable face and supported the French troops during the battles. They later excluded the colonial administrators from local governing councils and denied them access to decision-making institutions in villages.²

The French Empire’s campaign in Egypt was a conspicuously failed attempt at colonization in the Middle East that lasted for only three years. In 1801, Napoléon’s troops were defeated by British troops allied with the Ottomans, and the French were soon forced to depart from Egypt. However, this chapter argues that military misfortune was not the reason behind the rapid failure of the French Empire. Rather, it was a crisis of images. Before and during the campaign, French experts on the Orient forged one image of inferior and oppressed natives waiting for an enlightened nation to liberate them, and another image of the colonial self as exactly this liberator. Moreover, the colonial self was imagined as a competent exploiter of the colony’s immense resources, which were allegedly underutilized. As the troops encountered the harsh reality on the ground, these images were demolished, putting the empire in deep crisis.

Upper Egypt, especially Qina Province, was a distinct site where this plight was exposed. The population of the south consisted mainly of two groups that the revolutionary French Republic came to liberate: Copts and Arab tribes. These two groups both deliberately perpetuated the discursive construction of false images in order to take advantage of the French. When the truth was revealed, it was too late for the confused colonizer to escape. As this chapter recounts, the French faced a fierce holy war of Jihad launched by local and regional Arab insurgents and had to reinstall the very ancien régime they had originally come to depose. Shortly afterward, the failed empire brought about environmental destruction to the south: a massive wave of the plague swept Upper Egypt.

Postcolonial theory pays much attention to the issue of image making within contexts of modern imperialism. The colonizer—who was in the position of controlling knowledge production—created reductionist visions of the colonized in order to simplify the process of imperial hegemony. This is the problem of “representation,” as theorists of the field refer to it, where voices from the empire authoritatively described silent natives and presented simplifying categorizations and stereotypes that assisted in the domination of the colonized. Postcolonial theory largely presumes that representation was a unilateral process in which the colonizer solely controlled the production of images and imposed them on the represented natives.³ Nonetheless, this chapter shows how image making was a bilateral process to which the natives equally contributed through deceit and manipulation of the empire. The encounters between the French and the Copts and Arab tribes in Upper Egypt during Napoléon’s campaign are but one illustrative case.

Edward Said’s Orientalism is one of the canonical texts that established the concept of representation in postcolonial theory. Said relies on Michel Foucault’s vision concerning the inseparable relationship between knowledge and power to argue that European experts on the Middle East created a body of knowledge—in the form of reductionist stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims—that directly or indirectly served imperial ends. “Such ‘images’ of the Orient as this are images in that they represent or stand for a very large entity, otherwise impossibly diffuse, which they enable one to grasp or see,” Said writes.⁴ He asserts that imperialist Europeans controlled the production of these images with almost no interference from the natives. “The scientists, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient’s part,” Said asserts.⁵ Thus, Said grants the natives a minimum role in creating these stereotypical representations.

In the case of Upper Egypt, the natives did play an important role in making the stereotypes: the inhabitants of Upper Egypt perceived Europeans as naïve, and sometimes foolish, foreigners and potential subjects of exploitation. This is precisely what created a crisis of images in the French Empire’s colonial propaganda in southern Egypt and generated other military crises that undermined the empire’s allegedly liberationist endeavor. As the holy war of Jihad and the epidemic of the plague in Upper Egypt—and particularly in Qina Province—indicate, the French campaign proved to be an environmentally scarred endeavor of a trapped empire.

IMAGE MAKING, DECISION MAKING

During the two decades that preceded Napoléon’s campaign, a number of French “experts” visited Egypt to explore the country and produce scientific knowledge to aid in potential colonization. Their published records presented detailed recommendations to the old and new governments, or the ancien régime and the revolutionary French Republic, about how to use the agricultural and commercial sources of northern and southern Egypt. More importantly, their writings served as a foundational tool in an ongoing process of image making about the oppressed, barbarian native and the enlightened, liberating self. These writings portrayed an intelligent Frenchman who was able to go anywhere on earth, quickly learn the culture and investigate the resources of this place, and cleverly develop those resources. These foundational texts served as trusted authorities and propaganda pieces in the process of decision making, inside the French Republic’s government and Parliament, concerning dispatching the military expedition to the Orient.

FIGURE 3. Luxor Temple and plain.

French travelers visited Egypt and reported about it centuries before Napoléon’s arrival, especially after it became an Ottoman province in the sixteenth century. Since early travelers were mostly Christian pilgrims passing through holy places in Egypt and Palestine, they mainly sent back to France romantic accounts about biblical and holy sites. In the eighteenth century, the age of European secular enlightenment that glorified pre-Christian legacies of Western civilization, French travelers paid extensive attention to Greek and Roman relics in Egypt and romanticized Egyptian ancient sites. They were also sure to comment on the flourishing trade of this country, especially in Upper Egypt, which brought exotic luxuries of the Indian Ocean to Cairo and the Mediterranean.⁶ Finally, by the end of the eighteenth century, in the age of European imperial ambitions, French accounts mixed this romanticized view of ancient times with strategic geopolitical and economic observations. More than simple pilgrims or travelers, French visitors to Egypt were increasingly scientists, philologists, archaeologists, and the like, some of whom were officially sent by the French government on formal missions to explore the possibility of creating a colony in this resource-rich land.

M. Savary probably presented the first systematic account of France as the needed liberator of the Egyptians from the Ottoman despots and their installed military regime of foreign Mamluks. Savary explored Egypt in 1779, nearly twenty years before Napoléon’s Egyptian campaign. His published Lettres sur l’Égypte was a blunt proposal for colonialism. In the eyes of contemporary Europeans, Savary was a true scholarly expert. An English literary journal commended his “erudition and capacity” and asserted that he “has shown himself well versed in ancient and modern writings concerning Egypt and its antiquities.”⁷ With an informed tone, Savary indicated that Egypt was a country of immense resources, but it was unfortunately inflicted with the “ignorance” of the native Egyptians and the “tyranny” of the Mamluk rulers. Turks, Arabs, and Copts were all “barbarians” neglecting great potential sources of wealth and paying no attention to magnificent monuments. Only an enlightened nation that appreciated art and cultural history, such as France, could restore the riches of this land and return it to its ancient glory after centuries of backwardness.

In Qina Province, Savary formed the most important colonial argument, asserting that the occupation of the south would bring about French control over global trade. He observed that Qina’s Red Sea port of Qusayr was a meeting point of Indian, Arabian, East African, North African, and Egyptian commerce but lamented how Mamluk despotism and Bedouin raids had reduced the port city’s traditionally robust trade. He advocated using Qusayr to turn Egypt into “the center of commerce in the world,” uniting Europe and Asia.⁸ Savary even suggested digging a canal between Qusayr and the city of Qina—the seat of the province that was a southern Nile port and entrepôt—in order to connect the Red Sea to the river and ultimately the Mediterranean. In the late eighteenth century, caravans had to spend three days carrying Indian and Arabian commodities from the eastern desert to Qina. In ancient times, there had been a canal connecting Qina to Qusayr, but the Turks neglected it and let it dry out. Savary proposed to revive this canal—almost a century before another Frenchman proposed digging the Suez Canal for similar goals: