The Rest Is History - 126. Napoleon in Egypt

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

“God is too late, you have begun, now I will finish it.” Swash-buckling hero or sacrilegious tyrant? Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook explore Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt, his dream of becoming the next Alexander the Great, and the complicated history between France and Islam. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Citoyens, bienvenue au Rest is History, avec moi Dominique Sandbrook et mon ami Tom Holland. Ou, comme on dit en Egypte, Ahlan marawapan mikom fil albaki ho altarik, mei Dominique Sandbrook, wasadiki, Tom Holland. That's right. Our subject today is the French invasion of Egypt at the end of the 18th century. Napoleon, the Rosetta Stone, the Battle of the Pyramids, the Battle of the Nile, Tom Holland.

This is the best subject we've done since Alexander the Great, isn't it? I'm still reeling from your impersonation. Multilingual. Tom Holland, this is the best subject we've done since Alexander the Great, isn't it? I'm still reeling from your impersonation. Multilingual. Yeah. Multilingual. I mean, I've had so much grief for my, frankly, brilliant impression of Liam Neeson. Yeah. And you've gone on quite rightly.

That was shocking. You've got two different... You've got... What? That's... I am very much... I'm not parochial. I'm not introverted.

I'm talking to our international audience, to our French and Arabic listeners, and just giving them a little nod that we're not all, you know, Wiltshire and Stonehenge. That some of us are very outward-looking, citizens of the world. That's definitely how I see myself.

Like Napoleon. And how I think I'm seen. Yes. Okay, so today's episode is on one of the most brilliant episodes not just in the napoleonic wars but i mean it's one of the great stories of history how napoleon i mean he he invades egypt a 2 000 mile trip across the mediter, dodging the Royal Navy and so on. And it's brilliant both in itself, but also because it opens the floodgates for study of Egyptology. And in a way, it's the kind of primal start, isn't it, for the relationship of Islam with the modern West. So, Tom, let's take up the story um we are in the late 1790s napoleon is not yet 30 i mean that's one of the extraordinary things it's a bit like

it's a bit like alexander isn't it that's what i mean so much about this story is actually a self-conscious absolutely reenactment of alexander's conquest of egypt so napoleon you know he's from corsica he has distinguished himself kind of with his whiff of grapeshot in the service of the Directory, who are running France after the sort of the backlash against Robespierre. And before the whiff of grapeshot, he has saved Toulon, which is the kind of major French naval base on the South Mediterranean coast. That's right.

And he saved it from a kind of a royalist british takeover uh he's seen that off um a character called sydney smith uh as in the process of evacuation has blown up part of the arsenal so he's a figure who will reappear but this is one napoleon so much kudos that he basically he he ends up being given command of the revolutionary army that then invades Italy. Exactly. That's where he really makes his name, isn't it? With the Army of Italy. So this is the late 1790s.

He wins battle after battle. That's David's painting, isn't it? Of him looking, dashing and rowing on a horse, crossing the Alps. Exactly. So after a very rough time for France, suddenly they found this dashing, swashbuckling hero whose Frenchness actually is slightly ambiguous because of course he's from corsica but napoleon gives them something they haven't really had during the days of the kind of endless sort of revolution eating itself madame guillotine stuff which is a genuinely

dashing handsome swashbuckling youthful hero and that's what david puts in his paintings and napoleon gets all this loot i mean napoleon is incredibly corrupt right from the beginning he basically amasses tons of loot so he's suddenly very rich he's very famous he's a celebrity and the directorie love him the director is there but they're well they do you're right because they're starting to get worried aren't they quite keen to get rid of him because they can can sense that this is a man in a hurry and on the make. So their first scheme for him is Britain. Yes.

They talk about invading Britain, don't they? Talleyrand, who is the foreign minister. He and Napoleon are very keen on this idea of invading Britain. Basically, Napoleon says, eventually, no go. You know, it's going to be much too tricky. But it's one of these great invasion scares in britain at the end of the 1790s so they go for the obvious alternative so why cross you know 20 miles of the channel when you can cross 2 000 miles and go to egypt and so well there's an anti-british yeah it absolutely is and so in a way, this is fighting, this is taking the war to Britain because Egypt has become strategically key

because of the British, the emergent British empire in India. And this is what's grumbling on in India at the moment is actually Arthur Wellesley fighting, so the future Duke of Wellington, fighting Tipu Sultan in Mysore. And it's becoming clear that, well, I mean, basically, it's been clear ever since the Seven Years' War, when France was roundly defeated, lost its

holdings in Canada, lost its holdings in India, that Britain now has a kind of global grip that the French are obviously slightly envious of. And so Egypt becomes the target, both because it will frustrate British links with India, but also, I think, because the French see North Africa as kind of their backyard. They do. They've sort of been thinking about expanding into the Mediterranean. We talked before in a couple of our podcasts about how during the French Revolution and the sort of late period Enlight know, the late period Enlightenment, there is this extraordinary romance of Greece and Rome and this fascination with the classical world

and classical antecedents. And Napoleon has already been pictured as a kind of Roman figure, hasn't he? I mean, crossing the Alps is quite kind of Hannibal-like behaviour. And clearly, right from the start, the idea of invasion, as soon as the idea of an invasion of Egypt is mooted,

people are thinking, oh, just like Alexander the Great, and this is going back to the Romans, and that's in their minds. Telly Ron, who is such a kind of Peter Mandelson cube, I mean, kind of brilliantly subtle, clever, manipulativeulative survivor constantly being knocked down constantly coming back he'd been royalist he becomes a republican he ends up a royalist again

i mean it's kind of astonishing record but he said he said egypt was a province of the roman republic she must become a province of the french republic but i think on top of that, what is also bubbling away here is the idea that actually Egypt is much older than Greece or Rome. And that if you want to study the real roots of culture, of civilization, you know, it's not enough to go to Rome. It's not enough to go to Athens. You've actually got to go to Egypt. And it's still pretty much terra incognita. People have started going there, but there's a sense that there are vast, vast treasures just waiting to be found. And so I think that that also is absolutely a part of it. Well, yeah, that's one thing, sort of imaginative leap you have to make. They don't know what we

know. So you're right. There are not the detailed descriptions and pictures of Egyptian antiquities that we're all familiar with that British or indeed children anywhere in the world grow up with these days so there's a real sense of this is a not just an amazing story because it's not just an invasion it's not just a blow against the British it's a genuine voyage of discovery and that's why Napoleon assembles 151 savants kind of intellectuals yeah so it's not just got tens of thousands of troops in the fleet he's got all these boffins to come with a hot air balloon and they are i didn't read where's the hot air balloon i didn't know a hot air balloon he takes um do they do they does it

go up they use it they launch it in cairo and everyone's very impressed and they take a load of printing presses including including one and the only arabic printing press in the whole of europe do you know where that was uh salisbury no it was the vatican brilliantly so it got nicked from the vatican when he when he occupied i did not know that um and but but he's also they've got a plan they know that there was once because of this thing about india they know or they think they know that there was once, because of this thing about India, they know or they think they know that there was once a canal, weren't they? Yeah, going under eyes.

Across the, yeah, the Suez Canal. And they are thinking, well, if we can do something like that and find out where it was, then that will give us a massive advantage over the British. We can get to India and we'll control, you know, the sort of hinge of Eurasia, basically. Yeah, so it's geopolitical, it's colonialist, it's romantic, it's personal for Napoleon. He wants to become the new Alexander. It's political for the Directory. They want to get rid of this overambitious general. It is also that it's still kind of i think warmed by the the embers of revolutionary fervor so um there's this guy dominique arago who who says he lists the reasons

why the french should go to egypt and he says it's to offer a suckering hand to an unhappy people to free them from the brutalizing yoke under which they have grown for centuries and finally to endow them without delay with all the benefits of european civilization which is nice so there is this sense that the french when they go there see themselves as kind of the you know the the embodiments of the of the future with it um they're bringing liberty they're bringing enlightenment i'm sure you've got it, Tom, but when they embark at Toulon on the 19th of May, 1798,

Bonaparte gives this extraordinary address to his troops. Soldiers, he says, you're one of the wings of the French army. You've made war on the mountains, on the plains, in the cities. It remains for you to fight on the seas. The Roman legions that you sometimes imitated but no longer equaled fought carthage now on this same sea and now on

the plains of zammer soldiers sailors you've been neglected until this day today the greatest concern of the republic is for you the genius of liberty which made you at her birth the arbiter of europe wants to be the genius of the seas and of the furthest nations. So you've got so much going on there. There's a lot going on there. But all that stuff about Carthage and Zama and stuff, I mean, it's great. Well, Carthage is Britain. Yes, clearly.

The commercial naval power. Right. Who must be destroyed. They care only for money and killing children. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. But also, absolutely, the idea of liberating egypt which is um

well it's it's supposedly a province of the ottoman empire but effectively it's ruled by the mamaluks who are there's this kind of incredible dynasty of of slaves who get bought in mainly from the caucasus well there weren't slaves recently were they i mean there were slaves hundreds of years earlier presumably no but they continue to buy them so they're still buying them yes so they get bought in and they they live as slaves recently, were they? I mean, they were slaves hundreds of years earlier, presumably. No, but they continue to buy them. So they're still buying them? Yes, so they get bought in and they live as slaves as children and they're kind of raised to become Mamelukes. And then I think when they kind of sprout a beard or something

and they've done their military training, then they're elevated to basically they kind of become free. But I mean, it's kind of very odd. You know, you serve your apprenticeship as a slave and then you end up as a kind of ruler of Egypt. And that is, you know, that's a tradition that goes back to the 13th century, that they defeat the Mongols, kind of one of the great decisive battles in world history. But before that, they had defeated the crusade of Louis VII, which is a kind of precursor. So the French have got unfinished business, haven't they, basically?

There's an incredible kind of snuff of weird historical parallels echoes inspirations going on here and it's just incredibly napoleonic and one of the reasons why napoleon is such an amazing figure is that he kind of surfs the waves of all these kind of different trends and ideas um and does it with such kind of self-confidence that he gets the world to accept him on his own estimation. Absolutely. It's because he has that sense that great historical characters, I mean, I don't know, Alexander Churchill, let's say, has this too, that he is a figure in history. Napoleon has it from a very young age. And certainly when he sails to Egypt, he's consciously reenacting classical precedence

and he thinks he's writing an entirely new chapter in world history and he is as he does yes absolutely absolutely so he makes a promise right from the beginning doesn't he

he basically pretty much before I think he even lands in Alexandria there's obviously this issue that all his campaigns so far have been against other european christian nations so this is the first time they are they are going you know they they're not just going to an unknown land they're going to a muslim land and that gives it a real edge that it hasn't had so so so napoleon is always issuing these kind of streams of um announcements to to the egyptians in this kind of ludicrously

cod quranic language um a bit i remember it's kind of uh in the wake of 9-11 there was a real trend for western politicians to do all that you know peace be upon him and god the all-merciful and all that kind of stuff um and napoleon so napoleon is really the first Western leader who does this. So there's loads of kind of, have we not for centuries been the friends of the Grand Sunni? May God accomplish his desires and the enemy of his enemies. I mean, it's so great. And then when he actually gets to Cairo, he has this and he's talking to an imam. And he, glory to Allah, there is no God but God.

Muhammad is his prophet, and I am one of his friends. That's great. And I don't think anyone is really fooled by this. But he says at one point, doesn't he, I want you to tell the people, he says, Qadis, sheikhs, imams, Chorbadjis, and notables of the nation, I ask you to tell the people that we are the true friends of the muslims wasn't it us who destroyed the knights of malta wasn't it us who destroyed the pope who used to say that he had a duty to make war on muslims

wasn't it us who have all times been friends to the great lord and enemies to his enemies i mean does anybody believe this tom the stuff about i'm the enemy of the pope i love gala i'm no is this all i mean to appear does everybody see through it do you think well i i think um yes i think basically people do see through i mean in private napoleon is is much i mean he so he takes the quran with him he takes his library with him herodotusus, all kinds of stuff. And he categorizes it under various different labels. And he catalogs the Quran, not under religion, but under politics, which I think kind of gives you a kind of indication as to how he's reading this. And he, I mean, you know, in private conversation, he's absolutely upfront, he kind of says,

you know, we must lull this fanaticism. You know, we must kind of lull it to sleep so that we can then eradicate it. So he is very in private, self-consciously feeling that he's going there as a servant of the Enlightenment. But in public, he is talking about being the friend of Islam. And I think that to a degree, he's kind of kidding himself. And I think that this is one of the reasons why it's such an interesting topic going into the into the present day because i think he does feel that um that the enlightenment and the ideals of the french revolution provide a kind of neutral place where people who have emancipated themselves from christianity can be neutral between christianity and islam and superior to both

and this becomes kind of the controlling conceit really of a french secularism right the way up into the present day the idea that the french secular revolutionary state is superior to and can absorb into its fabric kind of different cultures different civilizations yeah that's very familiar isn't it but let's let's part that for a second. We get back into the sacral and the secular. Very familiar topics to some in the second half. So they land. They land in sort of Alexandria.

They march across the desert towards Cairo. And basically, they're about nine miles from the Great Pyramid from Giza when they meet the Mamluk army and this is one of these almost science fiction moments in history where you have a very very modern, well trained

well equipped European army facing a Mamluk army that basically is technologically much more backward, it is doing kind of mad cavalry charges towards guns and stuff like that. But it's not helped itself by having divided itself in two. Because there are effectively two Mamluk leaders. And one of the armies ends up on the wrong side of the Nile.

Yeah, 40,000 of the Mamluks don't even get to the battle. Yeah. But it's such a kind of dramatic setting that you've got the great citadel built by saladin of cairo across the nile on the left side as the french facing it and in the distance there are arguments about whether they could actually have seen the pyramids supposedly they couldn't see the pyramids but in all the paintings every painting that's done the battle because of course there's tons of paintings of the battle of the pyramids and all of them they're basically fighting in the shadow of the pyramids aren't they i mean

they might as well have and you have this great thing from napoleon that soldiers 40 years of 40 centuries of history look down upon you uh and and again people have the assumption has been that this is retrospective but actually that apparently there's a letter that was that was written the day after the battle that that basically all right so basically implies that Napoleon did so there's a very kind of histrionic self-conscious sense that this is an amazing place for a civilizational battle

and of course Napoleon wins it and he occupies Cairo the Mamluks retreat down the Nile and Napoleon sends they retreat up the Nile surely yeah up the Nile and Napoleon sends... They retreat up the Nile, surely. Yeah, up the Nile under a very distinguished general

called Dessay who pursues the Mamluks up the Nile. And again, just kind of looking ahead to when we come on to the Egyptology bit, they take various savants with them as they go up the Nile to pursue them. But Napoleon is now in charge of Cairo and it's all looking good.

But at this point, then, yeah, but then as if we didn't have enough good characters in this. So they had evaded the British, hadn't they, to get to Egypt. They had invaded the Royal Navy.

We're basically chasing them. So Nelson had been given orders to basically stop the Armada. And it's a fast Armada. mean it's it's um it's it's 335 ships it's you know hundreds of guns cavalry men i mean it's it's kind of almost up there with xerxes invasion it's it's on a vast scale and nelson is just harrying around trying to find it and there's one kind of excruciating moment, I think, when they're pulling out of Malta, which Napoleon has captured. And the French can hear Nelson's ships kind of sounding cannon through the night

so that the British squadron can keep track of each other. And they're just sailing silently so that Nelson won't know that they're going past. So Nelson is furious about this. Tom, this is so patrick o'brien i can't believe you don't like those books so jack our producer loves these books and he like me is disgusted that you are rude about patrick o'brien and broke it's too much i've said this before it's

too much rope but you know if it was just nelson like that i'd be all over that but in the end nelson works out where napoleon's fleet is and it's been um been, it's kind of been stationed in Abakir Bay, which is off Cairo in the mouth of the Nile. And the French fleet have moored there because there are very, very narrow shallows that they think no fleet could get round. And so essentially, were the British fleet to be able to go past these shallows,

the flank of the French fleet would be terminally exposed and that of course is exactly what Nelson does. So Nelson divides his attack, half go one way half go, you know, they cut off the French so they're basically between the land and the French now

and it's about a three hour battle, I think the Battle of the Nile and the sort of high point of it is when Nelson himself towards the end is hit, isn't he? He's shot. And he's already lost one eye before. So he's hit quite – I mean, people say it's only a flesh wound, but it sounds quite bad. Like his skull is exposed. He had that famous line, didn't he, that before the battle that I will gain either a peerage or Westminster Abbey.

Exactly. So he's kind of ready to die. And it's interesting that in this battle there are quite a number of, well, kind of echoes of the future story to come. So there's one Lieutenant Thomas Hardy, who has seized some Egyptian pilots who then are used to help negotiate the shoals. And there's also HMS Bellerophon, which is actually the British ship that gets most damaged. And it kind of ends up drifting off. And of course, Bellerophon in the long run

is the ship that will pick up Napoleon after Waterloo. And it's the cause of a famous poem, is it not? Is it? Yes. So Lorient, the flagship that Napoleon had sailed sailed on the vast ship and um it gets pounded and pounded it's got lots of gunpowder on and it explodes and the admiral

of the ship the commander of the ship casabianca uh he dies there and his son dies and his son is standing on the deck and refuses to leave until he's been told by his father to leave. And so you get this famous poem, the boy stood on the burning deck, went all but he had fled. The flame that lit the battle's wreck shone round him, the dead. And do you know Eric Malcom's version of that? I do not. I do not. I should. The boy stood on the burning deck. His lips were all a quiver. He gave a cough. His leg fell off and floated down the river. Very nice.

Very nice. Not a river, unfortunately. But there you go. So Nelson is hit. He's got lost one eye already. A flap of skin falls down and obscures his other eye. So he can't see anything. He's very frightened.

He shouts, I'm killed. Remember me to my wife. And then he's taken down. Emma Hamilton. Yeah. And the surgeon says, actually, you're fine. You you know it's just a kind of it looks back a man up get back up there he's snowflake so back he goes up and uh they win but there's a great so it's an absolute crushing victory so almost all the french ships of the line that's the big warships either captured or destroyed it is it shatters the French fleet. There's a lovely detail afterwards.

So Nelson is still quite blinded. He can't really see properly. So he's going around presenting gifts to the other captains and to people who distinguish themselves in the battle. And because he can't see, he gives a toothpick to a man who's had his teeth blown out. And to a man, do you know what he gave a man whose nose had been shot off?

No. He gave him a snuff box. Oh, goodness. Yeah. Anyway, so Nelson recovers from that mishap. And basically, at that very moment, so the invasion is not very old, but that moment,

you know, the French are doomed, really, from then, aren't they? Napoleon says... He's told what's happened and he says we no longer have a navy well we'll have to stay here or leave as great men just as the ancients did now of course people who listen to our alexander podcast exactly will remember that alexander had sent away his navy yeah after invading asia minor or indeed cortez burning his ships and cortez burning his ships, exactly. So there is a kind of...

He'd be aware of both those parallels. Exactly. And he would almost... You know, Napoleon being Napoleon, he would almost welcome this because he would see it as a chance to prove his worth and valour. I mean, I think one of the weird things

about the Egypt exhibition is that it kind of... It serves as an overture to Napoleon's campaigns in europe and of course you get trafalgar where nelson again destroys the french fleet and napoleon's reaction is to blaze off and win the battle of australis so i don't think that napoleon feels that this is terminal i mean he's he's still ready to go the full alexander and that's basically what he does so he's in cairo he has strange egyptian

um uh sort of festivities doesn't he where people are cheering him and muhammad together well so the french the french fund celebrations for muhammad's birthday that's it yeah to celebrate i think it's the seventh or i think seventh revolutionary year which begins i think in september they have a massive, great public celebration where they, they kind of raise a triumphal arch. That's right. And they kind of put revolutionary slogans and Quranic slogans on it.

And they have a vast meal where everyone is supposed to sit down. So the Egyptians, as well as the French and next to the placemats, they include quotations from the Quran and the Declaration of Human Rights. It's so strange. Yeah, but, I mean, that is, you know, that's where the French Republic basically still is. I mean, it's this idea that you can combine

the French Revolution with, say, Islam and that there's no kind of civilizational tension there. But there is also this third element, isn't there, which is that it's sort of done as a Roman, there's a bit of a Roman triumph. They go through a triumphal arch, and it's sort of, it's a bit like the sort of triumphs that Mark Antony had organized in Alexandria.

You know, that sort of, he'd imported the Roman triumph when he was shacked out with Cleopatra. Well, Napoleon has an affair, doesn't he, with a woman who he he calls his cleopatra exactly and he's calling himself all kinds of things isn't he he's uh at one point he's been given the title ali bonaparte which he's calling himself the favorite of allah this is all this kind of cosplay yeah it is this is exactly what it is but it's basically he's a man in a computer game but again so so basically a month after you know this rights of man quranic stuff um there's a there's a rebellion in cairo yeah so clearly no one in cairo is kind of wearing this at all it's absolutely

jibberish napoleon's response is absolutely brutal yeah mean, he fires cannonballs at the Al-Azhar Mosque, which is, you know, possibly the most significant mosque in the whole of Islam. I mean, it's... Do you know what he says? They say that God will save us. And he says... Yeah, too late.

God is too late. God is too late. You have begun, now I will finish it. Yeah. And he orders all the heads of the rebels to be piled up in you know uh in a great square and the corpses to be thrown in the nile and it's actually very very kind of battle of algiers and again this kind of the the tension between the claims to a kind of universal

enlightenment and brotherhood that the french republic embodies and the kind of willingness to repress very brutally people who oppose that is a theme running from napoleon right the way up to the up up to the algebra some people would say that's the theme wouldn't they have european colonialism it is that on the one hand is the sort of but i think i think with france it's more ideological i mean in britain of course they're blasting people out of cannons and all kinds of things but they're not claiming at that point to embody enlightenment ideals no no you're right and i think that that's the kind of peculiar quality of tension you get with french imperialism yeah right from the beginning so he does this then he i mean we better sort of whiz through the rest of the some of the rest of the campaign anyway because he goes up to syria doesn't he he decides he's basically gonna he's

gonna reenact the crusades so even though he's been cut off no fleet all this he thinks well i'll just keep going basically alexander style or i'll do a bit of richard the lionheart so he captures jaffa doesn't he and then he goes up to Acre which satisfyingly for for sort of John Bull types Richard the Ironheart had captured but Alex but um Napoleon doesn't manage to capture it does he because his troops will get played to be fair Richard the Ironheart captured it together with Philip the second that's true so we we mustn't um yeah that's true yeah but and and the basically the um so it's held by the Ottomans. An Ottoman relief force comes down, gets defeated at the Battle of Mount Tabor, which is very significant for Christians.

It's where the Transfiguration is supposed to have happened. But there's a British commander, Sidney Smith, who's the guy who had... Had too long. Had too long. And essentially, he forces Napoleon to retreat. So again, kind of precursor of the retreat from Moscow, perhaps. Too long. And essentially he forces Napoleon to retreat. So again, kind of precursor of the retreat from Moscow. Very much. And even then, I think there must be a sense

in some of the French soldiers' minds, rather anticipating what's going to happen in 10 or 11 years, they must be thinking, what the hell are we doing over here? I mean, what's going on? Why are we trudging through this? We're meant to be defending the French Revolution

and here we are kind of, you know, basically in these biblical landscapes. They've all got dysentery and typhoid and stuff, haven't they? So it's just an absolute nightmare. And Napoleon has done this kind of, you know, a bit like the kings would go in and touch people for the king's evil.

He's gone into plague wards and, you know, Diana style. But there's conflicting claims about it, aren't there? Some say he goes and embraces the soldiers and, you know, it's very... And others say he keeps a distance the whole time. Yeah, yes. He's masked up, basically. So again, this whole kind of myth-making is so self-conscious. And he says that had Acre fallen, had Sidney Smith not spiked his destiny,

he would have carried on. He would have made them into the immortals, he says. So the guards that guarded the Persian kings, the ancient Persian kings. And that he would have won a new battle of Isis, the battle that Alexander defeated the Persian king. So Napoleon crossed that, but he didn't. So he had to go back.

And that August 1799, he defeats another Ottoman invasion force at the second battle of Abakir Bay. He does indeed. He held a triumph, by the way, when he got back to Cairo, which is very, very Mark Ansley style behaviour. Like, I've just been defeated by the Parthians.

It's great news. Let's celebrate. Yeah, exactly. And then, of course, and then he absolutely disgraces himself, doesn't he? Very un-Alexander behaviour, I have to say. He just runs away.

On his own. Well, he would say... Well, he would say that he was going back to save France. Yeah, that is... Well, that is what he said. He said,

France is beleaguered. I must return immediately. But he basically leaves everybody else behind. And he also tells them he's going to go off sailing around the Nile Delta. He says, I'm just going to go on a little kind of weekend excursion. I'm off.

Do you know the Jean-Baptiste Clébé? I do. The general, what he said about it. Oh, I don't know what he said. What did he say? I quote, the bastard has shat his britches full. When we get back to France, we will rub his face in his own shit. Oh, my gosh.

Well, Clavier didn't get back to France, did he? No, he didn't. Because, again, in a kind of fascinating echo of current trends, he gets assassinated by what we'd perhaps now call a fundamentalist. A fundamentalist. A guy who's actually Kurdish. So he's not even... He'd been studying at the al-azhar so he's very ideologically motivated he's been radicalized and he and you know what happens to him i do i do i would tell the listeners what happens to

he is um horrible he is so his right hand is burned isn't it that's the right hand that wields the dagger but then he is killed by being impaled yeah on a blunt stick so to slow it down they sort of jam him onto this and his own weight and they bury it in the soil so he's kind of sitting there yeah so he's kind of sinking slowly sinking onto the stick which he makes not a sound makes not a sound. I can't believe that. Would you? No, because there are French observers who say this is incredibly impressive. This man never let out a cry, except then to kind of yell out

Allahu Akbar at the end. You know how long it took? Four hours. Yeah. Here's the thing. Who would stand there for four hours to watch this happening? I mean, spectator sports go.

It's kind of dull. Well, especially when you've got, you could watch hot air balloons or... exactly so when when clay big after he's been assassinated by this poor guy um he then gets succeeded by a guy called uh jacques francois menu who's an interesting figure he's kind of pot-bellied rather ramshackle long-haired disheveled kind of figure but what's interesting about him is that he's married an Egyptian woman and converted to Islam. So he stops being Jacques-Francois Menou

and becomes Abdullah Menou. Does he? So that's very, that's like one of Alexander's sort of companions becoming a Persian satrap and going native. And that's why Napoleon approves of it and thinks it's brilliant. Yeah. Napoleon really thinks it's brilliant. What happens to Monsieur Menou? He goes back to france um he's

he's i think he gets some kind of minor post and he ends up in a lunatic asylum oh god well it's better than being impaled so exactly yes exactly okay so that's the story of uh the napoleonic expedition which is kind of a defeat because the british move in and establish a political presence in Egypt. But the French have established a cultural presence. And perhaps that's what we should come to after the break. Anyway, we'll see you after the ads. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets,

head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hi, before we return to napoleon in egypt um regular listeners by now should be familiar with unheard unherd.com which is the online magazine that's sponsoring the podcast and for whom both of us have written is that not so it is i'm about to start writing a piece for unheard in the next few days. What about? I don't know if I can tell you because other commissioning editors. It's about a subject that you will really enjoy.

Well, I'll look forward to that then. Okay. Yeah, but I can't tell you what it is because other people will steal Unheard's brilliant ideas. Okay. So if you want to find out about that and read lots of other quality writing, there's a special deal to Restless History listeners, three months free subscription,

which should be cancelled at any time, normally one pound. Go to unheard.com forward slash rest and reminder unheard is U-N-H-E-R-D to claim it. And I'm very happy to be advertising it, particularly today when we're talking about Napoleon in Egypt, because I wrote an essay.

Yeah, it says a banger here, but I don't know what a banger is. Well, it says a banger here but i don't know i know what a banger is well it is a banger it is a banger so it's it's the title is the age-old clash between islam and france and the opening sentence dominic the opening sentence in 1798 napoleon embarked on the first french invasion of egypt since the era of the crusades wow so very timely tom did you write that knowing that we were doing the podcast? Or was it a complete coincidence? No, it was a while back in the aftermath of all the terrorist attacks.

Oh, right. Yeah. Oh, yes. So it was about the Islamic State, why they particularly hated France more than perhaps even Britain or other European countries. When the Islamic State attacked the Bataclan and that terrible night, the message of responsibility they put out cited both the Crusades

and by implication France's role as the revolutionary Enlightenment atheistical republic. And it's that kind of, the argument is that it's the fusion of those, you know, the Christian

and the revolutionary that particularly riles. Right. And that tension is definitely still there because UnHerd have an article this week about the French presidential candidate or would-be candidate,

Éric Zemmour. Have you been following him, Tom? I have, the one who looks like Gollum. Yes, he does look like Gollum. He came over to London. He's often described as being far right, isn't he? And some of his statements are quite... Well, he's a fan of Marshall Petain,

which I think qualifies you to be far right. Marshall Petain's not the French national hero that I would reach for, personally. Particularly since Eric Simmer is Jewish. He seems very odd. But if you want to understand some of those complexities and paradoxes, and this is, was again, an excellent kind of profile.

They do wonderful profiles there. So do check it all out. Unheard.com forward slash rest U N H E R D. And now back to Napoleon in Egypt. Bienvenue au Rest de l'Historie with me Dominic Samrock and Tom Holland. We are talking about Napoleon in Egypt. Tom, we had a lot of fun with the kind of campaign, but obviously the real significance of this is not so much military

or kind of diplomatic. It is kind of intellectual and cultural, isn't it? So the Savant, I mean, this is the moment that creates Egyptology. Is that right? I think it is. So Napoleon, later in life, he would look back at the Egyptian campaign and he would mourn the fact that his dream of becoming Alexander had been frustrated. But he would say, in the the long run it doesn't matter because the the real conquests the ones that uh leave behind no

regrets are those made over ignorance oh my god i mean we all know he didn't really no i think he was shameless absolutely shameless i think he was shameless. Absolutely shameless. I think he was genuinely interested. So on the trip, you know, the long trip from France to Egypt, he would host the various savants, and they would kind of discuss all this stuff. Yeah. So basically, until this point, Egypt has been very much terra incognita intellectually. Ancient Egypt.

People, I mean, for example, nobody understands what hieroglyphics mean they they've tried to understand them they think there's some kind of symbolic language but they don't know what it is and obviously it's on this trip that the french find built into what the walls of a fort i think um there is a stone there is a stone yeah the key that arguably the the mo one of the most important artefacts in all world history. Yeah, so it's when Menuh, Abdullah, as he'd become by this point, and it's July 1799, so when there's a kind of threat

from British and Ottomans and so on, and they're rebuilding the walls around around rosetta and they find this yeah this this kind of black stone that has three it's a trilingual announcement and one of the one of the announcements is in greek so they send it to um to cairo to this this thing called the the the institute de jeep which has been set up and it was set up in kind of august almost in 1798 so almost the moment that they get into Egypt. And that's such an enlightenment institution, isn't it? I mean, that's

literally what it is. It's kind of an intellectual institution. And it stood there for years. It kind of got burnt down in the Arab Spring. It did. Very sad. But and so they immediately recognised its absolute key significance and they send it back up

to alexandria ready to be taken back to france and then when that when all the french forces surrender in 1801 one of the terms of the surrender is that they have to hand over their loot so the british get it so that's why first the french are very weaselly about that aren't they hide a lot of their loot and the british keep saying we know you've got more what's in those crates like hidden away they know about the rosetta stone because the news of it has kind of gone around Europe like wildfire. And so the British, you know, they definitely want it. So that's why it's ended up in the British Museum

and not the Louvre. But what the French do have is that they have sent this expedition up the Nile to kind of chase the Mamluks and the various savants have gone. And there's this incredible description of them arriving at Thebes. So Luxor, Valley of the Kings, you know, this great monumental capital where bits of it are kind of still sticking out above the sand. And it's sufficiently impressive that when the French army arrived there, apparently they all spontaneously burst into applause at the site.

I thought you were going to say they burst into tears. That would have been much more burst into tears that would have been much more french baby i'm sure some of them did i'm sure some of them did um and then they come back so that's in january when when of course the um the climate in luxor is is gorgeous but they come back in the summer and reconnoiter the valley of the king so they're the first europeans and it's so hot that two of them die of heat stroke wow but imagine what it has to be like tom i mean now when you're a child you know all children do ancient egypt at school and they're so conscious of of them of mummies of the tombs of the you know the pyramids but imagine what that must have been like to have been the first people you know to be i mean they're

not the first europeans of course they're nothing it. But they arrive and many of them do not know what to expect, do they? I mean, the Savant will have a sense that there's something there. But the ordinary soldiers, I mean, it must just be, if you're coming from, you know, the foothills of the Pyrenees or something or the, you know, the wine-growing villages of Burgundy, I mean, this just must be mind-blowing to see. And I think it is for the Savant as well, because they're finding stuff that that no european has seen before and um recording it

tracing it all down um but that's what they do isn't it there's amazing books that they produce the um what's it called the description de l'egypte 1821 four volumes i think it's one now one if you can get a copy it's one of the most valuable books on the market, on the Canadian aquarium market. It's stunning. And it's a kind of Wikipedia of Egypt. So it's not just the antiquities. It's, you know, how people dress, musical instruments they play. And that's a very enlightening thing, isn't it?

It is. Napoleon has basically taken people and said you know compile an encyclopedia of egypt i suppose edward saeed would say it's a very colonialist project as well it's well it's about we can maybe come to him in a little yeah um he would of course um but one of the other one of the i mean one of the reasons why the um the discovery of the uh of the antiquities is has has the impact it does, is that it's not just Europeans who don't really know anything about it. The Egyptians don't either.

The Egyptians, you know, there was a stage where the Egyptians were interested in the pharaonic monuments, but that stage is long gone. And basically, they don't understand why anyone would be as interested in these antiquities as the French seem to be. And one of the measures of that is that, you know, the Great Pyramid, the kind of primal symbol of pharaonic civilization,

that the passageways that lead into it have become cluttered and impassable. And so Napoleon orders that in the first summer that he's in Egypt to be cleared and he then he goes into the king's chamber where the body of Cheops was placed and he orders everybody else out and he sits there communing with his destiny and he self-consciously models that on Alexander going to the oracle at Siwa and he self-consciously models that on alexander going to the oracle at siwa and he never revealed what he thought or what what you know was said what was said by the by the mummy yeah yeah but again a kind of just such a kind of fabulously histrionic scene um so so there's all that and and and as we said the the british kind of claim

the bragging rights politically i mean they establish a political protectorate over egypt that in the long run uh you know lasts right the way up to suez really i guess um but the french established this this sense that they are the people who have brought ancient egypt back to life um and i guess that there are two things that really embed that one of them as you as you said is the description of egypt which is commissioned by napoleon just as he's leaving egypt um and all these kind of various volumes come out and and they're still being produced even after napoleon has been defeated and and died but the other thing is that um there's a guy called joseph fouillet who's a mathematician and he becomes the first president of the institute in cairo and he gets back with he goes with napoleon on the skedaddle back to france and he settles in grenoble and he has all

kinds of antiquities around him and growing up in grenooble is a small boy called Jean-Francois Champollion. Now, he's a huge figure, isn't he, in the understanding of Egypt? Because isn't it not him? Is he not the person who discovers how the Rosetta Stone works? Is that right? So he cracks the hieroglyphs. Yes. So he uses the texts from the Rosetta Stone basically to crack the hieroglyphs. Yes. So he uses the texts from the Rosetta Stone basically to crack the hieroglyphs.

And this is what then opens up the understanding of Egypt. And he goes back to Egypt and he goes down the Nile. And he's probably the first person who can read the hieroglyphs since antiquity. Well, I mean, he is. I i mean it's kind of an amazing thought but also what's what's kind of um tantalizing is that he's he's probably also the last person to see egypt as perhaps um someone in late antiquity or the early middle ages would have seen it because what's going on is that um egypt's been taken over by this guy this albanian adventurer called mehmet ali who is muhammad ali who is he's an amazing character isn't he i mean he's he he absolutely is and he is very he has no interest in antiquities at all which is why he's a modernizer he's perfectly happy for the british and the french to kind of

engage in competitive antiquity rustling so that's how how, you know, the statue of Ozymandias in the British Museum, loads of antiquities in the Louvre, that's how they get there. And those that don't get taken by European plunderers kind of just get smashed, used as, you know, for lime kilns or whatever. So Lodes, so Champollion is the first to read hieroglyphs and he's possibly the last to see the antiquities

as they had been for centuries and centuries and centuries before egypt really kind of explodes into tomorrow and the kind of irony tom is that even as this stuff is being either taken away or destroyed in egypt there's this kind of egyptomania all over the kind of western world so it's just a few decades later you get the construction of say the was Monument to George Washington which is done as an Egyptian obelisk, something that probably wouldn't have been done that way 50 or 100 years ago

but because of the aftermath of Napoleon's invasion there is this absolute kind of mad fascination with all things Egyptian. And the obelisks being brought from Egypt, say Cleopatra's Needle to London, the one that was taken to New York,, every thrusting capital of a Western power has to have an obelisk.

And you need to be Freud to work out maybe what's going on there. But that's also kind of a Roman thing, isn't it? Because after Octavian had defeated Cleopatra, the Romans started putting out obelisks to remind themselves of how they'd captured Egypt. And so there's a sort of weird kind of classicism in that as well isn't there yeah so the sense that um the greeks and the romans had ruled egypt uh and now the western powers

should should equally have a stake is is definitely a part of what's going on but conversely um just as people in um in in europe are getting obsessed by Egypt, the Egyptians are very, very conscious of basically just how technologically advanced the French had been relative to, say, the Mamluks. And one of the things that Muhammad Ali does is, as part of his process of of modernization is to send Egyptian Savant to Paris and there's this one guy Rifa al-Tatawi who who um wrote a brilliant account of his trip to Paris um and again there's this sense of um you know as as with napoleon going to egypt the sense that he's struggling to get a handle on a very different way of seeing the world so likewise with al-tatawi you he so he describes france as a land of infidelity and obstinacy um one of their bad customs is their claim that the intellect of their philosophers and physicists is greater and more perceptive than that of prophets um and there's there's uh there's there's a french

observer of these egyptians who've come to paris to study and he's he says of them that um the only things that they learned to do in paris was to speak passable, to drink wine and to laugh at Mohammed. Really? So this is very kind of, is it the guy Kutub who went to America in the 1950s? Is that right? There's a kind of weird echo of that, isn't there? Well, Tatawi is more enthusiastic. He comes back to Egypt and he's he founds a kind of a European language centre. Right. So that people can learn languages and kind of translate treatises

and industrialise and improve agriculture and all that kind of stuff. So that's going on. But essentially it generates tensions within the traditional model of Islamic culture that are enduring to the present day. Because the thing is that up until Napoleon lands at Alexandria, basically nobody in the Muslim world had bothered with what the infidels were doing. And they just had no interest in them, couldn't care. And it's assumed that Islam is able to structure everything. And essentially, the shock of realising that that is not the case.

And what do you how do you do that? Do you try and integrate Islam with the kind of the trends that Napoleon and then the other European powers embody? Do you reject them completely? I mean, what do you do? These are tensions that are enduring throughout the Islamic world throughout the 19th and 20th century, into the 21st century. And of course, as so, so there's one of the comments of Tataoui when he goes to Paris, he says there's not a single Muslim settled in Paris. I mean, that is clearly no longer the case. And so those those arguments and those tensions have to be resolved by Muslims who are now living in France. But they also can see that what's going on with the presidential election moment in France. These are issues that are now dominating

mainstream French discourse as well. And as you say, it's a particular issue for France, isn't it? Because France has that kind of sense that Napoleon himself had of the kind of secular, rational, enlightened, of Frenchness being bound up with secularism, with liberalism, which they, as you say, they think of that as something outside religion. But I have a terrible feeling, knowing you, that you will say that is actually a product of their Christian heritage. Am I right? Yeah, I'm absolutely going to say that. I'm absolutely going to say that because it's

clearly true, because the French are exporting, you know, deeply Christian assumptions about the possibility of church and state being separate entities. I mean, you know, there's no equivalent to the phrase church and state in your fluent Arabic. Of course not. So what about this? What about this Edward Said business? this uh edward saeed business so we should definitely so for those people who don't know edward saeed is this sort of palestinian intellectual 20th century um writing sort of 1970s 1980s here is a book called orientalism that was massively influential but i think historians a lot of historians have said is utter utter utter utter utter bunkum um do you think it's utter bunkum?

Well, I don't think you can make so many... I mean, we all make mistakes, but I mean, to make... I don't think it's utter bunkum. I think when you've made so many mistakes... I think the controlling idea that for the Europeans in the 19th century, of whom Napoleon's Savants are the kind of archetype, the attempt to understand the countries that they were occupying was itself a part of colonial control. I mean, that seems to me indisputably true. But that's also just common sense.

I mean, that's just blindingly obvious. But to elaborate that into this grand theory. I wouldn't say that because I would also say that it's indicative of a curiosity that I think is rather admirable. You know, so it takes time for the Egyptians to become interested in ancient Egypt. You know, by the time the Tutankhamen is discovered, they're very interested in it. They're not going to let it all go off to London or whatever. But in the early decades of the 19th century, they're not interested in it at all. And it's the Europeans who are interested in it. And I feel grateful to the Savants that they, you know, they went and they, you know,

in many cases, they made illustrations, made it studies of monuments that no longer exist because they were demolished by the modernizing program of of memetalli yeah i don't i mean um tom i don't think anyone would surely well i mean you'd have to be very very impassioned i think um to disagree with that i mean obviously their curiosity is is one of the things that allowed these things to be preserved and that created created Egyptology and they created a lot of these things. But also to see people, especially in sort of the sort of debased form of Edward Said's thesis, which is to see almost all Western intellectual engagement of the East as a product of colonialism and only about power and only about control and all this. I think that is, I mean, I think Robert Irwin wrote a brilliant book about Orientalism that was a complete riposte to say. They kind of sewed his, you know,

just levelled his cities to the ground and said, a lot of these people are actually themselves anti-imperialist, that they weren't necessarily great advocates of empire and all this kind of thing. And then actually- But again, it's complicated, isn't it? Because Napoleon is saying, we're coming here to free you um we're coming here because we're against empires we're against the british empire we're against the ottoman empire but

i think it's more complicated than that i mean i think i think i think there's a lot of of um i think napoleon is in a way that's perhaps typical of quite a lot of European figures in the early 19th century, simultaneously idealistic and deeply cynical. And the two seem kind of able to coexist in a way that perhaps we in the 21st century find difficult to understand. Maybe. I mean, Napoleon, if you put him alongside the people he worshipped, Caesar, Alexander and so on, I think he actually makes complete sense, doesn't he? That blend of political opportunism and sort of genuine self-belief, but also a belief in his moral mission. I mean, those things quite happily coexist. But yes, but I think that we in the 21st century for reflecting kind of the way that the culture wars rumble,

we have a much more binary sense. Yeah, we do. That you're either an anti-imperialist or you're a colonialist. Yeah, right. In fact, you know, both of those are equally European. I mean, they're equally Western. So it's not like, you know, and you see them intermixed in the figure of Napoleon.

You see them intermixed in the figure of Napoleon. You see them intermixed in this whole extraordinary expedition. And I think that it is, you know, one of the absolutely kind of foundational episodes in modern history, modern global history. Because actually, when you think about European history, particularly before Napoleon, I mean, certainly in the sort of 17th, 18th century, the Ottoman Empire, the world of the Middle East,

the engagement with Islam, they've slightly been pushed to the side, haven't they? I know there's the Siege of Jena and all that kind of stuff. But for example, in Britain and in France, they're no longer really thinking about Christendom versus Islam in the 18th century, are they? And then after the invasion, that will be very different. Yes. the 18th century are they and then after the invasion that will be very different yes and i mean you i well you've got you've kind of got this awakening of interest in each so as early

as the 17th century 1780 something leibniz the the philosopher and and mathematician is suggesting to louis the 14th that the french go and invade egypt um and he's basically doing that to try and stop louis the 14th from invading germany but but there's a kind of sense that that egypt is of interest um and then you've got you've got uh there's this guy the comp de volney who's going to egypt drawing up that kind of sober report but then is is he he does a kind of very romantic uh portrayal of egypt as a land of ruins and timelessness and things. So that's also kind of feeding into it. And I think that there is, and I guess that Edward Said maybe has a point here, that there's a sense perhaps in which lots of people in Europe are more interested in a kind of fantasy of ancient Egypt than they are in the reality of...

Yeah, but again, that's true of everything, right? I think that is true. We're always interested in the fantasy of something rather than reality of it. I mean, that's just the way the human imagination works. Anyway, I think we've probably... Well, we haven't quite done this to death. I mean, there's tons more to say about it,

but we should probably wrap this up. Well, there's certainly tons more to say about Napoleon, isn't it? And this is the first episode we've done on Napoleon. It is. A real gap. And I have to say that kind of getting back to this whole theme just reminds me what an amazing figure he is. And Nelson as well, and lots to come.

Yeah, we've got to do Nelson, Tom. We will see you soon. A bientot. Bye-bye. Au revoir. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community,

please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.