In July of 1797, Talleyrand arrived from the U.S.A and became the Directory's Foreign Minister, lectured to the Institute of Sciences and Arts in Paris on 'The Advantages of Acquiring New Colonies'. Talleyrand argued that Egypt was an ideal colony, as it was closer to France than her possessions in Haiti and the West Indies and not so vulnerable, either to the Royal Navy or the rising power of the U.S.A. He pointed out that the great eighteenth-century French statesman the due de
Choiseul had wanted to buy Egypt from Turkey. The idea had been in the air from other sources too: n Cairo who stressed that this was the obvious gateway to India; and from Volney's Considerations Sur Ia Guerre actuelle des Turcs ( 1 788). It was perhaps no coincidence that Talleyrand was appointed Foreign Ministerfifteen days after making this speech.
Whether prompted by Talleyrand or not, on 6 August 1 797 Napoleon wrote from Mombello to the Directors as follows: 'The time is not far distant when we shall feel that, to destroy England once and for all we must occupy Egypt. The approaching death of the vast Ottoman Empire forces us to think ahead about our trade in the Levant. ' Soon he and Talleyrand were deeply involved in the project, at least at a theoretical level. On 13 September Napoleon wrote to the Foreign Minister to suggest that as a prelude to the conquest of Egypt France should invade Malta: the island had population of 100000 who were disgusted with their hereditary rulers, the Knights of St John, while the Knights were a shadow of their former military selves and could easily be suborned from the Grand Master. Through his secret agents on the island, Napoleon had already learned that the Order was in a terminal state of decline. When the French Revolution swept away feudal dues and benefices and confiscated Church property it unwittingly signed a death sentence on the Knights. Besides most of them were French.
After the debacle in the Directory on 24 February, Napoleon went away to compose a memorandum, stressing the advantages of an Egyptian expedition and setting out the minimum requirements in men and materiel. The Directors balked at the size of the expedition Napoleon proposed, especially as it would divert military resources from the European front, but they desperately wanted to be rid of Bonaparte so agreed to the enterprise on 5 March. The much-touted idea that the Directors opposed the adventure vehemently is false. Secret preparations were at once put in hand. Napoleon meanwhile ostentatiously attended the Institute daily, as if he were intending to withdraw into private life; as a further blind he was renamed commander of the descent on England with much public trumpeting.
Napoleon's motives for going to Egypt were a curious mixture of the rational and the irrational, in which expediency and cold calculation went hand in hand with his 'Oriental complex'. Some of the ideas in the memorandum were highly attractive to the Directory, though it is not clear how practical they were. The most tantalizing notion was that of establishing a French colony without slaves to take the place of Santo Domingo and the sugar islands of the West Indies, which would provide France with the primary products of Africa, Syria, and Arabia while also providing a huge market for French manufactures. In the short term, there were cogent military arguments, even if based on rather too many imponderables. If the conquest of Egypt was wholly successful, it could be used as a springboard for reinforcing Tippoo Sahib, sultan of Mysore, and the Mahrattas and ultimately expelling the British from India; links with Tippoo had been all but severed when the British captured the Cape of Good Hope. If a Suez canal could be dug, this would destroy the efficacy of the route round the Cape and neutralize British seapower. An immediate consequence of the conquest of Egypt
might be that France could use the country as a bargaining counter against Turkey. Certainly, the threat to India would pressurize Pitt towards peace. Above all, the invasion of Egypt would be easier to achieve and less expensive than a descent on England. These points could be argued for and against and were well within the realm of the feasible. But some of Napoleon's utterances suggest an
unassimilated obsession with the Orient, where the motives cannot be integrated into a rational framework. His reading of Plutarch, Marigny and Abbe Raynal had augmented his desire to emulate Alexander the Great and Tamerlane. He was always interested in the Turkish empire and, even if we did not know of his early hankering to serve the Porte, we would be alerted to the romantic side of his perception of the Orient by his many asides to Bourrienne. 'We must go to the Orient; all great glory
has been acquired there. ' On 29 January 1 798, two days after protracted talks with Talleyrand about all the implications of an Egyptian adventure, he remarked to Bourrienne: 'I don't want to stay here, there's nothing to do . . . Everything's finished here but I haven't had enough glory. This tiny Europe doesn't provide enough, so I must go east. '
No comments:
Post a Comment