Napoleon in Egypt (8 page)

Other notable figures in Napoleon’s military entourage included his giant mulatto chief of cavalry General Alexandre Dumas (future father of the novelist), whose physical prowess was such that it was said he could grasp a beam in the stables and lift his horse between his clenched legs. He was supported in the cavalry by the swashbuckling thirty-year-old General Murat, whose swift action had so helped Napoleon on 13 Vendémiaire.

However, of all Napoleon’s generals the one closest to him personally was the forty-two-year-old Louis Caffarelli, who had lost a leg serving with the Army of the Rhine and now had a wooden one. Descended from a noble Italian family which had emigrated to France just over a century previously, he had entered the college of military engineering at Mezières, where he had studied under the great French mathematician Gaspard Monge, who was quick to recognize his exceptional mathematical ability. After a brave and distinguished military career in the engineers, Caffarelli had settled in Paris, where he had been elected to the Institute of France. It was here that he had met Napoleon, who had been so charmed by his easy manner and evident intellectual brilliance that he had persuaded him out of retirement to command the engineering corps for the expedition to Egypt. Napoleon also entrusted Caffarelli with the task of recruiting the members of the Commission of Arts and Sciences, the so-called savants, who were to accompany the expedition. A list of the different professional groups included amongst the savants gives an indication of the sheer scale of this civilian aspect of the expedition: it was to comprise architects; artists and composers; astronomers; botanists; chemists and physicists; surgeons and doctors; geometers; printers; naval engineers; geographical engineers (including cartographers); constructors of bridges and highways; men of literature, economists and antiquarians; mechanical engineers; mineralogists; Orientalists; pharmacists; and zoologists. The Commission of Arts and Sciences would eventually include no fewer than 167 members, who would be augmented by a number of junior professionally qualified assistants and administrators.

Caffarelli was also instructed to requisition or purchase all the necessary equipment required by these savants—this would include every thing from astronomical telescopes to ballooning equipment, from chemical apparatus to Latin, Arabic and Syraic printing type. As if this was not enough, he was also briefed by Napoleon personally on the library that would be required for the expedition, a collection that would include over 500 books. These represented nothing less than a compendium of French, European and world culture, including such works as the many volumes so far produced of the
Encylopédie
, which had been assembled throughout the eighteenth century by the leading French philosophers, intellectuals and scientists of the Enlightenment, with the intention of including “all knowledge.” The library to be taken to Egypt also included the works of Voltaire; a political section, into which category fell such disparate tomes as the Koran, Montesquieu’s
The Spirit of Laws
, the Hindu Vedas and the Bible; the writings of pioneering travelers in the Orient, such as Volney; and the latest maps put together by the great geographer D’Anville, covering any regions into which the expedition might venture, ranging as far afield as Hindustan (India) and Bengal. These maps give a hint of the true nature of the expedition: its unique blend of meticulous planning and sheer fantasy.

One of Caffarelli’s chief assistants in his recruitment of savants was his former professor Gaspard Monge, another of the brilliant figures who had been able to rise from nowhere owing to the fluid social circumstances of the revolutionary era. Monge had been born the son of an itinerant knife-grinder in Burgundy in 1746. At fifty-two he was one of the older members of the Egyptian expedition, and was already regarded as one of the most distinguished mathematicians in Europe. His crowning achievement had been the conception of descriptive geometry, which enabled a three-dimensional object to be represented on a two-dimensional surface such as a page, by use of plane and elevation, thus allowing the dissemination of blueprints for the design of the machines that brought about the Industrial Revolution. At the time France believed in employing its finest minds in an administrative capacity, and in 1792 Monge was appointed Minister of the Navy. In the following years, when the Revolution was blockaded by France’s enemies, he played a major role in national defense by producing a pamphlet describing a process that enabled small-scale iron producers all over the country to manufacture steel. Together with the chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet he also invented a method for extracting saltpeter from the soil, thus giving a huge boost to France’s ailing munitions industry. In 1795 he was one of the originators of what became the Institute of France, which was intended to nurture France’s leading scientific and creative intellectuals. In the same year, he was also appointed as the first director of the elite engineering École Polytechnique, which would become a model for scientific higher educational establishments throughout Europe.

In 1797, Monge and his friend Berthollet were dispatched by the Directory to Italy, where they were instructed to seek out and requisition works of art in the territories “liberated” by Napoleon. During the course of this work they would ship back to Paris many of the paintings that nowadays form the Renaissance collection in the Louvre, as well as several of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. It was during this time that Monge first met Napoleon, who was immediately drawn to the middle-aged mathematician with the big bullish face yet unexpectedly kind manner. Monge’s combination of simple living, good-heartedness and mathematical genius quickly endeared him to the young commander-in-chief. It is difficult to exaggerate the warmth and suddenness of the distant Napoleon’s feelings for Monge, who soon found himself occupying the role of respected father-figure—a role that Napoleon’s actual father had never occupied, on account of his perceived weakness.
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In Milan, when Napoleon had been distraught over Josephine’s behavior, it was to Monge that he turned, pouring out his heart, and from then on his relationship with Monge was such that he always wished to have the mathematician amongst his close entourage.

During his time in Italy, Monge also became close to his scientific companion, the fifty-year-old Berthollet, who was now the foremost figure in the emerging science of chemistry. Berthollet had already success fully collaborated with Monge on such projects as the saltpeter process, though his attempt to use potassium chlorate as a substitute for salt peter in gunpowder had merely resulted in the invention of colored fireworks. For many years Berthollet sought an underlying theory which would explain all chemical reactions—the basis of chemistry itself—and his thinking on this subject had reached a crucial stage when he joined Napoleon’s expedition. His findings in Egypt would prove vital to this theory, which would become his major contribution to science.

Other leading scientists who would join Napoleon’s savants included the mathematician Joseph Fourier, whose theoretical researches in Egypt would lead to his conception of the Fourier series, which he used to describe the flow of heat, and consequently how the earth had cooled to its present state. The savants would also include leaders in techno logical fields, such as the forty-seven-year-old mineralogist Déodat Dolomieu, the discoverer of dolomite, which is named after him, along with the range in the Italian Alps formed out of this rock. Dolomieu had lived a hectic early life, which was destined to catch up with him when the expedition reached Malta. In his youth he had joined the Knights of Malta, and at seventeen had been sentenced to life imprisonment for killing a fellow knight in a duel, only to be pardoned by the Grand Master on condition he left the island forever.

Another savant whose name remains familiar was the forty-three-year-old inventor Nicolas Conté, who had made his fortune as a society portrait painter. Only after the Revolution, when aristocratic sitters were in short supply, did he turn to invention, a pursuit at which his ingenious mind proved highly adept. During the Revolutionary Wars against England, when refined Cumberland graphite had become unavailable for making pencils, Conté was given the task of coming up with a substitute, which he duly produced within forty-eight hours. This used coarse local graphite mixed with clay, and became known as the Conté pencil, which would in time earn his descendants a fortune. A man of indefatigable energy, with a genius for practical improvisation, he was also instrumental in the development of the balloon, which had been pioneered by the French Montgolfier brothers just a few years previously, in 1783. Conté was the first to realize the military potential of the balloon as a means of spying behind enemy lines, and was asked to bring along kits for assembling balloons in Egypt. Ironically, Napoleon had disregarded the balloon as a means for long-distance observation of enemy troop movements, and only wanted this latest scientific wonder in Egypt as a demonstration of France’s technological superiority. Conté’s main role on the expedition was to be as an inventor, using his ingenious skills to improvise any devices that might be required.

Here again we have another clue as to the true nature of the Egyptian expedition, and its purpose as Napoleon saw it; the sheer range, quantity and caliber of the savants hints at a further aspect of his fantasy. These assembled scientists, men of literature, architects, economists, legislators, Orientalists and what have you were to be something more than just a cultural mission for the dissemination of Western civilization: they in fact represented nothing less than an embodiment of French culture itself. The purpose of these savants was far more than education; their constitution was of sufficient size and multiplicity for them to evolve independently, of their own accord, a culture quite separate from that which had produced them. Monge and Fourier had played a major role in the establishment of the Institute of France and the elite École Polytechnique, which were simultaneously both ornaments of French culture and foundation stones of the new revolutionary order. The purpose of these two sages on the expedition would be to establish similar institutions in the Orient. Similarly, Conté’s role as an inventor and balloonist could spearhead independent technological advances to be made there, in case circumstances—in Europe or elsewhere—led to a rupture between France and its new colony. There are indications that from the very outset Napoleon foresaw that his Eastern empire might indeed become independent of France, much as the American colonies had recently become independent of their mother culture in Britain. Only when this is understood will some of Napoleon’s more bizarre actions and sayings in Egypt become clear. As he constantly reminded himself: “Consider all the options.” One of the options for the Egyptian expedition—and certainly not a minor one, indeed one for which it was well prepared—was the foundation of an America of the East, with the new Alexander as its president.

All this remained very much Napoleon’s private dream. Indeed, even the officially designated destination of the expedition remained a closely guarded secret, known only to a chosen few. Napoleon’s confidants Monge and Berthollet certainly knew, as did the Directory and Talleyrand (and the Prussian ambassador, to whom Talleyrand had blurted it out, though this was dismissed as a ruse). Even the Minister of War, Schérer, had been led to believe that the destination of the expedition led by the commander of the Army of England, still Napoleon’s official title, was England. As a result, several older members of the Institute of France turned down Napoleon’s invitation, some because they thought it would be too cold in England, others because they could foresee no use for their Orientalist talents there. Also in on the secret were Napoleon’s senior aides, as well as his senior generals, but no one else. Kléber recorded that, in all, only around forty people in the entire country knew that Egypt was the destination of Napoleon’s expeditionary force.

The reason for such secrecy was obvious. The British navy had to be kept guessing to prevent any attack on such a large and vulnerable armada, which although it would be escorted by a strong contingent of ships of the line would also contain a host of slow, indefensible transport vessels. With flotillas now being assembled in Toulon, Marseilles, Genoa, Civitavecchia and Ajaccio, British spies quickly ascertained that the French were preparing for a major expedition of some sort. When this intelligence began reaching London early in April 1798, Pitt the Younger summoned the British cabinet and they considered the potential invasion targets. Portugal or Sicily were agreed to be possibles, but the most likely option was the most dangerous. It looked as if the French Mediterranean fleet would attempt to break out via Gibraltar, join up with the French Atlantic fleet at Brest, and then launch an invasion of Britain or Ireland. Invasion panic swept Britain, with
The Times
demanding “Barricadoes for each street, to be defended by the inhabitants of the street” and “All obnoxious foreigners be sent out of the country.”
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Meanwhile preparations for the French expeditionary force continued apace in the Mediterranean. However, although most of those gathering at the ports had no idea where they were going, not even those few who were in on the secret knew how long they would be away. Napoleon had assured the Directory that he would be back in six months, a hollow assurance at best. He was a little more frank, if equally unreassuring, when his secretary Bourrienne asked him how long they were liable to be away: “A few months, or six years. It all depends on the course of events. I shall colonize that country. I shall import artists, workmen of all kinds, women, actors, etc. We are only twenty-nine years old;
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we’ll be thirty-five then. Six years will be enough for me, if all goes well, to go to India.”
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In other words, nothing was certain—though despite the incoherence of Napoleon’s plans, every eventuality was being prepared for. The idea of marching to India may have belonged in the realms of fantasy, but Napoleon continued with preparations towards this end, sending word to the Directory on April 14: “I would like to take with me Citizen Piveron, who was for many years the king’s agent at the court of Tippoo Sahib. We should try to get him through to India, so that he can send us intelligence of the situation there.”
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