THE EXPULSION OF THE FRENCH FROM EGYPT
1800-1801
When Kléber was assassinated in June, 1800, the command _par interim_
devolved upon General Menou. The new Commander-in-Chief had not taken
any part in the military operations of the French army since the capture
of Alexandria in 1798. He was only known as the Governor of Rosetta, as
an “apostate”[650] and the husband of a young Egyptian wife. The
marriage crowned a long career of “gallantry,” but it could hardly have
escaped the biting comments of Frenchmen and only helped to increase the
ridicule with which Abdalla Jacques Menou was regarded. He was fat and
bald, had the face of a _bon viveur_, and was uneasy on horseback. He
offered the greatest contrast to the soldiers of the Revolution. He was
an ex-baron, had the manners of an old courtier, was something of a
philosopher and even of an _idéologue_, had taken an active part rather
in the assemblies and the clubs than in the defence of the frontiers or
the expansion of the Republic. He seems to have been conscious of the
limits of his capacity, for he once petitioned the French Government to
accord him an administrative post in the colonies or an inspectorship of
troops or a diplomatic mission.[651]
During the two peaceful years he spent at Rosetta, he had ample time to
turn his craving for “systems” to good account.[652] He pressed Kléber
to give up the idea of restoring Egypt to the Porte and to direct his
attention to problems of domestic organisation and intensive
development. General Reynier, who later became the avowed enemy of
Menou, states that his Chief’s policy proceeded from “fear of meeting
his creditors.”[653] It is true that he was deeply in debt and
that—whatever he might say to the contrary—his debts were not all
incurred in the service of his country, but the statement is not
convincing. The attempt to explain grave decisions by motives of this
nature has never proved satisfactory. It is clear, however, that Menou
did not realise the great obstacles to the preservation of Egypt. He
diminished the necessity of free communication between France and her
colony and chimerically indulged in the hope that Britain might
acquiesce in the annexation of Egypt. On taking over the command, he
made it clear to his soldiers,[654] to the Grand Vizier[655] and to Sir
Sidney Smith[656] that diplomatic negotiations were not in his power,
and that the question of the evacuation of the country could only be
settled by the Government. These declarations had, at all events, the
merit of clearing the atmosphere, of destroying false hopes, and of
enabling the soldiers and the enemy to see exactly where they stood. But
Menou was not obsessed by any idea as to the modesty of his _rôle_. He
could not but see that the country was in a most unsatisfactory
condition. Since the conquest by Bonaparte everything was in chaos.
Turkish institutions, or rather, practices, subsisted side by side with
the European administration, the arbitrary procedure of the Mameluke
_régime_ was aggravated by the abuses of the purely military new
organisation. “On dirigeait,” writes M. Rigault, “à l’aveugle un pays
dont on connaissait mal les usages et la langue.”[657] The Egyptians
could no longer cherish any illusion as to the intentions of their new
masters. They saw that nothing was sacred in their eyes. The chief
mosque in Cairo was used to stable the horses of the army; the daughters
of the most eminent families were seduced; the lower orders were
encouraged to indulge in alcoholic beverages and drugs; the hated
Levantines, Christian Syrians and Copts were allowed to take their
revenge on their former oppressors;[658] the Commander of the Faithful
was attacked in his Syrian territories; the old impositions were exacted
with Mameluke rigour and with more than Mameluke thoroughness. In one
province, the Copts, on a tax-collecting tour went out on foot to return
superbly mounted on horseback and dispose of their horses in the public
market.[659] These Copts used formerly to fear the Beys, but now “ils se
croient sûrs de l’impunité et peut-être étorquent-ils de l’argent au nom
des Français qui les accompagnent.”[660] At Rosetta, the Copt held the
headmen of the villages under the bastinado for eight days and forced at
least one village to pay fifteen times the legal tax on the pretence
that the land had improved.[661] One French officer wrote that the Copt
who travelled with him had eighty servants and twelve tents and forced
the peasants to provide for his retainers.[662] It is difficult to
explain how men like Bonaparte and Kléber could condone such abuses and
continue to employ such vile agents. Kléber, apparently, tolerated them
with the view of forcing them now and again to disgorge, to use them in
the way kings of mediæval Christendom treated the Jews, namely, as a
sponge. One could not help suspecting that the French had a share in the
nefarious traffic. Kléber, indeed, once reminded one of his generals
that “the provinces were not pashaliks.”[663]
Menou endeavoured to eradicate the abuses. He ordered the heads of the
various departments to submit exact accounts,[664] forbade the generals
to levy unauthorised taxes.[665] He urged his soldiers to conduct
themselves more decently.[666] He forbade the “Deyyeh” or pecuniary
composition for murders, the smoking of “hashish,” the appearance in
public of indecently dressed—or rather undressed—“fakirs.” He projected
the publication of a newspaper in Arabic.[667]
But his ideas went beyond the removal of abuses. He conceived that the
evil had its origin in the lack of stable institutions and proceeded to
endow the country with them. He entrusted the local government of the
villages to heads or “sheikhs” of fellah or peasant origin. They were to
be appointed by him for one year, to pay a fixed duty and to be
supervised by a body of Egyptian inspectors under two directors, one
Egyptian and one Frenchman.[668] How far was the new organisation a
success? It did not last sufficiently long. The most evident result was
that the “heads” of villages immediately shifted the new impost on the
broad back of the fellah.[669]
Menou restored the “divans” or assemblies of notables, which had been
abolished by Kléber for “having proved futile.”[670] He elaborated codes
of customs and regulations for the encouragement of agriculture,
commerce and industry.[671]
But the “grand design” of Menou was to establish a new system of
taxation to take the place of the prevailing conditions. Those Frenchmen
who have studied them have systematised them into a coherent theory of
feudalism.[672] But the actual facts do not warrant this.
They started with the doctrine that the land belonged to the Turkish
Sultan, that he conceded it to tenants or “multezims” on the payment of
a land tax, the “miry.” The multezims divided their holdings into two
parts, one part they sublet, as it were, to the peasants and received
rent for it, the other part they exploited directly. On the death of the
multezim the land he held passed to his heirs on the payment of a fixed
sum. The fellah’s “right” amounted to no more than the “right to
cultivate” a certain strip of land. He could transmit it to his
children, could alienate it to any solvent person. Frenchmen have
thought it was the feudalism of Europe without the “hommage” or the
“oath of fealty.”
But this view is hardly tenable. So far, indeed, as there was any
doctrine, it was the Moslem one of absolute property. The multezims’
holdings were, for all practical purposes, absolutely their own. House-
property in towns was perfectly absolute. An important fraction of the
land, moreover, was under the Moslem régime of the “mainmorte” and was
exempt from the “miry.”
What then has led the French observers to that view? In the first place,
the origin of the multezims. The government in the early days of the
Arab Conquest used for purposes of revenue collecting to divide the
country into “fermes fiscales” and concede them in a public auction to
the highest bidders.[673] Those who could promise to hold themselves
responsible for the land-tax were allowed to take possession of the land
without any formalising as to the rights of the actual holders. It was
pure arbitrariness, neither more nor less. In the second place, the
Mamelukes provide a superficial comparison with the feudal knights. But
nothing, in reality, could be more dissimilar. The basis of the Mameluke
regime was slavery,[674] not land-tenure. They held land in the same way
as other multezims. Whatever governmental functions they exercised did
not have the slightest connection with the land in their possession and
were pure usurpation.
Under these anarchic circumstances, it was the weakest who was bound to
suffer.[675] The burden lay on the fellah. In the accounts dictated at
St. Helena, Napoleon states that he consulted the learned men of Cairo
about the introduction of Western usage with regard to property and
taxation, and that they agreed that the practice of the West was in
complete accord with the teaching of Islam. The solution he proposed was
simply to have no intermediaries between the peasants and the government
in respect to the lands held by them and to make the multezims
responsible solely for that portion of their holdings which they were
exploiting on their account. It is evident from this that the question
was not a theoretical one of “rights” or “property” but simply one of
urgent fiscal reform. Napoleon, however, recognised that the times were
not propitious for the introduction of radical changes.[676] His
successor in the command, Kléber, directed all his efforts to quit the
country and naturally ignored the question, but Menou, actuated by a
different motive, found in it congenial work. His first step was to
collect information, for which purpose, it is said, he had to force the
Copts through an imprisonment of three months to reveal their
“secrets.”[677] On the 1st nivôse an IX he announced in a proclamation
his intention to introduce changes in the methods of tax-collection.
“Who has given the great and the powerful,” he added, “the right to make
the people unhappy? Is it the Koran? No, for it teaches help to the
unfortunate, compassion towards the poor, and the giving of charity. If
you have forgotten your religion, I, in the name of the Republic and of
the celebrated Bonaparte, shall remind you of it. I am here to free the
people from oppression.”[678]
The intended changes so pompously heralded are to be found in a
manuscript of nine sheets, without signature and under the date of 20
nivôse an IX.[679] It seems that it was never published. Djabarti never
mentions it. It treats of four different objects, the unification of all
imposts on land (the physiocratic “impôt unique”) the abolition of all
pretensions on the part of the multezims to administrative or judicial
functions, the equality of all Egyptians in the matter of taxation, the
cessation of the employment of the Copts. The peasants, accordingly,
were to pay only one tax, the amount of which was to be fixed according
to the quality of their lands. The multezims were to become simple
landowners and receive an annual pension from the government for the
loss of the rents which they used to receive from the peasants. “Les
fellahs,” it is stated in the project, “ne devaient donc plus les
(multezims) reconnaître comme ceux dont ils pouvaient être
ignominieusement battus et condamnés à mort; le droit de vie et de mort
n’appartenait qu’au gouvernement, qui, lui-même, ne pouvait en faire
usage qu’en remplissant les formes juridiques ordonnés par les lois. Le
général en chef déclarait que ce serait par les lois seules que les
habitants de l’Egypte seraient désormais jugés.”
To carry out the project, orders were issued for a cadastral
survey.[680] This was on the eve of the battle of Canopus, 21st March,
1801. The British invasion killed the project. Mehemet Ali was able to
play fast and loose with every kind of property because he found
everything in chaos. But it was reserved for the British to make “amende
honorable,” it was they who made effective Menou’s promise, “que ce
serait par les lois seules que les habitants de l’Egypte seraient
désormais jugés.”
Menou has been unfairly dealt with by the historians.[681] The mingling
of dreams and realities, the premature or fussy interference, the
“extravagance” of wording and the eccentricity of conduct should not
blind us to the grandeur of his conception and the wisdom of his
solution. Even his enemy, Reynier, admitted that the evils could not be
suffered to exist longer.[682] The greatest cause of failure lay in the
invasion of 1801. But before that event took place Menou was subjected
to every obstruction that active hostility or passive apathy could throw
in his way. The active hostility proceeded from a group of superior
officers gathered round Damas and Reynier, the apathy paralysed
practically all Frenchmen and left the Commander-in-Chief all alone with
his dreams.
The generals had, as Napoleon said of one of them, “peu d’étendue dans
l’esprit et peu d’élévation dans l’âme.”[683] In the year II they fought
to repel the invader, in the year VIII it was for wealth, glory and
power. In Egypt they suffered, as Sorel neatly puts it, from an “excès
du sang.”[684] Lack of work had made them quarrelsome, headstrong and
exacting. Sidney Smith did not go wrong when he played upon their home-
sickness. They hated Menou as the man who had set his face against the
evacuation of Egypt. They also despised him, and were ashamed to be
subordinate to one whom they described as “général du faubourg,” or
“général à faire rire,” or “un intrigant de la Révolution,” or “général
d’antichambre.” “Il faut dire,” writes a historian hostile to Menou,
“que prévenus contre lui, ils étaient plutôt disposés à exagérer des
symptômes défavorables qu’à les atténuer. Menou, accepté par eux avec
répugnance et avec colère, n’avait pas pu leur vouer en retour de
l’affection et de la confiance. D’un côté le mépris de l’autre la
rancune; ici des subalternes qui se sentaient plus forts que leur chef;
là un chef obligé de dévorer les injures de ses subalternes; ceux-ci ne
donnant que des avis incomplets, sûrs d’ailleurs que celui-là, par
esprit d’antagonisme suivrait la pensée contraire, voilà où en était le
gouvernement de l’Egypte.”[685] They picked quarrels with their general
on every possible occasion. They questioned his right to impose death-
duties on the estates of Frenchmen who died in Egypt, on the grounds
that Egypt was not a colony. The notorious Tallien was their “jurist”
and Menou had to “deport” him. “Je viens de revomir,” Menou wrote to
Thibaudeau, “le fameux Tallien, qui avait été vomi à l’Afrique. Il
s’était occupé ici en s’amusant à vouloir insurger l’armée. Quelques
individus qui, par leur grade et leur place, devaient donner l’exemple,
avaient écouté et goûté sa théorie d’insurrection.”[686] They went so
far as to accuse him of complicity in the murder of his
predecessor.[687] Did he not give his son the name of Kléber’s assassin,
Soliman?[688] They even thought of relieving him of his command on the
ridiculous plea of dotage and of placing Reynier in his place.[689] But
Reynier shrank from this. They, however, determined upon a hostile
“démarche” before he was confirmed by the home government.
The “démarche” took place on the 6th Brumaire (28th October). Menou
promised to give up “innovations,” and an apparent reconciliation took
place.[690] But it was a serious blow to the discipline of the army—and
discipline was not exactly the strong point of the Army of the East.
Tallien quitted Egypt with a bulky “dossier” against Menou, but was
destined to be arrested on arrival in France.[691] Menou, on his part,
despatched Vial and Lazowsky with abundant “pièces justificatives.”[692]
It was for the First Consul to judge. The apathy extended from the
soldiers to the civilians. The “savants,” now that they had collected
their material, were anxious to go home, dreaming of the learned tomes
to be published and the academic distinctions to be won. There was no
more talk of carrying the learning of the West to the East. “Les savants
ressemblent beaucoup aux femmes, n’est-ce pas?” said General Bonaparte
to Chief Physician Desgenettes. The doctor observed, “On s’amuserait un
peu mieux avec les femmes.” Bonaparte explained, “C’est pour le
chuchotage que j’en parle et pour les rivalités et les
prétentions.”[693]
A committee that Menou set up for introducing French industries refused
to do so. They feared possible Egyptian competitors with French
manufacturers and entered on a lengthy disputation with the general on
economic doctrines.[694] The British blockade stopped all sea-borne
trade and rendered nugatory all projects for the encouragement of
commerce. The African traders stopped sending their caravans till they
could ascertain the character of the new masters of Egypt. All
circumstances, in short, were adverse to Menou. Time would have
consolidated the durable foundations and destroyed all that was fragile,
and time was denied him.
To save Egypt for France was, for the First Consul, not only a point of
policy, but also one of personal honour. The condition of the soldiers
whom he had left behind contrasted with his own advent to supreme power.
“Soutenir l’Egypte,” he wrote, “est la grande affaire à laquelle se
subordonnaient tous les plans de guerre, toutes les propositions de
paix.”[695] “L’Egypte,” he also wrote, “est un moyen de paix glorieux
avec l’Angleterre, ou une atteinte à la puissance britannique.”[696] He
made, accordingly, numerous efforts to pass reinforcements, munitions of
war, news and encouraging messages to his soldiers in the East.[697] In
January, 1800, he formed the project of a combined venture by the French
and Spanish squadrons under Bruix, to reach Egypt.[698] In February,
1801, Admiral Gantheaume was nearly able to reach Alexandria, but became
suddenly frightened and put back to Toulon. The First Consul pressed him
to try again and authorised him to land his troops at Derne on the coast
of Tripoli.[699] But Gantheaume could not do it, and deserved well the
epitaph:
“Ici gît l’amiral Gantheaume