Italy, and the campaign was ended, and Napoleon, at Montebello, was receiving the homage of Europe, his ever-impetuous mind turned with new interest to the object of his early ambition. He often passed hours, during the mild Italian evenings, walking with a few confidential friends in the magnificent park of his palace, conversing with intense enthusiasm upon the illustrious empires, which have successively overshadowed those countries, and faded away. “Europe,” said he, “presents no field for glorious exploits; no great empires or revolutions are to be found but in the East, where there are six hundred millions of men.”
Upon his return to Paris, he was deaf to all the acclamations with which he was surrounded. His boundless ambition was such that his past achievements seemed as nothing. The most brilliant visions of Eastern glory were dazzling his mind. “They do not long preserve at Paris,” said he, “the remembrance of any thing. If I remain long unemployed, I am undone. The renown of one, in this great Babylon, speedily supplants that of another. If I am seen three times at the opera, I shall no longer be an object of curiosity. I am determined not to remain in Paris. There is nothing here to be accomplished. Every thing here passes away. My glory is declining. This little corner of Europe is too small to supply it. We must go to the East. All the great men of the world have there acquired their celebrity.”
When requested to take command of the army of England, and to explore the coast, to judge of the feasibility of an attack upon the English in their own island, he said to Bourrienne, “I am perfectly willing to make a tour to the coast. Should the expedition to Britain prove too hazardous, as I much fear that it will, the army of England will become the army of the East, and we will go to Egypt.”
He carefully studied the obstacles to be encountered in the invasion of England, and the means at his command to surmount them. In his view, the enterprise was too hazardous to be undertaken, and he urged upon the Directory the Expedition to Egypt. “Once established in Egypt,” said he, “the Mediterranean becomes a French Lake; we shall found a colony there, unenervated by the curse of slavery, and which will supply the place of St. Domingo; we shall open a market for French manufactures through the vast regions of Africa, Arabia, and Syria. All the caravans of the East will meet at Cairo, and the commerce of India, must forsake the Cape of Good Hope, and flow through the Red Sea. Marching with an army of sixty thousand men, we can cross the Indus, rouse the oppressed and discontented native population, against the English usurpers, and drive the English out of India. We will establish governments which will respect the rights and promote the interests of the people. The multitude will hail us as their deliverers from oppression. The Christians of Syria, the Druses, and the Armenians, will join our standards. We may change the face of the world.” Such was the magnificent project which inflamed this ambitious mind.
England, without a shadow of right, had invaded India. Her well-armed dragoons had ridden, with bloody hoofs, over the timid and naked natives. Cannon, howitzers, and bayonets had been the all-availing arguments with which England had silenced all opposition. English soldiers, with unsheathed swords ever dripping with blood, held in subjection provinces containing uncounted millions of inhabitants. A circuitous route of fifteen thousand miles, around the stormy Cape of Good Hope, conducted the merchant fleets of London and Liverpool to Calcutta and Bombay; and through the same long channel there flooded back upon the maritime isle the wealth of the Indies.
It was the plea of Napoleon that he was not going to make an unjust war upon the unoffending nations of the East; but that he was the ally of the oppressed people, drawing the sword against their common enemy, and that he was striving to emancipate them from their powerful usurpers, and to confer upon them the most precious privileges of freedom. He marched to Egypt not to desolate, but to enrich; not to enslave, but to enfranchise; not to despoil the treasures of the East, but to transfer to those shores the opulence and the high civilization of the West. Never was an ambitious conqueror furnished with a more plausible plea. England, as she looks at India and China, must be silent. America, as she listens to the dying wail of the Red Man, driven from the forests of his childhood and the graves of his fathers, can throw no stone. Napoleon surely was not exempt from the infirmities of humanity. But it is not becoming in an English or an American historian to breathe the prayer, “We thank Thee, oh God, that we are not like this Bonaparte.”
Egypt, the memorials of whose former grandeur still attract the wonder and the admiration of the civilized world, after having been buried, during centuries, in darkness and oblivion, is again slowly emerging into light, and is, doubtless, destined eventually to become one of the great centres of industry and of knowledge. The Mediterranean washes its northern shores, opening to its commerce all the opulent cities of Europe. The Red Sea wafts to its fertile valley the wealth of India and of China. The Nile, rolling its vast floods from the unknown interior of Africa, opens a highway for inexhaustible internal commerce with unknown nations and tribes.
The country consists entirely of the lower valley of the Nile, with a front of about one hundred and twenty miles on the Mediterranean. The valley six hundred miles in length, rapidly diminishes in breadth as it is crowded by the sands of the desert, presenting, a few leagues from the mouth of the river, but the average width of about six miles. The soil fertilized by the annual inundations of the Nile, possesses most extraordinary fertility. These floods are caused by the heavy rains which fall in the mountains of Abyssinia. It never rains in Egypt. Centuries may pass while a shower never falls from the sky. Under the Ptolemies the population of the country was estimated at twenty millions. But by the terrific energies of despotism, these numbers had dwindled away, and at the time of the French Expedition Egypt contained but two million five hundred thousand inhabitants. These were divided into four classes. First came the Copts, about two hundred thousand, the descendants of the ancient Egyptians. They were in a state of the most abject degradation and slavery. The great body of the population, two millions in number, were the Arabs. They were a wild and semi-barbarian race, restrained from all enterprise and industry, by unrelenting despotism. The Turks or Janizaries, two hundred thousand strong, composed a standing army, of sensual, merciless, unprincipled usurpers, which kept the trembling population by the energies of the bastinado, the scimitar and the bowstring in most servile subjection. The Mamelukes composed a body of twelve thousand horsemen, proud, powerful and intolerable oppressors. Each horseman had two servants to perform his menial service. Twenty-four beys, each of whom had five or six hundred Mamelukes under his command, governed this singular body of cavalry. Two principal beys, Ibrahim and Mourad divided between them the sovereignty of Egypt. It was the old story of despotism. The millions were ground down into hopeless degradation and poverty to pamper to the luxury and vice of a few haughty masters. Oriental voluptuousness and luxury reigned in the palaces of the beys; beggary and wretchedness deformed the mud hovels of the defrauded and degraded people. It was Napoleon’s aim to present himself to the people of Egypt as their friend and liberator; to rally them around his standard, to subdue the Mamelukes, to establish a government, which should revive all the sciences and the arts of civilized life in Egypt; to acquire a character, by these benefactions, which should emblazon his name throughout the East; and then, with oppressed nations welcoming him as a deliverer, to strike blows upon the British power in India, which should compel the mistress of the seas to acknowledge that upon the land there was an arm which could reach and humble her. It was a design sublime in its magnificence. But it was not the will of God that it should be accomplished.
The Directory, at last overcome by the arguments of Napoleon, and also, through jealousy of his unbounded popularity, being willing to remove him from France, assented to the proposed expedition. It was however necessary to preserve the utmost secrecy. Should England be informed of the direction in which the blow was about to fall upon her, she might, with her invincible fleet, intercept the French squadron – she might rouse the Mamelukes to most formidable preparations for resistance, and might thus vastly increase the difficulties of the enterprise. All the deliberations were consequently conducted with closed doors, and the whole plan was enveloped in the most profound mystery. For the first time in the history of the world, literature and science and art, formed a conspicuous part of the organization of an army. It was agreed that Napoleon should take forty-six thousand men, a certain number of officers of his own selection, men of science, engineers, geographers, and artisans of all kinds. Napoleon now devoted himself with the most extraordinary energy to the execution of his plans. Order succeeded order with ceaseless rapidity. He seemed to rest not day nor night. He superintended