The French occupation and its consequences (1798–1805)

Although several projects for a French occupation of Egypt had been advanced in the 17th and 18th centuries, the purpose of the expedition that sailed under Napoleon I from Toulon in May 1798 was specifically connected with the war against Britain. Napoleon had discounted the feasibility of an invasion of England but hoped, by occupying Egypt, to damage British trade, threaten India, and obtain assets for bargaining in any future peace settlement. Meanwhile, as a colony under the benevolent and progressive administration of Revolutionary France, Egypt was to be regenerated and would regain its ancient prosperity. The military and naval forces were therefore accompanied by a commission of scholars and scientists to investigate and report the past and present condition of the country.

Eluding the British Mediterranean fleet under Horatio Nelson, the French landed at Abū Qīr (Aboukir) Bay on July 1 and took Alexandria the next day. In an Arabic proclamation, Napoleon assured the Egyptians that he came as a friend to Islam and the Ottoman sultan, to punish the usurping Mamluks and to liberate the people. From Alexandria the French advanced on Cairo, defeating Murād Bey at Shubrākhīt (July 13), and again decisively at Imbābah, opposite Cairo in the Battle of the Pyramids on July 21. Murād fled to Upper Egypt, while his colleague, Ibrāhīm Bey, together with the Ottoman viceroy, made his way to Syria.

After entering Cairo (July 25), Napoleon sought to conciliate the population, especially the religious leaders (ʿulamāʾ), by demonstrating his sympathy with Islam and by establishing councils (divans) as a means of consulting Egyptian opinion. The destruction of the French fleet at Abū Qīr by Nelson in the Battle of the Nile on August 1 virtually cut Napoleon’s communications and made it necessary for him to consolidate his rule and to make the expeditionary force as self-sufficient as possible. The savants, organized in the Institut d’Égypte, played their part in this. Meanwhile, Egyptian resentment of alien rule, administrative innovations, and the growing fiscal burden of military occupation was exacerbated when the Ottoman sultan, Selim III (1789–1807), declared war on France on September 11. An unforeseen revolt in Cairo on October 21 was suppressed after an artillery bombardment that ended any hopes of cordial Franco-Egyptian coexistence.

Ottoman Syria, dominated by Aḥmad al-Jazzār, the governor of Acre (now ʿAkko, Israel), was the base from which French-occupied Egypt might most easily be threatened, and Napoleon resolved to deny it to his enemies. His invasion force crossed the frontier in February 1799 but failed to take Acre after a protracted siege (March 19–May 20), and Napoleon evacuated Syrian territory. A seaborne Ottoman invading force landed at Abū Qīr in July but failed to maintain its bridgehead. At this point Napoleon resolved to return to France, and he succeeded in slipping away, past the British fleet, on August 22.

His successor as general in chief, Jean-Baptiste Kléber, viewed the situation of the expeditionary force with pessimism and, like many of the soldiers, wished to return to the theatre of war in Europe. He therefore entered into negotiations with the Ottomans and by the Convention of Al-ʿArīsh (January 24, 1800) agreed to evacuate Egypt. Sir Sydney Smith, the British naval commander in the eastern Mediterranean, sponsored the convention, but in this he had exceeded his powers and was instructed by his superior officer, Admiral Lord Keith, to require the French to surrender as prisoners of war. Although the Ottoman reoccupation was well under way, Kléber and the French determined on resistance and defeated the Turkish forces at the Battle of Heliopolis (March 20). A second revolt of Cairo, fomented by Ottoman fugitives, took about a month to suppress; but French authority had been restored when Kléber was assassinated by a Syrian Muslim, Sulaymān al-Ḥalabī, on June 14.

His successor, ʿAbd Allāh Jacques Menou, a French officer (and former nobleman) who had turned Muslim, was determined to maintain the occupation and administered at first a tolerably settled country, although he lacked the prestige of his two predecessors. In 1801 a threefold invasion of Egypt began. British troops were landed at Abū Qīr in March, while the Ottomans advanced from Syria. Shortly afterward, British Indian forces were landed at Quṣayr on the Red Sea coast. The French garrison in Cairo capitulated in June and Menou himself at Alexandria in September.

The brief episode of the French occupation was to be significant for Egypt in several ways. The arrival of a European army accompanied by scholars and scientists appropriately inaugurated the impact of the West, which was to be felt increasingly afterward. Egypt, insulated for centuries by the Mamluk and Ottoman sultanates, was no longer immune from European influence; it had become an object of the contending policies of France and Britain, a part of the Eastern Question. Napoleon’s savants had little success in interpreting Western culture to the traditionalist ʿulamāʾ of Cairo; their achievement was rather to unveil Egypt to Europe. They uncovered the celebrated Rosetta Stone, which held a trilingual inscription making it possible to decipher hieroglyphs and which thus laid the foundation of modern Egyptology. Their reports and monographs were collected in the monumental Description de l’Égypte (“Description of Egypt”), which was published in parts from 1809 to 1828 in Paris.

Of more immediate consequence for Egypt was the effect of the French occupation on internal politics. The Mamluk ascendancy was fatally weakened. Murād Bey, who had made his peace with the French, died shortly before their capitulation in 1801, and Ibrāhīm Bey, who returned to Egypt with the Ottomans, had henceforward little power. The new Mamluk leaders, ʿUthmān Bey al-Bardīsī (died 1806) and Muḥammad Bey al-Alfī (died 1807), former retainers of Murād, headed rival factions and had in any case to reckon with the British and Ottoman occupation forces. In March 1803 the British troops were evacuated in accordance with the Treaty of Amiens (March 27, 1802). But the Ottomans, determined to reassert their control over Egypt, remained, establishing their power through a viceroy and an occupying army, in which the most effective fighting force was an Albanian contingent. The Albanians, however, acted as an independent party and in May 1803 mutinied and installed their leader as acting viceroy. When he was assassinated shortly afterward, the command of the Albanians passed to his lieutenant, Muḥammad ʿAlī (reigned 1805–49), who, during the ensuing two years, cautiously strengthened his own position at the expense of both the Mamluks and the Ottomans.