Iraq certainly wasn’t the first war where the invaders sought moral cover to justify their actions, but you have to go far to top Napoleon’s claim that he was going into Egypt as a mission civilsatrice in order to bring French-style culture and democracy to all those unwashed Arabs.
But as Nina Burleigh writes in Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt, Bonaparte might have been crazy for starting the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place (sounds familiar, doesn’t it?), but taking along a corps of 151 scientists and artists to help give his 50,000 soldiers and sailors that moral cover had a classical precedent.
That was Napoleon‘s spiritual role model, Alexander the Great, who had philosophers at his side when he invaded Persia in the 4th century B.C. to give him, well, all kinds of advice.
Although France had barely recovered from the Revolution and its economy was in tatters, on July 1, 1798 an invasion force under Napoleon’s personal command disembarked near Alexandria in the service of attaining two goals that had nothing to do with bringing pommes frites to the Egpytian people.
These were tapping into Egypt’s huge commercial and agricultural potential and its strategic importance in the red-hot Anglo-French rivalry. This had tipped to the advantage of the English who were solidifying their hold on India, which was the biggest remaining colonial prize after a bunch of drunken American framers . . . er, farmers, had defeated the British crown.
The French forces took Alexandria in a nonce, routed the Mamluk army at Shubra Khit and Imbabah, and entered Cairo in barely three weeks.
Mamluk rule in Egypt collapsed, but Napoleon’s strategic position was far from strong because he controlled only the Delta and Cairo and Upper Egypt remained the preserve of the Mamluks and Bedouins.
Then things went from precarious to worse.
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