Summary
The collective record of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, published in twenty-three enormous volumes between 1809 and 1828, in which everything said, seen and studied in occupied Egypt was recorded — for Said, that great collective appropriation of one country by another, and the master type of all further Orientalist efforts to bring the Orient closer to Europe (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.93, 96 / printed p.84, 87).
Details
- Unlike the Abbé Le Mascrier’s 1735 Description de l’Égypte, Napoleon’s was to be a universal undertaking, produced by the Institut d’Égypte, the learned division of the army, with its teams of chemists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, surgeons and antiquarians (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.92-93 / printed p.83-84).
- Its préface historique was written by Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier, the Institut’s secretary; Fourier presents Egypt as occupying the center of the ancient continent, the homeland of the arts visited by Homer, Lycurgus, Solon, Pythagoras and Plato, and justifies the expedition over more than a hundred pages, each page a square meter in size (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.93-94 / printed p.84-85).
- Said’s enumeration of the project realized in the Description: to restore a region from its present barbarism to its former classical greatness, to transmute living reality into the stuff of texts, and to make out of every generalization an immutable law about the Oriental nature, temperament, mentality, custom or type (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.95 / printed p.86).
- The Description thereby displaces Egyptian or Oriental history as a history possessing its own coherence, identity and sense, identifying the history it records directly with world history, a euphemism for European history (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.95-96 / printed p.86-87).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Napoleon Bonaparte, Orientalism, Textual attitude