Summary
In Said’s account in Orientalism, the first modern conqueror of the Orient: his invasion of Egypt in 1798, prepared textually and accompanied by the Institut d’Égypte and the Description de l’Égypte, is the very model of a truly scientific appropriation of one culture by another and the founding project of modern Orientalism (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.51-52, 89-96 / printed p.42-43, 80-87).
Details
- Napoleon readied himself in Italy in 1797: the Treaty of Campo Formio left him no place to turn for glory but the East, Talleyrand had animadverted on les avantages à retirer de colonies nouvelles dans les circonstances présentes, he had been steeped since adolescence in the memories and glories of Alexander’s Orient and Egypt, and he knew Egypt textually through recent and classical European authorities — a project that acquired reality through ideas and myths culled from texts, not empirical reality (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.89 / printed p.80-81).
- His prior reliance was on Volney’s Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (1787) and Considérations sur la guerre actuelle des Turcs (1788): in the Campagnes d’Égypte et de Syrie, 1798-1799, dictated to General Bertrand on Saint Helena, Napoleon reports Volney’s three barriers to French hegemony in the Orient — England, the Ottoman Porte, and, most difficult, the Muslims (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.90 / printed p.81-82).
- His proclamation of July 2, 1798, to the people of Alexandria declared “nous sommes les vrais musulmans”; he used scholars to manage his contacts with the natives, invited the sixty ulemas who taught at the Azhar to his quarters, and instructed his deputy Kléber always to administer Egypt through the Orientalists and the religious Islamic leaders they could win over (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.91 / printed p.82-83).
- The military failure of the occupation did not destroy the fertility of its projection: the occupation gave birth to the entire modern experience of the Orient as interpreted from within the universe of discourse founded by Napoleon in Egypt, whose agencies included the Institut and the Description (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.96 / printed p.87).
- Napoleon and de Lesseps alike knew the Orient from books written in the tradition of Orientalism, in its library of idées reçues: for them the Orient, like the fierce lion of Said’s example in Chapter One, IV, was something to be encountered and dealt with because the texts made that Orient possible (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.103 / printed p.94). See Textual attitude.
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Description de l’Égypte, Ferdinand de Lesseps, William Jones, Textual attitude