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Soldiers of the Army of the Mediterranean! . . . You have campaigned in the mountains, in the plains and before fortresses; but you have yet to take part in a naval campaign. The Roman legions that you have sometimes rivalled, but have yet to equal, fought Carthage on this very sea … Victory never forsook them … Europe is watching you. You have a great destiny to fulfil, battles to fight, dangers and hardships to overcome. You hold in your hands the future prosperity of France, the good of mankind, and your own glory. The ideal of Liberty that has made the Republic the arbiter of Europe will make it also arbiter of distant oceans, of faraway countries.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine Wellington, or for that matter any of his generals, addressing his ‘scum of the earth’ thus. But then Bonaparte’s men were still inspired by revolutionary zeal, and by their extraordinary success (and bounty) in Italy. And the general himself was bent on ‘missionary’ work in the fashion of his idol’s, Alexander the Great’s, intent to Hellenise the Orient.
But what the assembling armada’s objective was perplexed His Majesty’s ministers: was it Portugal, or Sicily, or even Brazil? In April 1798, Pitt the Younger summoned his cabinet to review the intelligence on the build-up of troops and transports which his spies were reporting in Toulon, Marseille, Ajaccio, Genoa and Civita- vecchia. The cabinet concluded that the most dangerous option was also the most likely, that the armada would break out of the Straits of Gibraltar, join up with the French Atlantic fleet off Brest, and proceed to the invasion of Britain or Ireland.
Thank God for Nelson, for the French managed to set sail with their destination still a mystery to the spies. After beating up and down the Mediterranean for a month in a fruitless search for them, Nelson arrived off the Peloponnese and sent Captain Troubridge of the Culloden ashore, where he learned that Bonaparte had invaded Egypt, which intelligence was apparently confirmed by the capture soon afterwards of a French brig bound for Alexandria and loaded with wine. What better confirmation could there be?
The battle of the Nile, the audacity and skill of which ought to have warned Bonaparte of the later defeats he would suffer at the hands of England’s best (he might surely have imagined that Nelson was not unique in his military prowess?), marooned his army in the Middle East. Eventually the general abandoned them, as he did the army after 1812, and skulked back to Paris to secure his future. As Strathern puts it:
Napoleon’s experience in Egypt was in so many ways embryonic of his later rule in France. Here, at the meeting of Africa and Asia, his megalomania had been able to flourish, unrestricted by the everyday realities of Europe; his ambition thus nurtured, he returned to France with visions of a personal future such as no other sane man would have dared to contemplate.
Strathern describes that embryonic experience in a lively and entertaining way — the battles, the scholarship, the sexual intrigue, the flattering of potentates, the ‘conversion’ to Islam, the diversion in Syria, where the eccentrically brilliant Sir Sidney Smith held centre stage. Indeed, ‘stage’ the whole thing truly seems; and Strathern’s reference to sanity is more than passingly apt. This is an illuminating and most engaging book.
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