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Egypt The French Invasion and Occupation, 1798-1801
After the death of Muhammad Bey, there was a decade-long
struggle for dominance among the beys. Eventually Ibrahim Bey and
Murad Bey succeeded in asserting their authority and shared power
in Egypt. Their dominance in the country survived an unsuccessful
attempt by the Ottomans to reestablish the empire's control
(1786-91). The two continued in power until the French invasion
in 1798.
In addition to the upheavals caused by the Ottoman-Mamluk
clashes, waves of famine and plague hit Egypt between 1784 and
1792. Thus, Cairo was a devastated city and Egypt an impoverished
country when the French arrived in 1798.
On July 1, 1798, a French invasion force under the command of
Napoleon disembarked near Alexandria. The invasion force, which
had sailed from Toulon on May 19, was accompanied by a commission
of scholars and scientists whose function was to investigate
every aspect of life in ancient and contemporary Egypt.
France wanted control of Egypt for two major reasons--its
commercial and agricultural potential and its strategic
importance to the Anglo-French rivalry. During the eighteenth
century, the principal share of European trade with Egypt was
handled by French merchants. The French also looked to Egypt as a
source of grain and raw materials. In strategic terms, French
control of Egypt could be used to threaten British commercial
interests in the region and to block Britain's overland route to
India.
The French forces took Alexandria without difficulty,
defeated the Mamluk army at Shubra Khit and Imbabah, and entered
Cairo on July 25. Murad Bey fled to Upper Egypt while Ibrahim Bey
and the Ottoman viceroy went to Syria. Mamluk rule in Egypt
collapsed.
Nevertheless, Napoleon's position in Egypt was precarious.
The French controlled only the Delta and Cairo; Upper Egypt was
the preserve of the Mamluks and the bedouins. In addition,
Britain and the Ottoman government joined forces in an attempt to
defeat Napoleon and drive him out of Egypt. On August 1, 1798,
the British fleet under Lord Nelson annihilated the French ships
as they lay at anchor at Abu Qir, thus isolating Napoleon's
forces in Egypt. On September 11, Sultan Selim III declared war
on France.
On October 21, the people of Cairo rioted against the French,
whom they regarded as occupying strangers, not as liberators. The
rebellion had a religious as well as a national character and
centered around Al Azhar mosque. Its leaders were the ulama,
religiously trained scholars, whom Napoleon had tried to woo to
the French side. During this period, the populace began to regard
the ulama not only as moral but also as political leaders.
To forestall an Ottoman invasion, Napoleon invaded Syria,
but, unable to take Acre in Palestine, his forces retreated on
May 20, 1799. On August 22, Napoleon, with a very small company,
secretly left Egypt for France, leaving his troops behind and
General Jean-Baptiste Kléber as his successor. Kléber found
himself the unwilling commander in chief of a dispirited army
with a bankrupt treasury. His main preoccupation was to secure
the evacuation of his troops to France. When Britain rejected the
evacuation plan, Kléber was forced to fight.
After Kléber's assassination by a Syrian, his command was
taken over by General Abdullah Jacques Menou, a French convert to
Islam. The occupation was finally terminated by an Anglo-Ottoman
invasion force. The French forces in Cairo surrendered on June
18, 1801, and Menou himself surrendered at Alexandria on
September 3. By the end of September, the last French forces had
left the country.
As historian Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot has written, the
three-year French occupation was too short to exert any lasting
effects on Egypt, despite claims to the contrary. Its most
important effect on Egypt internally was the rapid decline in the
power of the Mamluks.
The major impact of the French invasion was the effect it had
on Europe. Napoleon's invasion revealed the Middle East as an
area of immense strategic importance to the European powers, thus
inaugurating the Anglo-French rivalry for influence in the region
and bringing the British into the Mediterranean. The French
invasion of Egypt also had an important effect on France because
of the publication of Description de l'Egypte, which
detailed the findings of the scholars and scientists who had
accompanied Napoleon to Egypt. This publication became the
foundation of modern research into the history, society, and
economics of Egypt.
Data as of December 1990
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