On the causes of the First Cairo Uprising of 1798
Tchoudinov Alexander
The Egyptian campaign of 1798-1799 has a special place in the biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. Throughout his military and state career, and with renewed vigor after its completion, Napoleon cared about what kind of image he would leave in history. And the Egyptian campaign was truly an Achilles' heel for him, providing critics with many opportunities to darken his heroic image. Therefore, Napoleon dedicated special memoirs to this campaign, trying to present everything that happened there in the most favorable light for himself. Their leitmotif is as follows: Bonaparte defeated all enemies on the battlefield, subdued the country, pacified it, created an effective administration, and found utter understanding with the locals. However, studying of other sources gives a completely different picture of the relationship between the French and Egyptians in the first months of the occupation of Cairo than the one presented in his memoirs by Bonaparte. The systematic insulting by the occupiers of the religious feelings of adherents of Islam, the incessant terror on the part of the new authorities, the aggravation of interfaith contradictions in Egyptian society provoked by the French, the attempt to radically change property relations and taxation without taking into account existing realities, and, finally, the aggressive introduction of alien cultural practices into the daily life of Muslim society – all this contributed to the accumulation of discontent among the Egyptians which, as a result, led to the social explosion of the First Cairo Uprising. The situation in Egyptian society was infinitely far from the harmony that Bonaparte drew in his memoirs. His attempt to win the sympathy of the people of Egypt completely failed.
The study is sponsored by the Russian Science Foundation, grant № 23–18–00011 (https://rscf.ru/project/23-18-00011/).
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