The Directory and the Legislature — Motives of the French Army — Augereau's Blunders — Humiliation of the Batavian Republic — Seizure of Piedmont — Proclamation of the Roman Republic — Swiss Territory Remodeled — Antagonism of Prussia and Austria — Bernadotte's Mission to Vienna — Prussian Neutrality — Unstable Equilibrium of Europe.
During the winter of 1797-98 it was the custom of Bonaparte, as the constructive commander-in-chief of the French forces, to share in the deliberations of the various civil authorities; sometimes they seemed uneasy under his influence, but a threat of retirement generally brought them to terms. They yielded because every faction believed that the unrelenting attitude of the Directory toward royalists, emigrants, and ecclesiastics would revive in the country the hatred of Jacobinism and give its enemies a victory in the spring elections of 1798. Animosity was all the more fierce since the press had been virtually throttled by closing during the winter the offices of some sixteen papers, in addition to many already silenced. Should the chambers be hostile to the executive, they would certainly attempt a civil revolution, and Bonaparte with his troops would be the arbitrator. The royalists, therefore, made approaches to him once more, this time through Mme. Bonaparte, who diplomatically procrastinated, and kept the suitors in expectancy. But while all was movement and plot under the surface, the Parisian populace only occasionally had evidence of aught but perfect harmonyin all parts of the government. They were fond of contrasting the brilliant results of Campo Formio with the unostentatious demeanor of the great general who had humbled Austria, and, as he himself had said in his festival speech, had brought two centers of light, "the finest parts of Europe,"—Italy and the Netherlands,—under the brighter rays of French illumination.
In later years the unexampled capability of Bonaparte for scheming and machination unfolded itself to such unheard-of limits that it is customary in our day to attribute every detail of European history in those times to his manipulation. This is the more natural because the events of that winter, beyond the boundaries of France, contributed in the highest degree to that political conflagration which preceded the ascendancy of Napoleon and the complete rebuilding of the European state system. And yet the most acute historians often overlook the evident causes in their search for hidden ones; in this case the former are sufficient to account for the results. With the Italian campaign republican armies ceased to fight either for the integrity of France, for her "natural" frontiers, or for the revolutionary system. They were often self-deceived, and thought themselves to be propagating liberal ideas; but glory and plunder were thenceforward the mainsprings of action in the majority of both officers and men.
1797—98
Accordingly, what might have been foreseen actually occurred. Augereau, during the autumn of 1797, sought to emulate in southwestern Germany the political policy initiated by Bonaparte in Italy. But his rude blundering compelled his recall, a step which was softened by his transfer to the Pyrenees, where an army stood ready to intervene in Spain whenever opportunity should be ripe. The movement in Germany spent itselfin shameless plundering both east and west of the Rhine—a double disgrace in view of the fact that the war was ended, that Mainz was surrendered, that the whole left bank, though not yet formally ceded, was in French control; and that the Congress of Rastadt was discussing how the princes who had surrendered their possessions to France should be compensated within the boundaries of the empire.
The course of affairs in the Low Countries was equally disastrous to the prestige of the Revolution. Holland had not only lost all her colonies, including the Cape of Good Hope, by her compulsory enrolment in the republican system, but at Camperdown on October eleventh, 1797, the fleet of the Batavian Republic was battered to pieces by that of England under Duncan. The new commonwealth was thus rendered contemptible, and made entirely dependent on France. Twenty-five thousand soldiers were already quartered on the Dutch, and now they were held to enormous contributions of ships, money, and men for the proposed landing in England. Delacroix and Joubert were the respective civil and military agents in these exactions.
Bonaparte's departure from Italy made no change in French policy or conduct with regard to her. The Venetian possessions had been literally stripped by Berthier of every valuable article before their definitive surrender to Austria. Formal negotiations for a treaty of offensive and defensive alliance with the Cisalpine Republic were opened as soon as the new state was recognized, but the same pillage continued as during its conquest. By that treaty, which was not concluded until March, 1798, the new "free" state was bound to support twenty-five thousand French troops, and to raise nearly four million dollars a year to pay them. As to the new Ligurian Republic, its boundaries wereincomplete without Piedmont. Before the end of June, 1798, revolutionary fires having been kindled in Turin by the old efficient methods, two French armies under Jacobin generals seized Piedmont, and incorporated it with the other "free" state, which was then bound to France in the same terms as Cisalpina. Charles Emmanuel, having thus lost all his possessions on the mainland, retired to Sardinia, where he was destined to become, under protection of the English fleet, the focus of a new coalition against France.
Rome had called to her service, for the reorganization of her army, Provera, one of the Austrian generals who had been active in the last campaign. Joseph Bonaparte demanded his dismissal. This spark fired the revolutionary spirit of the few determined liberals at the capital, and a rising took place in which General Duphot, who was expecting soon to become Joseph's brother-in-law, was killed. The insurgents were defeated, and sought refuge in the French Embassy. The papal authorities humbled themselves to make restitution, but Joseph would not be appeased, and demanded his passports. Within a month, on February tenth, 1798, Berthier and his soldiers entered the Eternal City, and proclaimed the Roman Republic. With no consideration for his estimable personal character, the French agents stripped Pius VI, the aged and feeble Pope, of all his jewels: his very rings were drawn from his fingers by their hands. The papal government was declared at an end, and the cardinals were forbidden to elect a successor. The Pope himself was allowed to withdraw to Siena; but disappointing his captors' expectations of his speedy demise, he was removed at their convenience from place to place, until at last he died in the following year at Valence. Naples, of course, was in an agony of fear, but her hour had not yet struck.
Finally the flames caught in Switzerland, where the democratic district of Vaud declared its independence of the Bernese aristocracy. The fire was fanned by Bonaparte's agent, Peter Ochs, the liberal burgomaster of Basel. France intervened, nominally in order to compel Bern to liberate all her political prisoners and to emancipate Vaud, but really to plunder and remodel the whole country. The entering army pillaged friend and foe alike. The desperate resistance of Bern, in which even women and children shared, was of no avail. At its close the Helvetian Republic was constituted under a new charter, like those of Cisalpina and Batavia; it likewise entered at once into an offensive and defensive alliance with France. Bern's indemnity was the surrender of her "treasure," or cash reserve—a sum of one million three hundred thousand dollars. Swiss historians state that besides the cash there were nearly two and a half million dollars in bonds. A fifth of this was sent at once to Toulon, where the fleet was fitting out; the rest went to the army and its commander, General Brune. Fribourg, Solothurn, and Zurich were likewise stripped for the benefit of the military chest. It is thought that from all the enormous sums seized during the winter nothing reached the national treasury. Napoleon in exile declared that Paris knew nothing of all this. But more serious still were the contemplated changes of territory. The Valtellina had already been incorporated with the Cisalpine Republic; the Frick valley was soon to be delivered to Austria along with the Inn Quarter; and eventually Geneva, with the upper Rhone valley, was to become a part of France itself, in order that the Simplon, another gateway into Italy, might be assured to her armies in case the difficult passes on the Mediterranean shore should ever be closed.[4]
The effect of all this upon the politics of Europe was like that of a torch in dead stubble. The German-Roman Empire was an antiquated institution. Prussia had risen to importance as the representative of a new Protestant German nationality. Frederick the Great, inheriting his shrewd father's army and policy, thoroughly understood that for the attainment of this end Roman Catholic Austria must be humbled and reduced to a secondary position. His success was only partial, but it was so far effective. The relations between these two great rivals in the Germanic body, therefore, were so strained that Prussia, in her antagonism to Austria, naturally leaned toward France. But the seizure of German lands not only on the west bank of the Rhine, but of some even on the eastern side, together with the behavior of the French armies not only in southwestern Germany, but again in Bern, created consternation at Berlin. Sieyès was sent to allay, if possible, the fears of Frederick William III, and to woo him to the French alliance. Meantime, the radical Directory, looking on the ecclesiastical principalities of the empire as anachronisms, had been planning their entire secularization. This would indemnify the secular powers; and the sentiment of both Prussia and Austria favored this solution of the problem. But Bonaparte, foreseeing that temporarily it would also unify public opinion in Germany, and give France no ground for meddling, had declared in Italy that if the Germanic body were non-existent, France should create it for her own purposes; and he impressed upon the French plenipotentiaries at Rastadt how important it was that they should at least prevent a complete secularization of the great bishoprics.
This was the first bone of contention thrown into that Congress; and Austria soon began to see that the treaty of Campo Formio was to be not merely an armistice,but a very short one. Bonaparte had formed in Italy a legion of five thousand Poles. They were still under arms, awaiting the event. It was notorious that French agents were fomenting discontent in both Poland and Hungary. The Army of Italy had carefully spared the hereditary dominions of the Emperor while hurrying toward Leoben, and Bonaparte, repressing pillage with relentless severity, had explained that France made war not with the good people of Europe, but with their tyrannical dynasties. Even in Carinthia some enthusiasm for revolutionary principles had been created. Thugut had cleverly prevented Clarke from entering Vienna, because he feared the presence of a republican among the inflammable elements of that city. Francis had refused, on the conclusion of peace, to send a diplomatic agent to Paris, because he did not wish for reciprocity, and was anxious lest a French minister, if received at Vienna, might there create such a focus of revolutionary agitation as existed wherever a French embassy had been established. But now it was suddenly announced that the French republic had accredited Bernadotte to his court. The report was true, instructions having been given that the envoy suggest a dismemberment of Turkey in lieu of the further indemnity Francis expected, and ascertain how the reconstruction of Poland would be regarded. He was to prevent Austria's interference in behalf of Rome, and to insist on being treated with the same punctilio as had been shown to the royal ambassadors of France. On the other hand, for the sake of the radicals among the Fructidorians, he was to be conciliatory, because it was of vital importance that France should learn the inner workings of the court of Vienna before war broke out again, especially if the directors were to forestall Bonaparte's complete ascendancy. There is not a scintillaof evidence that, as some have suggested, Barras, Sieyès, or Talleyrand tampered with Bernadotte. He was still a rude soldier, and not the adroit man of affairs he afterward became. They could rely upon his making a mess of his mission, and he did so. In a haughty tone he at once demanded, as he had been instructed to do, the suppression of the Bourbon orders in Austria, and likewise the omission from the royal almanac of that family as reigning sovereigns of France. At the same time he made such an undue display of the tricolor and the republican cockade as to arouse all latent antagonisms to the Revolution. These and other similar indiscretions were successful in agitating the populace to such a degree that finally the embassy was attacked by a mob. Thoroughly frightened, and knowing that his mission regarding Poland and Turkey was in vain, Bernadotte demanded his recall. He returned to Paris, having, as was expected, brought the relations of France and Austria to the verge of rupture. Arriving in April, 1798, he was married soon afterward to Joseph Bonaparte's sister-in-law, who quickly comforted herself after the death of Duphot.[5]
By that time Prussia had been virtually checkmated; for although Sieyès could not bring the court of Berlin to make an alliance with the Directory, yet he had prevented her adhesion to its enemies, promising that revolutionary propaganda should cease in Germany. In return she agreed to observe the old strict neutrality, and to recognize the Cisalpine Republic. This decision has been severely criticized in recent years as a virtual delivery of herself to Napoleon after he should have devoured Austria. It has even been suggested that her statesmen ought to have looked a hundred years ahead, and should have anticipated by a century the Prussianalliance with the house of Savoy, which was at this later date the only liberal monarchy in Europe. As Europe was in 1798, such a conception was impossible.
In the spring of that year, therefore, everything presaged the general outbreak which was soon to occur. It may be that Bonaparte had foreordained it, and to the minutest detail had regulated events as they took place. Taking each division of them into separate consideration, a credulous admirer might believe that so much was within the ability of a single man; but the complexity of the whole makes the demoniac power to produce a crash in this way seem beyond the capacities of even a Bonaparte, although he may have cherished the desire for one. It is clear that he rode triumphant in the swift rush of the times, and took every possible advantage from the instability of European institutions in their moribund condition. To complete the picture of Europe in 1798, we must recall that Augereau was in the Pyrenees with forty thousand men, ready, when French agents should have done their work of agitation, to cross the border at a moment's notice, and liberate Spain from her Bourbon rulers. Such arbitrary emancipation was possible elsewhere. Why did it eventually fail in Spain? The answer is that there were no favorable antecedent conditions beyond the Pyrenees. All the strange story of transformation in Italy, in western and in northern Europe, would seem a lying fiction except for the memory of a still more thorough antecedent transformation in the spirit of their inhabitants by the intellectual ferment of the century. This spiritual and rationalizing movement had left Spain, Russia, and eastern Europe almost untouched. It was for this reason that the schemes of Bonaparte as to Poland and Turkey at once healed the breach between Russia and Austria, neither of which was deeply influenced by theidealism of the age, and both of which were prompted only by dynastic motives. Elsewhere Napoleon seemed like a magician; in those lands his spell was vain. In culture and intelligence England was an age ahead of him, as the others were an age behind him; and the two opposing forces of ignorance and enlightenment crushed him in the end like the upper and the nether millstone.
French Policy Regarding Egypt — Bonaparte's Use of It — His Military Dispositions and Expectations — His "Complete Code of Politics" — The Alternatives He Saw — Friction Between Bonaparte and the Directory — The Fleet and the Army — The Departure.
Taken in its largest sense, the social life of the world has been due to the relations of commerce, thought, and religion between the Orient and the Occident. The short road from one to the other is by way of the Red Sea, the Isthmus, and the Mediterranean. The controlling site on that thoroughfare is Egypt. From the crusades onward the domination of the countries and lands in that great basin was the prize for which France and England were always contending. Pierre du Bois proposed the seizure of Egypt to Philip le Bel in the fourteenth century; Leibnitz sought to draw Louis XIV out of Germany by explaining to him the dazzling advantage of the same enterprise; d'Argenson suggested the Suez Canal in 1738; and Choiseul kept alive the plan of occupying Egypt. The republic had inherited the notion of world conquest which had occupied both Philip le Bel and Louis XIV, although in another form. Bonaparte, in the double rôle of Raynal´s disciple and supplanter of the Revolution, was full of the same idea. It was his early study of the "Philosophicaland Political History of the Two Indies" which made him, in one of his conversations before Campo Formio, designate Europe as a mole-hill when compared with the six hundred millions of men in the East. In these same pages, as in Plutarch, he had read of Alexander the Great, and had learned to admire his example; there, too, he was told that with a proper population and a firm administration Alexandria would rise to greater eminence than London, Paris, Constantinople, or Rome. These opinions he imbibed and never changed, reiterating them even at St. Helena, where he confessed that but for the repulse at Acre he would have founded an Oriental empire. The policy of the Directory was no doubt partly his; but to a far greater extent it mirrored the feeling abroad in the entire nation, and among all its agents, that the times were ripe for the seizure of Egypt. Talleyrand had called the attention of the Institute to its feasibility, and Magallon, the French consul at Cairo, filled his despatches with suggestions as to ways and means. By the spring of 1798 the plan of the Directory was formed and their preparations were finished. Under Talleyrand's supervision a statement of policy, with its historical justification, had been made ready for publication, while the secret outfit of ships and men at Toulon and other points was complete.
1798
The justification of the expedition to the Sultan and to Europe was the plea that Egypt no longer belonged to Turkey. Mameluke usurpers were holding it in disgraceful bondage; France would liberate it. To enforce this view with the Porte, every insurgent of the steadily disintegrating Ottoman empire had for months been receiving encouragement from Bonaparte's letters and agents, and now the grand vizir was given to understand that if an attempt were made to interfere with the French forces, these rebels would be unchained inhis rear; on the other hand, he was encouraged to regard the invaders as auxiliaries to suppress rebellion both on the Danube and on the Nile. Bonaparte was playing for high stakes; he probably hoped to win Turkey as an ally, and thus draw Russia and Austria away from France, but was determined in case of failure to hold Egypt as the French share when ultimately the expected partition of the Sultan's domains should be made.
Otherwise it is impossible to explain why he so managed as to leave France helpless against her Continental enemies; why all the gathered treasures of Italy and Switzerland were spent in his own preparations; why almost every general of ability and every regiment of prowess was destined for Egypt, while in the face of an impending European crash the national treasury was depleted, the inferior troops at his own disposal were left at home, and the remaining veterans of Hoche and Moreau were scattered in various divisions between the Rhine and the Pyrenees. The Army of England assembled in the north was temporarily in a state of atrophy. It was kept at Boulogne with depleted ranks, but ready to be recruited for a landing in England as a subordinate move, if the British should be overpowered in the Levant and compelled to divide their fleet. Otherwise, as Bonaparte thought and said after a visit in February to the shores of the Channel, it would be too hazardous to attempt a landing in face of the tremendous armament afloat under the English flag. "To invade England without the mastery of the seas is an enterprise the boldest and most difficult that has been undertaken. If it be possible, it is only by a surprise passage (of the Channel)." He felt that in any case it would be best to spend the summer in fitting out the fleet at Brest for an invasion of Ireland during the autumn. Two questions which present themselves in this connectioncannot be answered categorically: Was it of his own free will that Bonaparte accepted the command of the Egyptian expedition, or did the directors force it on him? What was the ultimate design of the great schemer if the imminent war broke out while the best French troops were in Africa?
In considering the probabilities as to both these queries, it appears as if Bonaparte had convinced himself that the open assumption of authority was for the moment impossible. He could not be a director: candidates for that office must be forty years old. He dared not take Barras's suggestion and seize the dictatorship, even temporarily, because the Jacobin members of the Directory made it plain, in certain very disorderly sessions of that body, that they would not tolerate such a plan and were strong enough to thwart it. These scenes, which were not kept secret, and were described in the coffee-houses, led the Paris populace to suspect Bonaparte. They were enjoying a temporary repose which it would have been dangerous at the moment for any aspirant to disturb. It must have seemed plain that a change in the constitution was essential to anything like the speedy realization of his personal ambition, which had already taken definite form. As early as September nineteenth, 1797, Bonaparte wrote Talleyrand a letter containing what he called his complete code of politics. His sphinx-like demeanor and the mysterious allusions already quoted from the festival speech, taken in connection with that outline, confirm the notion that Talleyrand, Barras, and Sieyès were preparing for a new constitution, which should be ready for use when the spring elections had increased the number of royalist delegates, as they were sure to do, and had thus produced a clash between the executive and the legislature.
The "complete code of politics" expresses the samecontempt for all antecedent French political speculation as that felt by Sieyès. Even Montesquieu had but arranged and analyzed the results of his reading and travels; though doubtless capable, he had done nothing really constructive. The English had confused the respective functions of the various powers in government. In view of their history, it was easy to see why the taxing power was in the House of Commons. But why should that body also declare war or make peace? Great Britain, being a state whose constitution was compounded of privileges, "a black ceiling with a gilt edge," was quite different from France, where these had been abolished, and all power proceeded directly from the sovereign people. Why, then, as under the present constitution, should the French legislature alone have rights which belonged to government in its totality? This sovereign power, he continued, "naturally falls, I think, into two magistracies quite distinct: one supervises, but does not act, and to this what we now call the executive power should be compelled to submit important measures—the legislation of execution, so to speak. This great magistracy would be truly the chief council of the nation; it would have all that part of administration or of execution which is by our constitution intrusted to the legislative." This assembly should be numerous, and composed only of men who had already held positions of public trust. The legislative should make and change the organic laws, but not in two to three days, as at present; for after an organic law has once been made operative, it should not be changed without four or five months of discussion. "This legislative power, without rank in the Republic, impassive, without eyes or ears for what is about it, would have no ambition, and would not inundate us with more than a thousand specific statutes which, bytheir absurdity, destroy their own validity, and make us, with three hundred tomes of laws, a nation without laws." Is this effusion a recurrence to youthful crudities of ideal politics, or does it hint at the exercise by that upper magistracy of its unchecked powers through a single executive agent like himself? Certain it is, this very concept, though sensibly changed, had a direct influence on the institutions of the empire.
In the absence of sufficient evidence as to the facts, there is but one complex theory which explains subsequent occurrences. The Egyptian expedition, as its commander publicly said in leaving Toulon, was the right wing of the Army of England; at the same time it was consonant with the ancient French policy, and appealed to the romantic, Oriental side of Bonaparte's own temperament; finally, as a practical measure it gave him a chance to await with distinction the outcome of affairs in Paris, whether it should be, as he said to Bourrienne, "for a few months or for six years." At the same time it was an anchor to windward. In consequence of the Bernadotte incident, the Austrian plenipotentiaries at Rastadt had refused even the entire left bank of the Rhine to France, and European sentiment was apparently consolidating for another coalition. "I go to the Orient," Napoleon said to Joseph, "with every means to guarantee success. If France needs me; if the number of those who think like Talleyrand, Sieyès, and Roederer increases; if war breaks out, and is unlucky for France, then I shall return, more certain of public opinion than now. If, on the other hand, the Republic is successful in war; if a political general like me appears and centers the hopes of the people in himself, good; then still in the Orient I shall perhaps do greater service to the world than he."
Everything indicates that in the months immediatelypreceding his departure there was friction between Bonaparte and the Directory. It is said that in one of their sessions, called to consider the situation, Bonaparte proposed to reknit the negotiations of Rastadt by himself returning thither, but that François was designated to go in his stead. Thereupon the worn-out scene of threatening resignation was rehearsed by him once more. "Here is a pen," said Rewbell; "you need rest." But Merlin snatched it; and as the furious aspirant, seeing his supremacy jeopardized, left the room, the others heard the words, "The pear is not yet ripe." "Believe me, it is good advice I give you," said Barras, in a private interview immediately after: "leave the country as soon as you can." There was abundant room for such scenes in a committee which considered as its own the policy of indirect attack on England through the East, while all its members were chafing under the dictatorial presence of an embodied and dissatisfied ambition which Talleyrand declares had really devised the scheme, but was now uncertain as to which was the best to take of not two or three, but half a dozen courses. The cast of the die decided for Egypt. The secrecy of preparation had kept even the French in doubt. England for a time was entirely misled, and made the nearly fatal blunder of concentrating her naval force in the Channel, and of guarding the entrance to the Mediterranean with only the few ships she could spare, while on the waters of that sea itself she had virtually no force.
Meantime the great fleet at Toulon, nearly the equal of any which France had ever launched, was entirely ready. To convoy the four hundred overloaded transports, there were fifteen ships of the line, fifteen frigates, seven corvettes, and thirty minor armed vessels. It was a surprise even to the initiated that at the last moment the soldiers were found to number not twenty-five thousand,as originally proposed, but forty thousand, comprising the flower of the republican armies. Of division generals there were D'Hilliers, Vaubois, Desaix, Kléber, Menou, Reynier, and Dugua; of brigade generals, Lannes, Davout, Murat, and Andréossy; of colonels, Marmont, Junot, Lefebvre-Desnouettes, and Bessières. The most novel feature of all was a carefully organized and equipped expedition of a hundred or more scholars, who, according to what was then the fashion, were destined to gather the treasures of the Pharaohs and of the Ptolemies for the collections of Paris. Their apparatus for discovery was the best obtainable, their learning was at least respectable, and their library was a mixture of the ancient classics with those of the modern romanticism, of medieval lore with modern atheism. There were of course the great military memoirs, of Turenne, Condé, Luxembourg, Eugene, and Charles XII; more interesting is the inclusion of fifteen volumes of geography and discovery. Whither bound? Was this another Alexander? Homer and Vergil jostled Ossian, Ariosto, and Tasso, while Rousseau's "Héloïse" stood neighbor to Goethe's "Werther." Among other "political" works were Montesquieu, the Vedas, the Koran, and the Bible. Caroline Bonaparte gave her brother as a farewell gift a little pocket library, among the volumes of which were Bacon's "Essays," Mme. de Staël's "Influence of the Passions," and Mercier's "Philosophic Visions." The curious have examined these volumes, and found in their well-worn pages a few passages specially marked. In his hours of solitude the great solitary read in Bacon how he who dominates others loses his own liberty; in Mme. de Staël how hard it is to keep the acquisitions of ambition; in Mercier of an Oriental visionary who, after the glories of temporary success, ended his days in exile and forgetfulness.
It was on April twelfth that Bonaparte received his final instructions from the executive. He was to seize Malta, drive the British from all their Oriental possessions which he could hope to capture, destroy their factories on the Red Sea, pierce the Isthmus of Suez, improve the condition of all the native populations, and keep a good understanding with the Sultan. Meantime from twenty-five to thirty thousand men were to be assembled at some point on the Channel as a feint against Great Britain so that her attention should be withdrawn for the time being from the Mediterranean. The very next day the departing general deposited with the Directory his secret plan for the camp at Boulogne and a scheme for the surprise passage. The scholar troop was ordered to Toulon and the commander-in-chief prepared to follow. But the Bernadotte incident at Vienna raised the war cloud and he waited a month until it disappeared from the horizon. Throughout that period Bonaparte kept the directors on tenterhooks by repeated offers to return to Rastadt, where he alone could secure reparation for the insult to the republic in the person of her ambassador. But the Austrians were unready for another appeal to arms, Thugut offered reparation, and the dangerous marplot of the Directory was at last free to remove his troublesome presence from Europe. He left Paris on the night of May third.
Visions of Oriental Conquest — The Surrender of Malta — Nelson Deceived — The Mamelukes — The Skirmishes at Shebreket and the Pyramids — The Emptiness of Success — Plans for Conquering Asia — The Battle of the Nile — Effects on European Policies.
The departure of the Egyptian expedition from Toulon, on May nineteenth, 1798, was thus far the greatest occasion of Bonaparte's life. Josephine, apparently no longer the light Creole, but seemingly transformed by the successes and responsibilities of the last two years into a fond and outwardly judicious helpmate, bade him a tender farewell. There had been checks in his brilliant career, but so far they had been temporary; as for the present hour, he believed, as he afterward told Mme. de Rémusat, that it might be his last in France. Mental fabrics of an Oriental splendor, visions of an empire bestriding three continents, dreams of potentates and powers far eclipsing those of western Europe—license like this intoxicates the imagination and disorders common minds. Such plans seem fantastic to the multitude, but what else than their realization is in sober reality the British empire of to-day? The rank and file of Bonaparte's army might not seea reward for this hazardous expedition in sentimental or distant returns, but they understood perfectly the words of a harangue delivered at Toulon before embarking, which, besides being a reminder of the plunder they had taken in Italy, contained the blunt promise that this time every man should return with money enough to buy seven acres of land. Sailors and soldiers alike were thrilled by the call to establish liberty on the plains of the ocean, as they had on the plains of Lombardy. They even dimly apprehended the meaning of a proclamation, issued at sea, in which their destination was finally revealed, and certain success was foretold, if they would respect the women, the goods, and the faith of the Mohammedans.
Yes; it was a sanguine expedition which, relying on an apparent relaxation of England's vigilance, set sail for Malta. The geographical situation of that island makes it in proper hands the citadel of the Mediterranean, the bulwark of Christendom against heathendom. But the military monks to whom it had been intrusted were grown corrupt and licentious. The Maltese loathed their masters. French agents had already been among them, winning thousands of the people and some of the French knights; and such was the internal disorder at the approach of Bonaparte that after the merest show of resistance to his demands, the gates of an almost impregnable fortress were dishonorably opened to the French republic without a blow. The order, neither monastic nor military in any true sense, was virtually annihilated by the sequestration of its goods, though nominally it survived as vassal to the crown of Naples under the protection of Russia. The spoils of the treasury and the Church were quickly seized, a goodly treasure, and added to the French war chest. Waiting only to garrison his easy conquest, andto establish a French administration, Bonaparte hastened on, and the entire fleet in good condition anchored off Alexandria on June thirtieth. With a few casualties the troops were landed.
News of the great preparations at Toulon had finally convinced the English admiralty that their supremacy in the Mediterranean was endangered. Nelson, with a small squadron, sailed in due time from Cadiz, and arrived off the French coast before the departure of Bonaparte's expedition. Driven from his position by a storm, he took refuge in the lee of Sardinia, where he remained until reinforced. Such was the overcharge of the French ships in troops and stores that even with a few active vessels Nelson could have crippled, if not entirely disabled, his enemy's great armament. With a new force which in the mean time he had received, he was prepared to dispute their passage wherever found, and his orders were stringent to destroy the enemy's fleet at any hazard. Returning to Toulon only to find that the French had escaped him, he sailed thence to Sicily, and perceiving at last the destination of the foe to be Egypt, passed swiftly to the south of Crete, and arrived off Alexandria to be disappointed in finding its roadstead empty. Supposing that he had been deceived, he hastened away toward Syria. In the desire to find his foe, he had passed him. Bonaparte, learning off Crete that he was pursued, sailed northward through the Candian Sea, while Nelson took the direct line on the other side. So it happened that thus far the good fortune of the invaders had not deserted them.
Map of Egypt.
Map of Egypt.
The denizens of the great Egyptian towns were not a warlike people; the great mass of the population, the down-trodden agricultural workers, or fellaheen, were even less so. Their strongest weapon was that Oriental stolidity which, like a fortress of mud, closes over hostilemissiles without crumbling under their blows. Accordingly, the city of Alexandria, after a feeble and ineffectual resistance, yielded. Bonaparte, ever conciliatory, issued a proclamation to the people, which was translated by one of his savants into the vernacular. It was clear and concise, but had little influence on the populace. The condition of Egypt at the time seeks in vain a parallel in history. Saladin had followed a tradition of Eastern despotism in the formation of a body-guard destitute of all ties except those which bound them to his person. Purchased as infants in Georgia or Circassia, its members were, like the janizaries at Constantinople, trained to arms as an exclusive profession, and, mounted on the finest steeds of Arabia, they became the elite of his army. In time this force of acute and powerful men transformed itself into a warrior caste, was divided into twenty-four companies, and obeyed no authority except that of its captains. These were known in Oriental phrase as Beys, the subordinates were themselves what we call the Mamelukes; the whole, in number about eight thousand, formed a kind of chivalry which, though reduced to nominal submission in 1517, still governed the land with despotic power, and bade defiance to the Sultan's shaky authority. The first portion of Bonaparte's proclamation sketched the evils of Mameluke tyranny, the second called on the populace to aid their liberators. "We, too, are true Mussulmans. Is it not we who have destroyed the Pope that said war must be made on the Mussulmans? Is it not we who have destroyed the Knights of Malta because those insensate chevaliers believed God wanted them to make war on the Mussulmans? Thrice happy they who are on our side! They shall prosper in their fortune and in their place. Happy those who are neutral! They shall have time to understand us, andshall array themselves with us. But woe, thrice woe, to those who shall take up arms for the Mamelukes and fight against us! There shall be no hope left for them; they shall perish." The contrast between this language and that which its author had used in Italy concerning the Church shows how much sincerity there was in either case. Here as there he used religion as a political expedient.
The capture of Alexandria was a bitter disillusionment to the French soldiery, for the once rich and famous city had shrunk into poverty and insignificance. There was no booty and the squalor was repellent. With this unpropitious start their struggle on to Cairo was an awful trial. The sky was brass, their feet sank in the dry, hot soil, and mounted skirmishers tormented them from behind the low hillocks on each side of their line of march. No enemy more redoubtable than a few half-naked fellaheen really disputed their progress; but even when, on July tenth, they came within sight of the Nile and their sufferings were about to be mitigated, it was in vain that their general sought to silence their bitter cries of disheartened anger. Three days later they were attacked at Shebreket by the outposts of the Mamelukes, under Murad, chief Bey of the force. The irregular and individual attacks of the well-armed and gorgeously equipped cavalry broke harmlessly against the serried ranks of the French veterans, and the desultory firing of the Turkish artillery was quickly silenced; the rusty cannon, though aimed point-blank at the gunboat flotilla which was ascending the river, did little or no damage. The enemy withdrew, and concentrated their forces for a final stand at Om Dinar before Cairo, behind the lines of Embabeh. On July twenty-first Bonaparte ordered his troops in squares six men deep, as before. They were to advance so as to cut off theenemy's retreat southward, and were to halt only to receive a charge. "Soldiers," cried the general, "forty centuries look down upon you from the summit of the Pyramids!" The resistance was scarcely worthy of the name. Five thousand horsemen and as many fellaheen were behind the weak ramparts. Murad and his men dashed forward with desperate courage against the phalanx of Desaix, but only to rebound from its iron sides against the equally impassive lines of Reynier and Dugua. Ibrahim, the other Mameluke leader, fled eastward across the river, and Murad retreated toward the south; the undisciplined infantry scattered and ran like frightened sheep. Many of the Mamelukes were drowned in the Nile. It was their custom to carry their wealth on their persons, and the French soldiers, bending their bayonets into grappling-hooks, spent much time in fishing for the corpses. It was estimated that each body thus recovered would afford about ten thousand francs to the lucky finder.
The so-called battle of the Pyramids will ever have a fictitious and romantic fame, largely due, of course, to the quality of Bonaparte's wonderful proclamations, which long after he admitted to Gourgaud were "un peu charlatan." Its results, however, were temporarily very important. Cairo was delivered by it into French hands, and the possession of Egypt's capital seemed of the first importance both to the soldiers and to their friends at home. The idea that East and West were fighting under the shadow of those monuments which, now hoary with age, were among the first achievements of civilized human intelligence, thrilled the "great nation," and added new luster to Bonaparte's laurels in the minds of a people wont to revel in great conceptions. Yet but thirty French soldiers were killed, and only one hundred and twenty were wounded. It wasa skirmish; much more decisive than that at Shebreket, to be sure, and somewhat more bloody, but only a skirmish. Both were represented to the Directory as great battles, the five Mamelukes killed in the first being magnified to three hundred. The camp at Embabeh furnished rich spoils to the victorious leaders, but the fabled wealth of Cairo, destined for the soldiery, proved to be like apples of Sodom. The army had been angry and disheartened; deprived of its accustomed booty, it became sullen and mutinous. There was no news from home. Oriental apathy long defied even Bonaparte's administrative powers. Egypt was subdued, but the situation of the general and of his troops was apparently desperate. Long afterwards the Emperor said to Gourgaud that, horrible as was the confession, he believed it fortunate that the French fleet was destroyed at Aboukir, "otherwise the army would have reëmbarked." If he had commanded Mamelukes, he would have been master of the East, he added.
Nothing daunted by what would have broken a feebler spirit, the disillusioned conqueror turned to the conquest of another world. Africa had failed him, but Asia was near, and a revolution might be effected there. The maltreatment of French merchants in Syria had been one of the Directory's original grounds of complaint; it must serve another turn, and if the Sultan were sufficiently humbled, he might be compelled to an alliance against the menacing league of Russia and Austria. The need for carrying out this plan was further confirmed by the awful news which soon came from Alexandria. Nelson, having scoured in vain the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, had returned first to Sicily, then to Greece, and finally to Egypt. Bonaparte had left instructions for Admiral Brueys to work the fleet into the old port of the Ptolemies;but if the anchorage or water-draft should prove insufficient, he was to sail for Corfu. It was believed that with his splendid new eighty-gun ships, and unhampered by the transports, he was more than a match for the inferior squadron of Nelson, whose largest vessels had but seventy-four guns. But Brueys, finding it impossible to enter the harbor with his warships, and fearing to sail for Corfu without the provisions promised by the general, disobeyed his orders, and took up what he believed to be an impregnable position near by in the bay of Aboukir, his line being parallel with the shoaling beach, and his van protected by insufficient batteries on Aboukir island to the northwest. The strongest ships in the center and van were those stationed seaward.
Nelson descried the anchored fleet on August first, about midday; before evening his daring scheme was formed and carried out. The English ships advanced in two divisions, one attacking the enemy's center and rear from the sea side, while the other, performing by skilful steering what Brueys had believed an impossible feat, entered the shoal waters, and, cutting off the shore defense, simultaneously attacked on that side. The French van, like the rest of the fleet, was at anchor, and could not come to the assistance of its sister ships. Thus entrapped, the French sailors fought with desperate courage, but they were out-manœuvered, and the English cross-fire was deadly. Moreover, with Nelson a new temper had entered the British navy. At Bastia he had determined the result by his personal daring, for the men of theAgamemnon, when led by him, "minded shot as little as peas"; at Calvi he had lost an eye in a desperate venture; at Cape St. Vincent he had boarded two opposing Spanish ships at the head of his ownCaptain'screw, with the cry, "WestminsterAbbey or victory!" and now, in the battle of the Nile, his greatest fight, he inspired the whole fleet with such audacious bravery that to this day his countrymen sing the proud boast of the ballad-writer, "At the battle of the Nile, I was there all the while." Though he had as many vessels as the French, they were of inferior quality and strength; but the result was never doubtful. The brave Brueys went down in his ownOrientas the dauntless crew shouted, "Long live the Republic!" and Rear-Admiral Villeneuve barely escaped with two ships of the line and two frigates. Two other vessels of the latter class had been towed into the harbor; all the rest were destroyed. From that awful day the modern maritime ascendancy of England was considered a menace by continental Europe. France had struck Great Britain deadly blows in the annihilation of her allies ashore, and was to do so again. England, however, on her own chosen element, seemed thenceforward indomitable.
Any plan which Bonaparte may have entertained for the use of fleets to transport himself or his armies either on the Mediterranean or on the Atlantic during the expected Continental convulsion had to be abandoned. As was explained in a despatch from the Directory, which he did not receive until long after, he must either make Egypt self-sufficient without aid from France, or march on Constantinople to intimidate or wheedle the Grand Turk, or invade India, collect all the elements hostile to British rule, and establish himself there. Any thought of immediate return to France must be abandoned, however disposed he might be to pluck his "pear." On the other hand, France without Bonaparte was a different subject for European consideration, military or political. The wild schemes of her government for aiding the Irish rebels or invadingBritish soil were necessarily either futile in their inception or never tried; the coalition was shaping itself, and with Bonaparte and Hoche both removed from the scene, the statesmen and generals of the other great powers were only too ready to try conclusions with France.
Islam and the French — Plans to Revolutionize the East — The News from Europe — Bonaparte's Recommendations to the Directory — The Invasion of Syria — Murder of Turkish Prisoners — Importance of Acre — The Battle of Mount Tabor — The Siege of Acre — Desperate Courage of Besiegers and Besieged — Defeat of Bonaparte — His Estimate of Human Life — The Retreat to Egypt.
1798—99
"This is the moment," said Bonaparte, on hearing how Brueys's splendid fleet had been annihilated, and the line of retreat to France cut off, "when characters of a superior order assert themselves." "The English," he cried on another occasion, "will compel us to do greater things than we intended." So far from his activity being diminished in the isolation of Egypt, it was redoubled. To preserve the fiction of his mission as the restorer of Ottoman power, the tricolor and the crescent floated everywhere side by side, while prayers were said for both France and Turkey in the mosques. The utmost respect was paid to the Koran and its precepts. Menou and a number of others made an open profession of Islam. To soothe all popular apprehension, existing institutions were changed only to strengthen them, while contemplated reforms were to follow inproportion as increasing public enlightenment demanded them. In particular, the utmost respect was paid to marriage customs, and no license among the common soldiers was tolerated. In marked contrast was Bonaparte's own conduct. An intercepted letter written from Alexandria to his brother Joseph expressed jealous doubts of Josephine's fidelity—or, rather, a certainty of her infidelity. From that instant his own licentiousness became a scandal even to the loose notions of his train. But outwardly he affected the inflated speech of a semi-divine messenger; once, while visiting the burial crypt in the pyramid of Cheops, he pretended to a mufti that he was a proselyte, and pronounced with an air of conviction the Mohammedan creed. Every element in the population, however,—Copts, Turks, Greeks, and Arabs,—was courted, and made to share in the administration. Printing-presses were established, and the French scholars, though surprised and disenchanted by what they found, united into an institute, and began the study of every possible improvement in political, social, and domestic economy. Nor was the army forgotten: the captured Mamelukes and other available youth were enrolled in the French battalions, and taught the drill and discipline of war. Even the scattered Bedouin received the conqueror's flattering attentions with ever lessening distrust.
All this was part of a plan to effect a religious and political revolution in the East, the two to move hand in hand, by an appeal to Mohammedan zeal for coöperation with those who had already destroyed Christianity in Europe. Talleyrand was to have been the representative in Constantinople of the same idea. But in disregard of his promise he stayed at home, and neither the Sultan, as the political and religious head of Islam, nor its devotees, were for a moment deceived. On thewell-known principle that offers of peace come best while war is hottest, Bonaparte's iron hand was shown in certain most stringent regulations, and one determined insurrection was put down with merciless rigor. The domestic relations of the people were sacred, but they must buy indemnity with the payment of all their cash; and treasure, wherever found, was seized for the army chest. The old city barriers of Cairo were broken down, and fortified turrets were built in their places. Resistance of any kind met with quick punishment, and heads fell throughout the land with such regularity and frequency as to force from the natives a recognition of Bonaparte as el Kebir, the Exalted.
The utter isolation of summer, autumn, and winter would have been intolerable but for such occupations. Only a single official despatch, and that a most insignificant one, reached Egypt from France during this interval; and the rush of events in Europe was for months utterly unknown to the castaway army. In fact, but two efforts were made to forward news—an astounding proof of the feeling in Paris. The Directory had failed in their attempts to cajole the Sultan, and a message from Bonaparte arrived too late to influence him; for, on receipt of news from Nelson's victorious fleet, the Turkish monarch hesitated no longer, and accepted the proffered alliance of Russia. The only certain news from Europe which was generally disseminated in Cairo was contained in a package of Italian newspapers brought into Alexandria by a blockade-runner. Through them it was known that the invasion of Ireland, having been precipitated by a misunderstanding between the secret society of United Irishmen and the Directory, had failed; that Malta and Corfu were blockaded; that the Spanish fleet was significantly inactive; and that all Europe was arming for the renewal of hostilities in thespring. Bonaparte made every effort to communicate with Paris. Some of his frequent despatches certainly reached their destination; but, going by circuitous routes, they were belated. This very fact, however, went far in France to surround him with a halo of romance, and to glorify the legend, never eradicated from French imaginations, that the national arms had subjugated the land of the Pharaohs. As every day revealed the incapacity of the Directory in the face of an exasperated and united Europe, the fancied splendor of Bonaparte's feats neutralized any remnants of suspicion remaining in the minds of the people regarding their absent victor. The conquering republic was over the sea; it was a spurious one which had remained at home to be humiliated.
Disquieting rumors of Bonaparte's death, said to have been spread by English and Russian agents, were prevalent during a part of December; but while at their height they were allayed by the arrival, direct from the seat of war, of a budget dated October seventh. The condition of the colony was described in glowing terms, but the gist of the despatches was that the Spanish admiral must be goaded to activity, and that the fleet from Brest must be sent to coöperate with him in the Mediterranean, in order to restore the prestige of France in the East. As for the writer himself, he hoped, should war break out again in Europe, to return in the spring. Meantime, the Neapolitans were marching on Rome, a fact which inclined the vacillating and harassed directors to act on the suggestions of their real master, although they kept his recommendations secret.
It was, therefore, not entirely without a coördination of plans that the Army of Egypt, strengthened and refreshed, made ready to move in February. The Turks, under the viceroy, Achmet, styled Jezzar, theButcher, were mustering in Syria, and it was necessary to anticipate them. Kléber was put at the head of twelve thousand men, and, after dispersing the eight hundred Mamelukes who had retreated in the direction of Rahmaniyeh, he advanced some days' march to El Arish, which was at once beset. Bonaparte tarried at Cairo for a few days, and then having learned that the congress at Rastadt was still sitting, and that war, though imminent, was not yet declared, set out, reaching El Arish on February seventeenth, 1799. Three days later the Turkish garrison, composed largely of volunteers, surrendered. They were paroled, and ordered to march toward Damascus. Gaza fell with the exchange of a few musket-balls, and important munitions of war were delivered into the hands of the French. On March fourth the invaders were before Jaffa, which had a garrison of four thousand men, a part of Jezzar's army. After three days' bombardment a breach was made in the walls, and two thousand troops who had taken refuge behind caravansary walls surrendered under promise of their lives; the rest, it is said, had been killed in a massacre which immediately followed the assault.
No French victory was ever marked by more unbridled license than that which the victorious troops practised at Jaffa. But what followed was worse. Although the prisoners of war were too numerous for the ordinary usage, yet they should have been treated according to the terms of quarter they had exacted. On the seventh a council of war unanimously voted that the old rule under which no quarter is given to defenders in an assault should be applied to them. For two days Bonaparte hesitated, but on the ninth his decision was taken. A few Egyptians were sent home, and the remainder of the prisoners, together with the eighthundred militia from El Arish, were marched to the beach, and shot. In the report to the Directory the total number was put at twelve hundred. Two eye-witnesses estimated it—one at three thousand, the other at four thousand. "I have been severe with those of your troops who violated the laws of war," wrote the author of the deed to Jezzar. No mention of the fact or excuse for it was made in any other portion of his correspondence at the time. All winter long he had been dealing as an Oriental with Orientals, and this was but a piece of the same conduct. The code of Christian morality was far from his mind. In January, for instance, he had ordered Murat to kill all the prisoners of a hostile tribe in the desert, whom he could not bring away; and in the same month identical orders were issued to Berthier concerning another horde. The plea which is made by the eulogists of Napoleon, and by some recent military writers, for this wholesale execution, is that among these slaughtered men the garrison of El Arish, which had surrendered, had been found again with arms in their hands; that they were deserving of death according to all the laws of war; and that, as to the rest, there were no French prisoners for whom to exchange them, and no provisions to support them; consequently their presence with the army would jeopardize its success, and it was therefore justifiable to diminish the enemy's resisting power by their execution. Those who believe that in any war, whether just or unjust, the practice of barbarity is excusable if it lead to speedy victory will agree with that opinion.
Bonaparte had foreseen that of all the Syrian towns the Pasha's capital, St. Jean d'Acre, which was on the shore, and not inland like the places so easily taken, would make the strongest resistance. Accordingly he had provided a siege-train, and had despatched it bysea from Alexandria. The English squadron in those waters, now in command of Sir Sidney Smith, was in the offing when the French army arrived on the coast. Approaching in order to open fire, the English admiral became aware after a few shots that his enemy had no artillery. Divining the reason, he swiftly put to sea, and easily captured their transports. Phélippeaux, a French emigrant who had graduated from the military school at Paris only two days before Bonaparte, was sent by Smith to superintend the fortification of the city with the very guns destined for its destruction. The siege of Acre thus became a task quite different from any hitherto imposed on the French. Supported by an English fleet, and easily provisioned under protection of their guns, the city might have made a determined stand even against an enemy with cannon; but to one without artillery it was likely that its resistance would be effectual. And so it proved; for under the ancient Gothic walls of a city whose name recalled the fleeting dominion of the Frank crusaders, Bonaparte's dreams of an Oriental empire vanished forever. On March nineteenth he sat down before them, with really no dependence except on fate. In spite of discouragements, however, a breach was effected on the twenty-eighth by means of a mine, but the assault was repulsed.
Day followed day without an important incident, until in the third week an army of twenty-five thousand men, under Abdullah, approached from Damascus to relieve Jezzar. Kléber set out to check their march, and the first skirmish of advance-guards occurred at Nazareth. For eight hours Junot, in the van with a few hundred men, stood firm against a tenfold force; and even when the whole French division arrived the overwhelming superiority of the Turkish numbers was not perceptibly diminished. Bonaparte was not farbehind. Leaving a respectable array before the town to keep up appearances, he hurried away with the rest, and by a forced march debouched on April sixteenth into the plain of Esdraelon. In the distance, at the foot of Mount Tabor, he could see a cloud of dust and smoke, in the midst of which the ranks of Kléber's division seemed buried beneath the masses of his foe. Throwing his fine cavalry on the Turkish flanks, the commander-in-chief, at the head of the infantry, caught his enemy unawares from behind the whirling sand which had concealed his presence. The result was an utter rout of the Turks, who fled by the mountain passes in complete disorder.
Bonaparte returned victorious to Acre, and resumed the siege with a grim determination such as even he had not often felt. He had good cause. Another messenger from the Directory, traveling with comparative directness by way of Genoa, had arrived with despatches and newspapers dated as late as February. Two Austrian generals, Mack and Sachsen, had put themselves at the head of the Neapolitan army, and were about to march on Rome. An Austrian army division had already begun hostilities by entering the Grisons, thus violating the neutrality of the allied Helvetian Republic. Russia, Turkey, and Austria were in coalition: Russia would despatch troops to defend the Turkish capital and to aid in conquering Italy. Two new French armies were in the field. Moreau, the only first-rate general in France, was still under suspicion of complicity with Pichegru, and although permitted to accompany the Army of Italy as a volunteer, had been passed over in the choice of commanders. Jourdan, whose consistent democracy as a member of the Five Hundred had restored him to favor and rank, was to command the Army of the Danube; Joubert was tosucceed Bonaparte in Italy. As for himself, he was left unhampered by instructions, but three alternatives had suggested themselves to the Directory—that he should either remain in Egypt and complete his colonial organization, or else press on to India and there supplant the English power, or, finally, march straight to Constantinople and attack the Russians. The tone of the despatches was one of anxiety. From earliest times Acre had been the key of Palestine; if Bonaparte should secure it, he would become the arbiter of his own destiny and of the world's. With Palestine, Egypt, and India at his feet, the tricontinental monarchy of his dreams was realizable; or else, in the same case, he could return to Paris with laurels unknown since the crusades, and put the copestone on the nearly completed structure of military domination in France and Europe. To the end of his days he imagined, or represented himself as imagining, that he would have altered the world's career by choosing the part of Oriental conqueror. We may call these notions dreams, or fancies, or visions, or what we will; they were sane conceptions in themselves, although it is not likely that England would have been conquered in the loss of India. She had been vigorous without it; she could have survived even that blow. For the moment the fall of Acre appeared to be an antecedent condition to either of the courses which were in the mind of Bonaparte.
But the siege was not prosperous. The assault and the defense during the attack in March had been alike desperate, and French valor had been futile. A fleet was now on its way from Constantinople to throw additional men and provisions into the town. At the same time Phélippeaux had constructed a new girdle of forts inside the walls, and had barricaded the streets. In the interval, however, the French had brought up someheavy guns from Jaffa, and were making preparations to renew operations. A breach was easily effected, and a few gallant fellows seized the tower which controlled the outworks and curtain; but the storming party was repulsed, and the men in the tower, though they held it for two days, were finally so reduced in numbers that they succumbed. This exasperated the French soldiers intensely. For the first two weeks of May there was scarcely a break in the succession of assaults. The fierce struggles which occurred in the breaches, on the barricades, even in the streets, to which the French once or twice penetrated, resulted in an appalling loss of life; but neither party quailed. Before long a pestilence broke out in the French camp, and the hospitals established at Jaffa and elsewhere were crowded with sick and dying.
On May seventh Kléber's division was called in for a conclusive onslaught, and in the face of a double fire from Sir Sidney Smith's cannon and the guns on the walls, both the first and second works were scaled and taken. All was in vain. Every house rained bullets from embrasures made for the purpose, and the entering columns retreated on the very threshold of their goal. Three days later a second equally desperate attempt likewise failed. In all, the siege lasted sixty-two days; the French assaulted forty times, and twenty-six sallies were made by the garrison; four thousand soldiers and four good generals from his splendid army were the sacrifice of human life which Bonaparte offered at Acre to his ambition. Finally, the squadron from Constantinople having safely arrived, news came that another was fitting out at Rhodes to retake Egypt itself. Nothing was left but to draw off, and on the seventeenth the siege was abandoned. The retreat began on the twentieth. At Jaffa Bonaparte passed through the hospitalwards calling out in a loud voice: "The Turks will be here in a few hours. Whoever feels strong enough, let him rise and follow us."
As a votary at the shrine of science he believed, both then and later, in the lawfulness of suicide; and he now coldly suggested murder to his surgeon-general, hinting that an overdose of opium would end the sufferings of those plague-stricken men who would have to be abandoned. It was long believed that such a dose actually had been administered to the sixty or more who were left behind. But the conclusive evidence that the report was false is in the fact that when Sir Sidney Smith occupied Jaffa the sufferers were still alive. Napoleon to the last defended the suggestion as proper, though he falsely denied having made it himself, and untruthfully declared at St. Helena that he had delayed three days to protect the dying patients. With cynical good nature, he told the fine story of how the noble French army surgeon Desgenettes had rejected the criminal suggestion, replying that a physician's profession was to save, not to destroy, human life. The rebuke was particularly scathing because the heroic doctor, in spite of his conviction that the plague was contagious, had already inoculated himself with the disease in order to allay the panic of the terror-stricken soldiers. The army was reduced to eight thousand. After a nine days' march through the burning sands, the exhausted columns of the French reached Cairo. Such was the unparalleled vigor of the survivors that a few days' rest and proper food sufficed to recuperate their strength.
More wonderful still, they soon believed themselves to have returned with crowns of victory. Their crafty general explained that but for the terrible heats of Syria, the pest, and the expedition from Rhodes, whichthreatened their rear, they would have leveled the walls of Acre and destroyed Jezzar's palace, returning with standards and spoils to confirm France's dominion in the hearts and fears of the Egyptians. The volatile and sanguine soldiery, unwilling to admit defeat even to themselves, half believed this was true, and soon by an easy transition came to hold the mere suggestions as actual facts. Berthier was instructed that the native authorities at Cairo were to be so informed by an advance agent, General Boyer. The few important prisoners whose lives had been spared were to be conveyed, with due display of captured standards, to the citadel of Cairo, and there imprisoned with the public announcement "that a great number of such were coming." The litters of the wounded French officers Lannes, Duroc, Croizier, and Arrighi were to be quietly carried in on different days. In one emphatic paragraph are the instructions for Boyer: "He is to write, to say, to do everything which may secure a triumphal entry." So adroitly were truth and fiction intermingled and confused by Bonaparte and his agents, that in spite of various attempted risings the country as a whole remained quiet. Murad, however, who had fled to Nubia, and had there remained in concealment until informed of the proposed Turkish expedition, soon reappeared with the remnants of his cavalry, for the purpose of coöperating with the Sultan's forces. For weeks he came and went among the people so mysteriously that the French guards could never seize him. Bonaparte's superstition was awakened by the stealthy and uncanny movements of his enemy, and in July he gave vent to his nervous irritation in a request to one of his subordinates either to kill or worry to death the object of his dread. "Let him die one way or another, I shall be equally obliged," were his words.