Napoleon in Egypt: The greatest glory, by Paul Strathern

'But for you English, I would have been Emperor of the East." remarked Napoleon to the Captain of the Bellerophon, the ship that transported him to his final exile on St Helena, following his defeat at Waterloo in 1815. It referred to Napoleon's ill-fated invasion of Egypt in the summer of 1798 when, as young General Bonaparte, he had launched a brilliant adventure designed to unite his country's dream of seizing Egypt from the Ottoman Empire and making it into a French colony, with his own ambitions of imitating Alexander the Great in a campaign of Oriental conquest.

In this grand scheme, in which he envisaged himself ruling a great Asiatic empire, independent of the government of the Directory at home, Napoleon planned to march overland to attack the British in India. But while the French were successful fighting on land at the Battle of the Pyramids, they were defeated at sea by Nelson at Aboukir Bay, at the engagement subsequently known as the Battle of the Nile. Meanwhile, the French army, plagued by disease, and weakened by inadequate supplies, was unsuccessful in gaining the support of the native population despite Napoleon's attempts to portray himself as their liberator against the Mameluke oppressor. Finally, the stagnation of the campaign together with unrest back in Paris forced Napoleon to relinquish command to his deputy Kléber. Under attack from British reinforcements and a major Mameluke force, Kléber led the French army's evacuation from Egypt in the summer of 1801. The expectations of glory had ended in farce, humiliation and tragedy, with perhaps as many as 15,000 Frenchmen killed, or dead from disease.

Napoleon is one of those historical figures whose character is so complex, and whose exploits are spread across such a broad canvas, that it's impossible to do them justice in the pages of a single volume. Paul Strathern has hit upon an ingenious solution to this biographical dilemma. He has written a stirring narrative of the Egyptian adventure, which simultaneously demonstrates how Napoleon's experiences in Egypt foreshadowed many aspects of his later rule in France. Here in embryo are many of the later preoccupations of Napoleon's peculiar brand of megalomania. His attempt to bring modern civil justice to Egypt anticipates his introduction of the Napoleonic Code, the foundation of the legal systems of modern Europe. Napoleon's crowning of himself as Emperor in 1804 and his dream of conquering Europe seem to have been rooted in his hopes of glory in Egypt. Less gloriously, his military setbacks were uncannily paralleled later, in the 1812 retreat from Moscow.

Napoleon's entry into Egypt consisted of an armada of more than 300 ships and 40,000 men. For a historical predecessor on a similar scale one has to go as far back as the fifth century BC, and Xerxes's Persian fleet which attacked Athens at the Battle of Salamis. There is also the disconcerting parallel with latter day imperialist adventures. Napoleon's invasion was the first attack on a Middle Eastern country by a Western power in modern times. Well might Bush and Blair have heeded Napoleon's dictum that "history is the only philosophy".

But drawing on Enlightenment ideals, Napoleon also showed himself intent on cultural as well as political control of Egypt. This was no longer a time, he declared, when conquerors "knew only how to destroy". On board his invasion fleet sailed 167 "savants", a legion of culture, the cream of France's mathematicians, scientists, artists and writers, instructed to provide Egypt with the light of reason. But they would also discover the riches of the remains of Egypt's ancient civilisation, temples, monuments, inscriptions, including those on the Rosetta Stone, all extensively documented in the vast publication, Description of Egypt. As Napoleon himself remarked: "The real conquests, those that leave behind no regrets, are those made over ignorance."

Paul Strathern has all the arts of winning, and keeping, the reader's attention, at his disposal. At the same time he has been able to make a solid contribution to the subject, underpinned by wide reading. This is popular narrative history at its best.

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