The Jaffa massacres in 1799: a forgotten colonial violence
Le Fellah, rue de Sèvres, Paris, March 2021 © Olivier Favier / RFI
Text by: Olivier Favier
6 mins
“
I have never been free except in Egypt.
So I allowed myself such measures
”, confided Napoleon I to a relative.
This freedom is not only that of a republican general who, once landed in Africa, dreams of being the successor of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan.
It manifests itself above all by an unthinkable cruelty in Europe towards prisoners of war as well as those wounded in his own army.
Publicity
Read more
When in March 1798, the Directory asked him to lead the expedition to Egypt that he claimed, Bonaparte was 28 years old and had an impressive record of service.
In 1793 he suggested the plan of attack which drove the English out of Toulon and became a brigadier general.
In 1795, he put an end to a royalist insurrection against the National Convention with the cannonade of Saint-Roch church, and he became a major general.
In 1796, he was the general-in-chief of an army of barefooters intended to create a diversion in Italy when the main front remained the Rhine.
He then carried out one of the most brilliant military campaigns in history, defeating in quick succession five Austrian armies and forcing the Habsburgs to sign the peace of Campo-Formio in December of the following year.
A new Alexander
On his return to France, he is scary.
His wish to carry the war far to cut off the route to India from the English provided an unexpected opportunity to get rid of this ambitious young soldier.
Bonaparte and his army from the East left Toulon in mid-May.
They reach Alexandria a month and a half later.
The purpose of the expedition was not announced to the troops until after the capture of Malta.
"
The first city that we are going to meet was built by Alexander
", declared Bonaparte then.
Before giving his first battle, he adds: “
From the top of these Pyramids, forty centuries contemplate you!
Very quickly, the republican references, the necessary religious tolerance to which he exhorted his soldiers on the ship gave way to antiquizing and oriental dreams.
Both will feed the decorum of the Empire.
Napoleon I will go on the battlefields protected from his Mamluks and will leave in Paris many reminders of his “Egyptian adventure”, from the Cairo passage to the Fellah fountain on rue de Sèvres.
The scientific gesture of Champollion and the museum work of Vivant Denon at the Louvre will complete the slide of the capital from Egyptomania to Egyptology, making everything forget about the realities of a conquest and its Syrian extension.
Without a base, Bonaparte dreams of an Empire in India
The army of 25,000 men which landed in Egypt was almost immediately cut off from its rear base by the destruction of the French fleet in the harbor of Aboukir.
On land, victories are multiplying, but as in Vendée, the soldiers have to face popular revolts and guerrillas.
In addition, the Ottoman Empire, threatened on its grounds, prepares a response.
Bonaparte then left with a large half of his men in an offensive with an uncertain goal.
He will confide it later: he dreams of a conquest of the Ottoman Empire and a return to France by Constantinople.
But he did not rule out seizing the Indies to create an Empire there which would no longer have any link with France.
He also describes himself to his troops as superior to Genghis Khan.
From the siege of El-Arich, in Sinai, in February 1799, the French betrayed their agreements with the besieged.
Gaza and Ramallah are looted despite the lack of resistance.
Jaffa is under siege in March.
The negotiator sent by the French is beheaded and his head brandished above the ramparts.
The assault is launched.
"
Everything was passed to the edge of the sword
", summarized Bonaparte.
A good part of the garrison manages to find refuge in large buildings in the heart of the city.
The negotiations resume and the aides-de-camp obtain a surrender against the simple promise to leave the prisoners alive.
"
What do they want me to do with it?"
Bonaparte then gets carried away.
The prisoners are executed in three days.
To save ammunition, the last are killed with bayonets.
According to a letter written by the head of the clothing workshop of the Army of the East, published only in 1979, the same fate would have been reserved for women brought back to the camp to sell it.
"The brake of a troublesome civilization"
The Jaffa massacre obviously feeds British propaganda against revolutionary France.
However, Bonaparte carries the conviction that it is necessary, in order to gain respect in Palestine, "to
be terrible with his enemies
".
The calculation was wrong and the next siege, in Saint-Jean d'Acre, ended in failure.
Back in Jaffa, he poisoned about thirty soldiers sick with the plague.
Some will survive and will tell their troubles when the English arrive.
It is a completely different image, obviously, that the painter Jean-Antoine Gros gives, of the
Plague victims of Jaffa
in the living room of 1804, where we see Bonaparte touching one of the patients.
Chateaubriand will not fail to underline the paradox: “
Buonaparte [sic!] Poisons the plague victims of Jaffa;
we make a painting which represents him touching, by excess of courage and humanity, these same plague victims.
This was not how Saint-Louis healed the sick.
"
If the counter-revolutionary propaganda exaggerated the scale of the massacres - speaking of five hundred poisoned!
- their reality in France has been practically ignored.
The campaign in Syria ended in military failure - Bonaparte returning on the sly a few months later to prepare his coup d'état in Paris - but it announced a change of paradigms in the way the war was waged.
These massacres will be repeated in Spain, where some of the officers sent to Algeria in 1830 will be formed in turn. In 1804, the emperor confided to Madame de Rémusat:
“In Egypt, I found myself freed from the restraints of a troublesome civilization.
I dreamed of all things and saw the means to carry out all that I dreamed of.
"
► To read also: On RFI Savoirs,
the file devoted to Napoleon Bonaparte
► To go further:
Juan Cole,
The true story of the Egyptian expedition
, The Discovery, 2017, € 12
Henry Laurens,
The Egyptian Expedition (1798-1801)
,
Le Seuil, 1997, € 11.20
Newsletter
Receive all international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_FR
History
France
Egypt