Cairo -

“It is the first year of the great epics, the grave accidents, the calamitous events, the colossal calamities, the multiplication of evils, the confluence of things, the succession of adversities, the disruption of time, the reversal of the printed matter, the reversal of the subject, the succession of horrors, the different conditions, the corruption of the measure, the occurrence of destruction, and the generality of ruin , and the frequency of causes.

This is how historian Abdel Rahman al-Jabarti describes the beginning of the French occupation of Egypt in 1798, reviewing the massacres and crimes of the occupation, as well as chronicling the struggle of the Egyptians and their resistance, which resulted in the evacuation of the occupation on this day, October 18, 1801, after 3 years that France spent trying to make Egypt is a strategic base from which to invade the East.

The French occupation faced a fierce resistance that extended from Alexandria in the north to Upper Egypt in the south, where the Egyptians fought fierce battles against the French in the three years, and revolted against the French twice in what is known as the first and second Cairo revolution. And they pursued the revolutionaries and their leaders and executed some of them, such as Muhammad Karim, the ruler of Alexandria, but they failed to protect their leader, Kleber, who was killed by the young Syrian Azharite Suleiman al-Halabi.

desecration of Al-Azhar

And the Egyptians do not forget that the soldiers of the French commander, Napoleon Bonaparte, entered the Al-Azhar Mosque to quell the Egyptian revolution, and desecrated the most famous mosques in Egypt in an unforgivable historical crime.

Al-Jabarti describes some of the crimes of the French when storming Al-Azhar by saying, “They entered the Al-Azhar mosque while they were riding horses, and among them were pedestrians like walruses. And the bowls, the deposits, and the caches with wheels and cupboards, and they showered books and the Qur’an, and on the ground they threw them, and with their feet and sandals they trampled on them, and they broke his utensils and threw them on his plate and his sides, and everyone they came across with him stripped him, and from his clothes they took him out.”

sleeve mouths

After the failure of his campaign against Egypt, Napoleon made a great effort to muzzle his generals and military leaders, threatening them with arrest, to prevent the publication of their memoirs about the military failure in Egypt. Despite acknowledging the military failure.

Napoleon and the French authorities took a very hostile stance against what was written negatively in the memoirs of the military leaders who participated in his campaign in Egypt, such as the memoirs of the General "René" published in Paris in 1802 under the title "Egypt after the Battle of Heliopolis", in which he revealed the confusion, turmoil and suffering of the French army. Huge human and material losses, which prompted Napoleon to ban and confiscate the notes.

Napoleon also traced the memoirs of the French soldier "Jacques Mio", which he wrote under the title "Memoirs of the History of the Campaigns on Egypt and Syria during the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Years of the French Republic", in which he exposed the deteriorating conditions of the campaign army and its soldiers, which prompted Napoleon to form a committee to review books before publishing and revise What is in it, especially what is written about the campaign in Egypt.

On the other hand, Napoleon's men presented memoirs condemning the Egyptians and glorifying the French campaign, such as the officer "Howe" who wrote his memoirs entitled "Egypt Campaign: Memoirs of an Officer in the French Army", to make his memoirs part of the national history of France.

"Howay" marginalized the image of the Egyptian resistance to the French, describing them as a "submissive society without a will." He did not mention the first Cairo revolution against Napoleon in it except on one page, describing it as a "general rebellion and a popular uprising", despite his subtitle: "Cairo and the Regions Revolution" And he saw that the Mamluks were the main engine of the Egyptian revolution to defend their personal interests.

distortion of history

In her book "The French Campaign Enlightenment or Forgery?"

The Egyptian researcher, Laila Annan - Professor of French Civilization at Cairo University - stated that Egyptian students in French schools were learning from an early age everything that Egypt owes to France, where the campaign is a scientific and cultural mission, not a colonial military campaign, and that the Egyptians lived in peace and harmony with The presence of the French in Egypt, harmony is not tainted by revolution or bloody violence.

The researcher says that she was a student in French schools, where she studied these curricula, and this prompted her to complete her studies on the truth of the French campaign, and to publish it, considering that the causes of the French campaign against Egypt are diffuse like any historical event, and go back to a time immemorial. Others, the first waves of the sweeping European colonial invasion in the 19th century, while a third party chronicles it as a secondary event, and others treat it as a separate event related to the famous Emperor of France Napoleon, who changed the course of events in all of Europe.

Last July, a new French school in Alexandria was forced to change its name from "Clipper International" to "Starsburg International", after the name angered the pioneers of social networking sites, when they considered it to memorialize the memory of a bloody general who participated in the occupation of Egypt and the killing of Egyptians during the French campaign against their country. .

In the same month, but last year, a propaganda advertisement for the French University in Cairo sparked a wave of widespread discontent among the tweeters, after portraying Napoleon Bonaparte as a figure who introduced civilization and science to the country.

The Egyptian wave of anger forced the university's page to delete the advertisement, but the interaction with the advertisement - which activists re-circulated - did not stop, and led to the university's demand for an official apology for the announcement, which tweets described as an unacceptable historical misleading of the French colonial era.

In the end, the French university was forced to apologize for what it described as the "misunderstanding" that arose after the announcement.

The justification for the invasion continues

For their part, the French are still clinging to their attempts to justify the failed campaign in the east. In 2018, the French historian Jacques-Olivier Beaudon published his book entitled “Egypt Campaign” on the history of the French Revolution and the Napoleon era, presenting the story of the campaign in the context that preserves its glow as an exceptional violent epic, Consolidating the legend of Napoleon, and increasing the phenomenon of obsession with Egypt.

The Egyptian researcher Nasser Ahmed Ibrahim - the author of the book "Two Hundred Years of the French Campaign" - comments that Boudon's book, like other books of the French, tries to justify the invasion. Before the French campaign was the first cultural or scientific campaign in modern history, and that the revolution France was concerned with the liberation of nations, and the Egypt campaign was one of its wars aimed at liberating Egypt from the Mamluk occupation.

Ibrahim adds - in his article in the government newspaper Al-Ahram - that the justification of the invasion is going in one fell swoop, as the French say that this transformation would have taken place only by military force, to ensure the removal of the Mamluk class from power, and to grant the Egyptian nation its independence outside the worn-out Ottoman subordination, according to their claim.

The Egyptian researcher points out that the French exploited this stereotype to overlook the catastrophic results of the campaign. More than two-thirds of the army was liquidated in Egypt, and the remaining third returned between sick, desperate and angry at being sent to a far war south of the Mediterranean, and their neglect for 3 years and the escape of their leader Bonaparte, who was busy making glory A personal politician, portrayed as a great conqueror, at the expense of the army and at any cost.

French novel

On the bicentenary of Bonaparte's death this year (died in 1821), "Robert Soleil", the French-Egyptian writer and journalist and author of many books on the French campaign against Egypt, says that the makers of Napoleon's legend put his military victories at the fore, and described him as the conqueror of the pyramids and the land of the pharaohs, despite The military failure of the French campaign in Egypt, and the restoration of the Ottomans and the British control over Egypt, which made the focus more on the scientific and cultural contribution of this campaign, which is an "invaluable contribution."

Soleil added - in an interview with France 24 - that the French scientists accomplished a great job with the encouragement of Napoleon himself, as they put the book "Description of Egypt", which documents countless discoveries, as they established Egyptology, and revealed the civilization of Egypt to the world and to the Egyptians themselves, "because the Egyptians in that They were not interested in their pharaonic past, but rather rejected that past as a pagan civilization."

Soleil confirms that this cultural approach established the obsession with Egypt and launched the French passion for it, and that Napoleon's campaign came in the wake of the French Revolution to spread civilization in the world, and because Egypt is the origin of civilization, Napoleon wanted to restore civilization to its cradle, considering that despite Napoleon's use of violence in his campaign "Modern Egypt begins without controversy with Bonaparte and his famous campaign, meaning that it had an important political impact by destroying the political system of the Mamluks and paving the way for Muhammad Ali, the founder of the modern state," as he described it.

Soleil believes that the Egyptians continued to accept the idea that Napoleon brought modernity to Egypt, rather than a military campaign that turned the country upside down, when Egypt was a monarchy, until the revolution of July 1952 and the campaign was considered a "foreign occupation", which played a role in awakening Egyptian nationalism , as described.