(Book Review)I was pretty excited when I stumbled upon this book in the bookstore. I had always wanted to learn more about Napoleon's Egyptian campaign.
There's a lot of romance that has grown up around this story. The politically incorrect part of me, the part that grew up reading Rudyard Kipling and watching movies like "Gunga Din" (w), is still somewhat fascinated by stories of European soldiers having adventure in exotic locations.
And if that's what you're looking for, some of that can be found here: French soldiers battling Bedouin nomads, getting eaten by crocodiles on the Nile River, and the Rosetta stone.
However, as the book's subtitle, "Invading the Middle East" indicates, the author Juan Cole is more interested in the problems created by a Western country invading a Middle Eastern Muslim country. There are, perhaps, certain parallels to the situation we find ourselves in today.
And in fact, it turns the parallels run a lot deeper than you might think. Remember that the Egyptian campaign was before Napoleon seized control of France's government with a military coup. Back in 1798, Napoleon was not yet Emperor of France, but simply a general under the French Republic.
At the time, France was the only republic in Europe, and they viewed it as their mission to spread liberty and freedom around the world.
They invaded Egypt partly for strategic reasons, but also partly under the rhetoric of freedom and democracy. When they overthrew the Turkish rulers, they fully expected the Egyptians would rise up and greet them as liberators, and the French were confused and frustrated when the Egyptians resisted them.
Perhaps by this point, the story is beginning to sound very, very familiar.
I know I recently recommended "The Revolutions of 1848" as a book relevant to our times, but I take it back. If you want to get some historical perspective on the mess we are in right now with Iraq, this is the book to read.
By the time of the Egyptian campaigns, Napoleon had already established himself as the most brilliant military tactician in Europe. He had smashed the Austrians, the Prussians, and the Italians, and everyone thought this campaign in Egypt, against the seemingly backward Muslims, would be a piece of cake. Instead it ended up a disaster.
The parallels to the present day that Juan Cole has been able to dig up are amazing, including a debate among the French about whether or not to use torture against Muslim insurgents. (The French eventually concluded that, although torture might be effective as a punishment, it is useless as an information gathering tool because the victim will say whatever he thinks his torturers want to hear.)
Some interent critics have accused Juan Cole about being more concerned with 2008 than 1798, but personally I feel that if Juan Cole has been able to dig up the parallels, than it is fair game to use them. And, for the most part, Juan Cole lets the history speak for itself. He quotes generously from eye-witnesses and French memorialists at the time, and for the most part avoids using his voice as the author to hit the reader over the head.
(There are a couple exceptions, such as when he explicitly draws the readers attention to Napoleon's attempt to set up a government of Muslim clerics, and the U.S. attempt to do the same in Iraq).
Indeed, reading this book, one gets a huge sense of frustration at the failure of our leaders in Washington. The historical record was out there and available for anyone who bothered to look (not only Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, but also the French in Algeria, our own national experience in Vietnam, or a million other examples on could mention) and yet we were still stupid enough to blunder into another military quagmire. Politicians always have a remarkable ability to commit this kind of stupidity when it is other people's lives at stake.
However, although Juan Cole brings up many parallels throughout his book, he does not forget about his original story. So if you're a history geek, and you're looking for a book to fill in a gap in your knowledge about this period of history (as I was), then this book will work quite nicely for that purpose as well.
My only complaint is that (as this Amazon viewer put it quite nicely) the book has serious problems in the last act. As I got closer and closer to the end, I kept wondering how Juan Cole was possibly going to have room to get to everything that happened in the little space he had left. And in fact, the end of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign is reduced to a quick summary in the last chapter. After so much detail in the early chapters, I was hoping for a thorough retelling all the way through, but inexplicably the book comes to a rather abrupt ending.
Still, over all an excellent book. Highly readable, and works great as a history or as a political commentary.
Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on Obama's Foreign Policy
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