Book Review: Napoleon’s Egypt

New York Times (Review by Tom Reiss)

“Napoleon’s Egypt” by Juan Cole

In early 1798 the Directory, the oligarchy that was ruling revolutionary France, ordered its top general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to plan the invasion of England. Instead, Napoleon organized and carried out the invasion of Egypt, which became the first modern incursion by the West into the Middle East. . . .

Most books on the expedition focus on the outsize characters of Napoleon and his staff, men like his towering second in command, Gen. Jean-Baptiste Kléber, who was eventually stabbed to death by a fanatical Muslim, or Gen. Jacques Menou, who converted to Islam. But in “Napoleon’s Egypt,” Juan Cole, who teaches history at the University of Michigan and writes a widely cited blog on current United States policy in the Muslim world, mostly ignores these larger-than-life characters to present the invasion and occupation through Egyptian eyes. Cole says his work “attends more closely than have others ... to the interplay of the ideas of the French revolutionary period with Ottoman and Egyptian ways of life,” and what it lacks in narrative drive and coherence, it makes up for in fascinating quotations, mostly from contemporary memoirs and diaries, and in an analysis that suggests comparisons to the current American adventure in Iraq.

See the above page for the complete two-page review.