At this point, there is no doubt that Napoleon’s desire to conquer the world was infinite. Perhaps the clearest example is Russia. On June 24, 1812, in Kovno, the French emperor witnessed the passage of the … Niemen River of the first regiments of his Grande Armée. Its dimensions were so gigantic that it took his troops eight days to cross it on three different bridges. Among its soldiers were Italians, Poles, Portuguese, Bavarians, Croats, Dalmatians, Danes, Dutch, Neapolitans, North Germans, Saxons and Swiss, each with their own uniforms and songs.
During the previous decade, Napoleon had already led further campaigns in Italy and France, and after being crowned at Notre Dame, he continued his astonishing series of victories at Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland. During the summer of 1812, it dominated the entire continent, from the Atlantic to the Niemen River, but beyond that, nothing. This is why he launched into the vast region of Russia to extend his domination to Asia with no less than 615,000 men from around twenty nations.
However, Napoleon’s intentions were not always military. Deep in his little heart was a scientific apprentice, a man of letters, a little intellectual who wanted to know the world as much as to conquer it, as evidenced by the conquest of Egypt at the end of the 18th century. The corsair race employed more than fifty thousand soldiers, nearly four hundred ships, a little more than two thousand officers and approximately three hundred women, including military wives and illegally embarked prostitutes.
At dusk on July 1, 1798, this war fleet, one of the largest ever assembled, set foot on the Egyptian beaches of Alexandria, Rosetta and Damietta. Until then, with the exception of a very small elite, no one knew very well where they were going or what was expected of them on the other side of the Mediterranean. Especially the small army of engineers, scientists, architects, musicians, poets, mathematicians, chemists, doctors, botanists and painters who had joined this adventure even if they were not going to wield a single weapon.
On the way to Cairo
In just twenty days, part of these troops took control of the Nile delta and descended towards Cairo. Seeing the impressive pyramids of Giza for the first time, they shuddered. And then, under the sharp shadows of these gigantic masses of stone, they defeated the poorly organized hordes of Mamluks. In less than two hours, they ended three centuries of Ottoman rule in Egypt.
“Soldiers, from the top of these pyramids, forty centuries gaze upon you”
When he led this colossal conquest, Napoleon was only a promising general of only 29 years old who, in reality, had in mind another objective than the military one and even that of his own glory: to learn everything he could about this country practically unknown in Europe and to show it to the world. This is why he recruited the best scientists, artists and intellectuals from this France of the Enlightenment.
This conquest is part of the interest that aroused among Europeans, throughout the Age of Enlightenment, to know the world and capture it in the most scientific and rigorous way possible, without artifice, through drawings and engravings which were perfected over the years until leading to the birth of photography in 1839. A fascinating journey of discovery in which certain armies put themselves at the service of science and art, in turn, at its service. The goal was to show, as faithfully as possible, areas of the world that most mortals would never be able to visit.
Discover the Orient
Napoleon had long been obsessed with the idea of discovering, in his case, the Orient. During the trip, he read the Quran and considered it “sublime.” And, upon his arrival at Giza, he comments, fascinated: “Soldiers, from the top of these pyramids, forty centuries gaze upon you. In his civilizing desire, he also issued a series of decrees as the new governor of Egypt, with which he created the country’s first regular postal system, a stagecoach service between Cairo and Alexandria, a currency to convert Mamluk gold into French shields, he built windmills to raise water and grind wheat, he drew maps and installed the first lamps in the capital.
Although this journey, which lasted four years, was perhaps the most transformative of all those undertaken in the Age of Enlightenment, it was not the only one. Not even the first. The number of scientific expeditions in this century was much higher than those carried out in previous centuries. Many of them traveled across Africa, America, Asia and even the most unknown corners of the old continent. From maritime explorations with cartographic contributions, to astronomical and geodetic explorations, including naturalists, who aimed to enrich knowledge with new plant, mineral and animal species.
“The description of Egypt”
The work carried out by Napoleon’s army of wise men, during its journey across the lands of the Nile from 1798 to 1802, was impressive. Among them was the mathematician Gaspard Monge, founder of the École Polytechnique; Baron Dominique Vivant Denon, artist who would later direct the Louvre Museum; the geologist Déodat de Dolomieu, one of the greatest explorers of the volcanic regions of Sicily, Calabria and the Alps; the physicist Étienne-Louis Malus, who discovered the polarization of light, and the chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, inventor of bleach.
Napoleon brought in 167 experts who carried out numerous scientific and ethnographic research on site.
In total, 167 experts, responsible for carrying out exhaustive scientific and ethnographic research in the field, which will then be continued in France by another group of artists and intellectuals. All this work resulted in the 23 volumes of texts and plates that make up “The Description of Egypt”. The first was published in 1809 and the last in 1829, in order to catalog all known aspects of ancient and modern Egypt, as well as its natural history.
More than two centuries after its publication in France, two years ago, this work was shown to the public for the first time with its separate plates, as part of the exhibition “A Promised Land”. From the Age of Enlightenment to the birth of photography. A huge exhibition with a selection of more than 900 plates, drawings, engravings and old photographs from this expedition and other scientific and cultural expeditions carried out between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, which can be seen at the Museum of the University of Navarra (MUM), in Pamplona.