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COLUMBIA FORUM
With the Brain Trust in Egypt
When Jacques Barzun `27, the nonagenarian University
professor emeritus and one of America’s most important
cultural historians, suggested that our fin de siècle was an
age of decadence, everyone from The New York Review of Books
to Charlie Rose took notice. Nonetheless, the former provost
told CCT that critics might be focusing too narrowly on one
aspect of his From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western
Cultural Life (HarperCollins, $36), which actually grapples with
myriad developments within Western history. In this excerpt, which
the author suggested, he recounts a neglected scholarly expedition
in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars.
It
is not surprising — but it is shameful — that an
unprecedented enterprise by occidentals that was mighty in size and
in cultural consequences has remained virtually unknown to the
educated in the western world. Most histories and biographies, if
they mention it at all, give it a few lines that associate it with
Bonaparte’s military failure and not with his cultural
success. The subject that has been ignored is the expedition of
French scholars, scientists, and artists to Egypt in the year 1798.
It is a forgotten troop indeed: 167 men of high qualifications,
plucked from schools, studios, and laboratories, pursuant to the
order of the French government and led by General Bonaparte. The
original idea was Talleyrand’s.
The
government, Bonaparte, and the savants (as the group was called by
the accompanying Army of the Orient) each had a different purpose
in mind. The government (the short-lived Directory) wanted to hold
at a distance the young general whose victories in Italy had made
him popular. Bonaparte thought that glory beckoned to him as the
founder of an empire in the East: if he won India, England would be
weakened and he could be a second Alexander. The path was through
Egypt. As for the savants, what they wanted was new knowledge and
possibly adventure.
Their average age was 25. The oldest, the mathematician Monge,
whom Bonaparte had befriended, was twice that age, and he shared
with his friend Berthollet, a chemist, the lead in most operations.
The youngest, not quite 15, was one of a half dozen students from
the Polytechnic School, with as many again of its faculty and 33 of
its alumni. The rest were: physicists, chemists, engineers,
botanists and zoologists, geologists, physicians and
pharmacologists, architects, painters, poets, musicians (one of
them a musicologist), and a master printer on the supporting staff.
Of those invited only two scientists and four artists refused,
pleading age and family obligations. Many tried to be taken on,
though not one among the 167 (or in the army) knew where “in
the Orient” the group was bound for. Secrecy until the
landing itself was imperative: Nelson with the English fleet
patrolled the Mediterranean....
The
organization was splendidly encyclopedic. Besides an amount of
supplies and equipment that could have set up a town, the ships
carried the scientific instruments used in each of the mechanical
arts and the sciences; two whole printing presses with Greek,
Arabic, and other fonts, materials for writing, drawing, and
painting; and 500 works of reference. In May 1798, Toulon harbor
was a forest of masts: 15 ships of the line, a dozen frigates, plus
brigs, avisos, tartans — in all 300 vessels, to be joined in
Corsica by three other convoys, to transport 38,000 troops and
10,000 civilians. The army numbered more officers than usual,
especially generals.
Of
the savants, those who were graded as “generals”
included authorities such as Dolomieu (the geologist for whom the
Dolomite mountains were later named), Fourier (physicist and
mathematician), Conté (chemist), Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
(zoologist), Quesnot (astronomer), Larrey and Desgenette
(physicians), Lancret (surgeon), Le Père (engineer),
Redouté (flower painter), Villoteau (musician). There were two
pairs of brothers and one of father and son. No Egyptologist on the
outgoing trip, many returning.
The
repeated, painful vicissitudes of the journey were many and beyond
full recording. For the savants the trip meant roughing it. The
soldiers resented them and showed their contempt; the generals did
not. The armada escaped Nelson and captured Malta without trouble,
Bonaparte showed there his ability to rule and reform. He abolished
slavery and overhauled the administration, finances, and
educational system. Landing in Egypt — for now all knew their
destination — was another thing altogether. Nelson ventured
into the safe haven where the French fleet lay and sank several
ships with loss of soldiers and sailors but not of
savants.
From
this moment on, the learned corps was repeatedly exposed to pitched
battles and violent native revolts. Possibly worse was the torture
of the many long treks through the desert in various directions,
with fatigue, thirst, sunstroke, sand blindness, and the jibes of
the soldiery as the price of scientific findings and amazing
discoveries. Not the least of these, for the historian, is that
these men, freshly out of their laboratories and studios and
classrooms, turned themselves overnight into soldiers on the firing
line, builders of fortified places, governors of occupied villages,
excavators of ruins, and makers of machinery with unfamiliar
materials. The savants’ courage was equaled only by their
versatility. Conté, a chemist and a painter, invented a new
kind of pump, made pencils without graphite, improved the gears of
water mills, and found a way to reproduce color drawings —
this, 10 years before lithography — all of it in response to
Egyptian predicaments. Nectoux, a botanist, studied the agriculture
and habits of the fellahin, the native peasants. The mathematician
Monge worked out the peculiar hydraulics of Moses’ Fountain.
Le Père, an army engineer, built a stairway and terrace for
the palace that Bonaparte appropriated as his headquarters. Fourier
shuttled between differential equations and presiding at trials in
an improvised, necessary court. Marcel, an Arabist, became the
publisher of the journal issued every ten days, which contained the
reports of the learned at intervals and, more frequently, news for
the troops. The surgeon Larrey took anthropological notes on the
mixed population — Egyptian, Turk, Armenian, Greek, Jewish,
and Bedouin. When mummies were found he studied embalming. At the
onset of bubonic plague and typhoid the astronomers turned
meteorologists to help the physicians predict wind and weather.
Science conquers all.
So
it went. The official program of the expedition was: (1) To study
all of Egypt; (2) to spread enlightened ideas and habits; and (3)
to furnish the government any information it might require. Duties
1 and 3 were abundantly fulfilled and 2 moderately so. The native
population was not at all impressed by the machines and techniques.
What they marveled at was that so many foreigners studied Arabic
and dashed about the desert for silly reasons. The people of Cairo,
the capital numbering 200,000 inhabitants, submitted to having the
main streets swept twice a day and the garbage removed. They were
shocked by the women’s unveiled faces, a little less by
having their own appearance sketched in pencil, but horrified when
color was applied to the portrait, which made it an aid to
witchcraft.
On
their side, the westerners were delighted by the sights, the mode
of life, and the people, whom after a few months they came to think
of as French. This has been a (very un-English) characteristic of
the French colonists everywhere. In Egypt they tolerated all but
the unsanitary practices, they took native mistresses (one general
married a Muslim wife and was converted), and they studied native
mores without condescension. Villoteau the musician was at first
repelled by the several musics of the different peoples; he came to
enjoy and distinguish their merits and share the emotions they were
meant to arouse. In the survey of diseases the physician Desgenette
told his aides to pay close attention to popular medicine —
“superstitions may teach us something useful.” Except
for this last piece of wisdom, the performance and the attitudes of
the corps of savants could be called the Enlightenment in
action....
To
give an adequate idea of what this brain trust, the first and
largest of its kind, achieved in 20 months is impossible in a few
pages or yet a book. The Description of Egypt fills 20
volumes of mega-elephant size — approximately 54 inches by
28.... Egypt was mapped in 47 plates. Publication, begun after the
return to France, was laborious and took a quarter century The
royalties were to benefit the authors, most of whom were then by
current standards old men, and not a few were dead. There had been
only a handful of casualties during the expedition, the most
damaging being the assassination of General Kleber after he had
succeeded Bonaparte as chief.
On
the joint epitaph of the 167, so to speak, one could inscribe the
following items. They gathered all the fauna and flora within
reach, found new species, filled gaps in the known ones. Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire was the indefatigable searcher and his collection of
fishes and mammals played a decisive part in forming his ideas of
evolution and those of Lamarck after him. In chemistry, geology,
geography, and mathematics, a number of important advances were
made, thanks to new facts supplied by the Egyptian environment. To
give but one example, Berthollet proved wrong the notion of
affinity in chemistry by studying sodium and magnesium carbonates
which are found ready made in Egypt, and he proposed a better
hypothesis. The ancient civilization of Egypt was laid open for
further study. At first, the explorers reared on Greco-Roman sights
found barbaric the Sphinx and the Pyramids, but the Valley of the
Kings, the sarcophagi, the mummies — one with a papyrus in
her hand — the bas reliefs, the zodiac on the temple ceiling,
won their unreserved admiration. They measured, made architectural
plans, and inferred history and religion from the vestiges. The
unresting pencil of Vivant Denon drew everything and everybody,
alive or dead, and the panels of hieroglyphics besides.
When
the big block of black granite was found at Rosetta, where the
soldiers were clearing the ground for defensive earthworks and
where that stone had no reason to be, the savants’ jubilation
was at its height: it bore three texts, one in hieroglyphics, one
in demotic (Egyptian cursive for common use), and one in Greek; it
promised the decipherment of the Egyptian language. This was done
20 years later by the independent but combined work of two
stay-at-homes named Champollion and Thomas Young. In the
Description volume, the picture of the stone is life size. In the
British Museum, where the stone reposes, the caption reads:
“Captured by the British Army (1801),” which is
literally correct. Adding “from the retreating French army in
Egypt” would fit the facts still better.
From FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE by Jacques Barzun.
Copyright © 2000 by Jacques Barzun. Used by permission of
HarperCollins Publishers.
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