Napoleon, Scientist
(Click on the images to enlarge)
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Joseph Fourrier from Louis Reybaud, Histoire de lexpédition française en Égypte (Paris 1830-36) v. 8. |
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Deodat de Dolomieu, from Louis Reybaud, Histoire de lexpédition française en Égypte (Paris 1830-36) v. 7. |
Napoleon is not remembered as a scientist, but he thought of
himself as one. He was trained
as a military engineer and
had considerable mathematical skills. In 1797, he was
elected to membership in the National Institute, the foremost scientific society in post-Revolutionary France.
When
the directive to invade Egypt came down, Napoleon saw it as an
opportunity to make the founding country of western culture a
province of the greatest country in modern Europe. And he
wanted to bring a gift — the gift of modern science — to help
the Egyptians map their country, manage the Nile, raise their
agricultural and industrial output, improve the standard of living,
and invigorate the intellectual climate. Accordingly, he decided
to take with him a corps of scholars, trained in engineering,
astronomy, natural history, topography, manufacturing, and linguistics.
The scholars were to be constituted as the Commission
of Sciences and Arts. He delegated responsibility for choosing
this Commission to three close colleagues:
Gaspard Monge, a
mathematician;
Claude-Louis Berthollet, a chemist, and
Joseph
Fourier, a younger mathematician. Together, they carefully
selected 151
savants to invite along. Several, such as
Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire and
Deodat de Dolomieu, were established
scientists; but many of the engineers were quite young and came
out of the newly established engineering schools, the École
Polytechnique, the École des Ponts et Chaussées, and the École
des Mines. The mission was kept a secret until the last
moment—the ostensible goal was to invade England, not
Egypt — and so these young men blindly streamed by coach
and foot to southern France, where they boarded ships for a
destination unknown.
The ships, 400 strong, set sail on May 19, 1798. Napoleon
and the senior scientists
were comfortably installed
on the flagship,
l'Orient,
but the junior scientists
were lumped in with the
soldiers and sailors, who
did not welcome their
presence. After stopping
to annex Malta, and
somehow avoiding Lord
Nelson's fleet in the
Mediterranean, the armada
landed at Alexandria on
July 1, 1798.
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View of the harbor at Alexandria, from Description de lÉgypte État moderne |
One of the ships, the
Patriote, had a hold full of
carefully selected scientific
equipment. It ran aground
and sank in the harbor, an
ominous beginning to the
scientific enterprise. But
the
savants survived, and
after biding their time in
Alexandria and Rosetta
while Napoleon and his
army established their
military presence, they
eventually made it to
Cairo, and their work
could now begin.
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