Summary: France's invasion of Egypt under Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798 was once seen as a seminal moment in the history of the Middle East and the spread of a modernity equated with European civilization to Muslim world. This narrative, which was largely the product of Napoleon's own propaganda, has been criticized, and scholars using sources such as al-Jabarti's chronicle of the Egypt expedition have focused less on the immediate political impact than on the ways that the French and their Egyptian partners viewed their respective others. The expedition also produced, Description de l'Egypte, a massive but very problematic study of Egypt that can be seen as the birth of Orientalism. In this episode, we explore these issues by considering Napoleon's Egypt campaign not in terms of its military significance but rather its symbolic meaning.
