“The genius of liberty, which made you, at her birth, the arbiter of Europe, wants to be genius of the seas and the furthest nations.” - Napoleon’s address to his soldiers before leaving for Egypt

In 1798, an initial review of France’s naval forces had led Napoleon to conclude his navy could not hope to outfight the power of the Royal Navy, which had been the dominant naval power for centuries, so he was forced to look elsewhere. After months of planning, Napoleon crafted a scheme to attack and conquer Egypt, denying the British easy access to their colonies in India, with the ultimate goal of linking up with the Sultan Tipoo in India itself and defeating the British in the field there. Napoleon sailed with Admiral Brueys and 30,000 troops that June, heading for Egypt. Notionally part of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt was de facto a weak independent regime run by the breakaway Mamelukes. For France, it offered an overland route to India and a chance to beat Britain at her own game via economic strangulation.

Ironically, in their attempt to intercept Napoleon and the French fleet, Admiral Horatio Nelson and the British forces beat the French to Africa, failing to take into account their slower troop transports. While the British turned north, only two days later, on June 28, 1798, Napoleon’s army disembarked at Alexandria. Back in Sicily, Nelson heard further reports about the French and again sailed south. This time, about six weeks after the French reached Egypt, Nelson’s fleet destroyed the French Mediterranean fleet, leaving Napoleon stranded in Africa.

Napoleon harbored all kinds of delusions about his time in Egypt that were not based in reality, but he definitely left a lasting legacy in the region, one he would never live to see or appreciate. By shifting the theater of operations to Africa and the Middle East, Napoleon inadvertently ensured the Europeans would fight there in the future, and the French occupation impressed upon the locals the necessity of catching up to the modern world in terms of technology.

Ancient tactics could not prevail against a modern army, no matter the numbers, but while that was a lesson Napoleon consistently taught his enemies in Egypt and the Levant to their detriment, the French also sped up the occupied populations’ technological advances as well. Perhaps more importantly, the Egyptian Scientific Institute introduced numerous modern innovations, perhaps most importantly the printing press, which in turn encouraged literacy.

This brought about the emergence of nationalism and liberalism, leading eventually to the establishment of Egyptian independence and modernization under the rule of Muhammad Ali Pasha in the first half of the 19th century, and eventually the Nahda, or Arab Renaissance. In a sense, the French arrival in Egypt marked the beginning of the modern Middle East.