Napoleon invades Egypt

In July 1798, a French fleet landed about 35,000 soldiers near Alexandria. Napoleon Bonaparte, then a rising general, aimed to threaten British routes to India and win glory for the French Republic. At the Battle of the Pyramids on July 21 his disciplined infantry squares crushed the Mamluk cavalry that ruled Egypt for the Ottoman sultan, and he entered Cairo. In early August the British admiral Horatio Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, leaving the army cut off.¹⁴

Napoleon also brought more than 150 scholars and artists. They founded the Institut d'Egypte and recorded ancient monuments, later published in the multivolume Description de l'Egypte. In 1799 French soldiers found the Rosetta Stone, which allowed hieroglyphs to be read. A rising in Cairo in 1798 was crushed, and the campaign into Syria failed at Acre in 1799. Napoleon slipped back to France in August 1799, and the last French troops left in 1801.¹²⁴

The occupation broke the power of the Mamluks and exposed Egypt to European ideas and ambition. In the vacuum that followed, an Ottoman officer, Muhammad Ali, rose to power in 1805 and began Egypt's modernization. Britain and the Ottomans, who declared war on France over the invasion, helped force the French out, and the 1801 surrender at Alexandria sent the Rosetta Stone to Britain, which is why it sits in the British Museum.¹³