The Franco-British Treaty of 1763 forced France to reassess its territorial ambitions in order to remain a world power. As a result, it concentrated on those territories left to it by the treaty while simultaneously exploring new and unexploited lands (Broc 1975: 275). These national, territorial missions of expansion were coupled with professional, scientific exploration. During this period, French foreign policy was motivated not only by the pressures of expanding empires, new technologies, and a need for resources. It was also motivated by Enlightenment, philosophical constructs. The writings of Constantin-Francois Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney (1757-1820), for example, pursued a train of thought similar to that of de Maillet. Volney’s writings prophesied the eventual collapse of the Ottoman Empire and, therefore, ideologically facilitated French expansion into the Orient (Laurens 1987: 117, 189-90). All of these factors motivated Napoleon’s decision to invade Egypt, a province of the French-friendly Ottoman Empire, in 1798. Capitalizing in part on precedents set by earlier missions of colonization as well as his own Italian campaign, Napoleon attached to his army a corps of scholars. Brought primarily to create a modern infrastructure necessary for the rapid colonization of Egypt, the savants initially numbered 151 in total. As their time in Egypt progressed the group applied its skills to record all aspects of the strange land: its antiquities, its people, its flora and fauna, its arts and sciences, its geography, etc. As the campaign and the scholars’ explorations continued, the notion of pooling all resources into one comprehensive publication was born. By 1802 all of the French scholars had returned to France and the government began the lengthy process of publishing their findings. The result is the mighty Description de I’Egypte, whose official, yet inaccurate, publication dates are 1809-1828. The first edition of the work comprises ten folio volumes of plates, two atlases, and nine volumes of text. What it represents is the sum of French knowledge concerning both ancient and modern Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century. It was the direct result of a large-scale, violent invasion of one country by another, motivated by new social ideologies, as well as economic and political ambitions, and strongly rooted in prior traditions (Bednarski 2005: 3-20). At the same time, it should be recognized that the historical dynamics which gave birth to the Description, the scale of research undertaken by the savants, the quality of their research, and the long-term efforts behind the project, make the corpus unique amongst earlier colonial-scientific works. Similarly, the corpus must also be viewed as distinct from previous Egyptological works.
World History
