Napoleon slams a hand down, rattling ink bottles and challenging the conviction of his lieutenants. Word has come: Egypt is lost. The day folds under the weight of their defeat, and sweat burdens the brow. After a swift reign of only seven years, the French are forced into the fringes of Alexandria. The British have brutalized their way into Cairo, supported by axed, surly Ottomans. Egypt sways in the balance, tight-roped between world powers. Napoleon seethes and surrenders. What he once called “the world’s most important country” is now cradled by his fated rivals. It was 21 March 1801 when the French entered the Battle of Alexandria: their final stand on Egyptian soil, and a defining moment for Egyptian modernity. France is credited as the “awakening” of modern Egypt, and although not the sole initiator, it provided a new landscape of political savvy, social sciences, and diplomacy; all of which remain, to this day, ingrained in the banal mechanisms with which Egypt operates. The society that Napoleon first encountered in Mamlūk Egypt was characterized “by intellectual immobility, social rigidity, and economic paralysis;” it was a stagnant reality that remained so…
