Scientific Aspects of the French Egyptian Expedition 1798-1801
Author(s): Charles Coulston Gillispie
Source: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , Dec., 1989, Vol. 133, No. 4
(Dec., 1989), pp. 447-474
Published by: American Philosophical Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/986871
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Scientific Aspects of the French
Egyptian Expedition
1798-1801
CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
Dayton-Stockton Professor of History Emeritus, Princeton University
X/ X r he French occupation of Egypt has greatly contributed to the
enlargement of all the sciences." So writes the military doctor Gaetano Sotira in a memoir on the plague. ' What did the
enlargement consist of? The most signal instance was archaeological,
opening the eyes of Europe to the glory that was Egypt and inaugurating the professional study of Egyptology. That story forms the subject of
another work,2 while the present essay concerns the importance of the
Egyptian expedition to the sciences in general, old and new.
The French expeditionary force of 36,000 men, borne in an armada of
400 ships, landed at Alexandria on 1 July 1798. Through the oven of the
summer Bonaparte moved his army clad in Alpine uniforms across the
desert and defeated the rulers of Egypt at the Battle of the Pyramids on
21 July. On 1 August Nelson surprised the French fleet at anchor in
Abukir Bay and destroyed it, effectively marooning the French army in
the country it controlled. The pretense of liberating the populace from
Mameluke despotism gave way to the reality of a military occupation
when Cairo rose against its conquerors in a bloody insurrection, swiftly
suppressed, on 21 October. Bonaparte's purpose in invading the Holy
Land in early 1799 remains unclear. Was it to escape with part of his
army by way of Turkey? Was it to move against India? In either case, he
had to put the best face possible on failure, his first, by falling back on
Cairo in pretended triumph in June 1799. Thereupon, he extricated himself and his immediate staff from the impasse by leaving, not to say
1 "Memoire sur la peste observee en Egypte pendant les annees 7, 8, 9," Memoires sur
l'Epypte 4 (An 11-1802), 156.
Charles C. Gillispie and Michel Dewachter, eds., Monuments of Egypt, the Complete
Archaeological Plates from "La Description de l'Egypte" (2nd printing; two volumes boxed,
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988). The first printing with the editorial material in French was also issued in Paris under the title Monuments de l'Egypte (Editions
Hazan, 1987.) A French version of the present essay appears in Henry Laurens, et al.,
L'Expedition franpaise d'Egypte, de 1789 a 1801 (Paris: Colin, 1989).
PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, VOL. 133, NO. 4, 1989
447
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448 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
deserting, his army in August 1799 and returning, an ostensible conqueror, to a France beset by temporary reverses, there to seize power as
First Consul in the coup d'etat of 18 brumaire (9 November). Left in
command in Egypt, Kleber continued the occupation with a firm hand.
A devout young Moslem assassinated him on 14 June 1800. His successor, Menou, maintained a faltering French presence until the inevitable
capitulation to British forces in September 1801, just over three years
after the initial landing.
The invasion of Egypt was the second main phase in the historical
trajectory of Napoleon Bonaparte, the first having been the overthrow of
Hapsburg rule in northern Italy in the battles that made his reputation
in 1796 and 1797. In both instances, the campaigns involved more than
the obvious strategic considerations of flanking attacks against Austrian
and British power respectively. In both countries, the French rationalized their intervention on the ground that the armies of the Republic
were the bearers of the principles of the Revolution in a worldwide war
of liberation, freeing all peoples from despotism and the abuses of the
past. Both in Italy and Egypt, moreover, political and administrative
modernization began under the French occupation, as it did elsewhere.
To that end, French policy comprised cultural aspects in company with
military factors. In the future-shaping spirit of the times, science was
foremost among the elements of culture. Bonaparte's esteem for science
and scientists is a major case in point. During the Italian campaign, he
attached a small civilian Commission of Science and Arts to his staff. To
fill the intervals between military actions, Bonaparte preferred the con-
versation of the mathematician Monge and the chemist Berthollet, its
leading members, to the company of others of his entourage. During
preparation of the Egyptian expedition, it was Bonaparte's decision to
enlarge on that precedent by forming a technical task force capable, not
only of serving the needs of the Army, but of rooting French science and
technology in the Valley of the Nile.
The Commission of Science and Arts, the first on such a scale ever to
accompany any military expedition, numbered at the outset some 151
persons, eighty-four of whom had technical qualifications while another
ten were medical men.3 The Institute of Egypt, a colonial adaptation of
the Institute of France, opened on 6 fructidor an 6 (23 August 1798). Its
total membership during the three years of the occupation consisted of
3 Jean-Edouard Goby, "Composition de la Commission des Sciences et Arts d'Egypte,"
Bulletin de l'Institut d'Egypte 37, 1" fascicule (1955-56), 315-342. Monsieur Goby has devoted
a large number of highly meticulous memoirs to the history of the expedition. For full
citations, see my preface to the work cited in note 2, pp. 44-45. I am further indebted to
him for kindly reading a draft of the present paper and correcting a number of errors. I am
equally grateful to Monsieur Jean-Franqois Roberts, who has saved me other mistakes that
he detected in the course of translating the paper for publication in France.
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FRENCH EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION 449
51 people. Twenty-six belonged to one or the other of the two scientific
sections, "Mathematics" and "Physics," the remaining two sections
having been designated "Political Economy" and "Arts and Letters."
The Institute held 62 meetings, the last on 1 germinal an 9 (22 March
1801). It elected Monge its first president and Bonaparte vice-president
for terms of three months. Fourier was Permanent Secretary throughout. The proceedings were those of academic bodies in France. Memoirs
were read or submitted in writing and referees named to report on the
contributions; the governmental, in this case the military, authorities
called on the Institute for advice on particular problems; these tasks and
others were referred to ad hoc committees.4
Publication occurred through various channels. The Courier de
l'Egypte, a chronicle or calendar of public events comparable to the semiofficial Moniteur universel in Paris, occasionally printed abstracts of the
proceedings of the Institute. La De'cade e'gyptienne modeled itself on the
De'cade philosophique, the journal of enlightened learning in France. The
majority of the communications to the Institute printed therein were
also published in the four volumes of the Me'moires sur l'Egypte brought
out in Paris by P. Didot between 1799 and 1802. The latter contains much
that the De'cade, which ceased publication in 1800, does not. Certain
memoirs also appeared in the regular scientific press-the Annales du
Muse'um d'Histoire Naturelle, Bulletin de la Socite' Philomatique, Journal des
Mines, etc. Several members of the expedition published books on what
they had seen and learned, for example Desgenettes's Histoire medicale de
l'Arme'e d'Orient (1802). The most famous in this category is Vivant Denon, Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte (1802). Finally, the monu-
mental Description de l'Egypte appeared between 1809 and 1828, with its
preface by Fourier and its ten albums of plates, its three atlases, and its
nine volumes of text, the whole divided into the three parts of Antiquite's,
Etat Moderne, and Histoire Naturelle, completed by an atlas of maps, Carte
Topographique et Ge'ographique.5
4 The proces-verbaux of the Institute, which were lost soon after the repatriation of the
expedition, have been reconstituted by Jean-Edouard Goby, "Premier Institut d'Egypte:
Restitution des comptes rendus des seances," Me'moires de l'Academie des Inscriptions et
Belles-Lettres, Institut de France, nouvelle serie, 7 (1987). Citations to this memoir employ
the author's coding to identify the references.
5 Hereafter to be cited as DE, with the initials A, EM, or HN. For the inception and
publication of this work, and its importance in the foundations of Egyptology, see the
introduction and notes in Gillispie and Dewachter, Monuments of Egypt, note 2, which
reprints the five volumes of plates on antiquity. A second edition of DE was undertaken
by the firm of Panckoucke before the first had been completed. It appeared between 1820
and 1829. The texts are there reprinted in 26 octavo volumes. References in this essay are
to the original edition. A table of contents giving the location of memoirs and Explications
in both editions appears in Henri Munier, Tables de la Description de l'Egypte (Cairo, 1943).
See also Michael W. Albin, "Napoleon's Description de l'Egypte: Problems of Corporate
Authorship," Publishing History, 8 (1980), 65-85. I am indebted to Dr. Robert S. Bianchi of
the Brooklyn Museum for this reference.
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450 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
Such is the printed record. Of the scientists themselves, five were
established figures at the time of departure from France in May 1798:
Monge, Berthollet, Fourier, Dolomieu, and Nouet. Three others, Malus,
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Savigny, became well known after their re-
turn to France. Lancret also probably would have done if he had not
died young. A number of the papers the leading people read before the
Institute treated topics that pertained to their personal research but not
to Egypt.6 These communications filled out the program with examples
of pure science, and we shall not consider them further. Neither, at the
other extreme, shall we consider applied science in the form of responses to tasks set by the commission concerning immediate needs of
the army.7 Our subject has two aspects, first, the properly scientific
work undertaken in consequence of the presence in Egypt and, second,
the scientific study of the country itself.
Of the papers concerning phenomena encountered in Egypt, the most
famous is Monge's memoir on mirages.8 He read it at the second meet-
ing of the Institute on 11 fructidor an 6 (28 August 1798), just a month
after the grueling march from Alexandria to Cairo. The illusion of island
villages shimmering and reflected in the waters of a lake ever receding
with the horizon had tantalized and tormented the army. Monge explained that at the height of the day in a desert the heat of the sunsoaked sand dilates the air immediately above the ground so that its
density is less than that of the enveloping atmosphere. Light rays from
just above the horizon are reflected as if by a mirror at the upper surface
6 For example, on 11 thermidor an 7 (29 July 1799) Monge read a draft of a memoir of
infinitesimal geometry later published in Journal de l'Ecole Polytechnique (lie cahier, 1802).
It was the first of three papers eventually included in Application de l'analyse a la geometrie
(1807), see Goby (1987) 313, and Rene Taton, L'oeuvre scientifique de Monge (1951), 221-228.
Fourier read four papers on pure mathematics, (Goby [1987] 203 and 221, 263, 274, 533).
The first, "Notes sur la mecanique generale," was probably an outgrowth of his earliest
published paper, a memoir on virtual velocities in the Journal de l'Ecole Polytechnique (5'
cahier, 1798), the only thing he ever published on classical mechanics, completed shortly
before his departure for Egypt. The titles of the other three papers concern theory of
equations, which became the second main division of his mathematical investigations, the
first having been heat diffusion. It is often said that the latter interest originated during his
three years in the Egyptian climate, but there is nothing in the written record to substantiate that surmise. Of the other mathematicians, Corancez, an altogether minor follower of
Lagrange, presented a piece on the theory of algebraic equations and another on the
design of balance wheels in watches to minimize the effects of heat dilation (Goby [1987]
232, 483). Malus, a Monge disciple and an engineering officer not originally a member of
the commission, presented a memoir on differential equations (Goby [1987] 596). A memoir on light, his entry into what became his principal work in physics, was intended for the
Institute but never read. Arago gives a resume ("Malus," Oeuvres 3 [1859], 131-134).
Berthollet, finally, read a paper on the formation of ammonia and another on the eudiometric analysis of the atmosphere. The latter compared the proportions of oxygen to
nitrogen in Cairo and Paris but had no other import for Egypt (Goby [1987] 031, 302).
7 Goby (1987), 95-96, lists the questions that Bonaparte proposed to the Institut d'Egypte
on such matters as resources for the manufacture of gunpowder, the improvement of
ovens for baking bread, the water supply, substitutes for hops in brewing beer, etc.
8 "Memoire sur le phenomene d'optique connu sous le nom de mirage," Decade egyptienne 1 (An 7, 1799), 37-46; reprinted in Memoires sur l'Egypte 1 (1800), 64-78.
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FRENCH EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION 451
of that rarefied layer. The effect is double. It bring
images of villages and palm trees that are beyond the true horizon, and
it also inverts them so that they appear to be surrounded by and mirrored in the waters of what is in reality a reflected rim of sky. Modern
optics attributes the phenomenon to a dual refraction, direct and inverse, in the surface layer rather than to reflection by its upper surface,
but the underlying physics of the effect remains what Monge adduced.
Altogether more strategic in the scientific development of the author
was Berthollet's "Observations sur le natron," the second most frequently mentioned paper to derive from the study of Egypt.9 Berthollet's career reversed the usual order, for he made his reputation in
applied science and contributed to fundamental science, not out of innovations in his youth, but as a middle-aged man reflecting on a lifetime
of experience with chemical reactions and procedures. His first specialty
had been the chemistry and technology of dyes, and indeed he read
minor papers to the Institute on the use of indigo, henna and safflower
in Egypt.10 After his return to France, the work of his maturity laid the
foundations of modern physical chemistry. Published in 1803, Essai de
statique chimique deals with the effect of physical factors-temperature,
pressure, light, relative concentration-in determining how far and how
fast a reaction will go, and sometimes whether it will occur at all. It
cannot be said that Berthollet's experience in Egypt caused him to take
up those problems. He was already dissatisfied with the prevailing theory of elective affinities, which depended on purely chemical considerations, and he would probably have moved beyond criticism to research
in any case. But Egypt was the occasion, and the specific problem it
offered was the natural occurrence of soda in the Natron Lakes, which
take their name from the Greek for that commodity, a staple of Egyptian
commerce since antiquity.
In late January 1799, Berthollet and his assistant Regnault accompanied General Andreossy in a six-day reconnaissance of the valley containing them, at a fourteen-hour march west of Cairo, and also of the
adjoining valley of the Fleuve sans Eau. They found the limestone formations surrounding the lakes, which are strongly saline, to be impregnated with salt and encrusted with a thick natural coating of the alkali.
Evidently salt (sodium chloride) and limestone (calcium carbonate) un-
dergo a double decomposition reaction to produce natron or soda (sodium carbonate) and calcium chloride. The natron formed only on limestone. Where clay predominated, the soil was full of salt with little or no
soda. The sandy areas contained neither since there the rains dissolved
the salt and carried it into the lakes. In coves into which the limpestnnp
9"Observations sur le natron," Memoires sur l'Egypte 1, 271-279. Extracts were also
published in Annales de Chimie 33 (1800), 343-348. The standard work on Berthollet is
Michelle Sadoun-Goupil, Le chimiste Claude-Louis Berthollet, 1748-1822, sa vie-son oeuvre
(Paris: Vrin, 1977).
10 Goby (1987), 064, 165, 202.
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452 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
areas drained, however, the water contained soda rather than salt in
solution. The deduction had to be that in those limestone regions, the
lime decomposed salt in the presence of heat and humidity while the
resulting natron dried out and solidified at the surface. The companion
product, calcium chloride, being extremely deliquescent, took up water
and seeped into the ground. The exciting feature, to Berthollet, was that
the reaction well known to chemists in the laboratory is exactly the
reverse. Here, then, was a classic instance where the conditions rather
than the chemicals determine the direction of the reaction.
On 4 February 1799, Andreossy gave the Institute a lively account of
the region, its topography, its dejected Coptic monasteries, its trade
routes traversed by Geaouabis and Bedouins." Berthollet followed with
a report on his observations and announced his intention of explaining
the formation of natron in another session. Instead, on 10 February he
and Monge departed with Bonaparte for the invasion of the Holy Land,
then part of Syria. On 29 June, at the first meeting of the Institute after
their return to Cairo, Berthollet was elected president and Andreossy
vice-president. He began reading the promised "Recherches sur les lois
de l'affinite chymique" on 8 August, and never finished. On 22 August
he and Monge departed again with Bonaparte, secretly, for France. He
thereupon read his memoir before the parent Institute of France in October and November. Published in its Me'moires for 1800, and also sep-
arately, it makes a preliminary statement of the argument of Essai de
statique chimique in briefer compass and, it has to be said, clearer form.'2
Only of the naturalists could it be supposed that their presence in
Egypt would contribute intrinsically to the development of their science
rather than incidentally, as was the case for mathematicians, physicists,
and chemists. Apart from the engineers, naturalists, indeed, were the
most important contingent. Originally, there were to have been fifteen,
five in each of the main specialties. In the event only twelve set sail, in
mineralogy Dolomieu and Francois-Michel de Roziere together with
three young mining engineers, Pierre-Louis Cordier, Victor Dupuy, and
Louis Duchanoy (who later entered the Corps des Ponts et Chausse'es); in
zoology, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Jules-Cesar Lelorgne de
Savigny together with the former's student assistant, Alexandre Gerard;
in botany, Antoine-Francois Coquebert de Montbret, Alyre RaffeneauDelile, Hippolyte Nectoux, and Henri-Joseph Redoute. Redoute was an
artist attached to the Jardin des Plantes, not a scientist but a flower
painter like his more famous older brother, called Raphael of the Flowers. Savigny was not a zoologist by training but a botanist. Berthollet
had approached Cuvier, who refused membership in the Expedition,
and urged the 21-year old Savigny to accept in his place, saying he could
11 "Memoire sur la vallee des lacs de Natron . . .," D&ade egyptienne 2, 93-122.
12 Academie des Sciences, Proc0s-Verbaux, 2, pp. 18, 20, 21, 38, 39; Institut de France,
Memoires 3 (1801), 1-96.
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FRENCH EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION 453
always learn the science. Gerard turned out to be an idler. Coquebert,
also little more than a boy, became librarian of the Institute and died of
the plague on 7 April 1801, the eve of the evacuation of Cairo.
Of the mineralogists, Roziere did the substantial work, as will appear,
and not Dolomieu, as might have been expected. Indeed, the expedition
destroyed Dolomieu's life. A onetime knight of Malta, Dolomieu was
one of two emissaries-the other was the administrator Poussielguewhom Bonaparte sent ashore in advance of landing to demand that the
Grand Master surrender the island. Dolomieu afterward resented Bonaparte's having made him appear a traitor to the order. He was not of a
temperament or lineage to play courtier to this upstart of a conqueror.
"My association with a military expedition, which placed me (albeit
indirectly) under the orders of a general, stultified my imagination . . ."
even though the general was Bonaparte.13 After eight months in Egypt,
he departed Alexandria with his assistant, Cordier, on 10 March 1799.
When storms forced his ship to take refuge in Taranto, he was thrown
into solitary confinement, a revenge taken by refugee knights of Malta
who had the ear of the Bourbon rulers presiding over the Neapolitan
counter-revolution. He was released after 26 months that ruined his
health. On regaining Paris in March 1801, Dolomieu survived appointment to a chair in the Museum by only eight months and died in November following a terminal tour of the Alps.
The most explicit record of the scientific conquests of the Expedition
is to be found in the third division of the Description de l'Egypte, three
albums of plates accompanied by two volumes of text devoted to "Histoire Naturelle." The whole, let it be said at once, is something less and
something more than the Natural History of Egypt that was intended. It
is less in that it is fragmentary, however voluminous, and the organization of the text is haphazard, not to say chaotic, rather than systematic. It is more in two ways: first, in that participants encountered problems and opportunities that carried over into their own careers and
disciplines, both constructively and destructively; and, second, in that
the entire enterprise associated scientific factors with historical, economic, social, and political factors in an intimacy never previously
achieved, nor even attempted, in the study of any other country.
What is in the "Histoire Naturelle"? Like the first division of the
Description de l'Egypt, "Antiquites," it is best approached through scrutiny of the plates, with secondary and supplementary reference to the
texts. The case is otherwise with respect to the second major division,
13 From a memoir written in prison in Messina, July 1799, A. Lacroix, D6odat Dolomieu,
sa vie aventureuse, sa captivite', ses oeuvres, sa correspondance (2 vols; 1921), 1, 3. During his
brief time in Egypt, Dolomieu interested himself rather in archaeology and agronomy than
in mineralogy and geology. The memoirs and reports he prepared are collected in A.
Lacroix and G. Daressy, "Dolomieu en Egypte," Menoires presentes a l'Institut d'Egypte 3
(1922). See also T. C. Brun-Neergaard, Journal du dernier voyage du cn Dolomieu dans les Alpes
(1802).
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454 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
the "Etat Moderne" of Egypt, where the memoirs hold far greater interest than the plates. The plates of natural history were engraved between 1805 and 1814. Four contributors were responsible: Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire and Savigny for zoology, Delile for botany, and Roziere for
mineralogy. In principle each was to supply a set of "Explications" to
accompany his plates in the volumes of text. Neither Geoffroy nor Savigny accomplished that, Geoffroy because he lacked the will, Savigny
because he lacked the power. Their annotations had to be supplied by
others some twenty years after the plates were ready, Geoffroy's by his
son Isidore, Savigny's by a naturalist also of the next generation, Victor
Audouin.
Volume I contains the vertebrates in 62 plates, 42 from Geoffroy's
collection and 20 from Savigny's. They are divided into the four classes
of Mammals, Birds, Reptiles, and Fish. Geoffroy did all the ichthyology
and Savigny all the ornithology, while Savigny supplemented Geoffroy's bats, mongooses, rabbits, and rams, his crocodiles and tortoises,
with carnivores and snakes of his own. Volume II contains the invertebrates, in 15 groupings-three classes of mollusca, the annelids or
worms, three classes of arthropods, three orders of insects, the echinoderms, and four orders still called zoophytes, (sponges, ascidians,
polyps, and algae) -the whole illustrated in 105 plates comprising thousands of drawings, all due to Savigny. Tome II bis contains 62 botanical
plates from Delile and 15 illustrating minerals from Roziere.
The plates that produce the most vivid impression for clarity of line,
precision of detail, and general elegance are the series of 14 in color on
birds in Tome I, the entire series of invertebrates in Tome II, and the 15
in color on minerals in Tome II bis. The effect is not accidental. Savigny
and Roziere gave minute and constructive supervision to their preparation, whereas Geoffroy and Delile appear simply to have engaged
artists to draw the specimens illustrated from their collections and
passed the designs along to the engravers. What with the skills and high
standards in those two trades, the results are good, but not outstanding.
Indeed, the incisive quality that Savigny brought to the plates he furnished will appear in comparing his with Geoffroy's in the few instances
wherein both illustrated the same animals, the ichneumon mangouste,
for example, and also their respective sets of snakes. Savigny's plates
thus became a resource, specially in malacology, and not mere illustrations of Egyptian flora and fauna for vicarious travelers.14
Given the importance attached to natural history, it comes initially as
a surprise that the naturalists contributed very little to the De'cade e'gyptienne and the Me'moires sur l'Egypte. The first time Geoffroy appeared
before the Institute of Egypt, he read a paper on ostriches, a piece of
14 It was for scientific, not antiquarian, reasons that in 1926 Paul Pallary reproduced
Savigny's plates on mollusks, identifying the species that Audouin had been unable to
name and correcting his faulty annotations, "Explications des planches de J.C. Savigny,"
Memoires prisentes a l'Institut d'Egypte, 11 (Cairo, 1926).
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FRENCH EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION 455
popular science, he confessed apologetically to Cuvier, "written for the
Army."15 While in Egypt, Savigny composed one paper, on the purple
lotus, a vestige of his botanical training. Its "very pointed style" served
to convince his skeptical older colleagues that the youth was a serious
and exact naturalist-thus Geoffroy to Cuvier, again.16 Apart from that,
Roziere wrote a memoir on the mineralogy of Qoqeyr, Delile a couple on
the cultivation of senna and on the genus Ximenia, and J. -L. -A. Reynier,
brother of the general, a pair on date palms and the caprification of the
fig sycamore.
That is all, and it was not much. Still, the naturalists were there, not
to write papers, but for the prior tasks of making observations and
collecting specimens. They suffered a setback before they could begin
when, in July 1798, the 'Patriote,' the ship carrying scientific apparatus,
struck a reef and sank. Scalpels, microscopes, tweezers, alcohol, jars,
pins, paper for pressing plants, frames for mounting butterflies-their
equipment lay at the bottom of Alexandria harbor.17 Still, except for
microscopes, they could improvise more easily than could the engineers, also deprived of their more elaborate and precise instruments. All
alike persevered. Geoffroy frequented scholars, fishermen, peasants,
snake charmers, bazaars, caves, and excavations, always drawing, dissecting, and mounting everything vertebrate, ancient or current, that he
could lay hands on. His enthusiasm prevailed until the return from
upper Egypt early in 1800. Thereafter, spells of illness and discouragement interrupted his activity. During the last months in Alexandria,
from March until September 1801, he largely gave himself over to speculative philosophy. Among the naturalists, only Savigny accompanied
the Syrian task force. He maintained his zeal until the bitter end. The
threat of confiscation of their material by the British then brought Geoffroy back into action at his junior colleague's side.
The collections they saved were very considerable. Back in Marseilles,
they needed forty or fifty cases to transport it all to Paris. Geoffroy
required some 300 pints of fresh alcohol to replace the turbid liquor in
which products of his dissection risked rotting. He succeeded in his
wish of presenting his specimens of vertebrate anatomy to his col15 "Observations sur l'aile de l'autruche," De'cade e'gyptienne 1, 46-51; Lettres ecrites
d'Egypte, ed. E.-T. Hamy (1901), #xxiii, 29 vendemiaire an VII, 21 October 1798, 95-96.
Geoffroy also contributed a "Note relative aux appendices des Raies et des Squales," male
sexual organs the function of which was suggested to him by analogy to similar structures
that he found dissecting reptiles in upper Egypt, loc. cit., 3, 230-233. In addition, he
requested support for a program of experiments to determine whether the sexes coexist in
"les germes de tous les animaux." That topic became a favorite motif of his research in later
life, but there is no evidence that he pursued it further in Egypt. Report in Me'moires sur
l'Efypte, 3, 385.
"Description d'une nouvelle espee de nymphaea," 1, 105-112; reprinted in Annales
du Muse'um d'Histoire Naturelle 1 (An 11 - 1802), 366-369, specifying the Nymphaea Caerula.
The Geoffroy letter is the same cited in note 15.
17 For the recovery of the cargo in 1985, see Patrice Bret, "Operation 'Patriote': EDG sur
les traces de Bonaparte," L'Histoire, 105 (Novembre 1987), 88-90.
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456 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
leagues of the Museum of National History. The commission that received them consisted of Cuvier, Lamarck, and Lacepede. The last wrote
the report and noted specially that the mummified forms were identical
with corresponding species today.18 Not being a member of the staff of
the Museum, Savigny kept his collection in his own possession in order
to prepare his plates for the Description de l'Egypte. The insects would
appear to have been the richest part and furnished the material for his
signal contribution to morphology, the study of the mouth parts of
insects and crustacea. Besides that, he had mounted the skeletons of
many birds, most notably the ibis, on which in 1805 he published the
book that made his reputation with the public.19
Geoffroy and Savigny were of comparable interests and contrasting
temperaments. Neither one was satisfied to do anatomy merely for the
sake of taxonomy. Zoologists both, they moved beyond classification to
morphology, Geoffroy in the spirit of romanticism, however, and Savigny in the service of precision. Geoffroy's was a generous disposition.
His letters from Egypt are lavish in their protestations of affection and
esteem for his colleagues of the Museum, and specially Cuvier, to whom
the majority are addressed. His ardor is almost embarrassing, the more
so as he received no answers nor any reassurance on the not infrequent
occasions when he let himself wonder whether he had been forgotten.
Already the polarization of his basic interests began to make itself felt.
In the first year and a half, coming to know the country, one of the inner
circle of the Institute, joining the engineers in the exploration of upper
Egypt and later of the Sinai, scalpel always in hand, he was full of
ichthyology, ornithology, herpetology, and the archaeological anatomy
of mummified animals disinterred at Saqqara and elsewhere. Toward
the end, he transcended all that in meditation about ultimate causes. It
was prompted by capture in the Mediterranean of specimens of the
torpedo ray and the electric eel. As soon as he reached quarantine, he
wrote Cuvier on 4 vendemiaire an 10 (26 September 1801), he would
send "a very extensive work on physics, chemistry, and physiology:
discovery of the nervous fluid and of the vital principle has led me to a
very grand theory. I hope to return to France worthy of you and my
illustrious colleagues." The discovery was that the nervous fluid is identical with caloric and that all the phenomena of nature can be explained
18 "Rapport des Professeurs du Museum, sur les collections d'Histoire naturelle rapportees d'Egypte par E. Geoffroy," Annales du Muse'um d'Histoire Naturelle 1 (An 11, 1802),
234-241.
19 Histoire naturelle et mythologique de l'Ibis (1805), Savigny's collection, together with five
albums containing the original drawings for the plates, was left to his companion, Olympe
Letellier de Sainteville, and by her to the city of Versailles, where they lived and died. It
might still be seen in the Bibliotheque de Versailles until 1919. In that year an impatient
librarian, pressed for space and failing to arrange for custody in the Museum or elsewhere,
consigned the specimens to the cellars. There they mouldered until Paul Pallary identified
the remains in 1927. See Pallary, "Marie Jules-Cesar Lelorgne de Savigny, sa Vie et son
Oeuvre," Premiere Partie, Memoires pre'sentes a l'Institut d'Egypte, 17 (1931).
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FRENCH EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION 457
by its interactions with light, oxygen, and the electric
these ruminations earned Geoffroy the contempt of Fourier, who, since
Berthollet's departure, had set out by "sarcastic insults" to show that all
his colleagues were ignoramuses, and that only his own students, the
civil engineers, had some knowledge. Fourier's object, thought Geoffroy-this from Marseilles-was "to exercise the same intellectual domination that Lagrange and Laplace are customarily accorded in Paris."20
The pattern repeats itself writ large in the record of Geoffroy's mature
development throughout his scientific prime. Immediately upon returning to Paris, he began publishing memoirs in the Annales du Muse'um
d'Histoire Naturelle on his discoveries in Egypt: on a hitherto unknown
Nile fish with 14 to 16 dorsal fins, a lungfish, which he called Polypterus
bichir from its name in Arabic; on a flatfish, Achire barbu, with both eyes
on one side of the head, for all the world like a Picasso drawing; on the
electrical organs of the torpedo ray, the electric eel, and the thunder fish;
on the Nile crocodile.21 Reprintings of these memoirs, together with an
account of the "Trionix" or Great Nile Tortoise and a general discussion
of the order of bats, constituted the principal contributions from his
own pen to the Description de l'Egypte. He preferred dramatic creatures,
obviously. In that respect, he harked back to Buffon, and also in that his
descriptions include character sketches of the animals, their habits, their
conduct, almost their morality. One title in the Annales is "Observations
sur l'affection mutuelle de quelques animaux, et particulierement sur les
services rendus au Requin par le Pilote."22 His anatomies were highly
professional, however. The detail is precise. The drawings and descriptions are clear. He knew the literature thoroughly. He had a keen eye for
novelty.
The true direction of his interests appears in a series of three memoirs
on the anatomy of fish in general published in 1807. "This year," he
wrote, he had had a revelation, "while working to put the finishing
touches on my ichthyology of the Nile for the imminent publication of
the great work on Egypt." Until then, he had agreed with the opinion
among naturalists that in many respects the internal organization of fish
bore no resemblance to that of vertebrates in general. Now, on close
examination of his Egyptian specimens, and of the rich collection assembled by Cuvier, he is delighted to find that the very organs that had
most obstinately resisted comparison do in fact exhibit deep analogies
with those of other vertebrates.
20 op. cit., Letters lviii, 4 vend. and lxii, 29 frim., an 9, 26 Sept., 20 Dec. 1800.
21 "Histoire naturelle et description anatomique d'un nouveau genre de Poisson du Nil
nomme Polyptere," loc. cit. 1 (1802), 57-68; "Description de l'Achire barbu," ibid., 152-155;
"Memoire sur l'anatomie comparee des organes electriques de la Raie torpille, du Gymnote engourdissant, et du Silure trembleur," ibid., 392-407. Geoffroy was very prolific. A
complete bibliography of his publications appears in Theophile Cahn, La vie et l'oeuvre
d'Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1962).
22 Loc. cit., 9 (1807), 469-476.
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458 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
The shift toward morphology led Geoffroy away from systematics and
toward eventual composition of his major work, Philosophie anatomique.23
It culminated in the famous confrontation with Cuvier in 1830 over
Geoffroy's central tenet, the underlying unity of form in all vertebrate
organization.24 He never did do any more annotations for the Description
de l'Egypte. Instead, subscribers waited. They waited and waited and
had to wait until 1824. By then Geoffroy's son Isidore was nineteen, and
his father turned him from the career of mathematician the boy had
intended and made of him the laboratory assistant who then gave those
"finishing touches" to the ichthyology of the Nile that his father had
promised when Isidore was two years old. So it was with the other
classes of reptiles and mammals. In the latter section, Geoffroy himself
did complete the bats, but that was all.
Savigny, by contrast, started by publishing a book of general interest
and moved in the opposite direction from Geoffroy toward the highest
specialization. His Histoire naturelle et mythologique de l'Ibis (1805) is a
work of surpassing charm, combining classical scholarship with zoolog-
ical precision in small compass and graceful proportion. Allowing for
the modesty of the presentation and scale, it may be said that Savigny
accomplished for the scientific side of the expedition what Denon had
done for the archaeological with Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute-Egypte
(1802). He piqued the fancy of the public. He vindicated Herodotus and
the classical authors who had written of two species of ibis in Egypt,
white and black, while questioning, on the strength of Hebrew sources,
their statements that the birds were unknown elsewhere. Modern naturalists who failed to identify the white ibis in its native habitat had
confused it with herons in lower Egypt, failed to penetrate upper Egypt,
where it was widespread, and taken their evidence from its representation in bas-reliefs instead of dissecting easily available mummies. As
for its black cousin, modern naturalists were again at fault in failing to
identify it with a common migrant, the curlew. Again, they had given
classical sources the wrong sort of confidence in looking for a bird that
feeds on snakes. The fame of the ibis in antiquity derived from its
antipathy to serpents and scorpions, from its service in devouring
snakes, especially winged ones, that otherwise would have invaded the
land of the pharaohs and poisoned its people. In natural fact, Savigny
found, the stomachs of both black and white ibises were full of crustaceans and mollusks. They are wading birds, stabbing their down-curved
beaks into the mud of marsh and river-bank, and quite incapable of
killing or eating snakes.
23 The first volume (1818) is generally agreed to be Geoffroy's masterpiece. In it he
argues for unity of type on the basis of comparisons of five groups of anatomical structures
among vertebrates of many classes. The second volume (1822) represents a further shift in
interest and discusses variation in species with much emphasis on teratology, and partic-
ularly on deformations in human anatomy.
24 Toby A. Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
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FRENCH EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION 459
Whence, then, the mythological role? Savigny spins
ination tempered by thorough knowledge of the Greek and Latin au-
thors who treated of Egypt. It had nothing to do really with snakes, from
which Egypt was in no danger, except as symbols of evil. No, the ibis
appealed because it is a fresh- water bird arriving on the summer winds.
It settles along the banks and leads the rise of the life-giving waters. It
follows them on their retreat, even into the canals and waterways of
town and village, a handsome, sympathetic creature, its graceful curve
of a bill congruent with life and humanity, a link between domesticity
and nature. Through its seasonal cycle, it becomes identified with the
zodiac and Toth, the ibis-headed equivalent of Mercury, bringer of science and messenger of the gods, to whom the first month of the year is
dedicated. If the ventral cavities of ibis mummies contained the remains
of snakes, and typically they did indeed, it was because the embalmers
had known how to respect truths that reach higher than natural history.
Thereupon Savigny, now twenty-eight years old, settled down to the
arrangement and study of his collection, and also of collections of invertebrates at the Museum and elsewhere, looking to preparation of the
plates for the Description de l'Egypte. Many bear the legend, "engraved
between 1805 and 1812." On 29 August 1808, he presented his taxonomy
of birds to the General Assembly of the Commission.25 He worked most
intensively between 1810 and 1814, for the division of Histoire Naturelle
was already falling behind Antiquite's and Etat Moderne in the struggle to
finish the work and to satisfy the increasingly impatient authorities. For
that reason he deferred what looked the easiest, almost routine, task of
furnishing the "Explications" for his plates in favor of perfecting the
illustrations themselves and writing up the discoveries the work was
yielding in zoology at large.
He gathered those discoveries in his major book, Memoires sur les
animaux sans vertebres, published in 1816, a work of morphology, as was
Geoffroy's Philosophie anatomique, and published almost at the same
time, but very different in spirit and subject matter. It consists of two
parts comprising two memoirs in the first and three in the second, all of
them read before the First Class of the Institute between October 1814
and January 1816. Part I, subtitled "Theorie des Organes de la Bouche
des Crustaces et des Insectes," marks the point of departure for the
19th-century zoological study of homologies in general. It contains no
speculation about the plan of nature, no obiter dicta at all. Nor do Savigny's other writings.
When he began ordering his Egyptian materials in 1802, so Savigny
advised the reader at the outset, he found himself at a loss to ascribe to
5 "Systeme des Oiseaux de I'lgypte et de la Syrie," DE.HN 1 i,re Partie (1809), 63-114.
A note advises the reader that "This systematization of birds is to form part of a larger
work." It never did. It is one of only two scientific memoirs published uniquely in DE
rather than reprinted there after having been long available in the journal literature. The
other is Savigny's Systeme des Annelides (n. 30).
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460 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
the manifold families of insects and crustaceans precise Linnean characters, that is to say systems of organs always disposed in the same
order and thus comparable from species to species. The botanist he had
been trained to be would do that (he implies), whereas entomologists
are forever multiplying observations without generalizing them or laying a foundation for their science. What no one had yet attempted, he
would try. The task might well prove beyond his strength, "But I
strongly desired to contribute in some measure to the perfecting of the
beautiful work on Egypt, which does such honor to France among the
public."26
He began with some 1500 species by detaching the mouth parts and
the other main external features and making separate drawings of each,
proceeding to organs of nutrition, of sense, of respiration, and of locomotion. Most of the creatures were barely 4 to 5 lignes long (a little less
than a centimeter) and some much smaller. With this array of thousands
of drawings before him, he found that the same elements of mouth parts
occur in all the forms and that their modification from species to species,
genus to genus, order to order, afforded the most regular and revealing
series of comparisons. His first paper concerns moths and butterflies.27
He there attacked the most controversial case, for Latreille had held that
Lepidoptera along with Diptera are the two orders whose organs of mastication are entirely different in the first and second stages of their lives.
Cuvier, too, considered that the jaws of the caterpillar disappear completely on its metamorphosis into a butterfly. Not so, Savigny found,
taking issue with his elders. Butterflies, like their caterpillars, like Coleoptera, like Neuroptera, and "all chewing (broyeurs) insects," have two
lips, an upper and lower, two mandibles, and two jaws, always in the
same relative positions. True, they are so modified, and so miniaturized,
that it was not surprising they had never been recognized. The maxillae,
in particular, had been taken for a tiny two-part coiled tubule in no way
resembling jaws. With that characterization, indeed, Savigny established the morphological definition of the class of insects properly
speaking, that is to say the Hexapods, with six legs and two antennae,
whether winged or not, whether undergoing metamorphosis or not.
There remained the second division of articulated invertebrates, the
myriapods, the arachnids, the crustaceans (the term arthropod is later),
which Linnaeus had grouped under the designation insect. They form
the subject of Savigny's second memoir, in which he adduced homologies with a virtuosity and daring that are even more startling than the
26 Op. cit., iii-iv. For bibliographical detail of these memoirs, see Henri Daudin, Cuvier
et Lamarck: Les classes zoologiques et l'idee de serie animale, 1790-1830 (2 vols., Paris: Alcan,
1926), 2, 314-315.
27 "Observations sur la bouche des Papillons, des Phalenes et des autres insectes lepidopteres; suivies de quelques considerations sur la bouche des Dipteres, des Hemipteres
et des Apteres suceurs," op. cit., 1, 1-37; lues a l'Institut le 16 octobre 1814. Rapport de
Lamarck, Academie des Sciences, Proces-Verbaux 5, le 24 Octobre 1814, 408-411.
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FRENCH EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION 461
acute comparisons of the first.28 Here, too, the mouth parts are the key
to classification, with the difference that in certain orders some of the
organs that hexapods exhibit are lost altogether. In those cases, the
organs that serve for mastication are comparable to those that other
orders use for locomotion. Crabs are the notable example. They show
two mandibles, two pairs of jaws, and underneath those structures
three pairs of auxiliary jaws. The organs that serve as legs in hexapods
thus appear to be transformed into jaws in crabs, which are called decapods, since they have five additional pairs of appendages that serve
for crawling.
The three papers that form Part II of the collected work are grouped
under the heading "Recherches anatomiques sur les Ascidies composees et sur les Ascidies simples." Very few memoirs read before the
Institute in these years were given such speedy and such full reports as
the successive committees, composed of Cuvier, Lamarck, and Latreille,
accorded to Savigny. Cuvier took the occasion of the first two of these
papers to review the entire field of polyps, zoophytes, and lithophytes,
inasmuch as Savigny's observations were "of epoch-making character in
the natural history of colonial animals."29 Savigny had shown, in a
word, that the organization of the alcyons-a designation he now pre-
ferred to the vagueness of polyps-was far more complex than had been
supposed, that several genera of zoophytes were in reality composite,
that is to say colonies of ascidians, and that the entire order of creatures
was very comparable to mollusca.
The second part of Savigny's Memoires sur les animaux sans vertebres,
but not the first and perhaps even more interesting part on buccal theory, was included in the Description de l'Egypte, as was the last work he
was able to complete, "Systeme des annelides."30 Comparing the species he had collected in the Red Sea and Mediterranean with those
already assembled at the Museum, he advanced the systematization of
the large and confused group of organisms that Cuvier had designated
"Red-Blooded Worms." Savigny read his monograph before the Institute in three installments from May to July 1817, and presented the
28 "Observations sur la bouche des Arachnides, des Crustaces et des Entomostraces,"
op. cit., 1, 39-117; lues a l'Institut le 19 juin 1815. Rapport de Lamarck, Cuvier, Latreille,
loc. cit. 5, le 3 juillet 1815, 521-526.
29 "Observations sur les Alcyons gelatineux a six tentacules simples," lues a l'Institut le
6 fevrier 1815, op. cit., 2, 1-23; "Observations sur les Alcyons a deux oscules apparens, sur
les Botrylles et sur les Pyrosomes," lues le ier mai 1815, 2, 25-66. Rapport de Cuvier, loc.
cit., le 8 mai 1815, 496-500. The third memoir in this series was "Observations sur les
ascidies proprement dites, suivies de considerations generales sur la Classe des Ascidies,"
2, 83-132.
30 DE, HN, Texte, 1, 2' Partie, Tableau systematique des Ascidies, tant simples que composees,
mentionn6es dans les trois me'moires suivants; offrant les Caracteres des Ordres, Familles, Genres et
l'Indication sommaire des Especes, 1-58; and 3e. Partie, Systeme des Annelides, principalement de
celles des Cotes de l'Egypte et de la Syrie, offrant les Caracteres tant distinctifs que naturels des
Ordres, Familles, et Genres, avec la Description des Especes, 1-128. Savigny appended a note
stating that after communicating the monograph to the Academy, he had added four new
genera, and had added five new species to five others, but had made no other changes.
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462 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
completed text on 29 November 1820. In the interim, he suffered the
first onset of the neurological disorder that robbed him of effective sight
and incapacitated him for life when it recurred in 1824, "in the prime of
life, victim of his devotion to science" -thus Latreille and Lamarck, the
latter near blindness himself in old age.31 Everyone supposed that Savigny must have contracted the "germ" of his affliction in Egypt, though
ironically he had been one of the few to be spared the prevalent
"opthalmia" while in the desert.
Savigny was never able to provide the annotations for his plates. Not
only could he not work, he could not be spoken to about work. In
desperation the commission responsible for publication, pressed by the
Minister of the Interior, the Marquis de La Corbiere, and drawing on his
authority, arranged that a young naturalist, Victor Audouin, would furnish identifications and explanations as well as he could by drawing on
secondary sources and the internal evidence of the drawings
themselves.32 Apparently Olympe Letellier de Sainteville, who selflessly
shared Savigny's life and cared for him, agreed that he should not be
told. Audouin made many mistakes and omitted much. Savigny never
became blind; he could occasionally read for brief intervals, and learned
what had been done. His objections and corrections may still be seen
entered in his copy of Description de l'Egypte in the Municipal Library of
his native city of Provins.33 Unable to support the light of day, he passed
the years until his death in 1851 enveloped in a veil of black netting
whenever the shutters of his room were opened. His only remaining
publication was a description and taxonomy of the highly patterned
hallucinations produced by the incessant turbulence in his optic
nerves.34 He lived out his days as if with an aurora borealis inside his
head.
31 "Rapport sur le travail de M. Savigny relatif aux Annelides," Academie des sciences,
Proces-Verbaux, 7, le 6 mars 1820, 22-28.
32 For the official explanation of these arrangements, see the introductory note to the 4e
Partie of the first volume of the text of Histoire Naturelle, which contains Audouin's Explications sommaires des planches dont les dessins ont e'te' fournis par M. J. C. SAVIGNY, followed
by a brief extract from the Histoire naturelle et mythologique de l'Ibis.
33 On Savigny's illness, see Paul Pallary, "Marie Jules-C6sar Savigny, sa Vie et son
Oeuvre," ibre Partie (La Vie), Memoires presentes a l'Institut d'Egypte 17 (1931), chapters
XII-XIX; 2e Partie (L'oeuvre), 20 (1932), 97-107; 3e Partie (Documents) 23 (1934), 87-146.
Pallary transcribed Savigny's annotations concerning Audouin's Explications, 2e Partie,
28-38.
34 "Remarques sur les Phosphenes, phenomenes dont le principe est dans l'organe de
la vue, ou fragments du journal d'un observateur atteint d'une maladie des yeux," Me'moires de l'Acade'mie des Sciences de l'Institut de France 18 (1842), 385-416. In the opinion of
colleagues in the Wilmer Opthalmological Institute of The Johns Hopkins University,
Savigny's illness was other than ocular. They find the symptoms to be a "classic description of temporal lobe epilepsy." The cause in an adult is normally a tumor, though it is rare
for an adult so afflicted to survive the onset as long as did Savigny. A possibility, extremely
rare, would be a low-grade glioma. Letter to the author from Dr. Alfred Sommer, 19
September 1988.
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FRENCH EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION 463
The botany in the Description de l'Egypte is of less importance to science
than the zoology.35 Geoffroy reported in an early letter that the botanists
were at first disappointed to find little in Egypt that they did not already
know in Europe.36 Hippolyte Nectoux, who had been Royal Botanist
and director of the royal gardens in Port-au-Prince, published very little
about Egypt.37 The young Coquebert died of the plague in Cairo in the
last moments of the occupation. A little memoir he had written comparing the flora of France and Egypt is included in the Description de
l'Egypte as a memorial.38 Apart from that, everything came from Delile.
He supplied 61 plates to Tome II bis, accompanying them with "Explications" in the text.39 He worked out a classification of the plants he had
illustrated, cross-referencing them to their Arabic names and also to
Linnean nomenclature and to the other major systems.40 Besides that,
he contributed memoirs on wild and on cultivated plants and another
on the doum palm of upper Egypt, on which he had read a paper.41
Delile was industrious but showed nothing of the conviction of either
Geoffroy or Savigny. In 1803 he went off to America as assistant commissioner for commerce in the consulate at Wilmington, North Carolina. He had studied medicine before joining the Egyptian expedition,
and he resumed those studies in New York and Philadelphia, taking an
M.D. in 1807. Thereupon, he was called back to Paris to take charge of
botany for the Description de l'Egypte. In 1809 he defended his New York
thesis (on pulmonary consumption) before the Faculty of Medicine in
Paris and proceeded to treat patients while also preparing his Egyptian
plants for publication. He was appointed to Candolle's chair in botany in
Montpellier in 1819 and lived there until his death in 1850.42
The mineralogy in the Description de l'Egypte is, on the other hand,
very interesting indeed. The fifteen plates are extremely handsome.
They comprise 112 illustrations in full color of the principal rocks and
petrifactions encountered in the exploration of the country and in the
study of its monuments. The author, Francois-Michel de Roziere, was a
mining engineer. His participation in the work on Egypt constitutes the
35 But see P. Ascherson et G. Schweinfurth, "Illustrations de la Flore d'Egypte," Memoires pre'sente's a l'Institut Egyptien 2 (1889), 25-260, Avant-Propos.
36 Lettres e&crites d'Egypte, Letter xv, to A. L. de Jussieu, 25 Thermidor an 6, 12 August
1798, p. 67.
37 Goby (1987), p. 107. My information on Nectoux's earlier activity comes from James
E. McClellan III, who has completed the draft of a book on Science and Colonialism in
Saint-Domingue. Nectoux did publish a brief Voyage dans la Haute-Egypte, au-dessus des
cataractes (1808).
38 A.-F.-E. Coquebert de Montbret, "Reflexions sur quelques points de comparaison a
etablir entre les plantes d'Egypte et celles de France," DE, HN, Texte, 1, 1r Partie, 59-62.
39 "Flore d'Egypte," DE, HN, Texte, 2, 145-320.
40 "Florae Aegyptiacae illustratio," DE, HN, Texte, 2, 49-82.
41 "Memoire sur les plantes qui croissent spontanement en tgypte," DE, HN, 2, 1-10;
"Histoire des plantes cultives en tgypte," 11-24; "Description du Palmier Doum," 1, i re
Partie, 53-58, cf. Goby (1987) 085.
42 On Defile, see the article by Jean Motte, Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 4 (1971),
21-22.
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464 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
sum total of his contributions to science and scholarship. He seems to
have been completely forgotten, and unjustly so, for the contributions
are remarkable. Roziere was quite evidently both thoughtful and conscientious, a person of unusual cultivation, taste, and imagination even
for a member of a generation in which those qualities were not rare
among technically inclined people. He was aided by a fellow mining
engineer, Hippolyte-Victor Collet-Descotils, and a student, Jean-Nicolas
Champy.
At that juncture in the development of earth science, mineralogy was
shedding the chrysalis of natural history and entering into the formation
of the new discipline of geology. Roziere designed his plates expressly to
exemplify the service that properly executed engravings of rocks could
render the new science. The graphic arts applied to natural objects had
been perfected in the previous thirty years. Roziere pointed to the difference in beauty and precision between Buffon's plates, excellent for
their day, and the much superior illustrations, especially of lilacs, by
Redoute the elder. Geologists had yet to develop a precise classification
and standardized nomenclature that would enable them to identify mineral productions by a systematic language. Roziere cited several scientific descriptions of the rocks of Egypt-for example, from Saussure,
"Rock resulting from a mixture of transparent quartz, yellowish feldspath, and black schist in moderately hard layers" -to show why neither
the scientific nor the general leader could dispense with either a sample
or an illustration of the mineral in question. Even for those with ready
access to a cabinet of mineralogy, a graphic representation had certain
advantages. It could be designed to exhibit the distinguishing characteristics of a particular mineral, not all of which might be present in
every sample. The elements could and should be written down, but the
form, the color, the mixture, above all the texture, those features could
only be shown graphically.43
Such were the theoretical considerations that presided over the drawing and engraving of the plates on mineralogy. Most of them were
executed by Cloquet, former drawing master at the School of Mines in
Paris, and others by Amedee and Ringuet. Half a dozen engravers divided the task of preparing the plates, often using different techniques-engraving, stippling, and dry-point-for rendering varieties of
surface in the same rock. The lines were too fine to permit color printing
from several plates. Instead, the principal colors were printed from a
single plate, and each sheet was then touched up by hand as called for
in the Redoute technique. Once prepared, the illustrations were pre-
sented, not in some order of mineralogical systematics, but according to
the occurrence of the objects in Egypt. The purpose of the Description de
l'Eqypte after all was "to give a complete knowledge of the country."
4 Roziere, "Discours sur la representation des roches de I'Egypte et de I'Arabie par la
gravure, et sur son utilite dans les arts et dans la geologie," DE, HN, Texte, 2, 41-48.
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FRENCH EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION 465
Thus, Plate 1 shows the varieties of granite, the "syenite" of writers in
antiquity, in the region of Assuan and the Cataracts; Plate 8 the porphyries of the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea; and Plate 9
fossilized shells of the Red Sea Coast. Elsewhere in the work, under
Antiquite's and Etat Moderne as well as Histoire Naturelle, other articles on
topography and agriculture, some of them by Roziere himself, deal in
passing with the mineralogy of various regions. The coverage was not
complete, however, and he undertook to incorporate in his Explications
enough detail of the regions that had been missed to complement those
memoirs.44 Prominent among them was his own De la Constitution Physique de l'Egypte, to which he joined these Explications in the form of an
appendix.45
The full title is "On the Physical Constitution of Egypt and on its
Relation with the Ancient Institutions of the Country." This book-length
study of physical geography by an otherwise unknown mining engineer
is characteristic of the larger commitments of the contributors to the
Description de l'Egypte. In other hands, or in some ideological context, the
treatment might have seemed daring. Roziere sought to show how culture derives from material circumstances. His approach is quietly matter-of-fact, however. More than any other country, he observes, Egypt
invites such analysis, first because of her historical importance in the
beginnings of civilization, and second because the physical conditions of
life in society largely came down to domination by the Nile. No other
country has ever exhibited such dependence of a highly developed society on a single set of natural factors that could be studied in isolation.
"That is what imperiously dictated the first customs and determined
their character, and perhaps that is what has changed least."46 Knowledge of the physical state of Egypt will throw light, not only on her own
ancient people, but on usages of Greece, of the Near East, and of Europe. Elements of their own theogonies, their arts and crafts, their systems of time and measurement, and their physical and astronomical
conceptions, all derive from Egypt. Roziere had informed himself of
what was known of the origins of the zodiac, of the division of the year,
month, and day, of linear and angular scales and units of measurerhent.
His treatment of the much discussed Egyptian metric system, a subject
that attracted others among his engineering colleagues, may be the most
interesting feature of his enormous and informative memoir.47
In the original planning of the Description de l'Egypte, topography was
to have been a fourth, or rather the first, main division of the work,
44 "Explications des planches de mineralogie," ibid., 683-725.
45 Ibid., 407-682.
46 Ibid., 408.
47 Ibid., 3e Partie, Sec. 1 re, 497-534; for other discussions, see P. S. Girard, "Memoire sur
le Nilometre de l'Ile d'Elephantine, et les Mesures egyptiennes," DE, A, Memoires, 1, 1-48.
Edme Jomard, "Memoire sur le Systeme Metrique des anciens Egyptiens," loc. cit., 1,
495-802; Samuel Bernard, "Notice sur les Poids Arabes anciens et modernes," DE, EM 2,
i6re Partie, 229-248; and "Memoire sur les Monnoies d'Egypte," loc. cit., 321-468.
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466 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
preceding and setting the stage for Antiquites, Etat Moderne, and Historie
Naturelle.48 That planning fell victim to considerations of military security when, after the collapse of the peace of Amiens in 1803, the Com-
mission was informed that the Emperor had ordered that the map of
Egypt "should remain under the seal of a state secret."49 In 1814 the
restored monarchy authorized eventual publication of the Carte Topo-
graphique de l'Egypte, et de Plusieurs Parties des Pays Limitrophes as a supplement to the completed work. It appeared only in 1828. Consequently,
the memoirs intended to accompany it are scattered amid the texts of the
other three divisions, the largest number ending in the three volumes of
Etat Moderne. The Carte topographique, or map itself, is on a scale of
1:100,000 and is divided into 47 sheets, numbered from south to north,
beginning with the Cataracts and spreading out to include the Delta, the
Sinai, and Syria. Accompanying and synthesizing them is the Carte geographique in three sheets at a scale of 1:1,000,000. A single-page "Tableau
d'assemblage" locates each sector in an overview of all Egypt. All told,
thirty-seven members of the expedition ran traverses, more or less ex-
tensive: seven topographical engineers, thirteen officers in the military
engineers, twelve civil engineers, two students, and three general officers (Andreossy, Reynier, and Sanson).50 On repatriation, all were ordered to deliver their sketches and data into the custody of the Depot
General de la Guerre. There the maps were drawn and the plates engraved under the supervision of Colonel Pierre Jacotin of the Corps of
Topographical Engineers, who had directed the field work in Egypt. The
preparation required the services of 23 engravers.
The plates are beautiful and the atlas is a triumph of the graphic arts.
Compared to the existing cartography of Egypt, it may also be considered a work of professional quality. The map that had guided the invasion was a pretty one. It had been compiled in 1765 by an armchair
cartographer, the chevalier d'Anville, who worked from books and from
other maps. When the Carte Topographique de l'Egypte is judged by the
criteria of mapmaking in 1800, however, the verdict is mixed. For it was
below standard technically. Not only was the model, the Cassini Map of
France, already beginning to be backward, but the circumstances in
I'vnt nrecliicded the use of enuallv accurate methods in the field. On th
48 On 18 February 1802, Chaptal, then Minister of the Interior, summoned the members
of the Institute of Egypt to his office in order to name the commission that would oversee
the work. They chose Monge, Berthollet, Fourier, Costaz, Desgenettes and Conte. See
Pierre Jacotin, "Memoire sur la construction de la carte de l'Egypte," DE, EM, 2, 2e Partie,
1-118, 18-19.
49 D'Hunebourg, Minister of War, to Berthollet, in 1808, though undated, Bibliotheque
nationale, NAFr 3577, registre 2, containing the proces-verbaux of the Commission on the
DE.
50 A manuscript memoir by Jacotin gives a different and fuller listing than the page of
credits printed with the atlas. "Expose des moyens employes pour parvenir a la confection
de la Carte de l'Egypte." Bibliotheque nationale, Departement de cartographie,
GeDD2564. It is evidently an early draft of certain of the passages included in the memoir
cited in note 48.
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FRENCH EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION 467
other hand, the map of Egypt was ahead of its time conceptually. It
anticipates the thematic cartography of the nineteenth century, which
serves civic purposes other than the simple mapping of terrain-showing transportation systems, for example, or natural resources, or population distributions, or regionalization of economic activity.
Ideally, admits Jacotin in his "Memoire sur la Construction de la Carte
de l'Egypte," an application of the most exact scientific procedures in a
full survey would have been appropriate. After all, geometry had been
invented in Egypt. That would have required measuring base-lines on
the ground, determining the length of an arc of the meridian, never yet
accomplished in those latitudes, triangulating the entire country as the
Cassini map did for France, and fixing the exact geographical position of
the resulting network by astronomical observation. Nothing so ambitious was possible. Teams of surveyors would have needed armed escorts, as did the mission that undertook Bonaparte's favorite project, the
limited task of re-establishing the route of the canal that had connected
the Red Sea with the Mediterranean in antiquity.51 Its results suffered
from the loss of precision instruments, most of them in the 'Patriote' and
the remainder in the sack of Caffarelli's headquarters in Cairo during the
insurrection of October 1798. But even had that fine equipment been
available, it could not have been used to undertake a general survey.
There were too few trained people. There was not time. All that could
be attempted were the rougher and readier techniques, either of traverse
or of sketch map, that are available to a surveyor working alone.
Those two sets of techniques are not to be despised. In skilled hands,
they suffice for ordinary purposes. Of the total area of 3010 square
leagues (for engineers still generally thought and worked in the old
units, reserving the metric system for official reports), about 40 percent
was mapped with the use of plane table, measuring chains, and graphometer (a graduated demi-lune with a moveable sighting arm), while
in the remaining areas the distances were paced off and the directions
taken by compass. In the ideal case of a proper survey by triangulation,
a single astronomical determination suffices in theory to fix the coordinates. Conditions in Egypt having been far from ideal, the senior astronomer of the commission, Nicolas-Antoine Nouet, multiplied observations to determine the latitude and longitude of some 36 vantage
points in order to compensate for error in the traverses.52
51 J.-M. Le Pere, "Memoire sur la Communication de la Mer des Indes a la Mer Mediterranee, par la Mer Rouge et l'Isthme de Soueys," DE, EM 1, 21-186. On this enterprise,
see Gillispie, in Monuments of Egypt (n. 2), 10-12; J.-E. Goby, "Histoire des nivellements de
l'Isthme de Suez," Bulletin de la Socie'te d'Etudes Historiques et Ge'ographiques de l'Isthme de Suez
4 (1951-52), 99-177.
52 Jacotin's explanation of the two techniques, op. cit., n. 47, 12-13 is admirably clear and
could perfectly well be incorporated in a modern manual of surveying. The terrain sectors
allocated to each engineer were chosen to include at least two of Nouet's reference sites,
one at either end where each overlapped with the neighboring sector. They could thus
serve to control the accuracy of the traverse in each sector and to link it to the next.
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468 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
The oldest member of the Institute of Egypt, Nouet had always been
something of a journeyman astronomer, not to say a workhorse. His
activity in Egypt, and it was prodigious, consisted entirely of determining and recording astronomical and meteorological data. Apparently he
had kept his instruments in his personal baggage. They consisted of a
Borda repeating circle 25 centimeters in diameter, a Dollond achromatic
telescope with 63 millimeter aperture on a copper mounting, a 35 centimeter quadrant also on a copper column, a Berthoud marine chronometer, no. 34 in that artisan's register, and two compasses, one for declination and one for inclination. Determining latitudes was, of course, a
relatively simple matter of reading the height of the sun on a given date.
To determine longitude required comparing the time of given astronomical events in Egypt to their occurrence according to Paris mean time.
The difference was a measure of the longitude, an hour corresponding
to 150. Nouet relied most frequently on eclipses of the moons of Jupiter,
but also noted occultations of Jupiter and Venus. He had with him the
astronomical almanac, Connaissance du Temps, but verified many of the
ephemerides on his return to Paris. Tourists even now may see the
record of his determinations inscribed by the sculptor Castex on the
stone of the temples of Philae and Karnak. Not all of them are correct.
He had established the position of Alexandria immediately on landing,
and run a triangulation of the city and its environs, in collaboration with
the naval officer Franqois Quesnot, as Nouet and other associates later
did for Cairo. Before his arrival there, an accident in Rosetta altered the
movement of the chronometer. By good fortune another member of the
expedition, the astronomer Beauchamp, also had a Berthoud chronometer, No. 29, and let Nouet have it. The extremes of heat affected its
regularity, however, particularly during the invasion of Syria. Nouet
referred later readings back to his Alexandria observations to correct for
this new source of error, though with only partial success. Assembling
the data in Paris, he followed the method that Dionis du Sejour had
devised for the Cassini map in calculating projection of the data onto a
plane surface. Intersections of latitude and longitude at 30' intervals
together with the 36 cardinal geographical locations were plotted with
respect to rectangular coordinates consisting of the meridian passing
through the apex of the Great Pyramid of Giza and the parallel of latitude at right angles to it.53
It is in the memoirs and studies on topography that the Description de
l'Egypte most largely fulfills the promise of its title. Evidently the term
connoted both delineating the outlines of a place and observing what
went on inside, for the description, much of it composed by engineers,
is of human society in its setting. On 19 November 1799, right after the
return to Cairo of the commissions that had explored the antiquities of
5 Jacotin, op. cit., 29-30; Nouet, "Observations astronomiques faites en tgypte pendant
les Annees 6, 7, et 8 (1798, 1799, 1800)," DE, EM, 1, 1-20.
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FRENCH EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION 469
upper Egypt, Kleber appointed a Commission des Rens
Moderne de l'Egypte drawn from members of the In
charge among ten sub-committees, the tenth on Ge
drography consisting of Pierre Jacotin, commander
engineers (Inge'nieurs-Ge'ographes) and J.-M. Le Pere
in the Corps des Ponts et Chaussees, who had directe
ancient canal from Suez to the Mediterranean. It is u
was they or the parent body who decided that an en
inquiry, should form part and parcel of the survey. I
and Le Pere drew up an elaborate set of instructions
running traverses.
It had three parts. The first prescribed the methods to employ in
surveying terrain. The second provided a form to fill out in ten columns.
The tabulation would assign a code number to each locality and give the
place names in Arabic and French. The surveyor would write down the
name phonetically as best he could understand it and have it corrected
as soon as he could find someone who knew Arabic. There were then
spaces for the number of inhabitants and families, their status and occupations, the type of agriculture, the species of trees, the nature of
commerce and industry, and particular remarks. The third item was a
notebook for recording general observations about the region. What of
the communications, by land and water? What of the state of canals and
tow-paths? What of the air quality and drinking water? What of animal
husbandry and of the prevalence of wild animals and snakes? What of
forestry, of gardening, of stone-quarrying and masonry? The surveyors
are invited to write at large of the character of the population; of why
one region is more densely populated than another; of the Arab tribes in
surrounding territories, their number, their camp sites, their movements, and the number of their camels and horses. What is the state of
agriculture, and how might it be improved? Are there arts and trades
peculiar to the region? Is commerce conducted by barter or by money, in
what commodities and with whom?
Only for a few provinces was there time to complete the forms, but
the conception of the task is nonetheless interesting for that. The problem of language will indicate how serious an effort the commission
made to get things right. Two sorts of information leap to the eye on
opening the album. Lettered on the face of the maps are the battle sites
of the campaigns and the names of villages, towns, and cities, the latter
in both French and Arabic. In order to render those place names, the
commission found an engraver, one Miller, who undertook to learn to
write Arabic. An Orientalist of the expedition, Remi Raige, gave Miller
an intensive one-man course. Only after passing an examination before
the famous Arabist, Silvestre de Sacy, sitting with Professor Langles of
the School of Oriental Languages, did Miller begin to engrave names
upon the copper. When the task was almost done, Volney, the sage in
all things near-Eastern, paid a visit to the Depot de la Guerre. He
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470 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
praised the map and the Arabic orthography, but found the transliteration into French complicated, fatiguing to the eye, and inconsistent.
There was, indeed, no standard practice, and the commission took the
occasion to devise one, a system that would be uniform and comprehensible by orientalists working in all European languages. To that end,
the Director of the Depot de la Guerre, General Sanson, named an ad
hoc committee of scholars and scientists-Volney, Silvestre de Sacy,
Langles, Monge, Berthollet, Lacroix, among others, with several native
Arab-speaking members. They met in four sessions and adopted a
scheme proposed by one Ellious Bochtor, formerly an interpreter with
the army. It is printed at the end of Jacotin's memoir on the construction
of the map. Re-doing the transliterations required another eighteen
months of work. The object was to ensure that the map be in harmony
with the texts, that all or most of the place names mentioned in the
memoirs be inscribed on the map, and that they be easy to recognize
despite the differences in orthography among the many authors.
Medicine too depended on topography. In general, of course, eighteenth-century medicine mediated between what Roziere called the
physical constitution of a region, with special emphasis on climate, and
the physiological constitution of men, women, and children. Desgenettes was head physician of the Expedition and Larrey head surgeon.
The Egyptian environment being dramatic, at least from a European
point of view, it is natural that Desgenettes should have begun by establishing a "Topographie physique et medicale de l'Egypte," on which
he collaborated with Nouet for the geographical part.54 Throughout, he
interested himself in the population dynamics of Egypt and compiled a
necrology of Cairo for the three years of the occupation. His Histoire
Medicale de l'Armee d'Egypte discusses administrative matters and describes the development of policy on sanitation, on public health, and
on the organization of hospitals. Larrey, on the other hand, wrote
mainly of disease.
A recent school of medical historiography offers a political explanation for the shift of the doctor's attention from the patient to the disease.
The Paris hospital is said to have become an institution wherein the
newly professional physician exercised power over the ailing members
of the indigent class, building his structure of knowledge and authority
at the expense of their bodies.55 Larrey did, of course, belong to the
same generation as Bichat and Pinel. His accounts of the diseases he
encountered in Egypt can have owed nothing to either one, however,
nor yet to the effects of the new regime in the Hotel-Dieu in Paris, nor
behind that to the change of the locus of power in the French social
54"Lettre ... sur un plan propre a rediger la Topographie physique et medicale de
l'Egypte," 25 thermidor an 6, 12 August 1798, Decade igyptienne 1, 29-33. Cf. Goby (1987),
99.
55 Such is the argument of the followers of Michel Foucault, La naissance de la clinique
(1963).
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FRENCH EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION 471
structure. The diseases he described were "opthalmia" (usually trachoma), bubonic plague, tetanus, yellow fever, atrophy and also gigantism in the testicles, leprosy, and elephantiasis. He was clear that the
etiology of plague, yellow fever, and tetanus, at least, involved an external agent, for which he sometimes used the word virus and sometimes germ. His concept of disease was as specific and objective as
anything that entered into nineteenth-century medicine from the milieu
of the new clinical practice in Paris.56 Since his absence in Egypt insulated him from all that, the suspicion arises that Larrey's notions derived
from observation.
All told, the text of the Description de l'Egypte comprises some 126
separate memoirs. A number of them were monographs. Only a few
were slight. Of the total, thirty titles pertain to what is now called
classical archaeology and twenty-one to natural history strictly speaking. If the remaining 75 were to be classified anachronistically, according
to where their main subject matter would fall along a modern spectrum
of the disciplines, the distribution would be as follows:
Physical Geography 24 History
Hydrography 3 History of Science
Meteorology 2 Medicine
Agronomy 2 Sociology
Technology 7 Demography
2
4
2
2
2
Weights and Measures 4 Anthropology/Ethnology 8
Economics 1 Linguistics 5
Political Science 3 Musicology 4
Shall we call the information contained in these thousands of pages
social science? Not if social science is knowledge produced by social
scientists. But what, then, are we to call knowledge of a society produced by a large number of scientifically and technically trained people
applying their talents to its description and analysis? When the surgeon
Larrey writes on the bodily conformation of Egyptians, ancient and
modern, is that physical anthropology? When the civil engineer DuboisAyme writes on the nomads of the region around Qoceyr and of Arab
desert tribes in general, is that cultural anthropology? When the topographical engineer Edme Jomard writes on the comparative population
of ancient and modern Egypt, is that demography? When the Civil
Engineer Michel-Ange Lancret writes on taxation and local administration during the last years of the Mamelukes, is that political science? Or
perhaps administrative history? When the chief engineer Girard writes
a veritable treatise on the trade, commerce, and agriculture of all Egypt,
region by region, is that economics?57
56 Larrey, "Memoire et observations sur plusieurs maladies qui ont affecte les troupes de
l'Armee francaise pendant l'Expedition d'Egypte et de Syrie," Etat Moderne, 1, 427-524.
57 The titles being very long, perhaps it will suffice to cite the locations: Larrey, DE, EM,
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472 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
True, a small number of pieces were written by people already expert
in the European aspects of their subjects. The administrator Esteve's
monograph on the finances of Egypt is the earliest systematic treatment
of feudalism in the Ottoman empire. The four memoirs that together
encompass Egyptian musical theory, practice, and instruments ancient
and modern, are by the musician Villoteau, who learned Arabic and
became a musicologist.58 But the great majority of the memoirs were
done, if not literally in execution of the questionnaire designed by Jacotin for his surveyors, certainly in that same spirit. That the authors
were outsiders was probably an advantage. Their attitude to their subjects is that of an observer of phenomena. It was a commonplace among
them that no other country in the world had been so thoroughly studied
as Egypt, and certainly not France. But it was not just a question of
thoroughness. No group of Frenchmen could have brought to the scrutiny of their own society the same detachment from its internal political
dynamics.59
It cannot be said that the data thus assembled fed directly into the
development of the social sciences as disciplines, except for geography.
There it did. The exploration of Egypt was an entering wedge into
Africa, and the Society of Geography, founded in 1821, numbered Jacotin, Costaz, Jomard, Fourier and Chabrol de Volvic among its moving
spirits.60 Apart from that, Bonaparte's elimination of the original Class
of Moral and Political Science on reorganizing the Institute of France in
1802 had arrested the formal development of the social sciences, and
there is little or no evidence that would-be social scientists, thus left to
their own devices, made use of the Egyptian material as it appeared. Its
direct influence was more instrumental in the later careers of its compilers, many of whom continued in the service of the state. Their conduct of responsibility partook of the elements out of which Saint-Simon
and after him Auguste Comte made philosophies abstracted from the
genius of their generation-engineers exercising civil authority, administration informed by fact. Fourier was Prefect of the Isere when he was
writing the "Preface historique" to the Description de l'Egypte. He there
says that "The sequence of plates thus represents objects which exist
and admit of exact observation and description and which, for that
2, iere Partie, 1-6; Dubois-Ayme, DE, EM 1, 193-202; 577-606; Jomard, DE, A, Memoires 2,
87-142; Lancret, DE, EM 1, 233-260; Girard, DE, EM 2, lere Partie, 491-711.
58 Esteve, DE, EM 1, 299-398; Villoteau, DE, A, Memoires 1, 181-206, 357-426; DE, EM,
1, 607-846, 1012-1016.
59 The most interesting treatment of this aspect of the subject is an unpublished these de
3eme cycle by Stephane Callens, "Etude sur la Description de l'Egypte, Histoire d'une enquete [1798-1830]" September 1985. I am grateful to M. Callens for providing me with a
copy of his admirable study.
Alfred Fierro, La Societe de Geographie, 1821-1946 (Centre de Recherches d'Histoire et
de Philologie, Hautes Etudes Medievales et Modernes, 5, #52, Paris, 1983: Librairie Champion). The author of this thesis is somewhat skeptical of the pretensions of the Society. It
seems to me, however, that its Bulletin does show a discipline in the course of being
formed.
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FRENCH EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION 473
reason, are to be considered as so many positive elements for the study
of Egypt." Chabrol de Volvic, a 25-year-old civil engineer in 1798, designed many of those plates, together with his colleagues. He also con-
tributed an "Essai sur les moeurs des habitans modernes de l'Egypte,"
and collaborated with Michel-Ange Lancret on a "Memoire sur le Canal
d'Alexandrie."'61 Prefect from 1806 to 1810 of the Department of Montenotte on the Ligurian coast, annexed by Napoleon along with much of
northern Italy, Chabrol wrote up all he learned of the provinces for
which he was responsible under the Grande Empire. The word "statistique" in the title of his memoir had gained currency for the voracious
fact-gathering characteristic of administration from the time of the Directory onwards.62 Chabrol ended his career in Paris as Prefect of the
Seine. He there put in hand an urban topography, the still inadequately
studied Statistique de la Ville de Paris, in its inspiration an "Etat Moderne"
of the capital of France.63
Over and beyond the enormous compilation of information on Egypt
itself, its antiquities, its current state, its geographical setting, the most
interesting general feature of the participation of science in the Egyptian
expedition is the relation it portended between formal knowledge and
power politics. The Napoleonic occupation of Egypt may be considered
the first instance of nineteenth-century imperialism in that it comprised
a cultural component lacking in the mercantile colonialism that preceded it. What the French later came to call their "civilizing mission"
had its origins partly in the Enlightenment and partly in revolutionary
ideology. Technical competence was the operational aspect of culture.
Bonaparte understood all that, not abstractly, but intuitively, practically,
as he did whatever related to the exercise of power. His was the imagination that implanted a clone of French science on the banks of the Nile,
in a milieu that, in contrast with earlier French and British colonies, was
totally other than European. The British had done nothing of the sort in
India.
The pieces of positive knowledge that resulted are not without interest-the physics of mirages, the homology of crabs chewing with parts
that comparable creatures use to walk on, the mortality to be expected
61 DE, EM, 363-524; Goby (1987), 403, DE, EM 2, iere Partie, 185-194.
62 G.-J.-G. Chabrol de Volvic, Statistique des provinces de Savone, d'Oneille, d'Acqui, et de
partie de la province de Mondovi, formant l'ancien departement de Montenotte (2 vols., 1824). The
history of pre-mathematical statistics is beginning to draw attention, for example, JeanClaude Perrot, L'Age d'or de la statistique regionale francaise (An IV-1804), Societe des Etudes
Robespierristes, 1977; Liliane Vire et al., La statistique en France d l'epoque napoleonienne
(Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1982); Marie-Noelle Bourguet, Dechiffrer la
France: La statistique departementale d l'epoque napoleonienne (Editions des archives contem-
poraines, 1988).
63 Recherches statistiques sur la Ville de Paris et le departement de la Seine (4 vols., 1821, 1823,
1826, 1829). Fourier served in the largely honorific post of Directeur du Bureau de la
Statistique, which assembled the data. On this project, see the interesting compte-rendu
of the first volume by Edme Jomard, published in the Bulletin de la Societe de Geographie 1ere
serie, 2 (1824), 305-322, and also in Revue encyclop6dique 21, 2e serie, T. ler Janvier, 1824).
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474 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE
of the plague. But it is unlikely that it would have made significant
difference to the relevant sciences if those things had been learned by
others elsewhere. The circumstances did matter to the scientists, and
enormously. The civil and professional status of the senior people,
Monge, Berthollet, Fourier, Jacotin, Denon, Larrey, Desgenettes, was
elevated by their proximity to the historical prime mover who was Bonaparte. Whether the Expedition was reciprocally dignified by the incor-
poration of science is, perhaps, a matter of opinion.
The junior people, Geoffroy, Savigny, Roziere, Malus, the dozens of
engineers and technicians who ran the surveys, measured and drew the
monuments, and studied the country, were in Egypt at the formative
time of their lives, many of them the equivalent of undergraduates. The
problems on which they cut their eyeteeth arose in consequence of their
presence there. The same, of course, may be said of the circumstances
of most young scientists. They respond to whatever their opportunities
may be in choosing problems. The difference in Egypt was the exceptional nature of the circumstances.
Unprecedented episodes become precedents. This one marks the beginning of the spread of European science and its appurtenances to
African and Asian societies under the aegis of military conquest and
political power. Despite growing British political predominance after the
opening of the French-built Suez Canal in 1869, a continuing French
technical and cultural presence informed the development of the Egyptian educational system, economy, and administration until the middle
of the present century.
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