Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson - The Revolt of Cairo , 1810
National Museum of Versailles
Bonaparte took Cairo July 22, 1798, after the Battle of the Pyramids. The French occupiers are quickly confronted with both the British navy, the hostility of the Ottomans and misunderstanding, then the resistance of a majority of the population. The French army of Egypt, isolated, can no longer rely on tax revenues from customs, and Bonaparte in Cairo decided to create a registry of deeds, so as to quickly implement a system of indirect taxes the French, transfer taxes, for the stamped paper marriage certificates and wills, etc. ... Absolute novelty for Cairenes, and impossible to achieve in a timely manner.
A compromise was reached with the Diwan (Assembly of Notables): residents pay a property tax proportional, architects will visit every house to calculate it. Encouraged by the sermons of some ulama, Cairenes see an jizya (poll tax) previously paid only by dhimmis (non-Muslims) and therefore a humiliation. On October 21, 1798 events are formed, with the students of Al-Azhar scholars small and the people of Cairo to its poorest. General Dupuy went to the scene to call quiet, he is killed. The insurgency is spreading, attacking the French and the Copts, Al-Azhar and takes as his headquarters.
The next Bonaparte-cons attacking and bombarding insurgent neighborhoods. The French regained the barricades one by one. The rebels attempted a negotiation refused by Napoleon, the final blows fire are heard in the night of 22 to 23. At dawn, Bonaparte gave orders to sack the Al-Azhar. The balance of fitna (1) Cairo is two to three hundred deaths on the French side, and ten times the Egyptian side (2).
The Revolt of Cairo, commissioned in 1809 to Girodet for the Gallery of Diana Tuileries, is part of the great iconographic program of the Napoleonic propaganda, but even in this set she shows a excess, evident when compared to Table of Guerin on the same topic ...
Pierre-Narcisse Guerin - Her Majesty forgiving revolts in Cairo instead of Elbek , 1808
Museum of Fine Arts of Caen
... and that was part of the same order. Stendhal admired painting by Girodet, comparing it to "a nest of vipers discovers that by changing up an old vase, it is hard to follow the same body, if one looks long, it makes your eyes go ... Besides two or three heads super fury. It's a, b, c expression "(3).
Vivant Denon, director of the Musée Napoleon (our Louvre) was more cautious than Stendhal by writing to the emperor as " all is well expressed and delivered with energy, but perhaps carried away by his subject, he overstepped the movement of revolt and anger of the insurgents ... (4) "
Carry , exceeded : in this orgy of violence we are far, indeed, the winner of Guerin merciful or compassionate visitor Plague Victims of Jaffa . Besides the obvious erotic charge of the naked body of the Arab fighter, as an official regretted the time: " this table, as I told his Excellency is unpleasant scenes. There are several characters on the front dead and a negro squatting in his hand, a head that has just been cut, but this will probably the most repugnant to her Majesty the Empress (5) is a character Arabic is completely naked among the figures in the foreground. However, it could remove what is most shocking about the nudity of the figure and it is thought that this would be a matter of few days. (6) "We do not know if that Girodet or another that this thinly veiled nudity is called a modesty repainted.
Amazing slippage where pictorial representation of extreme violence, also carefully ethnicized, echoes the brutality shocked the colonial contact - and, beyond two centuries apart, with its distant consequences, just over the Nile near Al-Azhar, the bloody tarmac of Tahrir Square.
(1) Fitna : test, rupture, discord, rebellion ...
(2) See Henry Laurens, The Egyptian expedition, 1798-1801 , Seuil, 1997.
(3) Letter from Stendhal to Faure, copied into his Journal, November 10, 1810.
(4) Vivant Denon, director of museums under the Consulate and Empire, Matches (1802-1813) ed. NMR, 1999.
(5) Marie-Louise.
(6) Chanal, head of the Office of Fine Arts, the Duke of Cadore, Quartermaster General - city, like the three previous notes, by Stéphane Guégan, Girodet, Stendhal Guizot and the Salon of 1810 , in life romantic tribute to Loïc Chotard , Presses de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003.
And during that time ...
An interesting analysis on Couterpunch via The Arabist
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