Tami Sarfatti (University of California)
Raynal's common reader: Bonaparte and his plans for an enlightened colony in Egypt

In September 1785, at the age of sixteen, Napoleon Bonaparte passed his exit exams at the École Militaire in Paris and was sent to Auxonne and later to Valence, as a commissioned officer in the Royal Artillery.  From that time to the summer of 1795, when he was assigned the command of the Armée de Paris Napoleon read widely, took notes of his readings and tried his hand at writing.

He was an active reader his notes show, one who questioned the assertions he read, checked the authors’ sources, and made connections between different texts.  And though his quest for cultivation should not be overstated, one can definitely see in his readings and writings a spirit that was open to the problems of the time, concerned with understanding the way societies operated, with what constituted the wealth of nations, the evolution of institutions, and the manners and the customs of foreign lands.

The importance of Abbé Raynal to the young Bonaparte has been mentioned by scholars. He tried but failed to win the competition of the Académie de Lyon with his Discourse on Happiness, a competition whose topic and prize were initiated by Raynal. He attempted to write A History of Corsica that was eventually discouraged by Paoli, the Corsican leader, and framed it as letters to Abbé Raynal, and he also read and took notes of the 1780 edition of Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes.

Biographers of Bonaparte, who saw in Raynal’s Histoire an anti-colonial manifesto, mentioned the influence of Raynal on Bonaparte’s early aspirations to free Corsica from the French. This paper will suggest emphasizing other aspects Bonaparte found in Raynal’s work. It will argue that Bonaparte’s first reading of Raynal was motivated - like many other readers as Anatole Feugère showed - by his quest to better his family’s financial situation through commerce. However, once the political and personal circumstances drastically changed for Bonaparte, the reading of Raynal became instrumental in different ways.

Strongly aware of the problems of establishing connections between readings and their influence on action, the paper will attempt to carefully demonstrate the ways Bonaparte used his understanding of Raynal and the terminology he copied from the Histoire, when planning a new model colony for France in Egypt in 1798.

The Contesse de Montholon, Napoléon’s mistress at Saint Helena, quoted Bonaparte saying : “Je n’ai jamais appris que ce qui m’était utile. Quand vous voulez savoir si je sais une chose, il faut seulement vous faire cette question : cette étude a-t-elle pu lui servir ?'

In the case of the Histoire and Egypt, his dreams for the new type of colony remained on paper, so to speak. The realities of occupation and resistance, the misreading of the international political situation, as well as the limits of his abilities to reshape history prevented this new ‘enlightened’ commercial colony from materializing.  


 

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