Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier Character Analysis

Said contextualizes Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798 as not just a military campaign meant to extend the French Empire but as an explicitly Orientalist project—that is, a project that aimed to bring the Orient (or a small part of it) under the control of Europe, both physically and rhetorically. Egypt isn’t important to Napoleon so much in its own right as it is important because it suits his political ambitions (interrupting the British trade routes with its large, valuable, and successful colony in India) and because it suits his image of himself. Casting himself as a new Alexander the Great—a new leader capable of unifying the known (European) world and extending its dominion over the globe, Napoleon wants to possess a territory that has unquestionable importance in the arc of human history.

In dominating Egypt, Napoleon claims his place as the latest in a long line of exemplars of Western intelligence, learning, and conquest. If the West is represented by conquerors of the known world (Caesar and Alexander the Great), philosophers (Plato), and the fathers of literature and mathematics (Homer and Pythagoras, respectively), and the contemporary world order (Solon is credited with founding Athenian democracy), then by implication the Orient is the opposite: dark, superstitious, backward, ignorant, and repressive. It can do or be nothing on its own but must be enlightened by beneficent European leaders. This is an Orient created by and for Europeans, not for Oriental subjects. In fact, Orientalist discourse completely writes Oriental subjects out of the picture rhetorically, so that European powers can dominate and exploit real Oriental subjects with no wrinkle in their consciences.