Bonaparte, l'Orient et la «Grande Nation».

Abstract

We have Bonaparte to thank for the notion and even the expression « la grande nation », in any case it was the who transmitted it to the Directoire in July 1797, like an echo of an expression used by a delegation of the people from peninsular Greece. The author follows the path of the idea — half-way between truth and myth— and sets it back into the context of Bonaparte's Ottoman policy; the author studies the latter's vision of a Greek national revival and on a wider scale the ideas he took from Volney who launched the theme in his Ruins. Bonaparte's thinking on the near East and his contacts with the Ottoman world allow him to define, through the Grande Nation concept, a symbolic expression of a republican revival, partly the fruit of his victories but which, in its deepest reality, already announces the Empire. In any case, the expression taken up and has great and immediate success in the context of the Directoire's propaganda war.