The Napoleonic Legend and the War Scare of 1840

Abstract

The Eastern Crisis of 1839–41 originated in the Ottoman Empire and in a bid for independence by the indomitable Mehemet Ali, the Pasha of Egypt. It soon became the concern of the European Great Powers, and it brought them to the brink of a war with France in 1840. How France could have risked war on behalf of an Egyptian pasha, however, often seems incomprehensible in existing accounts. This article uses a cultural lens to decipher a subject that has inconclusively been treated in conventional diplomatic histories. In so doing, it examines a whole body of hitherto neglected sources: press, parliamentary transcripts, pamphlets, histories, travel literature, and representational material. It argues, as a result, that the attitudes of decision-makers such as Adolphe Thiers and Louis-Philippe were grounded not in tangible French interests but in a series of cultural engagements that went back to the Egyptian expedition of 1798. Mehemet Ali emerged, in French public opinion, as an Oriental Napoleonic figure. Egypt, as a potential nation-state under a reforming leader, came to appeal to many elements across the July Monarchy's political scene. And, the enemy of the ancien régime in the East, it became a French national champion.