The World полностью

In 1800, Jefferson, running with an amoral New York lawyer Aaron Burr, was (just) elected president and moved into the President’s House in the new capital Washington – shortly before Sally gave birth to a daughter, Harriet. In September 1801, the Virginian Federalist published revelations about ‘Mr J’, claiming that he ‘has a number of yellow children and that he is addicted to golden affections’. Then a year later James Callender, a racist scribbler used by Jefferson in his battles with Adams, revealed in the Richmond Recorder, ‘It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps … as his concubine one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.’ Jefferson ignored the story.

Initially welcoming Saint-Domingue as part of the age of revolution, Jefferson changed his view when he heard about the killing of white people, warning that the ‘cannibals of the terrible republic’ could spark the ‘combustion’ of a US race war. Yet he tried to avoid the subject of slavery, concentrating on his life’s work – the creation of the new American nation. His greatest opportunity was ironically accelerated by Toussaint’s success.

In return for not encouraging slave revolts, Toussaint now cultivated good relations with the US and Britain. Believing that the best route to freedom lay through Paris, he sent his sons to be educated in France and had just invaded Spanish Santo Domingo, liberating its slaves and uniting the two sides of the island, when news arrived that a French general had seized power in Paris.

Just after his March 1796 wedding to Josephine, the twenty-six-year-old Bonaparte arrived in Italy to fight the Habsburgs, who were defending their northern Italian provinces. Bonaparte manoeuvred with vertiginous grace on the fields both of battle and of publicity. Like Germany, Italy was a ‘merely geographical expression’, as a Habsburg minister would say, ruled in the north by the Habsburg emperor and the Savoyard king of Piedmont–Sardinia, in the centre by the popes and in Naples–Sicily by a Bourbon king. As Bonaparte conquered Milan that May and moved south, he set up new republics to mirror France itself, imposing the principles of the Enlightenment, abolishing the Inquisition and noble assemblies and freeing the Jews from centuries of anti-Jewish restrictions.

Intoxicated by the excitement of power and the exercise of French superiority, ‘I no longer regarded myself as a simple general,’ Bonaparte confessed later, ‘but as a man to decide the fate of peoples.’ None of his ambitions would have mattered without the victories he won, which would have impossible without the unshackled force of France, la Grande Nation, its large population, its remarkable military organization and its generals, sons of innkeepers and coopers promoted on merit, combined with its republican fervour and a sense of French superiority. Their coalition of enemies, the Habsburgs now joined by the Romanovs and funded by Pitt, was overextended and ill-coordinated.^*

Bonaparte dreamed of power and of Josephine, begging her to join him, writing daily, swinging from the practical – ‘I’m a little tired, every day on horseback’ – to the erotic – ‘a kiss on your breast and then a little lower, then much, much lower’. When he discovered that she was sleeping with a ‘very pretty’ hussar, he dived into a romantic swoon: ‘You don’t love me any more, I have only to die.’ Holding court in a Milanese palace, joined by his mother, Bonaparte adopted regal ways, promoting his brothers, marrying his sisters to French generals and Italian aristocrats, while joking disarmingly to the Directoire: ‘If months ago I wished to be duke of Milan, today I desire to be king of Italy.’ ’^*

After signing a peace that won northern Italy and Belgium for France, Bonaparte advised the directeurs that they should aim to attack Britain ‘or expect to be destroyed by the corruption of these intriguing and enterprising islanders’. He added, ‘Let’s concentrate all our activity upon the naval side and destroy England. That done, Europe is at our feet.’ At a Paris triumph, Barras and the Directoire, all absurdly wearing Roman togas, compared Bonaparte to a new Caesar, who now planned an oriental adventure to knock Britain out of the war, found an Alexandrian empire, champion French Enlightenment and make himself invincible: Egypt.

As suggested by Talleyrand, Bonaparte promised that ‘as soon as he’d conquered Egypt, he will establish relations with the Indian princes and, together with them, attack the English in their possessions’. On 19 May 1798, Bonaparte and his 280 ships sailed out of Toulon with an army of 38,000, accompanied by 167 savants (historians, architects, mathematicians and botanists), his brother Louis, his stepson Eugène and his mixed-race cavalry commander General Dumas, plus 800,000 pints of wine.

EGYPTIAN POTENTATES: BONAPARTE AND MEHMED ALI