Stop 4: From the heights of these pyramids
‘From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.’ This is a famous line from a speech given by Napoleon to his soldiers on their arrival in Egypt. One can only imagine what the French soldiers thought on first seeing the majestic pyramids – in this room is Watteau’s theatrical battle painting in which a immense pyramid looms through the smoky haze and acres of battling soldiers. 
Napoleon aimed to topple the English and not the Egyptians through the Egyptian Campaign. The Directorate were concerned at the scope and expense of the ambitious young General’s plan but they were nevertheless in broad agreement with the objectives and agreed to fund the campaign. 
While the Egyptian Campaign had undoubted political and economic objectives, there was also an unusually large scholarly aspect to it. Accompanying the tens of thousands of soldiers were also mathematicians, geologists, chemists, physicists, engineers, and botanists and also a team of artists who were gathered under the leadership of Jospehine’s good friend Vivant Denon, who Napoleon would later appoint as Director of the Louvre. The scholarly work done by these teams led to the emergence of ‘Egyptology’, a new field of study that was greatly assisted by the French discovery of the Rosetta Stone which unlocked the secrets of the Egyptian language. 
The French imagination was captivated by tales of this exotic land, which led to a spate of ‘Egyptomania’ amongst the French populace. Egyptian designs became all the rage: here in this room you can see a series of designs modelled after Egyptian art, including Josephine’s very fine Sèvres porcelain tea service adorned with illustrations from Vivant Denon’s Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt. Josephine also cultivated blue lilies from the River Nile in her garden. 
Although you would never know it from the press reports, Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign was of mixed success. The French were not always victorious in battle and thousands of soldiers were killed in action or succumbed to the various diseases that ravaged the military camps. However, for General Bonaparte, it was a resounding success, helping to propel him to the next level of fame and fortune. Shrewd reporting that suppressed reports of failure, combined with the spread of Egyptomania, helped to position Napoleon as a great military commander and a celebrated leader. This created the strong foundation necessary for Napoleon to launch a coup d’État in 1799, which successfully installed him as First Consul. This made him the most powerful man in France. Napoleon well understood the machinations of politics: ‘I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion’ he once said. ‘The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.’