French and Egyptian peasant conscripts saw army service as burdensome tribute, not patriotic duty

Evidence

The French peasant, then, like the Egyptian peasant was an unwilling conscript fighting for a distant and impersonal leader whom he could neither comprehend nor sympathize with. Both were reacting to despots who had ambivalent feeling towards the men they led. Like Mehmed Ali, Napoleon knew too well that his glory could only be built on the sacrifices of his men, and for this he was grateful to them. But also like him, he had the sense of self-importance and contempt for human life (life of the poor peasant, that is,) that is characteristic of Great Men in the battlefield and which allowed him to say in a letter to Metternich in 1813, “Un homme comme moi ne regarde pas à un million de morts.” The men, for their part, had no ambivalence towards their despotic leaders and saw service in their respective armies not as an honorable duty owed to a larger community but as a heavy tribute exacted by an oppressive and distant regime. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1365

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the conscription dynamics described earlier in this book where Egyptian peasants were drafted for Mehmed Ali’s campaigns.