French soldiers only identified with the fatherland by the 1890s

Evidence

Judging from the record, it does not seem that the officers succeeded in convincing the soldiers that what they were fighting for was the nation. It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that the soldiers came to think that what they were doing was fighting for their patrie; only in the 1890s is there “persuasive evidence that the army was no longer ‘theirs’ but ‘ours’ … At least for a while, the army could become what its enthusiasts hoped for: the school of the fatherland.” This was possible not only because the soldiers believed this to be the case, but more importantly, because their officers, since their Great Emperor’s time, had been convinced strongly enough of this themselves and were then able to pass on this feeling to their subordinates. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1366

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in whether nationalism ever reached ordinary Egyptian conscripts under Mehmed Ali — the French parallel offers a comparison point for the Egyptian army’s own ideological development.