Napoleon’s academy modelled Continental conquest on prerecorded textual knowledge of the East.

Evidence

Such a triumph could only have been prepared before a military expedition, perhaps only by someone who had no prior experience of the Orient except what books and scholars told him. The idea of taking along a full-scale academy is very much an aspect of this textual attitude to the Orient. And this attitude in turn was bolstered by specific Revolutionary decrees (particularly the one of 10 Germinal An III—March 30, 1793—establishing an école publique in the Bibliothèque nationale to teach Arabic, Turkish, and Persian) whose object was the rationalist one of dispelling mystery and institutionalizing even the most recondite knowledge. Thus many of Napoleon’s Orientalist translators were students of Sylvestre de Sacy, who, beginning in June 1796, was the first and only teacher of Arabic at the École publique des langues orientales. Sacy later became the teacher of nearly every major Orientalist in Europe, where his students dominated the field for about three-quarters of a century. Many of them were politically useful, in the ways that several had been to Napoleon in Egypt. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 220

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how textual attitudes precede and enable colonial administration, a mechanism the Islamophobia readings will build on (Foucault’s discourse and institutional power).
• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘textual attitude’ — knowledge of a place drawn from books alone, which precedes and legitimizes domination of it.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 220