Napoleon and Mehmed Ali both treated peasant soldiers as expendable tribute for personal glory.

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.” — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1365

Categorization

• XREF: Ties together this book’s Egyptian material with Napoleonic historiography; the Metternich letter quote is a striking primary-source datum.