Volney’s travel book was an anti-imperialist warning, not an invasion blueprint
Evidence
It is tempting to read Volney’s Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie as a blueprint for that disastrous imperialist adventure and that is a temptation to which Said succumbed. As if what Volney had been saying in that book was ‘Allez la France! Now here is a golden opportunity for some ambitious young Frenchman, or perhaps a Corsican, to carve out a French empire in this backward part of the world.’ But that is to get Volney exactly wrong. The subtext of Voyage and of a later tract, Considérations sur la guerre actuelle des Turcs (1788) (which Said has muddled with Voyage) is that one should forget about Egypt as a territory that is ripe to be colonized. Volney was not saying that in order to conquer Egypt the French ought first to fight the Turks, then the English and finally deal with the Muslims. Rather he was arguing that first the French would have to fight the Turks, then they would have a battle on their hands with the English and then, finally, they would still have to fight the Muslims. Volney thought that, faced with such opposition, the occupation of Egypt was not feasible and that Muslim resistance to French rule would be particularly intractable. How right he was. The 1798 French expedition to Egypt was a military disaster to be compared with the Gallipoli landings, the Arnhem parachute drop and Dien Bien Phu. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 245
Categorization
- XREF: Direct evidence contradicting Said’s Orientalism reading of Volney — central to the book’s overall argument against Said.