Napoleon in Egypt.

 

Jaffa wasn't the only massacre carried out in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1798. The French fleet was sunk by Nelson at Aboukir Bay leaving Napoleon stranded in Egypt. Napoleon had invaded Egypt to disrupt British trading routes in the Mediterranean. The French used beheadings, hostage-taking and village burning to secure its presence in Egypt.

When Cairo rose up against Napoleon, he ordered that all captured rebels should be beheaded and their corpses thrown into the Nile, where they would float past and terrorise the local population. Their heads were put in sacks, loaded on mules and dumped in piles in Ezbekyeh Square in central Cairo. 

Jaffa refused to surrender and the governor replied by displaying the head of Napoleon's messenger on the walls. Napoleon ordered that the walls be breached and thousands of French soldiers slaughtered the inhabitants. Some nine to ten thousand prisoners who were captured at Jaffa, were taken to the beach and massacred in cold blood. The French caught the plague off Jaffa's inhabitants who they raped and pillaged.

Napoleon abandoned his troops in Egypt to return to France. When the French general Jean-Baptiste Kleber discovered that Napoleon had left Egypt he called him "that Corsican runt" and told his staff, "That bugger has deserted us with his breeches full of shit. When we get back to Europe we'll rub his face in it." Kleber was denied the opportunity because he was stabbed to death in June 1800 by a 24-year-old student called Soliman. He was executed by having a pike driven into his rectum up to his breast. 

In the 60 battles that Napoleon fought, captured European soldiers were never treated like the inhabitants of Egypt. Today, Napoleon's Egyptian campaign is best remembered for the way in which archaeologists documented Egyptian artefacts in the twenty-one volumes of the 'Description de L' Egypte' and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which led to Jean-Francois Champollion, being able to crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822.