"L'armée de la République est maître de toute la Palestine"

(Napoleon Bonaparte / Berthier, Alexandre). Expédition de Syrie jusqu’à la prise de Jaffa.

€ 25.000,00

Napoleon's official report to the Revolutionary Directorate, detailing his earliest victories in Egypt. The print contains the orders and reports of Bonaparte and Alexandre Berthier, generals of the armée d'Orient, from 22 August 1798 to 13 March 1799. They include brief accounts of Kléber's night attack on Fort el-A'rich, the battle of Gaza, and the siege of Jaffa, ending with Napoleon's (somewhat premature) declaration that the French army is master of all Palestine ("l'armée de la République est maître de toute la Palestine").

One of the earliest works printed in the Middle East, published in Cairo just after modern printing was introduced to the Arab world. Only in mid-1798 had J. J. Marcel arrived in Egypt with his employees and types to organize the Imprimerie Orientale. "The expedition of Napoleon Bonaparte to Egypt from 1798 until 1801 was a prelude to modernity. It was to change permanently the traditional Arab world. The French brought Arabic typography to Egypt [...] Only a few days after the French troops landed [...] they set up the Imprimerie Orientale et Française there. It was an extraordinarily important turning point. For, leaving aside the Hebrew printing presses in Egypt of the 16th to the 18th centuries, until this date announcements and news adressed to Arabs there, as well as in other parts of the Arab-Islamic world, had been spread only in hand-writing or orally, by criers, preachers or storytellers" (Glass/Roper).

Extremely rare; no copies are recorded outside the French National Library and the University of Lausanne.