What happened at the Battle of Abukir in 1799?
In July 1799 an Ottoman army under Mustafa Pasha landed on the Abukir peninsula east of Alexandria, supported by British ships under Sir Sidney Smith, and took the French redoubt and fort. Bonaparte marched from Cairo and attacked on 25 July. His infantry and Murat’s cavalry broke both Ottoman lines, thousands drowned trying to reach their boats and Mustafa Pasha was captured. The fort held out until 2 August, and three weeks later Bonaparte sailed for France.5
A year after Nelson destroyed the French fleet in the same bay, Bonaparte fought on the sand of Abukir and won. It was his last battle in Egypt, and the news of it reached France only days before he did. For the naval battle of 1798 see the Battle of the Nile, for the British landing of 1801 the Battle of Abukir, 1801, and for the rest of the day 25 July in military history.6
After Acre
In the spring of 1799 Bonaparte’s Syrian campaign failed before Acre, which the Ottoman garrison held with the help of the British commodore Sir Sidney Smith. Bonaparte told the Directory that the season for landings had made him leave Syria. He left Kléber to guard the coast at Damietta and kept himself ready to march on Alexandria.7
The Ottomans and Smith now planned to carry the war into Egypt by sea. La Jonquière, the French General Staff historian who worked from the army’s archives, writes that a corps of about 20,000 men was gathered at Rhodes under Mustafa Pasha, with a fleet under Patrona Bey. It had no cavalry and counted on Mamluks and Bedouin joining it after the landing. Napoleon later claimed that those horsemen would have given Mustafa an army of at least 30,000.8
The landing place was Abukir, a sandy peninsula east of Alexandria with an old fort at its tip. Marmont, who commanded at Alexandria, had been told to raze the village there and build a stone work, but put up an earth redoubt on a mound instead. Thiers criticises him for it.9
The Ottoman landing
The Ottoman fleet came in sight of Alexandria on the afternoon of 11 July. La Jonquière quotes Marmont’s first count of seven ships of the line, five frigates and 58 smaller ships, while Bonaparte’s report speaks of 100 sails. Marmont’s memoirs, written decades later, give 12 July and seventy sails.10
The troops landed in force on 15 July. Lord Keith’s secretary wrote that they stormed the French redoubt, the village and the fort that same day. La Jonquière, working from the French reports, says the redoubt fell on the 15th after a day of assaults and that its commander Godard was killed, while the fort, held by an engineer captain with 35 men, surrendered at noon on 17 July. Berthier, Bonaparte’s chief of staff, blamed the surrender on cowardice.11
Keith’s secretary wrote that the detachment of about 400 men was cut to pieces except for about forty saved by Patrona Bey. La Jonquière credits a French émigré in British service with saving the prisoners. Smith admitted he had not been there, and arrived five days after the landing.12
Marmont came out of Alexandria with fewer than 1,200 men, judged that he could not fight the Ottoman army with them and went back. Bonaparte, La Jonquière reports, later told him that with those 1,200 men he would have gone all the way to Constantinople. The Ottomans did not march inland. They dug in on the peninsula and waited for their cavalry.13
In Cairo the chronicler Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti recorded the news that Mustafa Pasha had taken the fortress of Aboukir, killing part of the garrison and taking the rest prisoner, and that people in the city rejoiced.14
Bonaparte marches from Cairo
Bonaparte heard of the fleet at the camp by the Pyramids on 15 July, in the morning according to La Jonquière and in the evening according to his secretary Bourrienne. Bourrienne says that at four the next morning he was on horseback and the army on the march. Murat had just driven back Murad Bey, the Mamluk leader, who had tried to come down into Lower Egypt to meet the landing.15
The army marched down the Nile to El-Rahmaniyeh, which Bonaparte’s report says he reached on 19 July, and then towards the coast. On 22 July he wrote to Desaix that the enemy had been master of the redoubt and fort since 15 July and was content to fortify the peninsula. He reached Alexandria on the evening of 23 July, as La Jonquière and Bourrienne both record.16
In the night of 24 to 25 July the divisions met at the wells between Alexandria and Abukir, joined at midnight, Berthier writes, by 400 horsemen from Upper Egypt. Kléber’s division was still on the road and was meant to form the reserve.17
Two armies on the peninsula
The French were the smaller army. La Jonquière says Bonaparte had fewer than 10,000 men, and that the arrival of Duvivier’s 400 horsemen raised his cavalry to about a thousand. Thiers gives about 6,000 engaged and Marmont 5,000 infantry and 1,000 horse brought by Bonaparte. Napoleon’s memoir has Murat’s vanguard at 2,300, Lannes at 2,700, Lanusse in reserve at 2,400 and Davout with 300 horse, 7,700 in all.18
The Ottoman numbers are even less certain. Berthier and Marmont give about 15,000, and Bonaparte wrote of 15,000 in his letters. Thiers gives about 18,000 infantry. On the other side Smith claimed that only 5,000 had landed instead of the 15,000 reported, and Keith’s secretary wrote of 8,000 or 9,000, officially 15,000. Both had reasons to make the Ottoman army look small.19
Almost all of it was infantry. Berthier says Mustafa had about a hundred horses and Thiers barely three hundred. Thiers describes them as brave janissaries with muskets but no bayonets, and says English officers guided them.20
Berthier describes two lines. The first stood about half a league in front of the fort, with about 1,000 men on a sand hill on the right, 1,200 men and four guns in a village in the centre and about 2,000 men with six guns on a sand hill on the left. The second line, around the captured redoubt, held about 7,000 men and twelve guns, with the village of Abukir and the fort behind it. Bonaparte described the position as anchored on the sea on one side and on Lake Ma’dyeh on the other.21
The first line breaks
The army moved off at first light on 25 July. Destaing’s brigade went for the hill on the Ottoman right and Lannes for the sand hill on the left, while Murat’s cavalry rode round behind them.22
With the horsemen cutting off their retreat, the Ottoman flank corps broke and ran for the sea. Berthier writes that two squadrons and a platoon of guides killed or drove into the water a body of 2,000 men. Bonaparte wrote that the fugitives tried to swim to boats three quarters of a league out and all drowned, the most horrible sight he had ever seen. Destaing and the 32nd then took the village in the centre.23
Napoleon’s St Helena memoir puts precise numbers on this first hour: 5,400 drowned, 1,400 killed or wounded and 1,200 prisoners. Bonaparte’s own letters of July 1799 give different figures, set out below.24
The redoubt
The second line was harder. Bonaparte described a loopholed village in front, a redoubt in the centre joined to the sea by entrenchments, and more than thirty gunboats firing from the flanks. Smith, according to Keith’s secretary, led the boats of HMS Tigre and twelve Turkish gunboats close in to fire grapeshot.25
General Fugières led the 18th along the shore against the Ottoman right, and a cannonball took off his left arm, Berthier writes. The French cavalry charged again and again but was caught between the redoubt and the gunboats, and its brigade commander Duvivier was killed. Adjutant-general Leturcq rushed into the enemy entrenchment, Berthier says, found himself alone there and died.26
The attack was falling back when the Ottoman soldiers left their lines to cut off the heads of the French dead and wounded. Berthier explains that the Ottoman government paid a silver aigrette for every enemy head. Smith himself wrote that this custom produced a burst of indignation among the French infantry and rallied them.27
Lannes used that moment. He sent battalions of the 22nd light and the 69th against the left side and the open rear of the redoubt and stormed it, as Berthier and Desvernois, an officer of the 7th Hussars who fought there, both describe. Murat sent a squadron straight through the Ottoman position to the ditch of the fort, cutting off the way back. Smith wrote that a small body of French cavalry leapt over the works after being thrown back three times by British gunfire.28
Into the sea
The rout ended in the bay. Berthier writes that 10,000 men threw themselves into the sea, where they were shot down with musketry and grapeshot, and that no sight had ever been more terrible. Marmont explains that the water was shallow, so the men had to wade far out under fire. He adds that the boats of the Ottoman fleet, instead of picking them up, fired on them to drive them back to the fight.29
Savary, who was not at the battle, blamed English sailors for firing on the swimmers. Marmont and Savary thus blame different fleets for the same shooting.30
Murat and Mustafa Pasha
Murat reached Mustafa Pasha’s tent. A contemporary account quoted by La Jonquière, and Desvernois in almost the same words, say the pasha fired a pistol that hit Murat below the jaw, and Murat cut off two fingers of his right hand with his sabre. Marmont says the ball went through Murat’s jaw near the joint. Smith confirmed that the pasha defended himself gallantly and wounded General Murat, who took him.31
Others claimed the capture too. A trooper of the guides, Krettly, said he had wounded and taken the pasha himself, and La Jonquière notes a third claim by an officer named Vigo-Roussillon. Berthier says Mustafa was taken with 200 men, Napoleon’s memoir with a thousand.32
Bonaparte gave the credit to Murat. He told the Directory that the victory was due mainly to him and asked for his promotion to général de division. Two English field guns sent by London to Constantinople and captured in the battle were given to Murat’s brigade, engraved with the words Bataille d’Aboukir. Bourrienne remembered Napoleon saying in 1800 that Murat had been superb at Aboukir.33
Mustafa Pasha was treated with courtesy and taken to Giza, al-Jabarti writes. The chronicler called him a man of extraordinary bravery who lost the battle only through an accident.34
Kléber came up only towards evening, riding ahead of his division, which Desvernois says arrived three hours after the Turkish defeat. He embraced Bonaparte and, as Thiers, Desvernois and La Jonquière all quote him, told him he was as great as the world.35
Counting the dead
French losses were small, but the figures move. Bonaparte’s letters give 100 killed and 100, 400 or 500 wounded, depending on the letter. Berthier gives 150 killed and 750 wounded, and Napoleon’s memoir 200 killed and 550 wounded. The surgeon Larrey reported, in a letter quoted by La Jonquière, 730 wounded for the battle and the siege together.36
Among the dead were Leturcq, Duvivier, the aide-de-camp Guibert and the engineer colonel Crétin, who died of his wounds. Savary notes that Crétin had built the fortifications of Alexandria. Bonaparte named three forts of the city after Crétin, Duvivier and Leturcq.37
The Ottoman dead cannot be counted with any confidence. Bonaparte reported more than 6,000 bodies counted on the shore and 3,000 buried on the battlefield. Berthier writes of 10,000 men in the sea, Thiers of over 12,000 floating dead and 2,000 to 3,000 killed by fire or steel, and Desvernois of over 12,000 dead. Berthier puts the total Ottoman loss, with the fort, at 18,000.38
Bonaparte also noticed that the bodies washed up on the same shore as the English and French dead of the year before, after the naval battle in the same bay. His order of the day of 1 August said that the name of Aboukir had been fatal to every Frenchman, and that the 25th of July had made it glorious.39
The siege of the fort
Several thousand Ottoman soldiers, with Mustafa’s son and his steward, shut themselves in the fort. Berthier says the officers wanted to surrender and the men refused, and Bonaparte wrote that half the garrison wanted to give up and the other half preferred to drown. He ordered seven mortars to fire 120 bombs each every twenty-four hours.40
Lannes, commanding the siege, was wounded in the leg when the defenders occupied houses of the village, and Menou took his place. Davout cleared the houses on 30 July. Smith, according to his own letter, sent marines into the fort while factions inside fought each other and took off more than a thousand men by night.41
On 2 August the garrison, crushed by the bombardment and above all by thirst, opened the gates. Berthier writes that the commander did not capitulate but simply had his men throw down their arms, and that more than 400 prisoners died within a day from eating and drinking too fast. Menou reported holding the pasha’s son and his steward, and Smith wrote that morning that the castle had fallen. Napoleon’s memoir dates the surrender to 1 August.42
Newspapers and a frigate
After the battle the French and British exchanged prisoners, and the British side passed over its newspapers. Marmont writes that Smith handed all his gazettes to the French officer sent to him, and Napoleon recalled that English papers and the Gazette of Frankfort reached Alexandria early in August. Bourrienne says Bonaparte read that Italy had been lost and decided he must leave Egypt.43
Marmont records Bonaparte saying that France would learn almost at the same time of the destruction of the Turkish army at Abukir and of his own arrival. When Smith’s squadron left to take on water at Cyprus, Bonaparte sailed from the beach of Abukir on the night of 22 to 23 August with two frigates, leaving the command to Kléber by letter. He landed at Fréjus on 9 October 1799.44
Thiers, writing forty years later, judged that at Abukir an enemy army was perhaps for the first time in the history of war destroyed entirely.45
Pictures of the battle
Murat commissioned the battle from Antoine-Jean Gros, and the Versailles catalogue records the order in 1806 for the gallery of the royal palace in Naples. The huge canvas, almost six by ten metres and signed in 1807, was bought by the French state in 1833 and is now at Versailles, the painting at the top of this page. The Fondation Napoléon notes that Gros shows Murat charging Ottoman soldiers who had come to cut the heads off the French dead and wounded.46
Louis-François Lejeune, an engineer officer and painter, showed a sketch of Abukir at the Salon of 1804 and dated the canvas 1805. The Château de Versailles notes that he himself never went to Egypt. Louis-Philippe later had a plan of the battle painted for Versailles by Siméon Fort in 1842.47
