The Scope of Orientalism 85 world-historical importance would take place. By taking Egypt, then, a modern power would naturally demonstrate its strength and justify history, Egypt's own destiny was to be annexed, to Europe preferably. In addition, this power would also enter a history whose common element was defined by figures no less great than Homer, Alexander, Caesar, Plato, Solon, and Pythagoras, who graced the Orient with their prior presence there. The Orient, in short, existed as a set of values attached, not to its modern realities, but to a series of valorized contacts it had had. with a distant Eyropean past. This is a pure example of the textual, schematic attitude [have been referring to, Fourier continues similarly for over a hundred pages (each page, incidentally, is a square meter in size, as if the project and the size of the page had been thought of as possessing comparable scale). Out of the free-floating past, however, he must justify the Napoleonic expedition as something that needed to be undertaken when it happened. The dramatic perspective is never abandoned. Conscious of his European audience and of the Oriental figures he was manipulating, he writes: One remembers the impression made on the whole of Europe by the astounding news that the French were in the Orient. . . . This great project was meditated in silence, and was prepared with such activity and secrecy that the worried vigilance of our enemies was deceived; only at the moment that it happened did they learn that it had been conceived, undertaken, and carried out successfully... . So dramatic a coup de théétre had its advantages for the Orient as well: This country, which has transmitted its knowledge to so many nations, is today plunged into barbarism. Only a hero could bring all these factors together, which is what Fourier now describes: Napoleon appreciated the influence that this event would have on the relations between Europe, the Orient, and Africa, on Mediterranean shipping, and on Asia’s destiny. . . . Napoleon wanted to offer a useful European example to the Orient, and finally also to make the inhabitants’ lives more pleasant, as well as to procure for them all the advantages of a perfected civilization. None of this would be possible without a continuous application to the project of the arts and sciences.*§

86 ORIENTALISM ¢ _ To restore a region from its present barbarism to its former \ classical greatness; to instruct (for its own benefit) the Orient in the ways of the modern West; to subordinate or underplay military