The Scope of Orientalism 87 biological theses in the Description—the confirmation of laws of zoological specialization formulated by Buffon.” Or it serves as a “contraste frappante avec les habitudes des nations Européennes,””* in which the “bizarre jouissances” of Orientals serve to highlight the sobriety and rationality of Occidental habits. Or, to cite one more use for the Orient, equivalents of those Oriental physiological characteristics that made possible the successful embalming of bodies are sought for in European bodies, so that chevaliers fallen on the field of honor can be preserved as lifelike relics of Napoleon's great Oriental campaign.” Yet the military failure of Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt did not also destroy the fertility of its over-all projection for Egypt or the rest of the Orient, Quite literally, the occupation gave birth to the entire modern experience of the Orient as interpreted from within the universe of discourse founded by Napoleon in Egypt, whose agencies of domination and dissemination included the Institut and the Description. The idea, as it has been characterized by Charles-Roux, was that Egypt “restored to prosperity, regenerated by wise and enlightened administration . . . would shed its civilizing rays upon all its Oriental neighbors.”*° True, the other European powers would seek to compete in this mission, none more than England. But what would happen as a continuing legacy of the common Occidental mission to the Orient—-despite inter-European squabbling, indecent competition, or outright war—would be the creation of new projects, new visions, new enterprises combining additional parts of the old Orient with the conquering European spirit. After Napoleon, then, the very language of Orientalism changed radically. Its descriptive realism was upgraded and became not merely a style of representation but a language, indeed a means of creation. Along with the langues méres, as those forgotten dormant sources for the modern European demotics were entitled by Antoine Fabre d’Olivet, the Orient was reconstructed, reassembled, crafted, in short, born out of the Orientalists’ efforts. The Description became the master type of all further efforts to bring the Orient closer to Europe, thereafter to absorb it entirely and— centrally important—to cancel, or at least subdue and reduce, its strangeness and, in the case of Islam, its hostility. For the Islamic Orient would henceforth appear as a category denoting the Orientalists’ power and not the Islamic people as humans nor their history as history. Thus out of the Napoleonic expedition there issued a whole

88 ORIENTALISM series of textual children, from Chateaubriand’s /tinéraire to Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient to Flaubert’s Salammbé, and in the same tradition, Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians and Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madinah and Meccah, What binds them together is not only their common background in Oriental legend and experience but also their learned reliance on the Orient as a kind of womb out of which they were brought forth. If paradoxically these creations turned out to be highly stylized simulacra, elaborately wrought imitations of what a live Orient might be thought to look like, that by no means detracts either from the strength of their imaginative conception or from the strength of European mastery of the Orient, whose prototypes respectively were Cagliostro, the great European impersonator of the Orient, and Napoleon, its first modern conqueror. Artistic or textual work was not the only product of the Napoleonic expedition. There were, in addition and certainly more influential, the scientific project, whose chief instance is Ernest Renan’s Systéme comparé et histoire générale des langues sémitiques, completed in 1848 for—neatly enough—the Prix Volney, and the geopolitical project, of which Ferdinand de Lesseps’s Suez Canal and England's occupation of Egypt in 1882 are prime instances. The difference between the two is not only in manifest scale but also in quality of Orientalist conviction. Renan truly believed that he had re-created the Orient, as it really was, in his work. De Lesseps, on the other hand, always was somewhat awed by the newness his project had released out of the old Orient, and this sense communicated itself to everyone for whom the opening of the canal in 1869 was no ordinary event. In his Excursionist and Tourist Advertiser for July 1, 1869, Thomas Cook’s enthusiasm carries on de Lesseps’s: On November the 7th, the greatest engineering feat of the present century is to have its success celebrated by a magnificent inauguration féte, at which nearly every European royal family will have its special representative. Truly the occasion will be an exceptional one. The formation of a line of water communication between Europe and the East, has been the thought of centuries, occupying in turn the minds of Greeks, Roman, Saxon and Gaul, but it was not until within the last few years that modern civilization began seriously to set about emulating the labours of the ancient Pharaohs, who, many centuries since, constructed a canal between the two seas, traces of which remain to this day. . . . Everything