Covid-19: what would Bonaparte have done?

When General Bonaparte prepared to invade Egypt in the summer of 1798, he was warned that he would face three enemies: the English, the Ottomans, and Islam. What no one could have predicted was a fourth: the plague. How the French dealt with it is as much an indication of the ethics and science of their time as how we deal with our current pandemic crisis is revelatory of ours.

The pestilence could not have broken out at a worse time. Nelson’s navy had sunk the French fleet in the Bay of Aboukir off the coast of Alexandria, leaving Bonaparte’s “Army of the Orient” stranded in Egypt and hemmed in by a British and Ottoman blockade. Cairo had erupted in bloody revolt against the occupation, and the even bloodier repression that followed left the French bunkered behind a ring of garrisons.

It was against this backdrop that the plague reared its head in Egypt in the winter of 1799. The chief French physician accompanying Bonaparte’s army, Docteur Desgenettes, recognized the bubonic plague —no stranger to Europe—but avoided the dread word “plague,” referring to it as “the epidemic,” much as the world took its time to acknowledge that Covid-19 was indeed a pandemic. The French took draconian measures to lock down the city of Cairo, and anyone caught scaling the city walls was shot. To contain the spread of the pestilence among the troops, “social distancing” from prostitutes was strictly enforced: thirty Egyptian prostitutes who were caught consorting were drowned.

Medicine, physicians and beds were in short supply in the three hospitals the French set up, so then, as now, hard questions arose: are all lives equal, or do we choose who deserves saving? In each era, a society’s ethics are reflected in the decisions made in such crises. In today’s pandemic, prioritizing who gets the last available ventilator in extremis is framed in terms of age and survival chances. In Bonaparte’s Egypt, ethnicity and religion were prioritized. Apart from the French themselves, only civilians from the European and Syrian Christian communities were admitted to the French hospitals, and Claude Royer, the chief pharmacist, had orders to dispense medications only to members of these two communities.

But other measures were taken to contain the plague among the native population, some of which will have a familiar ring to us today. Festivals and celebrations were banned, to limit congregation, and pilgrimage to Mecca was cancelled, just as it is this year of 2020. So was the slaughter of sheep for the annual Feast of the Sacrifice. Bedding was to be aired daily, and all raw food to be macerated in vinegar. A sick person was to be isolated from his family for forty days, and the entire household was to be strictly quarantined. A family that failed to report a sick member or neighbor to the police or who violated the isolation imposed on their household risked severe punishment. French soldiers did daily rounds of the city, inspecting house by house. As the locals would have balked at allowing a man to inspect the women’s harems, a local woman from each neighborhood was assigned to accompany the French soldiers. Then, as now with “aggressive contact tracing,” such extreme surveillance measures aroused suspicion as a sinister assault on privacy and liberties.

Hardest of all for the Egyptians to accept was the ban on holding funerals for their dead. How do you mourn when you cannot hold a funeral? How does your responsibility to society weigh against your deepest commitments to family and faith? Even today, we struggle with such questions.

But it is instructive to learn from a contemporary Egyptian account of the French occupation, the daily journal kept by the prolific historian Abdel Rahman al-Jabarti, that the harsh measures enforced by the French against the plague, resented as as they were at the time by Egyptians, were grudgingly conceded to have been partially effective in limiting its devastation. In every era, confronted with an existential threat, respect for science and scientists prevails over superstition or its modern equivalents.

But it was not only in Egypt that the French were beset by the plague. Bonaparte, who had launched a campaign against Ottoman-controlled Syria, found it waiting for him and his army in Jaffa. The French advance was initially victorious, but after the fall of Jaffa the plague began to seriously ravage the French army. Bonaparte set up a camp hospital there to administer to the diseased and pressed on with his campaign. The French were defeated before the impregnable walls of Acre and prepared to retreat from Syria back to Egypt. An appalling predicament arose: what to do with the plague-stricken French soldiers in the camp hospitals in Jaffa? Evacuating them was impractical if not unfeasible. Bonaparte ordered the chief physician, Docteur Desgenettes, to administer opium to the sick, arguing that it would put them out of their misery and lessen the chances of infecting other troops. Desgenettes, who had been selfless in fighting the epidemic, even going to the extent of inoculating himself publicly with pus from the bubonic sores, refused. In the event it was Royer, the pharmacist, who administered the fatal doses of opium.

In 1804, three years after the French evacuated from Egypt, Napoleon commissioned the painter Antoine-Jean Gros to immortalize him in the heroic “Bonaparte visiting the Plague-stricken of Jaffa.” History, however, recorded a far less glorious reality. Even today, it is debatable whether Bonaparte’s decision was humane or indefensible.

Two centuries later, when mankind shoots not just for the moon but for Mars, it is hard to believe that the world can still be caught short and ground to a standstill by disease. Harder still, that we grapple with the same ethical choices. We should prepare now for the next time we are tested, because we will be. When this is over, how will history judge us? Judge us it will.