World History Analysis and Views

Background In August 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte proposed a military expedition to seize Egypt, then a province of the Ottoman Empire, in a letter to the directory, seeking to protect French trade interests and undermine Britain’s access to India. The plan was agreed upon in March 1798. The Directory, although troubled by the scope and cost of the enterprise, readily agreed to the plan in order to remove the popular general from the center of power. At the beginning of the campaign, Bonaparte’s expedition seized Malta from the Knights of Saint John on June 9 and then landed successfully at Alexandria on July 1, eluding, for the time being, detection by the Royal Navy. Conquest of Egypt After landing on the coast of Egypt, Bonaparte’s force of 25,000 fought off a force of about 100,000 Mamelukes in the Battle of the Pyramids approximately nine miles (15 km) from the pyramids. He defeated the Mamluk cavalry using a larger version of the common infantry square, with cannons and

The Bastille was a royal fortress in Paris, but revolutionaries gave it an inflated notoriety by declaring it a state prison. On 14 July 1789, militant Parisian workers stormed the fortress and dismantled it. Although they claimed they were releasing prisoners, their real purpose was to acquire weapons. This event triggered a three-year reign of terror and political turmoil in which King Louis XVI was overthrown and 1000 people, including the king and his wife Marie Antoinette, were guillotined. Parisian revolutionaries and mutinous troops storm and dismantle the Bastille, a royal fortress that had come to symbolize the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchs. This dramatic action signaled the beginning of the French Revolution, a decade of political turmoil and terror in which King Louis XVI was overthrown and tens of thousands of people, including the king and his wife Marie Antoinette, were executed. The Bastille was originally constructed in 1370 as a bastide, or "fort