Jacques-Francois Menou

1750 - 1810

French military officer; governor of Egypt, 1800 - 1801.

The last leader of the French forces that occupied Egypt from 1798 to 1801, Jacques François Menou succeeded General Kléber as Napoléon Bonaparte's governor of Egypt in July of 1800. He converted to Islam in order to marry an Egyptian and changed his name to Abdullah. Believing that French occupation of Egypt would continue for a long time, Menou drafted proposals to encourage Egyptian agriculture, commerce, and industry. When Menou began to survey land-holdings in preparation for the assessment of new land taxes to pay for these reforms, Egyptians of all social classes, already alienated by Menou's declaration of Egypt as a colony of France, opposed him.

In March of 1801, a joint Anglo-Ottoman force occupied the Nile river delta. Leaving the defense of Cairo, the capital, to General Belliard, Menou led his troops to Alexandria. When Belliard surrendered, Menou, isolated in Alexandria, was forced to surrender. French forces left Egypt in October of 1801.

Bibliography

Goldschmidt, Arthur, Jr. Modern Egypt: The Formation of aNation-State. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988.

Wucher King, Joan. Historical Dictionary of Egypt. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984.

— DAVID WALDNER

Jacques-Francois de Menou

Jacques-François de Menou, baron de Boussay was a French general under Napoleon I of France. Born Jacques Menou in Boussay (Indre-et-Loire) on 3 September 1750, he died in Mestre in the Veneto on 13 August 1810. In 1798 Le Moniteur documented Napoleon's conversion to Islam, claiming his new Muslim name as ‘Aly Napoleon Bonaparte’.^[1] The newspaper referenced Manou's Islamic conversion, who changed his name to Abdullah Jacques-François de Boussay, baron de Menou. He later later married an Egyptian woman, Sitti Zoubeida, the daughter of a bath-house keeper. She was possibly a descendant from the line of prophet Muhammad. ^[2]

Captain Pierre-François Bouchard reported to him the discovery of the Rosetta stone, a vital key in unlocking the lost language of hieroglyphics.^[3]

On the assassination of Jean Baptiste Kléber on 14 June 1800, Menou, as senior officer, succeeded to the command of the Army of Egypt. After a dismal tenure, he surrendered Alexandria, the last French position in Egypt, on 30 August 1801.

He was appointed to the Tribunate in 1802. Administrator of Piedmont, he was appointed Governor of Tuscany in 1805, and later Governor of Venice.

Recalled to France 23 July 1810, he died at Mestre in the Veneto 13 August 1810.

References

• History of the Consulate and the Empire of France under Napoleon by Louis Adolphe Thiers, London 1893, v. 2, Book X, passim.
• French Wikipedie.

Notes

1. ^ "The history of new Muslims". Media ISNET. http://media.isnet.org/off/Islam/New/napoleon.html. Retrieved on 2007-03-17. 
2. ^ Sayyid-Marsot, Afaf Lutfi (1995). Women and Men in Late Eighteenth-Century Egypt. University of Texas Press. p. 90. ISBN 0-2927-5180-X. 
3. ^ Max Sewell. "The Discovery of the Rosetta Stone". Napoleon-series.org. http://napoleon-series.org/research/miscellaneous/c_rosetta.html. Retrieved on 2007-03-17. 

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