The Price of Glory

The human cost of these campaigns is often obscured by their tactical brilliance. In Italy, battlefield casualties reached tens of thousands. Cities suffered siege, countryside was stripped bare, and civilian populations endured the inevitable brutalities of war. The Egyptian expedition cost even more dearly—of 38,000 who sailed from Toulon, fewer than half would return to France.

For Egyptians, the French invasion brought three years of warfare, economic disruption, and cultural vandalism alongside scientific study. The uprising in Cairo in October 1798, brutally suppressed by French artillery, demonstrated the hollow nature of liberation at gunpoint. Napoleon's successor Kléber was assassinated, and the final French surrender in 1801 marked the end of a costly imperial adventure.