Epilogue

This concluding chapter reveals that the question of Muslim citizenship and the role of Islam in the republic arose out of the Revolution itself. In short, it did not arise belatedly as a result of colonial and postcolonial Muslim migration to the metropole. Moreover, the results of that consideration can reveal much about the Revolution and its principles. The citizenship of Muslims was not only a contingent possibility but a necessary condition for liberty, equality, and fraternity to be universal principles rather than merely national ones. At the same time, at the heart of the Revolution, until the rupture of its principles in 1798, the Muslim path to citizenship had become a routine process, greeted with the indifference proper to a society of equals, leaving few traces, and for this reason there is no way to know with any exactitude how many individuals followed this path.

Bonaparte’s Burka

This chapter explores Napoleone di Buonaparte's fascination with Islam. It argues that the impulsion that eventually took him to Egypt was formed in the context of his early experience of Corsican nationalism, radical disappointment, and revolutionary commitment to the new France that emerged after 1789. The belief that this invasion would be welcomed by Muslims—indeed, that they would somehow greet the French as fellow believers—was the product of a revolutionary politicization of Islam that was further overheated under the Directory. Indeed, the era of the Directory was the scene of a curious religious experimentation. The chapter shows how the catastrophic decision to invade Egypt effectively brought the Revolution to an end: Buonaparte brought back the taste for arbitrary rule he had established in Egypt to his rule over France and much of Europe.