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READING REPORT

The Great Plunder

Volume II — The Egyptian Campaign (1798–1801)

Historical Novel

Robert Casanovas

Legal deposit April 2026

 

Complete Analytical Reading

 

 

1. General Overview

 

Full Title

The Great Plunder, Volume II: The Egyptian Campaign (1798–1801)

Author

Robert Casanovas

Genre

Historical novel (historical fiction based on genuine research)

Publication

Legal deposit April 2026 — digital ebook edition and print version

Volume

Approximately 85,000 words — 4 chapters, 27 sections

Time Frame

19 May 1798 (departure from Toulon) — 31 December 1802 (work on the Description de l'Égypte)

Geographical Setting

Mediterranean, Malta, Alexandria, Cairo, Upper Egypt (Dendera, Thebes, Luxor, Valley of the Kings, Aswan, Philae), the Delta, the eastern desert — then Paris

Place in the Saga

Volume II of a tetralogy: following The Birth of the System (Volume I, Flanders and Italy), before Volumes III and IV

 

2. Structure of the Work

 

2.1 Overall Architecture

Volume II is organised into four chapters, each covering a distinct phase of the Egyptian expedition, forming a dramatic progression from enthusiastic conquest to bitter capitulation, then to scientific transmutation.

 

Chapter

Title & sections

Period & main issue

I — The Orient in Arms

8 sections: from Toulon to Malta · from Alexandria to the Nile · Battle of the Pyramids · Aboukir · Institut d'Égypte · Cairo Revolt · Sphinx and necropolises · Scientific debates

May 1798 – end of 1798. The expedition settles in. Military victories and first plunderings.

II — The Journey up the Nile

7 sections: Dendera · Thebes · Valley of the Kings · Aswan · Philae · Rosetta Stone · Negotiations, death of Kléber

Dec. 1798 – June 1800. Exploration of Upper Egypt with Desaix. Scientific apex.

III — The Time of the Scholars

6 sections: Last campaigns · Desert expeditions · Agriculture and irrigation · Time running out · Defeat at Cairo · March to Alexandria

1800–1801. Continuation of work under Menou. Growing isolation, military debacles.

IV — The Debacle and the Return

7 sections: The great antiquities · Collections saved · Ethics of spoliation · The farewells · The crossing · Return to France · The work begins

Sept. 1801 – Dec. 1802. Capitulation, negotiations with Hamilton, return, beginning of the Description de l'Égypte.

 

3. Chapter-by-Chapter Summary

 

Chapter I — The Orient in Arms (May–December 1798)

The French fleet leaves Toulon on 19 May 1798. Berthollet, Monge, Denon and Jomard embark aboard the Orient. During the crossing, Bonaparte presides over literary and philosophical evenings revealing his thinking: Egypt is less a military target than a reservoir of historical legitimacy. The stopover in Malta (9–12 June) gives rise to the first mass plunderings: silverware from the Hospital, paintings by Mattia Preti, monetary treasures. Denon saves a Caravaggio by diverting a soldier.

The landing at Alexandria (1 July) disappoints due to the mediocrity of the present-day city. The march of two hundred and twenty kilometres to Cairo, in forty-degree heat, decimates the soldiers. The scholars survive thanks to their motivation. The Battle of the Pyramids (21 July) is a clear French victory. But on the night of 1 August, Nelson destroys the fleet at Aboukir — a catastrophe that cuts the expedition off from France. The scholars gathered in the Institut's courtyard question the fate of their collections. The Institut d'Égypte is founded. The Cairo Revolt (October 1798) reveals the fragility of French dominance. The first archaeological explorations begin: the Sphinx, the necropolises of Saqqara, scientific debates on the origin of hieroglyphics.

 

Chapter II — The Journey up the Nile (December 1798 – June 1800)

On 25 December 1798, Desaix sets off for Upper Egypt with ten thousand soldiers and Denon. Bonaparte gives him a four-page list specifying the antiquities to be brought back — the first official codification of acquisition policy. The journey travels more than eight hundred kilometres up the Nile. At Dendera (January 1799), Jomard spends five days measuring the eighteen columns of the Temple of Hathor. Berthollet catalogues six items according to official forms. A sergeant-major simultaneously keeps an unofficial inventory of the soldiers' takings: at least a thousand objects from this temple alone, Jomard calculates. The Dendera Zodiac, two tonnes of sandstone, is deemed untransportable as it stands; a memorandum by Denon plans its future extraction.

At Thebes, the hypostyle hall of Karnak commands silence. In the Valley of the Kings, decipherment work progresses. At Aswan, the expedition's limits make themselves felt. At Philae, an ideology of conservation takes shape in the face of the extraction policy. The Rosetta Stone is discovered at Rosetta in July 1799 — a trilingual decree from 196 BC. Marcel spends two nights making rubbings of it. Section VII covers the assassination of Kléber (June 1800) and the transfer of command to Menou.

 

Chapter III — The Time of the Scholars (1800–1801)

Under Menou, an incompetent commander but convenient to circumvent, the scholars continue their work with an institutional survival strategy defined by Fourier: submit unintelligible reports and carry on without informing the general staff. Explorations in the Delta (Tanis, Bubastis), where Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire collects cat mummies whose species, unchanged for two millennia, begin to shake his conception of the fixity of species. The Coptic monasteries of the eastern desert (Saint-Antoine, Saint-Paul) reveal bilingual Coptic-Greek manuscripts that Denon copies without removing. The Institut's debates on civilisational memory reach a remarkable philosophical height. Isolation and illness decimate the Commission. The defeat at Cairo and the march to Alexandria signal the end.

 

Chapter IV — The Debacle and the Return (September 1801 – December 1802)

On 3 September 1801, Hamilton and Clarke present themselves to inventory the French collections pursuant to Article 16 of the Capitulation of Alexandria. Jomard has spent the night preparing a legal memorandum distinguishing three categories: seizable antiquities, non-seizable intellectual productions, scientific instruments. The negotiation is bitter: Denon and Fourier defend every category inch by inch. The Rosetta Stone and the great monumental antiquities leave for London. The notebooks, drawings and surveys are successfully defended as intellectual productions. The return to France is carried out in separate convoys.

In Paris, each scholar resumes his work in a cold room. Jomard calculates the value of the Egyptian royal cubit (0.5236 m), identifies Lepère's error concerning the Suez Canal. Fourier writes the historical preface to the Description. Denon and Fourier quarrel over the style of the notices (science vs. literature) — and end up allowing both tones to coexist. The Description de l'Égypte (1809–1822, 23 volumes) is presented as the expedition's true legacy: 'What France truly kept from Egypt was one hundred and sixty-seven minds and the eight hundred and thirty-six images they had produced. What it had stolen was in London.'

 

4. Characters

 

4.1 Main Characters

Dominique-Vivant Denon — The Witness-Actor

The novel's focal character, Denon is a diplomat, draughtsman and man of letters who accompanies Desaix into Upper Egypt. His narrative function is twofold: he documents (237 sketchbooks) and he takes (his personal satchel). The author makes him the most morally complex figure: Denon knows exactly what he is doing, offers no justification, but cannot bring himself to abstain. His night at Aboukir, where he draws up a list of objects he could carry on his back in the event of a forced retreat, constitutes one of the novel's most intense moments. He embodies the fundamental contradiction of the expedition: to be at once archaeologist, collector and plunderer, and to know that these three roles are sometimes indistinguishable.

 

Edme-François Jomard — The Quantified Conscience

A twenty-two-year-old graduate of the École Polytechnique, Jomard is the voice of rigour and quantified conscience. It is he who, at Dendera, calculates that the expedition will take on the order of ten thousand objects. It is he who prepares the legal memorandum for Hamilton. His method — anticipate, prove through numbers, concede nothing without verification — stands in opposition to Denon's lyricism and Berthollet's cold realism. His topographical surveys (200 sheets, from the Delta to the cataracts) constitute the most precise map of Egypt of the period. His return to Paris, in a cold room on the rue de la Croix-Faubin, shows him continuing to measure in the dark — a personification of science as resistance.

 

Joseph Fourier — The Intellectual Architect

A mathematician, Fourier is the discreet organiser of the scientific expedition. He presides over the Institut's debates with authority, finds the strategy for surviving under Menou, and understands before anyone else what the Description de l'Égypte will become. His relationship with Bonaparte is lucid: 'The difference between those who make history and those who understand it. Rarely the same people.' He will strike out Denon's lyrical passages; Denon will restore them. Their editorial arm-wrestling symbolises the tension between science and the humanities that the book sustains to the very end.

 

Claude-Louis Berthollet — The Resigned Pragmatist

A chemist and scientific commissioner, Berthollet is the character of unsentimental lucidity. He has known since Venice that 'the right word and the effective word are not always the same'. At Dendera, confronted with Jomard's calculations, he does not dispute the figures but refuses the role of 'police officer or magistrate'. His pragmatism is less cynicism than resignation: he accepted the terms of the expedition when he boarded the Orient. His final sentence on the Description is chilling in its accountant's precision.

 

Gaspard Monge — The Scholar's Fragility

A mathematician and intimate friend of Bonaparte, Monge is the character of consented vulnerability. Seasick, staggering through the desert, he represents the human dimension that the scientific mission exposes. His question after Aboukir — 'it is not hunger that concerns me' — implicitly says what the others dare not articulate.

 

Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire — Scientific Intuition

A naturalist, Geoffroy is in the process — not yet fully aware of it — of formulating the transformist theory that will lead him to oppose Cuvier for thirty years. The cat mummies from Bubastis, identical to living cats, become for him not proof of the fixity of species (Cuvier's thesis) but a sign that two thousand years is insufficient to detect change. His letter to Cuvier, in December 1802, opens one of the greatest scientific disputes of the nineteenth century.

 

Napoléon Bonaparte — The Present Absence

Central by virtue of his progressive absence, Bonaparte is the force that structures the expedition without being its narrator. His sentences are short, decisive, and reveal a mechanism of justification rather than a morality: 'If we win, the debate will not arise in the same way.' He leaves Egypt without warning in Chapter III. His political return (Consulate, Empire) is mentioned only in the epilogue.

 

Hassan — The Living Memory

An Egyptian interpreter, Hassan is the pivotal character who embodies the inhabited — not monumental — Egypt. It is through him that Jomard learns the Arabic names of the columns at Dendera — names that will not appear in the Description but which prove that these monuments were not abandoned ruins: they were neighbours. His presence is discreet but structuring, a constant reminder that the expedition operates in a living country.

 

4.2 Notable Secondary Characters

Character

Role and narrative function

Desaix

Pragmatic general who understands the value of the scholars. His death at Marengo (June 1800) is mentioned.

Kléber

Tall, Alsatian, frank to the point of brutality. Commander after Bonaparte. Assassinated in Cairo (June 1800) — a death that redefines the balance of power.

Marcel

Printer and draughtsman, champion of rubbings and reproduction methods. Witness to the seizure of the Rosetta Stone.

Hamilton & Clarke

British commissioners at the time of the capitulation. Hamilton, young and diplomatic; Clarke, rigid and bureaucratic.

Conté

The expedition's inventor (balloons, pencils, printing presses). Died in 1805 before seeing the Description published.

Sgt-Major Aubert

Keeps an unofficial inventory of his soldiers' takings at Dendera — a figure of order within disorder.

 

5. Themes and Issues

 

5.1 Spoliation as a System

The novel deconstructs spoliation into levels of implacable coherence, presented explicitly by Bonaparte himself: 'Three levels. Three different legitimacies.' The official acquisitions of the Commission (forms, registers); the personal collections of officers and scholars (their own money, individualised moral conscience); the anonymous takings of the soldiers (faience cat, blue figurine, Sergeant Aubert's passage). The implicit thesis: each level justifies itself through the existence of the next. The Commission is 'beyond reproach' so that the rest becomes 'tolerable by comparison'. This mechanism is that of all state acquisitions since the Renaissance — the author does not condemn it; he exposes it with surgical precision.

 

5.2 Documenting versus Possessing

The novel's central tension sets documentation (drawings, measurements, surveys) against possession (physical removal). Denon embodies both simultaneously, and it is precisely this coincidence that makes him the most disturbing character. At Dendera, he draws the zodiac lying on his back in the dark — and notes in a memorandum the possibility of physically extracting it thirty years hence. In Malta, he saves a Caravaggio by diverting a soldier — then carries off paintings by Preti. The novel does not resolve this contradiction: it holds it open until the last page.

The final formulation synthesises the thesis: 'What France truly kept from Egypt was one hundred and sixty-seven minds and the eight hundred and thirty-six images they had produced. What it had stolen was in London.' The distinction is not moral but geographical — and therein lies a bitter irony.

 

5.3 Inhabited Egypt versus Monumental Egypt

The novel keeps living Egypt constantly present alongside archaeological Egypt. The cloth merchant of Alexandria, the father superior of the Coptic monastery, the man from the village of Dendera with his fresh water and the Arabic names of the columns, the fellahin watching the columns pass without moving. These presences constitute a silent counter-narrative that invalidates the legitimating discourse ('these monuments have no living owner'). Hassan is the character who gives this presence a voice.

 

5.4 The Fragility of Traces

After Aboukir, the scholars realise that their work is 'hostage to a military situation over which they have no control'. Jomard makes duplicate copies from Alexandria. Denon lists the objects he could carry on his back. The question of what can physically travel supplants the question of what deserves to be saved — revealing that 'the history one tells about a country is the history of what managed to come back. The rest does not count.' This theme, which runs through the first three chapters like an anxiety, resolves itself in the fourth: it is the notebooks and drawings that survive, not the statues.

 

5.5 Science and Power

The sessions of the Institut d'Égypte dramatise the relationship between scientific production and its political instrumentalisation. Bonaparte does not listen in order to be contradicted: he listens 'to find precedents for what he already wanted to do'. Berthollet has known this since Venice. Under Menou, Fourier develops a technique of institutional survival that prefigures relations between science and the authoritarian state. The debate on civilisational memory (the November session of the Institut) reaches a philosophical height that the military circumstances render particularly poignant.

 

5.6 The Ethics of Restitutions (Anticipation)

Chapter IV, Section III ('The Ethics of Spoliation') constitutes the moment of explicit reflection for which the entire novel has been preparing. The arguments advanced — absence of a living owner, superiority of Western conservation, equivalence with earlier plunderings (Greek, Roman, Arab) — are precisely those which the author, in his professional life as president of an NGO specialising in restitutions, has devoted his career to refuting. The novel does not adjudicate: it allows the arguments to be heard in their full rhetorical force.

 

6. Writing and Poetics of the Novel

 

6.1 Focalisation and Point of View

The novel alternates between multiple focalisations — Denon, Jomard, Berthollet, Fourier — without an omniscient narrator. Each character perceives the same events through the lens of his own intellectual formation: the chemist sees reactions, the mathematician sees calculations, the draughtsman sees forms. This perspectival polyphony prevents any univocal condemnation and forces the reader to assemble the moral picture for himself.

 

6.2 Economy of Style

The style is characteristic of a constructed voice: short sentences, present indicative for action scenes, imperfect for states. No unnecessary adjectives. The dialogues are precise, revealing, never decorative. The novelist avoids conventional narrative transitions — one moves directly from a sceneto a reflection or from a dialogue to an action. Sensory notations (the smell of rope in Toulon, the violent blue of the Mediterranean, the cold of the stone at Dendera) anchor the historical abstraction in the body.

 

6.3 The Revealing Detail

The narrative technique rests on the singular detail charged with general significance. The faience cat from Dendera runs through the entire novel like a discreet thread: it passes from a soldier's hands to an anonymous crate, and its absence from the inventory implicitly conveys the entire mechanism of invisible plundering. The Caravaggio saved in Malta, the signature in blood ('f. Michelangelo'), says in a few lines what the decision not to take something weighs. These narrative choices have a genuine literary density.

 

6.4 Tension between Science and Literature

The Denon/Fourier arm-wrestling over the notices for the Description ('We are doing science, not literature' / 'If we do not convey the effect, we are cataloguing stones') is also the novel's own meta-poetics. The author has chosen to be both — documentary precision of verifiable historical data, lyrical amplitude of the nocturnal scenes (the night on the deck of the Orient, the Osiris chapel at Dendera, the night after Aboukir). Neither gives way. Nor does the novel.

 

7. Documentary and Historical Dimension

 

7.1 Factual Precision

The novel scrupulously respects verifiable historical dates and facts: departure from Toulon on 19 May 1798, capture of Malta on 12 June, landing at Alexandria on 1 July, Battle of Aboukir on 1 August, discovery of the Rosetta Stone in July 1799, assassination of Kléber in June 1800, Capitulation of Alexandria on 2 September 1801. The dimensions of the monuments (hypostyle hall of Karnak: 534 × 550 m, central columns of 23 m), the compositions of the collections, the names of the British commissioners (Hamilton, Clarke) are exact.

 

7.2 Fictional Freedom

In accordance with the prefatory note, certain scenes, dialogues and characters have been imagined for narrative purposes. Hassan the interpreter is a composite character. The nocturnal dialogues between Denon and Bonaparte on the deck of the Orient are fictional. The scene of Sergeant Aubert and his unofficial inventory is a narrative invention, but grounded in the documented reality of soldiers' takings. The encounter with the village man at Dendera is constructed.

 

7.3 The Description de l'Égypte as Watermark

The Description de l'Égypte (1809–1822) is the novel's teleological structure: everything the scholars do in Egypt is done with this monument in mind. Its 23 volumes, 836 plates, 62 draughtsmen, 48 engravers are evoked with precision. The royal cubit calculated by Jomard (0.5236 m), used for 150 years by Egyptologists, is mentioned. Lepère's error regarding the level of the Red Sea (a fictional discrepancy of 9 m) and its consequences for the Suez Canal (60 years' delay) are exact.

 

8. Literary Evaluation

 

8.1 Strengths

• Multi-layered moral construction, free of Manichaeism: the author grants the protagonists the arguments of their age while allowing the reader to see what they cannot.

• Successful perspectival polyphony: each voice has its own intellectual coherence, and the confrontation of perspectives produces a truth richer than any omniscient narrator.

• Scenes of great literary density (the night aboard the Orient, Aboukir, the Osiris chapel, the negotiation with Hamilton) that anchor abstract issues in precise, sensory moments.

• The revealing detail as narrative technique: the faience cat, the Caravaggio, Michelangelo's signature in blood, the Arabic names of the columns.

• A particularly powerful Parisian epilogue, with the scattering of the characters into cold rooms that extend the expedition in solitary gestures of transmission.

• An exemplary final sentence in its construction: the Paris/London distinction resolves the novel's moral ambiguity through chilling irony rather than verdict.

 

8.2 Some Points of Tension

• The informational density is at times high in the sections dealing with measurements and inventories (Dendera, Thebes): the non-specialist reader may momentarily lose their footing.

• The death of Kléber, a decisive event, is treated in a relatively elliptical manner given its dramatic importance.

• The character of Menou, caricatural, contrasts with the complexity of the other military figures (Desaix, Kléber).

 

8.3 Overall Assessment

Volume II of The Great Plunder establishes itself as a historical novel of the highest order, achieving the dual ambition of documentary precision and literary depth. It takes its place in the tradition of the great novels of cultural spoliation while proposing a contemporary reflection on the foundations of what is today called the 'restitution debate'. The narrative voice is authentically literary, built from within, making no concession to the popularising historical novel.

 

9. Notable Quotations

 

'In Italy, we negotiated with princes. Here, there are no princes. There are only tombs and monuments that no one claims. What we shall take will not have had a living owner for a very long time. That is a considerable difference.'

— Bonaparte, on the deck of the Orient

'The absence of a living owner did not signify the absence of an owner.'

— Berthollet, reply to Bonaparte (spoken in a low voice)

'The distinction was real, even if it was uncomfortable.'

— Denon, on the difference between the Commission and the soldiers

'This temple alone deserves six months of study.' / 'They would not return. Their drawings would remain.'

— Jomard at Dendera / narrative voice

'The history one tells about a country is the history of what managed to come back. The rest does not count.'

— Denon, after Aboukir

'What France truly kept from Egypt was one hundred and sixty-seven minds and the eight hundred and thirty-six images they had produced. What it had stolen — and the word was exact, whatever the justification — was in London.'

— Narrative voice, epilogue

'The difference between those who make history and those who understand it. Rarely the same people.'

— Fourier, thinking of Bonaparte

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10. Contextualisation

 

10.1 Place in the Saga

Volume II occupies the central position of the tetralogy: following the spoliations of Flanders and Italy (Volume I), Egypt constitutes the most complex case — an expedition with no identifiable living owner, with a genuine scientific justification, but whose balance sheet is summed up by the final sentence: the statues in London, the knowledge in Paris. Volumes III and IV will cover the campaigns in Germany and Austria, announced in the final lines ('The campaigns were to resume. Germany, Austria, Prussia. And with the campaigns, the collections.').

 

10.2 Contemporary Resonances

The novel enters into direct dialogue with current debates on the restitution of cultural property looted during the colonial and Napoleonic conquests. The author — president of the NGO International Restitutions and expert at UNCTAD — knows these arguments from the inside. The novel's strength lies in restoring them to their original context, without moral anachronism, while allowing the contemporary reader to hear them differently. The Egypt described in 2026 is not that of 1801: the statues are still in London.

 

 

Reading report written following complete reading of the manuscript. June 2026.