Bonaparte, Malta And The Destinies Of Europe was an intriguing topic taken up by French historian Emmanuel de Waresquiel, author of Talleyrand, le Prince Immobile, an authoritative biography of the renowned French Foreign Minister who, for a number of years, served both under the ancien régime and the republic in a turbulent period of European history during which Napoleon Bonaparte also seized Malta from the Order of St John.

Guest of the French Embassy and the Alliance Francaise, Dr Waresquiel highlighted Napoleon's association with islands beginning with Corsica, where he was born in 1769, Elba, where he was exiled at the age of 45, and St Helena, his final exile that led to his death in 1821. He visited another famous island, Malta, when he was only 29. The taking and losing of this little island seems to have provoked the second European coalition against the republic and eventually led to the Napoleonic Wars that were to last till his fall in 1815.

Dr Waresquiel pointed out that, along the 18th century, three great powers were fighting for dominance in the Mediterranean. These were Russia, England and France. England, dominating the waves for almost a century, consolidated its plans with the acquisition of Gibraltar in1783. France, an old ally of the Ottomans, dreamt of a future empire in the Far East while Russia, since the occupation of Crimea by Catherine II also in 1783, was looking for further extension westwards from the Black Sea.

The power struggle over the Mediterranean, mostly between France and England, threatened the survival of commerce in the Levant with the loss of income and jobs for mercantile traders from Turkey, Greece and Ragusa.

General Bonaparte was the card in the French plans for the Mediterranean. In a relatively short time, he conquered most of Italy and secured peace with the Austrians in 1797. It was after Italy that Bonaparte took off on his dream of the Orient with the seizure of Malta a year later and the start of the Egyptian campaign.

His writings to the Directory in Paris speak clearly of Egypt. We will become masters of all the Mediterranean, insisted the general. To curtail England's commerce to the Far East, the islands of Corfu, Zakynthos and Kefalonia are more important to France than the whole of Italy.

Bonaparte's personality played a very important role during this time. His dream of the Orient embarked him on a vast heroic programme of civilisation built on a return to the sciences and the arts by acquiring the places from where they originated. A commission of the sciences and the arts was created. In the port of Toulon, in May 1798, before he set sail for Egypt, the young general compared England to Carthage, a commercial and maritime power, needing another Scipio Africanus of mighty Rome. He started to annotate the Koran, studied maps and read the Voyage to Syria and the Orient by Volney. He wanted to get rid of despotism in the East and instead extend the reign of liberty to this great nation on behalf of humanity.

An ally in the heart of the Directory in Paris, Bonaparte had Talleyrand, who was among the first to understand the value of international commerce after his experience in the United States. He favoured the founding of colonies in the Mediterranean to replace those of the new world.

Malta was the first stop on the way to Egypt. The French republic knew everything about the Knights. The income from the commanderies in Europe had shrunk in value and, as Abbé Boyer explained in 1775, the Order was financially in hot waters. The real treasury of the Order depended on the commercial monopoly of the wheat from Sicily in the hands of a few Maltese merchant families. Many members of the Order were in debt with these families. The Maltese themselves were unhappy and brought about a short lived revolt in Valletta in 1775.

While Horatio Nelson's fleet was in Messina, Bonaparte entered Malta with one of the biggest fleets to visit the island in all its history. With thousands of men at arms were scores of scholars who would make history in the sciences and the arts. These included the geometrist Monge, the chemist Berthollet, the zoologist Saint Hilaire, the geologist Dolomieu, Villiers, Denon, the future first director of the Louvre museum.

With them some of the finest generals like Sulkowski, Caffarelli, Kleber, Menou, Desaix, who had more wins to his credit than Napoleon himself, Baraguay d'Hilliers, Lannes, Murat, King of Naples, Junot, Berthier, Marmont, Savary and Bertrand, who followed Napoleon into exile on St Helena.

Once on the island, the French set up a more liberal government but the insurrection by the Maltese people in the countryside left the French behind the city bastions for another two years. Peace was again declared in Europe and, in 1803, at Amiens, Malta was to be returned to a neutral state protected by other states such as Austria, Spain and Russia. The British opted not to leave Malta and this seems to have provoked a bigger, longer war that lasted until 1815.

There were moments when England seemed ready to leave if France left Holland but this never happened. Would Trafalgar, Austerlitz and Waterloo have happened if the British had left Malta in the early years of the 19th century?

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