Uniforms of Empire: The Intersection of Race, Religion, and Sartorial Politics in Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign

Abstract

This article examines the ideological significance of the Kashmir shawl during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign (1798–1801), focusing on depictions in Antoine-Jean Gros’ Bonaparte Visits the Plague-stricken in Jaffa and Andre Duterte’s portrayals of French soldiers for Descriptions de l’Egypte. Tracing the shawl’s transformation from an Islamic artefact to a French military accessory and later a symbol of domestic luxury, this study highlights its dual role as a site of cultural negotiation and a tool of colonial domination. Through its exploration of the Kashmir shawl, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the intersections of race, religion, and ethnicity, demonstrating how material culture both mediated and reinforced power dynamics within Napoleon’s imperial project.

1. Encountering Egypt: Struggles, Adaptation, and Mameluke Opulence

Among the memoirs of French soldiers who accompanied Napoleon—then a thirty-year-old general—to Egypt, a particularly revealing excerpt from Jean-Gabriel de Niello Sargy stands out. Written sometime between the Battle of Saléhié (3 August 1798) and the Battle of Abukir (25 July 1799), Sargy recounts the following:

“During our geographical exploration, we neglected nothing to obtain positive information on the Mameluke march of Ibrahim-Bey. It was only on the approach to Belbeis that we learned that Ibrahim, united with the Arabs, had just captured the greater part of the caravan from India, with which he was preparing to cross into Syria. We immediately walked in the direction of Saléhié, to snatch it from his hands. We were hoping to each have beautiful cashmere shawls”.1

At first glance, this excerpt aligns with the logistical concerns of a military expedition—divulging troop movements, intelligence, and objectives. Yet the final line strikes an unexpected note: amidst the chaos of war, Sargy and his comrades eagerly anticipated acquiring “beautiful cashmere shawls”. This seemingly offhand remark underscores a deeper narrative embedded in the campaign, where military ambition intersected with material desire. Textiles such as the Kashmir shawl became powerful symbols of appropriation, identity, and power, particularly because of their established status across Islamic courts as markers of elite taste, commercial power, and spiritual refinement. This article asks how and why the Kashmir shawl, an object embedded in Islamic prestige culture, came to occupy such a charged role in French military self-fashioning during a revolutionary campaign otherwise committed to austerity and rationality. While building on the foundational work of art historian Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby on colonial aesthetics (Grigsby 2002), this study shifts focus from representations of Napoleon himself to the broader sartorial culture of his officers and soldiers. It situates the material, visual, and sensory dimensions of appropriation, reframing the shawl not as a passive symbol but as an active site of cultural negotiation.

This textual account finds its visual counterpart in Jean-Antoine Gros’ Bonaparte Visits the Plague-stricken in Jaffa (1804). In the painting, Napoleon is centrally positioned, wearing a navy uniform and a scarlet Kashmir shawl, standing in sharp contrast to his near-nude, ailing soldiers (Figure S1). Napoleon’s composed stance projects rationality, order, and courage, juxtaposed against the vulnerability of his soldiers, who are either succumbing to illness or seeking shelter. Notably, Grigsby observes that the painting eschews a typical roi thaumaturge narrative, where healing powers affirm divine authority. Instead, Napoleon’s physical proximity to the afflicted is framed as a refutation of irrational fears of contagion, aligning his actions with an Enlightenment model of rationality (Grigsby 2002, p. 73). Building on such insight, the Kashmir shawl emerges as a pivotal element in the painting, functioning as both a site of cultural convergence and a symbol of colonial power. Both Napoleon and the doctor wear shawls, visually linking them through a shared material garment. Yet the shawl also encapsulates the complexities of appropriation and domination, signifying both admiration for Mameluke culture and its re-contextualisation within a colonial framework.

Sartorial politics—the ways in which garments serve as a medium for expressing and contesting power, identity, and cultural narratives—is the primary focus here.2 The Kashmir shawl, an object embodying both allure and authority, mediated the interplay of power, race, and religion within Napoleon’s campaign. As Faegheh Shirazi argues, textiles were deeply “connected to systems of religion, political organisation, marriage, social status and exchange” (Shirazi 2023, p. 92), making them essential artefacts for understanding the cultural dynamics of the Egyptian campaign. Launched in 1798, the campaign sought to disrupt British trade routes to India and assert French Enlightenment ideals (Dwyer 2008, p. 341; Herold 1962, p. 14). Emerging from the successes of the Italian campaign (1796–1797), Napoleon framed the expedition as both a strategic and ideological endeavour—an effort to position France as a civilising force in a region tied to ancient civilisations and trade.3 The formation of the Armée d’Orient, under Napoleon’s leadership, symbolised not only his military ambition but also his role as a reformer, bringing Enlightenment ideals to a perceived stagnant society (Meeks 2019, vol. XXVIII). Jean-Louis-Ébénézer Reynier, a Napoleonic general, insisted that “any useful change” to Egyptian society “cannot be brought about but by foreigners called to the government”.4

Against this backdrop of colonial ambition, the Kashmir shawl became a potent symbol of colonial appropriation and cultural anxiety. In this context, ‘colonial appropriation’ refers to the selective adoption of indigenous cultural elements such as the Kashmir shawl by colonial agents as a means of asserting power, while ‘cultural anxiety’ captures the paradox inherent in this process: a simultaneous admiration for, and unease with, the colonised Other.

French soldiers’ adoption of the shawl, without altering its Islamic design or religious associations, reflected both admiration for and domination over Mameluke culture. The shawl’s transformation—from a military adornment to a feminised object of domestic luxury in France—underscored the contradictions inherent in colonial encounters. As Grigsby demonstrates in her post-campaign analysis, such garments were reimagined post-campaign in fashion plates as feminine or infantile accessories, aligning with French perceptions of Mamelukes as effeminate or infantile (Grigsby 1996, p. 16). This dynamic exemplifies what Homi Bhabha terms mimicry: the colonial act of imitating and re-contextualising cultural symbols to assert power while exposing the insecurities and ambivalences within colonial rule (Bhabha 2012, p. 122).

This paper adopts a post-colonial framework to examine the intersections of race, religion, and sartorial politics within Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, centring on the Kashmir shawl as a symbol of cultural appropriation and colonial authority. This approach draws on Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism as a system of knowledge and representation that constructs the East as Other, and engages with visual and textual strategies that reframe appropriation as a form of aesthetic and ideological domination. Drawing on these insights, this study situates the Kashmir shawl within the broader material culture of post-revolutionary France (Said 2019). As Michelle Facos observes, the French fascination with Egypt rested in its depiction in Western narratives as a mythical place “unaltered since Biblical times—a direct link to the past” (Facos 2011, p. 155). This aligns with what Mona Ozouf penned as the Revolution’s ambition to achieve “for nothing less than the creation of a ‘new people’” (Furet and Ozouf 1989, p. 781). Within this post-revolutionary rhetoric, Desmond Hosford and Chong J. Wojtkowski argue that nineteenth-century French Orientalism sought to position France as the rightful inheritor of the bygone greatness of a now “abject Orient” (Hosford and Wojtkowski 2010, p. 6). Discourse casting France, and specifically Napoleon here, as a civilising benefactor is encapsulated in an issue of the French newspaper Le Publiciste, dated 23 November 1798:

“However, Buonaparte does not sleep. Dedicated to all the administrative cares of his important conquest, he ventures to Damietta, to Rosette, and defends the coast from all sides; he orders the necessary forts on the borders of the desert; in Suez & in Upper Egypt. He keeps his troops on their toes, making recruits in the country, and uses more art than force to feel amongst the natives. He takes advantage of the civil and religious divisions to attach himself to the Copts, the Bedouins, the peasants. He flatters their self-esteem, adopting many of their customs so they adopt ours…He prohibits premature marriages from nine to ten years, gently hinders polygamy; in a word, he is founding a new civil code in Asia, & which will change its face, I predict it to you”.5

Napoleon’s supposed adoption of local customs underscored his broader claim of bringing Enlightenment to the region, reinforcing his dual role as reformer and conqueror while asserting France’s civilising mission. The idea of the Kashmir shawl as a shared garment between Napoleon and the Oriental doctor adds further complexity to this analysis. Momentarily linking the two figures, this visual sharing of the textile complicates rigid binaries of power, suggesting a moment of ambivalent exchange within the campaign. Ultimately, the Kashmir shawl serves as a compelling lens through which to trace the interplay between material culture and imperial identity. Employing both visual and textual analysis to explore how the Kashmir shawl functioned as both a practical garment and a contested symbol, the outline of the paper is as follows: Section 2 provides a historical background of the political landscapes of France and Egypt leading up to the campaign, whilst Section 3 examines the shawl’s transformation from a cultural artefact of Islamic heritage to a militarised emblem of French authority. Section 4 analyses its dual role as a practical and symbolic garment, with a closer study of Gros’ Jaffa, interpreting the shawl’s presence as a shared garment that encapsulates the contradictions of French colonial identity. Through these sections, the paper highlights the paradoxes of French male military identity, as embodied in the Kashmir shawl’s transformation from battlefield trophy to a complex symbol of imperial authority. By tracing these dynamics, the study reveals how sartorial politics became a tool for redefining and controlling the intersections of race, religion, and ethnicity within this particular encounter.

2. The Political Context and Cultural Imaginaries of Egypt and Revolutionary France

At the time of Napoleon’s campaign, Egypt was nominally under Ottoman rule but was, in practice, controlled by the Mamelukes—a powerful military elite whose autonomy had grown significantly since their establishment in Egypt centuries earlier. Although the term ‘Mameluke’ translates to ‘slave’ in Arabic, their unique military origins allowed them to rise to positions of power, effectively governing Egypt while maintaining nominal allegiance to the Ottoman sultan (Q. Simon 2021). Originally brought as enslaved soldiers, primarily from the Caucasus, the Mamelukes rose through the military ranks to achieve considerable influence. By the 18th century, they effectively controlled Egypt, maintaining nominal allegiance to the Ottoman sultan while exercising substantial political authority and showcasing their wealth through cultural and artistic markers.6

Napoleon’s ambitions in Egypt were shaped not only by contemporary revolutionary ideals but also by a deliberate emulation of classical precedents, particularly that of Alexander the Great. The inclusion of savants alongside the military, the desire to scientifically catalogue Egypt’s monuments, and the selective appropriation of foreign customs were all hallmarks of Hellenistic expansion. In aligning himself with Alexander, Napoleon positioned Egypt as a symbolic and strategic proving ground for both conquest and cultural legitimacy. In this light, even the French military’s adoption of Eastern textiles such as the Kashmir shawl can be seen as part of a broader tradition of charismatic appropriation, wherein dress functioned as a performative tool of authority modelled on antiquity.7

The Mamelukes’ distinctive attire—silk slippers, billowing pants, and intricately patterned turbans and sashes—signified political dominance and cultural pride, intertwining regional craftsmanship with Islamic aesthetics. These garments exemplified Igor Kopytoff’s concept of ‘cultural biographies,’ undergoing transformations as they moved through different social and political contexts, reflecting the interconnectivity of Islamic trade networks.8 This includes Persian gold and silver weaving techniques (Behrens-Abouseif 2014, p. 153), Ottoman tailoring styles, and rich materials like silk, wool, and fur, sourced from Ba’albaki, Baghdad, and Mosul (Behrens-Abouseif 2023, p. 28). French artist André Dutertre, who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, depicted the Mamelukes in their daily attire within the Descriptions de l’Égypte, the voluminous post-campaign work published between 1809 and 1828. Although most savants did not wear Mameluke attire, they played a crucial role in recording and aestheticising it. Through illustrations, inventories, and textual framing in Descriptions, they helped translate local garments into Enlightenment objects of visual and cultural value.9 Duterte’s depiction of the Mameluke chieftain Murad Bey highlights the opulence of Mameluke dress, with an elaborate turban, flowing robes, and a second shawl holding a dagger, conveying the cultural richness of the Mameluke society against a backdrop of slender columns and intricately tiled floors (Figure S2). However, these depictions often juxtaposed Mameluke splendour with other images in Descriptions, which depicted locals in various supine positions amidst landscapes of crumbling architectural ruins, suggesting their languid indifference (Figure S3).10 Such contrasts reinforced a racialised discourse in which Egypt, marked by ancient grandeur, was now marred by stagnation and contemporary decadence. The framing of ruins as symbols of a bygone era positioned French intervention under the guise of a mission civilisatrice—a narrative central to the colonial imagination (Anne 1995, pp. 9–10).

While Mameluke society represented continuity and tradition in Egypt’s political landscape, post-revolutionary France in the 1790s underwent profound transformation. The French Revolution had dismantled aristocratic structures, ushering in a redefinition of socio-political and religious values.11 This upheaval fostered a new civic masculinity, characterised by discipline, restraint, and secular virtue—traits that stood in stark contrast to the perceived excesses of Mameluke culture. French soldiers, embodying this new ideal, wore austere uniforms that symbolised republican values. Morag Martin observes that the late eighteenth century replaced the ancien régime’s aristocratic fripperies and artifice with “a moral model that stressed natural beauty”.12 This visual shift reinforced narratives of French moral superiority and rational order over the ostentatious dress of their Mameluke counterparts. Yet, as Elizabeth Amann points out, French sartorial ideals were far from uniform. Subcultures such as the Incroyables—men who donned extravagant, oversized garments—used dress as a politicised critique of the Directory’s governance (Amann 2015). These sartorial complexities reveal the multiple and often contradictory ways clothing articulated identity and political dissent. Amid this contested sartorial landscape, French military uniforms assumed heightened symbolic significance, representing not only republican discipline but also a deliberate counterpoint to Mameluke dress (Aston 2000, p. 261). As Susan Fraiman argues, Middle Eastern and North African countries were often veiled in Orientalist rhetoric along gendered lines: “mysterious, sensuous, beckoning, undisciplined, and naturally subordinate to a West imagined in correspondingly ‘male’ terms” (Fraiman 2003, p. 49). French accounts of Mameluke attire frequently reflected these gendered binaries. François, Baron de Tott, a French nobleman who had travelled extensively in the region, described Mameluke garments as “inviting rest” and “apathy”,13 reinforcing stereotypes of Eastern indulgence as antithetical to Western vigour. Similarly, Claude-Étienne Savary’s Lettres d’Égypte (1785–1786) (Savary 1786, vol. II, p. 186) and Comte de Volney’s Travels through Syria and Egypt14 disparaged Mameluke attire as embodying vanity and artifice. Volney noted, “Their luxury is such that there is no Mameluke whose upkeep does not cost 2500 livres per year, and there are many that cost twice that … jewels, precious stones, Arabian horses costing between two hundred and three hundred sous, cashmere shawls costing between 25 and 50 sous and a host of fur coats”.15 Such accounts depicted Mameluke sartorial opulence as both excessive and morally lax, reinforcing ideological justifications for French intervention. French officer Chalbrand encapsulated these narratives during a military procession in Cairo, observing how Egyptians expected French soldiers to rival the splendour of Mameluke dress. Instead, they saw men who could “show themselves so brave under such shabby clothes”,16 which Chalbrand interpreted as evidence of French restraint and moral virtue. These depictions extended to broader Orientalist narratives about Mamelukes’ supposed cultural inferiority. Pierre Jaubert, an officer under Napoleon, likened Mameluke treatment of prisoners to “Socrates with Alcibiades”, invoking classical associations with homosexuality to depict Mameluke practices as corrupt.17 Similarly, French engineer C.S. Sonnini described Egyptians as afflicted by “the passion contrary to nature”, an accusation that framed such societies as morally degenerate and justified French claims of moral and cultural superiority.18

As Napoleon’s forces entered Egypt, they carried not only military ambitions but also a sense of ideological supremacy rooted in Enlightenment values. This self-perception contrasted sharply with the perceived decadence and moral laxity of Mameluke society, creating a visual and ideological binary. Volney encapsulated this view, describing the Mamelukes as “ignorant and superstitious from education” (de Volney 1787, p. 168). Mameluke dress, associated with power and opulence, became a focal point for these symbolic tensions. The Kashmir shawl, coveted for its craftsmanship and practicality, encapsulated the allure of Mameluke culture while serving as a site of colonial negotiation. French soldiers’ re-appropriation of the shawl reflected both attraction to and domination of Mameluke society, embodying the interplay of desire and subjugation central to the sartorial politics of Napoleon’s campaign.

3. Encountering Egypt: Struggles, Adaptation, and Mameluke Opulence

Arriving in Alexandria on 2 July 1798, Napoleon’s troops were immediately confronted by Egypt’s unyielding climate—an environment for which they were woefully unprepared. This unpreparedness reflected broader miscalculations about the region’s geographical and climatic challenges. Unaccustomed to the intense heat and relentless sunlight, soldiers quickly began to suffer from dehydration, heat exhaustion, and even vision loss. Charles Antoine Morand of the 88eme Demi-brigade vividly captured the plight of the soldiers, describing how excessive sweating and exposure hampered their ability to advance (Morand 2005, p. viii). Many soldiers removed their helmets in a desperate bid to cool themselves, exposing their heads to the sun, while others discarded parts of their heavy uniforms, only to suffer during the sudden temperature drops at night. Baron Larrey, the army’s chief physician, lamented the troops’ vulnerability:

“We had taken almost none of the necessary precautions to protect ourselves…thus, upon our arrival in Egypt, we were suddenly struck by a stubborn ophthalmia, which quickly weakened our battalions, plunged several of our soldiers into absolute despair and caused, in a certain number of them, the loss of their sight in such a rapid manner that no effective assistance could be provided to them”.19

This stark contrast between French fragility and Mameluke resilience underscored the symbolic and practical significance of the Kashmir shawl. As French soldiers observed the adaptability of Mameluke textiles, the shawl came to represent both the allure and the perceived superiority of local craftsmanship (Dewatcher and Gillispie 1997, p. 15). This blindness epidemic, as Liza Oliver argues, challenged the Enlightenment’s reliance on sight as the primary sense for acquiring knowledge, exposing the fragility of colonial ambitions when confronted with the region’s physical realities (Oliver 2012). Constance Classen’s insights into the cultural history of touch further contextualise this crises, emphasising how sensory interactions with local textiles reshaped French perceptions of the Kashmir shawl, elevating its value as both an object of beauty and practicality.20

Desperation punctuated the early days of the campaign. Lieutenant Vertray, reflecting on the agony of near-empty wells, wrote “it was pitying to see men stretched on their bellies around that fetid hole, dying of thirst, panting and unable to satisfy their craving”.21 When the army finally reached the Nile, chaos ensued as soldiers, overwhelmed by thirst, broke ranks to throw themselves into the river. Desvernois wrote that “Some kept their clothes, even their weapons … many found their deaths by drinking too greedily”.22 General Jacques-François Menou Damas, in a letter to General Jean-Baptiste Kléber, lamented their struggles: “You have no idea of the tiring walks we took to get to Cairo, always arriving at three or four in the afternoon, having suffered all the heat, most of the time without food, being forced to glean what the divisions which precede us had left”.23 These accounts underscore the soldiers’ vulnerability, transforming them from agents of imperial conquest into figures overwhelmed by the harsh realities of the Egyptian environment. Amid these hardships, French soldiers found themselves admiring Mameluke attire, which they perceived as emblematic of adaptability and quality—qualities that distinctly contrasted with their own inadequate uniforms. Major-général Louis-Alexandre Berthier captured the awe and discomfort inspired by the Mamelukes:

“The heat was burning; the soldiers were extremely tired…Such an imposing spectacle had not yet caught the eye of the French. The cavalry of the Mamelukes were covered with sparkling weapons. Behind on his left we see those famous pyramids, the indestructible mass of which has survived all empires and for thirty centuries defied the ravages of time”.24

This imagery encapsulated the duality of the French encounter: fascination with the Mamelukes’ grandeur and unease with their perceived power. Lieutenant Nicolas Philibert Desvernois recorded the dazzling appearance of the Mameluke cavalry: “Their costumes are brilliantly colourful; their turbans are surmounted by aigret feathers, and some wear gilded helmets … this spectacle produced a vivid impression on our soldiers by its novelty and richness”.25 Chalbrand, too, remarked on the “difference” between the Mamelukes’ attire and the French soldiers’ frayed uniforms, identifying an allure and authority inherent in Mameluke textiles.26 For many French soldiers, the Kashmir shawl became an object of particular fascination, valued not only for its intricate craftsmanship and vibrant colours but also for its cultural significance as a marker of Mameluke prestige. Sargy observed its economic and symbolic value, describing orders to seize “all gold and coined money, all objects of gold, all valuable shawls, carpets embroidered in gold” (Sargy 1825, p. 74). Beyond its material worth, the shawl embodied a complex duality: a practical shield against Egypt’s harsh climate and an exotic commodity framed through an Orientalist lens of opulence. Lightweight and breathable, the shawl offered l’Armée de l’Orient relief from the desert’s extreme temperatures, contrasting sharply with their own stifling woollen uniforms.

This dual attraction to the shawl’s utility and beauty reveals its deeper resonance within the encounter. As an object embedded in Islamic societies, the shawl carried significant religious and social meanings that heightened its allure.27 Its value in Mameluke society paralleled its symbolic role; Sargy’s description of shawls as equivalent to gold underscores their status as objects of prestige and wealth. By appropriating the shawl, French soldiers not only embraced its aesthetic and practical appeal but also claimed a token of Mameluke economic power. This dual appropriation—of cultural symbolism and material wealth—encompassed the broader colonial narrative of dominance, wherein plundered artefacts served as tangible markers of subjugation.28 Patterns such as the boteh motif, symbolising fertility and renewal, imbued the shawl to Islamic spiritual and cultural values, which the French appropriated while reframing it to serve colonial narratives. As the soldiers’ growing fascination with Mameluke textiles, particularly the Kashmir shawl, intensified, the shawl came to embody deeper socio-political tensions. This dynamic set the stage for the shawl’s symbolic transformation in French male imagination, where it would become a symbol of imperial authority and Orientalist allure.

4. The Colonial Fetishisation of the Kashmir Shawl and Gros’ Jaffa

The origins of the Kashmir shawl are deeply tied to religious and cultural influences, particularly those shaped by the spread of Islam in the Kashmir region. Under the guidance of Shah-i-Hamadan, Sayyid scholars and artisans introduced advanced weaving techniques and Islamic teachings that emphasised social equality and universal kinship (Kumar 2022, p. 134). This transformation allowed the shawl industry to transcend caste-dominated restrictions, providing artisans with unprecedented economic opportunities. Over time, shawl-making became closely associated with Muslim communities, particularly Shia artisans, embedding it deeply within Islamic heritage as a potent marker of faith, identity, and cultural tenacity (ibid., p. 135) (Figure S4).

Crafted for global circulation, Kashmir shawls became essential components of regional trade networks and tribute exchanges, admired not only for their intricate craftsmanship but also for their symbolic value (Ahad 1987, p. 9). The Mamelukes incorporated these shawls into their attire, wrapping them as sashes or fashioning them into turbans. These garments held multifaceted significance: they functioned not only as protection against the harsh climates of the region while also serving as markers of rank and religious affiliation (Beardsley 2005, p. 15). Patterns such as the boteh motif—commonly referred to as ‘paisley’ in Western contexts—enriched the shawl’s symbolic meaning. The boteh, derived from the Farsi word for “cluster of leaves” (ibid., p. 82), symbolised fertility, renewal, and prosperity in Islamic decorative arts (Chwalkowski 2016, p. 206; Gasparini 2020, pp. 82–83). Other motifs, such as those resembling the mihrab (the niche in a mosque indicating the direction of Mecca), added spiritual significance to the shawls, reinforcing their connection to Islamic religious traditions.29 As Michelle Maskill notes, Kashmir shawls exemplified the interconnectedness of Islamic societies, circulating widely through shared trade and artistic traditions (Maskiell 2002, p. 27). These elements not only made the shawls objects of utility and prestige but also imbued them with considerable religious, cultural, and symbolic resonance.

Visual depictions of French generals Louis-Charles-Antoine Desaix and Jacques Destaing adorned in Kashmir shawls demonstrate how these textiles became entangled in the dynamics of colonial appropriation and cultural dominance (Figures S5 and S6). Crafted by Duterte, these images provide compelling evidence of the shawl’s incorporation into French colonial visual rhetoric.30 Desaix, depicted standing in full military regalia, projects calm confidence, with his hand poised on his chest and his expression conveying ease and authority. The backdrop of sand-coloured terrain and scattered architectural elements resembling village structures reinforces his ease in a foreign environment, visually situating him as both conqueror and mediator. His fitted uniform—complete with a feathered bicorne hat, breeches, and a navy coat—contrasts sharply with the artist’s depiction of Murad Bey in loose, flowing garments. However, Desaix’s Kashmir shawl, wrapped around his waist in a traditional Mameluke fashion, complicates this binary, signalling not only his adaptability but also the French army’s strategic appropriation of Eastern aesthetics to assert control. Similarly, Duterte’s sketch of General Destaing mirrors this interplay between European regimentation and Eastern influence. Destaing’s streamlined military uniform is accentuated by a muted colour palette that focuses attention on the figure himself. The Kashmir shawl, once again worn as a sash, serves as a focal point, visually bridging the gap between French military discipline and Eastern artisanal traditions. Destaing’s commanding pose, with one hand flung outward as if issuing an order, reinforces the image of a figure deeply embedded in the machinery of colonial authority. The juxtaposition of his uniform with the shawl emphasises the tensions between adaptation and dominance, suggesting that while the French sought to integrate Eastern cultural elements, they simultaneously rebranded these symbols as indices of their own sophistication and power.

The inclusion of the shawl in these depictions exemplifies the broader French project of appropriation and re-contextualisation. As Edward Said aptly observed, Descriptions represented the “great collective appropriation of one country by another”, reframing the artefacts and traditions of Egypt and the broader Islamic world within a French colonial narrative.31 The Kashmir shawl, a product of non-European artisanship, becomes a marker of French refinement, severed from its original Islamic and cultural context. By portraying Desaix and Destaing adorned with these textiles, Duterte’s works reaffirm a racialised structure of colonial authority, where the ability of French officers to absorb and reinterpret Mameluke culture becomes a visual metaphor for their presumed right to dominate it. The shawl’s inclusion also underscores its dual status as an object of utility and a symbol of cultural erasure. In Islamic traditions, the shawl’s intricate motifs and craftsmanship carried religious and cultural significance, symbolising interconnectedness, prosperity, and spiritual devotion. Yet, in French imagery, these meanings were deliberately stripped away and superseded with a secular, imperial framework. Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign was as much an intellectual conquest as a military one, with Descriptions serving as a vehicle for extracting, chronicling, and reframing the cultural and religious elements of Egyptian society to fit within the narrative of French superiority. In Duterte’s sketches, the shawl embodies this process of decontextualisation, severed from its Islamic origins and absorbed into the aesthetic vocabulary of the French elite.

By the time Descriptions was published, Kashmir shawls had already transitioned into symbols of femininity and luxury in European society. Figures like Joséphine Bonaparte, Thérésa Tallien, and Juliette Récamier were often depicted wearing these garments, celebrated for their softness, intricate patterns, and exotic allure. As Woodruff Smith notes, these items “served as tokens of the excitement supposedly available in the lands they came from”, aligning with Orientalist fantasies that conflated Eastern craftsmanship with sensuality and indulgence (Smith 2002, p. 76). The shawl’s inclusion in images of Desaix and Destaing disrupts its entrenched association with femininity by placing it in a masculine, militarised context. This layered symbolism highlights the fluidity of colonial representations, where objects from subjugated cultures could shift between gendered and political meanings to serve imperial narratives. This act of mimicry, as theorised by Homi K. Bhabha, reveals a paradox (Bhabha 2012, p. 122). While the shawl retained traces of its Islamic cultural resonance, its adoption within French colonial imagery was intended to assert dominance. Yet, in appropriating this artefact without fundamentally altering its form, the French inadvertently allowed fragments of Mameluke identity to persist, subtly subverting the colonial hierarchy. As previously noted, French encounters with Mameluke attire evoked both fascination and unease. Accustomed to the regimented simplicity of their uniforms, French soldiers were confronted with the vibrant colours and intricate designs of Mameluke garments, particularly the Kashmir shawl. These vivid displays of colour and texture challenged the ideals of discipline and austerity central to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French rhetoric.32 Charles Blanc’s Grammaire des Arts du Dessin (Blanc 1867) articulates these anxieties, linking bright colours like red and yellow with sensuality and moral risk: “The union of design and colour is necessary to beget painting just as is the union of man and woman to beget mankind, but design must maintain its preponderance over colour. Otherwise, painting speeds to its ruin: it will fall through colour just as mankind fell through Eve” (Blanc 1867, p. 419). Blanc’s racialised aesthetics valorised simplicity and whiteness, casting Eastern excess as both alluring and dangerous (Rauser 2020, p. 128). The shawl, simultaneously desired and feared, encapsulated this tension. Chalbrand’s account of French soldiers risking their lives to plunder “rich, bloody cashmere” from Mameluke corpses vividly illustrates the shawl’s status as both a trophy of conquest and a symbol of sensual allure (Chalbrand 1856). Similarly, Vivant Denon, a prominent figure in the Institut d’Égypte—a scholarly institute founded by Napoleon during the campaign—and the first Director of the Louvre, noted the ubiquity of Kashmir shawls in ceremonial, military, and religious contexts, mentioning them alongside descriptions of the pyramids of Saqqara and mosques in Rosetta.33 The shawl thus becomes a multifaceted object—simultaneously a product of colonial appropriation, a symbol of cultural erasure, and a lingering remnant of Mameluke identity. Duterte’s depictions of Desaix and Destaing encapsulate these contradictions, presenting the shawl as a material manifestation of the complexities of French engagement with Egypt. It is at once an object of conquest, a marker of hybridity, and a site where cultural resistance quietly persists.

The Kashmir shawl’s visual and symbolic power finds its apex in Gros’ Bonaparte Visits the Plague-stricken in Jaffa. The Journal du Publiciste extolled Gros’ “brilliant but slightly russet” palette, invoking the feeling of heady, sand-filled terrains to the viewer.34 The Journal des Débats praised Gros’ skill in depicting Napoleon’s unflinching bravery as he approaches the afflicted, a stark contrast to his uneasy soldiers standing behind him, their discomfort palpable.35 As Grigsby points out, this romanticised narrative casts Napoleon as both saviour and conqueror, embodying Enlightenment ideals of rationality and colonial authority. His composed stance amidst devastation reinforces an imperial narrative of control over both land and people, centring exclusively on not France, nor l’Armée de l’Orient, but on Napoleon himself (Grigsby 2002, p. 73). The Kashmir shawl, prominently featured on both Napoleon and the Oriental doctor, creates a visual and symbolic bridge between the two figures. Garments are central to the discussions Gros’ work incurred. As Débats observes, one patient is “stripped down to the waist of his clothes which fall and drape over the lower part of the body”, emphasising a stark contrast with the fully clothed Napoleon and doctor. Napoleon’s scarlet shawl, vibrant against the muted tones of the background, becomes an aesthetic reminder of his vitality. Fashioned as a Mameluke-style sash, the shawl aligns Napoleon with Desaix and Destaing, reinforcing his adaptability to foreign surroundings. The shared textile between Napoleon and the doctor hints at a moment of commonality, yet this connection is laden with ambivalence. Napoleon, upright and bare-handed, signifies command, immunity, and intimate empathy with the afflicted. The doctor, in contrast, kneels while administering care with an intervening instrument, emphasising distance.

The emulation of a key Mameluke textile invites further nuancing. Scholars such as Theresa Dolan (Dolan 2015, p. 409) and Susan Hiner (Hiner 2010) have argued that Orientalising garments, particularly those incorporated into French fashion, symbolised wealth, status, and sensuality. From the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, Oriental dress became embedded within a fashion-oriented framework that feminised its wearers. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French literature often reinforced this feminisation: Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, for example, framed the Orient as an “effeminate” counterpart to the “brave and active” Occident (Montesquieu 1989, p. 280). Gros’ painting, however, complicates this binary. Napoleon’s sartorial appropriation of the Kashmir shawl operates within an exclusively male context, casting him as an authoritative figure capable of bridging cultural divides. Yet this masculinised framing is not extended to the doctor. The Journals des Monuments’ critique of Jaffa underscores French discomfort with the doctor’s attire: “The Arab doctor we have just mentioned in dressed in red, green, and yellow—colours so discordant with each other that they assault the eye and disrupt the harmony of the group”.36 The vibrant colours of the doctor’s garments—his yellow shawl and red robes—are framed as jarring and offensive amidst the plague-ravaged devastation. Such selective aesthetic interpretation exemplifies Bhabha’s concept of the colonial fetish, where desire and domination co-exist. Napoleon’s vibrant attire is interpreted as a symbol of vitality, while the doctor’s similar sartorial choices are dismissed as discordant, disrupting the painting’s “harmony”. Blanc’s aesthetic theory illuminates this framing further, asserting that colour, though seductive, risks leading art to moral and aesthetic “ruin” unless subordinated to design. Within this framework, the doctor’s attire disrupts the perceived order of the painting, reinforcing narratives of racialised aesthetics and Oriental chaos. The refusal to acknowledge commonality between Napoleon and the doctor reflects a deliberate strategy, maintaining the hierarchical binary necessary for the narrative of domination. Recognising their shared sartorial choices would destabilise the power dynamic at Jaffa’s core, challenging the visual and symbolic assertions of French superiority.

This tension between shared humanity and imposed hierarchy reflects the broader contradictions of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. The Kashmir shawl, prominently featured on both figures in Bonaparte Visits the Plague-stricken in Jaffa, becomes emblematic of these dynamics: a complex artefact symbolising both shared adaptability and colonial dominance. Napoleon’s shawl in Jaffa acts as a final assertion of control, visually linking him to the Orient while subordinating it to French military authority. Its unaltered form encapsulates the contradictions of the Egyptian campaign, portraying a moment when French identity was in flux, simultaneously assimilating and transforming Eastern elements. Gros’ portrayal crystallises these tensions, presenting Napoleon as a figure who navigates and commands cultural boundaries. The shawl’s integration into his attire visually encapsulates the paradoxes of French imperialism: a simultaneous fascination with, and subjugation of, Eastern symbols.

The Kashmir shawl’s symbolic trajectory reveals its layered ideological role within the broader colonial project. Initially a marker of Mameluke identity and Islamic craftsmanship, it was appropriated by French soldiers and reframed as a symbol of imperial adaptability and resilience. Gros’ painting transforms the shawl into a visual anchor for understanding the identity. In returning to Gros’ Bonaparte Visits the Plague-stricken in Jaffa, the shawl becomes a symbol of the complexities of French identity during the Egyptian campaign. Its placement alongside the doctor’s shawl highlights both shared humanity and imposed hierarchies, a tension central to the colonial narrative. Yet, the selective framing of Napoleon’s attire as a marker of vitality, contrasted with critiques of the doctor’s colourful garments as discordant, exemplifies the racialised aesthetics at play. Such duality mirrors broader French attitudes toward the Orient: an oscillation between admiration and domination. The shawl’s transformation from an Islamic artefact to a French military accessory, and eventually a feminised object of domestic luxury, underscores the selective appropriation of Eastern symbols as both exotic and morally ambiguous. This trajectory encapsulates the French colonial narrative: a simultaneous fascination with, and desire to control, the cultural symbols of the ‘Other.’ In Jaffa, the shawl’s colour, intricate patterns, and focal placement crystallise its symbolic weight. It bridges French and Mameluke worlds, offering a moment of shared significance. This visual tension mirrors the ambivalence of the campaign itself, where admiration for Mameluke resilience and aesthetics was inseparable from the imperative to dominate and transform them. The Kashmir shawl also raises broader questions about the role of material culture in mediating such encounters. How do objects like the shawl become both sites of negotiation and tools of domination within a colonial context? By tracing its shifting meanings—from a symbol of Mameluke identity to an object of French appropriation—this study contributes to a wider understanding of how material artefacts navigate the intersections of power, identity, and culture. As Serena Dyer has shown, material culture operates as both a repository of cultural meaning and a conduit for the exercise of power (Dyer 2021, pp. 282–92). The Kashmir shawl’s transformation highlights this duality, revealing how objects embody and transmit cultural ideologies.

Through its unaltered adoption by French soldiers, the shawl further reveals its enduring influence as an Islamic artefact, even as its meanings were re-contextualised within French colonial ideologies. Gros’ painting immortalises these tensions, presenting the shawl as a shared yet subordinated symbol that reinforces the paradoxes of French imperialism: the simultaneous appropriation of and resistance to local cultural symbols. The shawl emerges as a nexus of cultural fascination and colonial power, emblematic of the enduring ambivalence of the Egyptian campaign. This article has examined the shawl as a complex object of material desire, imperial negotiation, and visual power during the campaign. Tracing its transformation from a Mameluke prestige item to French military accessory and, later, to a feminised object of domestic luxury, it has shown how dress served both as practical adaptation and as a symbolic act of colonial appropriation. A post-colonial lens foregrounds the ambivalence of this process, in which mimicry and admiration co-exist with domination and erasure. This approach contributes to scholarship on visual and material culture by shifting attention to the male military body and reinterpreting the shawl as a contested site of identity, power, and cultural re-signification.

As Napoleon remarked shortly after arriving in Alexandria, the beauty and abundance of Egypt was inexorably tied to the Mamelukes: “Is there a beautiful region? It belongs to the Mamelukes. Is there a beautiful slave, a fine horse, or a magnificent house, whose is it but the Mamelukes?” (Eighteen Original Journals 1817, Napoleon Bonaparte, 2).