Measured by the successes of a few handfuls of British in the empire of the Moguls, the army brought by Bonaparte into Egypt was more than able to subdue that country, and to spread far and wide the obedience to the French arms. Like the founders of the British Indian Empire, the French general found himself face to face, not only with military institutions incomparably weaker and less cohesive than those of Europe, but with a civil society—if such it can be called—from which the element of mutual confidence, and with it the power of combined resistance, had disappeared. The prestige of success, the knowledge that he could command the services of a body of men superior in numbers as in disciplined action to any aggregation of units that could be kept steadily together to oppose him, was sufficient to insure for him the supremacy that concentrated force will always have over diffused force, organized power over unorganized. In military matters two and two do not make four, unless they are brought together in concerted action. Unfortunately, at the very moment of the most brilliant demonstration of his genius and of the valor of his troops, there had fallen upon one part of his command a reverse more startling, more absolute, than his own victories, and inflicted by a force certainly not superior to the one defeated. The Orientals, who could count upon no sufficient stay in men of their own race, now saw hopes of succor from without. They were not disappointed. Again a British naval captain, in the moment of triumphant progress, stopped the advance of Bonaparte.
The autumn and early winter of 1798 were passed in the conquest and overrunning of upper Egypt by Desaix, who left Cairo for this purpose on the 25th of August, and in the settlement of the affairs of the lower Nile upon such a basis as would secure quiet and revenue during the absence of the commander-in-chief. An insurrection in Cairo in October, provoked partly by dissatisfaction with intended changes, partly by the rumor of the Porte having declared war upon France, gave Bonaparte in quelling it an opportunity to show the iron firmness of his grip, and afterwards to manifest that mixture of unrelenting severity towards the few with politic lenity towards the many, which is so well calculated to check the renewal of commotion.