How does Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa elucidate its Historicity?
The painting was ordered by the state after Napoleon had become emperor, and it had a clear propaganda purpose. As for eyewitnesses, in General Berthier's campaign report there is no mention about such an event. Bourrienne, Bonaparte's private secretary, wrote only that the general crossed the lazaretto at a fast pace. However, Doctor Desgenettes (present in the painting between Napoleon and the patient with the raised arm) wrote that Bonaparte grabbed the sick and helped to transport them. It is now known that the plague is not transmitted by touch.The painting was also commissioned in part to counter reports of French atrocities during their capture of Jaffa. After two French messengers sent to parley with the Ottomans had been killed and their heads displayed on the city walls, Napoleon promised the troops under his command two days and nights to plunder the city. After the city capitulated on the fourth day, the French brutally sacked the city, "slaughtering Christians, Jews and Muslims indiscriminately." Napoleon also ordered the mass killing of 3,000 Ottoman prisoners in French captivity. News of such atrocities contradicted the French justification for their invasions of Ottoman-held Egypt and Syria, namely that it was a mission civilisatrice "that would bring enlightenment to the benighted lands of the East." The painting "thus had a very specific propagandist function."
Napoleon Jaffa mission civilisatrice Desgenettes lazaretto propaganda Bourrienne their capture of Jaffa Berthier