In Ridley Scott’s historical epic Napoleon, the titular French conqueror, played by Joaquin Phoenix, marches into the deserts of Egypt and orders his soldiers to aim their cannons at the pyramids. The whole scene is a fabrication – one Scott, who directed the equally sensational Gladiator, also starring Phoenix, has already been called out by historians. But even if Napoleon Bonaparte did damage these world wonders, this wouldn’t have been the strangest thing to happen during his excursion into Asia Minor.
The imperial French army invaded Egypt in 1798 after capturing the Mediterranean port of Malta with two purposes: to break up trade routes between India and England, and to establish French rule in the Middle East. Ultimately, Napoleon’s biggest obstacle wasn’t the Egyptians themselves, but their love of hashish – a love that spread to his own soldiers, and which he eventually resolved to ban, thus laying the foundation for Western Europe’s approach to cannabis.
Rather than forcing their own customs onto the Egyptians, Napoleon urged his administrators to embrace the local culture. French forces, including scholars and scientists, established libraries and research centers to nourish their genuine interest in the many traditions and inventions of the Islamic world. Lacking access to their French wines and liquors, they also learned about hashish, and soon began frequenting the cafés, markets, and lounges where the substance was typically found.
Legend has it that Napoleon issued a ban on hashish because his soldiers were too stoned to fight, but this is as much of a misconception as Ridley’s film. In truth, hash did not become illegal until after the campaign had come to an end; the ban itself wasn’t implemented by Napoleon, but one of his generals; and its goal wasn’t to protect French citizens against the drug’s “corroding influence,” but exert control over Egypt and Syria by pitting its own citizens against each other.
As Ryan Stoa explains in his article A Brief Global History of the War on Cannabis, written for The MIT Press Reader, hashish in Egypt was “associated with Sufi mystics and looked down upon by the Sunni elite.” The general Napoleon left in charge of Egypt, Jacques-François Menou, saw the hashish ban as an opportunity to kill “two birds with one stone.” In addition to improving a perceived public health problem, the general, married to a Sunni elite, also hoped to earn the respect of his in-laws.
Issued in 1800, Menou’s mandate is often considered the first drug prohibition law of the modern world. It’s also one of the most uncompromising, prohibiting the cultivation, sale, and consumption of cannabis in one fell swoop. Egyptians weren’t allowed to smoke cannabis itself, nor were they allowed to mix it into their liquor. “Those who are accustomed to drinking this liquor and smoking this seed,” the mandate read, “lose reason and fall into a violent delirium, which often leads them to commit excesses of all kinds.”
The ban, like many other idealistic goals pursued by Napoleon’s administration, didn’t work out. According to Stoa, hashish continued to be grown, traded, and used across Egypt – a practice that, if archeological finds can be believed, dates back as far as 3000 BC. Not only did French soldiers fail to prevent Egyptians from smoking hash, but they also ended up introducing the substance to Western Europe, not unlike some of the American veterans returning from Vietnam.
The French were no more successful at banning cannabis at home than abroad. In Paris, the open-minded writers and painters that made up the Romantic movement, which rejected the cold-blooded rationality of the Enlightenment in favor of emotion and spirituality, tolerated and at times celebrated the drug that their government was trying to eradicate. They proudly referred to their intellectual circle as the Club des Hachichins, the “Hash-Eaters’ Club” in English.
Despite pressure from their own government, the Egyptian city of Cairo blossomed into one of the biggest hash markets in the world. Rivaled only by Istanbul, in Turkey, Cairo’s cannabis industry survived well into the late 1800s, when a compounding list of prohibitions, penalties, and crackdowns caused its organizers to search for a new base of operation. Migrating along the coast of Northern Africa, they eventually settled in Morocco, where they remain to this day.
Hash wasn’t the only cannabis product that played an unlikely role in the Napoleonic Wars, however. Even more important was the hemp plant itself, which could be transformed into bags, rope, cordage, sails, and other materials that are tantamount to waging a successful war. Flourishing trade between England and Russia, Europe’s top hemp producers, was a major concern for Napoleon as he marched his forces into the Russian heartland on their way to Moscow.
Just as the French Emperor had sought to regulate the consumption of hash, so too did he attempt to gain control over the production of hemp. In the so-called Peace Treaty of Tilsit, signed in 1807, before France’s invasion of Russia, Napoleon actually demanded that Russia’s Czar, Alexander I, cease to do business with Great Britain. No business with Britain meant less hemp, less hemp meant a weaker army, a weaker army meant a greater chance at victory.
Maybe, if the Czar had accepted these terms, Napoleon would have made it to Moscow after all.
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