Revolt of Cairo, Bonaparte Ends the Uprising, Antique Madou Lithograph, 1827

An original antique lithograph from Madou's Vie de Napoléon, published at Brussels in 1827, lettered "REVOLTE DU CAIRE" in open capitals above the image. The scene is a street fight below the walls of Cairo, with palms, a domed building, a minaret and a castellated gateway behind, and smoke rising over the town. Napoleon rides in at the center on a pale horse, pointing ahead, with an officer in a plumed hat on a dark horse beside him and mounted troopers in crested helmets at the far left. At the right a French grenadier levels his musket with bayonet while an insurgent raises his arm to strike, and the foreground is strewn with the fallen, a round shield, a crested helmet and a horsehair plume.

The script caption below the image reads: "Bonaparte accourt au bruit du canon d'alarme, et met fin à la révolte." In English: Bonaparte hurries to the sound of the alarm gun and puts an end to the revolt. No scene number or printer's line is lettered on this sheet.

The plate comes from the first volume of Vie de Napoléon, published at Brussels in 1827 by the Lithographie royale de Jobard, the press of Marcellin Jobard, which the title page names as publisher and owner. The title page describes a text written by a society of men of letters from new documents dictated and corrected by Napoleon himself at Saint Helena, and plates lithographed by Jean-Baptiste Madou (1796 to 1877) after the first painters of the French school.

The revolt of Cairo broke out on 21 October 1798, three months after the French had entered the city. General Dupuy, the French commandant of Cairo, was killed on the first day. French artillery on the heights shelled the quarter around the al Azhar mosque, where the insurgents had gathered, and the rising was put down within two days.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.