A unique collection of eight exceedingly rare sets of regulations documenting the first months of the administration of the French Republican General Jacques-François "Abdallah" de Boussay de Menou, newly appointed commander-in-chief of Napoleons Armée dOrient to succeed General Jean-Baptiste Kléber after his assassination on 14 June 1800. In contrast to his predecessor, who intended to rule Egypt as an occupied territory, General Menou, though still representing France as a colonial power, had idealistic and egalitarian views and even considered granting French citizenship to all Egyptians. Soon after his arrival in 1798 he married a woman from a noble Cairo family, converted to Islam and took the name Abdallah.
The present regulations cover a wide range of topics such as tax and fiscal matters, fishing and hunting rights, duties of local dignitaries ("cheykhs el-beled"), customs and border regulations, rules for navigation on the Nile, taxation of merchants, craftsmen and workers, as well as the rights of various religious minorities (including Jews and Copts). They offer a vastly more detailed insight into the French administration of Egypt than the more widely distributed single-page broadside summaries of daily orders that were originally issued with them ("Inséré dans lordre du jour ..."). We have located only two other collections containing some of the present regulations: 3 of the present 8 sets and 5 sets not in the present collection (WorldCat without location; swisscovery); and 2 of the present 8 sets and 3 sets not in the present set (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, probably from the Silvestre de Sacy set recorded in 1847), but the present collection begins 9 days earlier than these two and ends 26 days later than the former.
The eight sets of regulations are:
5 Fructidor 8 [23 August 1800] concerning "Tous les cheykhs el-beled de lEgypte"
16 Fructidor 8 [3 September 1800] Ordre sur les douanes
18 Fructidor 8 [5 September 1800] Ordre sur limpôt du sel
18 Fructidor 8 [5 September 1800] Ordre sur les droits de pêche et de chasse
7 Vendémiaire 9 [29 September 1800] Ordre sur la navigation du Nil
20 Vendémiaire 9 [12 October 1800] Ordre du jour sur les Impositions des nations Copte, etc.
20 Vendémiaire 9 [12 October 1800] Ordre sur les droits des corporations
16 Brumaire 9 [7 November 1800] -
Unbound as issued. In very good condition. Bibliothèque Nationale de France (2 of the present 8 sets & 3 similar sets); Bibliotheque de M. le baron Silvestre de Sacy (1847), vol. 3, pp. 458-460, nos. 20-23, 28, 30, 33, 39, 41 (2 of the present 8 sets & 6 similar sets); swisscovery.slsp.ch (3 of the present 8 sets & 5 similar sets); WorldCat (same sets as swisscovery, listed with no location); for the Cairo printing office: D. Glass & G. Roper, The printing of Arabic books in the Arab world, in: Middle Eastern languages and the print revolution (2002), pp. 177-225, at p. 182.