Note 102 — Chapter IV · 1793-1817. THE WAR WITH THE FRENCH REPUBLIC: TOULON—CORSICA—EGYPT. THE NAPOLEONIC WAR: THE WEST INDIES.

The conquest of Egypt was no new idea to French statesmen. In the middle of the seventeenth century, while Louis XIV. was revolving in his mind schemes for the aggrandisement of France, he was urged strongly, though unsuccessfully, not to seek expansion in Europe, but to make himself master of Egypt, and by establishing her pre-eminence in the Mediterranean secure for his country the trade of the Levant and of the East. See Mahan’s ‘Influence of Sea Power on History,’ pp. 107, 141, 142.