Napoleon’s Egyptian Expedition Was Enveloped in a Haze of Hashish Smoke
Throughout much of French military history, the soldiers’ intoxicant of choice was alcohol – cognac and wine, and lots of it. Napoleon Bonaparte had a famous dictum about armies marching on their stomachs. Those stomachs often needed not just food to fuel the soldiers, but also alcohol to settle their stomachs and the butterflies fluttering in them, and to fuel their courage.
Campaigning in Europe, French armies seldom had a problem finding wine or other types of alcohol. However, when Napoleon launched his Egyptian Campaign in 1798, he and his French forces found themselves in a Muslim country with precious little home-distilled alcohol. And after British admiral Horatio Nelson and the Royal Navy destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, the French in Egypt found themselves cut off from resupply from home, including the resupply of wine.
In the absence of alcohol, French soldiers in Egypt cast an alternative intoxicant. They came upon hashish, and soon developed an insatiable taste for it. Before long, French forces in Egypt were swept by an epidemic of hashish addiction. The new habit quickly began eroding military discipline, and undermined the French military’s effectiveness to such an extent that Napoleon issued a total ban on hashish.
Napoleon and French commanders reasoned that their troops were more effective back when they used to be alcoholics, than they were now as junkies. So to help wean the French soldiers off of hash and return them to wine, Napoleon commissioned the production of date wines and spirits. It did not work: French troops drank the newly introduced date alcohol, and discovered that it went great with hash, which they kept right on smoking.
So instead of dealing with soldiers who were frequently high, French commanders found themselves having to deal with soldiers who were frequently high and drunk. Worse, after the Egyptian Campaign collapsed, and the surviving French troops were repatriated back home, they brought their hash and hash-smoking habits back to France with them. Soon, hashish started gaining popularity in Parisian salons and Bohemian circles, and from there, hash use spread to the rest of Europe.
