Bonaparte Visiting The Plague Victims of Jaffa - Analysis of The Scene

Analysis of The Scene

The capture and violent sack of Jaffa by the French army under Bonaparte on 7 March 1799 were rapidly followed by an outbreak of bubonic plague, identified by January 1799, which decimated the army. On 11 March, Bonaparte made a spectacular visit to his sick soldiers, touching them, which was considered to be either magnificent or suicidal according to one's point of view on the Napoleonic legend or of the terrors of an age of plagues.

The sick man with bandaged eyes on the right is suffering from blindness as well as plague. Since the army's arrival in Egypt in July 1798, several French had suffered serious eye problems due to the sand, dust and extreme light of the sun.

In 1804, there was no question of representing this as other than a daring deed by Bonaparte, but the officer behind Napoleon tries to stop him touching the bubo. The means by which bubonic plague spread were still unknown at the start of the 19th century, and the flea's role in its transmission was unknown until Paul-Louis Simond found evidence for it in 1898. Touching a bubo with a bare hand was not particularly risky, since all the other actors in the scene are (we now know) running exactly the same risk of transmission of the disease by fleas. The left-hand officer's action of holding something over his mouth and nose is not entirely unjustified, however - certain cases of bubonic plague can evolve into a pulmonary plague, with a highly elevated risk of infection from aerosols emitted by patients' coughs.

Medical efforts to stop the plague, seen a little further to the right, were unchanged since the Middle Ages - an old doctor is incising the bubos to let the pus flow out, which is in fact inefficient in terms of treating the disease, and also weakens the patient. He has already operated on a bubo under the raised right arm of his patient, who holds a bloodied compress under his arm, and is wiping his blade ready to incise a second bubo. The doctor's assistant supports the patient during the operation. The bodies are sick, languishing, and the hero is less heroic for being surrounded by ordinary people. Idealism and classicism were abandoned in favour of a certain romanticism. In effect, this is suffering in painted form, which was a novelty - previously only noble deaths were painted.

On 23 April 1799, during the siege of Acre, Bonaparte suggested to Desgenettes, the expedition's chief doctor, that the sick should be administered a fatal-level dose of opium - that is, mercy-killed. Desgenettes refused. On 27 May that same year, Napoleon made a second visit to the plague victims.

In the context of the Troubadour style, and especially at the moment when Napoleon was becoming emperor, this episode evoked the tradition of the thaumaturgical laying-on-of-hands which the French kings carried out with sufferers of scrofula.