Malta Surrendered: An Eyewitness Account Of Napoleon’S Invasion Of 1798
Translated by Joe Scicluna
Allied Publications pp 360
ISBN: 978-99909-3-161-7.
If there was ever a period of Maltese history that brought about a sense of guilt in all participating parties this must have been the short-lived first republic at the end of the 18th century. It started off with the promise of the French Revolution’s liberté and ended with most behaving badly afterwards. Indeed some, like Doublet’s Memoires Historiques sur l’Invasion et l’Occupation de Malte en 1798 par une Armée Française, often evoke the reader to regard such accounts as redemptive exercises.
In 1798-1800 those participating in this event included the French army of the Egyptian campaign led by General Bonaparte and later represented in Malta by General Vaubois and the government’s chief commissioner Regnauld de St Jean d’Angely; a number of French Knights and the Maltese Jacobins who paved the way for the French accession; the Order of St John, which lost the raison d’être of its traditional existence; the Maltese Catholic Church, which largely led the revolt against the government of the new republic strategically obtaining its own liberation from centuries’ old trappings; and the British, who helped the Maltese insurgents in the countryside without suffering damages and finally prised the Maltese archipelago from the Sicilian Kingdom, the rightful landlord.
Today such clear-cut, perhaps simplified, observations might only disturb the minds of traditionalists but when Doublet’s Memoires were published in 1883 this eyewitness account was looked upon as some new light on an event not too many knew well.
Joe Scicluna’s translation of Malta Surrendered from the original French, is a welcome document to the English-reading public. While Doublet was consulted about the last 20 years of the Order in Malta by many writers, others cast doubt on the veracity of his accounts especially when he reports on his own role in events.
Doublet claims that he was not at peace with the way Bonaparte took over the governance of the island. Reluctant to help the general at first, he gives his readers the impression that if it were for him he would never have acted as “traitor” to the Order and especially to Grand Master Hompesch, whom he seems to have revered as protector. Yet his feeble resistance to Bonaparte when asked to decipher the grand master’s secret code led to his full collaboration as secretary and commissioner to the government. Recording his experiences a couple of decades later, Doublet claims he had even advised the grand master not to accept the French terms of capitulation. Purturbed he confesses that “his heart was torn between reason, honour and necessity”.
Mr Scicluna’s volume, Malta Surrendered, also includes Poussielgue’s short report to General Bonaparte on the political situation prevailing in Malta briefly before the arrival of the French Army.
In his memoirs, Doublet does not limit himself to state affairs. He speaks of his acquantainces in Malta and his marriage to a Maltese maiden. Son of a gardener, Pierre-Jean-Louis-Ovide Doublet was born in Orléans in 1749 and arrived here in 1779 as an infantryman. Four years later, now a first sergeant, he resigned from the army and joined the office of the secretariat of the grandmaster where he distinguished himself enough to take the habit of donato. A few years on he could not accept an invitation to become a conventual chaplain as he had committed himself to Elisabeth Magri whom he married in 1784. He also claims to have declined Bonaparte’s invitation to join his army in Egypt in 1798 but then served in the new government under Vaubois. After 1800 his presence became untenable in Malta and he proceeded to live abroad, spending about 10 years in Rome, in vain hoping to be of some service to the Order. Later he lived with one of his sons in Tripoli and finally obtained permission to return from exile to his family in Malta, where he soon died in 1824.
In the first part of his memoirs Doublet records the last years of the Knights on the Island and dwells on how the French Revolution affected the Order. In the second part he describes Bonaparte’s arrival, the behaviour of the Maltese in the harbour area and in the country as well as the nobles.
Mr Scicluna is a Maltese living in Grenoble, after several years in London and Ivrea. He told me he wished to make this book more accessible to those who have a passion for history. In an epilogue to the book he pens his own thoughts on the original document and the period of the French in Malta, at times applying the same provocative lightness as he does for the title. In my opinion certain references such as the sinking in Aboukir of “the treasures pillaged from Malta”, the recruitment of “captured Maltese soldiers”, “interference with religion” and the “persecution of Maltese clergy” fall short of analytical scrutiny. As historian Annette Becker rightly points out when heroes become victims one also needs to find how to judge the guilty.
• France celebrates its National Day on Thursday.