*Napoleon’s Egypt*

The author of this interesting work is Juan Cole and the subtitle is Invading the Middle East.  Here is one excerpt:

Many of the French took seriously Bonaparte’s proclamations that he intended to bring liberty to the Egyptians through institutions such as the clerically dominated divan.  The French not only interpreted Egypt in terms familiar to their eighteenth-century world, they were also capable of reinterpreting their own history in light of what they saw in Egypt.  Just as rationalist officers coded popular Islam as reactionary Catholicism, so the Republican French mapped the defeated beys as analogous to the French Old Regime and saw their overthrow and institution of municipal elections as the advent of liberty.

This book is one good place to start.  Here is the Wikipedia page on the French invasion of Egypt and Syria.