In 1798, a French military campaign to Egypt, led by the young general Napoleon Bonaparte, was launched with extraordinary secrecy. The campaign began with the capture of Alexandria and then Cairo, and France began administering the country in June of that year. However, the campaign faced significant challenges, including violent uprisings supported by the British and a naval disaster at Aboukir Bay in 1798. These setbacks led to the eventual French withdrawal from Egypt in 1801. Despite the military failure, Napoleon, who later returned to France, never forgot his time in Egypt. He reflected on the experience in his Memoirs, written during his exile on the island of Saint Helena. The French campaign is the focus of a new book titled The Egyptian Expedition. Napoleon's Oriental Dream, written by Corinne Le Bitouzé and Charles-Éloi Vial, both conservators at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF). Using unpublished documents from the BnF's collections, the book retraces the campaign step by step. It includes the manuscript of Napoleon’s Memoirs and highlights the civilizational and cultural aspects of the campaign, describing it as "a scholarly enterprise." Alongside the more than 50,000 soldiers, Napoleon brought with him a remarkable group of 167 scientists and artists. These individuals included mathematicians, astronomers, naturalists, engineers, geographers, architects, writers, and even twenty-two printers. Organized as an academy in Cairo, this group included both renowned figures and young talents, such as the mathematician Jacques Antoine Viard, who was just 15 years old at the time. Eight artists, including the talented Vivant Denon, created detailed drawings of ancient Egyptian monuments. Some of these drawings are presented in color for the first time in the book. The authors also discuss the Description de l'Égypte, a monumental project undertaken from 1802 to 1829. This work produced twenty volumes, with one thousand copies printed at a cost of 4,300,000 francs at the time. It played a crucial role in reintroducing ancient Egypt to the Western world, just as Jean-François Champollion finally deciphered the mystery of hieroglyphs. Though militarily defeated, France became the birthplace of Egyptology, producing some of the greatest Egyptologists, including Champollion, Mariette, and Maspero. The treasures brought back from Egypt formed the foundation of the Louvre Museum's early collections, directed by Vivant Denon. The book, published by Perrin/Bibliothèque Nationale de France, has a print run of 7,000 copies, a price of 39 €, 312 pages, and an ISBN of 9782262107512.