An enormous broadside intended for posting on public walls, introducing the newly appointed commander-in-chief of Napoleons Armée dOrient (and therefore ruler of Egypt) and his government to the people of Egypt, in Arabic and French: "Habitans de lEgypte, écoutez ce qu jai à vous dire au nom de la République Francaise. Vous étiez malheureux; larmée francaise est venue en Egypte pouir vous porter le bonheur ...".
Menou, the French Republican General who succeeded General Jean-Baptiste Kléber after his assassination on 14 June 1800, converted to Islam and took the name Abdallah. Unlike most announcements published by his predecessor at the same press, the present proclamation is not headed with the motto of the French Republic, but rather with the Shahada ("There is no deity but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God") in both languages. In it, Menou sets out his principles for a good government for Egypt, emphasizing his firm stand against abuse and corruption in the local administration of taxation, justice and the police, and finally threatens any attempt at rebellion with severe retaliation.
When Napoleon sent his army on its first Egyptian campaign in 1798, he included a team of printers and typefounders headed by Jean Joseph Marcel, equipped with a printing press and type, including Arabic type. They set up the first printing office in the Arabic-speaking world (though Christians and Turkish-speaking Ottomans had printed some Arabic texts in Istanbul earlier), issuing their first publication in Alexandria, three months after they landed there, and moving the printing office to Cairo in October 1798, where it printed for the French Republican authorities, including the present important large bill for public posting, of the utmost rarity due to its sheer size and ephemeral nature. We have located only two other copies, at the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. "The expedition of Napoleon Bonaparte to Egypt from 1798 until 1801 was a prelude to modernity. It was to change permanently the traditional Arab world ... The French brought Arabic typography to Egypt, where it was practised under the supervision ... of Jean Joseph Marcel ... Only a few days after the French troops landed ... they set up the Imprimerie Orientale et Française there. It was an extraordinarily important turning point. For, leaving aside the Hebrew printing presses in Egypt of the 16th to the 18th centuries, until this date announcements and news adressed to Arabs there, as well as in other parts of the Arab-Islamic world, had been spread only in hand-writing or orally, by criers, preachers or storytellers" (Glass & Roper).
With some creases in the paper, but uncut with deckles intact. A surprisingly fresh and rare survival. WorldCat 457665343 & 559717647 (2 copies); cf. D. Glass & G. Roper, The printing of Arabic books in the Arab world, in: Middle Eastern languages and the print revolution (2002), pp. 177-225, at 182.