ABSTRACT
Sultan Selim III went back to hiring French military officers to teach and train a new military corps, and French experts to advise the government. The plan to create a new military force was the origin of the New Order. The consequent coexistence of old and new that Selim's New Order unintentionally institutionalized became a prelude to the dichotomy that would run through Ottoman society as secularist reform became more extreme with the growing impact of the West during the 19th century. While the New Order program of reforms was overall pretty much a joint Franco–Ottoman enterprise, Selim's engineering school, based as it was upon the precedents established by Count Bonneval and Baron de Tott in the earlier engineering and artillery schools, can be considered a French undertaking. Ordered to dress in the European-style uniforms of the New Order troops and march in step, they broke loose and rampaged through the streets.
