This study offers a thorough reading of a requisition order [firda] for products in kind imposed by the Armée d’Orient on the people of Rosetta in August 1799. It then analyses the complex conditions behind its composition to shed light on cumulative developments, as the French had made similar weighty demands that pushed the city’s urban and rural economy into a continual process of deterioration. Some of the questions the study evaluates relate to people’s reactions to these successive requests (financial or otherwise) and identifying their tangible effects, especially in relation to merchants and artisans. The study uses the microhistorical approach, made possible by an array of informative documents (in French and Arabic) related to Rosetta that remain extant in archival collections, and provides the opportunity to investigate several unexplored aspects of how the occupying power’s relationship to the local population evolved.