This paper examines the ambiguous legacy of Rifa'a al-Tahtawi. Tahtawi is commonly considered to be among the forebears of republican thought in the Arab world, based on his seeming attempts to integrate French Enlightenment thought into an Islamic conceptual universe. At the same time, there are notable elements of authoritarianism in Tahtawi's writings as well, specifically with regard to the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. This observation is not new in and of itself. But the tension between republicanism and authoritarianism in Tahtawi's thought is often attributed to his apparent “difficulty in reconciling the workings of the secular political system with his basic Islamic outlook” or his "late-Ottoman mindset." Instead, in this paper I argue that Tahtawi's autocratic sympathies should not be attributed to his learning in the Islamic legal tradition at al-Azhar, despite the fact that his arguments about rulership may resemble on the surface the premodern political thought of al-Ghazali, al-Mawardi or later Ottoman scholars, for example. Rather, I argue that Tahtawi is best understood as a figure integral to the emerging discourse of the Egyptian nation-state, and that state's bureaucracy of control and surveillance. Tahtawi's recognition that the state must control its citizens and the ruler must be obeyed, I argue, is just as attributable to his time in France as any republican sympathies that might come from his readings of, say, Rousseau and Montesquieu.