How accurate is the new Napoleon film? Sorting fact from fiction (Andrew Roberts, The Sunday Times, Nov 19 2023)
"Sir Ridley Scott’s long-awaited movie Napoleon will have a great effect on how the French emperor is viewed in the popular imagination.
So it was with some trepidation that I watched it.
Would it reproduce the old Anglo-American historical stereotype of a jumped-up Corsican tyrant, or might it recognise that in fact Napoleon created the Enlightenment’s institutions, many of which last to this day?
For here was an opportunity to change the tired conventional view of Napoleon put forward by so many postwar Anglophone historians that Napoleon was essentially merely a prototype for Adolf Hitler.
Sadly and somewhat predictably for an 85-year-old whose mindset was formed by the Second World War, Scott has gone for the intellectually discredited stereotype of a dictator who goes mad with hubris. (…)
Scott has remarked before that “f***ing historians” don’t know what happened in Napoleonic times because “they weren’t there”.
But in fact there is a plethora of believable first-hand accounts from people who were indeed there, used by historians to discover what happened.
What these first-hand accounts tell us is that Napoleon was a witty, highly intellectual and attractive personality, whose reforms changed first France and then Europe for the better.
Whenever his armies entered European cities they liberated the Jews from their ghettos, giving them civil and religious liberties.
He was therefore precisely the opposite of the malignant, humourless, Jew-hating Führer. (…)
So firm is the assumption that Napoleon’s psyche had “run wild” that he is given the line to Joséphine: “I must begin my march to Moscow.”
Yet the whole point of the 1812 campaign was that Napoleon had no intention of going more than 50 miles inside Russia, in what was intended to be a three-week campaign.
As he crossed the river Niemen, there was no “march to Moscow”.
There are plenty of people in history who have a Napoleon complex, but Napoleon himself was not one of them, despite what Scott and Kirby might say.
This show also assumes Napoleon lost in Russia solely because the weather got cold in winter, as if the highly intelligent and well-read emperor did not know it would.
No mention is made of the typhus that killed 100,000 men, which Napoleon could not have foreseen.
At one point in the movie, Joséphine forces Napoleon to say: “I am just a brute that is nothing without you.”
Quite apart from the appalling syntax, the line, like so many in this visually stunning but historically tone-deaf film, fails to ring true.
Yet it is not from thousand-page biographies that the mass of people take their history today, but from movies like this.
Henceforth, therefore, Napoleon Bonaparte — the great world force of the Enlightenment who ended the French Revolution and dragged country after country out of ancien-regime torpor and into the vibrant 19th century — will merely be a brute who was nothing without his Joséphine."
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James Ensor (Belgian, 1860-1949), Napoleon, c.1910-20. Conté and colour pencil on paper, 22.6 x 13.7 cm.
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