Submitted as a guest post by Joseph Lee, a student in the Security Studies Program (SSP).
I must confess that when Ridley Scott announced a new movie about Napoléon Bonaparte, I was overwhelmed with excitement. As a former student at King’s College London, I had seen the images of Academy Award winner Joaquin Phoenix dressed up in the deep red uniform of Premier Consul, parading around the impressive and familiar setting of Somerset House. The trailer seemed to confirm that my enthusiasm was warranted. Mixing epic battle scenes and the underexplored relationship between Napoléon and Empress Joséphine, this movie was a match made in heaven for my love of my country’s history and the moving screen. And despite a slight apprehension at the casting of Phoenix as Bonaparte, I was gladly planning to go, with family and friends, to what was sure to be a big hit.
My elation somewhat dimmed at the French press’ reaction to the movie. Due in part to our usual sense of national pride and our reticence towards foreign portrayals, reviews in France from all sides of the political scale (such as Le Figaro or Libération) had reserved a cold reception to the picture’s release in December. But my worry increased most considerably when I heard Ridley Scott’s response to criticism regarding the historical accuracy of his picture. Following the trailer’s release, Dan Snow, an Oxford-educated historian and a member of the Royal Historical Society, dared to point out factual errors in Scott’s portrayal. The answer he got from the director was surprising for its crudeness and indignity: “Get a life.”
Rarely do our entertainment media thread the needle to precisely follow the fabric of history. Many of our beloved TV series and movies are rigged with historical inaccuracies, from BBC’s production of War and Peace to Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge. Instead, directors and writers often agree to taint narratives with their own vision of history. Reacting to the French media’s general disapproval of the movie, Scott continued on his campaign of affront and contempt; the director retorted that “the French don’t even like themselves.”
Due to the familiarity of absurdist philosophy in French society and the irritable nature of the French people, one may be tempted to humorously concede the director’s point. Nevertheless, there are better ways to explain creative choices made in portraying history and its important figures. Ridley Scott’s remarks show the director’s profound insecurity and paradoxical Napoleonic complex, excluding the possibility of any criticism. They also show significant disdain for history and those studying it. Historians such as Dan Snow are precious members of our society. Allowing the wider public to acquaint themselves with the most fascinating details of history’s more decisive moments, they also do so in a fun, demonstrative, and humble manner.
The movie’s poster, showing a stern-looking Joaquin Phoenix wearing the imperial bicorne, bore the following words: “He came from nothing. He conquered everything.” These words tell the tale of a sadly lost opportunity for the public to get to know the Emperor intimately, something which Ridley Scott actually seems to want through the numerous (frankly, quite redundant) scenes depicting the Emperor’s love life. Yet the Emperor’s private affairs are triaged to fit Scott’s narrative of the Emperor’s obsession with Joséphine. No mention whatsoever is made of Maria Walewska, a member of the Polish nobility, mother of one of Napoléon’s sons, and who would even come to visit him in Elba and at the Emperor’s residence at Malmaison.
The choice to start the viewer’s journey into the life of Napoleon with the execution of Queen Marie-Antoinette in October 1793 is also questionable (and not, as the movie falsely specifies, in 1789). This decision lays to waste the possibility of delving into Napoléon’s tumultuous childhood: sent far from home to the military academies of Autun and Brienne, he was called “la paille au nez” (“straw nose”) by his classmates who bullied him for his accent and his birthplace. Overcoming this adversity, Bonaparte would become the first Corsican to graduate from the royal military academy or Ecole Militaire in 1785, completing his two-year course in only half the time. The movie also omits what is arguably one of Napoleon’s most brilliant campaigns: the campaign of Italy in 1796-1797. In a truly extraordinary show of force maneuver and employment against a numerically superior coalition of Austria and Sardinia, the young Général de Brigade conquered the Savoie region and the city of Nice while checking Sardinian and Papal ambitions, effectively making him a hero of the newborn and therefore fragile Republic.
It is unnecessary to delve into the movie’s many omissions or mischaracterizations of history: much more qualified than I have and will. I shall not expand on the somewhat passive portrayal of Napoleon’s indispensable marshals, leaving spectators oblivious to the names of Lannes, Murat, Soult, Ney, Berthier, Davout, Bernadotte, Oudinot, and Poniatowski. I will also bury the disappointingly inaccurate Emperor’s crowning in a scene that chose to lazily embrace the imprecisions of Jacques-Louis David’s well-known painting. Nor will I mention the imaginary bombing of the pyramids in Egypt (Napoleon was fascinated by Ancient Egypt) or the movie’s recounting of the Battles of Austerlitz and Waterloo (the Emperor charging at the head of his troops? Really?). Nor, finally, were Napoleon’s last words dedicated to Josephine.
Ridley Scott’s newest picture is an attempt at unbolting the myth of Napoléon Bonaparte through a provocative, grotesque portrayal, seeking to depict the vulnerability of the First French Empire’s ruler. By blatantly portraying the Emperor as a sexually depraved, awkward, and childish character, Scott somewhat forcefully imposes a revisionist version of the relationship between Napoléon and Joséphine, exaggerating the emperor’s emotional and social dependence on Josephine and portraying Napoleon at times as a small, emotionally dependant child reliant on the comforting of his first wife. Ridley Scott even seeks to convince the viewer that the history of Europe was connected to the ups and downs of their dominative relationship, declaring that Napoleon “conquered the world to try to win her [Josephine’s] love.” This simplistic explanation inflating Josephine’s role emphatically seeks to comfort Scott’s vision of Napoleon’s first wife as the love of his life, conveniently ignoring the many affairs on both sides of a couple built more on ambition than true emotional connection.
While imperfect, as are all men, Napoléon accomplished much that can be admired. Further than his conquests, Napoléon greatly contributed to France’s civil society. Many aspects of the legal system enacted by the Emperor remain in place in modern France, including important aspects of secularism, the prefectorial system, national uniformity in education and universities, as well as honorary distinctions such as the Légion d’Honneur (Legion of Honor). On the other hand, one must also accept that Napoléon’s rule had a darker side, which many find shameful in light of today’s societal shifts. Strangely, Ridley Scott’s picture omits such essential elements which could have been of great interest to today’s public: these particularly include his reinstatement of slavery, a topic which today remains a central point of controversy around the Emperor’s legacy.
The sacrifice of historical accuracy at the altar of the dramatic and the appealing is somewhat symptomatic of the issues we face on both sides of the Atlantic today. Instrumentalizing history as a means to serve political ends, Scott’s movie inscribes itself in the continuity of our era’s rewriting of history from the standpoint of today’s morals. Showing the estimated and contested number of casualties resulting from the wars of the First and Second Coalitions, Scott seems to try and pinpoint the responsibility of these losses to the Emperor himself, despite the strong possibility that France’s surrounding enemies would probably have attacked the newborn and ideologically dangerous Republic anyways. Scott said to those pesky Frenchmen objecting to the film’s inaccuracy that he often asks them, “Were you there? Oh, you weren’t there. Then how do you know?” Surely, I was not, but neither was he. A renowned French army officer, Hélie de Saint-Marc, once wrote: “We mustn’t settle into our truth and try to assert it as a certainty, but know how to offer it tremblingly as a mystery.” This looks like good advice for Mr. Scott if he is going to continue exploring history for the benefit of movie lovers. It would also show his respect for the intelligence of his viewers, who can absorb a complex tale in which the director does not resort to oversimplification or fabrication.
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Agreed