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. Yet Scott, surprisingly, goes even further in his bias and gives Napoleon precisely no achievements besides a certain tactical sense on the battlefields. As Scott told the film magazine Empire: “I compare [Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon] with Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler, Stalin. Listen, he’s got a lot of bad shit under his belt. At the same time, he was remarkable with his courage, and in his can-do and in his dominance.”
At the end of the movie there is a (partial and highly inaccurate) list of the number of troops who died in Napoleon’s wars, implying that he really was like Hitler. Yet the list includes wars that were declared against Napoleon, not by him. Of the seven Wars of the Coalition fought between France and her allies between 1792 and 1815, Napoleon started only two. Vanessa Kirby, who plays Joséphine in this movie, is no more historically literate than Scott, saying in an interview: “Napoleon wasn’t stoic and wonderful like Russell Crowe was in Gladiator. He was a dictator, a war criminal, really. It couldn’t be rousing, because that man killed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of men, in my opinion needlessly. And for what? To get an empire, for what? In the end, it all disintegrated anyway.’
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.
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On the early morning of Sunday, June 23, 1940, a gigantic black shadow fell over the reputation of Napoleon Bonaparte. Adolf Hitler, having captured Paris the week before, visited Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides, spending an hour there and being photographed staring down at the emperor’s pink porphyry tomb.
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The fatal connection was thus made in the public imagination between the two dictators born outside their countries who sought to dominate Europe, both of whom after initial military successes went to their downfall due to their failed invasions of Russia, their failure to conquer Britain and the efforts of the Allies who had coalesced against them. Unfortunately, Scott and Kirby have failed to look beneath these superficial resemblances to notice that Hitler was merely a great destroyer, whereas Napoleon was the Enlightenment on horseback.
Although Winston Churchill specifically stated that Napoleon had been no Hitler, his statement that “our determination to fight on, as Pitt and his successors fought on, till we in our turn achieve our Waterloo”, fixed the correlation in British minds permanently.
It may be understandable to demonise the character of an enemy while a war is being fought, but it makes no sense now, more than two centuries after his death. Churchill also called Napoleon “the greatest man of action born in Europe since Julius Caesar”, a plaudit of which he would have profoundly approved.
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Since the Second World War, two generations of historians have made constant references to the emperor as a kind of proto-Hitler, whose secret police, press censorship, aggressive foreign policy and desire for a new European order have been presented as presaging the horrors unleashed by the Nazis.
British historians — including friends of mine such as Paul Johnson, Sir John Keegan and Sir Alistair Horne — have had immense influence on the bleak way Napoleon is viewed. Claude Ribbe’s book Le Crime de Napoleon portrayed him as a genocidal dictator on a par with Hitler, and the US historian Paul Schroeder wrote: “Hitler did it for the sake of an unbelievably horrible ideal; Napoleon for no underlying purpose at all.”
Unfortunately, Scott’s movie perpetuates this absurd myth. No mention is made of any achievement beyond the military ones. He rightly shows Napoleon as being popular with the French people but the evidence given in the movie makes this incomprehensible.
Without the context of the Napoleonic Code — the reorganisation of French laws — the financial reforms, the restoration of law and order, the concordat with the Catholic Church, the infrastructure projects, the new education system, meritocratic social advancement, the creation of the Banque de France and Légion d’Honneur and Council of State, for example, the film’s emperor is reduced to a man who merely throws food at his wife, has sex with her under the table with servants present, and almost never takes off his hat while indoors.
French historians are in uproar over the supposedly pro-British aspects of this film, but in fact almost all Britons are shown with a sneer on their lips and a cutting comment for the emperor. The Duke of Wellington is depicted as having met Napoleon on HMS Bellerophon in Plymouth Harbour — where Wellington never went and the ship never docked with Napoleon on board. Wellington tells Napoleon he has never been to St Helena, when the briefest glance in the index of any biography of him would reveal he had, on his way to India decades earlier.
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• Ridley Scott: I didn’t need historians to make my Napoleon epic
Dozens of other errors could have been avoided if Scott had read one of the hundreds of biographies of Napoleon, for there have been more books published with the word Napoleon in the title or subtitle than there have been days since his death in 1821. But such is his low opinion of historians, he did not bother.
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.
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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.
Andrew Roberts is the author of Napoleon the Great, published by Penguin
15, 157min
Napolean is in cinemas
