Movie fans around the world have a date marked in red on their calendars: Ridley Scott's new film Napoleon opens on November 24. Any project by the director of Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise or Gladiator, among other jewels, arouses tremendous expectations. And even more if it is about reflecting the excessive existence of the French emperor (“My life, what a novel”, he came to say).
Even a titan like Stanley Kubrick crashed on a project like this, which he was never able to realize despite the fact that it was his great dream and he meticulously planned every last detail of the uniforms and dresses that the actors would wear. We do not know the degree of historical credibility of Ridley Scott, although from the little that has been seen in the trailers released so far, he takes some lies for granted.
Here two observations must be made. The first is that Napoleon promises a wonderful visual spectacle. The second, that the cinema is not a history lecture. The film would be worth it, even if Scott did with Napoleon what Tarantino did with Hitler in Inglourious Basterds. If Joaquin Phoenix, an actor in a permanent state of grace, is half as brilliant as he was in Gladiator, he'll already be worth going to the movies.
Napoleone Buonaparte was born in 1769 in Corsica, when this island was already a French possession. A young pupil at a French military school, he changed his name to Napoleon Bonaparte. He would later be known to the world simply as Napoleon. It is an admitted fact that there is only one historical figure more biographed than him, Jesus Christ. And everything is debatable: the literary Everest on Napoleon grows year by year...
It would seem that there are two kinds of historians: those who love Napoleon and those who hate him. The renowned Russian author Oleg Sokolov dedicated his magnum opus, L'Armée de Napoléon “aux soldats, officiers et généraux de l'Armée de Napoléon tombés au champ d'honneur” to him (by the way, this specialist, Knight of the Legion of Honor , was sentenced in 2020 to 12 years in prison in Russia for killing and dismembering his lover, a student).
Napoleon was also a great publicist, a genius when it came to appropriating other people's successes and unloading his own guilt on others. The Army Bulletin XXIX acknowledged the debacle of the invasion of Russia and ended thus: "Her Majesty's health has never been better." Which Napoleon will Ridley Scott reflect? The epic of the God of war or the lyric of the "greatest maker of widows and orphans in France" (Chateaubriand dixit).
War and Peace, by Tolstoy, is not the only Russian paper cathedral that speaks of the French emperor. So did Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment: "he devastated Toulon, butchered Paris, left an army in Egypt, and lost a million men in the Moscow campaign." And today? "Today they erect bronze statues to him," says the novelist, who exaggerated Russia's casualty figure, but whose summary of the character is valid.
From the outset, the choice of Joaquin Phoenix, who is 1.73 meters tall, seems right to embody a character who has gone down to posterity with the false label of being short. Napoleon was over 1.65, which was very good for the time. On the battlefield, surrounded by grenadiers of the Old Guard wearing bear fur caps, he was like Madrid's Corbalán on the court, who seemed short next to the pivots despite measuring 1.84.
Victims of the halo created by and for Napoleon, many historians have not questioned his lies. Acknowledging them would be very uncomfortable both for those who want to see a quasi-mythical figure in the character and for those who are proud of having defeated the "ogre", even if they do not want to admit that he was not that all-powerful military man who has gone down to posterity. The first part of his career was undoubtedly riddled with victories.
Even in his most tremendous victories, such as Austerlitz, chance was key. But Napoleon rewrote history to hide it: Austerlitz was not just another victory, it was the total defeat of the enemy, who drowned when the emperor bombarded the frozen lakes where he was fleeing. This is how the film seems to reflect it (see the video in the tweet above or here). The French bulletins, written to dictation, spoke of 20,000 drowned!
There couldn't have been that many deaths, says David Chandler (Napoleon's Campaigns) because there were only 5,000 Russians and Austrians near the lakes. This historian reduces the figure to 2,000 and does not rule out that there were 200. After the battle, he explains, "38 cannons and 130 bodies of horses" were rescued from the waters. Experts like Serge Cosseron (Les mensonges de Napoléon) or Bernard Coppens (Les mensonges de Waterloo) go further.
If there were 200 or 2,000 victims as a result of this historic episode, they did not die by drowning, but as a result of injuries or hypothermia. Lake Satchan, for example, one of the scenes of the bombing, was actually a huge pond converted into a fish farm where the water would reach the chest of most of the combatants, despite the dramatic and fanciful descriptions of dozens of memorialists and witnesses.
Waterloo was the battle that most obsessed that boy from Ajaccio who became emperor speaking French worse than Tsar Alexander. It is normal. Waterloo was his final defeat and involved his second abdication and banishment from him until his death in 1821 on a rock lost in the Atlantic, Saint Helena. The evil ones say that he was born on a small island and ended up on an even smaller one. Yes, although there he rewrote history.
The Saint Helena Memorial, which he dictated to the Count of Las Cases, is a singular and shameless exercise in washing the image, avoiding any iota of guilt and placing all the responsibility on others. Two characters suffered the most: the marshals Michel Ney, who was shot to death after the Bourbon restoration, and Emmanuel de Grouchy, who dragged suspicions about his courage in battle all his life.
Grouchy might not be the smartest of Napoleon's soldiers, but he wasn't a coward either. Stefan Zweig (Stellar Moments of Humanity) said of him: “He was a cavalryman, nothing more”, “a mediocre man”. He tried to strictly comply with orders and prevent the Prussian army from meeting Wellington's. But, and this is ignored by Zweig, they were confusing orders and they inevitably moved him away from the battlefield.
The exegetes denounce that when the cannons began to vomit fire, Grouchy was away, eating strawberries for breakfast, ignoring that he was blindly obeying Napoleon, who did not believe the Prussians were capable of turning around and reinforcing the British. And he was wrong. Grouchy, the coward, the one with the strawberries, was late, but achieved a monumental success. Surrounded by forces five times the size, he managed to reach France with all of his men. But there was no longer an emperor who could thank him.
