Napoleonic

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

It’s tempting to say that the new film Napoleon, from director Ridley Scott, which premiered in theaters just before Thanksgiving, comes at an apt time — given how many strongmen and outright dictators have dominated our post-post-modern 21st-century political stage. 

Just since the year 2000 we’ve seen the likes of George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Muamar Quaddafi, Osama bin Laden, Kim Jongs Il and Un, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump all enter stage left, exit stage right, and some (notably the latter three) remain in center stage.

Some draped themselves in medals, others have been self-styled revolutionaries and reformers, while most have played the role of the populist-turned-empire builder. But Napoleon stands alone, regardless of the time period — and encompasses all those aforementioned political impulses. 

That a movie about him is making headlines in 2023 means very little, compared to the long shadow his famously false slight stature has cast over the Western world since the turn of the 1800s. Every era since then is an apt era for a movie about Napoleon, because it’s hard to find any single person or thing that did more to shape the contours of the past two centuries than him and — more importantly — his mythos. 

Name an authoritarian political and/or military figure since Napoleon’s literal and figurative Waterloo in 1815, and you’ll find a man (and they’re almost always men) who is merely trying on the emperor’s clothes.

Courtesy photo.

How those clothes fit has been the test of every aspirant conqueror since Napoleon’s quiet demise in carceral exile on the island of St. Helena on May 5, 1821. Meanwhile, his adult life is short-handed by historians as the Napoleonic Era, there is an entire branch of political philosophy called Bonapartism, and we still use terms like “small-town Napoleon” and “Napoleon complex” for graspers both small and large. When Bill and Ted went on their Excellent Adventure through time in the 1980s, Napoleon stole the show with his love of ice cream sundaes and the San Dimas water park. I mean, we refer to the guy by his first name, which is always a sign that you’ve “made it” historically. (Go ahead and name your kid “Napoleon” and see how folks react. It lives in the same name space as Adolf, Genghis, Attila and, to a lesser extent, Vladimir.)

Living in the world since May 1821 has meant living with Napoleon Bonaparte. And here we are, in the Year of Our Lord 2023 and you can’t drive more than a few blocks in Los Angeles without seeing a poster of Joaquin Phoenix sporting le petit caporal’s bicorn and glaring out from under the big, bold letters “Napoleon: He came from nothing. He conquered everything.”

But how well the emperor’s clothes fit the emperor himself is the subject of Ridley Scott’s movie, which has kindled the kinds of passions that the man himself would have enjoyed, lover of drama and self-promotion that he was.

Put briefly, the French don’t like the film. They think it paints Bonaparte as his detractors would have seen him — as a vainglorious, rustic Corsican hustler, whose twin demons of insecurity and egotism drove him to excesses of political, military and sexual lust. That Ridley Scott is a Brit, and therefore a member of France’s and Napoleon’s bitterest frenemies doesn’t help.

English audiences seem to love Napoleon and their American cousins love it even more. How could they not? For the English, the story of Napoleon is of the defeat of a radical despot paving the way for the ascendancy of the Victorian Era and their own empire, over whom the sun never set… until it inevitably did, which I suppose makes watching Boney’s fall all the more delicious to watch. 

For us Americans, Napoleon is our crazy rich uncle, who kicked over the tables and chairs of Europe for almost 15 years, spoke the same language as our own “republican” revolution but wore an imperial crown and looked damn good doing it (like all Americans secretly want to do). He also sold us about half of our own country, via the Louisiana Purchase, so there’s that, too.

Napoleon doesn’t go into any of these subtleties — or any subtleties at all — focusing on Napoleon’s career from the siege of Toulon in 1793 until his death in 1821, with select bits thrown in regarding battles in Egypt, Austerlitz and Borodino; the self-immolation of Moscow; and, of course Waterloo, featuring Rupert Everett in a sneering, scene-stealing turn as Arthur Wellesley, duke of Wellington.

Shot through the entire sumptuous spectacle — and it is exquisitely costumed, choreographed and filmed, with the best battle scenes since Scott’s other Phoenix-imperial vehicle Gladiator — is Napoleon’s desperate, fraught love, life and marriage with Josephine de Beauharnais, who was his empress from 1804 to 1809 but with whom he could not bear children, therefore felt the monarchical necessity of putting aside in favor of another wife.

Played with wit, charm and more than a touch of villainy by Vanessa Kirby (who some may recognize as Princess Margaret from the Netflix series The Crown), Josephine is the third pillar in Napoleon’s story, which Ridley Scott frames as “France, the army and Josephine” — the reported last words of Napoleon on St. Helena (though accounts differ).

And therein is the problem with Napoleon, and every other piece of Bonaparte-related media for the past 200 years. So much of it is propaganda at best and merde at worst. 

Scott’s movie is no different. In its three-hour runtime, it simultaneously humanizes, humiliates and glorifies its subject, all the while inventing exploits (like shelling the pyramids of Giza), exaggerating victories (historians doubt whether so many Austro-Russian soldiers were drowned in the invented frozen “lake” at Austerlitz) and dwelling on the great man’s pathetic, underperforming horniness for Josphine (this part does indeed get tedious).

But, as Scott responded to such criticisms in a recent New Yorker profile, “Get a life.” 

Fair enough, and as someone who holds a Master’s degree in history with an emphasis and thesis on the 18th-century Atlantic World, I can attest that Napoleon is not a documentary. It’s a semi-biographical drama with a few laughs, much visual beauty, and compelling (but not spellbinding) performances by Phoenix and Kirby — for real, they are literally the only characters in the film who get anything approaching development, much less a narrative arc.

Do I recommend Napoleon? Oui. Is it a masterpiece? Non. In theaters now.