L’Année Napoléon in Emmanuel Macron’s commemoration-hungry France, was a bit of a damp squib. In 2021, two centuries after the death of l’Empereur on St Helena’s Island, there was enough noise from the anti-colonialist crowd on his reintroduction of slavery in the West Indies in 1802-1804 (under pressure from local landowners) that a number of grandiose projected events were quietly cancelled or indefinitely postponed. Post-Covid and a year before Macron’s re-election campaign, it was felt that any unnecessary controversy should be prudently shelved.
It took Ridley Scott and his bloated Napoléon to rouse the serried ranks of French historians, politicians, journalists, museographers, military brass and amateur re-enacters against what is largely seen here as an attack against France’s best-known ruler and military genius. We’re getting L’Année Napoléon two years late — and enjoying every moment of it.
“Napoléon”, c’est le film d’un Anglais très antifrançais (“Napoleon is a movie made by an arch-anti-French Englishman”) sniffed the historian Patrice Gueniffey in Le Point, before engaging in a meticulous fact-checking exercise. (The entire Institut Napoléon has been producing a detachment of painstaking little French Hugo Vickers to protest, with a thousand details, that the superannuated, gloomy, inarticulate brute portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix is wrong, wrong, wrong). “This is worse than a just a bad film: Ridley Scott desecrates Napoleon”, the Sciences Po professor of media studies, Romain Marsily, thunders in Le Figaro.
For a country supposedly in the throes of existential gloom and masochistic self-doubt, there’s nothing like a perceived attack by bloody foreigners on a national legend to bring a lot of us together. A recent poll shows only 3% of the French mention the West Indies slavery reinstatement in their rating of Napoléon’s “worse decisions”.
Putting aside the police state that France inherited from the Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety, the first Napoléonic accomplishments the French praise are Napoleon’s legislative and administrative reforms, which pretty much baked Roman law, Louis XIV’s centralism and command economy, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and the Revolution’s nation-building achievements into a consistent framework. It took four years — 1800 to 1804 — to write and collate the 2281 articles of the Civil Code, largely under the stewardship of the First Consul, as he was known at the time, himself (Bonaparte presided over 55 of the 107 writing sessions of the final version).
This, as much as his conquests, left an indelible mark in the law of places from Louisiana and Bolivia to Bavaria and Poland. You find the (translated) hand of Napoleon in the Japanese Civil Code of 1898, in Egyptian Law, in Mustafa Kemal Atatürk new Turkish Code. Half a century before Bismarck, the birth of modern Germany was facilitated by the breaking up of medieval laws and regulations and the power of guilds, as well as the expropriation, à la révolutionnaire, of the churches and the aristocratic landowners.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThanks, as always, to Anne-Elisabeth Moutet. No other Unherd writer can compete with Mme Moutet’s panache when it comes to twisting the knife.
When Napoléon Bonaparte’s nephew became Napoleon III, Marx wrote of history repeating itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Now, with Macron, we might add a third time as marionettes, followed, I fear, by a grand guignol.
Comparing Macron to Napoleon romantically suggests that his sudden emergence from nowhere and his “brilliant campaign” came about through sheer force of personality. Another more mundane explanation is that, faced with a resurgence of the populist left and right in the persons of Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Melenchon respectively, the “centrist” establishment and their well-oiled machine went to work, thrust the man they had been grooming into the limelight, and hastily assembled a party machine around him.
I know which explanation I’d plump for.
Indeed, and they managed to muck it up so badly that Macron’s job at this point is basically to sit on the lid of the pot so it doesn’t boil over and hope somebody comes to rescue him and his ilk from the revolution. If we’re determined to make a historical comparison for Macron out of French history, I think Louis XVI is nearer the mark.
I was looking forward to seeing it and saw the film on Wednesday last week, but found Joachim Phoenix unconvincing – especially as a 20-something General.
Surely a project of this scope didn’t need a name like Phoenix to attract the crowds… it would have been a fine opportunity for a younger actor.
Overall I thought the film disappointing. It was always going to be a sketch of his life and achievements whichever aspect of Napoleon’s life it tackled, but to cover two of Europe’s most tumultuous decades in a couple of hours….nope.
A series would have been a better medium.
I’ve only seen the trailer, but it looks so lame. Phoenix just stands there looking grumpy.
Portraying a powerful figure needs energy, mystery, fear. Dr Zhivago did it well it bits:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsjzY0lGLdw
Half of it is just editing and sound
Problem with Napoleon is similar to what Russia is facing today.
He won many battles but he left France depopulated.
So France from great military power became subservient to Prussia and then united Germany.
Yes, his administrative and legislative achievements are great if you believe in statist, bureaucratic arrangements.
Reality is though, that more market driven approach of Anglo-Saxon world proved to be more successful in creating wealth and new industries.
Which in turn saved France in two world wars.
I love French wine, food and art.
Reality is though, that without uk and USA there would be no France.
Without the US there would be no Britain. Well perhaps a Vichy style one……
“un Anglais très antifrançais”
Isn’t that somewhat of an oxymoron?
I’d rather say it’s a tautology 😉
You would be right : I would be an idiot.
You are definitely not (and I am right on this count, too )
You are very generous.
And you have style.
Thank you It’s very kind of you
Anyway, isn’t Ridley Scott a Scot?
No He’s from South Shields on Tyneside
Yes, Macron is “….is done, a three-year lame duck”; and deservedly so as a pale imitation of the real Napoleon.
However, it is also the case that Napoleon was a very disappointing movie and Scott and Phoenix failed as much as the screenwriter failed.
The first paragraph of ‘The Charterhouse of Parma’ drips with the elegant sarcasm of which Stendhal was a master. The fashionable performative enthusiasm of the Milanese is expertly filleted. How can Moutet have missed this?
“Emmanuel Macron is the closest we have come to a Bonapartiste recently.”
What about Charles de Gaulle and his ‘running away’ to Kaiserslautern in 1968 or is that now ancient history?
Yes, French running away?
Is it a pattern or an exception?
At least Italians have a pattern.
Never finishing war on the same side they started it.
Centralising the state and introducing a civil code aren’t the subject of films. Inevitably any dramatic representation of Napoleon will focus on his military victories and defeats. Not mentioned is how the other great powers with the exception of Prussia/Germany worked so hard to avoid another war in Europe for the century after Napoleon, so great had been the price Europe paid for Napoleon’s violence.
Found the film very poorly edited and the script was mediocre.The actress who plays Josephine is the main highlight but Phoenix is average not least if compared to Rod Steiger who played Napoleon in Waterloo,
However one should watch Napoleon and see Ridley Scott at his very best.
So, should I see the movie, or stay away to avoid having my mind contaminated – and stick to War and Peace?
Crap movie. Stay away!