France would no longer be France if Napoleon did not still spark controversy throughout the country, 200 years after his exile in Saint Helena. Not a newspaper has devoted its front page, its central pages or even its editorial to this little Corsican corporal who shook the world and made France and its modernity shine to the farthest reaches of Europe.
The occasion was great with the release of Ridley Scott’s film. Just imagine: the director ofAlien, Gladiator and of Blade Runner which attacks the supreme myth of Napoleonic France. What’s more, a full-blooded Englishman, citizen of the hereditary enemy, since he was born in deep England in the Tyne and Wear region, where Newcastle is brewed. It would be 51e film dedicated to the man that historians have elevated to the level of Alexander and Caesar, the German poet Henri Heine going so far as to compare him to Jesus. We would be tempted to believe it when discovering that no less than 80,000 books relate his adventures. More than one per day since birth!
Who will be surprised that the film was acclaimed in the Anglo-Saxon world and hated in France? THE Guardian gives it five stars, calling it “an outrageously spectacular cavalry charge”. THE Times speaks of “a masterful historical film”.
In France, Ridley Scott achieved the feat of reconciling the right and the left against him, which is no small task in these times. It goes from Release (“from grotesque cinema populated by human monsters”) to World (“rough character, jealous and brutal in love […]the political question is totally ignored”), passing through Le Figaro (“monolithic and boorish emperor”, “sentimental brute”, “insatiable and visionless conqueror”).
“From the sublime to the ridiculous, there is only one step,” said the emperor. A sentence of which this Napoleon is the perfect illustration.
Sublime are the reconstruction of the battles, the images, the soundtrack and the costumes. That Ridley Scott distorted the events and figures, after all, is the freedom of the filmmaker (Napoleon obviously did not desert the Egyptian campaign to avoid being cuckolded).
But how ridiculous is this romantic hero par excellence interpreted without passion, who makes love like a nag, to whom we attribute the morals of a boor in a court without the slightest spirit. An uneducated and unrepentant being, this half-Italian Corsican who was a compulsive reader and never went on campaign without his library? It’s hard to believe it.
Because Napoleon was not just a military genius, but a genius in general. It is he who finally stops the French Revolution and saves what can be saved. By the way, we owe him the Bank of France, the Council of State, the Court of Auditors, the high schools, the baccalaureate, the Civil Code, the Concordat, the departments, the emancipation of the Jews, the numbering of the streets and the garbage collection. In barely 15 years!
Despite his increasingly authoritarian methods, he sparked national awakening and spread the egalitarian reforms of the Revolution across the continent. Certainly, after freeing the slaves of Malta and Cairo, he reestablished slavery. France was then the only country in the world to have abolished it. According to the historian Thierry Lentz, administrator of the Institut Napoléon, he did it mainly for economic reasons, which he later regretted in his memoirs of Saint Helena.
For the record, let us recall that it was to Napoleon that in 1805 a certain Jean-Baptiste Noreau, from Saint-Constant, brought a petition affirming “the well-declared intentions of the Canadian people to return under the Empire of France and to bear again the glorious name of French.
In the wave of woke debunking which blew over the West in 2021, his equestrian statue which had stood on the square of the town hall of Rouen since 1865 had been sent to the repair workshop. To bring it back, residents had to call for a referendum and vote 68% in favor of its return. A clear sign that Napoleon remains a popular hero.
The die-hard pacifists will simply count the dead, forgetting that the Thirty Years’ War and the First World War killed many more innocent people. They will call him a dictator, often with good reason, forgetting the four plebiscites which confirmed his popularity with the French.
Questioning the reasons which made him passionate about this larger-than-life man, the writer Jean-Marie Rouart finally concluded that it was “the hatred of mediocrity, the attraction for that which elevates, ‘unconsoled love of greatness’. What a current subject in this era of flattening political life!
Whatever one thinks of Napoleon, his life is a school of courage. A virtue that has long been desecrated, but which is sorely lacking in our societies. In political life as in intellectual debate, it is not virtue that is doing best in these times. Particularly in Quebec. “Nothing is lost as long as courage remains,” said Napoleon. Before adding that if “bravery comes from blood, courage comes from thought”.
For that alone, we have to thank Ridley Scott.