not tonight, josephine
It’s clear that with his Napoleon witnessing Marie Antoinette’s execution and ordering the French forces to shell the pyramids, Ridley Scott is playing fast-and-loose with historical fact in his rollicking epic about the French emperor. Notwithstanding, two hundred years after the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, his legacy within France remains bitter and contested, an almost cultural battleground.
Ever since Napoleon’s reign, there have been two very distinct perceptions of his legacy. On the one hand, he has been seen as a national hero, a founder of modern France, the greatest soldier of his age, a statesman par excellence, a romanticist; on the other as a tyrant, a betrayer of the Revolution and an out-and-out warmonger. This dichotomy is patently witnessed in Paris where only the narrow, nondescript Rue Bonaparte bears his name and where there are merely two statues throughout the whole of the city.
However, his reputation is perhaps greatest as an administrative reformer. Napoleon established the Conseil d’Etat, which, to this day, still advises the French Government, the central Bank of France, its regional high school network and the baccalaureate exam system. Furthermore, he personally devised the Napoleonic Civil Code which successfully entrenched modern legal rights within French society. The code is credited with hastening the end of feudalism and has been voluntarily adopted by nations worldwide. Of this he stated “My real glory isn’t that I won forty battles; Waterloo will erase most of them – but nothing will erase my Civil Code.”
The oft-ignored flipside includes the facts that his dictatorship expressed zero-tolerance for any dissent and was enforced by an overly-enthusiastic secret police, reinstated slavery in the French West Indies, passed legislation banning “people of colour” from entering France and forced the break-up of interracial marriages. A committed dyed-in-the-wool misogynist, he confirmed the legal right of men to control women and ensured they were forbidden from owning property.
Napoleon eventually died, depressed and withdrawn, in exile on the bleak South Atlantic island of St Helena, a damp, desolate, rocky island six miles by ten miles, 1,200 miles from the African coast. Upon sighting it, he remarked “It seems no charming place to live.” Even in death, he was considered too dangerous to return to France and his desire to be buried in Paris was not granted by the British government until some twenty years later, when his body was finally entombed in the Dome das Invalides. There are many conspiracy theories about the causes of Napoleon’s death but doctors have subsequently diagnosed both ulcers and stomach cancer as the principal ailments. His final words were “La France, l’armee, tete d’armee, Josephine” – “France, the army, head of the army, Josephine”.
Okay, I admit I’ve yet to actually see the movie but strongly suspect Hollywood’s blockbuster budget throws little light on this most divisive and complex of historical figures.
