Ed Carey
Hollywood monopoly blockbuster Napoleon, directed by Ridley Scott debuted this month to reviews as unenthusiastic as the film itself. The most glaring faults of the film are that it is uninteresting and poorly written. Those with a little understanding of history will see naked historic inaccuracies, and those with no understanding will be left wondering why any of the things depicted in the film are taking place to begin with. All will end up bored and regretful for wasting the three hours it takes to watch it.
Scott openly proclaimed a rejection of historians in a most arrogant manner; he was able to take the talent of his cast and throw it away by creating a film that is neither educational nor interesting. Lurking beneath all the technical mistakes is a dangerous and reactionary politics. The film depicts a distorted and false history from a monarchist perspective sided with England. It begins with getting dates wrong by depicting the decapitation of Marie Antoinette before a bloodthirsty mob while Napoleon watches with dull satisfaction. Napoleon was not at the execution of Antoinette; he was 24 at the time and engaged in the battle of Toulon against the royalists backed by the British. Antoinette was found guilty of incest with her son and executed while Napoleon demonstrated great talent and invention at conquering Toulon and driving back the British, depicted in a later scene in the film that offers no insight into why the battle was so important to the revolution.
The film completely obscures both Napoleon’s revolutionary service and the conditions which drove him to take a reactionary role. The great revolutionary Maximilian de Robespierre is depicted with an even worse character, as a lone extremist rather than a figure unifying the left. Nothing is mentioned about Napoleon’s service to Robespierre. Being a Jacobin himself at the time, Napoleon was arrested after the coup of Thermidor. As a political prisoner, Napoleon could have faced execution by the hands of reaction were it not for having friends—who recognized his military talent and who were aligned with the Directory—secure his release. By concealing this, the film presents the Directory as mainly correct but inept, and Napoleon as a hapless apolitical commander.
The two Italian campaigns led by Napoleon, the battles in which he proved to France that he was one of the greatest military thinkers of his time, are glossed over with some brief dialogue. His campaign in Egypt gets no better treatment; it is reduced to an awkward moment he has with a mummy. Napoleon’s intellect is eradicated from the film as well; his own brand of opportunist nationalism and his attempts to inspire revolution in Egypt, bringing there the first mass printing press among other things are left out. Napoleon’s leaving of Egypt is reduced in the film to a personal decision based on romantic impulse. In reality, his deployment to Egypt was a maneuver to remove one of the youngest and most popular generals from Paris and get him far away from politics so that the corrupt Directory would not feel threatened, and his return had everything to do with confronting them. Likewise, his relationship to the masses and the rank-and-file soldiers is hidden from the audience, in spite of the fact that this characteristic allowed him to maintain a high level of support and discipline among his troops. One has to read between the lines of the film to even get the impression that his background was far closer to a commoner than any of the military elites and that this won him the love of the soldiers.
In what is perhaps the worst part of the film, the 13 Vendémiaire—a massive royalist uprising—is depicted as if the royalist were poverty-stricken radicals against a tyrannical state. In reality, the republic was infested and its forces were overwhelmed by well-armed and well-funded royalists. The French National Guard under Napoleon’s leadership were able to repel this larger force, and it took a lot more than firing a cannon into an unarmed group of riff-raff to do it. Presenting the battle which really took place, like all of the other battles, would have made a much more engrossing film. A small commando unit passing through enemy territory and securing a massive armory before enemy forces can capture it—what really happened—would be far better than the awkward depiction in the film, which bends to make royalists seem preferable to a troubled republic. Later battles in the epic of Napoleon fare no better.
About the only thing decent in the film are the talents of a few actors and the score, all of which Scott squanders and abuses. The French revolution is the high point of the bourgeois revolutionary epoch; it is testament to how reactionary the bourgeoisie has become when they cannot even get their best history correct, and instead long for the decrepitude of kings and feudal lords. The words of the great revolutionary journalist Jean Paul Marat are as true about revolutions today as they were in 1793: “For there is no way of going back, and this is the position in which we find ourselves today: we must win or perish, a palpable truth that Cambon rendered in a sublime image when he said at the tribune the day before yesterday: ‘We have finally docked on the isle of freedom, and we have burned the vessel that brought us there.’” These were the kind of ideas leading the revolution which Napoleon existed in, and eventually betrayed.
