REVIEWING NAPOLEON

I saw the new movie "Napoleon" today at a local theater. Here is my take on it. I have deliberately avoiding reading other reviews or comments so as not to skew my own view.

First of all, we must remember this is a Hollywood movie. It is not history. Since it is just a movie, we must think about the purpose and function of this movie. Why was it made? For entertainment, certainly. Then, we have to ask, how does this film work as entertainment?

I think a movie has to engage the viewer in one or two ways. It has to present an enveloping narrative, a plot, that draws us in and makes us care about what is happening on the screen. For instance, "Casablanca" does this perfectly. If the movie does not do this, then it has to present characters that we care about.

How does "Napoleon" function on each of these? It really has no unified narrative or plot. It is a collection of vignettes and they are not usually well-connected. So, the movie tries to rest on the characters, in this case Napoleon and Josephine. It does not succeed at this either. We really do not get to know either person well. Therefore, we never really care about them much as people. We do not even learn why they care so much about each other. The romance is not there. Instead the relationship is all sexual. There are numerous sexual references and two scenes of simulated intercourse. This depiction is most unfair to Josephine who, while she did use sex as a tool, was far more than a sex object. She was an intelligent, shrewd, and ambitious woman who contributed to Napoleon's career. This was really why Napoleon was attracted to her so much.

It is often true that movies tell us more about the time in which they were made than in the history being represented. If so, this movie tells us we live in an age obsessed with sex, sexuality, and gender. I do not think anyone would disagree with this. 

The movie is replete with historical inaccuracies and I will not go into this as it would take a long time. Suffice to say the one that grated on me the most was Josephine's reaction to being told that Napoleon was going to divorce her. In the movie she laughs disdainfully. In fact, people said one could hear her screams from one end of the palace to the other. She dissolved into hysterical sobs and begged and pleaded for a long time before becoming reconciled to the decision. In this case, history would have actually added to the emotional intensity of the movie since there was precious little otherwise. The countless other errors I would chalk up to poetic license. 

The battle scenes are mediocre to poor. In fact, they seemed gratuitous and even broke the narrative, such as it was, that the movie was trying to convey. Toulon was fair. Austerlitz was completely wrong. Borodino is barely a blip. The only battle scene that had any merit was Waterloo which was not too bad.

So, would I recommend the movie? I would give it 5 out of 10. If you are interested in history, or in Napoleon, it would be worth your while. If not, I would skip it. I doubt seriously that it will win any Academy Awards. And no, Joaquin Phoenix is not a convincing Napoleon.

I suppose one useful outcome of the movie is to make us think about the place of Napoleon Bonaparte in history. He was a gigantic figure who dominated Europe from 1799 to 1815 and cast a strong and long shadow over the next century and a half. The question is, what difference has he made to the world in which we live?

Historically, Napoleon represented two different currents, militarism and authoritarianism. Contrary to the film above, the driving force in his life was not Josephine, it was the army. He was first, last and in-between a soldier. One cannot understand anything about him without starting with this. As a soldier, he believed problems were solved on the battlefield. Hence, campaign after campaign, battle after battle. And this is what a lot of Napoleonic scholars love to specialize in. Napoleon was a genius at innovative, sometimes dazzling, strategy and tactics. But, in the end, his enemies inevitably joined up against him and brought him down. His militarism failed to keep him in power. 

The other current was authoritarianism. Napoleon overthrew the revolutionary republican government and made himself a dictator, calling himself consul, first consul, then emperor. While he institutionalized many reforms of the revolution, he betrayed the fundamental idea of the revolution, that people could govern themselves in freedom and equality.

One can argue that both militarism and authoritarianism have had devastating effects on civilization in the two centuries since Napoleon's time. Militarism zoomed ahead in the century after Napoleon so that by 1914, all the great powers had poured massive fortunes into military preparations, on the Napoleonic assumption that problems between nations could be settled on the battlefield. Every power in the world financed detailed historical studies of the Napoleonic wars as if to unlock the keys to his brilliance. This took all the great powers straight into the First World War. However, WWI was to be entirely different than the Napoleonic wars because of technology. Airplanes, submarines, tanks, machine guns, flame throwers, poison gas etc. were things N could not have imagined. The new militarism was far more deadly. Whereas at least 3m people died in the Napoleonic wars, some 20m died in WWI, and 60m in WWII. 

The authoritarian model has also been inordinately impressive since 1815 even though the main thrust of western civilization has been toward democracy. The Twentieth Century was the age of the ideological dictators, every one of which looked back to Napoleon. Hitler spent a long time standing at Napoleon's tomb on his triumphant visit to Paris in 1940. As we see in the world today, the urge toward authoritarianism is a major problem. This will be a large part of the American national elections next year. One of the parties is about to nominate a candidate who promises an authoritarian, that is, anti-democratic, state.

I would like to think the world has outgrown Napoleon and his legacy of militarism and authoritarianism. Aggressive wars do not solve problems and often only lead to more. The glory is not on the battlefield. It is in the making of the peace. Likewise, dictators do not know better than the communal spirit of the people. Sovereignty rests in the people as a whole and they have the right to decide collectively what they will do. Democracy is the best way to preserve liberty, equality, and fraternity.