Ridley Scott, Hitler, and Napoleon

It is obscene to compare Bonaparte to Hitler and Stalin, although at the time there were people who saw him as prefiguring the Antichrist due to the death and destruction he caused. From The European Conservative:

A recurrent criticism of the film from Bonapart-maniacs is the choice not so much of Joaquin Phoenix to play the Emperor—the actor’s performance is generally hailed with enthusiasm—as his age, since Ridley Scott has chosen to keep the same actor to cover the entire tumultuous life span of the Corsican soldier turned Emperor—one day a spirited young man crossing the Arcole Bridge, the next an aged and worn-out general, defeated on the plain of Waterloo. This undoubtedly takes the wings off the thirty-year-old hero of the Italian and Egyptian campaigns.

For the more fussy minded, some real mistakes have been spotted, hardly acceptable given the scale of the project and the budget involved. If you look hard enough at the trailer, the only content available at the moment, you’ll see Bonaparte wearing colonel epaulettes instead of general epaulettes, cannons firing too hard for the time, and the emperor riding through the middle of his soldiers, though he usually stayed out of the way. 

The root of the problem lies elsewhere, and French pride is in fact painfully wounded by the project itself. According to echoes on French social media, what can you expect from an American in a film about the French, directed by an Englishman? 

Not without reason, the Gallic viewer deplores the lack of ambition of French cinema, which is incapable of seizing on the marvels of national history and bringing them to the screen, leaving the task to others. Unfortunately, French cinema, with all its public subsidies, is often content with poorly constructed scripts based on vague, psychologising plots featuring the ‘sentimental’ problems—to put it politely—of a caste of manic-depressive forty-somethings, against a backdrop of questions about immigration and social misery. Mired in repentance and self-contempt, the French film elite is incapable of confronting the myths that abound in French history and refuses to tell great stories—apart from the two recent exceptions, the confidential documentary film about the Vendéen general Charette, Vaincre ou Mourir, and the major production reviving the epic of the Trois Mousquetaires based on the work of Alexandre Dumas. 

The French don’t forgive the Americans for talking about them, for them. In the case of Napoleon starring Joaquin Phoenix, their anger may well be justified by Ridley Scott’s personal interpretation of the historical figure. Despite all the energy devoted to the project, Scott admits that he doesn’t have a very sympathetic image of the emperor, whom he doesn’t hesitate to compare to Adolf Hitler. In an interview with Empireonline a few days ago, Scott said: “I compare [Napoleon] with Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler, Stalin.” The mistake about the epaulettes is all very well, but such a comparison is the last straw.

How can you imagine for a moment that the two men are on the same level, say French historians, who point out that Napoleon was the source of admiration among the French that lasted all throughout the 19th century, feeding a pride and nostalgia that continues to this day under the name of the “imperial legend”? Interviewed by The Times, Pierre Branda, academic director of the Fondation Napoléon, takes issue with what he sees as a scandalous short-cut: Napoleon was not a murderous dictator, and more than many other figures in French history, he shaped many of the features of France as we know it today. An army general of immense talent, he was also a great head of state, a builder, and a legislator—difficult to say the same of Hitler or Stalin. The fact that Hitler admired Napoleon is not enough to justify the parallel. Not only France, but contemporary Europe too, is built on the Napoleonic legacy of the Civil Code: Belgium, the Netherlands (Dutch Code of 1838), Italy (Italian Code of 1868), Spain, and Portugal still draw their inspiration from it today.

For the French, it’s obvious: this idle comparison can only be a dirty trick from the perfidious Albion, a slander of the kind the British—Napoleon Bonaparte’s greatest enemies—have a secret talent for. For Professor Thierry Lentz, Director of the Fondation Napoléon, the origin of this dubious amalgam is to be found in a comparative biography by the British historian Desmond Seward, published in 1988. The book in question drew a parallel between the two men’s miserable origins and their unquenchable ambitions. A historical absurdity: Napoleon Buonaparte was born into a family of Corsican nobility and, despite his modest origins, trained at the royal military academy of Brienne. What does this have in common with the obscure failed artist from Upper Austria, the son of a minor civil servant in the Danube monarchy? (Read more.)

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