Ridley Scott has started a new Napoleonic war

You won’t yet have seen Ridley Scott’s new biopic of Napoleon unless you’re a film critic, but it’s already sparked a new Napoleonic war. Especially in France. Unsurprisingly perhaps because, ironically, the big boy of French history is “Le Petit Caporal” himself.

Jeanne D’Arc might have cornered the market in burning martyrdom to national resistance, and Charles de Gaulle may have invoked her spirit in his “certaine idée de la France”’ but it was Napoleon’s “gloire” he really sought.

Founder of the modern French state, father of the Napoleonic Code, victor of Austerlitz, emperor, general, genius, statesman and revolutionary.

Other things too, of course. The “Monster” scaring the grand courts of Europe and the small children of Regency England in equal measure. “Small man syndrome” embodied, micro-penised lover of Joséphine (it’s a fact I tell you!), profligate with the lives of La Grande Armée from the snowfields of Russia to the shallow Belgian slope of Mont St Jean. And, purely in the name of l’egalité and the Rights of Man, reinstater of slavery.     

He divided Europe then, he divides France now. 

Unless and until, of course, an Anglo filmmaker comes along and, Wellington-like, boots the reputation of the great man himself. At a stroke, a regiment of French historians, and a battalion of film critics have formed square in his defence, condemning, in the words of Le Point:  “A very anti-French and very pro-British” screen rendering of the Napoleonic epic. 

There is a litany of historical inaccuracies alleged and critics have even taken issue with the casting of 49-year-old Joaquin Phoenix in the title role as too aged to take the part. 

This, of course, is an easy game to play and one Britain knows well, rendered, as we so often are, either brave but largely ponderous bit-part actors in the Second World War or cruel and perfidious empire builders prior. 

“Why do Hollywood films always show America winning the war?” a director was once asked. “Well, if you don’t like it, you could always make your own.” came the answer. A fair point one need hardly translate into French. 

And, before CGI allowed the conjuring of authentic flotillas, squadrons and tank divisions, the imitation game gave many Sunday afternoons of dismissive joy picking off equipment inaccuracies like a straggling US halftrack marked with a German cross. 

But the point all this rather overlooks is that these films are, at heart, drama and not documentary and the demands of each are different. Not least in the former’s need to create tension and to cover considerable distances both in time and geography in about two or so digestible hours. 

Neither are new problems. Shakespeare’s Prologue acknowledges the challenge of scale in Act 4 of Henry V:

“ ..we shall much disgrace 
With four or five most vile and ragged foils, 
Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous, 
The name of Agincourt.”

And then, of course, there’s the wider issue of narrative and historical accuracy. You may find this hard to believe but not everything portrayed in Shakespeare’s history plays was strictly speaking true. 

He did use historical sources, not least the chronicles of both Froissart and Holinshed. For the Roman plays, he used Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Grecians and Romanes. But, just like a Hollywood producer, he had to juggle the audience’s attention span and the sensitivities of financial backers.

The price of not doing so wasn’t just a box office flop but the danger that his largest crowd might be the matinee showing of his own execution. Shakespeare dealt in the troubled history of the War of the Roses. Difficult ground, not least when the reigning monarch was a Tudor and had skin in the game.   

But that didn’t prevent the creation of drama and characters that have stood the test of time. Richard III was, it seems, both more and less than a “bunch-backed toad” and “bottled spider”. He almost certainly went down fighting and not hollering for a horse. Similarly, Henry V’s powers of oratory have rendered him a national figure, a hero, as much for his pre-match speeches as for his routing of the French against all odds. 

One might argue the facts and legacy of both monarchs but, as John Julius Norwich points out in his excellent Shakespeare’s Kings, that’s hardly the point. And it can easily be argued that the broad impression of events, however condensed and elliptical, is a reasonably representative one.

According to Norwich: “His [Shakespeare’s] sources may have been few, and not invariably satisfactory, but where they were found wanting he always had his imagination to fill the gaps. He would never have claimed historical accuracy… but then he was not a historian, he was a dramatist. The play was the thing, and if he could amuse, inspire and modestly educate his audience, that was enough.”

One might argue that Ridley Scott is no Shakespeare. But then again, who is? However, a brief glance at his filmography will show that pictures like Gladiator and The Last Duel, though finding a basis in fact, replicate almost exactly the virtues Norwich ascribes to the Bard. 

They evoke the sounds, sights and smells of history; its feel and its drama.

This, of course, isn’t to say that truth doesn’t matter. Film is a powerful medium and it finds propaganda a very easy mate to couple with. However, most of the time, it matters less than we concern ourselves with. Churchill may never have blubbed on a Tube train as he did in Darkest Hour but emotional he often was and the overall impression of him as a man whom events and fortitude conspired to make great is by no means inaccurate. 

It is for the likes of Andrew Roberts, as he did last weekend in The Sunday Times to lament the treatment of the little Corsican and his founding role in many French and European institutions. Frankly, grandes écoles are not the stuff of compelling drama. 

Similarly, it is for the French film industry to ponder, as it often does, how regularly it produces work of great critical acclaim but no global commercial impact. If great art falls in a wood and nobody sees it, did it exist? And other appropriate faux philosophy. 

Fortunately for Ridley Scott, I remember Joaquin Phoenix’s child Lucifer performance as Commodus in Gladiator and the climactic medieval combat of The Last Duel as powerful stuff. And I’m off to the cinema.

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