Napoleon Bonaparte is one of a handful of historical figures identifiable by his Christian name alone; and in his case, it is the Frenchified version of the Corsican-Italian Napoleone, the Lion of Naples. Napoleon’s native island only became a French territory one year before his birth, and the royal decree allowing him to attend a French military school was issued in the nick of time for him to enroll. He may have been an accidental Frenchman, but in France today, Napoleon is more than a man. He is a legend like Alexander the Great, the non-Greek warrior-statesman who spread Greece’s glory.
In today’s Pays des Droits de l’Homme, Napoleon reposes in a grand sarcophagus worthy of the Pharaohs he visited in Egypt, a tourist attraction lying under the dome of Les Invalides in Paris. Around his body stand pictures of ten achievements, including the Civil Code, the Concordat, and the “pacification of the nation.” He is a symbol of transcendent greatness and national destiny, and an exemplar of how Romantic historians have defined history, as explained by Kenneth Clark in the closing moments of his Civilisation series. “Above all,” Clark says, “I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals.”
Some people argue Napoleon synthesized the ancien régime and the Revolution. Others see his failures melded with his successes in the primordial goo of modern Europeanness. There are those who believe Napoleon saved the Church from the excesses of the Revolution, while another camp identifies him as the champion of a Christ-free imperial religion that now wears the masks of countless secular ideologies. As for Napoleon’s military prowess, he was clearly a master strategist who got too greedy—a familiar story. And, as for his character, Alexis de Tocqueville may have put it best: “He was as great a man can be without virtue.” Again, quoi de neuf?
The English-speaking world has tended to prefer the caricature of Napoleon as a short man with a big ego—a little maniac who was simply in the right place at the right time. Once he was gone, the world could reset. To Americans, Napoleon’s rise to power may simply be a cautionary tale of bugs in the Liberal operating system. We tell ourselves that unlike the French, we got rid of our king the right way! Thus, Bonapartism has never really taken hold in the United States, and alarmists about authoritarianism have usually looked more than a little ridiculous in the land of the free, although that may be changing now.
Debates about Napoleon’s accomplishments and concerns about his legacy may persist long into the future. None of them, however, are of interest to filmmaker Ridley Scott, whose Napoleon reveals neither a symbol of ideals nor a genius of history, nor even a leader of any real import, but a fatuous man—a mama’s boy and a cuck. In this way, Scott’s film is unexpectedly farcical, with Napoleon, played by Joaquin Phoenix, uttering strange, puerile lines like, “You think you are so great because you have boats!” and “Destiny has brought me to this lamb chop!” The moral of the story, if we can rightly identify one at all, comes only in the words and figures on the screen after the final scene fades to black: the tally of casualties from Napoleon’s campaigns. This Emperor was a weird man who killed people, Scott shows us. Under different circumstances, he may have just been the Joker.
Scott does not limit his contempt to the title character. Every significant historical figure in Napoleon is morally feeble, and ultimately forgettable. The film begins with the fabricated story of the future conqueror of Europe watching the blade of the guillotine falling on the neck of a sniveling Marie Antoinette. Josephine, played by the excellent Vanessa Kirby, is a one-dimensional libertine incapable of inspiring pity even when Scott finally tries to turn her into a sympathetic character. The Duke of Wellington, played by the prolific early 2000’s softling, Rupert Everett, is unremarkably pompous.
For the whole of the two hours and thirty-eight-minute runtime, I felt nothing for anyone, and least of all for the millions of war victims whose demise Scott notes as an afterthought. Even Austerlitz and Waterloo are presented only briefly. Napoleon’s demise in Russia is done and dusted in two battle-free sequences.
It is possible that Napoleon was simply an impossible task for a feature film of reasonable length. By comparison, the famous 1927 silent film on the same subject is five and a half hours long. And although I usually think a movie is a better story-telling method than even the highest-quality prestige television shows, I found myself wondering whether a twelve-part series for the small screen would have been worthwhile this time. On the flip side, I considered the advantage of an even more focused cinematic offering where we see Napoleon through Josephine’s eyes, similar to the depiction of Elvis in Sophia Coppola’s Priscilla. Speculation aside, I was left to evaluate what I had seen—a cynical film by one of the great men of modern cinema purportedly about one of the great men of world history: a pointless Napoleon for a pointless world.
Now, I am the first to cheer when someone declares that our current crop of “great” men and women are about as bad as it gets. Their leadership really can seem pointless, if not reckless. In the United States, our faith in institutions, and especially government, continues to erode. A study released by the Pew Research Center in September 2023 revealed that only 15% of Americans say they trust the government to do the right thing “just about always”—which sounds a little high, if anything, until one notices that in 1958, almost 75% of Americans had confidence that elected officials rarely messed up. Other polling data show that trust in banks, newspapers, the military, and churches are all at or near all-time lows. None of us, therefore, should be too surprised at Scott’s puny indictment of authority.
But as in Napoleon’s times, the failure of our current leadership class has, if anything, increased our desire for a “great man” to deliver us from incompetence and make us “great again.” In France, for example, the populist media personality and politician, Eric Zemmour, recently posted on X (formerly Twitter):
December 2 is a day of glory for France. It is the day of the coronation of Napoleon I at Notre-Dame in 1804 and the day of our immense victory at Austerlitz in 1805. We want to write the rest of the history of France!
Although in the United States few would use Napoleon as such a model, “Make America Great Again” resonates with Zemmour’s Bonapartist sentiment. I have to imagine this is the kind of movement Ridley Scott’s film is meant to condemn, however poorly.
Again, I am conflicted about Napoleon, as I am conflicted about a lot of leaders, past and present. But I am not yet conflicted about leadership per se, nor of the need to keep imagining the renewal of society according to the Christian principles of the body politic. There are no pointless bodies—they all need heads atop them. And we make our peace with the fact that these heads are not always pristine.
The Catholic viewer of Napoleon may have Church leaders in mind. Some Catholics hearken for the days of Pius IX, thinking the Syllabus of Errors of 1864 a necessary corrective to the Liberalism. Others revere Leo XIII, whose Rerum Novarum of 1891 may prescribe a Catholic way through all modern ideologies. Some of us wonder how we had it so good—perhaps too idealistically?—during the more recent reigns of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
In any case, we know we must be led; but maybe we would be better off if our next pontiff were like Lenny Belardo from Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope. In this series, Cardinal Belardo, played by Jude Law, becomes Pope Pius XIII, a savvy idealist who retrieves the triple tiara of Saint Sylvester and, in Bonapartist fashion, places it on his own head. The twist comes, however, when Pius refuses to appear in public as an ecclesiastical celebrity, instead applying reforming zeal and displaying love for the faithful behind the scenes. Is Belardo’s God-given genius a hope or a delusion?
If the “great man” myth is doomed, I, for one, am not quite ready to accept it. Napoleon does nothing to convince someone either way.
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For those of you who have never seen Minard’s map:
From https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters :
POSTER: NAPOLEON’S MARCH
Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales. Exquisitely printed in two colors on fine archival paper, 22” by 15”.
The name (Ridley) Scott calls to mind the novelist (Sir Walter) Scott who also produced a very, very detailed “Life of Napoleon Buonaparte” (the publisher noticed the misspelling too late and, because it shows up throughout the two-volume, double-column text [1832], it remained in the early printed edition).
Somewhere amidst the fine print, after Talleyrand had failed in a conspiracy to replace Napoleon, the very survivable and wigged-and-powdered diplomat (who was also a cleric, the Bishop of Autun) remarks to Napoleon: “it’s a pity that so great a man should have been so badly brought up;” About which, Napoleon is said to have remarked, “You are shit, Talleyrand…shit in a silk stocking.” (Not sure who spoke first.)
Recent scholarship claims that Napoleon didn’t really say that, but if not, would such an exchange still have placed a fine and even “farcical” accent in Ridley Scott’s movie script? https://www.dannydutch.com/post/no-napoleon-didn-t-say-that
About the disastrous retreat from Moscow, what was left of the half-million-man army moved in a long single file, rather than spread out over the landscape. Scavenging for frozen potatoes and such in enemy territory served only the head of the line, while the casualties to starvation and disease piled up among the stragglers. A very forgetful application of another of Napoleon’s famous and terse axioms: “The basic principle that we must follow in directing the armies of the Republic is this: that they must feed themselves on war at the expense of the enemy territory.”
Thank you.
The character Talleyrand appears in Ridley Scott’s film, played by Paul Rhys. If not in the film, the lack of the encounter between Talleyrand and Napoleon is a missed opportunity.
A number of reviewers have criticized the line “You think you are so great because you have boats!” I found it hilarious, because it succinctly points out that Napoleon may not have been nearly as familiar with war at sea as he was with war on land. Nobody familiar with large ships calls them “boats”.
My grandpa was a ship’s captain and it’s true, he’d never call his ship a boat but it may differ in French. Bateaux may refer to both ships and boats?
Interestingly, the term boat is used when referring to a submarine.
True, at least in English, and that is why in 1899 Isaac Rice named his company the Electric Boat Company, now General Dynamics Electric Boat.
Decades ago, when I was living in a cheap apartment with sheetrock walls, I could hear my neighbor complaining on the phone to his mother at 3 A.M. that his new job at Electric Boat was not going well. I told a physicist I knew about this, and he replied that at Electric Boat, the welds are X-rayed and have serial numbers, and “it’s not enough to be a good welder, you have to be a gifted welder”.
German too. Das Boot.
🙂
It was a great movie.
Perhaps a bit here about the larger man-of-war warships and smaller frigates, and their significance to Napoleon. He was contained mostly to Europe largely because the superior British Navy defeated him at sea, first at the Battle of the Nile (August 1798) and later at the Battle of Trafalgar (Oct. 1805). Control of the Americas was decided, and all of the Louisiana watershed (800 thousand square miles) was sold to the new United States in 1803, doubling its size).
At the Battle of the Nile, the British decimated much of the French fleet, but it is also observed that if the British presence had included smaller ships of shallower draft, they at the same time could have blocked the near-shore offloading of French invasion supplies. The conquest of Egypt would have been prevented. But even such smaller ships (frigates of usually 30 to 40 guns) were not referred to as “boats.”
Well, perhaps the novelist Scott was right and you are also right. Because Napoleon was born on Corsica, ceded to the French only the year before his birth. The Italian spelling is apparently ‘Buonaparte’and the French is ‘Bonaparte.’
WIKIPEDIA has its paternal ancestors as Buonaparte originating from Tuscany; and his maternal side Ramolinos coming from Genoa.
I could never sit through the movie you have described meiron. If I had to do a movie review in such circumstances I would rely on short clips and diverse reading. Whatever imperfections I bear I find those displays are depraved; those who design and portray them, criminal; and whole cinemas sitting there showing it and watching that, obscene. When you see it presented in households you can tell things are debased. We used to have censorship up to the ’80’s with RC priests involved and very effective; and then it was ceded without a mention let alone a fight everything went haywire.
Under Trump and MAGA no new wars were started during his administration. His claim to foreign fame are the Abraham Accords.
My thoughts too, Mr.Greg.
President Trump knew how to make deals with difficult people. I don’t believe we’d be seeing the current violence in the Ukraine or the Holy Land had he still been in office.
October 7th was an attempt to derail the Abraham Accords and peace talks between Israel and the Saudis.
Your methods are…unsound.
What methods are you talking about, and how are they unsound?
Mr. Petiprin;
I was seriously considering going to see this film, but thanks to you I have saved the money and, more importantly the TIME that I would have lost forever had I gone to see it.
Thank you.
Leaders of these days (and you know who they all are) are but a reflection of the times. Quel Tartuffe!
Even Pius VII looks like an old man, when looking at David’s painting he had black hair! Ney had sideburns and black hair. In the 1970 film Waterloo, Dan Oherilihy looked like him especially with the red hair! Montgomery said that to win a war two things a general does not do: fight a three front war and invade Russia! One thing Ridley Scott did right was in the scene where Josephine is released the first people out where Carmelite nuns a lovely touch to the Martyrs of compeigne!
You cannot fit 25 years into two and half hours!!! Good effort, but a least Gettysburg had a good toilet break as did the Ten Commandments and The Greatest Story Ever Told!
Every time Napoleon’s name comes up I think of the idiocy of the French Enlightenment elites and their peasant followers. Their anti-Catholic and anti-monarchy mania led many to the guillotine. And yet, ten years later they found themselves with an Emperor no less and following him throughout Europe in military campaigns plundering and killing. Then they exiled him twice but eventually placed his body in an ostentatious sarcophagus housed in Les Invalides for all to worship and stand in awe. I sometimes think the French are certifiably insane in that they have no sense of who they are. Even now, they’ve handed over their culture to Muslims from North Africa and seem indifferent when these immigrant hordes of barbarians go on a rampage in the banlieu around Paris. Who exactly are “The French”?
Simple conceit. They’ve tended to believe they’re the smartest people in the world, willing to believe in anything and everything to prove it, oblivious to Chesterton’s observation that a man who believes in everything, believes in nothing.
Mr. Petiprin’s apparently serious use of “cuck” and “softling” are enough to make me sceptical of his views.
I didn’t see the ‘softling’ word. I did see the film. Knowing that Josephine cheated on the general, the word ‘cuck’ simply stands as shorthand for ‘cuckold,’ a man whose wife made him.
I thought the film was, visually a stunner of realism and well-done in that aspect. OTOH, Ridley showed a lot of sex. Although depicted without full frontal nudity, done from behind and in the presence of others, I rated it X and gratuitous.
The acting, costuming, scenery were all very good, but some battle scenes were confusing–when the nation’s flags or uniforms or lines were unclear.
The ego of the main character was evident. Otherwise, outside of the film being well acted, a good visual spectacle, and with lots of sex, Petiprin’s points are well taken.
Don’t be such a softling.
Ridley Scott made a splash with the scifi/horror mash-up Alien, and the emptiness of his technically adept soul has been evident in almost every movie he has made since then. Only Rutger Hauer’s ad-libbing at the end of Blade Runner saved that film, though again, Scott’s technical adeptness was evident and that movie, like Alien, has affected cinema and wider culture ever since. This review reminds me of similar reviews of his movie about the crusades, with the reviewers acting surprised that Scott produced such an empty and distorted vision of things. It should be no surprise at this point that his products are always technically adept, and always empty. David Lean he is not.
A Catholic’s leadership class is our Pope, Cardinals, Bishops and Priests. That is our path to eternal life. Politicians and our manmade government are a sideshow that should receive little attention—–unless you believe our politicians can write and pass legislation to give you eternal life. We must have our priorities.
Mightn’t a Bonapartist counsel the same thing? And even insist on it?
A worthy critique by Alexander Petiprin of a childish portrayal of Napoleon, reflecting the contempt of men who’ve lost their sense of manhood, for anything strong and masculine regardless of the good or evil of the personage. What we’re denied is further knowledge of the dynamic between good and evil allegedly touched on by Talleyrand, “It’s a pity that so great a man should have been so badly brought up”.
The virtues are a complexity that are inherent by natural law, and taught as were the virtues instilled in the young Alexander son of Philip king of Macedonia, at his behest by none other than Aristotle. Even the wicked exercise many virtues as means of deception, accruement of power. That unfortunate dynamic is perceived in some of our Catholic hierarchy.
Now when Nazism held sway in Germany, the pogrom intended to eliminate deemed non productive persons for governmental financial reasons was presented to the public in most endearing manner, well filmed and acted portrayals of families having to invest their needed savings to keep an elderly or terminally sick member alive, filmed with background delicate tones of a Clara Schumann string quartet. Reason why correspondent William Shirer [Rise and Fall of the Third Reich] called the Nazi hierarchy intellectual gangsters.
Your reference to the “wicked exercise of many virtues as a means of deception […] That unfortunate dynamic is perceived in some of our Catholic hierarchy.”
Historian Friedrich Heer notices this dynamic throughout history, in stark superlative, and calls it “Nicodemism.” For a definition, in one early context he writes this:
“The great thinkers of Islam were masters of Nicodemism; and in this too they set an example to western Europe [!]. Knowledge and wisdom are too strong for the masses, who can only take milk. The wise man must disguise his higher knowledge in conformism, not only to save his own life but also to preserve the precious purity of the higher doctrine. Out of many element a ‘disciplina arcani’ arose, a wariness in the expression of philosophical and religious thought, a kind of double-talk” (“The Intellectual History of Europe,” 1953).
To what degree do the illuminati and the mysteries in parts of “synodality” (i.e., its harmonizing of not only opposites but even contradictions), find their needed synonym in “Nicodemism”? How “backwardist” can you get?
A way to present Napoleon in a movie and be realistic, is to carve story around a turning point or crux event and concentrate the action, dialogue, history, themes and characters around that. To me an inescapable trajectory in the history standpoint is how Napoleon carried forward and catalyzed political, social and religious demise of France and Europe. One crux event that comes to mind is how Napoleon was eventually cornered. He escapes one confinement only to to be defeated and end back in exile.
From Petiprin’s review it sounds as if Scott tried to organize too much and devise it as an entertainment for mixed audiences like homosexualists; and add to the stores of proofs and popularization of their “insightful” -drabby- way of looking at things. Take note the audience sharing technique is an expanding phenomenon. A new market. You see it reflected in pop reviews and hailed as sound artistry. It’s not sound artistry; it is self-referential, distracting and corrupt. Petiprin’s use of “cuck” and “softling” and references from the silly scripting and the selected cast, etc., underscore that and make a lot of sense.
I look at Scott’s filmography and I see it as mixed and inconsistent. From Petiprin’s review this work of his is well below average and a waste of time.
Editor, I haven’t scanned all the grammar and spelling but the lede needs highlighting to be corrected now and in the future.
‘ Debates about Napoleon’s accomplishments and concerns about his legacy may persist long into the future. None of them, however, IS [ not “are”] of interest to filmmaker Ridley Scott. ‘
https://collider.com/todd-haynes-joaquin-phoenix-gay-romance-rated-nc-17/
The issue of whether “none” is singular or plural requires exploration. The entire article cited below is worth reading for those who are interested in such issues.
From Does “None” Take A Singular Or Plural Verb?
Excerpt:
When is none plural?
Use a plural verb with none when what it is referring back to is more than one of whatever is indicated:
Three people were on the panel. None of them were women.
I bought several types of batteries, but none of them are the right kind.
“Debates about Napoleon’s accomplishments and concerns about his legacy may persist long into the future. All of them, however, are of no interest to filmmaker Ridley Scott.”
What do you think?
I have not yet seen the film, so all I know about it is what I have read online.
I send my tongue-in-cheek clapping hand emojis to you, Charles. My English teacher experience applauds you too.
“None” is always singular and this is how the English have it. My theory is that two things happened. A later reasoning developed around using it as a plural pronoun while some then allowed that as a matter of style. I was taking it to task because it might be of service to CWR.
When “what” refers to an amalgam it can go either singular or plural, it depends on the sense; and drawing from this idea they figured they could apply a similar reasoning for “none”. I don’t mean to be strident about it, just reinserting the English as it used to be. There are other English teachers in the world (no emojis offered, etc.) and this is how some go on with the issue, to this day.
I too haven’t seen the movie Charles E Flynn. It sounds rubbishy and I notice Petiprin avoided mention of the explicit content. He should have said something about that -rated R. Readers are dependent. Also from where I sit Marie Antoinette is used as “sad counterpoint-motif” to what is offered in the story. Bad. You can’t just “feel nothing for anyone”!
‘ ….. the failure of our current leadership class has, if anything, increased our desire for a “great man” to deliver us from incompetence ….. ‘
The good leader eschews pursuit of his own greatness or extravagant adventure. He will be busily focused on building up the everyday working of the land and settling disputes at home and abroad before they result in loss.
Another way to analyze Napoleon is in the question, were the things he is credited with actually achieved by him? And – what was not done that should have come to be?
The Code Napoléon, the Grandes Écoles, Légion d’Honneur, Déscription de l’Égypte, infrastructure schemes, Louvre museum, a central bank etc all products of his rule.
I saw the film today. The reviews that I read previously led me to believe it was a complete bomb. I have studied Napoleon since I was a little boy. I have continued to do so to today (I am 68). I was a history major and a lawyer by trade.
My assessment of the film is mixed. I expected it to be worse than what I viewed. Historically, it is deeply flawed. To cover that critique would take far too long. But one of the posters commented on making a film on this subject in 2 and a half hours was impossible. I agree. However, some of the events were fairly dealt with though flawed.
As to Napoleon and ‘the final verdict’, I would highly recommend Peter Geyl’s classic ‘Napoleon: For and Against’. As the author concludes, “It is an argument without end’. God bless and Merry Christmas.