‘Napoleon’ is more progressive than you think

Despite some flamboyant inaccuracies, Ridley Scott’s biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix is a truthful exploration of how France ended up crowning an emperor just years after beheading a king, writes Clémence Michallon

Joaquin Phoenix as Napoléon Bonaparte and Vanessa Kirby as Joséphine de Beauharnais in Ridley Scott’s ‘Napoleon’. In this scene, Bonaparte has just been crowned emperor and his wife is being crowned empress (Courtesy of Apple)

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I booked a ticket to see Napoleon. The marketing surrounding Ridley Scott’s biopic of the emperor Napoléon Bonaparte has been confusing. Its US tagline, “He came from nothing/He conquered everything”, is not only inexact (Bonaparte was born into minor nobility)—it also struck me as a strangely girlboss-y description of a man who rose to immense power by war-waging and political maneuvering—and whose ascent ended France’s first attempt at a republic.

In my native France, Paris metro users walked past side-by-side photos of Bonaparte, portrayed in the film by Joaquin Phoenix, with various captions. A frequent combination included a photo of Phoenix’s Bonaparte as a war leader, next to one of him embracing his wife Joséphine de Beauharnais, each image respectively adorned with the words “the conqueror” and “the lover”.

All this made me wonder whether Napoleon would lionize its subject—whether it would ask me to believe that he had, in fact, come from nothing and conquered everything, and whether it would expect me to be enthralled by Bonaparte’s trajectory. (And perhaps in wondering so I forgot that Ridley Scott is English, and say what you will about the English, but one thing they’re not particularly prone to is lionizing Napoléon Bonaparte.)

What I found instead was a film that knowingly commits some flamboyant historical inaccuracies, but gets at a convincing truth about Bonaparte’s rise to (and fall from) power.

Napoleon opens with the public execution of Marie-Antoinette, months after that of her husband, King Louis XVI. France then descends into the Reign of Terror—the period during which alleged enemies of the revolution were surveilled, imprisoned, and executed. Historians estimate that at least 300,000 people were arrested, 17,000 were executed, and 10,000 died in prison over just a year.

Bonaparte is shown taking advantage of the period of instability that (somewhat inevitably) followed the revolution: first staging a coup in 1799 to become the head of the government of the first French republic, then proclaiming himself emperor of the French in 1804. While Bonaparte’s reign as emperor had some differences from the monarchy (I leave it up to historians to dispute those in further detail), some key elements, shall we say, were borrowed from it. For example, Bonaparte was crowned in a religious ceremony inside the medieval cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. In the event of his death, power was to go not to an elected leader, but to his heir—or, absent an heir, to his brother.

Bonaparte’s legacy is complicated, and I’m not aiming to settle any debate here. (Historian Charles-Éloi Vial stressed Bonaparte’s role in “modernizing [French] administration” in comments to France 24.) But Napoleon is an interesting examination of social movements, violence, backlash—and of how France ended up crowning an emperor just 11 years after beheading a king.

There is a sense, in the film’s chronology, that France was perhaps so scarred by the revolution’s brutal aftermath that it reverted not just to the monarchy, but went one step further. The Reign of Terror was horrific—the film makes that viscerally obvious, and reinforces that what France needed to do was to stop that part, not get ourselves an emperor. It is, from that point of view, a surprisingly progressive movie: Bonaparte’s reign is (rightly, I think) portrayed as volatile and, for all of its leader’s professed popularity, infinitely fragile. France is as prompt to place itself in the hands of Bonaparte as it is to renounce him; he gets exiled not once, but twice.

Director Ridley Scott and lead actor Joaquin Phoenix during the filming of ‘Napoleon' (Courtesy of Apple)

About those historical inaccuracies: I don’t mind when a movie takes artistic license, as long as it’s clear when some things are made up. For example, in Napoleon, when Bonaparte, after his wife Josephine spitefully tells him he has gotten fat, he replies: “Destiny has brought me this lamb chop”. This particular line seems almost designed to go viral on TikTok, where indeed Apple (a co-producer and distributor of the film) made sure to share it, and where it has already inspired a few videos.

The problem with Napoleon is that it knows how to lie a little too credibly. Its battle scenes, for example, have an air of expertise. Paul Biddiss, the British ex-paratrooper who advised Scott on those scenes, “ran five hundred extras through ‘boot camp’” in Napoleon-era barracks, “studied old military manuals”, and generally paid attention to detail, according to the New Yorker.

So when the film told me something about the historic battles it recreates, the natural impulse would have been to believe it. And yet, the internet is rife with fact-checks of some pretty spectacular liberties: contrary to the film’s depictions, Bonaparte never fired at the pyramids in Egypt; he did not go into battle with the cavalry, there was no large frozen lake during the 1805 Battle of Austerlitz, and the list goes on.

Some of those liberties do take on some symbolic meaning: Bonaparte is shown in the film witnessing Marie-Antoinette’s execution, and while that never happened, I can understand that this is an efficient way to show the impact of the revolution’s aftermath on Bonaparte. There are only so many ways we can depict the act of thinking on screen, and this is one of them—and as long as people care to find out that this did not actually happen, but serves as a storytelling shortcut, then fine.

This is what art is capable of, and perhaps what it is for: to articulate an emotional or intellectual truth while sometimes veering away from facts. From that standpoint, Napoleon is a worthy exploration of the march of history, and of the slow, often chaotic cycles of progress.