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June 4, 2023

‘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

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.

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