Ridley Scott’s biopic Napoleon veers from battlefield to boudoir, portraying Bonaparte as a caricature of masculine excess.
Such sensationalism might sell, but critics maintain it comes at the cost of narrative coherence and historical accuracy.
As a historian who specializes in the French Revolution, my main reservation about the film is not what it makes up, but what it leaves out.
Scott’s focus on Napoleon’s tactical triumphs, reckless miscalculations and sexual entanglements neglects his most paradoxical legacy: as a visionary, albeit self-serving, lawmaker.
A product of the Revolution’s decade-long experiment with “liberty, equality and fraternity,” Napoleon enacted egalitarian reforms that eroded the social, religious and feudal hierarchies that pervaded Europe at the turn of the 19th century.
Yet at home and across France’s continental empire and overseas colonies, he proved willing to sacrifice core revolutionary principles whenever they conflicted with his insatiable ambitions.
Completing the French Revolution in law
To its credit, the film’s moments of unexpected levity challenge both the hagiographic and anti-Bonapartist strands of Napoleonic mythology. In Joaquin Phoenix’s guttural rendering, “Little Boney” comes off less Corsican ogre than oaf.
But this portrait of a socially awkward warrior neglects Napoleon’s greatest accomplishments and failures as a prolific legislator.
Just as impactful as the dramatic military and political feats that fuelled Bonaparte’s meteoric rise were the sweeping civil reforms he undertook after seizing power in 1799.
The young soldier-turned-statesman made an indelible mark as the energetic sponsor of new institutions and procedures.
These included a secular education system to staff his growing bureaucracy, ambitious public-works projects, and above all, a uniform system of laws.
Converting feudal assets into property
Back in the euphoric summer of 1789, deputies pledged to abolish the medieval land management system known as feudalism. They quickly swept away the mandatory fees, labour obligations and tithes that had, for centuries, bound peasants to their lords and priests.
But as historian Rafe Blaufarb has shown, successive governments would struggle with a thornier problem: converting feudal assets into modern property.
The 1804 Civil Code (soon dubbed the Napoleonic Code) aided the process by instituting a transparent system of property and family law.
Napoleon did not stop there, however. His tireless collaborators churned out complementary commercial, criminal, rural and military codes. Together, they supplanted the Old Regime’s morass of feudal privileges and royal ordinances, as well as Roman, customary and canonical laws.
New law had didactic purpose
Napoleon cast the Civil Code as an Enlightenment project par excellence: both a practical necessity and a tool to solidify revolutionary reforms.
Its straightforward prose and rational organization also served a didactic purpose, informing each citizen of the “principles of his conduct” and reconciling France’s fractured populace as equal citizens before the law.
As his Empire grew, Napoleon’s zeal for standardisation anticipated many of the political and economic aims of the European Union. He envisioned a continent bound by a “supreme court, a single currency, the same [metric] weights and measures,” and, most importantly, “the same laws.”
Entrenched, exported, betrayed Napoleonic law
If Napoleon exported an egalitarian legal framework across Europe, however, it was often imposed at gunpoint.
The man who transformed France’s hard-won First Republic into an imperial “security state” did not deliver “Enlightenment on horseback,” whatever his admirers contend.
While championing freedom of conscience, national sovereignty and representative government, Napoleon imprisoned a pope, rigged plebiscites, re-established hereditary monarchy and enlarged his empire through endless wars.
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Whatever its merits, the Civil Code reversed the revolutionary gains of workers and women — especially adulterous wives, who risked “confinement in a house of correction.” A cheating husband, on the other hand, was merely barred from receiving his “concubine” in the marital home.
The code’s free-speech provisions were compromised by its namesake’s paradoxical belief that, “controlled by the government, a free press may become a strong ally.” Napoleon’s agents increasingly turned to preventive detention, exile and censorship to suppress dissent.
In Scott’s rendering, major figures associated with these policies flit across the screen without uttering a word. These include Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s wily Minister of Police who oversaw his vast surveillance operations, and Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, the “second most important man in Napoleonic France,” whose portfolio included drafting the Civil Code.
Attempted to restore slavery
As noted by historian Marlene Daut, the film is also silent on Napoleon’s most egregious violation of revolutionary values: his attempt to restore “order,” and with it slavery, in France’s plantation colonies in 1802.
This included Napoleon’s dastardly betrayal of Toussaint Louverture, the Saint-Dominguan leader every bit as complex, consequential and worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster as his captor.
Coupled with yellow fever, the genocidal violence in Saint-Domingue claimed more French soldiers than Waterloo.
Along with its most profitable colony, the quagmire cost France its moral standing as the first European empire to abolish slavery. With the sale of Louisiana, France’s dreams of a North American empire were quashed.
Legacy of global legal code
On remote Saint Helena, Scott captures the angst of an authoritarian deprived of authority, hobbled by hubris but still incapable of accepting responsibility for his errors and crimes.
What the movie does not show, however, is Napoleon’s clear-sighted appraisal of his most enduring legacy.
While in captivity, he told his entourage that his “real glory” was attained off the battlefield. If his final defeat would “destroy the memory” of his forty military victories, he took solace in the belief that “nothing will destroy…my Civil Code.”
This has proven true not only in countries that were occupied or colonized by France, but as far afield as Meiji-era Japan and pre-revolutionary Iran, which used the Napoleonic template for their own codification projects. Versions of the code are still in effect in multiple countries today.
If Napoleonic tactics faltered at Trafalgar, Vertières and Waterloo, the precedent set by the Civil Code has proven unconquerable.
Michael Broers, the accomplished scholar who advised Scott, has said legal intricacies “don’t make for good cinema.”
It has been done, however. Perhaps Scott’s much-anticipated director’s cut will defy expectations by exploring some of these conundrums when it streams this spring.
