The best monograph on Napoleon written by a Romanian was signed by Mihai Eminescu’s nephew, Gheorghe, a private soldier. In love with the hero, Gheorghe Eminescu presents us Napoleon in the image of Prometheus, who puts the world on a new foundation and fights against all the forces of darkness, building a new Europe. Whatever the “little corporal” does is good, but the others either do not understand his policy, or oppose him, trying to stop the progress of history, the true meaning of which Napoleon embodies. I read the book when I was little and I was fascinated by the character, but with my current mind I couldn’t accept it the same way.

Napoleon was a brilliant commander, an excellent legislator, and his mark on history remained indelible. Question: Was everything he did positive? Wasn’t the greatness of France of his era achieved at too high a price?

In Romania, the image of Napoleon is somewhat one-dimensional, inspired by French historiography, our sensitivity to the (super)heroes of history (history as a gallery of personalities) and the idea that Napoleon spread the ideas of the French Revolution. in Europe, a fact that the Romanian principalities took full advantage of. But this image is not the only one at the European level.

The communists (Lenin) preferred the “incorruptible” Robespierre, who sent tens of thousands of people to their deaths without flinching. Napoleon kills the revolutionary vein and unites with “reaction”, ending by “begging” the recognition of crowned persons whom he otherwise despised. On the other hand, there are those who show that Napoleon simply saved what was good from the revolution by eliminating excesses and violence. He took on a dangerous utopia and created the best of all possible worlds at the time.

The propaganda of Tsar Alexander I, Napoleon’s friend and enemy, admirer and envy, will present the French emperor as a true antichrist, and the Tsar as the savior of the divine order. This propaganda was visible in the Romanian principalities 10 years after the end of the Napoleonic epic, in the chronicles written by local priests, which told of the cosmic conflict between Napoleon and Alexander, represented as the essences of darkness and light, and of Napoleon repenting his actions, forgiven by the wise Alexander A kind of Putinism before Putinism, in a period when Bessarabia had just been annexed to the Russian Empire for a hundred years, but many of the Romanian elite, with the exception of Metropolitan Veniamin Kostaki, did not perceive this event as a catastrophe. They are used to the fact that they are periodically trampled by musketeers…

And last but not least, which surprises many, some consider Napoleon to be the forerunner of Hitler because of the scale of the wars he started that seriously disrupted the world order at the cost of millions of casualties.

Ridley Scott is British. Britain created the largest empire in history and, in my opinion, the most spectacular. Only Rome can match what Albion did. The empire is the result of an organic process, the evolution of a social, economic and political system, which turns out to be the most vital, defeating its rivals in turn and expanding as if naturally throughout the globe, controlling the most important territories from an economic and commercial point of view. British expansion is not the result of an explosion of individual genius. Even if the empire is ruled by great personalities, they all obey the system, are part of it to the point of anonymization. For example, who knows who was the British king and prime minister during the time of Napoleon? British expansion seems to be the result of an inexorable fate, but it is supported by a genius that tried to make the most of opportunities, not to push the limits of possibilities, and to consider, in addition to further expansion, the possibility of preserving what it already possessed through scientific policy. balance

Did being British leave its mark on how Scott thought about the film and the character?

Napoleon saw England as France’s main rival for world domination. France is inferior to Britain in many ways, but Napoleon relies on his unique genius to achieve the impossible. He provokes, disrupts the natural order of things, throwing on the table of history the extreme violence with which he thinks he can win. The film ends with a list of casualties in the great Napoleonic battles, which is not discussed in apologetic works. The era of Napoleon was marked by the greatest carnage in the history of Europe, until the First World War. Only in Leipzig in 1813, 560,000 soldiers were involved, and in four days the losses amounted to 133,000 people. It took a hundred years and the Battle of Verdun for those numbers to be surpassed.

Napoleon considers himself an instrument of fate. In the film, there is a line by Napoleon: “my fate is stronger than my will.” In fact, Napoleon is not an instrument of fate, but a challenger, one who challenges fate, seeking to change it. Many were stunned by Ridley Scott’s “poetic license” with The Battle of the Pyramids. Indeed, Napoleon did not fire cannons at the pyramids, but he later claimed to have called his soldiers to battle by reminding them that from the tops of these pyramids, 40 centuries of history had watched over the French, called to find their glory on the banks of the Nile. The cannon shot at the pyramids, as imagined by Scott, represents the challenge of history we have been talking about, the struggle with eternity and destiny.

What no one has noticed so far are the scenes where Napoleon contemplates the mummy. This is again a fictional scene, since it is about the mummy of the pharaoh Ramses II, who at the beginning of modern Egyptology was considered the greatest sovereign in the history of Egypt. Through the millennia, Ramses meets Napoleon, who, short in stature, rises on a chair to contemplate, but also to challenge, looking into his eyes, the one who, several thousand years ago, embodied the ideals by which he was inspired. and a Corsican. As he looks at him, the mummy falls to its side (it’s just a body eviscerated by life, artificially preserved), and Napoleon begins to worry: a sign that what he thinks of himself is wrong, and he’s actually walking on quicksand.

And yet his attempt to change the world seems successful: he defeats the enemy at Austerlitz and convinces/forces the major European powers to implement an economic blockade of Great Britain. The project is difficult to maintain, it cracks at all joints, and Tsar Alexander betrays it. Napoleon begins a campaign against Russia, which ends in a famous disaster. Napoleon believed that once Moscow was conquered, everything would be over. In fact, it was only the beginning… which leads to the end of Napoleon, and Paris sees Cossack troops marching through its streets. Waterloo is only the epilogue of what was inevitable. At Waterloo, Napoleon is confident that he will win, but the rain interferes with his plans. Under the pressure of the approach of the Prussians, he is forced to attack the English positions. The desperate turns of the French cavalry around the square of the English infantry mean a futile confrontation with the irreconcilables, which occurs with the arrival of the Prussians on the battlefield. Wellington knows that fate is on his side and rejects the possibility of a lucky strike, preventing the “sniper” from trying to kill Napoleon.

With the defeat and exile of Napoleon on the island of St. Helena, the British saw the restoration of the international balance, too disturbed by the “little corporal”. The world had to settle in its natural bosom.

The theme of the film is actually this: what would happen if Napoleon curbed his “hubris” and “megalothymia” and was more realistic in his projects? It’s about what you’ve gained and what you’ve lost in life because of your choices. And everything in the film revolves around the relationship with Josephine.

To some, the relationship with Josephine depicted in the film seems exaggerated, frivolous, almost pornographic, but in fact everything was not so far from what is described in the film. Napoleon was in many ways a difficult Corsican provincial, on whom the aristocratic Josephine had a huge influence. He depended on her for a long time, including from a sexual point of view, Napoleon was recognized by the “quality” of being a miserable lover, devoid of any sophistication in the partners he had.

The film shows how the relationship between the two “evolves” into a continuous marriage attempt to get the long-desired heir to the throne. The subject becomes so relevant that Napoleon breaks with the circus of austerity correctly depicted in the film to marry a young woman from the imperial family who will bear him a son. But the new empress from the Habsburg family, Napoleon’s enemy, will not feel too connected to the “Corsican ogre”. In fact, the child of both, the young Napoleon, who died too soon of tuberculosis, told a close friend: “If Josephine had been my mother, my father would not have been buried on the island of Saint Helena, and I would not have been buried in Vienna. My mother is kind but weak; she was not the wife my father deserved.’

Therefore, this consciousness of Josephine’s power is not an invention of the director. Even the scene in which little Napoleon is brought and presented to Josephine is real, as is her response to the sacrifice she made in the name of state interests.

There’s something else the movie doesn’t talk about. Josephine was passionate about roses and had an impressive collection at Malmaison. To enrich the empress’s collection, Napoleon, without hesitation, stopped the blockade of English trade several times to bring more rare varieties of roses from Great Britain to France…

Therefore, this is a film about Napoleon the man, about what he gained and what he lost in life, because of the choices he made, to what extent he was the hand of fate or tried, like Prometheus, to change the world by force. Obviously, there are ways to deal with this fascinating character that is Napoleon.-Read the full article and comment on Contributors.ro