Ridley Scott’s Napoleon: Was the French leader really a monster?

Quoi? Arrête! The French wasted no time in returning fire and correcting the impudent Brit. "Hitler and Stalin built nothing and only wrought destruction," Pierre Branda, academic director of the Fondation Napoléon, told The Telegraph. "Napoleon built things that are still in place today." Thierry Lentz of the Fondation Napoléon said in the same piece: "Napoleon did not destroy either France or Europe. His legacy was subsequently celebrated, embraced and expanded on." So what is the truth of the matter – and does Scott have a leg to stand on?

Napoleon, a brilliant military commander, seized power in 1799 during a period of political instability in France following the French Revolution. Admirers say he made France a more meritocratic country than it had been under the pre-revolutionary ancien régime. He centralised the government, reorganised banking, overhauled education and instituted the Napoleonic code, which transformed the legal system and served as a model for many other countries.

But he also waged a series of bloody wars across Europe, establishing an empire that, at its height, stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to Moscow. By 1812, the only areas of Europe free from his control, by direct rule or puppet rule or through alliance, were Britain, Portugal, Sweden and the Ottoman Empire. He was finally defeated in 1815 by an alliance of nations led by Britain in the Battle of Waterloo.

Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars loomed large in the minds of British people of the period and beyond. Cartoonists were obsessed with him. He is in the background of Jane Austen's novels. Pride and Prejudice, which was published in 1813, for example, features the militia that was to repel the expected invasion by Napoleon. Charlotte Brontë owned a fragment of Napoleon's original coffin, given to her by her tutor in Brussels. Arthur Conan Doyle's great detective Sherlock Holmes dubs villain Professor Moriarty "the Napoleon of crime". In George Orwell's Animal Farm, published in 1945, the pig who becomes a dictator is called Napoleon. But is calling Napoleon a dictator – and equating him with other infamous dictators – really fair?

The differing views of him

Philip Dwyer, professor of history at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and the author of a three-volume biography of Napoleon, doesn't think so. "You can have a debate about whether Napoleon was a tyrant or not – I'd be leaning towards the tyrant – but he was certainly no Hitler or Stalin, two authoritarian dictators who brutally repressed their own people, resulting in millions of deaths."

Some have even argued that the Empire was a 'police state' because there was a complex system of secret informers keeping tabs on public opinion," he continues. "But very few people – a number of aristocrats more or less involved in plots to overthrow the regime, a couple of journalists – were actually executed by Napoleon for their opposition. If I was going to compare Napoleon to anyone, then I would go back in history to Louis XIV, an absolute monarch who waged unnecessary wars costing thousands of lives.

"So too Napoleon waged wars  – again debatable whether they were necessary or not – costing the lives of millions of people, although we don’t know how many civilians were killed directly or indirectly as a result of the wars."

French journalist and Telegraph columnist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet agrees that Napoleon is not comparable to Hitler or Stalin. "He [Napoleon] did not have concentration camps," she tells BBC Culture. "He did not single out minorities for massacre. Yes, there were intrusive political police but ordinary people could live as they liked and say what they wanted."

Moutet says that the French view Napoleon principally as a reformer.

"He had a remarkable mind and was the instigator of a body of laws and institutions that we still live by today.

"We like to think – and it’s not entirely false – that lots of people were much happier being ruled by the French than living under whatever feudal laws they had had."

However Charles Esdaile, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Liverpool and the author of several books on Napoleon including Napoleon’s Wars: An International History 1803-15, has a different view.

"I see Napoleon as a warlord," he says. "A man who was driven by personal ambition and who was absolutely ruthless. A man who had a very clear vision of the sort of France he needed to construct and, indeed, the sort of Europe he needed to construct, to support his war machine. Any idea that he was some sort of liberator, some sort of a man of the future – essentially this is all part of the Napoleonic legend.

The Napoleonic propaganda machine was a very, very powerful tool in the course of the Empire and churned out a version of his wars in which much of the fault was down to perfidious Albion," he adds. "It wasn't France at all – it was everybody making war against France. This powerful Napoleonic legend continues to operate to this day. Napoleon is a living presence. He continues to operate from beyond the grave. He continues to mould the way in which we see him."

But Esdaile also rejects the Hitler and Stalin comparisons.

"Napoleon had many faults and was a loathsome individual but the racial ideology that underpinned the Nazi regime simply wasn’t there," he says. "Napoleon is not guilty of genocide. Napoleon doesn’t engage in wholesale purges. In fairness to Napoleon, the number of political prisoners in the course of his reign is relatively limited. To compare him with Hitler and Stalin is a historical nonsense."

Of course, Ridley Scott, a titan of the film industry, director of Blade Runner, Gladiator, Thelma and Louise, Alien and many others, has been in the business long enough to know how to promote a movie. (Napoleon is a return to the milieu of his first feature, The Duellists, released more than four decades ago.) It's entirely possible he knew the Hitler and Stalin remarks would generate publicity and that is why he made them.

So will Esdaile be going to see Napoleon when it is released?

"I suppose I'm going to have to but I know it can't be any good because Rod Steiger is not playing Napoleon,” he jokes. “There is so much wrong with the 1970 film Waterloo but Steiger's performance as Napoleon is just outstanding.”

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