France mocks an Englishman’s ‘Napoleon’
The French don’t like an Englishman’s portrayal of Napoleon.
Or at least: the French critics don’t.
Looking grim and moody under a huge bicorn hat, Joaquin Phoenix beams from posters in Paris promoting Ridley Scott’s film that offers the latest reincarnation of the French hero whose nose – as one reviewer wonderfully written – still appears in the midst of French political life, two centuries after his death.
Yet while British and American reviewers glowed, French critics found it lazy, pointless, boring, migraine-inducing, too short and historically inaccurate. And that’s just the beginning.
The critic of the left-wing daily Libération the film panned as not only ugly, but also vacuous, positing nothing and ‘very sure of its absurdity’. The review inside Le Monde offered that if the director’s vision had one merit, it was “simplicity” – “a montage that alternates Napoleon’s love life with his exploits.”
The right-wing Le Figaro took many stances in its breathless reporting, seizing the moment to release a 132-page special edition on Napoleon, along with more than a dozen articles, including a readers’ survey and a Napoleon knowledge test. The newspaper’s most memorable statement came from Thierry Lentz, the director of the Napoleon Foundation, a charity dedicated to historical research: He found Phoenix’s version of Napoleon – compared to more than a hundred other actors who have played the role – “ a bit vulgar, a bit clumsy, with a voice from elsewhere that doesn’t fit in at all.”
All this was to be expected.
As the French writer Sylvain Tesson once said, “France is a paradise inhabited by people who think they are in hell.” How else would you expect a country where the eternal answer to the question “How are you?” is “Not bad” to respond to a historical film about itself?
But to have that film be about a French legend – even one whom many loathe – played by an American actor and directed by a British filmmaker?
The horror.
“However, this very anti-French and very pro-English film is not very ‘English’ in spirit,” said the historian Patrick Gueniffey in the magazine Le Point, “because the English have never compromised their admiration for their enemy.”
“It is difficult not to see this hasty approach as the historic revenge of Ridley Scott, the Englishman,” said the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné. “An Austerlitz of cinema? More like Waterloo.’
As you brace yourself under the cascade of negative responses, you begin to wonder whether the criticism reveals more about the French psyche than the country’s taste in historical cinema.
“When we talk about Napoleon, we actually touch the core of our principles and our political divisions,” said Arthur Chevallier, a Napoleon expert who has published five books about the Corsican soldier who seized power after the French Revolution and made himself emperor crowned. and went on to conquer – and later lose – much of Western Europe.
“The common point among all French people is that Napoleon remains a subject that influences our understanding of ourselves and our identity,” Chevallier said.
More than 200 years after his death, the smudges of Napoleon’s fingerprints still richly decorate the country and its capital: along the streets and metro stations named after his generals and battles; from the top of the Arc de Triomphe which he had planned; in the gleam of the golden dome of the Invalides, beneath which rises his gigantic marble tomb.
Lawyers still follow an updated version of its civil code. Provincial regions are still overseen by prefects – or government officials – in a system he devised. Every year, high school students take the baccalaureate exam his regime introduced, and citizens are rewarded the country’s highest honor, which he invented.
Last Sunday, before the film hit theaters here, a French auction house announced that it had sold one of Napoleon’s signature bicorn hats for a record 1.9 million euros, or $2.1 million.
In recent decades, Napoleon’s record of misogyny, imperialism and racism – he reintroduced slavery eight years after the revolutionary government abolished it – has come under intense scrutiny. But that simply seems to have amplified the weight of his legacy.
For many, Napoleon is the symbol of a France under attack by what they see as an American import of identity politics and “wokeism.” The latest front page of the far-right weekly Valeurs Actuelles called him ‘the Anti-Woke Emperor’. (The reviewer also played the film: from the first scene the viewer knows that “historical accuracy will suffer from the guillotine,” wrote Laurent Dandrieu.)
In a national poll conducted this week74 percent of respondents with an opinion about Napoleon viewed his actions as beneficial to France.
“You have the impression that when we talk about him, he is a living politician,” says Chevallier, who has already seen the film twice and counts himself among the few unabashed French fans.
What he liked, he said, was the different view of Napoleon and the revolution from which he emerged, and of modern France. Instead of a royal leader with insatiable energy and ambition, Joaquin Phoenix portrays an ordinary, grasping mortal who is the product of a bloodthirsty, barbaric upheaval — something some find “very destabilizing,” Chevallier said, but which he found interesting and educational : ‘ because you understand why Napoleon stirred up such hatred among other European powers at the time.
He predicted that his fellow citizens, who are more movie fans than history buffs, would enjoy the film, which opened to the public on Wednesday.
About 120,000 people went to watch across France that day – a strong opening, but not a blockbuster like “Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom,” which attracted more than 460,000 visitors on its opening day early this year, according to figures collected by CBO Box Office, a company that collects French box office data.
Moviegoers streaming out of a theater in Paris’s Latin Quarter on Thursday evening were unenthusiastic.
Augustin Ampe, 20, said he was all for demystifying Napoleon, but this was just too much. “Here he looks like a clumsy man focused only on his wife,” said the literature student, briefly breaking away from a fierce debate about the film’s failures with his friends. He preferred the mythical figure offered in the books and poems of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, he said.
Charline Tartar, a librarian, waited until her movie date finished his post-movie cigarette and judged Phoenix’s performance as too grouchy.
“It’s a shame that Napoleon looks like a loser,” says 27-year-old Tartar. She thought a French director would have paid more attention to historical accuracy.
“The French,” she added, “are very jealous of their history.”
Juliette Gueron-Gabrielle reporting contributed.