What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in Napoleon

It’s not hard to see why the story of Napoleon Bonaparte—a man who emerged from obscurity to marshal large numbers of people and matériel to realize his vision, despite daunting odds—appeals to leading directors. First out of the gate in 1927 was French director Abel Gance with a five-hour silent epic, still the gold standard. Then Stanley Kubrick started developing a biopic that proved to be too ambitious and expensive to get off the ground, although Steven Spielberg recently floated the idea of adapting Kubrick’s notes into a seven-hour limited series. Now Ridley Scott has weighed in with a 2.5-hour feature for theatrical release (a four-hour “director’s cut” version will supposedly be appearing on Apple TV at a later stage).

Scott has tried to tackle the sprawling nature of the Napoleonic story by reducing it to its essence: major military campaigns, thrilling battle set-pieces, and, at its heart, the complicated, passionate relationship between Napoleon and his first wife, Joséphine. The problem is, dramatizing Napoleon’s story is not as simple as dramatizing, say, Julius Caesar’s (one of Napoleon’s role models)—i.e., “now I’m going to invade Gaul, now I’m going to invade Germania, now I’m going to invade Carthage”—because the context for Napoleon’s actions was Europe’s fiendishly complicated patchwork of ever-shifting alliances reinforced by dynastic marriages (an arrangement that remained in place until WWI blew it to smithereens). It’s easy to understand why Scott preferred to spend screen time on a cinematic cavalry charge instead of wrangling over a treaty clause.

Paring back or compressing historical detail is fine if it helps makes the story more comprehensible and less likely to overwhelm the dramatic narrative. The danger is that it flattens out the characters and relationships. Scott’s Napoleon is reduced to being obsessed by three things only: military tactics, Joséphine, and his “destiny.” The developer of the Code Napoleon, which still forms the basis of most of Europe’s legal systems, and the autocrat who nevertheless championed equality before the law (for white men), is completely missing.

Scott has made clear how he feels about historical nitpicking. “When I have issues with historians,” he told Britain’s Sunday Times, “I ask: ‘Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then.’ ” At the risk of bringing down Sir Ridley’s wrath, we take a look at what’s fact and what’s fiction in his Napoleon.

In the film, Napoleon, as portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, appears to be at least 40 when, despite being a lowly artillery captain, he is tasked with breaking the blockade of Toulon, where British navy warships are defending the Royalist forces occupying this essential Mediterranean port. Napoleon’s cunning plan is to seize control of the relatively undefended fort overlooking the harbor and then use its guns to blow the British ships out of the water. Putting on a disguise, he reconnoiters the fort himself to see where to place explosives; then, after they have gone off while the British soldiers are carousing, sends French troops (including himself) to scale the walls for hand-to-hand combat. As a result of this daring victory, he is made a brigadier general.

Much of this is correct. Napoleon did indeed come up with this effective strategy, showing the genius for tactics that defined his military career, and he received a promotion as a result. However, the capture of Toulon took place in 1793, when Napoleon was only 24 years old and a young man in a hurry. Also, Napoleon did not get his plan adopted because he was buddies with Paul Barras, the minister for war; he became friends with Barras because he won the battle.

Napoleon attends one of the notorious “survivors’ balls,” a raucous celebration by aristocrats who had been held in the Bastille awaiting execution but managed to survive until the end of the Reign of Terror in 1794. There, across a crowded room, he sees the alluring Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby), the seductive widow of an aristocrat and a former prisoner in the Bastille, who appears to be in her early 30s. He is smitten but she is cooler, accepting his card but no more.

In fact, Joséphine, born in 1763, was six years older than Napoleon (on their marriage certificate, the canny Joséphine took four years off her age and increased Napoleon’s by 18 months, making them roughly the same age). But Scott apparently did not want to break the Hollywood rule that says an older male star must have a female co-star at least a decade younger than himself. Making her younger changes the whole dynamic of their relationship. Napoleon is shown to be somewhat, er, unsophisticated in the bedroom, until Joséphine shows him a thing or two. This would make more sense if he was in his early 20s, but for him to be in his 40s and still so unskilled just makes him a boor. She also is shown improving his table manners. In actuality, Napoleon was not the loutish soldier Scott depicts; rather, he was from a family of minor Corsican aristocrats (Joséphine came from a similar family of minor nobles on Martinique), and so was not quite a rough diamond unacquainted with proper table manners. In fact, he was known for his love of literature—he curated a famous personal library—and Enlightenment thought.

Also, Napoleon did not meet Joséphine across a crowded room, but was introduced to her by his friend Barras, the most recent in a line of influential lovers and protectors the young widow had cultivated—indeed, it was said that Joséphine was to the boudoir what Napoleon was to the battlefield.

Barras sends Napoleon to Egypt in 1794 with the goal of “liberating” it from British influence and attacking England via its Eastern Empire. Deploying artillery as per usual, Napoleon fires at the pyramids (“I don’t know if he did that, but it was a fast way of saying he took Egypt,” Scott explained) and later inspects a golden sarcophagus that has been removed from a tomb, opening it up and destroying the dried mummy within by touching it. On discovering that Joséphine has taken a lover, he hustles back to Paris even though this will be seen as deserting his post.

While firing on the pyramids and destroying a mummy reinforces the film’s take on Napoleon as a strategically intelligent thug (a sort of proto-Hitler; very much the British, though not the European, view of Napoleon), in fact he brought along 167 scholars, including geographers, historians, economists, and architects, because he wanted wanted the campaign to be more than a military mission. Initially, Napoleon won a major victory against the Mameluke army and spent the three months he was in control of Cairo introducing street lighting and cleaning, reforming the tax system to place less of a burden on the Egyptian peasantry, and building modern plague hospitals, as well as changing the city’s administrative structure so it was no longer feudal. He also established a scientific institute to study mathematics, physics, political economy, and the arts.

He did learn Joséphine was having an affair, but then again, he was having an affair of his own (with the wife of a junior officer who became known as “Napoleon’s Cleopatra”), so his withdrawal from the city had more to do with problems finding food in the desert, as well as a plague epidemic and renewed resistance from the Egyptians supported by the British. By 1801, the remaining French army withdrew in defeat, although the expedition resulted in a 23-volume encyclopedia about the country and arguably the creation of Egyptology as a field of study.

In the movie, after Napoleon has himself been crowned emperor and Joséphine his empress, he becomes increasingly conscious of the need for an heir to secure his legacy and concerned about Joséphine’s inability to provide him with one. In order to determine whether the fault lies with Joséphine (although she’s already had two children, which would seem to have settled the question) or her husband, Napoleon’s mother installs an attractive 18-year-old in her son’s bed and tells him to get her pregnant.

If Madame Bonaparte did in fact do this, it seems entirely unnecessary. Joséphine had already caught her husband in the bedroom of her lady-in-waiting, Élisabeth de Vaudey, shortly before the 1804 coronation, at which point Napoleon threatened to divorce her due to her failure to produce an heir (the divorce became official in 1810). Then in 1805, he met the 18-year-old Eléonore Denuelle de La Plaigne, who was part of his sister Caroline’s household (and sleeping with Caroline’s husband). Napoleon set Eléonore up in a house in Paris, and in December 1806, she gave birth to Napoleon’s son. He had a second illegitimate child in 1810 with another mistress, Countess Marie Walewska. It has been said of the Bonapartes’ marriage that Joséphine was serially unfaithful while he was devoted before he became the First Consul, and then after he became the ruler of France, the positions were reversed.

The film follows the traditional view that in 1812, after winning the Battle of Borodino, Napoleon figured that he was only 200 miles from Moscow, so he might as well push through. However, when the French army arrives, they find the city deserted and three-fourths of it destroyed by the departing residents in an act of patriotic arson. With no food or supplies, the army is forced to retreat toward France during the harsh Russian winter with horses that, as one general says, “were not raised for it.” Having set out with 600,000 men, Napoleon returns with only 40,000, and his mystique is gone forever.

This is broadly what happened, but it has always seemed unlikely that anyone as devoted to planning as Napoleon was would not have taken the ferocity of the Russian winter into account. However, the 2001 discovery in Lithuania of some 2,000 skeletons, the remains of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, provided a more plausible explanation; it wasn’t the winter (or not the winter alone) that decimated the French force—it was typhus.

According to a Slate article, the problems started in the spring of 1812, when deeply rutted roads in Poland meant the supply trains lagged farther and farther behind the main force, with resulting shortages of food and water. The combination of having no water for bathing plus living in the same clothes for days plus a hot summer meant the French soldiers were soon infested with lice. Within a month, Napoleon had lost 80,000 soldiers to typhus despite the excellent French sanitary facilities. In July, three generals, noting that the army was now at half strength and supply chain difficulties were getting worse, urged Napoleon to abandon the campaign. By September, even before reaching Moscow, the army was down to 103,000 men. The most powerful man in Europe was undone by a tiny parasite.