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First of all, this should not be confused with the 2000 Disney animated movie, The Emperor’s New Groove. That is a great movie in its own right, but it’s about an Incan emperor who is forced to grow and mature after being turned into a llama. Whereas this movie is about… wait for it… now, this will really surprise you…

Napoleon!

Yes, I know; you may be saying, as Louis Castaigne exasperatedly does to his cousin Hildred in The Repairer of Reputations: “Napoleon, Napoleon, Napoleon! …For heaven sake, have you nothing but Napoleons there?”

But let me reassure you that I am every bit as sane and well-adjusted as Hildred Castaigne, if not more so! You have no need to fear on that account. 🙂

Besides, I needed something to wash away the bitter taste of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. Whatever you think of the guy, he deserved a better movie than that.

The Emperor’s New Clothes begins with a teaser: we see a young boy looking at an illustrated biography of Napoleon on a magic lantern. As he gets to the final image, showing a picture of the emperor on his deathbed, a shadowy figure enters the room and says, “No… that’s not how it ended.” He steps in front of the screen and says to the boy, “Let me tell you what really happened…”

Flashback to St. Helena, where Napoleon and his aides have hatched a daring plan to retake the throne: Bonaparte will switch places with a lowly seaman named Eugene Lenormand, a deck-hand on a ship bound for France. From there, he will meet with a Bonapartist officer, who will convey him to Paris. Meanwhile, Lenormand will pretend to be Napoleon to fool the British authorities, until the emperor is in Paris and the switch can be revealed.

It’s a clever scheme, but it quickly goes wrong when the ship changes course and instead lands in Belgium, forcing Napoleon to improvise a new route to Paris, which takes him through Waterloo among other places, before he finally meets a Sergeant Justin Bommel, formerly of the Imperial Guard, who helps him make his way to French soil, and tells him to find a Bonapartist officer named Truchaut in Paris.

Napoleon finds Truchaut—in a coffin. The emperor’s best hope of retaking his throne has died, leaving behind a widow nicknamed “Pumpkin”, an adopted son, and a struggling fruit business.

Meanwhile, on St. Helena, the faux-Napoleon is coming to enjoy his life of luxury, gorging himself on the emperor’s food, taking long baths, and dictating a risqué memoir, all while the impatient officers wait for the deception to be revealed. Eventually, one of them tries to force the imposter to confess, but he simply tells the British guards that the man has gone mad.

Back in Paris, having been injured in a fall, and not having a clear idea how to salvage his plan, the real Napoleon devotes his brilliant strategic mind to rescuing the widow Pumpkin’s fruit-selling business. Armed with maps of the city, and his legendary talent for planning and organization, Napoleon provides the fruit vendors with a detailed plan of battle and heroic words to motivate them: “Remember,” he says, “we conquer or perish!”

This scene was when I knew this movie was something special. Much more than in the Ridley Scott film, more even than the 1970 Waterloo film, this scene captured why Napoleon was a great general. I think Scott’s film just took it for granted that because we have all heard about the formidable strategist’s powers, we would automatically believe it. Not this movie, and certainly not Ian Holm, who conveys it perfectly.

Soon, the fruit business is booming, and Pumpkin is finding herself drawn to the charismatic stranger lodging in her home, as he is to her. This is much to the dismay of Pumpkin’s friend, Dr. Lambert, who suspects the new arrival is hiding something.

On St. Helena, the Bonaparte doppelgänger dies suddenly, and the French and British officers both agree never to reveal the deception. When word of “Napoleon’s” death reaches Paris, the real emperor decides it is time to take back his rightful place… only he quickly realizes he has difficulty persuading anyone of his true identity, while Pumpkin is devastated that her beloved Eugene now suddenly seems to believe he is the Emperor of the French. As she tearfully says, “I hate Napoleon! He’s filled France with widows and orphans. He took my husband. I won’t let him take you too.”

When you read enough history of the period, you see there are basically two schools of thought re. old Boney: the Bonapartist view, that he was a Great Man who, through the sheer force of his will, brought the values of modernity forward, sweeping away the stale old monarchies and overseeing tremendous advances in science, letters, law, and the arts across Europe and elsewhere, all through his supreme gifts for military conquest.

And there is the Bourbon/British view: that he was a “Corsican ogre”; a weird little guy who stumbled into ruling a Revolution-devastated France and, thanks to his own neurotic insecurities, tyrannized the continent for 15 years before cooler heads finally brought him to heel. (This is basically the position Scott’s film took.)

The Emperor’s New Clothes takes a different view: that Napoleon was a Great Man, possessing great talents, but that he misused his gifts. That he was led astray by the siren song of ambition to a mirage of empire; believing that he should be a Caesar or an Alexander. And what did all this conquering get him in the end? Dying of stomach cancer on a wretched little island, away from his wife and children and family.

What if he had used all his tremendous talents for something else? What if he’d realized that being happy consists not in ruling over a massive empire, but in coming home at night to a loving family, sitting around the fireplace together?

This film gives Napoleon, as Paul Simon might say, “a shot at redemption” so he doesn’t “end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.”

(Incidentally, in a way, this is also exactly the theme of the aforementioned Emperor’s New Groove movie. I find this rather cool.)

If you can’t tell by now, I’ll just straight-up say it: I love this movie. Ian Holm gives the best portrayal of Napoleon I’ve ever seen, capturing both his greatness and his flaws, not to mention also playing an amusing caricature of him as the impostor. And beyond the depiction of the upstart Corsican himself, the film felt authentic to the whole period. The early scenes of Napoleon wandering Belgium are especially gorgeous, and the film is great at showing us these little slices of life from the era, be it fruit-sellers, soldiers, deck-hands, carriage drivers, and even, in one memorable case, the inmates of an insane asylum.

If you’re into Napoleonic history, it’s a must-watch. If you’re not, well, it’s still worth checking out just for its beautiful scenes, its sweet story, and its inspiring message.

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You know I don’t often review non-fiction books. What am I supposed to say? “This guy’s life should have been different to be more dramatic.” But sometimes I read a non-fiction book that’s just so good, I can’t resist.

Remember when the Napoleon movie came out, and people were like, “it’s not accurate,” and Ridley Scott was like, “Were you there, bro?” Well, Captain Blaze was there! Admittedly, he wasn’t at the big battles, such as Austerlitz, Borodino, or Waterloo. But he was wounded at Wagram, and took part in many Napoleonic campaigns in Poland, Germany and Spain. As such, he is in a position to speak with authority on these matters.

Not that he purports to be telling us an authoritative history of the period. No, Captain Blaze’s manner is much more casual and friendly, as he tells interesting stories of things that happened to him throughout his military career. The feeling is rather like you’re sitting at a bar, knocking back a few with him while listening to his war stories.

This is how I like to learn history. It’s not random lists of names and dates; it’s things that happened to real people. Captain Blaze is witty, human and relatable. Well, mostly. He does have a few old-fashioned attitudes towards some groups that may strike some readers as offensive. But when we study the past–or at least when I do–I want to study the whole past; even the ugly parts. No sense in sugarcoating it.

Still, for the most part, Blaze is actually quite likable and self-deprecating, as when he says that the best battle he was ever in was one that he was able to observe through a telescope from the safety of a church steeple. It was the “best” in his view, because he was out of harm’s way.

Most interesting are Blaze’s insights into human nature. He has little use for people claiming that the French soldier was inspired by love for the emperor. While Blaze has a certain admiration for Napoleon, he makes no bones about why they fought:

“How often has it been asserted in print that the soldiers fought for the emperor! This is another of those current phrases, which many people have taken up and repeated without knowing why. The soldiers fought for themselves, to defend themselves; because in France, a man never hesitates when he sees danger on one side and infamy on the other…

…show them the Prussians, the Russians, or the Austrians, and whether they are commanded by Napoleon, Charles X, or Louis Philippe, you may be sure that French soldiers will do their duty.” 

But again, he respects Napoleon. Or rather, he respects General Bonaparte. His victories early in his career are what Blaze values most highly, for as he reasons:

“The glory of Bonaparte will never be eclipsed by that of Napoleon; for the means of the emperor were more vast than ever general had at his disposal. When a ruler drains a country like France of her last man and her last crown, when he renders an account to no one, it is not surprising that, with a well-organized head, he should accomplish great things; the contrary would be much more astonishing.”

I’ve really just scratched the surface here. I could go on quoting passages from this book for a very long time. Capt. Blaze is insightful, clever, and, above all else, very funny. Yes, while he never shies away from the horror and tragedy of war, he also has a knack for recounting humorous incidents he witnessed or was told about. He makes a jolly guide to what must have been a rather grim time.

Of course, not being able to read French, I’m going by the translation. I also was unable to find much more information about Captain Blaze, and I was obliged to use a Google-translated version of his French Wikipedia page. Apparently, he went on to a career in writing after his military service. Quite an interesting fellow.

Dear readers, we live in a strange and unsettled world. Last week, a controversy broke out over edits on the Star Wars wiki to a page about a minor character, to bring them into line with something that happens in one of the innumerable new Star Wars productions. It escalated to death threats. As Dave Barry would say, “I am not making this up.”

My purpose here is not to relitigate Star Wars-related controversies. There are no good guys in Wookiepedia edit wars. But what has this world come to, when people care more about the biographies of fictional aliens than real people who actually existed? Maybe once Captain Blaze has an English-language wiki, and a few of his other published works are available online, then we can worry about what is considered “canon” in a fictional universe. Or, better yet, not.

This powerful electronic network we’re using houses vast repositories of human knowledge. Yet we ignore that and use it instead in the pursuit of the most trivial inanities. People are always prone to recency bias, but c’mon; this is pathetic. This is worse than destroying the Library of Alexandria. At least the Romans were in a war. What’s our excuse?

Oh, well. Let me quote once more from Blaze himself, from a bit later on in the book. To set the scene a bit, he has been talking about the tendency of people to romanticize war and soldiers after the fact, exaggerating the dashing and adventurous element far beyond what existed before peace came.

“I was talking one day on this subject with a publisher of lithographic prints, and was beginning to prove what I am here advancing. ‘You preach to one who is already converted,” said he at the first word: ‘I am well aware that all this is not true, but such things sell. In trade, “such things sell” is an unanswerable argument…'”

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My dad and I love watching history documentaries. He sent me one the other day about Joseph Goebbels, the infamous Nazi propaganda minister.

I learned that, in addition to things like making newsreels and staging rallies and so on, Goebbels also served as a producer on German movies. Think Cecil B. DeMille but a Nazi, and you get a pretty good idea of his cinematic style.

The documentary showed a few clips from a film called Kolberg, an epic war film set in the early 1800s, depicting the German town of–you guessed it–Kolberg withstanding a siege laid by Napoleon’s forces.

I have to say, some of the clips I’ve seen from the film look surprisingly good, from a technical standpoint. Look at this:

Kolberg (1945) represented an attempt by the Nazi film industry to get ordinary Germans fired up to defend the Fatherland.

The film was intended to boost German morale–it’s supposed to be an Alamo or Thermopylae-like story of a small group of fighters defying overwhelming odds. Goebbels apparently was so hell-bent on making it that he required tens of thousands of German soldiers to serve as extras.

That’s right: between 1943 and 1944, the Nazi-controlled film industry was using military assets to make epic war propaganda films.  In case you needed any more evidence that these people were insane.

When the Kolberg was finally released in January 1945, it was a box office disappointment, owing possibly to the weather (winter ’44-’45 was extremely cold) or possibly to the fact that MOST OF THE MOVIE THEATERS HAD BEEN BLOWN UP BECAUSE GERMANY WAS IN THE PROCESS OF LOSING A WORLD WAR!

Anyway, Goebbels was apparently pleased with this thing. Supposedly he gushed after seeing it that the die-hard Nazis who fought to the end would be remembered like the city leaders of 19th-century Kolberg.

…

I assume a lot of Goebbels’s subordinates knew he was nuts, but just didn’t say anything.

What’s most interesting–disturbing, actually–about this is how much the Nazis thought about how they would be remembered. Hitler and his architect, Albert Speer, wanted buildings that would leave impressive ruins and endure into the future, like the Colosseum in Rome or the Parthenon in Greece.

Architecturally, their plan mostly failed since nearly all Nazi-era buildings were destroyed. But it bothers me sometimes how much Nazi iconography persists in modern media. Granted, it is inevitably used as a shorthand for evil, but I fear that sometimes the symbols trump the larger message. SS uniforms, for example, were designed to convey darkness and power, and those things are alluring to some people.

It’s no coincidence that lots of internet trolls use Nazi symbols as avatars, logos etc. Partly this is just because trolls like to be ham-handedly shocking in order to get attention–that’s almost the definition of a troll. But I think there’s also something inherent in the design that strikes a chord–and not a good chord either, but a chord of power and aggression.

I’d never heard of the story of Kolberg before, and, while I’m no expert, I’ve studied the Napoleonic wars more than most. There’s clearly good material here for a drama–indeed, a German writer named Paul Heyse wrote a play based on it in 1865. Heyse was apparently pretty well-respected in his time, because he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1910. The film is based on the play to a degree, although they didn’t give Heyse proper credit because he was Jewish.

I have a feeling I’d rather see Heyse’s version of the story than Goebbels’s. But this is exactly the problem I mean–the pages of History are filled with the words and deeds and icons of psychopaths who wanted to be remembered at any cost, not those of normal people who just tried to do good work.

Kolberg is available online, by the way, but I’m not going to link to it, because ownership of the rights is unclear, and I’m not sure if these are legal.

 

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Yesterday I posted a flash fiction story that involves a fair amount of historical background. I think it’s better if you read the story first without knowing what inspired it, so click here to read it. (It’s really short.)

(more…)

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DelarocheNapoleonMost histories of Napoleon’s downfall begin with his disastrous invasion of Russia, and at first glance, this seems appropriate. Napoleon suffered huge losses, failed to gain much of anything, and never won a campaign again after the invasion. It seems like the obvious point where his fortunes turned for the worse.

But the truth is, Napoleon’s downfall started much earlier. And it wasn’t due to any “nearest-run-thing-you-ever-saw” kind of bad luck that happens in battle, either. It was due to the fact that Napoleon didn’t understand economics nearly as well as warfare.

In 1806, the British Empire began a naval blockade against France. In retaliation, Napoleon–who at this point controlled most of continental Europe–enacted an embargo against trade with Britain, forbidding all French-controlled nations from importing British goods.

By all accounts, it didn’t work. Even the Empress Josephine herself purchased smuggled British products.¹ And Britain simply made up the losses in revenue from Europe in other parts of the world.

Finally, it was in an attempt to impose his ban on British goods that Napoleon invaded Russia to begin with! If he hadn’t been trying to enforce the embargo, he would never have had to make such a risky move at all.

At the time, France had a very strong military tradition. Nowadays we tend to stereotype Germany as the most militaristic European nation, but German militarism is heavily rooted in reforms introduced in Prussia following their losses to Napoleon. So in the early 19th century, it was French militarism vs. British capitalism.

Napoleon was a great military strategist and leader, but he seems to have been pretty ignorant when it came to economics and trade. Napoleon fell into the error of regulators everywhere, in that he assumed he could end demand for goods by making them illegal. In fact, all he did was create a lucrative black market for the British and punish his own people simultaneously.

It would have been different if Napoleon had been able to defeat the British Navy. Then he maybe could have enforced the embargo more effectively. But then, if he could defeat the British Navy, the whole problem of Britain would have been solved anyway.

Napoleon was seeing everything in military terms–that was what he was trained to do, after all. British policy was designed more in economic terms, and the military (mainly the Navy) was just a tool used by Britain to secure their material wealth. The results of the differing philosophies speak for themselves: Napoleon got to be in a lot of famous battles, sure; but eventually lost his Empire and died alone on St. Helena. Britain became the dominant superpower in the world for the next century.

Napoleon should have been patient. Yes, the British were constantly financing uprisings against him, but they weren’t working out very well, and they couldn’t keep it up forever.

There are a couple lessons here. First, you can’t ignore the laws of economics, even if you are the greatest military strategist of your time. And second, though it may be more dramatic to depict Napoleon’s downfall with a retreat from a burning Moscow or a failed charge at Waterloo, he sealed his own fate much earlier with a serious error of his own design.

Fireofmoscow
Study Economic policy, or this could be you. (“Fire of Moscow” by Viktor Mazurovsky. Image via Wikipedia)

It’s easy to point to one battle or one bit of bad luck as being “Where It All Went Wrong”, but oftentimes, such events are really just the culmination of a less dramatic, more systematic bad decision made much earlier.

So instead of saying “So-and-so met their Waterloo when…”, look instead for when So-and-so made their Continental System.

UPDATE 5/22/2018: See Patrick Prescott’s post on this subject for more info–he has a lot more expertise on this than I do.

CITATION

  1. See Napoleon: A Life, by Andrew Roberts. p. 429

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Possibly the worst movie poster in history.
Poster for “Waterloo”

In the days before CGI, epic war films were massive and costly undertakings. You wanted a shot of 10,000 guys marching across a field in full battle uniform? Well, you had to get them! You couldn’t just have Johnny the Computer Whiz draw them in after the fact.

As in actual warfare, there are innumerable logistical difficulties with re-creating these battles. You’ve got to have men in position, knowing how to use their equipment, and then film them as they maneuver in the field.

All that’s quite hard enough.  But when you are making a film for wide release, you have to have all that plus a story the audience can follow, structured so as to play out in a coherent and satisfying way over the course of two hours.

It’s this last bit that’s really tricky, because while history offers plenty of incredible and compelling stories, they rarely fit into neat three-act schemes that can be concisely portrayed in a couple of hours.

Waterloo starts out well, showing Napoleon’s abdication to Elba in 1814 and subsequent return in 1815.  Especially memorable is the moment when the Emperor walks alone to face his former soldiers, now under orders to kill him, and through sheer bravery and charisma wins them back over to his side. This is one part of the Napoleonic legend that seems made for the movies, and it certainly is a high point of the film.

After that, however, problems arise in this dramatization of the final chapter of Bonaparte’s career.  There are unnecessary voice-overs in which Napoleon (Rod Steiger) thinks in exposition for the benefit of the audience.  Many lines of dialogue uttered by officers on both sides seem like they were lifted from history books and changed to the present tense.

An inordinate amount of time is spent on Wellington’s staff at the Ball hosted by the Duchess of Richmond.   This scene also includes the introduction of a totally fictional and pointless love story that goes nowhere.  The only upside is the chemistry between Wellington (Christopher Plummer) and the Duchess (Virginia McKenna).

Wellington and the Duchess
“Old Boney’s advancing on Quatre-Bras… IF you know what I mean.”

The film dwells on things like this, Napoleon’s illness, and some peculiar episode involving a British soldier stealing a pig, and yet glosses over incidents like the Battles of Quatre-Bras and Ligny with a couple lines of dialogue.

It’s not that the film is inaccurate–indeed, they seem to have gone to some lengths to describe things in historically correct fashion. (Except for the romance and a reminiscence about Major-General Ponsonby’s father) The problem is that the film depicts these events in a strange and sometimes incoherent manner.

The biggest technical flaw is probably the mud.  The battle was famously delayed by wet ground after a rainy night, and indeed the film states this correctly. Where it falls down is the fact that the ground we see on screen is demonstrably dry, as evidenced by the huge clouds of dust kicked up by the columns of cavalry and infantry.

The end result is the comical visual of a frustrated Napoleon sinking in an obviously artificial mud puddle while all around him is a vast expanse of dry land. The fundamental historical fact is correctly depicted, but not in a dramatically effective way.

There are lots of issues like this.  After Marshal Ney’s ill-fated cavalry charge against the famous infantry squares, Napoleon rushes back to the field from his sickbed, crying, “What is he doing?  Everyone knows not to make a cavalry charge without infantry support!”

While completely factually accurate, this seems unlikely to be what Napoleon actually said at the time. It comes across as a line delivered for the benefit of audience members who aren’t familiar with the battle of Waterloo.

And this is the other difficult thing about making historical movies: balancing the history lesson aspect with the need to depict real characters, as opposed to instructional puppets designed to illustrate a historical lecture.

Chances are, if someone is watching the movie Waterloo, they are already a Napoleonic history fan. Sure, there might be the occasional viewer who is an ardent follower of Rod Steiger or Christopher Plummer, but if I were overseeing the production, I would make the executive decision that any viewer who doesn’t already know how the battle went is just going to have to piece it together as best they can–no reason the script should go out of its way to help them out.

Waterloo_1970_06Despite all of that, the movie isn’t horrible.  As an instructional device, it is not bad, and there is something inherently impressive about seeing huge lines of soldiers and horses advancing across a smoky field.  It gives you some vague hint of what it might have felt like to be in the battle.

It’s just that the film lacks a dramatic narrative.  Napoleon and Wellington don’t “come alive”; they just repeat their famous quotes and stoically watch the battle.  Because of this, it feels more like a recording of an elaborate re-enactment rather than a truly epic historical drama.

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I watched two history documentaries yesterday. One was about Ancient Greece, and the other one was about Napoleon’s invasion of Moscow.

  1. In the Ancient Greek one, as the Persians were invading, the Greeks evacuated Athens and lured the Persians into it.  It was a bold and self-sacrificing move, but it ultimately enabled the Greeks to win and brought defeat and disgrace to the invaders.
  2. In the Napoleon one, the Russians evacuated Moscow (and burned most of the city and countryside around it) and lured the French into it. It was a bold and self-sacrificing move, but it ultimately enabled the Russians to win and brought defeat and disgrace to the invaders.

Now, I’m not saying the situations were identical.  The Greeks’ triumph was a Naval one, whereas the Russians just let nature take its course on the French army in an abandoned city with no food in wintertime. I’m just saying that you start to see the same things happening again and again in history.

You may find my blog posts boring, but when your Capital city is being invaded by the army of a Foreign Emperor, you’ll thank me.