How the English invented the myth of Napoleon

“Everything concerned with the late Emperor Napoleon belongs to British history”, claimed the catalogue entry for Napoleon’s carriage when it was exhibited at Madame Tussaud and Sons in 1843. The carriage had been sent to London as a war trophy soon after the Battle of Waterloo and, after being displayed at Mr Bullock’s museum of natural curiosities in Piccadilly, it toured the country, on the orders of the Prince Regent, so more members of the public could enjoy climbing into it and sitting where Napoleon had sat before the Duke of Wellington defeated him. 

The carriage was a mobile office, bedroom, dressing room, kitchen and dining room, fitted out with telescopes, an atlas and an inkwell.  Hundreds and thousands of British citizens wanted to be close to the objects that had been close to Napoleon – even his travelling coffee pot seemed part of British history. There was a huge outpouring of anglophone newspapers, books and artworks about him during his career, exile and after his death.    

Ridley Scott’s new film about Napoleon revives this long-standing British obsession with the Corsican soldier. “He came from nothing. He conquered everything”, the trailer asserts, though neither of these statements is strictly true. The film opens with a gruesomely glamourized version of the execution of Marie Antoinette, showing the French Revolution at its absolute worst: a mob of cabbage-and-tomato-throwing French citizens bray as their deposed and defiant queen’s head is cut off. Napoleon, magnificently played by Joaquin Phoenix, stands close to the guillotine, an unknown soldier in 1793, glowering with disapproval. The point here is not that Napoleon witnessed the death of Marie Antoinette (he did not) but that he disapproved of the chaos unleashed by the French Revolution (he did, but he owed his entire career to it).  

Napoleon’s relationship to the French Revolution is too deep and complex a matter for any film. Abel Gance’s five-and-a-half-hour silent epic from 1927 is the closest anyone has ever, perhaps will ever, come to evoking Napoleon’s rise through the trauma of the Revolution on screen. Scott is more concerned with Napoleon’s relationship with Great Britain. 

The Siege of Toulon in 1793, at which Napoleon, a scruffy artillery officer, still known as Bonaparte, first displayed his genius for military strategy, is thrillingly recreated. An English soldier shouts “sh-t bag” at the future emperor as he masterminds the destruction of the beautiful English tall ships in the harbour of Toulon. Sweating, frightened, wounded, courageous: Napoleon from this point on is in a personal conflict with Britain. Later he loses his temper with the English ambassador and yells, “You think you are so great because you have boats”. Two centuries on, the idea that the British got on Napoleon’s nerves is still funny. 

There has always been fear and awe behind British jokes at Napoleon’s expense, as though Britain needed to create a suitably impressive antagonist. Napoleon inherited the wars of the French Revolution and by 1802 Britain was France’s only unvanquished enemy. After the brief Peace of Amiens, when Britain finally recognised the French Republic, war between the two countries broke out again. English children grew up terrified that Napoleon the bogeyman of nursery rhymes might eat them: “just as pussy tears a mouse”. 

Popular prints and cartoons equating Napoleon with the devil tried to deflect into ridicule the very real fear that he might be about to invade. Firmly in the English tradition of thinking about Napoleon, Scott’s film portrays him as a warmonger who is by turns sinister, comic and ultimately unknowable.  

Napoleon’s decision to crown himself Emperor of the French held a mirror up to Britain’s monarchy. Loyalist, anti-reform journals and pamphlets asserted affection for George III mixed with anxiety about the state of the nation. The Rival Gardeners, a print from 1803, showed Bonaparte and George III in their gardens on either side of the Channel, each growing a crown in a tub hooped with gold. Bonaparte’s weedy crown wilts on its stem, while George III’s thrives at the top of an oak sapling. “The Heart of Oak will flourish to the end of the World”, reads the hubristic caption. Meanwhile, radical, pro-reform commentators and statesmen such as the Whig Charles James Fox, celebrated Napoleon whilst still thinking him an upstart, intoxicated with his own success.  

Scott’s take on Napoleon’s coronation is brilliant. Although he had gone to enormous lengths to bring the Pope to Paris for the ceremony, on the day itself, 2 December 1804, Napoleon placed the crown on his own head, then crowned his wife Josephine. Scott shows Napoleon awkwardly balancing the crown on top of the gold laurel wreath he is already wearing, all very precarious and rapid, the crown no sooner on his head than off again. Vanessa Kirby as Josephine, kneels meekly before her husband to receive her crown, exuding a sexy aura of ambitious submission. Coronations, the ultimate set-pieces of monarchical constitutions, were gloriously sent-up by Napoleon: “I found the crown of France lying in the gutter. I picked it up and put it on my head.”  

Sex is another long-standing British preoccupation projected onto Napoleon. Josephine was six years older than him, she had lost the father of her two children to the guillotine before they met and was lucky to have survived herself. No sooner were they married than they both had affairs, Napoleon whilst conducting a brutal invasion of Egypt, Josephine with another soldier in Paris. British satirists leapt immediately onto the idea Napoleon was a sexually inadequate cuckold. 

A James Gillray cartoon, published soon after the coronation, looked back on the early days of Napoleon’s infatuation with Josephine, showing him peeking at her from behind a curtain as she dances naked before one of her previous lovers, who is twice his size. Over 200 years of smirking at the phrase “Not tonight Josephine”, listed in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as originating in the early 19^th century, is transcended by the compelling sexual chemistry between Scott’s Napoleon and Josephine. Their love story is the counterpoint to the film’s panoramic battle scenes.  

In one controversial scene, which raised concerns about glorifying domestic violence before the film was released, Napoleon slaps Josephine as they are signing their divorce papers. For different reasons, both are conflicted about what they are doing: Josephine because she doesn’t want to lose her status, Napoleon because he still loves her but needs a wife who can give him a son. “Do it for your country!” Napoleon demands as he hits Josephine whose pen is faltering. 

This vehement and contorted interpretation of patriotism – the idea that a self-made, self-crowned emperor must produce a legitimate male heir to secure the future stability of the state – is more British than French. Napoleon’s second wife, Marie-Louise of Austria, was Marie-Antoinette’s great-niece.  Their son, known as the King of Rome, was born in 1811.  A George Cruikshank cartoon from three years later shows Napoleon teaching his son to swear “eternal enmity to those islanders the English… swear by the flames of hell… swear to shovel their accursed country into the sea.”  

Scott is right to lash out at historians who try to diminish his artistic achievement by pointing out factual inaccuracies.  Imagination has always had a part to play in trying to understand a life as gigantic as Napoleon’s. “We must leave him to posterity” the British poet and novelist Helena Maria Williams wrote in 1815, “Time will place his figure in the point of view, and at the proper distance, to become a study for mankind.” One of the very best books about him is Simon Ley’s novel The Death of Napoleon, which ends with the softly spoken line: “Napoleon, you are my Napoleon.” The Napoleon in Scott’s film is his own: the result of a creative collaboration between himself and Phoenix. More British than French, but no less fascinating for that.  

Ruth Scurr is the author of Napoleon: A Life in Shadows and Gardens (Chatto & Windus)

Napoleon is in cinemas now