Why Napoleon Still Has Star Power

“Always him! Everywhere him!” When Victor Hugo published his poem “Him” (“Lui”) in 1827, no one could doubt the identity of the “him” in question. Six years after Napoleon Bonaparte’s death, and just 12 after his final defeat at Waterloo, his presence still loomed massively over the Western world. Today, that presence is fainter, but the French emperor remains a source of fascination and controversy, as shown by the buzz surrounding Ridley Scott’s film “Napoleon,” which will be released on Nov. 22, with Joaquin Phoenix in the title role.

When Hugo wrote his poem, and for decades afterward, opinions about Napoleon tended to divide along the lines first set during his rule. It could hardly have been otherwise, given his enormously disruptive impact on the Western world. Here was a man who in 1799, when just 30 years old, seized dictatorial power in a coup and five years later crowned himself emperor of the French.

Thanks to a series of brilliant military victories, he expanded the borders of France to their greatest extent ever seen while reducing much of the rest of continental Europe to a series of client states. Napoleonic rule swept away traditional noble and clerical privileges and brought far-reaching changes to law and civil administration. His wars cost millions of lives and ended in France’s defeat and occupation.

Most inhabitants of the countries that had fought him long regarded him as a tyrannical monster: the “Corsican Ogre,” or even an incarnation of the Antichrist, as the Russian Orthodox Church formally designated him. But many in France, and even some political radicals in the states he fought, saw Napoleon as a champion not just of French nationalism but of the secularism and civic equality associated with the French Revolution.

Even some of his fiercest opponents found it difficult to suppress their sheer fascination for the man, mixed with notes of admiration. Napoleon himself, in final exile on the British island of St. Helena, remarked “What a novel my life has been,” and it would be hard to disagree. A junior artillery officer from a family unknown beyond his small, poor native island, he rose to carve out the greatest empire seen since the Romans, only to fall just as dramatically.

By the end, his story seemed like something out of myth: Icarus, soaring too close to the sun; Prometheus, exiled to an ocean rock, gnawed at by British vultures. The writer François-René de Chateaubriand excoriated Napoleon as a tyrant but also wrote lyrically that “to fall from Bonaparte and the Empire into what followed them is to fall from reality into nothingness, from the summit of a mountain into an abyss…What person can evoke interest other than him?” As Hugo concluded his poem about Napoleon, “You dominate our age; angel or demon, what does it even matter?”

Throughout the 19th century, great writers were drawn irresistibly to this man who seemed to have pushed outward the limits of human possibility. Stendhal and Goethe, Lermontov and Pushkin, Heine and Hegel all devoted brilliant pages to him. Nietzsche, in a memorable aphorism, called him “a synthesis of Unmensch and Übermensch” (monster and superman). Walter Scott wrote a biography; Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of his greatest essays (“Napoleon, or the Man of the World”). Tolstoy featured him as a character in “War and Peace.” For Thomas Carlyle, Napoleon exemplified the idea that “the History of the world is but the Biography of great men.”

But the popularity of the “great man theory” has faded since Carlyle’s day. Already Tolstoy undercut the idea of Napoleon as a colossus changing the direction of history, terming him rather a “blind instrument” of larger historical forces. In “War and Peace,” Napoleon often appears less as a tragic character than a comic one, at one point “uttering little snorts and grunts” while a valet rubs down his “plump hairy chest.” Although swarms of popular biographies continued to appear in the 20th century, the period’s greatest historians tended to look elsewhere for their subject matter.

Where do things stand today? The contemporary French Republic has mostly refused to celebrate Napoleon, although it maintains his magnificent tomb in the church of the Invalides in Paris. Charles de Gaulle—another French general turned domineering chief executive, but one who never abjured republicanism—declared that “Napoleon exhausted the goodwill of the French, abused their sacrifices and covered Europe with graves, ashes and tears.”

In 2004, nationalist critics blasted then-President Jacques Chirac for refusing to commemorate the bicentennial of the Battle of Austerlitz, the greatest French military victory of all time (and, to judge from the trailer, one of the principal scenes in the new film). But Chirac replied that Napoleon had sounded the death knell for the revolutionary First Republic with his 1799 coup. He imprisoned political opponents, imposed harsh censorship on the press, restored monarchy and waged constant, aggressive warfare. This was not a person that modern France should be celebrating. The best recent novelistic portrayal of Napoleon’s wars, a trilogy by Patrick Rambaud, likewise stresses their horrors, not their glory.

More recently, critics attacked the French government even for sponsoring exhibitions about Napoleon on the bicentennial of his 1821 death. The principal accusation now concerns Napoleon’s reestablishment of slavery in France’s colonies. After men and women of African descent in the Caribbean seized freedom for themselves in the early 1790s, the First Republic formally proclaimed the abolition of slavery, but Napoleon reversed the decision. In what became the independent state of Haiti, his forces were defeated, but elsewhere they succeeded in returning free people to bondage, where they languished until the second, final abolition during the Revolution of 1848.

Many of these same critics have attacked Ridley Scott for devoting a big-budget biopic to Napoleon rather than, for instance, to the Haitian freedom fighters Toussaint L’Ouverture or Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Scott himself clearly has mixed feelings about his chosen subject, whom he has compared to Hitler.

But despite the many dark chapters of Napoleon’s career, the fascination remains hard to resist. The pro-Brexit English biographer Andrew Roberts once scorned the emperor for trying to create an early version of the European Union. But in the course of writing Napoleon’s life, Roberts fell under his subject’s spell and ended up titling the book (in its British edition) “Napoleon the Great.” During the long series of Napoleon bicentennials between the 1990s and 2021, at least two dozen other new biographies appeared in English alone.

And Napoleon has been an inexhaustible screen subject, featured in hundreds—perhaps thousands—of films since the invention of the medium. Two of them are cinematic classics: Abel Gance’s epic of 1927 and Sacha Guitry’s of 1955, both titled “Napoleon.” Others have bombed, including Sergei Bondarchuk’s massively expensive 1970 “Waterloo” (which used thousands of Soviet soldiers as extras) and a laughably bad 2002 French miniseries starring Christian Clavier, a comic actor previously best known for portraying an oafish medieval peasant. Now we will have to see where the latest “Napoleon” falls in this long—and no doubt unfinished—filmography.

David A. Bell teaches history at Princeton University and is the author of “Napoleon: A Concise Biography.”