The historical inaccuracies of Ridley Scott’s ‘Napoleon’
Ridley Scott doesn’t care in the slightest about how historically inaccurate Napoleon turned out to be, with the famously curmudgeonly director telling his critics to “get a life” when they dared to point out the myriad of details that either didn’t happen or unfolded in a dramatically different fashion.
It didn’t stop the filmmaker’s latest blockbuster historical epic from netting upwards of $200million at the global box office, though, and the fact a lot of the praise pointed in Napoleon‘s direction was aimed towards its performances, production design, and battle sequences would certainly indicate that not too many members of the casual cinemagoing public were distraught by its dramatic deviations.
To be fair, there are plenty of them, and that’s without even mentioning middle-aged thespian Joaquin Phoenix resolutely failing to convince anybody that he was doing justice to the 24-year-old upstart officer during the Siege of Toulon. Sure, the role spans decades, but that’s the sort of suspension of disbelief required from the outset.
Napoleon was also depicted on several occasions as being a skilled horseman who would dutifully lead from the front, but that wasn’t true, either. In fact, historians pointed out that he’d stay as far away from the threat of physical danger as possible, while his inability to complete horse training during his military years rendered him less than proficient on horseback.
Wife Joséphine – played by Vanessa Kirby – never suggested divorce as an option during their marriage, and the woman born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie was six years older than Napoleon, whereas in real life, Kirby is 14 years Phoenix’s junior. The Bonaparte family may have disapproved of her as they did on-screen, but Napoleon didn’t have anywhere near as much trouble to conceive, seeing as he ended up as a father to at least two – but probably more – illegitimate children born from his various affairs.
The Battle of Austerlitz didn’t feature the frozen lake that would become the centrepiece of one of the film’s biggest sequences, Napoleon never came face-to-face with the Duke of Wellington, he most definitely did not fire his cannons as the Pyramids of Giza, he wasn’t present for the execution of Marie Antoinette, and he didn’t even live up to his own tagline.
The posters and trailers proudly bore the slogan, “He came from nothing. He conquered everything”, but he kind of did come from something. The son of aristocrat Carlo Bonaparte, young Napoleon was born directly into minor Corsican nobility, which gave him a leg-up when it came to trying to establish himself as a leader and society figure later on in life. Not only that, but his mother’s side of the family – the Ramolinos – were a Genovese noble family, so he was actually the product of two.
Napoleon hardly marked the first time Hollywood – or even Scott, for that matter – had played fast and loose with the historical facts, and there’s absolutely no chance it’ll be the last.
