By: Simon Schama / The Financial Times
Translation: Telegrafi.com

In a German concentration camp, the most serious book about Napoleon's obsession was born. In early 1940, the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl wrote an essay on how Bonaparte was viewed by successive generations of French historians and submitted it to a magazine for publication. After the German invasion in May, although he had "not written a single word about Hitler", the article was returned to him by the editor, who was irritated by the implied parallels.

Geyl was a master of sharp analogies. He went on to make it clear that “the persecution of the Jews had no parallel in the Napoleonic system.” But when he turned the essay into a lecture in Rotterdam in September of that year, the audience got the gist, as he ran through the inventory of Napoleon’s failings listed by French critics: the disappearance of a free press; the devaluation of every meaningful representative institution; the contempt for intellectuals; the ego-fetishism of the will to action; the assumption that national glory must necessarily be forged in the carnage of war and, as a logical consequence of this, the insatiable lust for military expansion; the habit of treating people instrumentally—as grist for the mill of his glory; the icy indifference to the loss of millions of lives, especially of his own troops; the unchanging tendencies to blame everyone - except yourself - when things went wrong.

However indirect Geyli may have been, the SS allegedly took him as a ransom for the mistreatment of the Germans in the Dutch East Indies. In the Buhenuald [camp] where he spent 13 months, the audience continued to laugh, but Geyli began the drafting of what would culminate in the masterpiece of historiography that is Napoleon: For and against [Napoleon: For and Against]. The main motive is that the story is "argument without conclusion".

This is certainly true of the Napoleon Bonaparte debate. Whether you like it or not (and I generally don't), there is no escape from the cult. Last Sunday, one of the 20 surviving double-cornered hats worn by Napoleon sold at auction for €1.9 million - a price that confirms the famous epigram attributed, among others, to the emperor, that there is a fine line between the sublime and the absurd. The hat's buyer remains anonymous, but you can imagine him trying it on in front of a full-length mirror, perhaps with one hand in his jacket. The Qivuri does not tolerate skepticism. In the south of France, Julia Blackburn, The last island of the emperor [The Emperor's Last Island] whose is one of the few books about Napoleon that reads like poetic prose, inspected what a museum there proudly claims are his preserved testicles.

Napoleon ranks third after Jesus and Hitler in the number of books written about him, but he surpasses both of them in the number of films - about a thousand - made for cinema and television. As soon as the Lumière brothers invented film, in 1897 they gave the world Napoleon meeting the Pope [Napoleon Meets the Pope]. By 1914, 180 films dedicated to Bonaparte had already been made.

The epic not-half-bad by Ridley Scott, stars Joaquin Phoenix with his muffled muttering that is occasionally accompanied by labored breathing or harsh screams. But Phoenix's performance, which oscillates between restrained anxiety and neurotic energy, captures what historian Georges Lefebvre believed to be Napoleon's main source: his volatile and dynamic temperament. Additionally, Phoenix's vocal articulation is a vast improvement over Marlon Brando's husky voice in Désiré [Desiree, 1954] as well as from Rod Steiger's muffled scream at Waterloo [Waterloo] Sergei Bondarchuk's otherwise fascinating 1970.

It may be that the challenge of reproducing the vox Napoleana (the tone on which the historical sources are surprisingly silent) is best described by the subtitles of silent films, such as Abel Gancey's stunning historical masterpiece of 1927. Still, you have to wonder what Jack would have sounded like Nicholson who was chosen by Stanley Kubrick for his unrealized biopic.

It takes the confidence of Napoleon to tackle this subject, as, until now, commercially the most ambitious films have suffered the fate of WaterlooAfter Gance's five-hour avant-garde, manic-expressionist film was met with more speculation than applause from the public, he was denied the funding to realize his long-cherished desire to make five more films - leading Napoleon to exile on St. Helena.

Sergei Bondarchuk's simply stunning Battle of Borodino in [film] War and peace, from Soviet times, is still the most compelling cinematic representation of what it feels like to be trapped inside a battle, a challenge since its two most prominent characteristics, as [the book] pointed out The face of battle [The Face of Battle] by John Keegan - invisibility (smoke) and inaudibility (the crackle of the cannon) - are not audience-friendly. Inevitably, Tolstoy's expensive seven-hour film was cut short by Soviet producers before its proper conclusion, short of the burning of Moscow. However, the failure did not stop Bondarchuk from committing to direct the Waterloo (featuring the unusual casting of Christopher Plummer as Wellington), complete with 15 extras and 200 cavalry horses, the film was such a commercial failure that it played a role in the studios' reluctance to "approach the monster of Kubrick's Dangerous".

You don't need a degree in cultural psychology to notice that all these important people didn't make films about Napoleon just to experience his control - fooled by the siren song of Film Fate.

Gance used the story to create a cinematic revolution, one that offered the effects of artillery barrages—handheld cameras (unique to silent films), pendulum-mounted cameras, very fast cuts, and the triple opening of the final scene with the French army ready to land in Italy—with the aim of pushing the audience to become part of the action. At first glance, the experimental film was described by Kubrick as "terrible," although the impression of it lasted so long that he wanted to overcome it by calling it "the best film ever made."

To those who asked Kubrick late in his career whether he would consider reviving his Napoleon project - abandoned around 1970 - the maestro adamantly said he had never wanted to make the film; and, surprisingly, he said he had never possessed the script for filming. But when the script and the monumental archive of its development were discovered, the extent of Kubrick's Napoleon-syndrome-fueled attack became apparent.

About 30-50 thousand extras provided by the Romanian Army would be transported by a fleet of a thousand trucks. Two years of obsessive research produced a library of 18 documents, many of which Kubrick had analyzed, as well as a trove of 15 images. Lenses would be purchased that could shoot in available light (as he did a few years later for the magnificent Barry Lyndon/Barry Lyndon). The love scenes would be lit only by the candles that would shine from the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, which Kubrick thought had to do with Napoleon: Versailles, only more pornographic.

In other cases, Kubrick was obsessed with historical accuracy - to the point of wanting to film battles in the places they actually took place. Disappointed to discover that many of them had long since been built over, he collected soil samples to scatter at alternative locations.

For all of this, its estimated budget - between $3-6 million, a tad high now, but not then - was less than the $10 million spent on 2001: A Space Odyssey [2001: A Space Odyssey] that had incurred the expenses - and more than that. But the scale of it all frightened him MGM-in and Kubrick went to Warner Bros-i to do it A Clockwork Orange [A Clockwork Orange], adapted from the novel by Anthony Burgess who also brilliantly wrote it Napoleon's symphony [Napoleon Symphony].

It is safe to say that Napoleon - ever conscious of the visual mystique as an integral element of his machinery of power - would have enjoyed all the trouble it took to keep his romance alive, generation after generation. Unlike the absolutists of the ancien régime, he wanted iconography with which to make credible his claim to be both citizen and sovereign: as the embodiment of the benefits brought by the revolution (especially equality), but with an anarchic disorder.

For him, art mattered - as an instrument of the state; in the background he gave instructions to generals and marshals to plunder masterpieces wherever and whenever possible. Thus Descent from the cross of Rubens in Antwerp Cathedral, Transfiguration of Raphael in Rome, The wedding feast at Cana of Galilee of Veronese was removed from the wall in the monastery of St. George in Venice and The new bull of Paulus Potter was carted from The Hague to stand on the walls of the Louvre.

There, grateful subjects could also see the description of the great man - according to the creators of his myths. No one was more capable than [the painter] Jacques-Louis David who, as if by magic, in prison sobered up from his radical Jacobin passion - after the fall of Robespierre. The fascinating painting of Mrs. Rekamije [Madame Récamier] may have created the prelude for her late friend Joséphine Beauharnais, and thus also for her lover and husband whom David sketched it in 1797 - during the splendor of his Italian triumphs, adorning it with his fiery vigor.

In 1801, after escaping the disaster of [the Battle of] Marengo, David, using his own son sitting at the top of a ladder - after the great man refused to pose - painted Napoleon crossing St. Bernard's neck, with the raised forelegs of the horse iconographically used to manifest the equestrian power of sovereigns. But the versatile David also produced images of the heroic lawgiver. In 1812 he created a complete portrait of hardworking administrator, who stays up all night working (it's 4:13 am).

The image was compelling, but for Napoleon it was somehow too prosaic. His desire, especially in the years after his coronation and great victory at Austerlitz, was for images charged with every kind of imperial memory: Greco-Alexandrian, Romano-Augustan, Franco-Carolingian, and the medieval Capetian [dynasty].

Sensing this, one of David's students, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, thought of urging the emperor to create - for the Paris Salon of 1806 - a large hieratic icon of Napoleon on the throne, decorated with every emblem of grandeur imaginable.

In one hand he holds what is said to be the scepter of Charlemagne, topped by a statue of that former Frankish emperor. In his other hand he holds the staff with the Hand of Justice, made for the 1804th-century king Charles V, destroyed during the revolution and remade in XNUMX for the new sovereign. A sword based on Charlemagne's "Jouais" hangs from his left leg, while his head is crowned with the gilded laurels of the Caesars.

For keen observers of Napoleon, the carpet beneath the throne has a large ornate eagle in the center, but along one side, in embroidered designs, are the signs of the zodiac, each of which can be read as having a calendrical significance. To ensure that no one confuses Napoleon with a mere mortal, the shimmering effect of the back of the throne was borrowed directly from the painting of Jan van Eyck, God the Father - in the central panel of the Ghent triptych, which was sent from the Cathedral of Saint Bavo to the Louvre. The iconographic burdens and the bloodless porcelain face and neck covering did not please David, and the painting did not find favor with those responsible for the recommendations of the subjects.

There were other, more documentary ways to represent the hero as a savior prophet: Napoleon visiting plague victims in Jaffa Antoine-Jean Gros, touching the armpit where lymph had burst in the body of a plague-stricken figure, reminds one of the magical healing powers of the Merovingian kings or of the compassionate Napoleon moving among the dead and wounded after the Battle of Aigle - as if he were disturbed by the sight, not at all like the man of whom Metternich said that a million lives were nothing to him.

It fell to non-French artists to record the horror and misery experienced by ordinary people who had grown weary of the pitiless hellhole of Napoleon's war. Goya's series of prints, Disasters of war - with his body parts dismembered and paralyzed and, most horrific of all, with the French soldier watching - was too dangerous to be published during his lifetime.

As one of the many cultural tourists who visited Waterloo Plain, where the death rate was a shocking 41 percent, [JMW] Turner made a somber and touching painting of the dead and wounded, among whom are desperate women looking for their surviving husbands, brothers, sons.

The dark side of what Napoleon did, of course, doesn't make money for movies. Although Ridley Scott is an expert at presenting the spectacle of extreme violence - a horse being torn apart by a cannon - the pathos of the humble is not his thing. Only one film I know of - the wonderful film Colonel Shaber [Let Colonel Chabert] by Yves Angelos (1994), based on a novella by Balzacut in which an officer thought to have died at the Battle of Ajloun returns to try to claim his property and wife - it gives full weight to the horrific consequences of a great battle. Against a landscape of hellish death, the bodies of horses burning in the fire, the dirty hands of thieves dragging the bodies and searching inside the uniforms of the dead for anything of value, the trio is interpreted Spirit [Ghost] of Beethoven who can't stand the merciless desolation.

It doesn't matter much how the professors clash over earned liberties and historical facts, and for that matter Scott doesn't get anything out of it. Joséphine's black teeth were unlikely to ever appear in the attractive mouth of Vanessa Kirby, who is tasked with taking her place in the empire's line of mistresses. A greater regret is the assumption, belied by films such as Lincoln [Lincoln] of Steven Spielberg, that provoking the public to reflect on the big questions of history must necessarily mask entertainment.

Because, Napoleons comes with a heavy load of baggage for such questions, much of it with the tensions of our troubled times. Becoming increasingly reactionary, he reinstated the slave trade that the revolution had eliminated, while handing the right of divorce exclusively to men - except in cases where a mistress (he himself had 22 of them) entered the family home.

In the end, Napoleon was the prototype of a modern despot, assuming - cynically - that most people cared little or nothing about freedom, about constitutions or the "sovereignty of the people" he boasted about, and so he could easily dismantle them, replacing freedom with the blinding glare of military triumph. From 1814 and onwards, France was humbled, impoverished, its people brutally murdered by conscription into legions of the dead and the maimed. And all this for what? For a fleeting bubble of glory.

Sometimes, the reality of the Napoleonic moment is caught from the sidelines. to Parma Monastery In Stendhal's novel, Fabrizio del Dongo wanders the field of Waterloo, where he wanted to be a hero, but is stopped by the horror of "a horse covered in blood, lying writhing in the plowed earth, its hooves driven into its entrails." The release of suffering opens Jeanette Winterson's wonderful book, pasioni [The Passion], while in the amazing work of Simon Leys, Death of Napoleon [The Death of Napoleon], the immortal emperor spends his days in what would be a narrative for a movie.

But no one, I think, captured the essence of Napoleon as well as Tolstoy War and peace. On the eve of the battle, the fog that lay over Austerlitz is lifted and Napoleon, removing the glove "from his beautiful white hand, made a sign to the marshals and gave the order for the attack to begin". A moment earlier, "he stood still, gazing at the heights that appeared from the removal of the fog, and on his cold face was that special shade of self-confidence, of deserved happiness that can be seen on the face of a boy who has happily fallen in love". /Telegraph/

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