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Film Review
| Napoleon. Directed, produced, and written by David Grubin. 2003; color; 240 min. Distributed by PBS Home Video.Napoléon. Directed by Yves Simoneau. Produced by Jean-Pierre Guérin and Gerard Depardieu. Written by Didier Decoin. 2003; color; 280 minutes. Distributed by A&E Home Video.
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| Thirty years ago, Louis Bergeron published a history of the First Empire—L'épisode napoléonien, aspects intérieurs, 1799–1815 (1972)—that scarcely mentioned Napoleon Bonaparte. One cannot expect a television documentary to attempt the equivalent; if any figure in modern times deserves Great Man treatment, surely it is Napoleon. Still, one would hope that, two centuries after his rise to power, we would have progressed beyond the "man of destiny" approach that too evidently shapes David Grubin's documentary. "He doesn't die, he will never die": these closing words, voiced by Jean-Paul Bertaud, may have been intended to laud Bonaparte's success at crafting his posthumous legend. But they suit all too well an awestruck documentary whose picture of Napoleon's significance is blinkered to exclude all but his own blazing light. |
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The format of Grubin's documentary (part of PBS's "Empires" series) will be familiar to anyone who has caught a glimpse of the History Channel. It features a large cast of talking heads. Its historical reenactments star actors whose faces are off-screen, except when in crowd or battle scenes (shown, as a rule, in slow motion). Visual images are used simply as illustration and are hardly ever mentioned—let alone analyzed—by the script. Francisco Goya's paintings and etchings flash by during the very brief discussion of Napoleon's Spanish wars, but not a whisper is given to the artist's name or his mission. |
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It would be a great shame if the documentary shows up in high school or college classrooms. This is the tale of Napoleon as fighter and lover. Military and personal history overwhelm any political or social content. Twelve minutes are spent on the battle of Austerlitz, and twelve on Waterloo, but considerably fewer than twelve, over the course of the documentary's four episodes, on matters of state such as Napoleon's administrative and legal reforms. Attention is doled out in strange proportions. The Eighteenth Brumaire does not arrive until nearly halfway through the 225-minute documentary (one reason so little time is left to discuss Napoleon's policies as consul and emperor). The Napoleonic state is reduced to the Napoleonic person: Joseph Fouché and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand each gets a brief mention (Fouché so that Napoleonic France may be branded "a police state") and then vanishes, never to reappear. Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant are notable no-shows. With no mention made of the Confederation of the Rhine or the Cisalpine Republic, it is no wonder that the documentary fails to discuss Napoleon's catalyzing influence on German and Italian nationalism. Besides noting that the Civil Code (barely introduced) was spread across Europe and that the Venice ghetto was opened, no attention is given to the effects of French conquest on other lands. We could use more of this, even if it required paring down the discussion of Napoleon's liking for macaroni. |
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Remarkably little time is given to events preceding Maximilien Robespierre's fall—apparently, the revolution will not be televised—and the attempt to sketch the revolutionary prelude in a few minutes leads to simplistic and misleading condensation. (The crowds storming the Bastille were not "crying 'liberty, equality, brotherhood'"; nor, I think, was the "monarchy ... totter[ing] at the edge of destruction" on that day.) Inadequate attention to events of the 1790s makes certain later developments mystifying. The documentary ignores the religious history of the revolution (including egalitarian liberalization, de-Christianization, and the Cult of the Supreme Being) and thus ensures that viewers will not understand the significance of Napoleon's 1801 concordat with the papacy, mentioned in passing. |
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