How accurate is the Napoleon film? A historian sorts fact from fiction
Sir Ridley Scott’s long-awaited movie Napoleon will have a great effect on how the French emperor is viewed in the popular imagination. So it was with some trepidation that I watched it. Would it reproduce the old Anglo-American historical stereotype of a jumped-up Corsican tyrant, or might it recognise that in fact Napoleon created the Enlightenment’s institutions, many of which last to this day? For here was an opportunity to change the tired conventional view of Napoleon put forward by so many postwar Anglophone historians that Napoleon was essentially merely a prototype for Adolf Hitler.
Sadly and somewhat predictably for an 85-year-old whose mindset was formed by the Second World War, Scott has gone for the intellectually discredited stereotype of a dictator who goes mad
