L’Année Napoléon in Emmanuel Macron’s commemoration-hungry France, was a bit of a damp squib. In 2021, two centuries after the death of l’Empereur on St Helena’s Island, there was enough noise from the anti-colonialist crowd on his reintroduction of slavery in the West Indies in 1802-1804 (under pressure from local landowners) that a number of grandiose projected events were quietly cancelled or indefinitely postponed. Post-Covid and a year before Macron’s re-election campaign, it was felt that any unnecessary controversy should be prudently shelved.
It took Ridley Scott and his bloated Napoléon to rouse the serried ranks of French historians, politicians, journalists, museographers, military brass and amateur re-enacters against what is largely seen here as an attack against France’s best-known ruler and military genius. We’re getting L’Année Napoléon two years late — and enjoying every moment of it.
“Napoléon”, c’est le film d’un Anglais très antifrançais (“Napoleon is a movie made by an arch-anti-French Englishman”) sniffed the historian Patrice Gueniffey in Le Point, before engaging in a meticulous fact-checking exercise. (The entire Institut Napoléon has been producing a detachment of painstaking little French Hugo Vickers to protest, with a thousand details, that the superannuated, gloomy, inarticulate brute portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix is wrong, wrong, wrong). “This is worse than a just a bad film: Ridley Scott desecrates Napoleon”, the Sciences Po professor of media studies, Romain Marsily, thunders in Le Figaro.
For a country supposedly in the throes of existential gloom and masochistic self-doubt, there’s nothing like a perceived attack by bloody foreigners on a national legend to bring a lot of us together. A recent poll shows only 3% of the French mention the West Indies slavery reinstatement in their rating of Napoléon’s “worse decisions”.
Putting aside the police state that France inherited from the Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety, the first Napoléonic accomplishments the French praise are Napoleon’s legislative and administrative reforms, which pretty much baked Roman law, Louis XIV’s centralism and command economy, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and the Revolution’s nation-building achievements into a consistent framework. It took four years — 1800 to 1804 — to write and collate the 2281 articles of the Civil Code, largely under the stewardship of the First Consul, as he was known at the time, himself (Bonaparte presided over 55 of the 107 writing sessions of the final version).
This, as much as his conquests, left an indelible mark in the law of places from Louisiana and Bolivia to Bavaria and Poland. You find the (translated) hand of Napoleon in the Japanese Civil Code of 1898, in Egyptian Law, in Mustafa Kemal Atatürk new Turkish Code. Half a century before Bismarck, the birth of modern Germany was facilitated by the breaking up of medieval laws and regulations and the power of guilds, as well as the expropriation, à la révolutionnaire, of the churches and the aristocratic landowners.
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