School of War - Ep 100: Alexander Mikaberidze on Ridley Scott’s Napoleon

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

Alexander Mikaberidze, Professor of History and Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University and author of The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History, joins the show to talk about director Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. ▪️ Times      •    02:54 Introduction      •    04:52 First reactions     •    08:18 Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon     •    15:12 Propaganda of the time     •    17:14 No invention needed     •    21:22 Wellington and Talleyrand     •    23:24 Napoleon: Master Tactician     •    27:35 Waterloo     •    33:45 Josephine and Elba     •    35:44 More Napoleon content Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack  

Wow. Welcome to the 100th episode of School of War. I did not anticipate this little project going so far, and it's safe to say that things have really gotten out of hand. I'm proud of the work our team has done over the course of the last two years, starting with episode 1, H.R. McMaster on the Persian Gulf War. I'm not going to tell you how many people downloaded that episode in its first week on the air. Suffice it to say that it's less than download our episodes now, a lot less. but many have gone on to listen to it in many other recordings that I think make useful contributions in an ongoing way. I think of the recordings that we've done with today's guests, Alexander Micah Beridze. Today's show is quick and fun on the subject of Ridley Scott's questionable movie about Napoleon, but our conversations in the past, more substantively, about the Napoleonic Wars, in particular episode 51 on Kutuzov, show this podcast, I think, at its very best, looking to history for lessons that inform present-day strategic concerns. Same goes for Michael Niebuhrig on Vichy France,

Andrew Lambert on Julian Corbett, and also on the Crimean War, New Strawn on Klaus Fitz and many, many more. We've strayed into fields adjacent to military history and strategy at times, like when we talked about Putin and tyranny with Waller Newell or about IR realism with Jonathan Kirchner, and we've talked a lot directly about the present day in some of our most popular episodes,

with people like Fred Kagan, Dan Blumenthal, Mike Duran, and Hal Brands, and more. The title of the title of the last, the podcast is, of course, a reference to Thucydides, who reports a king of Sparta saying, we should remember that one man is much the same as another, but he is best who is trained in the severest school. We don't offer training here, but I do hope to offer tools and openings into an education about war and statecraft and things related to war, which is, in fact, the severest school, so that we might all prevail in the future. Thanks so much for listening.

Let's get back to the show. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people who have not seen buildings. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds.

We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. MacLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted today to welcome back to the show, Alexander Micah Bereze, who is Professor of History and Ruth Herring-Noehl endowed chair at Louisiana State University in Shreveport.

Alex, thank you so much for coming back. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor and privilege, especially because you just told me it's a special episode. It is a special episode. It's our 100th episode. 100. I would never have guessed at the start of this project that we would get to 100 episodes. And yet here we are. I also think there's another milestone here, which is this is your third episode, if I'm not mistaken. And I believe you are the first three-time returner. We have a growing crowd of two-time guests.

People like, let's see, Mike Gallagher has been on twice. Andrew Lambert. We've had a number of two-timers. But you are now, when this airs, you will be responsible for 3% of the enterprise that is School of War. So thank you for your service. I'm almost like Messi, I guess. And we have kind of a fun one plan for today, which is that you obviously are a scholar of Napoleon and the Napoleonic era and Napoleonic Wars. And we have a Ridley Scott movie that has been attracting a great deal of attention that just came out. So we both went and saw it. And I thought we could talk about it and about Napoleon and about history in movies as a thing to think about, if that's all acceptable to you.

Absolutely. Well, look, so I'm fresh from seeing the movie. I'm coming from the theater to record this. So it is fresh in my mind. And I will just make the 30,000-foot observation as a person who cares about history in a general way, but is certainly not a scholar of the Napoleonic period. and somebody who likes good movies and doesn't like bad movies, I thought some of the criticism was a little overheated. I didn't hate it.

I actually was regretting our plan this morning because the reviews have been so bad. I got to go see this. It was really kind of three hours out of my day I didn't need to lose. But I enjoyed it. So that's my superficial man on the street top line response. What is your scholarly serious informed response? Well, let me maybe be a,

kind of do a two-part answer to it. I think there are some elements in the movie that I did enjoy. Despite all the commentary that Ridley Scott offered us on the kind of superfluousness of the historical accuracy, you got to give it to him that the uniforms look great. He clearly went out in terms of the patronry of Napoleonic era. I actually found some scenes quite spectacular. And I think both Vanessa Kirby and Hawking Phoenix have moments when they really, really shine. But overall, I got to say, it's a movie that is not working for me. I mean, I suffered through it. Did you suffer through it for aesthetic reasons, for reasons of historical, accuracy or respect or however we want to talk about it, or combination of the two? Or something else.

Yeah, I think setting aside historical accuracy, right? And then again, not navigating into the weed of it. And we can discuss the issues with that as well. I think the script itself is not working for me because it doesn't offer any emotional growth for the characters. In fact, if you can pay close attention, there are only two characters and plenty of characters that make entrance and disappear. There's no support, really, for a wider narrative of how Napoleon, at the age of, let's say, when he's fighting at Borodino or Worlu, how is he different from the guy that witnesses the execution of Marie Antoinette?

And I don't see that emotional curve. I don't see, for example, the exploration of their relationship between Josephine and Napoleon. Why did she like him just because he stared at her? And why did he stay loyal to her even after she cheated on him? In fact, that part when she's disloyal to him with Ipoly Charles, and actually is one of the, I think, kind of more interesting moments of the movie. And then overall, I think, what is missing. And again, it's not about kind of presenting Napoleon as a romantic hero.

In fact, that's one, I think, one of the problems I have with the movie is that it didn't really try to showcase the complexity of this guy who can't be, on one hand, perceived as a romantic hero by so many, and on the other hand, derided as a tyrant by the other, right? The movie doesn't really, nothing grapple with it. But for me, that becomes an issue when, in 1815, there is a scene in the movie when Napoleon returns, and he encounters his troops or former troops who are now in the royal service at the small village of Lafrey. And there, he gives him a speech, and they switch side.

And actually I was at the movie with my colleagues and after two and a half hours of dealing with his kind of whining, my colleague turned around and asked me, why would anyone switch side for this whining bitch? And I think he's right, right? Because that is the biggest issue I have with the movie. Setting aside historic accuracy is that it doesn't flesh out the character of neither of Napoleon or Josephine.

Yeah, so I'm glad you mentioned that scene because that is That is a famous moment, right? And I know there's a famous painting of this moment, probably multiple. Absolutely. One I'm thinking of, but you probably know the artist. Absolutely. The soldiers mobbing around, right? Yeah.

And of course, Bondan Chukh, Waterloo, right? Sergi Bonachuk's famous movie, Waterloo, start with that scene. And it delivers that epic nature of it, that here you have these people who have a split-second decision to make a choice, to stay loyal to the Bourbonne government, or to betray it, and, in fact, really, for sank death for the rest of their life for this one guy. That's a big decision to make. Right. And this guy better deserve it, right? That was the scene where, because I guess I went in really expecting to dislike the movie, and then I found the opening to actually be more entertaining than I was prepared to expect. And so then I started sort of making, I sort of started defending

the movie in my head as I watched it. The very scene that you point to, I agree completely. It does not, It does not work at all. And it's because, and this is, this is something that I want to ask you about specifically, is that the Phoenix performance of Napoleon is so relentlessly uncharismatic. And it's, it's always uncharismatic. There's no, as you point it, one way to look at it is, you know, you could imagine a portrayal of a Napoleon who begins is a dynamic figure and then falls into a kind of torpor, which I guess is sort of what Tolstoy implies in war and peace.

That's basically what happens to his life. But even so, you would need to, you know, the scene we're talking about, you know, he basically talks a regiment into switching sides through one, through one address. And yeah, you watch the address as delivered by Phoenix, and it's just not plausible. It's simply not plausible that a group of soldiers would say, okay, we'll follow this guy. I think. And so that raises for me sort of the broader question of, you know, as I was in my mode sort of defending the movie from its critics, I was thinking to myself, well, you know, the fact is Napoleon was, you know, a, thug and a killer and, you know, at the end of the day, a politician who had real talents on the battlefield who got lucky politically in certain respects. And so would I expect to see this dazzling sort of figure who kind of romances me? I don't know. Maybe this is real. Maybe

he was a bit oafish like Phoenix portrays him. But like, what is the reality? Where's the truth here? No. And so part of me actually enjoyed Phoenix's portrayal. There are moments when I think Phoenix delivers that sternness that Napoleon could, you know, had that kind of expression of possible violence or possible kind of ruthlessness. But mostly the way I think Phoenix approached the role was to portray him as this bumbling, uncertain man who, I mean, the scene where Napoleon's mother comes and tells him, hey, I have this young mistress for you. And he's stands officially by the door kind of looking at her whether he should go or not. And she's like, yes, son, go ahead, do it. That's not Napoleon, right? Napoleon would not have needed that kind of

thing. I mean, if anything, as you said, he's capable of a great deal of ruthlessness, callousness. You know, this reminds me in 1811 in July of 1811, right? I actually let me kind of preface this. Over the last about 20 years, we've been working on this remarkable project. that was led by French historians, a group of French historians, to collect and publish as much of Napoleon's written legacy as possible. So we finished this project. There are over 44,000 letters published. And if you go through them, you get the sense of who this guy was because you read what

he was capable of. And so it reminds me of July of 1811 when he's told about two guys who were resisting Napoleon's authority. And so he says, the guy's names are Sifanti and Sassi. And so he says, in this letter, it says, all right, have Sifanti executed. He's a spy. He doesn't deserve calamity. But in Sassi's case, I want to commit his sentence. But take both of them to their place of execution, have Sifenty executed, make sure that Sassi watches it. And as he gets to the scaffold, I want to read the commutation. And there is a passage. I want him to see with these own eyes how crimes are punished in my state.

And there's this kind of coldness to this, right? There's a kind of rationality to it. And I don't see that in the movie. So it's not about portraying Napoleon as a black, kind of the black legend, kind of the auger guy or the Prometheus of the Romantic. But to show the complexity that this guy is capable of both. he's capable of vision and delivering this great reforms upon which modern France is based. I mean, pick any side of French daily life.

Chances are, you'll trace it to something Napoleon done from finance, to administration, to courts, to whatever, to things like fire brigade, to high school exams. All of them can be traced back to Napoleon. None of this even is hinted at in the movie. And of course, we don't ask movie directors to write dissertations, right? We don't ask them to produce this masterpiece that touch on all of it. What we ask is to provide a storyline that is based, even loosely, but based on the actual event and one that asks us to seek more. And I don't know if deliberately or not, Scott's movie actually doesn't do that, at least not for me or for people that.

watched it. And in fact, one of the interesting things of social media was that, of course, the scholars were kind of bitching about it for quite some time. But now, even the people who were not necessarily involved in close study of Napoleon coming out and saying that the movie is just simply not based on a good script. So I think that's where we can agree. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it ends with this list of some of Napoleon's, it kind of mixes battles and campaigns with death tolls. And it, again, I'm sympathetic to this. Probably it's my, my deep sympathy to, as I sort of, it's, it's, it's, it's my deep sympathy to the anti-Napoleonic cause of the time. My dislike of, of, of, of dictatorial rule as a, and, and as a general question, but

it did feel a bit like almost like it could be British propaganda of the day, you know, like the movie almost sort of evokes that spirit. It's like it's written by the characters in a Patrick O'Brien novel talking about, you know, you know, the movie. you know, how silly Napoleon is. No, that selection of battles actually is interesting because some of those battles are not necessarily a part of the words that Napoleon declared or fought. There's an interesting note by the side of Waterloo

that says single-day battle, kind of single-day casualties, even though all other battles that they list are also single-day. So I don't know why they pointed to that out. And, of course, there is a long debate in academic circles to what degree you Napoleon's shoulder the responsibility for the Napoleonic wars when we know that, if nothing else, that these are the wars that,

if you kind of look closely, were declared by the coalitions against Napoleon. So 1803, Britain declares war on France. 1805, it's the Austrians and the coalition partnership declaring war on him, 1809, saying, it's not to say that we're excusing Bonaparte, right? Bonaport's, but it's also a statement on Bonaport's skill as a diplomat and a statesman

that he exploits peacetime to such a degree and to such an extent that he leaves the opponents no other chance but to essentially go out, to resort to this extreme measure of a war, which then they lose and suffer consequences, right? And so I think this is where the big question of the thing I have is, Ridley Scott, an amazing director responsible for movies that I adore, the man who creates the worlds like alien, like Blade Runner, for all the historical inaccuracies of Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, or the last duel, these are the movies I adore, right, then gives us this thing. And I'm not sure what to make of it.

Is it him just giving up halfway through? Is it the problem of a script? Because he did have great artists and he has a lot of money. And for some reason, the final product is not where his others movies are. For me, it's Black Hawk Down, I think, is one of the great movies of... Oh, my God, yeah. Post-Cold War Combat, the Wars of the Unipolar Moment, if you will. Truly, truly a fantastic movie.

That is, if you read the book that it's based on you know, in its detail. Mark Bowden's, I guess, right? Yeah, Mark Bowden, exactly. Excellent book, too. Really brilliant book. And a fine, fine piece of reportage that obviously being what it is is devoted to try to figure out the truth of each incident as it occurred.

The movie, then, you know, it conflates characters, it moves things around, as you would expect. But I have never heard anyone suggest that it is somehow emotionally untrue or thematically untrue to the story that Bowden reports or to the extent that we can know, you know, what actually happened. And that seems to be the charge here that it's somehow, it's not just that it mixes and the facts up and takes licenses, which, you know, realistically you'd expect any movie to do. It's that it's somehow spiritually untrue to the period. And I think, yeah, and usually, and this, I think, I think I'm sure you've heard this, is that usually the complaint is that in most, you know, history is oftentimes so diverse and multifaceted and interesting.

that you don't even need to invent anything. That if you simply kind of show what actually happened, you know, people might, you know, you will, I think, surprise people more than by inventing anything. Austerlitz is a brilliant battle from start to finish without adding or inventing anything. And yet in the movie, it is so far removed from what actually happened that has to make it almost unrecognized.

And so once again, what's the point of it? All right, or Waterloo. There's a million different ways you can reenact Waterloo, but the last one I expected was with trenches. So why would you have trenches of Waterloo? Why would they have trenches with a bodice, those wooden pole sticking out of it in the Napoleonic, right, in the Napoleonic warfare? warfare. So is it for visuals? I mean, there is a question to ask, right? Why would anyone spend time digging something like this on the day of the battle after torrential rain or in the torrential

rain? And so those are the kind of questions that I don't know why Scott chose to proceed, but it creates a kind of disjointed narrative. It raises quite a lot, a lot questions. Speaking of Waterloo, I personally, there are several of these capsule performances that I I found, again, in my uninformed way, I think all I know really about the Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley is the Keegan, the John Keegan chapter on him and Master, Mask of Man. Years and years ago, I read it. Yeah. It's stuck with me.

I found it pretty compelling as a, I think it's sort of unrecognizable. Belvoir. I thought he was excellent. I thought Talerand, an actor who I don't think I've ever seen in anything else. I've, to prepare for this, I will confess to a total failure here. I tried to watch the A&E miniseries. about Napoleon for a few years ago.

2000, yeah. Yeah, Colin got me a copy. Yeah. And I got about 30 minutes into it. And I just, again, I will stick to my original aesthetic judgment.

I found this movie for all of its faults, which we are currently discussing it. I'm like, watchable. I, that A&E miniseries is unwatchable. Unwatchable. And the John Malkovich

tally, the preposterous figure, you're always sort of walking around with this whispering smile. And the reality, of course, of Talleyrand is that somehow he pulls off this series of personal, coups in his personal career in addition to Coos diplomatically, he manages to stay in service to a series of regimes you would think would not all employ the same person. And I thought the performance in this, I regret, I can't come up with the actor's name.

The performance in this film, I thought, had a kind of sophistication to it and a confidence matched with calculation that I found quite plausible. I felt like if I had met the real Talley, it might have looked a little bit like this. I don't know what you think about that. No, actually, I think I would agree with you in terms of a portrayal because I think the Talleyron in in in Malkovich's performance, I just don't buy, you know, don't buy it as such. So I don't know, it's just a issue maybe not believing that Talleyan could be it. I think in this new movie, in Ridley Scott's movie, it's Paul Reese who is, I think he's a Welsh actor who portrays Taleran. And I think he's a better choice for it.

So it's just, it doesn't, but unfortunately he doesn't get, I think, enough screen time. And maybe in a better script, you could have explored the relationship, which is a fascinating relationship between Talley and Napoleon, where you see both loathing and hating each other, but at the same time having a respect for each other's skills, for each other's talents, which is why Napoleon employs him for so long and why Talleyran, you know, for many years later, spoke highly of Napoleon. But in this movie, he doesn't get treatment beside the cursive, kind of a couple of statements that he makes.

And, of course, the last scene where Talleyan is reading, berating Napoleon in 1814 is a forcical. So it's not true. So you mentioned that Austerlitz and Maudilu both simply don't live up, that they fail not only as a matter of historical accuracy, but actually an attempt to be historically accurate would have been more compelling. Absolutely. In the reality.

Talk a bit about, you know, and I realize this question could be, you know, an entire semester's course. So take it wherever you would like to take it. But yeah, what, if all you know about Napoleon's way of war is the battle scenes that you see in this movie, what have you missed? What is it about Napoleon? The movie does seem to concede that that is the one thing that Napoleon deserves credit for as being a master tactician. What is it about Napoleon's war fighting that was so distinctive and important? Except that it is, the movie doesn't really show why he is an ascetician as such, right? And Austroletes, I think, is the most fleshed out of the three battles that Scott chose to portray.

But the way he treats Australis is wrong. To start with, Napoleon never conducted reconnaissance in disguise and kind of weighed out on his own. Second, the whole sequence where Napoleon lures the Allies on the frozen lake and then fires cannons to drown them in the frozen lake, it never happened. What did happen is that Napoleon spent several days examining the terrain between the city of Brune and the village of Auschwitz. He understood the tactical advantages that the local terrain offered him, including the heights, the cold process. Heights, which in a kind of prevailing tactical doctrine you would have held in order to have a superiority of the position that would have allowed you to dominate the valley. But Napoleon, in the remarkable decision, chooses to give it to the enemy, surrender it to

the enemy to mislead the enemy into thinking that he's weak. He, Napoleon also knows that morning, that the morning, you know, December, late November, early December mornings are covered, the area is covered in the mist. So he takes full advantage of that to conceal his army. And most crucially, you know, if you read his correspondence, you see how he anticipates what the enemy will do, right? And say on the battle, then he anticipates that the enemy will try to attack him on the right flank and then he waits for it. a moment to the counter strike, split the opponents into two parts, and then smash and destroy them. And only at that moment, at that they're on 4 o'clock in the afternoon, when the Russians and Austrians are already demolished, that they're fleeing from the battlefield, and some of them have to pass by the ponds, not even the lake, by the ponds. And as they do, Napoleon targets them with artillery. Now, a myth then emerges from there that these, you know, these Russians, this

Austrians all drowned there. But interestingly, there's documents that showed that Napoleon after the battle demanded draining these ponds, and they drained them and they found three bodies. They did find 28 cannons abandoned by the shores. They found 150 carcasses of horses, but only three bodies, right? And so to take this master plan that Napoleon had about kind of bringing the enemy down, splintering their center, kind of to dictate the terms. to simply bring them onto the frozen lake and then drowning them,

it just, it doesn't convey tactical brilliance that Napoleon really shows here. And what, you know, one thing that struck me about Waterloo in particular, though I guess you could see it a little bit in the Austerlitz scene, is it looked like Gladiator, like quite like, I haven't done a shot-by-shot analysis, but, you know, the big battle that Gladiator opens with also a sort of, I don't think I've ever heard anyone do too much criticism of Gladiator for its historical characters. Obviously, if anything, probably even more widely, it definitely is more widely off the market

Napoleon, right? I'm pretty sure it doesn't end it that way for Cometheus in Roman history. But that battle, who knows what battle is meant to be, you know, you have the two sort of long lines of troops facing each other. You have a lot of wooden stakes, just like you had in the Ridley Scott Napoleon. There was a sort of similar rhythm to the scene. And so he clearly has in mind, you know, sort of a rhythm of battle scenes that works. So it's, you know, he's imposing some sort of tactical vision that's downstream of his sort of aesthetic system.

But beyond, I guess, just my question is as much in terms of his own tactical decision-making and suppleness, you know, what was Napoleon's system of war fighting the movie can't even really begin to capture? What were his, what were his innovations? Well, so if we stick kind of to Waterloo, so the way Scott portrays it is that it's a straightforward kind of open field, rolling plane, right? Heights on one side, heights on the other, and then there's two sides converge. You probably remember that one moment when there is this long, long line of men, British line, almost like two miles long. they fire against French, French in their line, and then they kind of close in and fire. That is not how Napoleonic Warfare fall, right? Neither side, neither the British or the French fought in that particular way. The way they fought was through a combination of a column, line,

combined arms. At no point would you have seen something like what the Rickles Scott shows after the discharge of the volley, the two sides then converge and you have this hand-to-hand melee, confused, chaotic, with horses and cavalry and infantry all thrown together. No, that's not how these battles were fought. To start with, the units would have maintained their formation. In a contrary to the popular perception, very rarely, you would actually have hand-to-hand combat,

especially with his bayonet charges. Usually one chart, one side will try to charge, the other one will retreat, regroup, and then fight back. And then you have things like, I mean, at Waterloo, one of the iconic moments of Waterloo is, of course, the defense of the Chateau-Hulgamel, which was on the British right flank. And here you have the Man of the King's German Legion, 95th Rifles. I mean, this is some of the most heroic moments of the British military history. you probably've seen this painting of these men holding the farm gates against the French who are trying to get in. None of it. It just doesn't exist.

You know, worse than this. The movie shows the Prussians arriving from the direction where Hulggemont is supposed to be, right? I mean, it's like all the heroism is gone. Prussians then arrive at the last moment as if to save the day. So I don't know. I think overall, clearly Scott's interest was not. not to show any resemblance of, no effort kind of made to resemble what the battles would have been like. Some of it is reduced it into ridiculous.

Like at Waterloo and the British form square and the French are kept circling around it, right? Are we at a state fair on a carnival? I mean, that scene is really awkward, right? they're constantly moving around in a circle and being the British keep shooting it. Of course, cavalry charges don't take place like that. What was the sort of standard countermeasure, well, I guess the square itself is a countermeasure to cavalry. What is then the countermeasure to the countermeasure? What does cavalry do in the light of a square?

Retreat and regroup. So they are not going to just keep circling around it because they know that it's besides, in the movie, Scott suggests that some of the squares were broken when we know that it's not, right? And now there is kind of this embellished views where the horse falls and flips, right? I mean, considering how the weight of the horse, that's physically simply possible, right? So, but these are quibbles, right? We can quibble with Bondur-Chicks Waterloo, but at least there, they are visually conveyed in such a way as you're buying it a story. You're buying the story of the heroism of men on both sides or the sacrifice.

Here, it's all an afterthought. And that thing, you know, with a sniper next to Wellington at a time when those such things. It says that. And does he say something like, take the shot? It was something like that. Am I clear to take the shot? That's not in, you know, that's like America, cliche, you know, the SWAT special operations language from the current era.

Right? I love the fact that he didn't listen to Wellington ultimately. Yeah, yeah, he takes a shot in the end. Yeah, yeah, totally. There was another moment, and it was so off. And it like there was almost like an embarrassed titter in the theater when it was said. I'm actually curious if this is historical because it felt so off. And it's the exchange between Napoleon and I guess it's the British ambassador

relatively early in the board. Yeah, the boats. Yeah, the boats. He says you think it really isn't as crude is you think you're so special because you have votes. I think that is actually the line. Yeah. It's so wrong. It is.

Did he actually say it? So the scene actually happened because it is in 1803 and there is Napoleon deliberately. Actually, we know that it was a scene that he wanted to kind of perform, so to speak, for the public consumption, where he berates Whitworth and kind of provokes kind of he wants the reaction from me. He wants to show that he means what he said. But of course, he never said boats. And considering Napoleon, you know, there's a lot of things we can say about him, but he's an educated guy. He's a smart guy.

The last thing he would have said is boat. He knows full well what those boats are capable of. Right, right, right, right. The movie portrays, I mean, as you point out, there's really only two characters in the movie. There's Napoleon and Josephine. And the relationship is the subject of the movie. I mean, that's really what the movie is about.

And it's portrayed to the point where her behavior and his responses to her behavior are central to his decision making and prove to be, you know, of great historical significance. He's portrayed as coming back from Egypt because of reports of her infidelity. He is portrayed as coming back. Elba. You know, essentially because he wants to see her. To what extent is there any truth to this? And to what extent is it all made up? I'll start with a second one.

So Napoleon goes, he abdicates on April 6th of 1814, signs the Treaty of Fontainebleau guaranteeing his exile to Elba and two million francs, which all of this is mentioned in the movie on April 11. And then he goes into exile. By the time he reaches Elba, Josephine is sick and she dies at the end of May of 1814. So that means Napoleon could not have simply left Elba. in order to see her because she was already dead. That'll do it. That'll do it. Let's put that aside.

And of course, in Egypt, he's told indeed that scene where one of his friends or officers tells him about Joseph being disloyal, we know that that did happen. And we know that it did provoke a lot of reaction in Napoleon. He was absolutely heartbroken. But the way he dealt with it was not by quitting and returning. he did it by starting his own affair with Pauline Fouret, the wife of one of the junior officers in Napoleon's army, who became kind of notorious as Napoleon's Cleopatra. And it is only later on, right, when Napoleon in 1799 in August learns about the military setbacks that France has experienced during the war second coalition that he decides to return. But I did like that scene where he comes back and Josephine is not at home and then she rushes back home.

she finds all her stuff out, I think that is a powerful scene and that did take place. So you mentioned, excuse me, so you mentioned Bonda Chook's Waterloo, which I confess I have not seen, I've seen his war in peace, but I've not seen Waterloo as a better cinematic treatment of the period. What else would you, I mean, we can expand it out a bit from Napoleon as well, you know, on this theme of what historians believe filmmakers owe. their audiences, what films either about the Napoleonic era or elsewhere really to you have succeeded by the standard that you set there? Thank you. And again, this is where I think one of the biggest, at least on social media where I was kind of expressing my commentary and critical commentary,

I got a pushback that, hey, this is, you know, this is not documentary. I know it's not documentary. And I don't expect it always to be documentary like this. But it's just, this movie is not working because it's just not a good movie. On the other hand, we have plenty of good movies that we can watch and enjoy them despite all the artistic license that has been taken. So, for example, one of my favorite movies or Napoleonic movies is called Monsieur N. And Monsieur N is a relatively recent movie. I think it was done in 2003 by French director Antoine Conn. and it essentially reimagines what might have happened if Napoleon organized a conspiracy to escape from San Helena.

It's a wonderful movie. It's both the script is brilliant, the dialogues are brilliant, all the characters are done right. And of course, the ending is completely a historical. Spoiler, he escapes, but it works. Or another one, again, one of my favorite ones is Emperor. new clothes. That's a, it's a comedy about, again, Napoleon escaping from San Helena coming to Paris and becoming the most successful baker in all of Paris. I mean, I've never seen him. With Ian Holm. I mean, that guy is, of course, he played, I think he's the only one

who played Napoleon twice. And it's a brilliant movie. Another thing, a good movie that I would recommend would be, for example, it's a French movie, though. It's an unfortunately. I don't think it's been translated in English, but it's Edward Molinado's The Supper. And again, takes a lot of liberties. It's a, it's a movie about two men, two guys, Foucher, Napoleon's Minister of Police, and Talley Ron, the guy that you've talked about, Minister of Foreign Affairs, sitting down for a dinner after Napoleon is overthrown. And they essentially are having a long conversation about what happened during the empire.

And there is no big battles, no big scenes. but through their conversation, through them kind of trying to outweigh and out match each other, I think you get better glimpse of what it was like to be with Napoleon than through two and a half hours of Ridley Scott's movie. And there are other movies that we can mention, for example, a new release, a V-Dog, again, a French production with a wonderful Vincent Cancel. Again, based on real-life story of a man who effectively creates the modern police detective service in Paris, Francois Vidalc,

and it shows kind of Paris under underworld, right, during the polya era and how these different gangs operated and how police tried to control and restrain them. Plague of historical, historical, artistic license, but overall it's a fun movie. Well, Alex, this has been fun. I feel like we would have more to talk about had it been, in your estimation, a brilliant movie.

But it seems like the best we can do is point folks to other examples from the period. Oh, wait. I think Stephen Spielberg is working on the seven-part miniseries. Really? Yeah, for HBO. Oh, amazing. For HBO.

Miniseries, go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, no, no. I think you were about to say that miniseries is a good format for this, right? Yeah. I'm currently watching The Winds of War. Have you ever had the pleasure of this? The television television of Herman Wilkes, amazing set of novels, which I first became aware of.

These are World War II dramatizations that pull off a difficult trick where you have the intermingling of fictional and historical characters and somehow succeeds. And you're watching it and you feel like it's not going to work. And then somehow it keeps working. And actually, my first encounter with Herman Woke was as a relatively young reader, I came across this review by Gore Vidal that Vidal wrote in the 70s And he was this sort of show-offy piece where he reads the top 10 New York Times bestsellers

and provides sort of generally speaking searing demolitions of each one of them as he goes. And he gets to woke and he starts making fun of it. This would have either been wins of war or war and remembers. I can't remember which one it picks up. And he sort of begins demolishing it and making fun of it. And then he kind of starts admitting, you know, through this capsule of the longer piece that, you know, I just can't help myself. I kind of like it.

Like I kind of want to keep reading it. It's pretty enjoyable. And that's true of the books and of the miniseries, which also combines some phenomenal performances. Robert Mitchum as the main, the naval officer. Victor Henry, yeah. Victor Henry, exactly. That's right, huh?

It is a towering and amazing performance. And then several other of the performances, though, just do not work. They just objectively fail. His daughter-in-law, who's played by then, I guess, the sort of world-famous Allie McGraw, who was a huge movie star, but it just fails. It is not a successful performance. And yet, the whole thing is quite watchable.

And the mini-theories format, to the original point, does kind of give you this space to explore things that are just inherently complex. You know, how the war starts and how it affects individuals is just extremely complicated question to unfold the answer to. And, you know, 13 hours is about right as a start. Yeah. I completely agree. Yeah.

And I think what, what, would Renly Scott or Spielberg, again, if I'm in there, if I can take that kind of be so presumptuous as to offer an advice, is not necessarily to look at Napoleon through kind of prism of his life, but do something like Rome did, right, for HBO, where you take characters who are close enough to these remarkable events and then reenact the life of, you know, Caesar, but through the eyes of those two soldiers. And same can be done with Napoleon, right? Choose one of his either of ministers. or just soldiers, officers, and then retrace his footsteps through that because there is so much that you can do with this because it's one of the most well-studied periods with the enormous

amount of material. So when Ridley Scott asks us, you know, with historians were there, no, we were not there in person, but we were there because we have wealth of material surviving from it. That's right. I should have cited at the top of this recording because I'm not a military historian, of course. And so I feel like I stand slightly outside of this, but he did call out your profession directly. There was direct fire from Ridley Scott to the military historians and historians of the world as to whether or not you have a right to comment on his work. Although I would not say it a fire, it's a mist fire because he clearly doesn't understand what historians actually do. Well, so there's this Spielberg project. Alex, you have to get one of these consulting gigs and actually

get in there in shape. They're eminently more quality. people than me, but yes, if they call me, I will do it for free. I recently, we haven't released it yet, but I recently interviewed Don Miller, author of Masters of the Air, which is coming out as a miniseries here in just a few months. Then he served as a consultant on that, and as I gather as a consultant on the Pacific as well, back when it came out and obviously had a, had a delightful. What you have to do, really, is sell one of your books to the studios, Alex. You got to, you must know people or people who know people.

you got to get in there and make it. If anyone knows, people, it's you. Help me so I can help you. I'm not going to. Unfortunately, the movie industry is not something I am particularly well connected in. No, I'm excited about it. So in, again, Spielberg, knowing his the quality of the work he produces, so I have a higher, higher hopes for it. This has been a pleasure.

It's kind of a fun episode, but we've, you and I have recorded quite serious episodes before. I would point listeners, I enjoyed both of our prior recordings, but I would point listeners to our conversation about Kutuzov, and in particular, we have this sort of discussion as part of that episode on Kutuzov's strategic thinking in the course of 1812 that, to me, and don't get embarrassed here, but to me was, I think, one of the better examples of this show serving its purpose, which is to give people, you know, I think that the inattention shown to military history and to strategy is actually dangerous, because the world is a dangerous place and I don't think that people are prepared to be responsible citizens in the face of how

the world is actually functioning in 2023 without some understanding of military history and strategy. And I thought your analysis of Kutuzov's thinking and the sort of more universal or at least broader principles that that conversation sheds light on is really what I try to make this show about. And so I'm grateful to you for coming back a couple times over the years and listeners, should go and check out that episode and check out your work. What do you work on right now? What are you writing about?

I am finishing up a new study on Louisiana Purchase and kind of setting it in a wider context of imperial kind of rivalries. And that's my big project that probably will come out next year. And another project that I'm pursuing is kind of understanding how wars are paid for, especially during Napoleonic and a late 18, early 19th century. the close kind of incestuous relationship between finance and war. Amazing. Alexander Micah Berezei, thank you so much for your time.

I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.