tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/napoleon-14858/articlesNapoleon – The Conversation2023-12-11T13:13:40Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2188782023-12-11T13:13:40Z2023-12-11T13:13:40ZThe Napoléon that Ridley Scott and Hollywood won’t let you see<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564552/original/file-20231208-29-g15j8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C6%2C1388%2C1023&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The 1802 Battle of Crête-à-Pierrot was part of Napoléon's effort to retake Haiti − then known as Saint-Domingue − and reestablish slavery in the colony.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Haitian_Revolution.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Critics have been raking Ridley Scott’s new movie about Napoléon Bonaparte over the coals for its many <a href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/heres-why-historians-are-not-a-fan-of-ridley-scotts-napoleon/articleshow/105540885.cms">historical inaccuracies</a>.</p>
<p>As a scholar of French colonialism and slavery who studies <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/tropics-of-haiti-9781781381854">historical fiction</a>, or the fictionalization of real events, I was much less bothered by most of the liberties taken in “Napoleon” – although shooting cannons at the pyramids <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/science/napoleon-movie-ridley-scott-egypt-pyramid.html">did seem like one indulgence too far</a>. </p>
<p>I have <a href="https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5292/">argued elsewhere</a> that historical fictions need not necessarily be judged by adherence to facts. Instead, inventiveness, creativity, ideology and, ultimately, storytelling power are what matter most.</p>
<p>But in lieu of offering a fresh and imaginative take on Napoléon, Scott’s film rehearsed the well-known <a href="https://www.euronews.com/culture/2023/12/04/battle-of-austerlitz-reenactment-draws-record-numbers-of-participants">battles of Austerlitz</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Wagram">Wagram</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/world/europe/200-years-after-battle-some-hard-feelings-remain.html">Waterloo</a>, while erasing perhaps the most momentous – and consequential – of Bonaparte’s military campaigns. </p>
<p>As with <a href="https://collider.com/great-napoleon-movies/#39-love-and-death-39-1975">every other Napoléon movie</a>, Scott’s version will leave viewers with no understanding of the <a href="https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/all-devils-are-here">genocidal war to restore slavery</a> that Bonaparte waged against Black revolutionaries in the French colony of Saint-Domingue – what’s known as Haiti today. </p>
<p>To me, leaving out this history is akin to making a movie about Hitler without mentioning the Holocaust. </p>
<h2>‘I am for the whites, because I am white’</h2>
<p>France’s seemingly eternal on-again, off-again war with Great Britain did not change the immediate boundaries of either country. These wars were often fought over land in the American hemisphere and included a historic contest over Martinique, a small island in the Caribbean, whose fate had far-reaching repercussions for slavery.</p>
<p>In 1794, following three years of slave rebellions in Saint-Domingue – events now known as <a href="https://theconversation.com/inside-the-kingdom-of-haiti-the-wakanda-of-the-western-hemisphere-108250">the Haitian Revolution</a> – the French government <a href="https://revolution.chnm.org/d/291">abolished slavery</a> in all French overseas territories. </p>
<p>Martinique, however, was not included: The French had recently lost the island to the British <a href="https://www.historytoday.com/archive/martinique-british-occupation-1794-1802">in battle</a>.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/L_Europe_pendant_le_consulat_et_l_empire/9MROAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=RA1-PA234&printsec=frontcover">a 1799 speech to the French government</a>, Bonaparte explained that if he had been in Martinique at the time the French lost the colony, he would have been on the side of the British – because they never dared to abolish slavery. </p>
<p>“I am for the whites, because I am white,” Bonaparte said. “I have no other reason, and this is the right one. How could anyone have granted freedom to Africans, to men who had no civilization.” </p>
<p>Once he rose to power, Bonaparte signed the 1802 <a href="https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/treaty-amiens">Treaty of Amiens</a> with the British, which returned Martinique to French rule. Afterward, he passed a law permitting slavery to continue in Martinique. And in <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9tablissement_de_l%27esclavage_par_Napol%C3%A9on_Bonaparte">July 1802</a>, Bonaparte formally reinstated slavery on Guadeloupe, another French colony in the Caribbean. Slavery then persisted in France’s overseas empire until 1848, long after his death in 1821.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in Saint-Domingue, Bonaparte <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k62963447/f210.item">authorized</a> his <a href="https://unsansculotte.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/repression_revolt_and_racial_politics_ma.pdf">generals</a> to <a href="http://www.manioc.org/gsdl/collect/patrimon/tmp/NAN13043.html">eliminate the majority</a> of the adult Black population, and he signed a law to <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k62963462/f457.image">reinstate the slave trade</a> to the island.</p>
<h2>A Black general’s rise</h2>
<p>For the mission to succeed, Bonaparte’s troops would have to contend with a formerly enslaved man called <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/loverture-toussaint-1743-1803/">Toussaint Louverture</a>, who had become a prominent leader during the early years of the Haitian Revolution. </p>
<p>After general emancipation, when the Black population had become citizens – rather than slaves – of France, Louverture joined the French army. He went on to play a key role in helping France combat and eventually defeat Spanish and British forces, who had since invaded the colony in an attempt to take it over.</p>
<p>Recognizing his military prowess, the French consistently promoted Louverture until he became the second Black general in a French army – after <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/people-global-african-history/dumas-thomas-alexandre-1762-1806/">General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas</a>, father of the famous French novelist Alexandre Dumas. (Thomas-Alexandre Dumas incidentally appears in the film as a character with a nonspeaking part.) </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564546/original/file-20231208-18-oomc5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Illustration of Black man dressed in military regalia opposite a man in religious garb. They are surrounded by soldiers and citizens, and a god-like figure looks over them from the clouds." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564546/original/file-20231208-18-oomc5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564546/original/file-20231208-18-oomc5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564546/original/file-20231208-18-oomc5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564546/original/file-20231208-18-oomc5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564546/original/file-20231208-18-oomc5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564546/original/file-20231208-18-oomc5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564546/original/file-20231208-18-oomc5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A print of Toussaint Louverture holding a copy of the Constitution of 1801.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.31021/">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1801, as a testament to his growing authority, Louverture issued a <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/haiti/1801/constitution.htm">famous constitution</a> that appointed him governor-general of the whole island. Yet he still professed fealty to France even as the colony became semi-autonomous. </p>
<p>By then, however, Bonaparte had assumed power as first consul of France – and had made it his mission to “<a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k62963462/f330.image">annihilate the government of the Blacks</a>” in Saint-Domingue so he could bring back slavery.</p>
<p>In January 1802, Bonaparte sent his brother-in-law Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc to Saint-Domingue with tens of thousands of French troops. </p>
<p><a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k62963462/f424.image">Bonaparte’s instructions</a>? </p>
<p>Arrest Louverture and reinstate slavery. </p>
<h2>The fall of Louverture</h2>
<p>One of the film’s writers, <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/awards/consider-this/ridley-scott-napoleon-writer-david-scarpa-true-false-1234931486/#:%7E:text=There's%20a%20dangerous%20allure%20to,affair%20with%20his%20wife%2C%20right%3F">David Scarpa</a>, said Napoléon represents for him “the classic example of the benevolent dictator.” </p>
<p>If that Napoléon ever did exist, Louverture never met him.</p>
<p>In June 1802, Napoléon’s army arrested Louverture and deported him to France. As Louverture wasted away in a French prison, Bonaparte refused to put Louverture on trial. Throughout his incarceration, the guards at the jail denied Louverture food, water, heat and medical care. Louverture subsequently <a href="https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/wrongful-death-toussaint-louverture#:%7E:text=On%20the%20morning%20of%207,captive%20for%20nearly%20eight%20months.">starved and froze to death</a>.</p>
<p>With Louverture gone, Napoléon’s army operated with more bloodlust than ever before. In addition to conventional weapons, his troops fought the freedom fighters with <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/An_Historical_Account_of_the_Black_Empir/CTpAAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22assumed+a+complexion+more+sanguinary+and+terrible+than+can+be+conceived+among+civilized+people%22&pg=PA326&printsec=frontcover">floating gas chambers</a>, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Literary_Magazine_and_American_Regis/9BwAAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%E2%80%9CSeven+or+eight+hundred+blacks,+and+men+of+colour,+were+seized+upon+in+the+streets,+in+the+public+places,+in+the+very+houses%22&pg=PA447&printsec=frontcover">mass drownings</a> and <a href="https://www.sas.upenn.edu/%7Ecavitch/pdf-library/Johnson_dogs_and_torture.pdf">dog attacks</a> – all in the name of restoring slavery.</p>
<p>The Black freedom fighters, now calling themselves the armée indigène, led by Haiti’s founder <a href="https://theconversation.com/meet-haitis-founding-father-whose-black-revolution-was-too-radical-for-thomas-jefferson-101963">General Jean-Jacques Dessalines</a>, definitively defeated French forces in the historic <a href="https://ageofrevolution.org/200-object/the-battle-of-vertieres/">Battle of Vertières</a> on Nov. 18, 1803. On Jan. 1, 1804, they <a href="https://haitidoi.com/doi/#:%7E:text=IT%20is%20not%20enough%20to,act%20of%20national%20authority%2C%20to">officially declared independence</a> from France and changed the name of the island to Haiti.</p>
<h2>‘A fatal move’</h2>
<p>If the filmmakers had included Napoléon’s failed mission to restore slavery in Saint-Domingue, it could have served as a propitious moment to tie the movie back to one of its only coherent arcs: Napoléon’s undying love for <a href="https://www.history.com/news/napoleon-josephine-bonaparte-love-story-marriage-divorce">Joséphine de Beauharnais</a>, his first wife.</p>
<p>In one memorable scene in the film, Joséphine tells Bonaparte that he is nothing without her, and he agrees.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Painting of woman with short brown hair wearing two necklackes and a white ruffled blouse." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564547/original/file-20231208-29-3a2n46.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564547/original/file-20231208-29-3a2n46.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564547/original/file-20231208-29-3a2n46.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564547/original/file-20231208-29-3a2n46.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564547/original/file-20231208-29-3a2n46.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564547/original/file-20231208-29-3a2n46.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564547/original/file-20231208-29-3a2n46.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Joséphine de Beauharnais advised Napoléon to let Saint-Domingue operate as a semi-autonomous colony.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Jos%C3%A9phine_de_Beauharnais_vers_1809_Gros.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, Joséphine’s posthumously published memoir suggests that Bonaparte disregarded his wife’s most prescient counsel. Joséphine wrote that she urged her husband not to send an expedition to Saint-Domingue, prophesying this as a “fatal move” that “would forever take this beautiful colony away from France.” She <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9636609r/f112.image">advised Bonaparte</a>, alternatively, to “keep Toussaint Louverture there. That is the man required to govern the Blacks.” </p>
<p>She subsequently asked him, “What complaints could you have against this leader of the Blacks? He has always maintained correspondence with you; he has done even more, he has given you, in some sense, his children for hostages.” </p>
<p>Louverture’s children had attended Paris’ storied <a href="https://www.persee.fr/doc/dhs_0070-6760_2000_num_32_1_2364">Collège de la Marche</a>, alongside the children of other prominent Black Saint-Domingue officials. Although Bonaparte ended up sending Louverture’s children back to the colony with Leclerc, another Black general from Saint-Domingue who fought to oppose slavery’s reinstatement was not so lucky. </p>
<p>Just before Bonaparte’s troops began their genocidal war in the name of restoring slavery, Haiti’s future king, <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/the-king-of-haiti-and-the-dilemmas-of-freedom-in-a-colonised-world">General Henry Christophe</a>, sent his son, François Ferdinand, to the Collège de la Marche. </p>
<p>After the Haitian revolutionaries defeated France and declared the island independent in 1804, Bonaparte ordered the school closed. Many of its Black students, like young Ferdinand, were then thrown into orphanages. The abandoned child <a href="https://archive.org/details/rflexionspolitiq00vast/page/6/mode/2up?q=Ferdinand">died alone in July 1805</a> at the age of 11.</p>
<p>Only at the end of his life, during his second exile on the remote island of St. Helena, did Napoléon express remorse for any of this. </p>
<p>“I can only reproach myself for the attempt on that colony,” the <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4710580&seq=533&q1=Toussaint">defunct emperor</a> said. “I should have contented myself with governing it through Toussaint.”</p>
<h2>A missed opportunity</h2>
<p>By including some of this rich material, Ridley Scott could have made a truly original film with historical and contemporary relevance. </p>
<p>After all, Napoléon’s history of trying to stop the Haitian Revolution – the most significant revolution for freedom the modern world has ever seen – has never been depicted on a Hollywood screen.</p>
<p>Instead, hiding behind beautiful cinematography, magnificent costuming and Vanessa Kirby’s masterful portrayal of Joséphine, Scott ultimately produced an unimaginative film about the already well-trodden military successes and failures of the man depicted as having literally crowned himself France’s emperor.</p>
<p>If “Napoleon” doesn’t exactly glorify its main subject, its creators certainly seemed to sympathize with the man whose wars were responsible for more than 3,000,000 deaths, as the film’s final caption reads. </p>
<p>The film did not say whether that number includes the tens of thousands of Black people Napoléon’s army killed in Saint-Domingue.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218878/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marlene Daut does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Leaving out the history of Napoléon’s brutal subjugation of Haiti is akin to making a movie about Hitler without mentioning the Holocaust.Marlene Daut, Professor of French and African American Studies, Yale UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2189652023-12-08T14:55:12Z2023-12-08T14:55:12ZNapoleon: ignore the griping over historical details, Ridley Scott’s film is a meditation on the madness of power<p>While Ridley Scott’s Napoleon has been causing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/25/napoleon-film-ridley-scott-critics-miitary-expert-battle-scenes">consternation among some historians</a>, they are overlooking the fact that the historical record does actually support the film’s narrative in terms of one man taking power and shaping a new order during times of revolution and chaos.</p>
<p>Set against the bloody backdrop of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/French-Revolution">French revolution</a> (1789-1799), Empress Josephine – a beautifully judged performance by Vanessa Kirby – who narrowly escaped <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maximilien-Robespierre">Robespierre’s</a> guillotine, loves Napoleon for his power and image. </p>
<p>In turn, the general (played by a much older Joaquin Phoenix – Napoleon at this point was 30, Phoenix is 49, but is so good it is easy to overlook this detail that had historians squawking), is obsessed with Josephine. The film unfolds in an unpredictable narrative, laying bare the poignant letters that expose the complex love/hate relationship they share. </p>
<p>But Napoleon’s Egyptian trip is interrupted by rumours of Josephine’s infidelity, compelling him to return home in secret. He justifies this with the need to monitor the turbulence that threatens the cohesion of France. </p>
<p>By illuminating Napoleon in different shades – sometimes as a passionate being devoted to his love for Josephine, and sometimes as a military genius leading his troops – Scott manages to bring us into the intimacy of power. This comes at a time when France faces the temptation to turn back the clock and deviate from its revolutionary ideals by <a href="https://www.cairn.info/revue-napoleonica-la-revue-2008-2-page-16.htm">restoring the <em>ancien régime</em></a> (the system of prior to the French Revolution).</p>
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<h2>Picking his moments</h2>
<p>The film avoids descending into excessive carnage and instead maintains a fast pace with carefully chosen scenes. The intention is not to reproduce every detail of Napoleon’s life, but rather to present the powerful French general who captured the world’s attention for more than 15 years.</p>
<p>On the geopolitical front, the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Siege-of-Toulon">battle of Toulon</a> was fought in 1793, where Napoleon surprised British troops by taking possession of their fleet. Then came the conquest of Egypt, whose scenes, no doubt exaggerated (such as the destruction of the pyramids and the opening of a sarcophagus), form part of Scott’s artistic interpretation.</p>
<p>When Napoleon’s hat rises above the corpse in the sarcophagus, it recalls <a href="https://theclassicreview.com/beginners-guides/mozart-requiem-a-beginners-guide/">Mozart’s Requiem</a> – death slowly approaching in these carefully choreographed moments of destruction. The <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Austerlitz">battle of Austerlitz</a> is admirably rendered, with Napoleon’s memorable strategic manoeuvre outsmarting the enemy by making them think there was a weak point where he could attack.</p>
<p>By letting the enemy surround him on both flanks, Napoleon used the strategic advantage to fight superior opposing armies. He then meets <a href="https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/biographies/alexander-i/">Tsar Alexander I</a>, portrayed by a young actor. Scott uses the age aspect to show the ambivalence of Napoleon’s relationship with power. Napoleon thinks he is dealing with a young tsar, less experienced and impressed by the large army.</p>
<p>The fact that they have a common enemy is not enough to unite them, and the director gives the viewer a powerful wink when Phoenix sits on the abandoned throne of Alexander I, a leader who preferred to burn his cities to starve the great army.</p>
<p>It is as if we have a second version of Scott’s Oscar-winning <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/may/12/3">Gladiator</a> here, with Napoleon as Emperor Commodus, unable to accept the rationality of reality and stubbornly stuck in a form of hubris that will claim the lives of more than <a href="https://www.history.com/news/napoleons-disastrous-invasion-of-russia">500,000 soldiers</a>.</p>
<p>The “spirit of the world”, as the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called Napoleon, is now no more than a shadow of his former self, aware that death is never far away. Scott chooses to show us a man who, despite the exaggerations, is sincere and direct, capable of winning the respect of soldiers and leading them into difficult battles.</p>
<h2>History and power</h2>
<p>The film is rich in subtle nuances, alternating between the tragic, the farcical and the grotesque, as power often manifests itself in this paradoxical arena. Karl Marx, a keen observer of the upheavals in France, showed no hesitation in his <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/">book on Napoleon’s coup d'état</a> in emphasising the tragic and comic recurrences in history.</p>
<p>A despot always creates successors, and history is found in parodic reincarnations. <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Napoleon-III-emperor-of-France">Napoleon III</a> was, for instance, a pale replica of Napoleon I, losing most of <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1861-1865/french-intervention">his wars</a>. In fact, Napoleon III tried to mimic the leadership style of Napoleon without being able to reconcile monarchist and republican forces. Although he succeeded in modernising the country, he never really established himself as a leading figure in the memory of the French people. </p>
<p>In Scott’s film, we can feel the postmodern hesitation between the old and the new world. Historically, Napoleon consolidated the gains of the Revolution, and the French are grateful to him for ending this phase. This prevented a complete return to the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/ancien-regime"><em>ancien régime</em></a>, despite the illusions of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Bourbon-Restoration">counter-revolutionary Restoration regime</a> after the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Congress-of-Vienna">Congress of Vienna</a>.</p>
<p>That is why this film is an absolute must-see. Through the fiction, sometimes surpassed by the brutal reality, the viewer is invited to immerse themselves in the madness of power and its irreversible impact on the fate of nations.</p>
<p>There is also an underlying appeal to not just read history to trace the past, but rather to understand the experience of power madness. Scott has undoubtedly created the film that <a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190808-was-napoleon-the-greatest-film-never-made">Stanley Kubrick dreamed of making</a>. Don’t miss it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218965/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christophe Premat does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Ridley Scott’s film is not intended to paint a romanticised image of Napoleon, but rather immerse the viewer in the dilemmas and complexities of power.Christophe Premat, Associate Professor in French Studies (cultural studies), head of the Centre for Canadian Studies, Stockholm UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2187172023-12-05T19:24:24Z2023-12-05T19:24:24ZNapoleon director Ridley Scott is calling on us historians to ‘get a life’ – and he has a point. Art is about more than historical facts<p>The release of Napoleon unleashed a torrent of objections to <a href="https://theconversation.com/did-napoleon-really-fire-at-the-pyramids-a-historian-explains-the-truth-behind-the-legends-of-ridley-scotts-biopic-217951">historical errors</a> in the movie. </p>
<p>Social media platforms were inundated with outrage – particularly from military historians – objecting from everything from details on uniforms to military formations. </p>
<p>These heated responses highlighted a more fundamental question: how should historians respond to creative works about history? Do historians have a public responsibility to apply their specialist knowledge to contest spurious claims about the past? Or should they simply respect creative licence, and let moviegoers have their fun? </p>
<p>Historical accuracy matters. But more important for historians should be whether creative works pass the test of authenticity: whether a creative work “rings true” to the historical context as a whole. </p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/did-napoleon-really-fire-at-the-pyramids-a-historian-explains-the-truth-behind-the-legends-of-ridley-scotts-biopic-217951">Did Napoleon really fire at the pyramids? A historian explains the truth behind the legends of Ridley Scott's biopic</a>
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<h2>Historical inaccuracies</h2>
<p>Whatever the cinematic opulence of Ridley Scott’s battle scenes and of the coronation of Napoleon and Josephine in 1804, historians have railed against a plethora of shortcomings and silences.</p>
<p>Careful makeup could not disguise 49-year-old Joaquin Phoenix as the 24-year-old lieutenant who first came to notice at the battle of Toulon in 1793. The portly, middle-aged Robespierre (Sam Troughton) bears no resemblance to the young revolutionary in appearance or style. Napoleon was not at the execution of Marie-Antoinette, nor did he order his troops to open fire on the Pyramids when in Egypt. </p>
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<p>There are many more serious objections one could make – notably of silences about Napoleon’s failure to suppress guerilla resistance in Spain and his disastrous attempt to reimpose slavery in French colonies in the Caribbean after its abolition in 1794. </p>
<p>But historical inaccuracies are nothing new. Similar, if less strident, objections may be made about all historical recreations on film or in theatre.</p>
<p>In the celebrated Australian movie The Dish (2000), Rob Sitch and his team located the first reception of news of the Apollo 11 moon landing and Neil Armstrong’s famous words about his “one small step” at the iconic Parkes Observatory rather than, as in reality, at the NASA stations at Honeysuckle Creek near Canberra and in California. Cinematic attraction trumped accuracy. </p>
<p>The 1982 film Breaker Morant is <a href="https://theconversation.com/pardon-me-but-breaker-morant-was-guilty-5025">still receiving criticism</a> for its lionising of Morant. The pivotal Battle of Stirling Bridge scene in Braveheart <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/bendzialdowski/inaccurate-films">didn’t include a bridge</a> in the film. Hospitals <a href="https://www.warhistoryonline.com/featured/endless-historical-errors-made-pearl-harbor-movie.html">weren’t a target</a> during the attack on Pearl Harbor.</p>
<p>Far more controversial was the scintillating musical Hamilton (2015) created by Lin-Manuel Miranda, based on the prize-winning 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563222/original/file-20231204-29-p27cgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Production image of Hamlet." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563222/original/file-20231204-29-p27cgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563222/original/file-20231204-29-p27cgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563222/original/file-20231204-29-p27cgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563222/original/file-20231204-29-p27cgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563222/original/file-20231204-29-p27cgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563222/original/file-20231204-29-p27cgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563222/original/file-20231204-29-p27cgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Hamilton cast people of colour as the Founding Fathers.</span>
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<p>Miranda explicitly recognised the musical was his interpretation of the founding of the United States from today’s perspective, deliberately cast non-white actors as the Founding Fathers and drew on musical styles ranging from R&B to soul and hip hop. </p>
<p>Despite his candour, <a href="https://screenrant.com/hamilton-historical-inaccuracies-wrong-true-story/">historians rushed</a> to point out errors, exaggerations and elisions. Hamilton’s contributions to the battlefield during the American War of Independence are exaggerated for effect. The Schuyler sisters articulate feminist ideas far from those they would have had at the time. While Miranda makes much of Hamilton’s opposition to slavery, Hamilton was personally involved in purchasing slaves and his wife came from a wealthy slave-owning family. </p>
<p>But artists create works within different genres to that of professional history. They are not creating documentaries that can be evaluated according to the historical conventions of the careful use of available evidence, and respect for ambiguity and uncertainty. These need to be considered, first and foremost, as creative works. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-alexander-hamiltons-deep-connections-to-slavery-reveal-about-the-need-for-reparations-today-151459">What Alexander Hamilton's deep connections to slavery reveal about the need for reparations today</a>
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<h2>A place for historians</h2>
<p>As <a href="https://variety.com/2023/film/news/ridley-scott-napoleon-historical-fact-checkers-1235781258/">Scott snapped</a>, the fact-checkers should “get a life!” and join the crowds enjoying his interpretation. </p>
<p>Instead of nitpicking the historical details of entertainment, perhaps historians should celebrate the fact that a long historical drama has been an immediate box office success, <a href="https://www.nme.com/en_au/news/film/napoleon-conquers-french-box-office-despite-vicious-reviews-3549901">including in France</a> – home to some of the film’s most vocal critics. </p>
<p>People who attend Napoleon, or any historically-based work of art, are more likely to be curious to know more rather than be gullible about its historical accuracy. </p>
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<span class="caption">Jacques-Louis David’s 1810 portrait highlighted the Napoleonic law code on his desk.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.46114.html">National Gallery of Art</a></span>
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<p>Of course, historians should not fall silent on failings of historical accuracy, but the central issue for historians should be authenticity. That is, a creative work should be evaluated by historians not so much on whether specific details are accurate but on whether the producer’s imagination captures the essence of the historical moment. </p>
<p>“Poetic licence” permits selectivity and exaggeration in the interests of evoking a deeper meaning. (Of course, that cannot excuse deliberate distortion unless, as in Miranda’s case, it is openly acknowledged.)</p>
<p>The real weakness of Napoleon is Scott’s failure to ground the Emperor’s motivations in the principles underpinning his 1804 legal code – which he saw as his greatest legacy. Scott’s focus on Napoleon’s brutality and megalomania means the explanation for his behaviour boils down to a mixture of murderous territorial greed and a pathetic need to impress Josephine, instead of a more complex impulse to also impose revolutionary reforms. </p>
<p>In their public comments, historians might focus more on the level of contextual veracity in creative works and leave their long lists of errors of detail to professional journals. The problem with the Napoleon movie is not so much its errors of detail as its lack of authenticity about what we know of the man and his world view.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/napoleon-bonaparte-features-in-60-000-books-and-more-than-100-films-does-ridley-scotts-stand-up-212782">Napoleon Bonaparte features in 60,000 books and more than 100 films – does Ridley Scott's stand up?</a>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter McPhee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Napoleon has unleashed a torrent of objections to the film’s historical errors. More important for historians should be whether creative works pass the test of authenticity.Peter McPhee, Emeritus professor, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2127822023-11-23T23:02:56Z2023-11-23T23:02:56ZNapoleon Bonaparte features in 60,000 books and more than 100 films – does Ridley Scott’s stand up?<p>There have been more than <a href="https://mrodenberg.com/2021/10/16/finding-napoleon/">60,000 books</a> written about Napoleon since his death in 1821. Cinema too has been drawn to him time and again. </p>
<p>The Lumière brothers made a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZcYkP9y-Q4">short film</a> in 1897 and he featured in the mostly lost British film The Battle of Waterloo (1913). Already, the standard image of Napoleon was established: the squat frame, the horizontal hat, the arms behind the back. </p>
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<p>There have been more than <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/napoleon-movies-history.html">100 incarnations</a> on screen since. </p>
<p>Now, Ridley Scott’s latest charts the rise of the lowly artillery officer who became Emperor of France. All Scott’s <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/where-begin-with-ridley-scott">usual components</a> are in place: meticulous world-building, visceral combat scenes and a devil-may-care attitude to <a href="https://theconversation.com/did-napoleon-really-fire-at-the-pyramids-a-historian-explains-the-truth-behind-the-legends-of-ridley-scotts-biopic-217951">historical accuracy</a>. But how does it stand up to its predecessors?</p>
<h2>Cinema’s love affair</h2>
<p>In 1927 came the monumental <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0018192/">Napoleon</a>, directed by legendary Abel Gance, which has acquired a mythic status in France. </p>
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<p>Gance initially planned to make six films focusing on a particular part of Napoleon’s life, but ended up focusing on Napoleon’s rise and his victorious campaign in Italy. A restoration of the seven-hour original is being partly <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/netflix-romances-french-industry-finances-restoration-of-napoleon-4116998/">funded by Netflix</a> to be released in 2024.</p>
<p>Napoleon is often depicted as a fish-out-of water comic character – one of most memorable moments in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) was a time-travelling Napoleon <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJNql1dUPJo">hanging out at a bowling alley</a> and eating ice cream. </p>
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<p><a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/napoleon-complex">Longstanding myths</a> are often played for laughs. In Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009), Ben Stiller tells Napoleon “There’s a complex named after you … you’re famous for being little” while the so-called “<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/napoleon-delusion-200-years-later-psychiatry-in-the-arts/21D2B8425FB9CD2D4336B4B965C7E418">Napoleon Delusion</a>” – a mental illness in which a person believes they are Bonaparte himself – features as a plot device in Stan Laurel’s delightful <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rc5-k2JrTQ">Mixed Nuts</a> (1922).</p>
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<p>Marlon Brando played him as a kind of soap opera star in the Technicolor biopic <a href="https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/72866/desiree/#overview">Desirée</a> (1954). Brando – who earlier that year played a sweaty, muscular Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire – completely transforms into an exact replica of Napoleon, complete with clipped diction and a ponytail. </p>
<p>Most of the film unfolds in drawing rooms and at decorative society balls, far away from the battlefield and focuses on his relationship with <a href="https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/paintings/portrait-of-bernardine-eugenie-desiree-clary-princesse-de-pontecorvo/">Bernardine Eugénie Désirée Clary</a>, the queen of Norway and Sweden.</p>
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<p>Rod Steiger’s performance in Waterloo (1970) returned Napoleon to the theatre of war, where he played him as a bad-tempered bully. </p>
<p>He’s since gone up against <a href="https://looneytunes.fandom.com/wiki/Napoleon_Bunny-Part">Bugs Bunny</a>, Blackadder and Bewitched.</p>
<p>These earlier incarnations are less focused on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory">Great Man myth</a> and more interested in Napoleon the lover, the politician and the irascible Frenchman. Scott returns us to a much more complex and convoluted version. Helped by an <a href="https://screenrant.com/napoleon-movie-battles-cgi-ridley-scott-response/">impressive array of CGI effects</a>, Scott’s and Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon is a mix of clear-sighted strategist and cuckolded buffoon.</p>
<h2>A whirlwind view of history</h2>
<p>The tagline for this latest incarnation is “He came from nothing. He conquered everything”. </p>
<p>Over two and half hours, Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa show us exactly how. They sweep breathlessly through 30 years of French history, starting in 1793 and the guillotining of Marie Antoinette before a bloodthirsty mob. </p>
<p>Then, in rapid succession, come Napoleon’s triumphs at Toulon, Egypt and Borodino, stunning examples of tactical acumen and military innovation and finally his exile to Elba, return and eventual defeat at Waterloo. </p>
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<p><a href="https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/retrospective-the-films-of-ridley-scott-114468/">Scott’s films</a> are not known for their focus on psychological motivation or character depth. So his decision to chronicle much of Napoleon’s volatile relationship with French aristocrat Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) in an awkwardly comic manner is a misstep. The account of their <a href="https://frenchcargo.com.au/blogs/news/napoleon-and-josephine-the-great-love-affair">passionate</a> and often mutually destructive relationship is the weakest part of the film, and features the oddest line: “Destiny has brought me this lamb chop”. </p>
<p>Scott, who has given us the tough <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Ripley">Ripley</a>, <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/gi-jane-1997">G.I. Jane</a> and <a href="https://tonicmag.com.au/all/thelma-louise-turns-30">Thelma and Louise</a> reduces the always excellent Kirby to a passive bystander.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/napoleon-and-josephines-real-relationship-was-intense-but-they-loved-power-more-than-each-other-218160">Napoleon and Josephine’s real relationship was intense – but they loved power more than each other</a>
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<p>He is on much surer footing when depicting strategies, battles and geopolitical rivalries. The <a href="https://www.nmrn.org.uk/news/truth-behind-napoleons-meeting-duke-wellington">confrontation</a> (which never actually happened) between the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon onboard HMS Bellerophon after Waterloo is a blend of machismo posturing and mutual admiration.</p>
<p>Phoenix does an excellent job at revealing Napoleon’s legendary strategic shrewdness as well as his petulant, often vainglorious stubbornness. He gets Napoleon’s look just right – the haircut, the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67465802">bicorne</a>, the thousand-yard stare. </p>
<p>The reviews have been <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/napoleon-movie-review-monster">mixed</a>. But Scott doesn’t care. What has always mattered most to him, from Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) right up to House of Gucci (2022) is visual panache and spectacle. He spent ten years as a <a href="https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/looking-back-at-ridley-scott-advertising-career/">commercials director</a> in the United Kingdom before making his first film, and it shows. </p>
<p>We see epic recreations of Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor in 1804, the eerie scene of Moscow in flames and the pivotal <a href="https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/modern-history/austerlitz/">Battle of Austerlitz</a>, all shot with precision and verve.</p>
<p>It remains to be seen whether Scott’s Napoleon will be the definitive version. The director has promised a future release of a <a href="https://www.ign.com/articles/ridley-scotts-napoleon-getting-a-4-hour-directors-cut-on-apple-tv">four-hour version</a> for Apple TV+. Maybe this extra footage will allow a more consistent and balanced story to emerge.</p>
<h2>The greatest movie never made?</h2>
<p>Hollywood’s love affair with Napoleon is set to continue. Steven Spielberg <a href="https://deadline.com/2023/02/steven-spielberg-stanley-kubricks-napoleon-7-part-series-hbo-1235266372/">announced</a> earlier this year he was preparing an HBO mini-series based on a Stanley Kubrick screenplay abandoned in the 1970s. Before quitting the project, Kubrick did an <a href="https://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/publications/stanleys-kubrick-napoleon-the-greatest-movie-never-made/">astonishing amount of research</a> on the film that would have starred Jack Nicholson and Audrey Hepburn.</p>
<p>Napoleon incarnates everything Hollywood looks for in a hero - genius, charisma, star quality, hubris, and the embodiment of the “comeback”. It’s no surprise his legend continues to grow.</p>
<p>And Scott, who turns 86 this week, now leaves 19th-century France behind to return to Ancient Rome in the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9218128/">sequel to Gladiator</a>. Like Napoleon himself, Scott has more battles still to win.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/did-napoleon-really-fire-at-the-pyramids-a-historian-explains-the-truth-behind-the-legends-of-ridley-scotts-biopic-217951">Did Napoleon really fire at the pyramids? A historian explains the truth behind the legends of Ridley Scott's biopic</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212782/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ben McCann does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Joaquin Phoenix is a great Napoleon. How have other films treated France’s most famous man?Ben McCann, Associate Professor of French Studies, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2182082023-11-22T17:05:24Z2023-11-22T17:05:24ZNapoleon: the film’s fashion tells a story of its own, from cropped hair to ribbon chokers<p>In his epic historical drama, Ridley Scott depicts Napoleon Bonaparte’s career not only through a military lens but a romantic one, suggesting that Napoleon’s global conquests were driven by a desire to conquer his wife Josephine’s heart. </p>
<p>The film’s trailer offers a glimpse into the couple’s coronation in 1804, a moment <a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/story/story-of-a-coronation-palace-of-versailles/NgWhI7emoChPKw?hl=en">immortalised by the artist Jacques-Louis David</a>.</p>
<p>David’s work emphasises that the coronation broke with traditional royal protocol. Traditionally, queens were not crowned directly after the king. In doing so, Napoleon was signalling the start of a new dynasty. He also invoked a historical parallel. The last queen to receive such treatment was <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marie-de-Medicis">Marie de’Medici</a>, crowned in May 1610.</p>
<p>Josephine wore a sumptuous, high-waisted white satin gown with a red velvet train. Her fan-shaped lace collar invoked a second reference to Medici. Known as a <em>chérusque</em>, Medici is seen wearing the design in <a href="https://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/digital/collection/Civilization/id/880/">Ruben’s depiction of her coronation in 1624</a>. Josephine was therefore sartorially linked to the leading figure of a powerful dynasty. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/napoleon-and-josephines-real-relationship-was-intense-but-they-loved-power-more-than-each-other-218160">Napoleon and Josephine’s real relationship was intense – but they loved power more than each other</a>
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<h2>Revolutionary style</h2>
<p>Josephine’s journey to becoming empress of France was marked by tumult and tragedy. Raised in Martinique, she moved to Paris as a teenager and married Alexandre Beauharnais, a French viscount. Josephine experienced the trauma of the Revolution first-hand. Beauharnais was executed in 1794. Shortly after, she was sent to <a href="https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/People/Josephine/KNAEJO/7*.html">Les Carmes prison</a> where she lived under the fear of a similar fate. By the time she was released, she found herself in a society attempting to redefine its political and cultural identity.</p>
<p>In such a period of uncertainty, a new fashionable set emerged. Referred to as the <em><a href="https://thisistribute.xyz/blogs/contribute/les-merveilleuses-the-rebellious-women-of-1795-france">les Merveilleuses</a></em> (the wonderful), they captivated the post-revolutionary social scene with their radical approach to dress. Corseted dresses and all their elaborate padding were eschewed for a streamlined silhouette. </p>
<p>Embroidered silks and ruffled sleeves were disregarded for cotton muslin and flaxen linen. The towering, powdered hairstyles favoured by the old royal court were replaced by a shorn cut known as the <em><a href="https://www.transcriptmag.com/post/coiffure-%C3%A0-la-victime-the-urban-legend-of-the-guillotine-haircuts">coiffure à la victime</a></em>, paying tribute to guillotined prisoners whose hair was lopped off before execution.</p>
<p>Paris was both enthralled and scandalised. As fashion magazines breathlessly depicted the new styles in beautiful, hand-coloured plates, other newspapers featured doctors pleading with the <em>Merveilleuses</em> to forsake their diaphanous dresses for fear of catching ill. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1DJYiG6wh0w?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Josephine’s hair is cut in the coiffure à la victime style in the trailer for Napoleon.</span></figcaption>
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<p>At the forefront of this movement was Josephine, who wielded such influence in fashion that she and her fellow <em>Merveilleuses</em> would often exchange letters before social functions, <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6149314d/f171.item%20lettre%20vii%20to%20madame%20tallien">methodically planning their attire</a>. They knew their garments would be eagerly followed, replicated and reported in painstaking detail in the French press.</p>
<h2>Napoleon’s fashion</h2>
<p>Napoleon’s appearance contrasted sharply with his wife’s. His contemporaries <a href="https://www.google.ca/books/edition/M%C3%A9moires_de_Madame_de_R%C3%A9musat_1802_180/HQ0xAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">often derided him</a> for his lacklustre style, marked by dust-ridden boots and ungloved hands. He refused to attend social functions in anything other than his uniform. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37499/37499-h/37499-h.htm">His letters to Josephine</a> after their first meeting in 1795 show him to be utterly enamoured. In his eyes, Josephine was worldlier, older and effortlessly charming. Most importantly, perhaps, she was emblematic of two worlds: the French aristocracy of a bygone era and the new, sophisticated glitterati set he now wished to enter. </p>
<p>Ridley Scott’s depiction of their first meeting shows Josephine sporting the popular <em>coiffure à la victime</em>. She’s also wearing a red ribbon – another staple of the “guillotine aesthetic”. The ribbon emphasised where the blade would have landed on a loved one’s exposed neck. </p>
<p>The differences between them – Napoleon, stubbornly clad in his uniform, Josephine impeccably attired in the styles she and her fellow <em>Merveilleuses</em> heralded – is sartorially punctuated.</p>
<h2>Empire style</h2>
<p>Newly wedded, Josephine visited Napoleon in Italy where she began what became a lifelong enthusiasm for cameos (a hard or precious gemstone carved with a raised relief, often depicting a person, animal or mythical scene). Attaching pieces to her belts, jewellery and headwear, she sparked a revival of the trend. </p>
<p>Napoleon’s gifts of Kashmiri shawls during his 1798-99 Egyptian campaign turned these garments into coveted luxury staples. A shawl was often included as an item of prestige in the gift basket for affluent 19th-century brides. Josephine boasted over 400 in her personal collection and wears the shawl in several paintings.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560504/original/file-20231120-17-ftj5s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="painting of Josephine with red shawl" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560504/original/file-20231120-17-ftj5s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560504/original/file-20231120-17-ftj5s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=813&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560504/original/file-20231120-17-ftj5s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=813&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560504/original/file-20231120-17-ftj5s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=813&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560504/original/file-20231120-17-ftj5s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1022&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560504/original/file-20231120-17-ftj5s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1022&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560504/original/file-20231120-17-ftj5s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1022&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Empress Josephine in the park at Malmaison by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon (1805).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pierre-Paul_Prud%27hon_-_The_Empress_Josephine_-_WGA18457.jpg">Musée de Louvre</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As Empress, she became synonymous with the Empire style, marked by high-waisted dresses with tiny sleeves. White remained her preferred colour for dresses, its pale aesthetic often contrasted with a red Kashmiri shawl. </p>
<p>Napoleon relied on Josephine’s sartorial influence: what his wife wore, he knew, would be replicated. The fabric of her dresses changed, from the English cotton muslin she wore as a <em>Merveilleuse</em> to Lyonnais silk satin brocade. Her fashion choices were not only personal, they were strategic, stimulating the French luxury industry and contributing to the post-revolutionary national economy.</p>
<p>In 1810, after 14 years of marriage with no offspring, Napoleon and Josephine divorced. Josephine retreated to her beloved Malmaison, a country chateau outside of Paris, where she continued to receive flocks of guests and admirers until her death in 1814. </p>
<p>“You want to be great, but you are nothing without me,” Josephine tells Napoleon in the trailer. An apt sentiment, perhaps, for a woman whose fashion sense is imbued with historical significance and endures in cultural relevance to this day.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tania Sheikhan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A shorn haircut known as the coiffure à la victime, paid tribute to guillotined prisoners whose hair was loped off before execution.Tania Sheikhan, PhD Candidate, History of Art, UCLLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2181602023-11-21T12:16:05Z2023-11-21T12:16:05ZNapoleon and Josephine’s real relationship was intense – but they loved power more than each other<p>When Vanessa Kirby was announced to play Josephine in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, it caused a ripple of surprise among historians. Kirby is considerably younger than the actor in title role, Joaquin Phoenix (14 years her senior), but in fact, Josephine was six years older than Napoleon. </p>
<p>The film portrays Napoleon as someone who, <a href="https://variety.com/2022/film/news/ridley-scott-napoleon-rewritten-joaquin-phoenix-comfortable-1235467546/">according to Scott</a>: “conquered the world to try to win her [Josephine’s] love, and when he couldn’t, he conquered it to destroy her, and destroyed himself in the process”.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GFxZN5rteXk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Vanessa Kirby discussing her role as Josephine.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The director has since <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/13/ridley-scott-director-profile">told historians</a> who have been correcting inaccuracies in the film to “get a life”, but the age difference between Napoleon and Josephine was a significant factor in the way in which their lives – and their love – played out. </p>
<h2>Napoleon’s infatuation</h2>
<p>Widowed during the French Revolution, and with two young children, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Josephine">Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Beauharnais</a> (the woman Napoleon called Josephine) faced an uncertain future. She was unable to access her family’s wealth from sugar plantations in Martinique, or from her guillotined husband’s estate. </p>
<p>As she was in her thirties, she was no longer considered young, but she did what she could to become part of fashionable Parisian society, calling in favours and cultivating the friendship of leading politician <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paul-Francois-Jean-Nicolas-vicomte-de-Barras">Paul Barras</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560480/original/file-20231120-21-5d59g9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Portrait of Josephine in coronation finery" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560480/original/file-20231120-21-5d59g9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560480/original/file-20231120-21-5d59g9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560480/original/file-20231120-21-5d59g9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560480/original/file-20231120-21-5d59g9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560480/original/file-20231120-21-5d59g9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1021&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560480/original/file-20231120-21-5d59g9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1021&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560480/original/file-20231120-21-5d59g9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1021&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Empress Josephine in Coronation Costume by François Gérard (1808-18080).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baron_François_Gérard_-_Joséphine_in_coronation_costume_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Musée national du Château de Fontainebleau</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>She was persuaded to marry an up-and-coming young Corsican general, Napoleon Buonaparte, who was intoxicated by her. Just a few months after meeting Josephine – and almost immediately after their marriage in March 1796 – the general was sent to lead the Revolutionary Army in Italy.</p>
<p>From Italy, he wrote her <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37499/37499-h/37499-h.htm">dozens of impassioned letters</a>. They are so full of controlling, emotional blackmail that the repeated declarations of love seem menacing rather than maudlin. </p>
<p>“You never write to me; you don’t care for your husband”, he exclaims in one. “I get no news from you, and I feel sure that you no longer love me”, bemoans another. And: “Every day I count up your misdeeds. I lash myself to fury in order to love you no more. Bah, don’t I love you the more?”</p>
<p>When Josephine joined him in Italy, she had to put up with him tracking her every move and opening her letters. By the time they were reunited, however, he was less infatuated – although still controlling. Napoleon recognised the usefulness of his wife’s connections and seemed to accept a mismatch in their feelings. His earlier novelistic outpourings were replaced by a very different tone as early as 1797, and by 1800 he turns rather cold. These letters are practical, with formulaic sign offs such as “a thousand tender things”.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Portraits of Napoleon and Josephine" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560386/original/file-20231120-29-6w9xuc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560386/original/file-20231120-29-6w9xuc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560386/original/file-20231120-29-6w9xuc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560386/original/file-20231120-29-6w9xuc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560386/original/file-20231120-29-6w9xuc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560386/original/file-20231120-29-6w9xuc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560386/original/file-20231120-29-6w9xuc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portraits of Napoleon and Josephine, probably made in 1797 after their return to France.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84130164.r=buonaparte%20josephine?rk=85837;2#">Gallica/Bibliothèque nationale de France</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the wife of a feted war hero, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Jos%C3%A9phine/3-zzDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Pierre+Branda+josephine&printsec=frontcover">Josephine exploited her political connections</a> for her own gain, perhaps as a way of resisting the control Napoleon was exerting over the rest of her life. </p>
<p>Aware of how effective they could be as a team, detractors including Napoleon’s own family took delight in spreading rumours to tarnish Josephine’s reputation. Josephine’s <a href="https://www.abebooks.com/9782228890564/Correspondance-Pincemaille-Christophe-Catinat-Maurice-2228890561/plp">letters to her lover</a> Hippolyte Charles give an idea of how precarious the situation was for her. </p>
<p>Napoleon was on campaign in Egypt when he was given proof that she had been having an affair. A letter to his brother where he talks about it was intercepted and published by the British and quickly became known in France. Furious at first, he forgave her when he returned to Paris and she supported the political manoeuvring which led to him taking power after a coup d’état in 1799. </p>
<p>He needed her soft diplomacy and her aristocratic lineage to help smooth over the factionalism that had characterised the Revolutionary decade. She relished the preeminence that the role of helping create a new France gave her. Having been reluctant to join her husband in Italy in 1796, she took to accompanying him everywhere. It was very much in her interests that he was not distracted by a younger woman.</p>
<p>In 1807, he wouldn’t let her accompany him to Poland where he conducted a lengthy affair with the noblewoman <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maria-Walewska">Maria Walewska</a>, although his letters show that he was still on intimate terms with Josephine as well. Nevertheless, the risk of divorce was growing.</p>
<h2>The divorce</h2>
<p>Once Napoleon instigated a hereditary empire in 1804, his family increasingly badgered him about the need for an heir. Josephine was unable to give him one. One of her maids, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/58254">Mademoiselle Avrillion</a>, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=twxaAAAAcAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s">wrote an account</a> of how, in the period leading up to their divorce, the couple had become less close. But Josephine was still devastated when her fate was confirmed in 1809. </p>
<p>The divorce was framed as a sacrifice to the needs of the nation. Napoleon continued to visit Josephine and write to her before his marriage to the Hapsburg Archduchess <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marie-Louise-Austrian-archduchess">Marie-Louise of Austria</a>. Josephine congratulated Napoleon on the birth of his son in 1811, telling him that she would always share his happiness as their destinies were inseparable. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Painting showing Josephine's divorce from Napoleon." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560385/original/file-20231120-25-h3lx9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560385/original/file-20231120-25-h3lx9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560385/original/file-20231120-25-h3lx9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560385/original/file-20231120-25-h3lx9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560385/original/file-20231120-25-h3lx9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560385/original/file-20231120-25-h3lx9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560385/original/file-20231120-25-h3lx9y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Divorce of the Empress Josephine in 1809 by Henri Frédéric Schopin (1843).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Le_divorce_de_l%27Impératrice_Joséphine_15_décembre_1809_(Henri-Frederic_Schopin).jpg">The Wallace Collection</a></span>
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<p>Napoleon visited her at Malmaison, her preferred retreat just outside Paris, before he began his Russian campaign in 1812. He would never see her again as she died in 1814. After his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon spent time at Malmaison before being banished definitively to St Helena.</p>
<p>Establishing their real relationship is difficult because so few of Josephine’s letters survive to offer her side of the story. Did she love Napoleon at the beginning? Probably not. Did she come to love him? Probably yes. </p>
<p>Napoleon enabled her to defy her age and critics, and he took good care of her children, Hortense and Eugène. Ultimately, both Josephine and Napoleon loved power more than each other. </p>
<p>They recognised the benefits of working together and achieved a vertiginous rise to the top. In the end, Napoleon’s need for a son destabilised both the regime and their marriage, but his visit to Malmaison on his way into exile shows how much Josephine meant to him. </p>
<p>She had remained loyal, if not always faithful, and had been a lucky talisman. Shortly before he died in 1821, Napoleon dreamt about her. His faithful grand marshal <a href="https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/timelines/napoleons-last-days-march-may-1821-as-seen-through-the-eyes-of-the-grand-marshal-bertrand">noted</a>: “He said that he had seen Josephine and spoken to her”. He’d hoped they’d be together again soon. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Katherine Astbury receives funding from UKRI's Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is affiliated with the Commission internationale d’histoire de la Révolution française.</span></em></p>A historian explains what the relationship between one of the most famous couples in history was really like.Katherine Astbury, Associate Professor and Reader of French, University of WarwickLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2179512023-11-17T14:00:59Z2023-11-17T14:00:59ZDid Napoleon really fire at the pyramids? A historian explains the truth behind the legends of Ridley Scott’s biopic<p>Directors of historical feature films face a difficult task. How can they make the characters familiar to an audience without reducing them to caricature? How can they make sure that knowledge of the outcome – battles won or lost, empires built then ruined – doesn’t make the story seem like it’s writing itself? </p>
<p>Director Ridley Scott is not a historian and presumably wants to entertain rather than to enlighten. But the problem of historical truth is an interesting one. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer for Napoleon.</span></figcaption>
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<p>It is not easy to know the “real” Napoleon. There’s a recognisable version of him – the confident general beloved of his troops, the instinctive military tactician who could run on empty for days at a time, his stern and somewhat petulant gaze. But much of this is the product of layers of historical storytelling, accrued by the labour of generations of artists, journalists and memoirists – and of course, Napoleon himself.</p>
<p>Abel Gance’s spectacular <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6504eRh5h6M">silent film</a> Napoleon (1927), for example, charted the life and career of Napoleon up to his departure as a military general for the Italian campaign in 1796. In one scene, a heavy winter snowfall interrupts classes at Napoleon’s military college. The boys run outside to play and inevitably start throwing snowballs at each other. The scene depicts a very young Napoleon emerging as a natural commander, directing the combat as though on the field of battle.</p>
<p>Yet the veracity of this moment rests primarily on a single account – the <a href="https://archive.org/details/memoirsofnapole01bour/page/n7/mode/2up">memoir</a> of one of Napoleon’s childhood friends, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Antoine-Fauvelet-de-Bourrienne">Louis de Bourrienne</a>, who attended the same school. The author was later an employee of Napoleon, who sacked him for embezzlement in 1802.</p>
<p>Many years later, in 1829, de Bourrienne <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3567/3567-h/3567-h.htm">penned a memoir</a> in the hope of cashing in on the popular appetite for authentic tales of the great general. What we think we know about the “real” Napoleon is often filtered through self-interested and partial accounts like this one.</p>
<p>Here are the facts and legends behind some of the major scenes from Ridley Scott’s new Napoleon biopic.</p>
<h2>Did Napoleon crown himself?</h2>
<p>Napoleon went to great lengths to craft his image as a benign ruler and man of the people, often enlisting the talents of artists to do so. </p>
<p>Most notoriously, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jacques-Louis-David-French-painter">Jacques-Louis David</a> was commissioned to produce a series of grand paintings <a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/story/story-of-a-coronation-palace-of-versailles/NgWhI7emoChPKw?hl=en">depicting Napoleon’s coronation</a> in Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris in December 1804. In the most famous, we see Napoleon place a crown on the head of the new Empress Josephine while a reluctant Pope Pius VII looks on.</p>
<p>In an astonishing act of hubris, Napoleon had indeed already placed a crown on his own head, though the oil painting shows him only in laurel leaves to signify his martial triumphs. What Scott’s film depicts is the magnificence of the oil paintings, which showed Napoleon and his empress in the most flattering light, rather than the coronation ceremony itself. </p>
<h2>His relationship with Josephine</h2>
<p>There is no doubt that Napoleon felt a deep passion for <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Josephine">Marie Joséphe Rose de la Pagerie</a> – known to him as Joséphine – whom he married in 1796 as his military career was in the ascendant. Yet her depiction in Ridley Scott’s film as a young seductress probably speaks more to sexist cliche than to Joséphine’s undoubted self-assuredness. </p>
<p>She was six years older than Napoleon, a widow and mother of two young children when they met, and the young general’s romantic feelings were seemingly stronger than hers. While on campaign he wrote to her virtually every day, his pen sometimes piercing the parchment, such was the force of his emotions. Yet some of these <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Josephine.html?id=KS1MXwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">letters</a> to her remained unopened. </p>
<p>Their relationship was as tumultuous as it was passionate, and both spouses had several affairs. Yet when Napoleon instigated divorce in 1809 for want of an heir, it was surprisingly amicable. The Empress retained her imperial title until her death in 1814 and was permitted to continue living in the imperial <a href="https://musees-nationaux-malmaison.fr/chateau-malmaison/en/history-chateau-de-malmaison">Château de Malmaison</a>.</p>
<h2>Was Napoleon present at the execution of Marie Antoinette?</h2>
<p>The autumn of 1793 was especially busy for Napoleon given his increasingly important role in the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Siege-of-Toulon">Siege of Toulon</a>. Federalist rebels had handed over the French fleet to the British <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Hood-1st-Viscount-Hood">admiral Samuel Hood</a>, and the young artillery officer commanded the operation that eventually seized it back. </p>
<p>Therefore it is highly unlikely that he ventured to Paris in October to be among the crowd that witnessed the execution of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marie-Antoinette-queen-of-France">Queen Marie-Antoinette</a>. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Another trailer for Napoleon shows the lead up to Marie Antionette’s execution.</span></figcaption>
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<p>In a <a href="https://ia800909.us.archive.org/7/items/lettersofdocumen006632mbp/lettersofdocumen006632mbp.pdf">letter to his older brother Joseph</a>, however, Napoleon did claim to witness the <a href="https://revolution.chnm.org/d/319">storming of the Tuileries Palace</a> by an angry crowd of republican protesters in June 1792. It revolted him.</p>
<h2>Did Napoleon really fire at the pyramids?</h2>
<p>Napoleon began his Egyptian campaign in 1798. The cultural legacy of the campaign can be seen in the well-stocked Egyptology section of the <a href="https://www.louvre.fr/en/explore/the-palace/a-royal-setting-for-egyptian-antiquities">Louvre</a>. But it was also the scene of atrocities. </p>
<p>At one point, several thousand <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/napoleon-9781408854693/">Ottoman soldiers</a> were shot or driven into the sea on Napoleon’s orders, rather than taken prisoner. You don’t need to invent ice traps or Napoleon ordering his men to fire at the pyramids, as Ridley Scott’s biopic does, to convey his callous disregard for life. </p>
<p>It was the rumour that he had ordered his own plague-stricken troops to be poisoned in the town of Jaffa that finally tarnished Napoleon’s reputation in the early 19th century. It stuck, no matter how brilliant the <a href="https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/paintings/2-bonaparte-visiting-the-plague-victims-of-jaffa/">sanitising riposte of the artist Antoine-Jean Gros</a>, whom Napoleon commissioned in 1804 to paint a different story.</p>
<p>Ridley Scott’s film does not represent the past so much as carry versions of the tales and images depicting Napoleon that have spun him into existence since his own lifetime – many of which were crafted by his own hand. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joan Tumblety is affiliated with the Labour Party as an ordinary member.</span></em></p>Here are the truths behind some of the major scenes from Ridley Scott’s new Napoleon biopic.Joan Tumblety, Associate Professor of French History, University of SouthamptonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1907042022-09-16T12:19:36Z2022-09-16T12:19:36ZUkraine’s rapid advance against Russia shows mastery of 3 essential skills for success in modern warfare<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484686/original/file-20220914-22-hzlr2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=49%2C24%2C8194%2C5462&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An abandoned and disabled Russian tank. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/this-photograph-taken-on-september-11-shows-a-ukranian-news-photo/1243164354?adppopup=true">Juan Barreto/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ukrainian forces, aided by Western firepower, have upset traditional military logic once again.</p>
<p>Advancing deep into Ukrainian territory seized by Moscow earlier in its invasion, a counteroffensive launched in September 2022 has forced back the invading Russian army. In the process Kyiv has <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-says-northeastern-offensive-has-retaken-3800-sq-km-week-2022-09-13/">recaptured over 2,000 square miles of land</a> in the country’s northeast and left Moscow’s prized units like the <a href="https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1569578858021810176">1st Tank Guards Army</a> in disarray.</p>
<p>The success of the counteroffensive has shown that what is known in military circles as “<a href="https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/November-December-2018/Blythe-Operational-Art/">operational art</a>” – the creative use of time, space and forces to achieve a position of advantage – can be more important than relative combat power and simply counting the tanks and artillery possessed by either side in conflict. </p>
<p>And while this latest operational turning point in Ukraine is not the end of the conflict, as <a href="https://www.csis.org/people/benjamin-jensen">a defense strategist</a> with more than 19 years of military experience, I see three key insights about <a href="https://warontherocks.com/2022/05/the-changing-character-of-combined-arms/">modern warfare</a> in the recent Ukrainian success.</p>
<h2>1. Deception is still possible in conflict</h2>
<p>Modern war takes place during an <a href="https://www.csis.org/events/sparking-revolution-open-source-intelligence">open-source intelligence revolution</a> in which commercial satellite photos and a constant stream of social media facts and fiction bombard politicians, soldiers and citizens. This <a href="https://theconversation.com/open-source-intelligence-how-digital-sleuths-are-making-their-mark-on-the-ukraine-war-179135">flood of information</a> makes hiding large military formations <a href="https://theconversation.com/technology-is-revolutionizing-how-intelligence-is-gathered-and-analyzed-and-opening-a-window-onto-russian-military-activity-around-ukraine-176446">increasingly difficult, if not impossible</a>. Yet, Ukrainians have shown the world that a globally connected information environment does not mean the art of deception is dead.</p>
<p>Ukraine’s military planners used old concepts optimized for a new era in designing its counteroffensive. They employed a variant of the 19th-century military concept of “<a href="https://www.warhistoryonline.com/napoleon/8-changes-napoleon-made-warfare.html?chrome=1">central position</a>.” This concept is associated with Napoleon, who when confronted with two armies, <a href="https://www.napolun.com/mirror/napoleonistyka.atspace.com/Napoleon_tactics.htm">positioned his forces between them to split the enemy</a>. This allowed the French leader to concentrate his forces in one location, even when they were outnumbered overall.</p>
<p>In the recent counteroffensive, Ukraine used a central position to confront two concentrations of Russian forces, one in the east around the city of Kharkiv and the Donbas region – which includes portions of Donetsk and Luhansk – and a second in the south along the Dnieper River and Kherson. These Russian forces collectively outnumbered Ukraine’s army and possessed greater numbers of tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and attack aircraft. </p>
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<p>While Ukraine was building up forces in Kherson in the south and using rocket artillery, sabotage and unconventional warfare to attack infrastructure to isolate Russian troops, it also maintained a large armored force in the east. This gave Ukraine the ability to fix Russian forces along one front while attacking on another.</p>
<p>Ukraine’s central position made Russia have to factor in the possibility of Ukrainian troops attacking in either direction.</p>
<p>Ukraine also employed a clever form of deception adopting elements of what is known as “<a href="https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/call/call_3-88_concept.htm">Magruder’s Principle</a>.” This maxim holds that it is easier to induce a target to maintain a pre-existing belief than introduce a new idea. </p>
<p>By conducting strikes that isolated Russian forces along the Dnieper River and making public statements that suggested Ukraine would attack Kherson, Ukraine reinforced Russian views that Kherson would be the initial main area of attack during the counteroffensive. This use of public statements and action to shape an adversary’s decision-making is also consistent with the old Soviet concept of “<a href="https://www.rit.edu/%7Ew-cmmc/literature/Thomas_2004.pdf">reflexive control</a>,” which uses misinformation to skew how the target perceives the world and conditions them to make self-defeating decisions. </p>
<p>As a result, Russia moved forces to the south to bolster its fighting positions in Kherson. Doing so likely hollowed out Moscow’s forces in the east and compromised its ability to deploy reserves. </p>
<p>Combined with Ukraine’s central position, this clever ruse meant that Kyiv set the conditions for the large-scale rout of Putin’s army in the east and future operations to retake Kherson.</p>
<h2>2. Precision strikes facilitate depth and produces cascading effects</h2>
<p>At a more tactical level, Ukraine has proven a master of using precision strikes to hamper the movement of Russian troops. Kyiv has employed <a href="https://www.csis.org/analysis/send-swarm">swarms of “loitering munitions”</a> – airborne drones that locate and then attack targets – alongside a mix of anti-tank guided missiles as well as traditional armored formations and artillery to pressure Russian ground forces. </p>
<p>This combination has freed up the country’s warplanes, special operations teams and long-range precision missiles to hunt Russian radars, command posts and supply depots. The net result is that Russian forces have had to confront <a href="https://adminpubs.tradoc.army.mil/pamphlets/TP525-3-1.pdf">multiple dilemmas</a> and have struggled to build up sufficient combat power to counterattack and halt the Ukrainian advance. </p>
<p>War is a complex system governed more by power laws than linear dynamics. That is to say, a smaller, mobile force – like the Ukrainians – can defeat larger armies. The <a href="https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA314276.pdf">depth and simultaneity</a> of the Ukrainian tactical approach in the counteroffensive produced <a href="https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCDP%201%20Warfighting.pdf">shock and dislocation</a>. Information operations compounded this effect by circulating images of retreating soldiers, thus making defection and surrender contagious. </p>
<h2>3. War remains a continuation of politics</h2>
<p>A political timeline drove the sequence and setting of Ukraine’s recent counteroffensive. Kyiv needed to disrupt the ability of <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kherson-referendum-plans-paused-due-security-situation-tass-cites-russian-2022-09-05/">Russia to hold an illegitimate referendum</a> in Kherson and occupied territory in the east – the same playbook Moscow used to seize Ukrainian territory in 2014 through the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/what-are-minsk-agreements-ukraine-conflict-2022-02-21/">Minsk agreement</a>.</p>
<p>Moscow wanted to use the referendum to justify annexing Ukrainian territory and show progress to a weary Russian public.</p>
<p>At the same time, Putin was likely trying to consolidate territorial gains before using the looming <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3613859-how-a-long-cold-winter-could-dampen-western-support-for-ukraine/">threat of winter to divide Western support</a> for Kyiv. In other words, at the strategic level even if the recent counteroffensive had not gained large amounts of territory or defeated entire Russian divisions it could have complicated Moscow’s ability to hold a referendum in occupied territory. Russian forces would be forced to defend the front as opposed to securing polling sites.</p>
<p>So while the operational and tactical gains produced by the counteroffensive are important, the underlying underlying objective Ukraine is pursuing at the strategic level remains political.</p>
<p>This political logic, despite the success of the counteroffensive, casts doubt on the prospects of the conflict ending with a decisive battlefield defeat of Russian forces in the near term. Even if Ukraine makes significant gains in the south and retakes Kherson, Moscow can still opt for a large-scale mobilization and continue the war until either Russian elites or its citizens turn on Putin and his inner circle.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/190704/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The views expressed are his own and do not reflect the views or positions of the U.S. Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.</span></em></p>A military strategist breaks down how a smaller Ukrainian army has successfully taken back swaths of land from the Russians in the country’s northeast.Benjamin Jensen, Professor of Strategic Studies, Marine Corps University; Scholar-in-Residence, American University, American University School of International ServiceLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1899202022-09-09T12:34:17Z2022-09-09T12:34:17ZHow Ukraine is adapting the ancient practice of trophy displays for modern propaganda<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483094/original/file-20220906-26-8ryy6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=26%2C26%2C2968%2C2218&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A Ukrainian inspects a ruined Russian tank displayed on the streets of Kyiv.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/destroyed-russian-tanks-are-displayed-in-lviv-ukraine-in-news-photo/1242829000">Thomas O'Neill/NurPhoto via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As Ukraine prepared to celebrate its independence day even while its military forces battled a monthslong Russian invasion, government officials assembled a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/weary-uncowed-ukraine-mark-independence-day-amid-new-strike-fears-2022-08-23/">grandiose, yet gruesome, display</a> on Khreshchatyk, the main street of Ukraine’s capital city, Kyiv. </p>
<p>Wrecked and burned-out tanks, military trucks and other equipment lined the street <a href="https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1560933336557801472">as an intentional mockery</a> of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s failed plan of a victorious Russian army parade in Kyiv. </p>
<p>This display, in August 2022, wasn’t a first for Ukraine, and it echoes an ancient tradition of displaying the looted weapons of a military adversary.</p>
<p>On the sites of battles they won, the ancient Greeks typically erected what they called <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/trophy">tropaions</a> – triumphal monuments made from trees and decorated with captured <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0063:entry=tropaeum-cn">armor, weapons and helmets</a> – to commemorate the victory and pay homage to a god. The classic Greek epic the “Iliad” contains references to Odysseus stripping the dead enemy of his armor for a <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0134%3Abook%3D10">subsequent ritual offering to Athena</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Athena-Greek-mythology">the goddess of war and his divine patroness</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0007.tlg033.perseus-eng1:19.5">Ancient Romans continued</a> the practice, and also developed a tradition of <a href="https://exhibits.library.villanova.edu/ancient-rome/roman-activities/roman-triumph">military triumphs</a>, parades through the imperial city of Rome to show off the spoils of war, including slaves, art, bullion and weapons. Rich benefactors then often bought the loot and donated it to the Roman public for stationary displays that symbolized Roman imperial power. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483095/original/file-20220906-16-p4u1zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A painting showing people carrying weapons, armor and other captured treasures." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483095/original/file-20220906-16-p4u1zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483095/original/file-20220906-16-p4u1zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483095/original/file-20220906-16-p4u1zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483095/original/file-20220906-16-p4u1zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483095/original/file-20220906-16-p4u1zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483095/original/file-20220906-16-p4u1zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483095/original/file-20220906-16-p4u1zl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">This 15th-century painting depicts Romans carrying weapons, armor and other treasures captured in battle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Triumph3-Mantegna-bearers-of-trophies-and-bullion.jpg">Andrea Mantegna via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Trophy displays in the Modern Era</h2>
<p>The practice continued into the modern Western world.</p>
<p>In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when Napoleon led French forces to <a href="https://content.lib.washington.edu/napoleonweb/timeline.html">conquer and pillage other countries</a>,including Italy, he brought back stolen art along with the enemy’s weapons. His triumphal processions in Paris deliberately evoked Roman tradition. The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/arts/design/napoleon-looted-art.html">objects were then displayed in the Louvre</a>.</p>
<p>The pillaging of cultural property became a feature of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/06/the-brutish-museums-by-dan-hicks-review-colonial-violence-and-cultural-restitution">colonial violence</a>, filling Western museums with looted art and valuables belonging to the colonized nations. The practice is currently <a href="https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v1_rul_rule40">prohibited by international humanitarian law</a>, though that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/magazine/ghazni-panels-afghanistan-art.html">does not actually stop the pillaging</a>. </p>
<p>Seizing the enemy’s weapons, however, is <a href="https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v1_rul_rule49">customarily accepted</a> as war booty. Various nations have used displays of captured enemy arms to invoke patriotism and boost morale.</p>
<p>As the wars and the weapons became bigger, so did the trophy exhibitions. In 1918, London’s Trafalgar Square was turned into a “<a href="https://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/exhibiting-the-first-world-war">wrecked village</a>” filled with German weapons. It was a part of the promotional campaign to sell bonds to continue to pay for the ongoing conflict, later known to history as World War I. Battle trophies were one of the biggest sources of exhibition material for the British <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Imperial-War-Museum">Imperial War Museum</a> in its early days. </p>
<p>As I have shown in my <a href="https://www.academia.edu/86336571/War_and_Terror_in_Leningrad_The_Museum_of_the_Defense_of_Leningrad_and_War_Commemoration_under_Stalin">doctoral dissertation</a>, during World War II, the Soviet Union extensively used exhibitions of trophy weapons as a propaganda tool. When the Red Army won the monthslong <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Moscow">Battle of Moscow</a> in January 1942 and began a counteroffensive, the retreating Nazi army left behind a large amount of weapons. The trophies then became an important feature of war-themed exhibitions across the USSR.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483308/original/file-20220907-9399-6xdmsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="People in civilian clothes look at rows and rows of tanks." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483308/original/file-20220907-9399-6xdmsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483308/original/file-20220907-9399-6xdmsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483308/original/file-20220907-9399-6xdmsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483308/original/file-20220907-9399-6xdmsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483308/original/file-20220907-9399-6xdmsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483308/original/file-20220907-9399-6xdmsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483308/original/file-20220907-9399-6xdmsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An exhibition in Moscow’s Gorky Park in the 1940s displayed Nazi weapons captured by the Soviet Union.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gorky Park Archive</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The biggest Soviet exhibition of captured German weapons opened in <a href="https://nyti.ms/3R0pBaz">Moscow’s Gorky Park on June 22, 1943</a>, the second anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Russia. The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcZpgn_zBQw">grandiose outdoor display</a> featured German tanks, planes, cannons and other large equipment.</p>
<p>The exhibition conveyed two messages. First, the enemy was powerful, as evidenced by its <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1943/06/14/85106933.html?zoom=14.5&pageNumber=2">innovative and strong equipment</a>, and victory would require everyone’s full effort. Second, though, the fact the weapons were captured demonstrated that the Red Army and the Soviet people were able to overcome and defeat the invaders.</p>
<p>Similar exhibitions opened in many other Soviet cities, including Leningrad, Minsk and <a href="https://kyivpastfuture.com.ua/ru/kak-leonyd-bykov-v-tanke-nocheval-ystoryia-kyevskoj-vystavky-trofejnoho-vooruzhenyia-vremen-vtoroj-myrovoj-vojny/">Kyiv</a>. The displays were dismantled by the end of the 1940s; the weapons were recycled as scrap.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A 1943 Soviet film shows vehicles and weapons captured from the Nazis.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Mocking the enemy</h2>
<p>Since Russia first invaded the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-happening-to-civilians-trapped-in-eastern-ukraines-war-zone-45136">Donbas region of eastern Ukraine</a> in 2014, Ukrainians have embraced the practice of displaying captured weapons as trophies.</p>
<p>In July 2014, the <a href="https://warmuseum.kyiv.ua/index_eng.php">National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War</a> in Kyiv presented a temporary exhibition of heavy equipment captured from Russia-sponsored separatist groups. After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukraine continued to use the trophy exhibitions of newly captured Russian weaponry as propaganda, seeking both domestic and international support.</p>
<p>In May 2022, the National Military History Museum of Ukraine opened an exhibition of recently destroyed Russian military equipment on Mykhailivs’ka Square in the Kyiv city center. The exhibition of the wreckage was meant to boost the morale of the Ukrainian people by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwbyEgd69ek">celebrating the strength of the Ukrainian army</a>, and to <a href="https://twitter.com/oleksiireznikov/status/1530816075021033473?s=20&t=NykpoLSlwX7AOobElPuimQ">humiliate the enemy</a> by demonstrating the incompetence and moral inferiority of the Russian army and its weaponry.</p>
<p>A month later, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson <a href="https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/volodimir-zelenskij-i-boris-dzhonson-vidvidali-svyato-mihajl-75873">to visit the exhibition</a>, along with other sights of Kyiv. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483311/original/file-20220907-4832-3vbng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483311/original/file-20220907-4832-3vbng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483311/original/file-20220907-4832-3vbng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483311/original/file-20220907-4832-3vbng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483311/original/file-20220907-4832-3vbng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483311/original/file-20220907-4832-3vbng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483311/original/file-20220907-4832-3vbng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483311/original/file-20220907-4832-3vbng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A July 22, 2022, display in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, shows off Russian weaponry destroyed and captured by Ukrainian forces.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/people-look-at-a-russian-t-90a-tank-and-other-russian-news-photo/1408955273">Sean Gallup via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Gathering international support</h2>
<p>Ukraine has used captured weapons to seek support from <a href="https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/central-europe-leads-the-way-in-backing-ukraine-heres-its-game-plan-for-whats-next/">other former Soviet-bloc countries</a>, sending Russian trophy weapons for display <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/wrecked-russian-tanks-show-warsaw-poland-hails-ukraines-courage-2022-06-27/">in Poland</a> and the <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-tanks-ukraine-captured-prague-exhibition/31938101.html">Czech Republic</a>. </p>
<p>In Prague, Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs Denys Monastyrsky opened the exhibition of the defeated Russian tanks and other weapons on July 11, 2022. In his speech, Monastyrsky referred to the <a href="https://www.history.com/news/prague-spring-czechoslovakia-soviet-union">August 1968 Soviet invasion</a> that crushed the anti-communist Prague Spring demonstrations, saying, “<a href="https://mvs.gov.ua/uk/news/denis-monastirskii-rosiiski-tanki-znovu-v-prazi-ale-rozbiti-spaleni-ukrayinskimi-voyinami">Russian tanks are back in Prague</a>, but this time broken, burned out by the hands of the Ukrainian warriors.”</p>
<p>With this ancient practice, Ukraine is showing off its might and resolve, and demonstrating its opponents’ weaknesses – boosting morale within Ukraine and bolstering support from the international community.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189920/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anya Free does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Displays of captured Russian weaponry aim to show the strength of the foe Ukrainians face, but also that victory is possible.Anya Free, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of California, DavisLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1603132021-05-05T13:37:45Z2021-05-05T13:37:45ZNapoleon’s bicentenary: why celebrating the French emperor has become so controversial<p>Napoleon Bonaparte may have died 200 years ago, but the vast ramifications of his rule can still be felt – and not only in France. This year marks the last in a series of bicentenaries since 1969, the 200th anniversary of his birth, but the chance to give the most famous emperor in French history another send-off is proving distinctly tricky – and not only because of COVID-19 restrictions.</p>
<p>This isn’t the first time that commemorating Napoleon or the events of his reign has posed a problem. In 2005, the then president of France, Jacques Chirac, and his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin – also a Napoleonic historian – thought it wise to <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4491668.stm">sidestep the celebrations</a>for the bicentenary of the French victory against the Austrians at Austerlitz. A key part of this decision, in commentators’ eyes, was mounting controversy about Napoleon’s legacy, including accusations of genocide against people in the colonies. </p>
<p>By the bicentenary of Waterloo in 2015, the commemoration of these battles had become <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/06/18/415394680/200-years-after-waterloo-napoleon-still-divides-europe">distinctly less nationalistic</a> in tone across Europe. Traditionally portrayed as an Anglo-French duel, exhibitions about Waterloo emphasised the role of soldiers from Prussia and the battle’s larger social and political context.</p>
<p>The year 2021, also marketed as the “Année Napoléon” or “Napoleon Year”, has been a difficult milestone. It used to be the president who decided the who, what and when of official commemorations. But, in the wake of a series of backlashes, the French president Emmanuel Macron decided that such commemorations needed to be <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2021/01/16/commemorations-une-delicate-mission-de-pacification-pour-france-memoire_6066450_3246.html">“pacified”</a>.</p>
<p>Since January 2021, the <a href="https://www.institutdefrance.fr/commemorations-nationales/">“France Mémoire”</a> section of the Institut de France has overseen the selection of official figures to commemorate. This year its list includes Napoleon. “France Mémoire” emphasises the importance of debate, of democratising memory, and of accurate historical information. </p>
<p>But others are less optimistic about how much genuine debate there will be. In a recent<a href="https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/idees-et-debats/thierry-lentz-a-l-origine-napoleon-etait-de-gauche_2147167.html"> interview</a>, Thierry Lentz, a major Napoleonic historian and the director of the “Fondation Napoléon”, claimed there are two recurrent issues with commemorating Napoleon today: his reintroduction of slavery and his misogyny.</p>
<h2>Dictator or beloved historical figure?</h2>
<p>Napoleon’s role in the reintroduction of slavery isn’t a new point, but this media-heavy debate has gained traction, especially in the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the toppling of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDZ9GTkxEMA&ab_channel=RCIMartinique">statue of Napoleon’s wife in Martinique</a>, a Caribbean island and a French overseas department. </p>
<figure>
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<p>France abolished slavery in 1794, but Napoleon’s role in its reintroduction is literally on view in one of the major blockbuster exhibitions to commemorate the bicentenary, <a href="https://expo-napoleon.fr/">L’Exposition: Napoléon</a>, at La Villette in Paris. Here, displayed for the first time, visitors can see <a href="https://la1ere.francetvinfo.fr/napoleon-et-l-esclavage-des-documents-rares-seront-exposes-a-la-villette-955984.html">the originals of the orders of May 20 and July 16 1802</a> that re-established slavery in various French colonial territories.</p>
<p>This year, there might be less debate about Napoleon’s misogyny, but it has been prominent in the past. The Civil Code (also referred to as the “Napoleonic Code”) of 1804 essentially made married women subservient to their husbands, and the two spouses were subjected to different standards if they wanted to divorce. </p>
<p>There is also a plethora of quotes by Napoleon about the position of women in society that in today’s context tarnish his image. Outside of academia, the topic of Napoleon and women seems to have shifted from the ramifications of the Civil Code to the relationships he cherished with the women <a href="https://www.napoleon.org/magazine/livres/les-femmes-de-napoleon/">close to him</a>. There’s also more of a focus on the fact that he gave some of these women <a href="https://www.france24.com/fr/france/20210502-napol%C3%A9on-tyran-ou-g%C3%A9nie-les-controverses-autour-de-l-empereur">important political tasks</a>. While more sympathetic readings of Napoleon’s legacy may diffuse some tension, the potential remains for charges of misogyny to erupt once more.</p>
<p>But what about the larger picture? Author and thinker Germaine de Staël, an outspoken opponent of Napoleon’s who lived in Napoleonic France, is often cited as an example of a independent woman of the time. Lower down the social ladder, there are multiple examples of women who succeeded in having a public life despite the repressive laws. Female actors and theatre directors, for example, could lead financially independent lives. Caroline Branchu, a singer of mixed French and Haitian heritage, was one of the most famous performers of the legendary Paris Opéra and was reportedly courted by Napoleon. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Black and white illustration of Germaine de Staël in a dress sitting on a large chair" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398883/original/file-20210505-15-hrsf5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/398883/original/file-20210505-15-hrsf5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398883/original/file-20210505-15-hrsf5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398883/original/file-20210505-15-hrsf5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398883/original/file-20210505-15-hrsf5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1018&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398883/original/file-20210505-15-hrsf5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1018&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/398883/original/file-20210505-15-hrsf5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1018&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Illustration of Germaine de Staël, a writer and public adversary of Napoleon’s despite his tyrannical rule.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/madame-de-stael-vintage-engraved-illustration-268951745">Morphart Creation/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, at the same time, people of colour were excluded from contemporary life, as author and historian <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/140278/the-black-count-by-tom-reiss/">Tom Reiss</a> has charted through the swashbuckling life of General Thomas Alexandre Dumas. Father of one of France’s most famous authors, Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Alexandre Dumas rose to prominence as a general during the Revolution, only to see racial inequalities introduced under Napoleon. </p>
<h2>Past, present, future</h2>
<p>These examples aren’t attempts to deny Napoleon’s legacy, far from it, but analysing cases such as these offers us examples of resistance and change. They also reintegrate other difficult aspects from Napoleon’s reign that we would do well to remember today, such as the enormous death toll of the period’s military campaigns and the way in which these conflicts stirred nationalistic sentiments across Europe.</p>
<p>Recent discussions about Napoleon show that his legacy is a far from settled. It’s interesting that many of the official channels promote the importance of debate and discussion when talking about Napoleon. The La Villette exhibition on Napoleon even has a <a href="https://expo-napoleon.fr/manifesto/">manifesto</a> to this effect. But a cursory glance at social media and newspaper columns show that the debate about Napoleon’s legacy is very much still ongoing.</p>
<p>Realistically, these contests over Napoleon’s memory are not likely to be settled any time soon, if ever. However, the commemorations and the debates that accompany them will shape Napoleon’s image for future generations. We can’t alter the facts of Napoleon’s reign, but who we give a platform to, what we choose to focus on and how we debate can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of a period’s complexity – and perhaps a little of our own complexity too.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/160313/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clare Siviter receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust. Her work on Napoleon started with a PhD on the 'French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era' project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.</span></em></p>Commemorations have slowly become more muted over the years due to the racist and misogynistic aspects of his ruleClare Siviter, Lecturer in French Theatre and Performance, University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1581692021-03-31T16:08:13Z2021-03-31T16:08:13ZSuez canal: what the ‘ditch’ meant to the British empire in the 19th century<p>The <a href="https://theconversation.com/suez-canal-blockage-what-it-takes-to-unwedge-a-megaship-158006">week-long blockage</a> of the Suez canal by the Ever Given container ship has reminded us that the canal, though immensely important to the world’s commerce, is also very vulnerable. </p>
<p>Since its completion in 1869, it has <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-03-27/bloomberg-new-economy-globalization-runs-aground-in-suez-canal">symbolised global interconnectedness</a>. But it has also demonstrated how fears, rivalries and bottlenecks have threatened to obstruct that connectedness. Its narrowness has generated periodic panic and neurosis in the countries which rely on it most – often meaning Britain. </p>
<p>In 1882, Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, from an anxiety to secure the imperial link with India which seemed imperilled by Egyptian disorder. Its troops did not leave until 1956, after the debacle of the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/suez_01.shtml">Suez crisis</a> of that year. </p>
<p>Though the waterway came to be hugely symbolic for the British, it is too simple to see it as the only driver of British imperialism. It was merely the third stage of the transit arrangements across Egypt forged during the 19th century: to create effective communication with India, British entrepreneurs, helped by the state, pioneered a river and road connection in the 1830s between Alexandria and Suez, and then a railway in the 1850s. From 1840, these linked with P&O steamers on both sides. </p>
<p>In 1854, £6.4 million of currency was transferred across Egypt, as well as nearly 4,000 passengers. In 1851, the Royal Navy sent two warships to Alexandria to give “moral support” to the Egyptian viceroy’s approval of the railway, which was opposed by his nominal overlord, the sultan of the Ottoman empire. </p>
<p>In 1855, Lord Clarendon, the British foreign secretary, made clear to the sultan, the viceroy, and Napoleon III, the French emperor, that while Britain sought no territorial advantage in Egypt, it insisted on a “thoroughfare, free and unmolested”. The importance of this to Britain can be seen by the fact that, in 1857, 5,000 troops were sent through Egypt to quell the Indian mutiny. </p>
<p>In the 1850s, even Napoleon III accepted Britain’s primacy in Egypt, because of its ships in the Mediterranean and Red Sea. So did successive Egyptian viceroys. </p>
<p>So although the canal quickly became the most important of the Egyptian transit arrangements, its existence just confirmed what was already clear. Britain would stop any other power controlling Egypt, whenever the Ottoman empire tottered. </p>
<h2>Power or trade?</h2>
<p>In the late 1850s, then prime minister Lord Palmerston opposed the canal’s construction. This was not so much because he imagined that France could ever control it in opposition to Britain (though a few people did fear this). Instead he felt it could create a new source of tension between the European powers and raise again the questions about the integrity of the Ottoman empire that the defeat of Russia in the Crimean war seemed to have settled.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/392800/original/file-20210331-25-1amtyyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Locator map showing position of the Suez canal connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/392800/original/file-20210331-25-1amtyyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/392800/original/file-20210331-25-1amtyyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/392800/original/file-20210331-25-1amtyyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/392800/original/file-20210331-25-1amtyyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/392800/original/file-20210331-25-1amtyyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/392800/original/file-20210331-25-1amtyyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/392800/original/file-20210331-25-1amtyyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Suez canal: one of the most important trade routes in the world for more than 150 years.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">shubhamtiwari via Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many other British people did not worry about such things, and welcomed the canal as a symbol of peaceful global liberal modernisation. Likewise in France, Napoleon Bonaparte had, in 1800, urged an Egyptian canal as a way of challenging British rule in India. But most of its French proponents in later decades envisaged a civilising project uniting east and west and abolishing war.</p>
<p>Together with the completion of railroads and telegraph links across the United States and India, the opening of the Suez canal seemed a crucial part of the global communications revolution – something celebrated by Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1872).</p>
<h2>International, but British</h2>
<p>Britain supplied three-quarters of the canal’s shipping in 1870, and naturally became its major beneficiary. But as the historian Valeska Huber has shown in her <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/channelling-mobilities/50A7B89170F8265D08DEC5D9DB73A340">book about the canal</a>, despite the canal undoubtedly boosting the global free market, this process was neither trouble-free nor straightforward. </p>
<p>It helped the east African slave trade, and so created new pressures for its control. It also helped the spread of contagious diseases, prompting the establishment of a regulatory bureaucracy to monitor passengers, including on racial criteria.</p>
<p>Travellers noted the canal’s tedious bottlenecks, which meant that steamships were sometimes outstripped by dhows and camels, and were often vulnerable to canal works, strikes and accidents. By 1884, <a href="https://www.historyhit.com/1869-opening-suez-canal/">around 3,000 ships had been grounded</a> along the route. </p>
<p>Moreover, British policy on the canal remained ambivalent. Approval of its contribution to international commerce could easily give way to panics that rivals like Russia might use it to attack India. In 1888, a major conference agreed to the <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304012064_2_-_The_Suez_Canal_Imperial_Ventures_and_International_Law_-_from_International_Law_in_the_Middle_East">internationalisation of the canal</a>. All the European powers, the United States and the Ottoman empire stipulated that ships should enjoy free transit – not only in peacetime but also in war. </p>
<p>Britain, however, insisted on adding a rider reserving the right of the Egyptian government, which it now effectively controlled, to close the canal whenever order was imperilled. In the first world war, Britain closed the canal to enemy ships and restricted merchant use to daylight hours.</p>
<p>In this respect, the narrowness of the canal helped the controlling power to restrict access. Gladstone pointed out in 1877 that its dimensions made panic about a Russian assault on India via Suez ridiculous – ships could easily be scuttled there, or sappers employed to render it impassable in a few hours.</p>
<p>It is worth remembering, finally, the cause of the canal’s bottlenecks. It was built by a Franco-Egyptian private company with limited finances, which – until 1864 – was reliant on local forced labour. It was a ditch dug by conscripted Egyptians. Thousands died in its making. </p>
<p>The project allowed critics to portray Egypt as still a land of slavery. The biblical Israelites had escaped this slavery because of divine intervention, in the form of the parting of the Red Sea. The canal, the extension of the same sea, seemed – like the pyramids – to symbolise the oppression of the human spirit.</p>
<p>In that sense, the sight of the Ever Given wedged against this ditch has been another reminder of an obvious truth, that global capitalism rests on labour – the labour of those who toil now to make the factory goods that fill its stacked rows of massive containers. And the labour of those who earlier sweated to build this narrow link between those manufacturers and their markets.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/158169/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jon Parry received funding from the Leverhulme Trust for the research for a book on Britain and the Middle East, which is scheduled for publication in early 2022.</span></em></p>Britain’s preoccupation with the canal was as much about controlling Egypt as it was about global trade.Jonathan Parry, Professor of Modern British History Director of Studies in History and Politics, Pembroke College, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1435062020-08-12T11:28:07Z2020-08-12T11:28:07ZHow Napoléon III used photography as propaganda to hide the horror of his new Paris<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350913/original/file-20200803-24-1g59tjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=533%2C991%2C2798%2C1366&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Patients of the Imperial asylum at Vincennes celebrate Emperor Napoléon III.
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/286165">The Metropolitan Museum of Art.</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, ruler of France from 1848 to 1870, was “<a href="https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb34681089f">the most enthusiastic supporter of photography in all of Europe</a>”. He stocked his libraries with countless photographs of <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8446968q">bridges</a>, <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52506488t">parks</a>, <a href="https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/61925/gustave-le-gray-souvenirs-du-camp-de-chalons-au-commandant-verly-military-scenes-of-the-camp-at-chalons-of-napoleon-iii-french-1857/">army camps</a>, <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b1200025z">railways</a>, and <a href="https://www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/musee-carnavalet/oeuvres/salle-du-trone-palais-du-luxembourg-6eme-arrondissement-paris-0#infos-principales">palaces</a>. These structures were his most important achievements and he commissioned a panoply of photographers to celebrate them.</p>
<p>First publicly demonstrated in 1839, photography was a modern, scientific marvel – its realism, accuracy, and truthfulness astounded 19th-century viewers. In the 1850s, these associations primed it to become an <a href="http://expositions.bnf.fr/napol/bande/index_us.htm">essential propaganda tool</a>. Even medical photography became political.</p>
<p>Yet, as the photographer Charles Nègre discovered when he visited the <em><a href="https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/125534">Asile impérial de Vincennes</a></em> – a convalescent hospital for working men founded by Louis-Napoléon – bodies were more difficult to politicise than bridges. <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6205548s/f228.image">Disabled by amputation and infected with typhoid</a>, the asylum’s patients did not fit easily into Louis-Napoléon’s self-aggrandising propaganda. To win official approval, Nègre had to censor their afflictions.</p>
<h2>Highlighting progress</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350915/original/file-20200803-16-a85tpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A photograph of slums in Paris." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350915/original/file-20200803-16-a85tpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350915/original/file-20200803-16-a85tpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350915/original/file-20200803-16-a85tpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350915/original/file-20200803-16-a85tpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350915/original/file-20200803-16-a85tpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350915/original/file-20200803-16-a85tpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350915/original/file-20200803-16-a85tpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Charles Marville, Haut de la rue Champlain (vue prise à droite), 1877-1878.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Louis-Napoléon inherited a cramped, crumbling and crime-ridden capital. Paris’s one million inhabitants lived cheek-by-jowl in a vast tangle of densely packed buildings. There was even a slum in the courtyard of the Louvre. </p>
<p>Modernising Paris promised more than practical benefits: “I want to be a second Augustus”, <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k26829r/f212.image">wrote</a> Louis-Napoléon in 1842, “because Augustus … made Rome a city of marble”. It meant glory. So, he hired a ruthlessly efficient administrator, Baron Haussmann, to knock down the old slums.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350911/original/file-20200803-22-14i4t9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A photograph of a construction site in Paris." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350911/original/file-20200803-22-14i4t9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350911/original/file-20200803-22-14i4t9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350911/original/file-20200803-22-14i4t9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350911/original/file-20200803-22-14i4t9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350911/original/file-20200803-22-14i4t9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350911/original/file-20200803-22-14i4t9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350911/original/file-20200803-22-14i4t9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Delmaet & Durandelle, [Construction Site in Paris], about 1866. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Getty</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The city became a building site. Charles Marville’s photographs record the squalor of the slums, the chaos of their transformation, and the spectacle of their rebirth. Thousands of men were drafted into an army of construction, battling away on this new “<a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5531466g/f2.item">field of honour</a>” for the glory of the nation and its increasingly power-hungry leader.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352257/original/file-20200811-20-1c8vv3h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A photograph of a modernised Parisian street, with a wide, paved road, new buildings, and gas lighting." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352257/original/file-20200811-20-1c8vv3h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352257/original/file-20200811-20-1c8vv3h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352257/original/file-20200811-20-1c8vv3h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352257/original/file-20200811-20-1c8vv3h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352257/original/file-20200811-20-1c8vv3h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352257/original/file-20200811-20-1c8vv3h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352257/original/file-20200811-20-1c8vv3h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Charles Marville, [Rue de Constantine],about 1865.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Metropolitan Museum of Art</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In December 1851, Louis-Napoléon overthrew the Second Republic and made himself Emperor Napoléon III. Liberal democracy was replaced by populist authoritarianism. To compensate, Napoléon III <a href="https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb36329356r">promised a bounty of progress and benevolence</a>, especially for the working-class – as he put it: “those who work and those who suffer can count on me”. The legitimacy of his rule depended on his being believed. Any evidence to the contrary put him in real danger, not least from the rebellious Parisian workers. As <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/2027/miun.act8203.0001.001?urlappend=%3Bseq=235">one commentator put it</a>: “A week’s interruption of the building trade would terrify the Government”.</p>
<p>Napoléon III and his ministers called upon photographers to help him walk this tightrope. In addition to <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/charles-marville">Marville</a>, they commissioned <a href="https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/59467/edouard-baldus-reunion-des-tuileries-au-louvre-1852-1857-recueil-de-photographies-publie-par-orderachille-fouldvol-1-french-1852-1857/">Édouard Baldus</a> to record the renovation of the Louvre, <a href="https://data.bnf.fr/fr/14057493/auguste_hippolyte_collard/">Auguste Hippolyte Collard</a> to document Paris’s new bridges, and <a href="https://bibliotheque-numerique.inha.fr/idurl/1/6505">Delmaet and Durandelle</a> to showcase the city’s new opera house. Their photographs offered tangible proof of progress.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350916/original/file-20200803-20-5ok9zp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A view of a bridge under construction." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350916/original/file-20200803-20-5ok9zp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350916/original/file-20200803-20-5ok9zp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350916/original/file-20200803-20-5ok9zp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350916/original/file-20200803-20-5ok9zp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350916/original/file-20200803-20-5ok9zp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350916/original/file-20200803-20-5ok9zp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350916/original/file-20200803-20-5ok9zp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Auguste Hippolyte Collard, Chemin de fer de ceinture de Paris (rive gauche): Pont-viaduc sur la Seine au Point-du-Jour, 1863-1865.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bibliothèque nationale de France</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Collard’s view of the rebuilt Point du Jour bridge is typical for its emphasis on the superhuman scale and clean geometry of its subject. <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b1200025z/f31.item">Other photographers</a> approvingly compared Napoléon III’s bridges to Roman aqueducts – Collard instead contrasts the structure to the workers erecting it. Their tiny bodies, “<a href="https://www.persee.fr/doc/arss_0335-5322_1984_num_54_1_2221">trapped in the labyrinth of scaffolding</a>”, are visually dominated by the bridge, which, stamped with the imperial “N”, is a tangible artefact of Napoléon III’s achievement. The photograph’s political message is clear: work for the masses, glory for the Emperor, modernity for France.</p>
<h2>Hiding disability</h2>
<p>Yet, as Napoléon III’s interior minister knew, “industry has its injured like war” and the rebuilding of Paris too had its “<a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5531466g/f2.item">glorious war-wounded</a>”. In 1855 Napoléon III ordered the <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5531469q/f13.item">construction of a convalescent asylum</a> to care for workers injured during the building works. </p>
<p>Charles Nègre visited the asylum around 1858 to photograph <a href="https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/125534">its buildings, patients, and staff</a>. To get paid, Nègre knew he had to toe the party line. Yet, the bodies he encountered had been wounded in the war for Napoléon III’s self-aggrandisement, giving the lie to his image of populist benevolence. Nègre’s challenge was to celebrate Napoléon III’s care for their suffering without revealing his culpability for it.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350914/original/file-20200803-18-77zcdv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A photograph of hospital patients stood outside, raising their hats to celebrate a marble bust of Napoleon III." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350914/original/file-20200803-18-77zcdv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350914/original/file-20200803-18-77zcdv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350914/original/file-20200803-18-77zcdv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350914/original/file-20200803-18-77zcdv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350914/original/file-20200803-18-77zcdv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350914/original/file-20200803-18-77zcdv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350914/original/file-20200803-18-77zcdv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Charles Nègre, [The 15th of August. Imperial Asylum at Vincennes], 1858.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Metropolitan Museum of Art</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nègre began his album with a scene of the patients and staff of the asylum paying homage to their benefactor. Nègre organised the patients into two geometric blocks, angled to draw our attention towards Napoléon III’s marble bust, placed in the centre, and away from individual patients, whose stoic faces and discreet walking sticks blend into a seamless whole.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352262/original/file-20200811-14-sfsft0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A photograph of two nuns working in a laundry." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352262/original/file-20200811-14-sfsft0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352262/original/file-20200811-14-sfsft0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352262/original/file-20200811-14-sfsft0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352262/original/file-20200811-14-sfsft0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352262/original/file-20200811-14-sfsft0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352262/original/file-20200811-14-sfsft0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352262/original/file-20200811-14-sfsft0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Charles Nègre, Asile Impérial de Vincennes: la lingerie, 1859.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These working men are visually subsumed within a superhuman structure akin to Collard’s bridge. While the bridge symbolised progress, this unified mass of bodies offers a metaphor of social cohesion and “<a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k477780b/f2.item">national gratitude</a>” towards the Emperor. </p>
<p>In other photographs, Nègre focused on the asylum’s modern architecture and efficient staff. Patients are shown <a href="https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/125534">eating, playing and reading</a>, as if on holiday. Nègre dared to show medical care only once but even then ensured the patient was so tightly bandaged as to disappear. The visibility of Napoléon III’s benevolence depended on the invisibility of his subjects’ illnesses and disabilities.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350919/original/file-20200803-18-niumcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A photograph of a female patient of Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, facing the camera." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350919/original/file-20200803-18-niumcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350919/original/file-20200803-18-niumcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350919/original/file-20200803-18-niumcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350919/original/file-20200803-18-niumcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350919/original/file-20200803-18-niumcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350919/original/file-20200803-18-niumcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350919/original/file-20200803-18-niumcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hugh Welch Diamond, Patient, Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, 1850–58.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Metropolitan Museum of Art</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the 1850s photography was typically used to discover, rather than disguise, illness. In England, Dr Hugh Diamond photographed his “lunatic” patients because he trusted photography’s minute detail to capture hidden diagnostic clues. During treatment, he showed patients these portraits, believing the medium’s inherent truthfulness and arresting novelty would <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03087290902752978">shock them into recognising their own illness</a>.</p>
<p>Nègre broke from this emerging medical consensus under political pressure and his meagre finances made him desperate for state subsidy. His photographs, in trying to tell us so much about Napoléon III, tell us so little about the asylum’s patients. Photographs, even of bridges or hospitals, are never neutral: they are a tissue of the choices made by the photographer. In choosing to tell one truth, photographers can obscure many others.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143506/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Samuel Raybone does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In 19th-century France, even photographs of hospitals and bridges could become propaganda.Samuel Raybone, Lecturer in Art History, Aberystwyth UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1408882020-07-01T11:11:21Z2020-07-01T11:11:21ZHistory tells us that ideological ‘purity spirals’ rarely end well<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344801/original/file-20200630-103668-10703cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C8%2C2000%2C1077&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Iconoclasm: the beheading of the English king, Charles I, in January 1649.</span> </figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Author James Baldwin’s words, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nobody-Knows-My-Name">written in the America of the late 1950s</a>, captures perfectly a feeling in the air that is currently troubling public discourse in many Western countries. Increasingly, questions once treated as complicated inquiries requiring scrutiny and nuance are being reduced to moral absolutes. Just look at Trumpism.</p>
<p>This follows a now dismally familiar pattern: two camps are identified, the acceptable “for” and the demonised “against”. The latter are cast beyond the pale, cancelled and trolled. Identity politics has become a secular religion and, like any strict sect, apostates are severely punished. </p>
<p>This can lead to a “<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d70h">purity spiral</a>”, with the more extreme opinion the more rewarded in a pattern of increasing escalation. Nuance and debate are the casualties, and a kind of moral feeding frenzy results. </p>
<p>Are <a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Purity%20Spiral">purity spirals</a> inevitable? It is natural for humans to form “in” and “out” groups. Identifying a common enemy is often the key to group solidarity. Nationalist politicians and the marketing teams who serve them know how effective such strategies can be with ill-informed electorates. Equally, if an individual can manifest virtues valued by the group, this fosters a sense of self-worth and belonging.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, we have been here before. History demonstrates the ease with which ordinary people commit atrocious acts, particularly during crises. When you believe you are morally superior, when you dehumanise those you disagree with, you can justify almost anything. Take the example of one of the most consequential purity spirals, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3161951?seq=1">the Puritan Revolution in 17th-century England</a>.</p>
<h2>Word of God</h2>
<p>The Puritans were certain that the godly majority supported them in toppling the tyranny of King Charles I. In their eyes, the monarch and his bishops were challenging the true word of God. The Puritans established an English Republic and Presbyterianism replaced Episcopalianism. Families were divided and fought during a bloody civil war across England, Scotland and Ireland. </p>
<p>The ultimate act of iconoclasm or cancellation is to kill another human being. The poet John Milton, in his <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Eikonoklastes">Eikonoklastes</a> (Icon Breaker) of October 1649, justified the execution of Charles I by arguing that shattering the sacred icon of monarchy had been essential to prevent the English people from being turned into slaves. </p>
<p>Living within a purity spiral defined Puritan society. Dress <a href="https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/puritan-dress-code-and-outrage-slashed-sleeves/">became simple</a>. Luxury was forbidden. <a href="https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/when_christmas_was/">Christmas was cancelled</a>. And discipline <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3166367?seq=1">became a social watchword</a>.
Marriage and patriarchy within the household <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/206103">were sacred</a>. Children were given first names such as “<a href="https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Nicholas+If-Jesus-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned+Barbon">Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned</a>”. </p>
<p>The “saints” competed to show their godliness. Those who did not accept the new culture were condemned. It was said of beggars, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pJrQsqhVESYC&pg=PA551&dq=%22the+curse+of+God+pursueth+them%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjnkqrY0qnqAhXRaRUIHbsYAqMQ6AEwAXoECAEQAg#v=onepage&q&f=false">for example</a>, that “the curse of God pursueth them” because they had abandoned family life. A new tyranny replaced the old.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344806/original/file-20200630-103683-114542k.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344806/original/file-20200630-103683-114542k.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344806/original/file-20200630-103683-114542k.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344806/original/file-20200630-103683-114542k.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344806/original/file-20200630-103683-114542k.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344806/original/file-20200630-103683-114542k.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344806/original/file-20200630-103683-114542k.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The mid-17th century was not the most liberal era if you didn’t agree with the majority view.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">British Museum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Looking back from the 18th-century, many feared new waves of Puritans seeking to enforce their moral codes upon an unwilling society, bringing public violence and political upheaval. It was natural for the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WbLP6mA_F-gC&pg=PA299&lpg=PA299&dq=forty+thousand+Puritans+such+as+they+might+be+in+the+time+of+Cromwell+have+started+out+of+their+graves&source=bl&ots=qc1rU6fXtC&sig=ACfU3U3X4oMS6sWzBaKR_kjCU2TVI8E41w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjMn-Lyu6nqAhVKfMAKHaBFCF4Q6AEwC3oECDUQAQ#v=onepage&q=forty%20thousand%20Puritans%20such%20as%20they%20might%20be%20in%20the%20time%20of%20Cromwell%20have%20started%20out%20of%20their%20graves&f=false">historian Edward Gibbon to note</a> during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of June 1780 that “forty thousand Puritans such as they might be in the time of Cromwell have started out of their graves”.</p>
<p>Some philosophers, such as the <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/">Scot David Hume</a>, argued that the Puritan purity spiral <a href="http://www.english.upenn.edu/%7Emgamer/Etexts/hume.superstition.html">had been worth it</a>. Hume likened the process to a wild storm bringing calm. He called the devout crusaders “fanatics”, and also ridiculous. He also asserted that their passion for liberty had made Britain a free state with limited monarchy and enhanced civil liberties. </p>
<h2>Liberty, Equality, Fraternity</h2>
<p>Should we encourage purity spirals because they are the source of our liberty? No, we should not. Take another purity spiral during the French Revolution – perhaps the greatest in history. Few events have so united a population. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/345033/original/file-20200701-159781-1p13t5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/345033/original/file-20200701-159781-1p13t5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/345033/original/file-20200701-159781-1p13t5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/345033/original/file-20200701-159781-1p13t5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/345033/original/file-20200701-159781-1p13t5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/345033/original/file-20200701-159781-1p13t5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1069&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/345033/original/file-20200701-159781-1p13t5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1069&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/345033/original/file-20200701-159781-1p13t5h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1069&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Zenith of French Glory (1793) by James Gillray.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">British Museum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Revolution began with the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-Rt7Cq7f-KcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">iconoclastic storming the Bastille</a>, the prison symbolising absolutism whose walls were reduced to rubble. Within months, a new world was established. Aristocrats gave up their feudal rights. Empire and war were rejected. Liberty and rights were proclaimed. Hairstyles changed (no more wigs). So did fashion (no bling). </p>
<p>By January 1793, after years of controversy over the nature of liberty, the head of state, Louis XVI, was executed for treason. Monuments of monarchy then toppled. Royal tombs were desecrated. Many aristocrats changed their names to signal their dedication to republican revolution. The rich cousin of the king, Louis Philippe, duc d'Orléans, changed his name to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/01/french-revolution-books">Philippe Égalité</a>.</p>
<p>But by the end of the year, the revolutionaries had turned upon themselves. A law passed the governing Convention on April 1, 1793 condemning any person deemed an enemy of liberty. Although Égalité voted for the law, he soon became its victim, guillotined in November by the Revolutionary Tribunal. </p>
<p>The republican church began to break up as <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ukxaAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA32&dq=intitle:robespierre&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiI_LL91anqAhWPa8AKHWkXDWAQ6AEwAHoECAEQAg#v=onepage&q&f=false">virtue-signalling reached new heights</a>. Under “the incorruptible” Robespierre, anyone with an aristocratic demeanour or critical of government was imprisoned. Thousands died. The philosopher Condorcet, a true supporter of equality between the sexes, was arrested for carrying a Latin book by Horace. </p>
<p>Having any connection to the English enemy brought suspicion. <a href="https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/2316">Thomas Paine</a> remained imprisoned for almost a year because the US ambassador, Gouverneur Morris, who hated Paine, would not vouch that he was no longer English. Critics of Robespierre, such as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jacques-Pierre-Brissot">Jacques-Pierre Brissot</a>, ended up singing republican songs on their way to the guillotine, convinced that <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TI-1wQEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">mad anarchists had hijacked the Revolution</a> and commenced indiscriminate murder.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344808/original/file-20200630-103653-yreo48.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344808/original/file-20200630-103653-yreo48.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344808/original/file-20200630-103653-yreo48.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344808/original/file-20200630-103653-yreo48.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344808/original/file-20200630-103653-yreo48.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344808/original/file-20200630-103653-yreo48.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344808/original/file-20200630-103653-yreo48.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Having consigned many others to death by ‘Madame Guillotine’, Maximilian Robespierre met his end the same way in July 1794. Engraving by Giacomo Aliprandi of a design by Giacomo Beys.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bibliothèque nationale de France</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hume was right that fanaticism and virtue-signalling burn themselves out. Robespierre found himself on the execution block. The price was civil war. The Revolution then went the way of so many democratic revolutions, descending into aristocratic rule (<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Directory-French-history">The Directory</a>) until a general conducted a coup. Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself emperor, delighting the populace by combining public order and military victory. </p>
<p>In asserting his authority, Bonaparte warned that the alternative to his rule was a descent into Terror. He overran most of Europe, replacing monarchs with members of his family. His new aristocracy was the Légion d'honneur. Savvy followers learned the lesson, including <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3625978/A-role-model-for-all-dictators.html">Stalin and Mao</a> – make the people afraid of so-called fanatics and they will follow you.</p>
<h2>Lessons for today</h2>
<p>The lesson: purity spirals can topple authoritarian regimes, but assist new authoritarians in ruining the lives of innocent people. They turn families and friends against one another.</p>
<p>At the end of his life, Hume worried that a lust for liberty was turning fanatical. Hume’s disciples attacked the French Revolution for reigniting religious warfare. Instead of killing each other to save souls, people now did so in the name of freedom. Civil liberties were forgotten.</p>
<p>As polarisation intensifies, people are increasingly loath to consider opinions that don’t reinforce their own. Quite literally the road to hell can be paved with good intentions.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/140888/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The polarisation of today’s political discourse has echoes of the intolerance that characterised the Puritan era and the French Revolution.Katrin Redfern, Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Intellectual History, University of St AndrewsRichard Whatmore, Professor of Modern History, University of St AndrewsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1188742019-10-30T13:29:36Z2019-10-30T13:29:36ZWhy French poet Charles Baudelaire was the godfather of Goths<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299348/original/file-20191029-183120-jqdut2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The poet in a picture by Gustave Courbet.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Goths are typically regarded as being on the fringes of society – members of a subculture which finds beauty in the darker elements of human experience. And while their dress code is much imitated – and <a href="https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/people/the-25-best-photos-from-whitby-goth-festival-2019-1-10071521">celebrated</a> – over Halloween, they have a proud history that stretches far beyond a seasonal horror festival. </p>
<p>In fact, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) could easily qualify as the template goths (and other bohemians) aspire to. He often dressed in black, dyed his hair green, and rebelled against the conformist, bourgeois world of mid-19th century Paris in both his personal life and his art. </p>
<p>His first collections of poems, <a href="https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3618002.html">Les Fleurs du Mal</a> (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), was prosecuted for offending public morals, challenging its audiences with its startling treatments of sex, Satanism, vampirism and decay. No wonder his words would one day be <a href="https://www.baudelairesong.org/the-a-z-of-baudelaire/">set to music by The Cure</a>. </p>
<p>Aside from his writing, Baudlaire’s dissolute life was a checklist of boho credentials. He fell out with his family. He went bankrupt. He pursued reckless sexual experiments and contracted syphilis. He developed a drug habit. He associated with artists, musicians, writers and petty criminals rather than “respectable” people.</p>
<p>He outraged his family by having a mistress who was mixed race and probably illiterate. He refused conventional employment and made a precarious living as a writer, critic and occasional art dealer. </p>
<p>He wrote poetry which was prosecuted for obscenity and was adored by like-minded souls throughout Europe while being hated, even feared, by “straight” society. And then he died young, after years of serious illness and addiction, at the age of 46.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299349/original/file-20191029-183120-1z5h2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299349/original/file-20191029-183120-1z5h2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299349/original/file-20191029-183120-1z5h2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299349/original/file-20191029-183120-1z5h2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299349/original/file-20191029-183120-1z5h2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299349/original/file-20191029-183120-1z5h2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299349/original/file-20191029-183120-1z5h2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Baudelaire, photographed by Étienne Carat in 1863.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Baudelaire was also a dandy, clean-shaven in an age of whiskers and dressed immaculately despite squalid domestic circumstances. Never ostentatious, he wore sombre black in mourning for his times. </p>
<p>Considering nature to be tyrannical, he championed everything which fought or transcended it, while being, like many of his contemporaries, overtly misogynistic. “Woman is natural. That is to say, abominable,” <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=riWFCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=Woman+is+natural.+That+is+to+say,+abominable&source=bl&ots=Yho_FQ1Ih6&sig=ACfU3U1Bpwtnk8j-0yUzTVQTpiiVLi6Yzw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwig853g5cPlAhVwRxUIHcmXAIkQ6AEwEnoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=Woman%20is%20natural.%20That%20is%20to%20say%2C%20abominable&f=false">he wrote</a>. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, he recognised how both genders were trapped within their fleshly prisons and urged resistance to such incarceration through costume and cosmetics, recreational sex, drugs and alcohol.</p>
<p>Baudelaire sounds like many later writers, actors and rock stars, but it is unfair to suggest his cultural importance resides only in his delinquent mannerisms. What makes Baudelaire so significant, and so relevant today, is his recognition in Les Fleurs du Mal, his prose poetry, and essays, that the urbanised, industrial and increasingly godless modern world is radically different from any earlier epoch. </p>
<p>Artists responding to these new conditions of existence cannot cling to outworn traditions. They need instead to cast off convention and rethink their relationship to their culture and surroundings. </p>
<p>Baudelaire’s <a href="https://library.brown.edu/cds/baudelaire/translations1.html">translations of Edgar Allan Poe</a> brought the American writer to a new audience – and the morbidity of many Baudelaire poems suggests the two men were kindred spirits. In <a href="https://fleursdumal.org/poem/126">Une Charogne</a> (A Carcass, 1857) for example, he recounts finding a woman’s maggot-infested body, cataloguing her obscene decay in hideous detail before telling his lover that one day, she too will be rotten and worm-eaten. </p>
<p>Like his contemporary, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gustave-Flaubert">Gustave Flaubert</a>, Baudelaire felt stifled and alienated by the bombastic hypocrisy of <a href="https://www.history.org.uk/secondary/resource/475/napoleon-iii-and-the-french-second-empire">Napoleon III’s Second Empire</a>. He despaired at the gulf between public morality and private vice, and was sickened by the rise of bourgeois respectability, the protestant work ethic, and the sweeping modernisation of Paris itself. </p>
<p>Disdaining realism’s preoccupation with appearances, his writing examined the mental states his surroundings produced: boredom, an aggressive self-lacerating melancholy, and <em>ennui</em> – the listlessness and depression which left sufferers joyless and blasé. </p>
<p>He depicted himself as being like the king of a rainy country gripped by an unending despair, prematurely aged, impotent and sorrowful with no clear cause. “Life is a hospital,” <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/782454-this-life-is-a-hospital-in-which-each-patient-is">he wrote</a>, “in which all the patients are obsessed with changing their beds. One would prefer to suffer beside the fire, another thinks he’d recover sooner if placed by the window.” </p>
<h2>A series of unfortunate events</h2>
<p>More than 150 years after his death, Baudelaire remains a challenging figure – not least for his <a href="https://www.baudelairesong.org/should-feminists-read-baudelaire-3/">sexual attitudes</a>. Nevertheless, his influence is undeniable. <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2929192.pdf?seq=1/subjects#page_scan_tab_contents">T.S. Eliot hailed him</a> in <a href="https://www.bl.uk/works/the-waste-land">The Waste Land</a> (1922), borrowing his line: “<em>Hypocrite lecteur – mon semblable – mon frère!</em>” (Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother), for his dissection of the post-1918 world. </p>
<p>More recently, English author Angela Carter’s <a href="https://www.angelacarter.co.uk/black-venus/">Black Venus</a> (1985) gave a voice to Baudelaire’s mistress, Jeanne Duval, who rages at how “his eloquence denied her language”. And How Beautiful You Are, by Gothic rockers The Cure (1987) <a href="https://twostorymelody.com/literary-brilliance-cures-beautiful/">adapted his prose-poem</a> Les Yeux des Pauvres (The Eyes of the Poor). </p>
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<p>Baudelaire’s rich musical heritage is being currently documented by the <a href="https://www.baudelairesong.org">Baudelaire Song Project</a>. His notion of the “<em>flaneur</em>”, the aimless urban idler, influenced the German philosopher Walter Benjamin and the explorations of modern <a href="https://theconversation.com/psychogeography-a-way-to-delve-into-the-soul-of-a-city-78032">psychogeographers</a>. His presence even lurks in the young adult fiction of <a href="https://www.lemonysnicket.com">Lemony Snicket</a>, where the Baudelaire children suffer a series of unfortunate events.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, black remains one of the uniforms of teenage disaffection from London to Tokyo, shaping the subcultures of the past four decades. Baudelaire’s existential anxieties and refusal to capitulate to the forces of conformity make him a continued inspiration.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/118874/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nick Freeman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>His legacy connects a great swathe of modern popular culture.Nick Freeman, Reader in Late Victorian Literature, Loughborough UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1157342019-04-18T14:42:49Z2019-04-18T14:42:49ZNotre Dame: the public and private lives of France’s spiritual home<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269989/original/file-20190418-28119-ue5z72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C4%2C998%2C655&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Seine and Notre Dame, physically and spiritually the heart of Paris.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Iakov Kalinin via Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>While flames engulfed Notre Dame on the evening of April 15 and the world watched in despair, French president Emmanuel Macron <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/bcd5aa90-5fc9-11e9-a27a-fdd51850994c">told news cameras</a> that the Paris cathedral was part of the history of all French people: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is our history, our literature, our imagination, the place where we have lived our great moments … it is the epicentre of our life.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Macron hit the mark in more ways than one. Certainly, since its first stone was laid in 1163, Notre Dame has witnessed a great many of France’s iconic moments. It was, after all, the church of the country’s medieval kings long before the royal court moved out to Versailles in the 17th century.</p>
<p>In 1558, it witnessed the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the Dauphin, soon to be King François II. In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself emperor there. And, on August 26 1944, the towering frame of general Charles de Gaulle strode triumphantly down the aisle for a thanksgiving service on the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation – having braved snipers on the way.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269996/original/file-20190418-28103-1hevo6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269996/original/file-20190418-28103-1hevo6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269996/original/file-20190418-28103-1hevo6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269996/original/file-20190418-28103-1hevo6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269996/original/file-20190418-28103-1hevo6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269996/original/file-20190418-28103-1hevo6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269996/original/file-20190418-28103-1hevo6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Napoleon Bonaparte crowning himself emperor in Notre Dame, December 1804.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jacques-Louis David and Georges Rouget</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Notre Dame is one of the country’s “lieux de mémoire”, a “realm of memory”, to use <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2928520">historian Pierre Nora’s term</a>; a place where historical memory is embedded and commemorated.</p>
<h2>Secret lives</h2>
<p>All buildings have their “secret lives” – a topic that Edward Hollis explores in his brilliant book with that very title. One of the cathedral’s secret lives was its part in the “culture war” that bitterly divided France after the Revolution of 1789. The Revolution was not only a frontal assault on hereditary privilege, seigneurialism and the monarchy – it also developed into an attack on the Catholic church, and Notre Dame was one of the most important sites of this conflict. </p>
<p>In the autumn of 1793, as the Terror gathered pace, the firebrands who dominated Paris’ municipal government ordered the removal of the statues that lined Notre Dame’s façade above its great doors.</p>
<p>These, it was proclaimed, were “the gothic simulacra of the Kings of France” (in fact, they represented the Kings of Judea). As the iconoclasm swept through the city, the interior of the cathedral was gutted: all religious images, statues, effigies, reliquaries and symbols were stripped out until all that remained was a bare shell of masonry and timber. The cathedral’s bells and spire were melted down for their metal.</p>
<p>This was the most serious damage sustained by the cathedral in modern times, until the recent fire, and yet (and here we might take heart) Notre Dame would be restored in the 19th century by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, whose work included the replacement spire that fell so tragically in flames on April 15.</p>
<p>The crescendo of the revolutionary campaign of “dechristianisation” came on November 10, 1793 when Notre Dame – renamed the “Temple of Reason” – played host to a secular, atheist festival to the triumph of human reason over religion and superstition. The French Revolution left a legacy of cultural and political division between, on the one hand, the Republic, the secular and visions of a democratic, rights-based order, and, on the other hand, the Church, the sacred and memories of the old monarchy.</p>
<h2>Crisis of faith</h2>
<p>Napoleon Bonaparte papered over the chasm in 1801 by signing a Concordat – an agreement with the Pope, whereby he pragmatically recognised Catholicism as the religion of the “great majority of French citizens”. This was a clever formula that was both a statement of fact and left room for other faiths. In return, the Pope accepted many of the reforms of the Revolution and Notre Dame was returned to the Church in April 1802. </p>
<p>Despite this compromise, friction continued between the church and the state as the political pendulum swung back and forth over the course of the 19th century. Education was a particularly contentious battleground, as both sides fought to win the hearts and minds of the younger generations.</p>
<p>From this conflict sprang the republican principle of “laïcité”. While French people of all races and creeds were free to practice their beliefs as private individuals, in their contacts with the state, particularly in schools, they were meant to be equal citizens abiding by the same laws and adhering to the same, universal, republican values.</p>
<p>Notre-Dame was given a role in this – if only in opposition to laïcité. When the Eiffel Tower was opened in 1889 for the Universal Exposition, itself commemorating the centenary of the French Revolution, it was heralded by republicans as a triumph of human reason, science and progress over faith and superstition. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269988/original/file-20190418-28087-pyt7es.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269988/original/file-20190418-28087-pyt7es.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269988/original/file-20190418-28087-pyt7es.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269988/original/file-20190418-28087-pyt7es.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269988/original/file-20190418-28087-pyt7es.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269988/original/file-20190418-28087-pyt7es.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269988/original/file-20190418-28087-pyt7es.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Two of Notre Dame’s oldest inhabitants enjoying the view of the Eiffel Tower.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Neirfy via Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The French diplomat and travel-writer <a href="https://www.revolvy.com/page/Eug%C3%A8ne%252DMelchior-de-Vog%C3%BC%C3%A9">Eugène Melchior de Vogüé</a> imagined an argument between Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, between the old and the new, between faith and science. The cathedral’s two towers mock Eiffel’s creation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You are ugly and empty; we are beautiful and replete with God … Fantasy for a day, you will not last, because you have no soul.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The iron structure retorts: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Old abandoned towers, no one listens to you anymore … You were ignorance; I am knowledge. You keep man enslaved; I free him … I have no more need of your God, invented to explain a creation whose laws I know. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In 1905, the republicans finally triumphed, formally separating church and state, thereby tearing up Napoleon’s Concordat. Notre Dame itself, along with other ecclesiastical property, was taken over by the government.</p>
<h2>Sacred union</h2>
<p>So Notre Dame is certainly a symbol of France’s past, but not only because of its longevity, its royal associations, its undeniably stunning architecture and its location on the Île de la Cité – the ancient legal, political and ecclesiastical heart of the former kingdom. It also stood as a site – and a symbol – of the culture war: the “Franco-French” conflict between, on the one hand, the country’s monarchist and Catholic traditions and, on the other hand, its revolutionary and republican heritage. These frictions have periodically torn the country apart since 1789. This is its hidden history.</p>
<p>This alone is reason to mourn the damage, because its “secret life” carries lessons for all of us – about the relationship between church and state, faith and reason, the secular and the sacred, about tolerance and intolerance, about the use and abuse of religion and culture.</p>
<p>But happily this is not the full story. In times of national crisis, the French have shown an inspiring capacity to rally together, evoking the “union sacrée”, the unity of wartime in 1914, just as they mobilised around the democratic, republican values in response to the terrorist attacks in 2015. </p>
<p>And Notre Dame has historically played a part in these moments of reconciliation and union. When France emerged from the brutal, sectarian 16th-century strife between Catholics and the Protestant Huguenots – remembered as the Wars of Religion – the Protestant Henri de Navarre, who took the crown as Henri IV, pragmatically decided that: “Paris is well worth a Mass” and converted to Catholicism.</p>
<p>When he rode into the capital in 1594, he immediately took communion in Notre Dame: it was a moment that promised peace between Catholics and Protestants (and four years later, the new king issued the Edict of Nantes, which declared toleration for both faiths). </p>
<p>It was in Notre Dame, too, that the official celebrations of Napoleon’s compromise with the Church, the Concordat, came to a climax on Easter Sunday 1802, with a Mass attended by the entire government of a republic once deemed “Godless”.</p>
<p>In 1944, de Gaulle’s triumphant march to Notre Dame through liberated Paris was a moment of catharsis for French people humiliated by four years of Nazi occupation. And in 1996, the then president Jacques Chirac (also the first French president to make a state visit to the Vatican) helped to arrange a Requiem Mass for his agnostic predecessor, François Mitterand.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269991/original/file-20190418-28103-4s10ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269991/original/file-20190418-28103-4s10ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269991/original/file-20190418-28103-4s10ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269991/original/file-20190418-28103-4s10ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269991/original/file-20190418-28103-4s10ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269991/original/file-20190418-28103-4s10ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269991/original/file-20190418-28103-4s10ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">General Charles de Gaulle marches down the Champs Elysees to Notre Dame for a service of thanksgiving following the city’s liberation in August 1944.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Imperial War Museum</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The gesture – and the subsequent papal visit that same year – certainly <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/historians-battle-over-clovis-first-french-king-1306501.html">elicited protests from people</a>, particularly on the left, who defended a pure form of laïcité. Yet that Chirac, who in other contexts steadfastly defended the Republic’s secularism, could as president do these things suggests how far the boundaries between republicanism and Catholicism have softened. Notre Dame is certainly an appropriate site to reflect on this because it is both state property – and officially designated a “monument historique” as long ago as 1862 – and a fully-functioning church.</p>
<h2>Bridges to build</h2>
<p>This is not to say that there are no bridges still to build, or frictions to resolve – far from it. Recently, controversies over laïcité have revolved around attempts to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/14/headscarves-and-muslim-veil-ban-debate-timeline">ban the hijab, the burka and the burkini</a>, which have stoked fears of racism and of the exclusion of France’s substantial Muslim population. And while there is certainly a dark side to les gilet jaunes, they are no less a symptom of deep economic distress and social malaise.</p>
<p>So when Macron, on first learning of the terrible fire consuming Notre Dame, could tweet that his thoughts were with “all Catholics and for all French people” and that “tonight I am sad to see this part of us burn”, he was – perhaps intentionally – almost using the Napoleonic language of the Concordat. His tweet recognised that not all French people are Catholic, while at the same time stating that the iconic cathedral is the heritage of all citizens regardless of belief. </p>
<p>And indeed the rector of the Paris Grand Mosque, <a href="https://churchpop.com/2019/04/16/french-islamic-leader-calls-for-muslims-to-aid-notre-dame-rebuilding-citing-their-veneration-of-mary/">Dalil Boubakeur</a>, issued a press release as the fire still blazed, saying: “We pray that God might safeguard this monument so precious to our hearts.” </p>
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<p>When the reconstruction of Notre Dame begins, the country will be restoring not only a site of its history, but also a symbol of the complexities of that history, complexities that, hopefully, remind us of a capacity for healing, inclusion and unity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/115734/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Rapport receives funding from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for his work on Revolutionary Paris. He is a member of Stirling4Europe.</span></em></p>From coronations to Revolution to reconciliation, Notre Dame has witnessed nearly 900 years of French history.Michael Rapport, Reader in Modern European History, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/713122017-01-31T02:23:56Z2017-01-31T02:23:56ZHow Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ can inspire those who fear Trump’s America<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154826/original/image-20170130-7685-15qhqab.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A Soviet-era stamp depicts a scene from Leo Tolstoy's 'War and Peace.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/The_Soviet_Union_1956_CPA_1968_stamp_(Leo_Tolstoy_and_Scene_from_War_and_Peace).jpg/1024px-The_Soviet_Union_1956_CPA_1968_stamp_(Leo_Tolstoy_and_Scene_from_War_and_Peace).jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As a professor of Russian literature, I couldn’t help but notice that comedian Aziz Ansari was inadvertently channeling novelist Leo Tolstoy <a href="http://www.vox.com/culture/2017/1/22/14350570/aziz-ansari-snl-monologue">when he claimed that</a> “change doesn’t come from presidents” but from “large groups of angry people.”</p>
<p>In one of his greatest novels, “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace">War and Peace</a>” (1869), Tolstoy insists that history is propelled forward not by the actions of individual leaders but by the random alignment of events and communities of people.</p>
<p>The unexpected electoral victory of Donald Trump last November was a political surprise of seismic proportions, shocking pollsters and pundits alike. <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/046f4f9a-ab73-11e6-9cb3-bb8207902122">Myriad explanations</a> have been provided. Few are conclusive. But for those who disagree with his policies and feel powerless as this uncertain moment unfolds, Tolstoy’s epic novel can offer a helpful perspective. </p>
<h2>The illusory power of an egomaniacal invader</h2>
<p>Set between 1805 and 1817 – during <a href="http://www.history.com/news/napoleons-disastrous-invasion-of-russia-200-years-ago">Napoleon’s invasion of Russia</a> and its immediate aftermath – “War and Peace” depicts a nation in crisis. As Napoleon invades Russia, massive casualties are accompanied by social and institutional breakdown. But readers also see everyday Russian life, with its romances, basic joys and anxieties.</p>
<p>Tolstoy looks at events from a historical distance, exploring the motivations of the destructive invasion – and for Russia’s eventual victory, despite Napoleon’s superior military strength. </p>
<p>Tolstoy clearly loathes Napoleon. He presents the great emperor as an egomaniacal, petulant child who views himself as the center of the world and a conqueror of nations. Out of touch with reality, Napoleon is so certain of his personal greatness that he assumes everyone must either be a supporter or take pleasure in his victories. In one of the novel’s most satisfying moments, the narcissistic emperor enters the gates of conquered Moscow expecting a royal welcome, only to discover that the inhabitants have fled and refuse to pledge allegiance. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the heart of a novel about one of Russia’s greatest military victories does not rest with Napoleon, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alexander-I-emperor-of-Russia">Tsar Alexander I</a> or the army commander, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mikhail-Illarionovich-Prince-Kutuzov">General Kutuzov</a>. Instead, it rests with a simple, loving peasant named Platon Karataev who is sent to fight the French against his will.</p>
<p>But even though Platon has little control over his situation, he has a greater ability to touch others than the authoritarian Napoleon, who only sets a pernicious example. For example, Platon offers the motherless hero, Pierre Bezukhov, an almost feminine and maternal kindness and shows him that the answer to his spiritual searching lies not in glory and blistering speeches but in human connection and our inherent connectivity. Pierre soon has a dream about a globe, in which every person represents a tiny droplet temporarily detached from a larger sphere of water. Signifying our shared essence, it hints at the extent to which Tolstoy believed we are all connected. </p>
<p>The case of Platon and his spiritual power is only one example of the grassroots power of individuals in “War and Peace.” At other times, Tolstoy shows how individual soldiers can make more of a difference in the battlefield by reacting quickly to the circumstances than generals or emperors. Events are decided in the heat of the moment. By the time couriers return to Napoleon – and he boldly reasserts his conquering vision – the chaos of battle has already shifted in a new direction. He is too removed from the real lives of soldiers – and, implicitly, people – to really drive the course of history. </p>
<p>In depicting Napoleon’s campaign this way, Tolstoy seems to reject Thomas Carlyle’s <a href="http://history.furman.edu/benson/fywbio/carlyle_great_man.htm">“Great Man” theory of history</a> – the idea that events are driven by the will of extraordinary leaders. Tolstoy, in contrast, insists that when privileging extraordinary figures, we ignore the vast, grassroots strength of ordinary individuals. </p>
<p>In a sense, this vision of history is appropriate for a novelist. Novels often focus on ordinary people who don’t make it into the history books. Nonetheless, to the novelist, their lives and dreams possess a power and value equal to those of “great men.” In this dynamic, there are no conquerors, heroes or saviors; there are simply people with the power to save themselves, or not.</p>
<p>So in Tolstoy’s view, it is not Napoleon who determines the course of history; rather, it’s the elusive spirit of the people, that moment when individuals almost inadvertently come together in shared purpose. On the other hand, kings are slaves to history, only powerful when they’re able to channel this sort of collective spirit. Napoleon often thinks he is issuing bold orders, but Tolstoy shows the emperor is merely engaging in the performance of power.</p>
<h2>A united, public opposition</h2>
<p>All of these ideas are relevant today, when many who did not vote for President Trump are concerned about how his campaign rhetoric is shaping his presidency and the country. </p>
<p>Obviously, the president of the United States has tremendous power. But here is where “War and Peace” can provide some perspective, helping to demystify this power and sort out its more performative aspects.</p>
<p>There’s quite a bit of action coming from the White House, with President Trump furiously signing one executive order after another before the cameras. It’s hard to say how many of these executive orders can go into immediate effect right away. Many – like the recent ban on immigrants from seven Muslim majority countries – are certainly affecting lives. But others will also require legislative and institutional support. We hear every day about <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/government-bites-back-civil-servants-troll-trump-leak-info/">government workers and departments</a>, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-rahm-emanuel-donald-trump-chicago-sanctuary-cities-met-0126-20170125-story.html">mayors</a> and <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/24/politics/jerry-brown-california-donald-trump/">governors</a> vowing not to follow President Trump’s orders. </p>
<p>While those who oppose Trump might not have philosopher peasants like Platon Karataev at their disposal, mass marches and protests broadcast united opposition – as do all the petitions, safety pins, pink pussy hats and rogue tweets. Some of this might be derided as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/pussyhats-pins-petitions-whats-the-point-of-these-anti-trump-protests/2017/01/10/f513ab94-d2d8-11e6-945a-76f69a399dd5_story.html?utm_term=.e29974bccf86">#slacktivism</a>. But collectively they map out tenuous networks of connections among individuals. </p>
<p>Thinking in essentialist terms, Tolstoy felt that Napoleon failed to destroy Russia because the collective interests of Russian people aligned against him: a majority of people – wittingly or unwittingly – acted to undermine his agenda. Is it possible that we will see a similar alignment of grassroots interests now? Could men, women, people of color, immigrants and LGBTQIA individuals make their voices heard against some of President Trump’s executive actions, which may threaten many on a personal level? </p>
<p>I can’t see Tolstoy wearing a pink pussy hat. But always a voice of defiance, he would have certainly approved of resistance.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71312/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ani Kokobobo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Set during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the epic novel is a case study in the grassroots strength of ordinary people.Ani Kokobobo, Assistant Professor of Russian Literature, University of KansasLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/625602016-07-15T21:22:42Z2016-07-15T21:22:42ZWhy the attack in Nice on Bastille Day was an attack on France’s sense of self<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130767/original/image-20160715-2120-1nkqkna.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Striking at the heart of the French Republic. </span> </figcaption></figure><p>Islamic State has <a href="http://news.sky.com/story/three-arrested-after-lorry-massacre-in-nice-10503226">claimed</a> it was behind the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe-36799172">attack in Nice</a> in which at least 84 people died. It is yet to be verified, but the event bore all the hallmarks of a terrorist attack against the French people. This was not simply because of the identity of the perpetrator and his presumed motives, but because of the symbolism of the date of the attack. </p>
<p>The attack on <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30708237">Charlie Hebdo</a> in January 2015 was motivated at least in part by the satirical magazine’s portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed. The following killings of shoppers in a Port de Vincennes supermarket clearly targeted Paris’s Jewish population. The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/nov/13/shootings-reported-in-eastern-paris-live">November 2015</a> attacks in Paris can be viewed as a more general assault on what Islamic State views as an undesirable, hedonistic Western lifestyle. The attack in Nice, however, because it took place on the national holiday of Bastille Day, is an attack on modern France’s very sense of self.</p>
<p>July 14, as every student of French knows, is the date on which the French nation celebrates the storming of the royal prison, the Bastille, in <a href="https://global.oup.com/ukhe/product/the-oxford-history-of-the-french-revolution-9780199252985?cc=gb&lang=en&">1789</a>, by an angry, hungry mob of Parisians. This is remembered as a first blow against royal oppression and the event that launched the revolution that would lead eventually to the downfall of the monarchy, the emergence of the short-lived First Republic, and the rise of Napoleon. </p>
<p>The storming of the prison was a largely symbolic event to the extent that it contained very few prisoners and not all of these were political. Many historians would actually argue that the revolution proper began a month earlier in June 1789 when the <a href="http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/decouvrir-l-assemblee/histoire">National Assembly</a> was established by the people’s representatives without the king’s permission. </p>
<p>July 14 1789 is significant because it was the moment when the people themselves became a key actor in the unfolding drama, joining forces with, and lending muscle to, the middle-class lawyers, clergymen, and lesser nobility who represented them in the assembly. In the eyes of revolutionaries and their republican inheritors, it brought to life one of the most important principles of the revolution: that sovereignty resided with the French people and not with the king.</p>
<h2>A site of conflict</h2>
<p>Bastille Day celebrations have therefore become a way of celebrating national and social unity alongside the principle of popular sovereignty. But July 14 only became a public holiday in 1880 under France’s <a href="http://www.bonjourlafrance.com/france-history/french-third-republic.htm">Third Republic (1870-1940)</a>, the first regime to try to capitalise symbolically on the revolution. </p>
<p>It was a crucial weapon in the war waged by republicans against opponents and, in particular, those monarchists and nationalists who wanted a return to authoritarian forms of government and who therefore refused to celebrate it. In the first half of the 20th century, movements such as the anti-Semitic <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Action-Francaise">Action Française</a>, for instance, sought to return France to a mythical golden age of absolute monarchy, tried instead to encourage the French to adopt the <em><a href="http://www.lonelyplanet.com/france/orleans/events/local-festivals-culture/fetes-de-jeanne-darc">fête de Jeanne d’Arc</a></em>, commemorating the liberation of Orleans by Joan in 1429. </p>
<p>When the Nazis invaded in 1940 and the Republic voted itself out of existence by granting full powers to the collaborationist <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/VichyRegime.html">Philippe Pétain</a>, July 14 went the way of parliamentary democracy, human rights, and secular education. Neither Pétain nor the Germans could risk allowing the celebration of the power of the French people at a time of dictatorship and occupation. </p>
<p>It was replaced with a national holiday centring on Joan of Arc, she who had rid France of Germany’s principal remaining enemy: the English. Celebrating Bastille Day in occupied France was a particularly serious offence and could lead to deportation. Nevertheless, many French did mark July 14 and it became an act of resistance. </p>
<h2>Republican values</h2>
<p>Since the return to democracy under the Fourth (1944-58) and Fifth Republic (1958-present), Bastille Day has remained in many French minds a means of reaffirming both the government’s and the people’s commitment to the principles of republicanism. It is not just a means of commemorating a single revolutionary act. It represents an annual resigning of the contract between the government and the people and a reaffirmation of the latter’s sovereignty and the former’s recognition of this fact. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"753767828143083520"}"></div></p>
<p>But we can never assume that this contract is recognised and respected by all and the history of Bastille Day shows that this has rarely been the case as it has long been a site of conflict. It is clear to many of us who observe France from abroad that, as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/15/multiculturalism-assimilation-britain-france">in other European nations</a>, there is a section of the population that does not feel, and perhaps has never felt, part of the national whole.</p>
<p>The Nice attack was a clear rejection of the values of the Republic and the principles by which many Europeans of diverse origins live. It may well have been motivated by anger and alienation, but it was delivered with the insensitive brutality of the oppressor.</p>
<p><em>This article was updated on July 16 to reflect the claim of responsibility made by IS for the attack.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62560/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Hurcombe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Terror on July 14 is a clear rejection of the values of the French Republic.Martin Hurcombe, Reader in French Studies, School of Modern Languages, University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/578932016-07-08T07:09:20Z2016-07-08T07:09:20ZBaron Larrey – Napoleonic inventor of ambulances, triage and MASH<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125534/original/image-20160607-15041-ha3qqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">MASH TV cast.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16354650">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When I was young, one of my favourite TV shows was M*A*S*H. Set in a US mobile hospital during the Korean War, the army doctors and nurses approached their work with wacky black humour. As the helicopter ambulances brought in the wounded to the tented Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) near the battlefront, they were triaged and patched up before being sent on to larger hospitals. This is a model for treating the wounded that was largely developed by a French surgeon, during the Napoleonic wars. He was Baron <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/aug/05/2">Dominique Jean Larrey</a>, born 250 years ago today. </p>
<p>Larrey, who fought in most of <a href="http://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC2479995&blobtype=pdf">Napoleon’s campaigns</a>, believed in rapid treatment of the wounded, and invented the first ambulance. These horse drawn “flying ambulances” could manoeuvre rapidly across the battlefield, picking up injured men and taking them to field hospitals just <a href="http://cdm15290.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15290coll3/id/527">outside the battle zone</a>. There the soldiers would be treated, and when stable, sent to hospitals behind the lines, often based in convents or monasteries.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129422/original/image-20160705-823-tvg81f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129422/original/image-20160705-823-tvg81f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129422/original/image-20160705-823-tvg81f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129422/original/image-20160705-823-tvg81f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129422/original/image-20160705-823-tvg81f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129422/original/image-20160705-823-tvg81f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129422/original/image-20160705-823-tvg81f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Jean_Larrey#/media/File:Larrey%27s_Flying_Ambulance.jpg">The National Library of Medicine.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Larrey worked tirelessly to provide good medical support for men in his care. He constantly battled a military administration, who often saw the wounded as unwanted mouths to feed. He fought incompetence and quartermasters who sold the supplies needed by hospitals for personal profit. And he argued with generals who would prefer resources to go to front-line operations. </p>
<p>Although Larrey often made himself very unpopular, he had the support of the Emperor Napoleon who had a great regard for him, possibly in part because he realised the positive effect he had on <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/aug/05/2">troop morale</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120682/original/image-20160429-10485-dn5elz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120682/original/image-20160429-10485-dn5elz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=789&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120682/original/image-20160429-10485-dn5elz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=789&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120682/original/image-20160429-10485-dn5elz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=789&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120682/original/image-20160429-10485-dn5elz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=992&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120682/original/image-20160429-10485-dn5elz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=992&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120682/original/image-20160429-10485-dn5elz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=992&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Baron Larrey.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/repolco/12663727754/sizes/l">irinaraquel/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Larrey had strong principles. He developed triage, so that the wounded were treated in order of need, regardless of rank or nationality. While this did not endear him to all generals or administrators, in the long run it saved his life. </p>
<p>Wounded and captured by the Prussians after the battle of Waterloo, he was about to be shot when the medic tying the blindfold recognised him. He was sent to the Prussian general, Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. Larrey had saved Blücher’s son’s life after a previous battle and, following dinner, was released with money and an escort.</p>
<h2>Skilled surgeon</h2>
<p>As well as a fantastic administrator and a brave man, Larrey was an innovative and skillful surgeon. He promoted rapid amputation as he saw it led to better survival than the standard delay. For conventional amputations, he used three circular cuts to form an inverted cone, which, for legs, produced a stump that <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/aug/05/2">fitted wooden legs well</a>. This compared very favourably to the alternative, a straight cut with the tissue then being pulled down and sewn over the end of the bone; resulting in pain, frequent infection and gangrene. </p>
<p>Larrey was one of the few surgeons who could successfully undertake disarticulation (separation of two bones) at the hip or shoulder joint, and amputation at the shoulder joint is sometimes still known as <a href="http://bit.ly/1Ycsx47">Larrey’s amputation</a>. During 1812 he noted that he could reduce the pain of amputation by <a href="http://bit.ly/1U5ABR3">packing the stumps with snow</a>. </p>
<p>He also operated on civilians. If anyone wants a reason to give thanks for the development of anaesthetics, they should read the account by novelist Fanny Burney of her mastectomy that Larrey did, without the <a href="http://newjacksonianblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/breast-cancer-in-1811-fanny-burneys.html">benefit of drugs</a>.</p>
<h2>Complex, vain, virtuous</h2>
<p>He was a <a href="http://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC1543132&blobtype=pdf">complex person</a>. He kept his hair long, because he felt physically and mentally ill if it was <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/aug/05/2">cut too short</a>. He picked fights because of perceived slights, and railed against the establishment when he did not get honours or jobs that he felt due to him. He was a committed revolutionary republican, who led 1,500 students in the storming of the Bastille, but adored Napoleon even as he assumed the title of Emperor. </p>
<p>He was vain, claiming that at Waterloo the Duke of Wellington had ordered the artillery not to fire in his direction. He then doffed his hat. According to the anecdote, the Duke of Cambridge asked the Duke of Wellington who he was saluting. “I salute the courage and devotion of an age that is no longer ours,” he <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/aug/05/2">replied</a>. This touching story is only slightly marred by the fact that the Duke of Cambridge was not at Waterloo.</p>
<p>However, Larrey was much loved. There are many stories of ordinary soldiers putting themselves at risk to save his life. In the panic stricken crossing of the Berezina River, during the retreat from Moscow, they passed him over their heads across the bridge jammed with <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/aug/05/2">fleeing soldiers</a>. He was also one of relatively few people that Napoleon recognised in his will, leaving 100,000 francs to “<a href="http://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/articles/napoleons-last-will-and-testament/">the most virtuous man I have known</a>”.</p>
<p>Larrey died in 1842 in Lyon, at the ripe age of 76, rushing back to Paris from an inspection of military hospitals in Algiers to see his sick and much beloved wife, Charlotte. She sadly died three days earlier. </p>
<p>But Larrey’s influence lives on. Next time you see an ambulance weaving through the traffic, remember the man who invented its predecessor, which galloped around the battlefields of Europe.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/57893/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew George is Chair of the National Research Ethics Advisors' Panel of the Health Research Authority</span></em></p>The story of an amazing man you have probably never heard of.Andrew George, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Brunel University LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/596172016-05-19T10:51:12Z2016-05-19T10:51:12ZIt’s irresponsible to compare the EU to the failed demagoguery of Hitler and Napoleon<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/122995/original/image-20160518-13499-1b1mcdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Napoleon victorious at the 1805 Battle of Austerlitz. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AAusterlitz-baron-Pascal.jpg">François Gérard via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It was always inevitable that history was going to take its place in the European debate: not only do historians have a duty to reach out beyond the ivory tower and engage with and inform public debate, but the last three centuries are replete with examples that can be drawn upon to fuel the debates of today. </p>
<p>References to the past have cropped up on many occasions during the EU referendum campaign, with both sides accusing the other of using and abusing historical examples to suit their own purposes. Most recently, the former mayor of London and Vote Leave campaigner Boris Johnson <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/14/boris-johnson-the-eu-wants-a-superstate-just-as-hitler-did/">caused outrage</a> by seemingly comparing the European Union of today with the failed projects of Napoleon and Hitler. </p>
<p>I will not stoop so low as to suggest that Johnson seriously believes there is any direct comparison between EU Brussels, Napoleonic Paris or Hitlerite Berlin. That said, given that many of the electorate have a limited understanding of historical events, to utter the words “Hitler” and “European Union” in the same breath is, to put it mildly, both dishonest and dangerously demagogic.</p>
<h2>Imposed from the centre</h2>
<p>Let us set moral outrage aside and consider the facts of the case. Johnson is not the first to point out that the European Union is but the latest is a long series of proposals to unite Europe in a single political entity. </p>
<p>Yet, whenever this has actually been attempted in the past, it has been done by force: a single hegemonic power has sought to impose its will on the rest of the continent by right of conquest. As for the nature of the policies that they created, these are all too clear: Hitler’s “New Order” brought murder and horror to Europe. In the end, Napoleon’s Europe was nothing but a colonial empire established in the French near-abroad, an <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Transformation_of_European_Politics.html?id=BS2z3iGPCigC&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y">“uncommon market”</a> in which French manufacturers were privileged at the expense of everyone else.</p>
<p>These examples were indeed in all probability doomed to fail because in the end, success impelled Napoleon and Hitler alike to forget that war, like politics, is the art of the possible. </p>
<p>But there is a crucial difference: the European Union is founded on democratic will and in principle treats its members on the basis of equality, while the Napoleonic and Hitlerite empires were imposed from above and subjected to varying levels of control from the centre.</p>
<h2>Here to stay</h2>
<p>Herein, of course, lays the rub: in 1814 and 1945, Napoleon and Hitler’s projects at a sort of European union bit the dust, but that does not mean that the current project will inevitably meet the same fate. </p>
<p>That the EU is imperfect is certainly true. It is in urgent need of reform, but its catastrophic failure is not something that I would bet on. </p>
<p>What Brexit will mean, then, may not be the British sailing on the serene seas of the North Atlantic in company with the good ship, USA, but, rather the British sitting marooned on a desert island while the good ship Europe disappears over the horizon. </p>
<p>To put it another way, leave the European Union by all means, but do not imagine that the European Union is going to disappear. Warts and all, it is likely to be around for a very long time, and that means that Britain needs a way to influence what goes on inside it.</p>
<p>By all means let us talk history, but let us talk sense too. For all the importance of NATO and the US, and for all the military and diplomatic deficiencies of the European Union in its current form, remaining in is infinitely preferable to risking secession.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/59617/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Charles Esdaile is affiliated with Historians for Europe. </span></em></p>A historian responds to Boris Johnson’s claim that the EU is pursuing a powerful super-state, like Hitler.Charles Esdaile, Professor in History, University of LiverpoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/588262016-05-19T09:39:09Z2016-05-19T09:39:09ZHow the British defeated Napoleon with citrus fruit<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/122893/original/image-20160517-9487-1dhjz9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Blockade of Toulon by Thomas Luny.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7546600">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Everyone knows that Britain’s conclusive victory over Napoleon was at Waterloo. The story of that day – the squares of infantry repulsing cavalry charges, the Imperial Guard retreating under murderous musket fire delivered by a red line of soliders, the just-in-time arrival of Field Marshal Blücher’s Prussian army – is one of excitement, horror and heroism. However, Britain’s biggest contribution to Napoleon’s defeat was much less romantic. It involved the first <a href="http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=39532">randomised controlled trial</a>. </p>
<p>Without the trial, the years of blockades of French ports by the Royal Navy would not have been practical. The blockade kept the French fleet confined, preventing Napoleon from invading Britain. It gave the British freedom to trade across the world, helping finance not only the British but other European armies and nations. It threatened France’s trade and economy, which forced Napoleon to order the <a href="http://www.britannica.com/event/Continental-System">continental system</a>: a Europe-wide embargo against trade with Britain. He invaded both Spain and Russia to enforce this boycott – actions that ultimately brought about his downfall. </p>
<p>Blockade work was often tedious, always dangerous. Navy frigates, keeping close to the shore, would watch the French ports, using signal ships to notify the main fleet over the horizon if the French were to sail. The ships (and sailors) had to maintain station for months without relief. In 1804-5, Admiral Horatio Nelson spent ten days short of two years on <a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/christopher-hibbert-10/nelson-a-personal-history/">HMS Victory</a>, never stepping on dry ground, most of the time enforcing the blockade of Toulon. </p>
<h2>The scourge of scurvy</h2>
<p>The ability of the sailors of the Royal Navy to operate for such long periods at sea was remarkable. For most of the 18th century, ships could only stay at sea for relatively short periods (six to eight weeks), without the sailors developing scurvy. </p>
<p>Victims would feel weak, bleed at the gums, old wounds would break down and they would get infections. In the later stages of scurvy, sailors would have hallucinations and could <a href="http://www.dermnetnz.org/systemic/scurvy.html">go blind before dying</a>.</p>
<p>More sailors died from scurvy than enemy action. In 1744, Commodore George Anson of the Royal Navy returned from a nearly four-year circumnavigation of the globe with just <a href="http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/history/Gordon_1984.pdf">145 men left</a> from the original complement of 1,955. Four died as a result of enemy action. Most of the rest died from scurvy. </p>
<p>This was not unusual – 184,889 sailors were enlisted into the Royal Navy during the Seven Years’ War and 133,708 died or were lost due to sickness, again <a href="http://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312313920">mostly scurvy</a>, and just 1,512 died in combat. There is no way that the navy could have maintained the blockade of France for so long without preventing this disease.</p>
<h2>A breakthrough experiment</h2>
<p>The cause of scurvy was unknown, and many cures were proposed. The Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, made his men <a href="https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8852139/Mayberry.html?sequence=2">use urine as a mouthwash</a>, an intervention that did not prevent nearly two-thirds of them dying from scurvy. </p>
<p>The breakthrough experiment – the first randomised controlled trial – was carried out by Scottish Royal Navy surgeon <a href="http://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/publication/Limeys/9780750939935/">James Lind</a> in 1747. After eight weeks at sea on HMS Salisbury, there was an outbreak of scurvy. He took 12 sailors with the disease and, ensuring the cases were as similar to each other as possible, he put them together in the same part of the ship and gave them the same diet. He divided them into six groups and gave each group a different treatment. For example, one group was given a quart of cider every day, another had to drink half a pint of seawater. Two sailors were given two oranges and a lemon daily. After six days, one recovered and returned to duty, the other was deemed well enough to nurse the remaining ten patients.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/122894/original/image-20160517-9491-1huqsuk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/122894/original/image-20160517-9491-1huqsuk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122894/original/image-20160517-9491-1huqsuk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122894/original/image-20160517-9491-1huqsuk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122894/original/image-20160517-9491-1huqsuk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122894/original/image-20160517-9491-1huqsuk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122894/original/image-20160517-9491-1huqsuk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">James Lind by George Chalmers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/James_Lind_by_Chalmers.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1753, Lind <a href="http://www.jameslindlibrary.org/lind-j-1753/">wrote a treatise</a> describing this crucial experiment. While others had previously used citrus fruit to treat scurvy, this trial proved its effectiveness.</p>
<p>We now know that scurvy is caused by lack of vitamin C or ascorbic acid, present in large amounts in citrus fruit. In the Napoleonic wars, all British sailors were issued with lemon juice or other fruit. In 1804, 50,000 gallons were <a href="http://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/publication/Limeys/9780750939935/">purchased by the Royal Navy</a>. The effect was remarkable. In 1809, the Naval Hospital, at Haslar near Portsmouth, did not see a single case of scurvy.</p>
<p>Lind’s controlled trial was essential for the defeat of Napoleon. Without it, the blockade could not have been sustained, Napoleon’s fleet could have disrupted British trade, and, more importantly, allowed the emperor to invade Britain.</p>
<h2>Delayed recognition</h2>
<p>The story isn’t so simple, however. It involved big admiralty egos and political infighting. Lind’s treatise was largely ignored when it was published. It took decades of work by others – notably Thomas Trotter and Gilbert Blane – to fight for <a href="http://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/publication/Limeys/9780750939935/">the adoption of lemon juice</a> by the navy. </p>
<p>It was not until 1795, after Lind’s death, that his findings were fully adopted. Other countries were also slow to follow the British example. Even though Americans knew that British sailors drank lemon juice (the origin of the slang-term “limey”), scurvy remained a major problem for soldiers in the <a href="http://www.faqs.org/health/topics/51/Scurvy.html">American Civil War</a>. </p>
<p>One lesson is that it is not enough to do good science and assume any finding will be instantly adopted. There are many barriers to adoption and people like Blane and Trotter who fight and overcome those barriers are as important to the story as those, like Lind, who make the original discovery.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/58826/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew George is Chair of the National Research Ethics Advisors' Panel of the Health Research Authority</span></em></p>The British blockade of France wouldn’t have worked if it wasn’t for an ingenious experiment conducted half a century earlier.Andrew George, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Brunel University LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/437892015-06-24T12:30:03Z2015-06-24T12:30:03ZNapoleon rides high again in Waterloo coverage – he shouldn’t<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86237/original/image-20150624-31507-13jxj8q.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Andrew Roberts
at a reconstruction of the Battle of Borodino.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Back2back Productions</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Waterloo was one of the most awful and costly engagements in the history of Europe. It cost the lives of many thousands of British, German, Dutch and Belgian soldiers – and left many others horribly maimed and in many instances reduced to a life of destitution.</p>
<p>It is therefore all too right that we should remember their sacrifices – and all the more so as the threat which they faced down was exactly the same as the one that raised its head again in 1914 and 1939, namely the establishment of a colonial empire in the heart of Europe. </p>
<p>Given this, it is deeply depressing to discover that the BBC’s chief contribution to the bicentenary has been to recast itself as the Bonapartist Broadcasting Corporation.</p>
<p>I refer, of course, to the twin documentaries on Napoleon, the one on <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05xx9pz">Radio 4</a> and the other on <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05z36x2">BBC2</a>, that have been presented by the well-known author, Andrew Roberts. Before going any further, let me hasten to allot credit where credit is due. Roberts is a writer of real quality who has produced some excellent works in the past and much of the detail that he retails is both accurate and of great interest. That said, it is impossible for me, as a historian of the Napoleonic epoch, not to take issue with him.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86242/original/image-20150624-31518-1k3zej6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86242/original/image-20150624-31518-1k3zej6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86242/original/image-20150624-31518-1k3zej6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86242/original/image-20150624-31518-1k3zej6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86242/original/image-20150624-31518-1k3zej6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86242/original/image-20150624-31518-1k3zej6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86242/original/image-20150624-31518-1k3zej6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Andrew Roberts spinning a tall tale.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Back2back Productions</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>For and against Napoleon</h2>
<p>Where, then, to begin? Historians have been deeply divided about Napoleon ever since his death on Saint Helena in 1821. There are those who loathe the emperor and all his works and who see him as little more than a warlord and conqueror with a brilliant publicity machine. And then there are those who either see him as a veritable apostle of liberty or, at the very least, are prepared to accord him a major role in the modernisation of Europe. </p>
<p>To put it mildly, Roberts fits into the second of these categories. As he has already argued in a massive biography of the emperor entitled <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/13/napoleon-the-great-andrew-roberts-review">Napoleon the Great</a>, for him, the French ruler was a hero. He presents Napoleon as a man of courage and determination, who showed just what difference even the most insignificant of individuals can make to the world in which they live. And a man of genius, who built a strong and beautiful France on the basis of the principles of 1789. </p>
<p>A man of vision, who was for all his life driven by a commitment to the principles of administrative rationalism and equality before the law. A man of the future, who wanted to establish a European Community. A man of tolerance, who emancipated the Jews. A man of decency and kindness who was warm, affable and devoted to his family. And, most of all, a man of peace, who throughout his career was dogged by the refusal of the affronted and terrified powers of Europe to cease waging the war against the French Revolution upon which they had embarked in 1792. </p>
<p>All this makes for a beguiling story – and Roberts tells it with great verve and commitment. The trouble is, alas, that it is but a story. Roberts can be challenged on almost every count. Space does not allow for a full critique of his views, so I will confine myself to some remarks on the international history of the period. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86244/original/image-20150624-31476-u5m344.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86244/original/image-20150624-31476-u5m344.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86244/original/image-20150624-31476-u5m344.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86244/original/image-20150624-31476-u5m344.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86244/original/image-20150624-31476-u5m344.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86244/original/image-20150624-31476-u5m344.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86244/original/image-20150624-31476-u5m344.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Battle reconstruction.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Back2back Productions</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The reality of empire</h2>
<p>In brief, even assuming that Napoleon actually stood for them, the idea that France was faced by a relentless crusade against the ideals of the Revolution is simply untrue. As even the most cursory analysis shows, the history of the Napoleonic Wars is essentially one of a long series of failed attempts somehow to come to terms with Napoleon and find a way of integrating him into the international order. </p>
<p>Austria, Russia and Prussia all successively tried policies of détente and even military alliance, only to find that the emperor was an impossible partner who rode roughshod over their interests. Even Britain essayed compromise peaces in 1802 and 1807. In the end what we have is a story of the powers of Europe gradually coming to the conclusion that there was no option but to fight.</p>
<p>So the chief factor in the overthrow of Napoleon was Napoleon himself. All this is glossed over by Roberts – and the fact is that he therefore stands accused of doing nothing more than rehashing the famous legend of Saint Helena the apologium-cum-manifesto that the emperor put together during the six years he was in exile between 1815 and his death in 1821.</p>
<p>This prompts another thought. “Write down everything I say,” Napoleon told the small band of courtiers who followed him into exile, “and I will make your fortune”. Seemingly, this is advice which continues to resonate down the ages, and so it is that we are left with a weed that continues to spring forth no matter how often it is cut back by the secateurs of academic argument. </p>
<p>How sad it is, then, that in this month of all months the BBC should so dishonour the memory of all those who died in the fight against the exercise in conquest, looting, exploitation and personal aggrandisement that is all the grand empire stood for.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43789/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Charles Esdaile does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The BBC’s chief contribution to the bicentenary has been to rename itself the Bonapartist Broadcasting Corporation.Charles Esdaile, Professor in History, University of LiverpoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/433042015-06-18T11:32:48Z2015-06-18T11:32:48ZWalter Scott war journalism from the Waterloo battlefield<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85423/original/image-20150617-23226-64pq7a.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Field of Waterloo by Joseph Turner (c.1817)</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://historicphotoimage.com/store/index.php/artists/turner/joseph-turner-the-field-of-waterloo-giclee-art-reproduction-on-stretched-canvas.html">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo on June 18 1815, it came as a great relief to all those in Britain who had feared a French invasion. Among them was the celebrated 19th-century writer Walter Scott, who articulated his fears in <a href="http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/novels/antiquary.html">The Antiquary</a>, his third novel, which was published the following year (though there <a href="http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/24/101024928/">has been</a> speculation that he might have quietly supported the French revolution in his younger years). </p>
<p>The revolution, the Napoleonic wars and Waterloo were undoubtedly the great historical events of Scott’s lifetime. As a writer who had immersed himself in moments of conflict and their effect on history, the 43-year-old Scott was excited by the concluding battle and was <a href="https://theconversation.com/as-soon-as-waterloo-was-over-poets-flocked-to-the-battlefield-43211">one of a number</a> of writers who went to visit the battlefield. As his biographer JG Lockhart <a href="http://lordbyron.cath.lib.vt.edu/contents.php?doc=JoLockh.Scott.Contents">notes</a>, “he grasped at the ideas of seeing probably the last shadows of real warfare that his own age would afford”. As Scott <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Paul_s_letters_to_his_kinsfolk.html?id=jEpeAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">put it himself</a>, this was such an event “as only occurs once in five hundred years”.</p>
<h2>Scott sets forth</h2>
<p>Though he was anxious to set out as early as possible, other commitments meant that he could not begin his journey until July 27 1815. During his visit he collected objects from the battlefield, several of which can still be seen at <a href="http://www.scottsabbotsford.com">his home at Abbotsford</a> in the Scottish borders. These included buttons, bullets and cuirasses (leather body armour), as well as a book of popular songs owned by a French soldier and carrying the signs of battle. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Scott portrait by Henry Raeburn (1823)</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?client=safari&channel=mac_bm&hl=en&authuser=0&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1435&bih=763&q=walter+scott&oq=walter+scott&gs_l=img.3..0l10.491031.492430.1.492950.12.8.2.1.1.0.127.612.3j3.6.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..3.17.1367.N1co5jsXBxI#q=walter+scott&channel=mac_bm&hl=en&authuser=0&tbm=isch&tbs=sur:fc&imgrc=EwVoDcABLKSWrM%253A%3BbSqTDPjoVfZSOM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fupload.wikimedia.org%252Fwikipedia%252Fcommons%252Fthumb%252Fc%252Fc1%252FHenry_Raeburn_-_Portrait_of_Sir_Walter_Scott_and_his_dogs.jpg%252F496px-Henry_Raeburn_-_Portrait_of_Sir_Walter_Scott_and_his_dogs.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fcommons.wikimedia.org%252Fwiki%252FFile%253AHenry_Raeburn_-_Portrait_of_Sir_Walter_Scott_and_his_dogs.jpg%3B496%3B600">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He also sent daily letters to his wife Charlotte in the persona of “Paul”, ostensibly addressed to an imaginary group of correspondents, most likely as a device to be able to express himself more clearly. The letters outlined the situation that he found in France, the political events and social circumstances that had led up to Waterloo, and what the future might hold for both France and Europe. These formed the basis of the book <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Paul_s_letters_to_his_kinsfolk.html?id=jEpeAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Paul’s Letters to His Kinsfolk</a>, published the following year. This was one of the earliest and most interesting accounts of France just after the battle, not to mention an important early example of war journalism. </p>
<p>Perhaps foremost among the emotions Scott describes is a sense of France in limbo. He <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Paul_s_letters_to_his_kinsfolk.html?id=jEpeAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">notes that</a> the war might be “ended to all useful and essential purposes, [but] could not in some places be said to be actually finished”. He expresses repeatedly a sense of sympathy for the plight of the ordinary French people. His landlady, for example, seemed “ready to burst into tears at every question we put to her”. </p>
<p>He also recognises the dangers posed by so many soldiers released from the duties of war, worrying that they will “beg, borrow, starve and steal” until new conflicts arise. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>what will become of these men, and what of the thousands who, in similar circumstances, are now restored to civil life, with all the wild habits and ungoverned passions which war and license have so long fostered. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Scott also wrote letters from France as himself, which are at times poignant. In a letter to the Duke of Buccleuch, for example, <a href="http://lordbyron.cath.lib.vt.edu/contents.php?doc=JoLockh.Scott.Contents">he describes</a> the whole of France as “melancholy” and reiterates the sorrow of the women generally. <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Paul_s_letters_to_his_kinsfolk.html?id=jEpeAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Elsewhere</a> he “beheld the ocean of humanity in a most glorious state of confusion – fields of battle where the slain were hardly buried – immense armies crossing each other in every direction …”</p>
<h2>Scott and Byron</h2>
<p>In London on his way home, Scott met the romantic poet <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/byron_lord.shtml">Lord Byron</a>, for whom Napoleon was a hero. “Waterloo did not delight him”, <a href="http://lordbyron.cath.lib.vt.edu/contents.php?doc=JoLockh.Scott.Contents">Lockhart reports</a>. In his artistic response to Napoleon’s defeat, <a href="http://www.gradesaver.com/lord-byrons-poems/study-guide/summary-childe-harolds-pilgrimage-canto-iii">Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III</a>, Byron wrote that all the suffering caused by years of war was pointless if Napoleon was to be defeated. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Distraught: Byron.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lord_Byron_coloured_drawing.png">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like Byron, Scott recognised Napoleon’s greatness, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Paul_s_letters_to_his_kinsfolk.html?id=jEpeAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">commenting on</a> his “inexpressible feelings of awe” at standing on the spot where he “who appeared to hold Fortune chained to his footstool” had been defeated. Yet where Byron’s main response to the events was despair, Scott’s was compassion. For him the suffering that had ravaged Europe was the inevitable and terrible consequence of revolution, rebellion and radicalism. On a very human level, it horrified him.</p>
<p>Scott’s poetic response to the battle, <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/walter_scott/2563/">The Field of Waterloo</a>, published on October 23 1815, brings many of these sentiments together. As one might expect, it is clearly in praise of the victorious British general Wellington and the bravery of the British troops, but it is in general elegiac. It opens with a description of a calm country scene, only to look back at the bloodshed this landscape has witnessed only weeks before.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Look forth, once more, with soften’d heart,<br>
Ere from the field of fame we part;<br>
Triumph and Sorrow border near,<br>
And joy oft melts into a tear … </p>
<p>Or see‘st how manlier grief, suppress’d,<br>
Is labouring in a father’s breast,<br>
With no enquiry vain pursue<br>
The cause, but think on Waterloo! </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The first edition sold 6,000 copies at a shilling each, the profits from which went to the fund raised for the relief of the widows and children of the soldiers slain in battle. In a <a href="https://archive.org/details/lettersofsirwalt00scotrich">letter to a friend</a>, Scott says he was induced to write it “to give something to the fund more handsome than usual for the poor fellows and their relatives who suffered”. </p>
<p>Scott only felt able to express his admiration and compassion for Napoleon years later in his monumental <a href="http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/prose/napoleon.html">Life of Napoleon Buonaparte</a>, published in 1827. At the time of Waterloo, his thoughts were only for the victims, living and dead, that passed before his eyes.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43304/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alison has received grants from the AHRC, Carnegie Trust for Scotland and from a private donation.</span></em></p>When word reached the Scottish writer of Napoleon’s famous defeat, he promptly travelled to the continent to bear witness to the carnage first-handAlison Lumsden, Professor of English and Scottish Literature, University of AberdeenLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/418622015-06-18T05:20:40Z2015-06-18T05:20:40ZWaterloo won, war over: the painting that captures the moment<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85202/original/image-20150616-5835-awxe5f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">David Wilkie, Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch, 1822.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Picture the scene: it’s the summer of 1815 and a cluster of veterans huddled around an old pensioner reading from a newspaper have just received confirmation of the Allied victory over Napoleon at Waterloo on Sunday 18 June. </p>
<p>You register various responses. There’s the ardent appeal of the Glengarry Highlander on the left, whose searching gaze and pointed hand gesture seeks further corroboration from the mounted light-horseman who has just delivered the paper. There’s the blithe self-satisfaction of the man seated at the table at the centre of the scene dining on oysters. The carefree expression of the mildly inebriated Irish light-horseman, relaying the news to the hard-of-hearing pensioner on his left. And then the gleeful attentiveness of the black foot soldier, leaning in to the Irishman’s right.</p>
<p>David Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners Receiving the London Gazette Extraordinary of Thursday June 22th, 1815, Announcing the Battle of Waterloo (1822), to give this well-known picture its full, temporally exacting, and declamatory title, is often cited by historians of the period, such as Linda Colley and Stephen Brumwell, as a set piece display of cheerful unanimity in the aftermath of war. The painting works exhaustively to weave almost every one of its approximately 50 subjects into the magic circle of enthusiasm emanating from the white heat of the newspaper.</p>
<h2>Vestiges of war</h2>
<p>There are just one or two instances of potential dissent. A mother wears an anxious expression as she scans the paper for the name of a beloved, her screaming infant giving symbolic vent to pains remote from this portrayal of near unalloyed joy. And a peg-legged ex-serviceman in front of the pub has a quizzical demeanour that seems at odds with the prevailing mood of celebration.</p>
<p>But whether or not Wilkie included these figures as subtle reminders of the violent underpinnings of national unanimity – the blasted, pierced, shot, crushed and trampled bodies on which victories are raised – one must attend very closely, and for a prolonged amount of time, to allow such impressions to cloud the scene. </p>
<p>What viewers are meant to and do in the main perceive in Wilkie’s painting is the sense of Waterloo as an unequivocal affirmation of national solidarity. The artwork stresses the involvement of men and women of all classes and from all corners of the British Isles and its imperial domains, as well as a decisive blotting out, manifested in the radiant glow of the London Gazette, of the ignoble realities of war. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85274/original/image-20150616-5810-1x6nxya.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85274/original/image-20150616-5810-1x6nxya.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85274/original/image-20150616-5810-1x6nxya.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85274/original/image-20150616-5810-1x6nxya.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85274/original/image-20150616-5810-1x6nxya.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85274/original/image-20150616-5810-1x6nxya.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85274/original/image-20150616-5810-1x6nxya.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Robert Alexander Hillingford, Wellington at Waterloo.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The dispatch</h2>
<p>The text that forms the focus of this composition is the <a href="http://www.wtj.com/archives/wellington/1815_06f.htm">Duke of Wellington’s dispatch</a>, written on June 19 and addressed to Earl Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. In Wilkie’s painting the duke’s report is received with unqualified enthusiasm, yet at the time of its publication many readers were left perplexed by the document’s apparent obliquity. </p>
<p>Those left in Britain – women, workers, pensioners – only found out about the victory four days after the battle. Communication relied on newspapers, letters painstakingly travelling back by horse and boat. And so the <a href="http://www.wtj.com/archives/wellington/1815_06f.htm">long and circumlocutory missive</a> that announced the end of war may have been perplexing to many. </p>
<p>The first half of the dispatch focused on allied losses sustained in the action at <a href="http://napoleononline.ca/2011/03/battle-of-quatre-bras/">Quatre Bras</a> on the June 16. So it seemed, if anything, to presage defeat for the Allies. It was not until well over the half way mark that the description of the outcome of the engagement at Waterloo on June 18 confirmed the defeat of the French:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The attack succeeded in every point: the enemy was forced from his positions on the heights, and fled in the utmost confusion, leaving behind him, as far as I could judge, 150 pieces of cannon, with their ammunition, which fell into our hands.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some readers complained of the dullness of the duke’s description, noting its signal failure to convey the importance of Napoleon’s defeat, but others succumbed to its mounting power, recognising in the rousing final declaration the rhetorical equivalent of a nation’s long-delayed release from bewilderment and uncertainty. </p>
<p>Looking again at the pensioner reading from the paper at the centre of Wilkie’s composition, it’s clear from the direction of his gaze that this single, climatic phrase has just been uttered, and that it is Wellington who is responsible for the displays of enthusiasm, joy and relief circulating around the painting. And unsurprisingly – Wellington himself commissioned it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/41862/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Philip Shaw receives funding from the AHRC</span></em></p>How did the bulk of those at home in Britain find out the news of Waterloo?Philip Shaw, Professor of Romantic Studies, University of LeicesterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/431332015-06-16T10:47:43Z2015-06-16T10:47:43ZWhy we are still living with the legacy of Waterloo – that ‘most bloody battle’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85196/original/image-20150616-5829-1iaabi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'The sorest stroke any Cavalry Regiment has suffered at one day’s fighting since the memory of man.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scotland_Forever!.jpg">Scotland forever! – Elizabeth Thompson</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Our views of war are sanitised today. In an age of professional armies trained for increasingly technical tasks, few of us have witnessed combat, much less taken part in it. In that vein, commemorations of the 200th anniversary of Waterloo will focus on the battle’s strategic significance. There are, though, individual accounts that give us a glimpse into what sword fights and cavalry charges must have been like – and the deadly consequences of defeat. </p>
<p>One such story was sent home by James Russell, a Serjeant (his own archaic spelling) in the North British Dragoons, a regiment known today as the Scots Greys. Russell was my ancestor, and my family still has his letter. “Since I wrote to you last we have had a most Bloody Battle with the French as ever was fought,” he writes to his wife, Mags, on June 24, six days after Waterloo. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85197/original/image-20150616-5816-1ujnkbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85197/original/image-20150616-5816-1ujnkbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85197/original/image-20150616-5816-1ujnkbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85197/original/image-20150616-5816-1ujnkbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85197/original/image-20150616-5816-1ujnkbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85197/original/image-20150616-5816-1ujnkbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85197/original/image-20150616-5816-1ujnkbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85197/original/image-20150616-5816-1ujnkbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Famous son: Charles Ewart.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Ansdell_%E2%80%94_The_Fight_For_The_Standard.jpg">Richard Ansdell – The Fight For The Standard.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Russell lists the dead and wounded – as a cavalryman, he also mentions the horses that suffered – before concluding that it was, “the sorest stroke any Cavalry Regiment has suffered at one day’s fighting since the memory of man”. And they were victorious. </p>
<p>The Greys won great renown for one of their number, Ensign Charles Ewart, captured a standard – a Napoleonic eagle – in hand-to-hand fighting. With his feat of arms, <a href="http://www.nam.ac.uk/waterloo200/themes/soldiers/soldiers-story-charles-ewart-the-most-illustrious-grey/">celebrity came to Ewart</a>, and “he travelled the country making speeches at dinners with Sir Walter Scott, his friend and unofficial agent”. </p>
<p>After recounting the fate of his regiment, Russell turns to how he fared. “I have lost all my things,” he explains:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This day I am getting a dead Frenchman’s shirt washed to put on. My horse was wounded and sent into Brussels during the action and has lost my whole kit so I am now as I stand. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>If such were the spoils of victory, imagine the loss of defeat. </p>
<p>In Paris recently, I visited the <a href="http://www.musee-armee.fr/en/english-version.html">Invalides</a> – both Napoleon’s massive marble tomb, and the adjoining museum. I saw no mention there of the upcoming 200th anniversary of the battle, although it seems the French leader was even-handed enough to concede, alongside recognition of his qualities as a general, and a politician, that he was a “warlord” and a “despot”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85198/original/image-20150616-5807-9lpncd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85198/original/image-20150616-5807-9lpncd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85198/original/image-20150616-5807-9lpncd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85198/original/image-20150616-5807-9lpncd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85198/original/image-20150616-5807-9lpncd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85198/original/image-20150616-5807-9lpncd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85198/original/image-20150616-5807-9lpncd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85198/original/image-20150616-5807-9lpncd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Les Invalides: no mention of 200 years since Waterloo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">from www.shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We are now in the midst of four years of commemorations of the World War I. A century after Waterloo, Britain and France were allies, and it is in this spirit of comradeship that these events are taking place. Other alliances have shifted, though. Without Russia’s heroic struggle against Hitler, World War II would not have been won as it was, if at all. </p>
<p>Today, Russia may not be a direct enemy of the West, but it is hard to think of it as an ally. Waterloo; World War I; World War II (or the “Great Patriotic War”, as it is known in Russian) – all of these victories have played a vital part in creating the identity that binds the nation state together. </p>
<p>Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, seems to understand very well the power of celebrating past victories. As a correspondent in Moscow in 2008, <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7302177.stm">I watched the first VE Day military parade</a> of the post-Soviet era roll across Red Square. The event seems only to have grown since.</p>
<p>Russia is telling itself that, whatever else it may or may not have accomplished in the 20th century, victory over the Nazis was a shining achievement which can never be tarnished. Memories of those Ukrainians who sided with Hitler’s troops in the hope of ending Soviet power are <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/29/putin-ukraine-forces-nazis-arctic">evoked now</a> to justify Russian policy towards its neighbour – the sorest point in generally sour relations with the West. </p>
<p>While triumphs are celebrated, failures seem soon forgotten. Watching television pictures earlier this year of the service at St Paul’s to commemorate combat operations in Afghanistan, I wondered whether that campaign would be remembered in 200 years, as Waterloo will be this summer. For who now commemorates the British Mandate for Palestine, or other less glorious episodes of imperial history?</p>
<p>Such selection means that important lessons are ignored. While World War I commemorations have focused on Europe, surely the real consequences of that conflict for us today are in the Middle East: think of Islamic State’s keenness to demonstrate that the <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-why-a-century-old-deal-between-britain-and-france-got-isis-jihadis-excited-28643">Sykes-Picot agreement is finished</a>. </p>
<p>My recent research has included looking at newspaper archives of the reporting of the end of the British Mandate for Palestine. The failure of this episode in late imperial history to deliver, or even prepare the ground for, a just and lasting peace in the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean may be given little thought in Britain today, but it is still very much on the minds of those who live with the consequences. </p>
<p>My ancestor would no doubt have been dismayed to see Europe again in 1915, or 2015. In the introduction to <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/19/sleepwalkers-christopher-clark-review">The Sleepwalkers</a>, his account of the causes of World War I, historian Christopher Clark writes of the “raw modernity” of the events of the summer of 1914, when failed diplomacy led to war. As someone who began their career in international news during the last summer of the Soviet Union, I take the phrase to be a warning of the possible consequences of the direction our own unstable age, which arguably began then, might take. For what is the conflict in Ukraine, if not the unfinished business of the summer of 1991? </p>
<p>“We are in hopes that another firm battle will settle this business,” James Russell writes towards the end of his letter. Perhaps to spare his family, he offers little detail of what he had seen at Waterloo. But he did not forget.</p>
<p>His son, David, would later recount a childhood memory of “big tears coursing down the cheeks” of his father and his fellow veterans on the anniversary of the battle. As we remember triumph at Waterloo this week, let us not ignore the lessons for foreign policy which can also come from failure.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43133/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Rodgers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From Belgium to Moscow to Helmland: how one battle helped shape how we think of war.James Rodgers, Lecturer in Journalism, City, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/426482015-06-12T15:29:43Z2015-06-12T15:29:43ZWitnesses, wives, politicians, soldiers: the women of Waterloo<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84398/original/image-20150609-10720-8mghxv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Napoleon's step-daughter Hortense and his second wife Marie-Louise.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>The nature of warfare 200 years ago made the Battle of Waterloo a predominantly male affair. But, two centuries on, the history of the battle and our understanding of it by no means have to be predominantly male affairs too. If we see the battle in its wider context of Napoleon’s return to power in the spring of 1815, then women take their place as players in their own right. So before we get to the 200th anniversary on June 18, learn a little about the women of Waterloo.</p>
<h2>On the battlefield</h2>
<p>There were women present on the battlefield at Waterloo – serving drinks and food, following husbands or lovers, and even occasionally fighting. There was even one who was officially sanctioned: the Prussian sergeant Friederike Krüger, who had been awarded the Iron Cross in an earlier campaign, was in the thick of the action at Ligny (June 16) and survived unscathed.</p>
<p>Undoubtedly there were other women unofficially present in the ranks, dressed as men to fight, and there were also considerable numbers of women travelling with the armies, women who preferred to be with their menfolk than wait behind for news (there were reportedly <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fbJvcUd4E4kC">4,000 women</a> with the British forces alone). Unless killed or wounded, or in some way memorably widowed, these women are barely visible in accounts of the battle. </p>
<p>But we shouldn’t focus so much on the battle itself, because Waterloo was simply the culmination of 100 days between March and June 1815, a period which in its totality had a momentous effect on the shape of European politics for the rest of the 19th century (and beyond). With this broader focus, the parts women had to play come to the fore.</p>
<h2>French aristocracy</h2>
<p>Marie-Louise, Duchess of Parma, was an Austrian archduchess. She was also Napoleon’s second wife. In 1814 when the allies had forced Napoleon to abdicate, she chose to go into exile with him but instead returned to her father’s court in Vienna. When Napoleon escaped from exile on Elba and returned to France, seizing power once more in March 1815, she decided to stay in Austria with her son rather than return to the side of her husband. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84400/original/image-20150609-10747-6eaosu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84400/original/image-20150609-10747-6eaosu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84400/original/image-20150609-10747-6eaosu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=954&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84400/original/image-20150609-10747-6eaosu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=954&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84400/original/image-20150609-10747-6eaosu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=954&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84400/original/image-20150609-10747-6eaosu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1199&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84400/original/image-20150609-10747-6eaosu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1199&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84400/original/image-20150609-10747-6eaosu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1199&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Marie-Louise in 1810.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This move was calculated. There were secret negotiations during the 100 days to investigate the possibility of putting Napoleon’s son on the throne in his place. And so Marie-Louise’s decision not to return to France was politically motivated: it increased her chances of being regent. This decision not to stand by her husband had a profound effect on Napoleon (he broke down in tears when he realised the pair of them would not be joining him) and a direct influence on his responses to the allies. Without his heir by his side, Napoleon knew that there was little chance of resolving by political means the question of who should rule France.</p>
<p>In Marie-Louise’s absence, it fell to Hortense de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s step-daughter (and sister-in-law) to take over her official duties. One of the first to arrive at the Tuileries to welcome Napoleon back to Paris, Hortense remained faithful to his cause to the end, hosting dinners, smoothing tricky negotiations, facilitating his brief escapes from Paris to Malmaison where he would weep in memory of his first wife Josephine. After Napoleon’s abdication, it was Hortense who sacrificed her diamonds for him, sewing them into a black ribbon so that he would have ready cash in case of emergency. Of course, she paid for her steadfast support once Louis XVIII was restored. She went into exile but raised her son to continue the family tradition – he became Napoleon III in 1851.</p>
<p>Women also played a part in the 100 days on the royalist side. The Duchesse d’Angoulême, whom Napoleon famously declared was the only man in the royal family, tried to rally support for the king in Bordeaux. Her actions were an inspiration for royalists the length and breadth of the country, even if she couldn’t hold the city and had to flee to England.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84401/original/image-20150609-10747-18xsino.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84401/original/image-20150609-10747-18xsino.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84401/original/image-20150609-10747-18xsino.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84401/original/image-20150609-10747-18xsino.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84401/original/image-20150609-10747-18xsino.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84401/original/image-20150609-10747-18xsino.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84401/original/image-20150609-10747-18xsino.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84401/original/image-20150609-10747-18xsino.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Duchesse d'Angouleme.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Eye witnesses</h2>
<p>And then there were a number of women who provided astute observations of the political ramifications of the allies’ interfering in questions of French sovereignty. Kitty Wellington was effectively her husband’s representative in Paris after he left for the Congress of Vienna and took her duties very seriously. It is common knowledge that Wellington treated her badly, as the recent <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05vlz90">BBC documentary</a> stressed, and she hoped to win back some of his affection by being a model ambassador’s wife. Such was her perceived importance that the French thought she had helped smuggle the crown jewels out of France when she fled ahead of Napoleon’s arrival in Paris. </p>
<p>Helen Maria Williams (in Paris), Frances Burney (first Paris, then in exile in Ghent) and Charlotte Eaton (Antwerp and Waterloo) remain to this day important British eye witnesses. On the French side, Claire de Duras, a French noblewoman at the court in exile in Ghent, wrote letters to one of the leading intellectuals of the period, Germaine de Staël, providing telling details of court and society.</p>
<p>The Duchess of Richmond, her ten children with her, had a pivotal role in keeping British society in Brussels together in the run-up to the battle. Her ball on June 15 was interrupted by news of Napoleon’s imminent approach and has become one of the iconic moments in almost every retelling of the battle over the years. Recently the ball has been revived as an <a href="http://www.dorb.be/">annual charity event</a>, confirming its legendary status.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84422/original/image-20150609-10701-lrrtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84422/original/image-20150609-10701-lrrtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84422/original/image-20150609-10701-lrrtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84422/original/image-20150609-10701-lrrtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84422/original/image-20150609-10701-lrrtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84422/original/image-20150609-10701-lrrtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84422/original/image-20150609-10701-lrrtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Duchess of Richmond’s Ball, Robert Alexander Hillingford.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>One word</h2>
<p>Of course, not all of the women caught up in the ramifications of the 100 days were able to play an active political role. For many it was by far and large a period of “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nss-AAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">torturing suspense</a>
” caused by “the overwhelming anxiety of being so near such eventful scenes, without being actually engaged in them”. </p>
<p>Whether on the French side or the allies’, women’s experience of the 100 days was dominated above all by waiting for news. They bore the brunt of the practical complications arising from exile, displacement, and conscription and, after the battles of mid-June, from the death or injury of loved ones. Burney’s letters to her husband remind us that for many of the women caught up in the 100 days, there was little they could do but wait and hope to receive “one word! one word!” to confirm that their loved one was safe and well.</p>
<p>The women of Waterloo are more than passive victims. Listening to them provides a more inclusive narrative of 1815 that reclaims the significance of the bicentenary from the exclusive preserve of military historians and those who take delight in the gore of the battlefield.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/42648/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Katherine Astbury receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a project on French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era. She is also co-curator of an online exhibition about Napoleon's 100 days: <a href="http://www.100days.eu">www.100days.eu</a> </span></em></p>Two centuries on, the history of the battle and our understanding of it should by no means be a predominantly male affair.Katherine Astbury, Associate Professor and Reader of French, University of WarwickLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.