Napoleon the Movie

He came from nothing. He conquered everything. From acclaimed director Ridley Scott, #Napoleon is exclusively in movie theaters this Thanksgiving. Watch the official trailer now. pic.twitter.com/Kx7FcQmBqo

— Napoleon (@NapoleonMovie) July 10, 2023

I did not steal the crown of France.  I found it lying in the gutter and picked it up with my sword.

Looking forward to seeing this, although I doubt if it will do justice either to the man or his career.   The first of the modern military dictators, Napoleon reshaped France and Europe.  Probably History’s greatest soldier, he was too disruptive a force to maintain his rule for even his abbreviated life.  He once opined that you could do much with bayonets except to sit on them, and his career illustrates that even the greatest victories tend to be ephemeral if they produce an imbalance in power which will not be tolerated by ever growing numbers of enemies, your enemies learning slowly what you have to teach about the Art of War from their defeats by you.  Sometimes compared to Hitler, that is an insult to a man who was infinitely more humane, and constructive, the Code Napoleon being only one of the testaments to this, and an undue compliment to the psychopathic and murderous Austrian corporal, who left nothing behind him but death and a devastated continent.  Napoleon is in many ways sui generis and we are still sorting him out more than two centuries after his death.  My own reaction to him mirrors partially that of the author Van Loon:

Here I am sitting at a comfortable table loaded heavily with books, with one eye on my typewriter and the other on Licorice the cat, who has a great fondness for carbon paper, and I am telling you that the Emperor Napoleon was a most contemptible person. But should I happen to look out of the window, down upon Seventh Avenue, and should the endless procession of trucks and carts come to a sudden halt, and should I hear the sound of the heavy drums and see the little man on his white horse in his old and much-worn green uniform, then I don’t know, but I am afraid that I would leave my books and the kitten and my home and everything else to follow him wherever he cared to lead. My own grandfather did this and Heaven knows he was not born to be a hero. Millions of other people’s grandfathers did it. They received no reward, but they expected none. They cheerfully gave legs and arms and lives to serve this foreigner, who took them a thousand miles away from their homes and marched them into a barrage of Russian or English or Spanish or Italian or Austrian cannon and stared quietly into space while they were rolling in the agony of death.

Hendrik Van Loon, The Story of Man