“Napoleon”
Tonight and next Thursday at 9
on WNET/Ch. 13
WHAT do you call a short Corsican guy with a big sword? Emperor of France, that’s what!
Tonight, WNET embarks on its four-hour documentary, Napoleon, the story of the disgruntled soldier who rose to the rank of lieutenant in the French army, and finally its most famous general (both during and after the revolution).
Napoleon (a one-name celeb if ever there was one) was so disgruntled that he could have been a postal worker had he been born in another century. But since he was born in the 18th century, he went on to command armies instead and ultimately was responsible for the deaths of millions of soldiers.
As you know, by the time Napoleon had accumulated something like a 10-0 win record, he had become so popular with the good folk of France – who seemed to forget all that liberty, equality and fraternity stuff – that they crowned him emperor.
And that made his tart of a wife, Josephine, empress. But, as the documentary so clearly points out, if it weren’t for Josephine’s sleeping around, Napoleon wouldn’t even have gotten his first command. So clearly, the little tramp deserved something for all her efforts. So many men, so little time!
The documentary, while really good and compelling, is too long by an hour. Four hours of looking at the same Goya painting 57 times gets trying. And the re-enactments are strange in that all the soldiers are seen running and getting stabbed and all, but the camera insists on constantly cutting them off at the neck. (Wasn’t that the job of the Reign of Terror, which immediately preceded Napoleon?)
The other annoying thing is the endless and loud Gregorian-type chants that play constantly during Part One. OK, we get it already!
What I learned was that Napoleon stood 5ft 2ins, that after his coronation Josephine spent about a million bucks a year on clothes (let them wear ready to wear!), that Josephine’s ex-lover (who kept her) was a big shot in the French army and gave Napoleon his first command because he was so thankful that he took her off his hands, and that Russian soldiers put on clean white underwear before a battle, in case, God forbid, they should die with dirty undies.
While Napoleon wasn’t much of a lover – and Josephine was actually repulsed by him – she married him nonetheless because he was a comer, and her marginal looks were already fading. Smitten hubby wrote her constant and pathetic lust letters from his battlefields, which she then read to her friends for laughs.
Meantime, while he was marching his men 30 miles a day, she was sleeping around. He found out and tried to divorce her. She cried outside his bedroom door until dawn and then fainted, so he took her back.
He was a micro-manager (literally!), an ego-maniac who needed only two hours sleep and a man who believed he ruled by divine destiny because he could do no wrong. He was also a womanizer who finally divorced Josephine when she couldn’t give him a male heir, declaring sensitively, “I want to marry a womb.”
Most astounding was the fact that he seems to have fallen if not in lust, than at least in deep like with Czar Alexander I of Russia, of whom Napoleon once said, “If he were a woman, I’d make him my mistress.”