Time.news – Two hundred years after the death of Napoleon, there are countless films, novels, theatrical performances, songs, advertisements, cartoons and video games featuring the great leader. If Bonaparte has become such an indelible pop icon and why he was already in life. And the credit went to the English archenemies who turned him into a caricature.
The iconography of the general course, rather than of the painting by Jacques-Louis David which shows him crossing the Great St. Bernard on horseback, is indebted to the countless satirical publications in which Albionic illustrators, from James Gillray a George Cruikshank, portrayed him as a bizarre and megalomaniacal little fellow. Even where it was painted with animal features, the unmistakable two-horned headdress was enough to make it clear who was the subject represented.
In fact, according to the autopsy conducted by Francesco Antommarchi, Napoleon would have been over one meter and seventy tall, more than Horatio Nelson. If the soldiers called him, with affection, the little general it was for his proximity to the troops and the relative frugality that led him to prefer Spartan foods and functional clothing. Yet the belief that Bonaparte’s eagerness for conquest was linked to the frustration of his short stature is so inextricable from popular belief that it led the psychologist Alfred Adler to theorize, in 1908, a syndrome that bears his name.
A caricature of Napoleon by James Gillray
A romantic and bourgeois hero
The overlap between real identity and fictitious deformation is part of the destiny of the Greats. The negative propaganda, later accentuated by the Restoration, however, is not sufficient to explain why one of the most disruptive personalities in modern history has so easily become a character. Without bothering famous novels such as The Count of Monte Cristo e War and peace, the question to be answered is why, in pop culture, the madman on duty always imagines himself to be Napoleon (at least before the advent of social networks: today, as Marcello Veneziani pointed out, the mythomaniacs have worsened and they believe they are themselves).
A partial answer is that Napoleon was the ultimate bourgeois hero, someone with whom that sector of society that had conquered the world in the nineteenth century could identify with. Chancellor Bismarck also had excellent iconic potential but, crazy as you may be, it’s hard to believe him unless you come from the agrarian nobility.
Bonaparte was therefore the first big dream of the middle class. Not, as in the 1950s, a house owned and a car, but an empire and eternal glory if you were able to prove your worth in the field and learn how to move in the environments that matter. An Englishman who loved him, Lord Byron, he sang him as the brave romantic par excellence, solitary and master of his destiny, new man for the new century.
© Andreas Arnold / Dpa via Afp
A Macron puppet dressed as Napoleon at the carnival in Mainz, Germany
For the British, a symbol of tyranny
The consolidation of a negative reputation is however indissoluble from the anglocentrism of twentieth-century popular culture, which made Napoleon the very emblem of tyranny. The despotic pig of the Animal farm of George Orwell his name is Napoleon. And another of the best known postwar English writers, Anthony Burgess, in his Napoleon Symphony he drew a mocking portrait of the general, marred by marital infidelity and unpleasant physical ailments. There are other examples in pop music. In ‘Powerman’, recorded in 1970 by Londoners Kinks, Napoleon is compared to Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler. In 1996 the American singer-songwriter Ani Di Franco, in ‘Napoleon’, compared to the First Consul the musicians who sell themselves for success. In 2019 a Canadian black metal group, i Departure Chandelier, recorded a disc entitled ‘Antichrist Rise to Power’, or ‘The ascent to power of the Antichrist’, with the forgetful bare on the cover.
“Napoleon was a man who conquered the world twice and then became the symbol of the devil, which is how he was described in England,” he explained. Jack Nicholson, that Stanley Kubrick he had chosen as the emperor’s interpreter in his most famous project ever made. The films dedicated to Bonaparte are numerous; the first was even signed by Lumiere brothers, the inventors of cinema. They gave Napoleon the face some of the greatest actors in the history of the silver screen: Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Dennis Hopper, Claude Rains.
© Afp
Marlon Brando plays Napoleon in ‘Desiree’
Story of an obsession
Television production is even richer, mostly Anglo-American, often derisive and malevolent. To make the Napoleon I Society, one of the main bodies dedicated to safeguarding Bonaparte’s memory, however, were not the many mocking parodies but a 1964 episode of “Doctor Who” in which the protagonist travels in 1794 and witnesses a plot by Napoleon to overthrow Robespierre. “The BBC has a duty not to give incorrect information to children,” thundered MMG Oborski, secretary of the association.
The story of Napoleon in pop culture is therefore in large part the story of the Anglophone world’s obsession with the specter of a formidable adversary from whom he continues to be haunted. A compulsion to shrink, in fiction, a gigantic figure that aims to dispel the awareness, uncomfortable in both London and Washington, that once in the world there was someone else capable of conquering nations not only by force of arms but even with that of a promise of freedom.
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