Introduction

Interpretations of Gance's film are often determined by critics’ ‘prejudicial hostility’ towards the historical Napoléon (Icart 1983: 178). Steven Englund argues that there is a tendency among Anglophone scholars to pursue an ‘inaccurate, anachronistic, and […] unfair’ comparison of Napoléon with Hitler and Stalin, in spite of the fact that the Emperor was neither ‘invoked’ by French, German, or Italian fascists nor by Russian communists, in the twentieth century (2004: 459). It is a common assumption that the ‘sinister’ legacy of Napoléon in some way sullies Gance's film and that its portrait necessarily contains a ‘dangerous’ doctrine (Samuels 2004: 267). Such views attribute NAPOLÉON with vague notions of ‘the political’ (definite article, indefinite meaning) and categorize it according to simplistic binaries of ‘left’/‘right’ or ‘reactionary’/‘progressive’.

This ahistorical approach is unhelpful. As Norman King points out, the ‘political’ stance of European intellectuals like Gance in the 1920s was characterized by a cross-fertilization of ideas which renders terms like ‘left’ and ‘right’ obsolete (1984a: 140-6). It is equally important to challenge the view that interpretations of Napoléon were in any way consistent: he inspired an astonishingly diverse, and often entirely antithetical, set of ideologies. As Joseph Fouché told the Emperor during his reign: ‘some say you are a god, others that you are a devil; but everyone agrees you are more than a man’ (1824: I/182). After his death, Napoléon was ‘transformed into a mythical figure, an equivalent to those other Romantic archetypes of transgression and limitless desire: Faust, Satan, Prometheus, and Don Juan.’ (Bainbridge 2005: 451) This chapter outlines the history of Napoleonic messianism through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, locating Gance's film within the cultural context of Romantic ideology and the political legacy of the Great War.