Introduction

This chapter explores the historical contexts that inform Gance's portrayal of French high society in the Victims’ Ball sequence of NAPOLÉON. Set in late 1795 during the ‘Thermidorian Reaction’ that succeeded the Terror, the sequence is also a response to the conditions of post-war France in the 1920s. After providing an overview of the circumstances of each period, I will analyse the key socialites and politicians portrayed in relevant sequences of NAPOLÉON. In doing so, I want to demonstrate the links between the eighteenth-century events depicted in the film and Gance's concerns for the world of the twentieth century. The social issues at stake in the aftermath of the Great War inform the director's promotion of Bonaparte and the image of a ‘Universal Republic’ in NAPOLÉON.

Corrupting powers

Reacting to the worldwide catastrophe of 1914, many European intellectuals and pacifists began to place ‘the struggle against war and the fight for social justice within the paradigm of the class struggle, seeing them as being part of the national and international struggle against capitalism and imperialism’ (Drake 2005: 75). When the Russian Revolution erupted in 1917, commentators made comparisons to the French Revolution of 1789: both upheavals were seen as the result of not merely political division and foreign invasion but of entrenched social inequalities (Mathiez 1920: 3-4). Gance's J’ACCUSE was one of many angry expressions by former soldiers that attributed wartime ‘price rises and shortages [to] the work of speculators and other economic evildoers’ (Stovall 2012: 29).