By Scott Graber
It is Sunday, cold and wet, and I’m just back from St Marks where I tried to engage my Episcopalian God. This morning’s service ended with a rousing rendition of “Eternal Father, strong to save …”
“Eternal Father, strong to save,
Where arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bid’st the mighty ocean deep,
Its own appointed limits keep,
O hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea.”
This patriotic hymn comes, of course, in tandem with Veterans Day. The Wall Street Journal also gives a slight nod to this holiday with profiles on Napoleon Bonaparte, General Joshua Chamberlain and the 2002 Rugby team at West Point. This week’s New Yorker (November 13) also gets into a discussion about Napoleon Bonaparte in connection with the November 22 release of “Napoleon;” directed by the aging Ridley Scott and featuring Joaquin Phoenix in the title role.
When I was a 17 — a lonely and acne-pocked teenager — I visited Paris with my military family. I wasn’t interested in the Champs or Montmartre or Bateaux Mouches; but I did want to see Napoleon’s marble tomb at Hotel des Invalides. I also wanted to see the bare breasted dancers at the Lido, but my parents were unwilling to share that evening with me.
Even at age 17, largely unformed and callow, I knew the Napoleon had been remarkably accomplished in the craft of war — especially the deployment of artillery; but I did not know that he reformed higher education, introduced the metric system, rewrote the tax code and introduced the brand new Napoleonic (Civil) Code. Many years later I would tour his house on Elba — just off the Italian mainland — looking for more clues that would help me understand Napoleon Bonaparte.
As I write this piece Ridley Scott’s movie is about to be released. Some may remember “Gladiator” and “Blade Runner” and know Scott will provide lots of battle scenes with their attendant dust, mud and blood.
“The production set up a ‘war room’ in Brentford, a London suburb, with three dimensional models of the terrain. Biddiss, the ex-paratrooper, ran five hundred extras through ‘boot camp’ at the Calvary Barracks in Hounslow, which were built in Napoleon’s era.”
It’s safe to say we’re going to get the battles of Austerlitz, Borodino, Marengo and the retreat from Moscow with all of the agony, grandeur and severed body parts. We probably won’t get a lecture on the French howitzer — the Gribeauval Gun — and the advantages of using this mobile, light-weight cannon in these same battles.
And it is doubtful we will get anything more than a passing reference to his governmental reforms — especially the changes in taxation, simplification of civil remedies and the ending of the feudal system.
Napoleon also established the Bank of France and dissolved the Holy Roman Empire which led to the unification of the many small statelets that once comprised what is now modern-day Germany and Italy.
And so, in the final analysis, how does history come down on this controversial, five foot two inch Corsican?
In 2004, President Jacques Chirac refused to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Austerlitz — Napoleon’s greatest victory. And then there is Napoleon’s re-establishment of slavery in the French Caribbean. And then there are the killed and wounded.
France, especially its students, believe the self-proclaimed Emperor was fatally flawed and runs a close second to Adolf Hitler. And there has been some criticism of Ridley Scott for even making a movie about this man.
All of which brings me to movies that try to capture famous people. We have recently watched “Oppenheimer” and it is rumored that “Napoleon” will run four hours — an hour longer than “Oppenheimer.”
How does the controversy and creativity surrounding the writing of Napoleonic Code stand up against the Battle of Borodino? How does one project the tax reform virtues of this complicated midget against the silken, white-skinned glamour of Josephine? How does one weave these positive, less obvious virtues into a movie that screens the slaughter of an entire generation?
On our way home from Paris we stopped-off for a few hours at the Verdun Battlefield — and, yes, I know Verdun was a World War I battle — and after a hike through that still barren landscape my father said, “After this battle, after WW1, the French were never the same …”
One has to believe that Waterloo (1815); Verdun (1916) and the fall of France in 1940 took their toll on the French psyche.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
