Napoleon and History
Dec. 1st, 2013 10:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dormouse1953The film Napoleon I posted about yesterday is not supposed to be an historical document. It is a work of fiction, with invented characters interacting with real historical figures. And as is common in such works, errors of fact can creep in. For instance, the IMDb goofs page for the film mentions that a reference to Corsica aligning with Italy is anachronistic, as there was no Italian state at that time, Italy was a region.
However, in the opening titles to the film it is stated that incidents and quotations taken from an historical source are marked as such when they occur. So, Napoleon's speech to the army about to invade Italy is reported as being (a translation of) the words he actually said.
I have my doubts about some of them. At the end of the first part, Napoleon and his family flee Corsica in a ship called Le Hasard. As they sail towards France, an officer on a British Navy ship spots them and asks his captain if he can fire on the "suspicious-looking vessel". The captain replies, "No, Lieutenant Nelson, we have better things to do." This is marked as "historical" and presumably implies that the officer is Horatio Nelson. Nelson was in the area of Corsica in 1792-3, but by that time, he was captain of his own ship.
The incident I'd most like to be true involves a character named as La Bussière, the eater of documents. During the Terror, the Committee for Public Safety was your typical bureaucracy. When a prisoner was selected for the guillotine, the documents of the case were handed to a clerk for copying. This character allegedly ate the documents instead while nobody was looking. If the document didn't exist, then the person could not be executed. The film states (historical, again) it was due to him that Josephine escaped the guillotine. (And the film adds the fictional Tristan Fleuri who takes inspiration from La Bussière and tries to eat Napoleon's documents.)
Trouble is, I can find no reference to him that does not come from the film. There is a Narcise Labussière mentioned in Simon Schama's Citizens, but that individual appears to have been a member of a Revolutionary youth group, aged nine, not the bearded adult man shown in the film.
Update: A further google search turned up a biography of Josephine by Ernest John Knapton which tells this story. However, whoever put the book on the net has added a footnote at this point: "Here is where I would have liked to see a footnote with citation. As far as I can tell, Knapton is the first author to tell the tale of Delperch de la Bussière: later writers all refer back to him, and some (Philip Dwyer, for example, in Napoleon: The Path to Power) call this a 'legend'." The book is dated 1963, over 35 years after the film was made, so it is possible Knapton got the story from seeing the film, or he and Gance got it from another source. I have the Dwyer book on my to-be-read pile.
However, in the opening titles to the film it is stated that incidents and quotations taken from an historical source are marked as such when they occur. So, Napoleon's speech to the army about to invade Italy is reported as being (a translation of) the words he actually said.
I have my doubts about some of them. At the end of the first part, Napoleon and his family flee Corsica in a ship called Le Hasard. As they sail towards France, an officer on a British Navy ship spots them and asks his captain if he can fire on the "suspicious-looking vessel". The captain replies, "No, Lieutenant Nelson, we have better things to do." This is marked as "historical" and presumably implies that the officer is Horatio Nelson. Nelson was in the area of Corsica in 1792-3, but by that time, he was captain of his own ship.
The incident I'd most like to be true involves a character named as La Bussière, the eater of documents. During the Terror, the Committee for Public Safety was your typical bureaucracy. When a prisoner was selected for the guillotine, the documents of the case were handed to a clerk for copying. This character allegedly ate the documents instead while nobody was looking. If the document didn't exist, then the person could not be executed. The film states (historical, again) it was due to him that Josephine escaped the guillotine. (And the film adds the fictional Tristan Fleuri who takes inspiration from La Bussière and tries to eat Napoleon's documents.)
Trouble is, I can find no reference to him that does not come from the film. There is a Narcise Labussière mentioned in Simon Schama's Citizens, but that individual appears to have been a member of a Revolutionary youth group, aged nine, not the bearded adult man shown in the film.
Update: A further google search turned up a biography of Josephine by Ernest John Knapton which tells this story. However, whoever put the book on the net has added a footnote at this point: "Here is where I would have liked to see a footnote with citation. As far as I can tell, Knapton is the first author to tell the tale of Delperch de la Bussière: later writers all refer back to him, and some (Philip Dwyer, for example, in Napoleon: The Path to Power) call this a 'legend'." The book is dated 1963, over 35 years after the film was made, so it is possible Knapton got the story from seeing the film, or he and Gance got it from another source. I have the Dwyer book on my to-be-read pile.
