Is Napoleon anti-French?

The English director Ridley Scott has certainly produced a massive irritation to French amour-propre. Over the weekend, he said that criticism of his film Napoleon proved that the French ‘don’t even like themselves’. Whether Napoleon is a masterpiece is yet to be determined (it isn’t released until Wednesday) but opinion is already divided. As if the French were ever likely to appreciate the Anglo-Saxon appropriation of a French national hero.

Scott, who will be 86 this week, has created an epic row, as well as an epic film. The sting of the criticism here is that he has revealed himself to be essentially uninterested in anything resembling the real Napoleon. He is not an expert on the subject. Indeed he seems incurious. In an interview with the New Yorker, he admits he discarded all of the late Stanley Kubrick’s voluminous research as boring, hadn’t read deeply into the capacious reservoir of primary sources or even finished watching the classic 1927 film about Napoleon.