He might have been nicknamed "The God of War" by some, but he never led a cavalry charge.
As per usual with Ridley Scott's historical epics, his epic biopic about Napoléon Bonaparte has many instances of Artistic License – History, from his military campaigns (or occasional lack thereof) to the depiction of his personality and his love life with Joséphine de Beauharnais. While praising the spectacle, leading Napoleonic expert Jean Tulard (also a cinema historian) called the film a "catastrophe" as far as history is concerned.
- The film’s marketing included the tagline, "He came from nothing. He conquered everything," neither of which is true.
- The Buonaparte family were socially prominent (though cash-poor) Corsican gentry and Napoleon's father Carlo was an important political leader on the island. It was due to this social rank (especially after Carlo was granted a title by the French government) that young Napoleon was able to attend the elite military school of Brienne on the mainland. Other important figures of the Revolution started with less.note
- More obviously, while he’s remembered as one of history’s greatest generals, Napoleon certainly didn’t conquer “everything”. He not only failed quite spectacularly to conquer the Spanish, Russians, or British (the film shows the latter two), but even after defeating the Austrians and Prussians in multiple wars he consistently settled for treaties rather than pursue wars of annihilation.
- Marie-Antoinette wasn't arrested in a palace then executed shortly thereafter while still having plenty of hair and wearing a court dress. She was actually imprisoned at the medieval-era Tower of the Temple in Paris (which doesn't exist anymore) for the previous 14 months, had her hair cut short to facilitate her beheading, wore the standard white garb of the condemned, and wasn't pelted with anything. Also, Napoleon is seen attending her execution, while in real life he wasn't there, being busy at the siege of Toulon.
- About the siege of Toulon:
- Napoleon wasn’t specially commissioned to resolve the siege by Paul Barras. He was actually escorting a convoy of gunpowder to Nice when his Corsican patron Antoine Saliceti recommended him to fill in for the current artillery commander who’d been badly wounded.
- In his briefing, Barras mentions only 2,000 British troops and their navy, ignoring the equally large Spanish and Neapolitan forces.
- Napoleon never did recon work himself in civilian clothes. If any reconnaissance had to be done past what could be observed via handheld telescopes, he would always delegate it to one or more subordinates.
- In the film, Napoleon recasts abandoned cannons he inexplicably finds littered around Toulon into mortars. In reality, Napoleon did set up a forge to cast new guns and a few howitzers were used during the siege but they weren’t that devastating or decisive and certainly not worth melting down standard cannons to make. Napoleon's skills in standard artillery tactics, organization, and logistics were far more decisive: he assembled around 100 cannons by requisitioning them from other armies and nearby cities and press-ganging infantrymen and retired officers to crew them.
- There’s no sign of the cannon batteries and entrenchments that Napoleon built and led in real life. Historically, Napoleon’s plan required nearly two months of positional warfare, establishing new batteries to force the Coalition navies out of the outer harbor and isolate forts l’Eguillette and Balaguier, followed by more trench and battery building around the forts before finally storming the British redoubt at Fort Mulgrave which forced them to evacuate L’Eguillette and Balaguier.
- The forts of Toulon look quite different from the genuine articles. Fort Mulgrave, the key position personally stormed by Napoleon, was a new earth-and-timber redoubt rather than a stone fortress, while Fort l’Eguillette from which the French could bombard the inner harbor was far smaller and simpler than depicted and was evacuated without a fight after Mulgrave fell. Ironically, the film’s stand-in, Fort Ricasoli in Malta, actually withstood three assaults by the real Napoleon when he conquered the island in 1798.
- Napoleon sustained the most serious injury of his life in Toulon when his thigh was slashed by an English soldier's spontoon. He is not injured at all in the film.
- The French didn’t immediately shoot at British ships from the ramparts with captured cannons. It took them until the next day to get their guns repositioned, and by the next morning the Coalition forces had already evacuated or burnt most of their captured French ships and supplies in addition to their own ships, soldiers, and thousands of refugees. The massive ship explosion in the film is probably based on the powder ships Iris and Montreal, which detonated unexpectedly while the British themselves were burning the ships, warehouses, and dockyards in the Old Arsenal. The Spanish, however, failed to do the same to the New Arsenal and a significant number of the ships were salvaged by the French Republic's armies and used for the invasion of Egypt in 1798.
- In the film, Maximilien Robespierre is arrested in the parliament immediately after his regime is overthrown. In real life, he escaped to take shelter with some of his partisans elsewhere in Paris, and the arrest happened several hours later. The exact circumstances in which he ended up shot in the jaw (either a Bungled Suicide as depicted or someone else shooting him) during the arrest are still not known, so the film has some leeway on that detail.note
- Napoleon seems to be single before meeting Joséphine in the film, while in real life he was engaged to a woman named Désirée Clary but broke the engagement off after meeting Joséphine. Désirée instead married Marshal Jean Bernadotte, who later became King Charles XIV John of Sweden.
- Napoleon meets Joséphine at a ball for victims of the Reign of Terror despite being a protégé of Robespierre’s brother and having no family members who perished by the guillotine, which should make him unwelcome as well as uninvited. In reality, Napoleon and Joséphine first met at an intellectual salon hosted by Thérésa Tallien but didn’t speak to each other until they were introduced at a later dinner hosted by Paul Barras.
- Eugene introduces himself to Napoleon as the son of "Joséphine Beauharnais" before Napoleon and Joséphine start their relationship. "Joséphine" was a nickname Napoleon gave her, before which she went by “Rose” or “Marie-Rose”; her actual given name was "Marie Rose Josèphe" as mentioned during the wedding scene. The sword-returning scene is also based on an Urban Legend.
- Napoleon’s summation of his first Italian Campaign as, “I’ve already conquered Italy, who surrendered without conflict,” is a strong contender for getting the most wrong in the fewest words.
- At it’s most charitable, this line can be ascribed to Napoleon’s opening Montenotte campaign, in which he defeated an Italo-Austrian coalition that outnumbered him 2:1 and knocked Sardinia-Piedmont out of the war in just 18 days, but subduing Piedmont was far from “conquer[ing] Italy” and six battles totalling 32,000 combined casualties was hardly “without conflict”.
- Napoleon’s main adversaries in Italy weren’t even the Italians but the Austrians, who arrayed several armies against him. He did end up subjugating a lot of northern Italy once they allied with Austria against him, but he left neutral realms in central and southern Italy like Tuscany and Naples alone.
- “Without conflict” doesn’t even come close to describing the year-long war in which Napoleon’s forces fought 67 actions, won 18 pitched battles, captured 150,000 prisoners and 540 cannons, and advanced to within 100 miles of Vienna to force Austria’s surrender and the end of the First Coalition.
- About the Campaign of Egypt:
- The Battle of the Pyramids actually happened nine or ten miles away from its namesake, well out of cannon range. Moreover, unlike the Monumental Damage depicted in the film, Napoleon famously used the Pyramids to inspire his men by declaring, “Soldiers! From those heights, forty centuries look down upon you!” The scene was clearly inspired by equally untrue Urban Legends that Napoleon shot off the nose of The Sphinx despite the nose being gone centuries earlier and Napoleon actually respecting Ancient Egypt enough to bring 150 scientists to study its history and monuments.
- The film indulges in a spurious “Napoleon was short” note gag when he awkwardly requires a stool to get face-to-face with an Egyptian mummy. Napoleon was actually of average height for the time and coincidentally almost identical to the average Egyptian mummy.
- Napoleon didn't return to France because of Joséphine's adultery. He did so because his own campaign and the wider war in Europe had both turned badly against France and he felt that both his country and his own ambition required his return. It was in this context that Napoleon found the political climate in France was ripe for his coup of 18 brumaire an VIII (November 9, 1799). As for the adultery itself, he assuaged both his own distress and the social stigma of being cuckolded by taking a mistress of his own, Pauline Fourès.
- While the inclusion of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas among Napoleon’s generals is accurate, his participation in the Brumaire Coup and Napoleon’s coronation are not. In fact, Dumas didn’t leave Egypt until four months after the coup and during his return to France a storm forced his ship to land in the Kingdom of Naples, where he was imprisoned, physically broken, and abandoned by Napoleon, thereby ending his career.
- The film entirely omits Napoleon’s second Italian campaign apart from listing the Battle of Marengo in its final butcher’s bill. Historically, this campaign (coupled with General Moreau’s victory at Hohenlinden) effectively won the War of the Second Coalition for France, thereby consolidating Napoleon’s position as First Consul and putting him on the path to becoming Emperor.
- During the coronation scene, Napoleon astonishes everyone when he scandalously stomps up to seize the crown and place it atop his own head. Historically, this was carefully choreographed to symbolize Napoleon’s merit and popular acclaim rather than divine right or papal approval as a gesture to the secularist ideals of the French Revolution. The film also repurposes Napoleon’s reflection, “I found the crown in the gutter,” uttered in private on St. Helena into a public proclamation and alters, “But it was the people who placed it upon my head,” into “I place it atop my own head.”
- The Battle of Austerlitz didn't take place on a frozen lake, nor was it a simple ambush with Napoleon unleashing concealed artillery on the Austrians and Russians from a height. In reality, Napoleon feigned weakness by evacuating the Pratzen Heights but then baited his enemies off again to attack his weakened right flank while sending his center to capture the heights behind them. Following this tactical coup, some of the surrounded Austrians and Russians left wing did flee across frozen ponds and drown, but when the French drained the ponds a few days later they found only two or three men, 150 horses, and some cannons, a minuscule proportion of the thousands of enemy casualties (for instance, the 1960 film Austerlitz is more in line with the facts).
- The French battle flags are modern-looking. There were blue, white and red banners and cockades, but never "plain French flag"-looking ones except in the French navy (which is never featured in the film). Many regimental flags, for example, especially those presented to the army by the newly-crowned Emperor in December 1804, were white with red and blue triangular corners and the regiment's name in the center, though the Imperial Guard had flags with the more familiar blue-white-red tricolor, with battle honors sewn upon them.
- Napoleon did impregnate Éléonore Denuelle de La Plaigne and this did prove he wasn’t infertile, but their affair wasn’t a "very practical experiment" mandated by his mother, and their son Charles Léon was born in 1806, several years before Napoleon and Joséphine’s divorce in 1809. Éléonore was in fact a reader for Napoleon’s sister Caroline and mistress to his brother-in-law Joachim Murat. Sources differ on whether Murat himself recommended Éléonore to the Emperor or if it was Caroline ridding herself of an adulteress to the detriment of Joséphine, whom she disliked. And far from a one-night stand, Napoleon’s affair with Éléonore lasted until she remarried in 1808, having divorced her first husband prior to bedding Napoleon.
- To make Napoleon appear sexually inept, the film also omits all but a vague, dismissive mention of his more than 20 other mistresses. Notably absent are Pauline Fourès (whom Napoleon seduced in Egypt in response to Josephine’s own affairs), Elisabeth de Vaudey (a lady-in-waiting whom Joséphine caught with Napoleon just weeks before their coronation), and Marie Walewska (a Polish noblewoman who influenced Napoleon on Polish affairs and bore him a second bastard son, Alexandre Colonna-Walewski, whose family has since formed Napoleon's direct — albeit illegitimate — known bloodline).
- Nothing has ever indicated that Napoleon slapped Joséphine when they divorced. By all accounts, he was a genuinely affectionate and non-violent husband to her throughout (even if both cheated on each other) and when she proved too distraught to complete her divorce statement, he simply had an attendant finish it for her. Joséphine is also portrayed as encouraging the divorce, whereas in reality, she was fearful of it.
- The Fourth and Fifth coalitions are skipped entirely, with the time between Austerlitz (1805) and the Treaty of Tilsit (1807) instead devoted to relationship drama surrounding Napoleon and Joséphine’s divorce without mention of Napoleon’s victories against Prussia and Russia in 1806-07 (Jena-Auerstadt, Eylau, and Friedland) to bring about Tilsit, nor Austria’s redeclaration of war and subsequent defeat at Wagram (1809) which actually led to Napoleon’s marriage to Marie-Louise (1810). The film also places Napoleon and Joséphine’s divorce prior to the Treaty of Tilsit when it actually came two and a half years after.
- Napoleon's 1808 invasion and ensuing brutal occupation and war of independence in Spain aren’t mentioned either, despite their importance with the severe losses it caused to Napoleon and the land combat experience and launchpad for the 1814 invasion of Southern France it gave to the British. It got to the point that Napoleon called this campaign "The Spanish Ulcer".
- Poland is referenced a few times in the movie, even though it had been wiped off the map by Prussia, Austria, and Russia in the last of three partitions in 1795). Although the Poles did briefly regain their independence under Napoleon’s auspices, the country thus founded was named "Duchy of Warsaw" (Księstwo Warszawskie) at Bonaparte's insistence so as to not rile up Tsar Alexander. After Napoleon’s defeat, the Congress of Vienna did restore the Kingdom of Poland, but as a mere Russian vassal state with each Russian tsar simultaneous bearing the title of the King of Poland.
- The film’s reduction of the Battle of Borodino to a vignette of the French overrunning the Russians in the open field is not only inaccurate to the actual bloody fighting over the Bagration flèches and Raevsky redoubt, but downright ironic given the films ahistoric inclusion of field fortifications at Austerlitz and Waterloo. The script also fails a basic fact check after the battle when Napoleon claims, “Moscow is now only 200 miles away,” while the distance is actually only 72 miles.
- Finding Moscow in flames, Napoleon declares he will march on to St. Petersburg and his encouragement to his freezing men that, “We are winning!” implies that he persisted despite his marshal’s protests. Historically, Napoleon had no illusions of attacking St. Petersburg since he’d already lost most of his army to heat, hunger, and disease during the summer advance and his position at Moscow was so tenuous that he didn’t dare re-engage the Russian army just outside the city. Instead, he spent five weeks attempting to bluff the Russians into negotiating before being forced to admit weakness by beginning a retreat that quickly degenerated into a desperate escape.
- The film goes straight from Napoleon's disastrous retreat from Russia in 1812 to him abdicating in 1814 as if the former directly caused the latter. The film’s phrasing even vaguely implies he was ousted partly by the French themselves for his failure, without any indication that the real causes, namely the 1813 German Campaign (particularly the gigantic and pivotal Battle of Leipzig) and the 1814 Invasion of France (in which Napoleon unexpectedly defeated several larger coalition armies before being overrun) even happened. Historically, while he could never regain the colossal levels of manpower and experienced soldiers he lost in Russia, his enemies had suffered almost as badly and Napoleon still heavily mobilized for these campaigns and his complete downfall and abdication were not foregone conclusions in 1812 were it not for serious military losses against the Sixth Coalition.
- The film also oversimplifies and thereby somewhat overstates Napoleon’s losses in Russia as only 40,000 out of 600,000 surviving. Historically, 40,000 was the roughly the number of armed men who escaped Russia with Napoleon, but they were accompanied by just as many stragglers, not to mention the 50,000+ Austrians and Prussians who’d been part of the initial 600,000 but left earlier and fought against Napoleon in 1813.
- As with his return from Egypt, the film attributes Napoleon’s escape from Elba mainly to his fixation with Joséphine rather than any of the actual personal and political aspirations that motivated the man in real life. In the movie, Joséphine then dies awaiting Napoleon’s return from Elba during the Hundred Days in 1815, creating a dramatic scene where he arrives too late and her daughter Hortense announces her death to him. In real life, Joséphine died on May 29, 1814, less than a month into Napoleon’s exile and the news reached him long before his escape. Moreover, she’s said to have died of diphtheria when she actually died of pneumonia and her death is still dated to May 29, 1815, by which time Napoleon had already been back in Paris for two months.
- King Louis XVIII is seen attending the Congress of Vienna, which he never did since his morbid obesity, diabetes, and gout never allowed him to travel far. The French delegation was actually led by Talleyrand.
- The film oversimplifies the battle of Waterloo to the point of extreme inaccuracy.
- Wellington's army is depicted as all-British. In reality, the Brits comprised only about half of Wellington's multi-national force of British, Dutch, Belgians, and Germans, though as the best trained, equipped, and experienced they did bear the brunt of the fighting.
- In the film, the rain persists well into the morning of the battle and, despite saying they must wait for the ground to dry, Napoleon immediately launches his attack as soon as it stops. Historically, the rain stopped the night before and Napoleon did indeed wait several hours for the ground to dry.
- Wellington’s men didn’t dig World War One style trenches on their ridge; they didn’t have the time or energy to prepare such complex defenses after retreating 10 miles through a downpour after a day of hard fighting at Quatre Bras. Instead they deployed behind the ridge for a reverse-slope defense (as was common for the time) and made use of existing structures like the farm complexes of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, which proved hotly-contested features that turned the tide of the real battle but are entirely absent from the film. Paradoxically, in the film, the British dig their trenches on the forward slope where they are more vulnerable to French artillery and then abandon them to form historically accurate but less defensible squares to repel the French cavalry.
- The Prussians’ arrival is depicted as a cavalry charge appearing on Wellington’s right (western) flank. Historically, the Prussians came in on Napoleon’s right (eastern) flank and deployed gradually in combined-arms units, forcing Napoleon to redeploy his initial reserves against them instead of Wellington.
- The movie omits the larger campaign in favor of showing Napoleon persist in attacking Wellington without properly planning for the Prussians’ arrival. While the real Napoleon was uncharacteristically lax in his conduct of the battle, he wasn’t that foolhardy and sent three entire corps under Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy to pursue the Prussians after surprising, dividing, and driving back both Wellington and Blucher at Ligny and Quatre Bras. Unfortunately for Napoleon, the Prussians raced to support Wellington at Waterloo while delaying Grouchy with a rearguard at Wavre. Grouchy's name and the absence of his 33,000 men have remained infamous in France ever since by those who believe their presence could have reversed Napoleon's fortunes in the battle.
- Wellington’s assessment that Napoleon personally can’t resist a frontal assault or getting personally involved in the fighting are both untrue. Napoleon actually preferred to use his superior mobility and firepower to outmaneuver and outgun his opponents both tactically and strategically. Likewise, Napoleon was an artillery officer and mediocre rider who never led a cavalry charge, especially not at Waterloo where he's infamously believed to have had such bad hemorrhoids that he was unable to even sit upon his horse. The actual cavalry charge was a spur-of-the-moment decision by Marshal Michel Ney, with no input from Napoleon.
- No British riflemen ever shot at Napoleon; he was never within firing range, especially not at his command post as implied in the film. Telescopic sights also weren't invented until at least 20 years after Waterloo. Wellington may have said commanders shouldn’t deliberately shoot at each other, but if he did he was speaking about artillery fire, which had actually killed Wellington’s predecessor Sir John Moore and a couple of Napoleon’s marshals in earlier battles.
- The French cavalry charge wasn’t the final action of the battle either. In reality, after his cavalry charge failed, Marshal Ney organized a proper combined-arms assault that captured La Haye Sainte and pushed Wellington’s men nearly to the breaking point. Then, in a desperate attempt to defeat Wellington before more Prussians arrived, Napoleon sent his elite Imperial Guard forward to break Wellington’s weakened infantry line, but they were disastrously repulsed and Wellington and the Prussians executed a general advance that routed the French from the field.
- The Duke of Wellington telling Napoleon that he'll be exiled to Saint Helena never happened. In reality the two men never met in person. The scene’s staging on HMS Bellerophon, however, is actually correct since historically Napoleon learned of his exile informally from the ship’s captain Rear Admiral Frederick Maitland (who left an extensive account
) and officially from the Admiral Lord Keith. - The film’s Napoleon unironically claims to have never made a mistake even after his final defeat whereas the real Napoleon—even when flattering himself for posterity—admitted things like: “I embarked very badly on the Spanish affair, I confess. The immorality of it was too obvious, the injustice too cynical.” Instead he blames his marshals, which is not only very reductive of Napoleon’s actual performance reviews but comes across as baseless given his marshals’ reduced role in the film and the adapting out of the wars in Spain and Germany that contextualize this argument.
- Napoleon didn't suddenly collapse in the garden at Longwood on Saint Helena. He had a stomach ulcer that became cancerous, eventually consuming and likely perforating the organ, resulting in septic shock. After months of increasing illness and weight loss, he started vomiting blood on April 29, 1821 and was in extreme pain by May 1. His British doctor's mercury-based medication only made things worse and he spent the next days agonizing in his bed, ordered a bust of his legitimate son be put in front of the bed so it would be the last thing he'd see, went semi-comatose on May 3, then passed away on May 5.
- The numbers of deaths brought up by the final card before the end credits don't make sense. Jean Tulard has called them "pure fantasy".
- It seems the filmmakers either mistakenly or willfully conflated total casualties (killed, wounded, and missing/captured) with “dead”, a metric by which Napoleon himself would’ve been killed three times and which denigrates his patronage of the era’s foremost combat surgeon, Dominique-Jean Larrey, whose innovations saved many of those lives.
- Listing both Borodino and the Invasion of Russia also effectively counts Borodino twice, and the card curiously specifies that Waterloo lasted a single day but doesn’t do the same for the equally brief battles of Marengo, Austerlitz, and Borodino.
- The broader context of the film and the filmmakers’ comments also implicitly blame Napoleon personally for all of these wars and their casualties. While he certainly shares a lot of the blame, of the battles listed at the end, only Borodino and the Invasion of Russia (admittedly the bloodiest) were conflicts started by Napoleon himself. Coalitions kept forming against him because the big powers surrounding France kept fearing the effects of The French Revolution for what it did to the established royal and aristocratic order in France and never truly recognized Napoleon as a legit peer among European monarchs, forcing him to be constantly on the war footing. Even Waterloo wasn’t a one-sided affair since war was actually declared by the Seventh Coalition.
- Napoleon also fought around 81 battles, not 61.
