Tory Sovereignty

You don't watch a Ridley Scott film in the hope of a history lesson. The emperor Commodus did not murder his father, Marcus Aurelius, nor did he die at the hands of a gladiator in the Colosseum (he was actually drowned by a wrestler in a bath). So it seems churlish that Scott's Napoleon has been criticised for playing fast and loose with the facts, such as Bonaparte witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette or the Battle of the Pyramids starting with the French firing cannons at the Great Pyramid of Giza (the site of the battle was actually 9 miles away). What the film does present is a traditional view of Napoleon, but that view is decidely the one generated during his lifetime and after by British propaganda, hence the traditional tropes of his sexual dysfunction, his callous disregard for his soldiers' lives and his megalomania. Scott's film is first and foremost an English film, embodied in Rupert Everett's enjoyably supercilious turn as the Duke of Wellington. You can understand why it has enraged many French critics. To be fair to them, it isn't as good a film as Scott's feature debut, The Duellists, which was also set in Napoleonic France, but the reaction is more to do with national sensitivities than cinematic craft.

The film obeys the usual rules of a Hollywood epic in that many of the supporting characters are English (even if actually Scots, Welsh or Irish). Tahar Rahim, as Paul Barras, is the only prominent French actor (he has an impeccable English accent). The American Joaquin Phoenix naturally plays the man of action, distinct from the silver-tongued Brits such as Ben Miles as Coulaincourt and Matthew Rhys as Talleyrand. He is a fine actor but miscast here, not least because we must believe that a bear of a man who looks every one of his 49 years can convincingly portray the character from 24 to his death at 51. The key physical characteristic of Napoleon was not sticking his hand inside his coat but the possession of boyish looks. Vanessa Kirby is likewise miscast as Josephine because she is too young, though she makes a decent enough fist of the part. The empress was six years older than the emperor. Had the film been a French production, it would have made sense to cast Benoit Magimel (also 49 but credibly boyish) and Juliette Binoche (59 and still able to play 20 years younger), not least because they have history as a couple (incidentally, they are excellent in The Taste of Things).

The film compresses the history, sometimes to the point of absurdity. For example, Napoleon's abdication in 1814 follows hard on the heels of the retreat from Moscow in 1812, as if the War of the Sixth Coalition, culminating in the battle of Leipzig, never happened. But one thing that does get a mention is the apparently dry subject of the Continental System, the attempt to stop the import of British goods that commenced in 1806 as a response to the British blockade of French ports. The prominence of this in the story owes much to its historic significance for the UK, notably in encouraging greater trade outside of Europe and reinforcing the strategic policy, formalised by Lord Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna, of Britain's role in supporting the balance of powers in Europe while avoiding any continental entanglements. The role of the Continental System in exacerbating domestic recession after 1810 (it was a contributory factor to the Luddite revolt) and friction with the US (it was also a contributory factor to the War of 1812) are less noted.

The French are quite right to criticise the film as anti-French and pro-English, but they've tended to emphasise the former over the latter, which I feel misses the point. Scott is a Hollywood fixture but he remains a recognisably English director and one who subscribes to the romantic and conservative tradition of David Lean and Michael Powell. That might not appear obvious in films such as Blade Runner and Alien, but the themes of free will and motherhood have been constants throughout his career. I mention all this not simply because I like many of his films but because his latest has coincided with the resurfacing in politics of the perennial theme of sovereignty, the core issue of Brexit, this time in respect of the ridiculous and performatively cruel Rwanda scheme. Sovereignty means not only autonomy but the poessession of the power necessary to impose your will on others. Thus the term cannot be understood in a British context without consideration of the history of British power, and a useful place to start is the first great crisis of empire in the late nineteenth century occasioned by the loss of the American colonies and the threat, specifically of domestic contagion, posed by the French Revolution.

Napoleon has always been a figure who prompted mixed feelings in Britain. He curtailed the revolution and yet he also embodied the revolutionary spirit of ambition that upset the settled order. The trope of the asylum inmate who imagined he was the real Napoleon captured this ambivalence: the daring and the delusion. What Scott and Phoenix's Napoleon embodies is the idea of will, from his determination at the siege of Toulon to his decision-making at Austerlitz and Waterloo. His divorce from Josephine and marriage to Marie-Therese of Austria in search of an heir is presented as a petulant bending of the affairs of state to his personal satisfaction (in a parallel universe, Scott would have cast the suitably French surnamed Mark Francois as Napoleon and Nigel Farage as Wellington). The iconography of Brexit - the Spitfires, the white cliffs of Dover - dwelt on the patriotic resistance against Nazism of World War Two, yet there was always an under-current that saw "taking back control" not simply as the inversion of the colonial relationship - Britain as the occupied rather than the occupier, a rather trite intepretation beloved of liberals - but as a recovery of that imperial might: the power to do as we wished.

The latest troubles of the government over Rwanda have led liberals like Rafel Behr to decry the Tories' "neurotic obsession with immaculate national sovereignty". But this is to forget the lesson of Brexit, which is that national sovereignty, whether immaculate or otherwise, remains a powerful issue in the public mind. It wasn't immigration or asylum that tipped the vote in 2016 but sovereignty, however poorly understood or incoherent the concept. What remains unresolved in British politics, and what has been the underlying tension since the incomplete revolution of the 17th century, is whether it should be popular sovereignty or parliamentary sovereignty. Whether, in the contemporary context, our political system remains fit for purpose. When Behr scoffs at the idea that reality can be amended by a simple act of parliament, he isn't about to suggest that the will of the people should be untrammelled. He is advocating the conservation of a system in which parliament is constrained both by domestic and international law. That's a perfectly reasonable position to hold, but then so too is the belief that parliament should be unconstrained by either, even if it is advanced by the likes of Bill Cash. 

The power of Margaret Thatcher in the Tory mentality has less to do with private property or the restoration of class power, let alone the creation of a shareholding nation, than with the expression of national will, first in the Falklands and then against the "enemy within" of the NUM. It is that tradition, with its ancient roots in the Reformation and Shakespeare, not the recent derangement of Brexit, that powers the Tory tradition of sovereignty. In contrast, Labour has never managed to follow the logic of its role as the people's party and fully embrace popular sovereignty. As the party of the state apparat and the professional classes it has preferred to defend both parliamentary sovereignty (some of its staunchest defenders have been leftwingers with romantic delusions, like Michael Foot and Tony Benn) and the constraints of domestic and international law, though not without inevitable tensions, such as over the invasion of Iraq when Tony Blair's hubris approached Napoleonic proportions. Keir Starmer's project is to restore the authority of the state, but that inevitably means putting the genie of popular sovereignty back in the bottle, which is why talk of a return to the EU is misguided. If Ridley Scott fancies directing another historical epic centred on a dour man of will, I'd suggest he try his hand at Cromwell.