Napoleon, Historians, and a Silly Movie
Ok, yeah, fiction is fiction but people get their history from it
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
Just a few days ago, a little Ridley Scott film was released about Napoleon. You may have heard something about it.
In the run-up to the release, as so often happens, the director did some sit-downs with various media outlets to promote the film. In one interview, and although (or perhaps because) a lot of his films are based on historical subjects - Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, etc. - it became clear he really doesn’t like historians. In an interview with the Sunday Times, he just generally said he doesn’t care about historical accuracy and that historians should shut the fuck up.
In one sense, it’s fine. It’s a fictional movie, right? Historical fiction is still fiction and so can do with the past what it wants in order to tell the story that it wants to tell.
But as our friend Rutger Kramer pointed out on Bluesky, it's “easy to claim 'it's just entertainment' but movies like this one still influence our view of history - so the Ridley Scotts of this world need to take some kind of responsibility for their narratives.” We couldn’t agree more. Despite self-serving (and naive) protestations to the contrary, people who are rich and famous - or who are just in the public eye more generally - need to consider the ethics of what they do and how they do it. Charles Barkley was actually a role model, even if he didn’t want to be, for example.
And people get their history from movies like Napoleon.
In 2021, the American Historical Association released the results of a large national survey about the state of “history” in the country. Part of that was asking people where they got their history, where they learned about the past. The results were SUPER interesting:
Look at #2 on here. That’s Napoleon.
Again, fiction is fiction and Ridley Scott can do whatever the heck he wants but at the very least this chart should show how absolutely important it is for historians to engage with these works - not to condescend but to thoughtfully dialogue with the media and more importantly that media’s audience. The things that academic historians usually do are only on the bottom half of the above list, and never hitting more than 1/3 (nonfiction history book) of our potential audience.
History is in crisis. We all know this. Sure, Napoleon and things like that are silly. Sure Scott is being kind of a jerk. But we have to engage.
One problem is that when historians do talk about movies, we tend to focus (sometimes pedantically) on what’s right or wrong with a given depiction. Instead, we’d like to see more historians taking these moments to discuss how we can really know anything about the past more generally, and this past in a specific film more specifically, and then talk about why that past matters.
That is at least just as interesting as any Ridley Scott movie and has the benefit of being an actually important conversation.
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