Guest Post – Napoleon in fiction by Tom Williams

Today, I am delighted to welcome Tom Williams to my blog. Please see below for his excellent article ‘Napoleon in Fiction’. With Napoleon being released a week today, I thought it was the perfect time to host Tom, and he has kindly included a special offer, so keep reading!

With Ridley Scott’s new film, Napoleon, due to arrive in British cinemas on 22 November, what is it about the Emperor that makes him such a popular subject for fiction? (Ridley Scott has made it quite clear that his film is not historical documentary, so fiction – at least in part – it is.)
Napoleon was a towering figure at the beginning of the 19th century. A military genius, he built an Empire that, at its height, governed, directly or indirectly, most of Europe. Although much of his energies went into the conduct of his wars, he was an able political ruler. In France, he introduced the prefecture system which enabled effective government across the whole country. The reform of the legal code (the Code Napoleon) under his direction, still has a significant impact on legal principles across Europe. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the sciences and the French produced significant advances in everything from mathematics to food preserving (with the predecessor of canned food) to the development of the graphite pencil. He was happy to sponsor foreign scientific discoveries too, such as Volta’s work on electricity. He even started the Parisian sewer system.
It’s not these achievements, though, that writers and film makers tend to concentrate on. There’s a lot about battles – notably Waterloo – and a fair amount of interest in his relationship with Josephine. We don’t know how Ridley Scott will deal with his subject but the trailers suggests a lot of scenes of warfare and he has said that much of the movie is a love story between Napoleon and his Empress. Different writers present him in very different ways: B M Howard’s Blood & Fireflies even has him as a relatively minor character in a detective story.
So if we don’t see Napoleon featuring in stories that highlight the things that he was rightly famous for, why do we see so many books and films about him? Wellington was a pretty good general with a colourful private life and he went on to become Prime Minister of Great Britain, but he is much less often featured in fiction.
Writers, whether they are writing scripts or novels, are attracted to big characters: people who stamp their mark upon the story. It helps if they bring with them a ready-made legend, sparing the author from too much effort in building the character. Napoleon scores on both accounts. If you are writing a story set in the wars of that period, you are writing about the Napoleonic wars, not the Wellington Wars. And everybody already has a mental image of Napoleon (even if it is often hopelessly wrong).
The idea of writing stories loosely based on Napoleon goes back to the man himself. Early in his career, Napoleon recognised the importance of PR in creating the myth that would carry him from an insignificant artillery officer from Corsica to the ruler of an empire. He had an eye for the dramatic. His ‘Battle of the Pyramids’ is still remembered today and features prominently in Scott’s film.

In fact, the battle was fought some distance from the pyramids, which can just be seen on the horizon in this rather more accurate depiction from 1808.

Napoleon was no fool. He knew that a glorious victory at the Battle of the Pyramids would make more impact back in France than success at the Battle of Embabeh, where most of the fighting actually happened. He established his own newspapers in Italy and Egypt, alongside the government’s official Moniteur, to carry news of his military successes and his bulletins were masterpieces of propaganda and self-advancement. They are nothing like the dry accounts of battles posted home by Wellington.
Napoleon was an expert at manipulating public opinion, inspiring almost fanatical loyalty among many of his troops while being used as a bogeyman to frighten children in homes that saw him as villain rather than hero. In either case, he was a larger-than-life figure, tailor-made to feature in novels as whether the writer loves him or loathes him.
In my own books set in the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon features only once, as a distant figure making a speech to his troops (in Burke and the Bedouin) although Josephine is an important character in Burke and the Pimpernel Affair. But as with any books written about that period, all the action takes place in the shadow of Napoleon. He would take time out from the affairs of state to command that the rubbish be cleared from the streets of Cairo or to arrange the marriage of one of his junior officers. Back at home in France, the head of his secret police, Fouché, would provide a daily bulletin which included news about overheard remarks both praising and damning Napoleon and these bulletins could have consequences for those mentioned in them. Napoleon’s rule might affect almost any aspect of your life. Anyone writing about his Empire cannot ignore him.
Napoleon is, at the same time, an almost legendary figure and yet somebody whose world we can recognise and identify with. It is the beginning of the world we live in now: a world run by a vast international bureaucracy communicating by telegraph towers (semaphores that presaged the coming of the electric telegraph) as well as by messengers on horseback. His idea of a united Europe was over a hundred years ahead of its time but it arrived eventually with France as a major player and the damned rosbifs still outside (and still unsubtly trying to destroy French hegemony). Whether he is triumphing on the field of battle or being twisted, yet again, round Josephine’s little finger, he offers something to every reader, every writer, and every film director.

Tom has written seven stories (so far) about James Burke, a spy in the age of Napoleon. You can see details of all of them (and his other books) on his website, http://tomwilliamsauthor.co.uk

He regularly blogs there too. Rather too many of his blog posts are about Napoleon.
Tom will be celebrating the launch of the new film by putting Burke and the Bedouin on sale at 99p/99c from 23 to 29 November. It’s your chance to read what really happened at the Battle of the Pyramids.