Bicentenary celebrates the rise and fall of Napoleon, one of history’s great heroes

 

French actor Frank Samson plays Napoleon as part of the bicentenary celebrations. Photo / AP

On March 20, Napoleon Bonaparte will once more set foot on the cobbled streets of Paris, the staging point of his plan to rout his enemies and recover the empire he lost.
Well, okay, it won't be the real Napoleon. Obviously. In real life, he's not the conqueror of Europe but a Paris lawyer called Frank. His speciality is finding loopholes to get drivers off traffic offences.
But cover Frank's bald head with a straggly wig and a bicorne hat, put him in a uniform with gold epaulettes, place him on a horse and let him bark an order in Corsican-accented French, and you would swear Napoleon had returned to life. Allez-y, les braves! Vive l'Empereur!
For the legions of Napoleon obsessives around the world, the coming weeks will be a special time.
An extraordinary commemoration will mark the 200th anniversary of the final rise and dramatic fall of one of the greatest figures in history - a man whose deep and controversial imprint endures today.

Right now, devotees are re-enacting the Hundred Days, when Napoleon slipped out of exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba, landed on the French coast and persuaded the troops who had come to arrest him to rally behind the imperial eagle and help his return to power.
Town after town fell to to the emperor without a shot being fired as he made his way towards Paris, where he mustered an army to face Britain and Prussia, which threw together an alliance to face their old enemy.
The final, bloody showdown happened at Waterloo, 13km south of Brussels, on June 18, 1815. Napoleon, fielding an army of 69,000, sought to divide and crush his adversaries, who had around 67,000 troops.
On a single, chaotic, brutally violent day, around 25,000 Frenchmen, 15,000 British and 7000 Prussians were killed, although the final tally will always remain uncertain and even today, amateur archaeologists are sifting through graves.
The bicentenary day will be marked on the battlefield by a high-octane sound-and-light show, "Inferno", for 12,000 spectators, followed by a battle reconstruction on June 19 and 20, complete with cavalry charges and cannon fire, by 6000 participants clad in the uniforms of the Napoleonic Wars.
Schoolchildren are told to remember 1815 as a turning point, determining the fate of Europe for the following century.
But as this year's commemorations show, geopolitics take a very distant back seat to the enigmatic, brooding, hypnotic figure of Napoleon himself.
"It's the romance of Napoleon that people are interested in," said Alan Rooney, managing director of The Cultural Experience, which runs bus tours to Napoleonic sites and has 20 such visits already lined up this year.

"The legend flourished after Waterloo and was captured in fantastic art - all those sumptuous pictures - and in novels. It's a watershed in people's psyche."
Fascination with Napoleon runs deep. An outsider who came to power on merit rather than money or title, he has been the subject of hundreds of films and tens of thousands of books - more biographies are believed to have been written about Napoleon than about any other personality in history. Around France, streets, hotels and restaurants are named after him, his generals or his battles, although Trafalgar and Waterloo are not favourites.
"He is a fascinating character," says Frank Samson, who is playing the part of Napoleon in the re-enactments. "He made France what it is today."
Not just a military genius - he was a general at 26 - Napoleon was also an able political ruler.
He centralised France's administration, reformed its taxation, declared Jews to be equal to everyone else, introduced a legal code that remains in place in a quarter of the world's jurisdiction, brought in the Legion d'Honneur, helped to foster the metric system and championed the sciences and arts.
In the territories that he conquered, which at his zenith in 1811 spanned from Spain to Russia, he abolished feudal privilege, scaled back the power of the Catholic church and passed laws on equality.
At the time, though, Napoleon was reviled and feared around many parts of Europe as a megalomaniac. The 12 years of the Napoleonic Wars cost between three and a half and seven million lives.
Historians of English folklore say that parents would recite a rhyme about "Boney" the bogeyman to discipline a crying child: "Baby, baby, if he hears you / As he gallops past the house, / Limb from limb at once he'll tear you / Just as pussy tears a mouse."
An exhibition running in the British Museum in London entitled Bonaparte and the British: prints and propaganda in the age of Napoleon shows the extent to which the British sought to ease their dread of Napoleon with humour - a tactic that found an echo in World War II with Hitler.
It shows British prints and propaganda of Napoleon, mocking him especially as an angry little man: a stereotype was born and never faded, even finding a home in psychology as the Napoleonic complex. Yet this was wrong, say Napoleon experts today. The British propagandists believed "Little Boney" stood only five feet two inches (1.57m) without his boots on. But this figure derived from misunderstanding the French measurements given of his height, and the inch in pre-metric France was longer than that in Britain.
Boney in fact stood five foot seven inches (1.68m), which was the standard height for Frenchmen of the day.
Napoleon was hauled off to exile on the barren South Atlantic island of St Helena where he died in 1821 at the age of 51.
Even now, his final moments are shrouded in romantic fog and nationalistic rivalries.
A strand of amateur scholars in France remains darkly convinced that the British poisoned Napoleon with arsenic to prevent another comeback. A post-mortem examination by British physicians at the time concluded stomach cancer was to blame, a conclusion that US pathologists in 2007 said was right.
Some fans are even sceptical that the remains entombed beneath the dome of the Invalides military hospital in Paris are those of their hero.
They want DNA tests, suspecting that the Brits swapped Napoleon's body with another corpse to have the last laugh - classic Anglo-Saxon perfidy, n'est-ce pas?