“One dark and snowy night in December 1940 in German-occupied Paris, a strange funeral took place when German soldiers carried the coffin of Emperor Napoleon II into Les Invalides. Why was a Napoleon receiving a Nazi funeral?”
“I don’t know if he did that, but it was a fast way of saying he took Egypt.” — Ridley Scott
Would have been far more interesting and timely if Ridley Scott hired John Tolan (“Faces of Muhammad”) as an advisor on the life of Napoleon… Juan Cole would have also saved him couple of embarrassing scenes.
“Napoleon had an idealised, bookish, Enlightenment vision of Islam as pure monotheism: indeed, the failure of his Egyptian expedition owed partly to his idea of Islam being quite different from the religion of Cairo’s ulama. Yet Napoleon was not alone in seeing himself as a new Muhammad: Goethe enthusiastically proclaimed that the emperor was the ‘Mahomet der Welt’ (Muhammad of the world), and the French author Victor Hugo portrayed him as a ‘Mahomet d’occident’ (Muhammad of the West). Napoleon himself, at the end of his life, exiled on Saint Helena and ruminating on his defeat, wrote about Muhammad and defended his legacy as a ‘great man who changed the course of history’. Napoleon’s Muhammad, conqueror and lawgiver, persuasive and charismatic, resembles Napoleon himself – but a Napoleon who was more successful, and certainly never exiled to a cold windswept island in the South Atlantic.”
Muhammad: an anticlerical hero of the European Enlightenment
#OnThisDay, September 14, in 1812, the Great Fire of Moscow began as Napoleon approached the city and retreating Russians burned it (depicted in the BBC series War & Peace, 2016)