“History,” the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, “is the biography of great men” — and of these Napoleon, whom Carlyle described as “our chief contemporary wonder,” was considered by many to be the greatest.
The ambitious dreamed of emulating him; inmates of lunatic asylums believed they were him.
And now we find him, some 200 years later, larger than life once again, on IMAX screens and in multiplexes in Ridley Scott’s new epic “Napoleon.”So why does Mr. Scott’s choice of subject feel like something of a throwback?
What has changed is not Napoleon’s story, but our sense of the possibilities it once represented.
People (with the possible exception of Mr. Putin) are unlikely to see themselves as history’s protagonists.
Persons:
Thomas Carlyle, “, ” —, Napoleon, Carlyle, ”, Ridley Scott’s, Hegel, Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin, Stalin, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Mr, Putin, who’ve, Scott
Locations:
Ridley, Italy