Bonaparte Makes a Comeback as Mickey Mouse

History, it is often said, belongs to the victors. Except in France. Here a cultural mythology of national grandeur has long defied the inglorious facts of history. Napoleonland, a Disney-style theme park to be built just south of Paris, is the latest cultural monument in this time-honoured French enigma.

Napoleonland will celebrate Napoleon’s greatest triumphs. Accordingly, there will be re-enactments of the famous Battle of Austerlitz, for which a Paris rail station is proudly named. There will be no re-enactments, however, of the Battle of Waterloo, for which a London rail station is proudly named. Presumably there will be no re-enactments of Napoleon being sent off into ignominious exile on Saint Helena Island.

The Napoleanic theme park tribute to French national glory has only recently been announced, the cornerstone has yet to be laid, but already Napoleonland has been studiously dissected and irreverently mocked in the Anglo-Saxon media. An American historian has theorized that Napoleonland is a desperate symbolic gesture by the French to reclaim their long-vanished international stature. Time magazine put Napoleonland at the top of its list of the “World’s Weirdest Theme Parks”.

True, Napoleon’s legacy in the Anglo-Saxon world is generally assessed with more severity than reverence. Bonaparte was a thrusting military general who seized power, proclaimed himself emperor, and promptly took his Grand Army on a bloody path of conquest, destruction, and looting throughout Europe and beyond. Defeated finally in 1814, Napoleon stubbornly came back a year later only to provoke yet another war with Britain — until he was finally stopped at Waterloo in 1815. One British columnist, in an article about the “Grand Delusions of a Second-Rate Nation”, described the Napoleonland project this way: “A country which can still partly revere such a man surely has a problem.”

Yves Jégo, the French centre-right MP who is championing the Napoleonland scheme, sees thing differently. One can easily grasp Jégo’s motivation: the theme park will be built on the location of a famous Napoleonic battlefield that just happens to be situated in Jégo’s own electoral patch near Montereau. Seizing on the language of product marketing to trumpet his high-minded pork-barrelling, Jégo argues that Napoleon is a “global brand”. Hard to dispute that assertion. Now Jégo has to find the €250 million to get Napoleonland built.

Meanwhile, the question merits being asked: Why the do French still worship a figure who symbolizes defeat and national humiliation?

There can be no doubt that Napoleon enjoys a uniquely heroic place of pride in the French collective psyche. Today he is entombed under the magnificent gold dome of Les Invalides, only a couple blocks form my where I live in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. No French king of centuries past enjoys such an exalted display of public adoration in the French capital. The French Revolution rejected monarchy, but France’s Jacobine republic has accommodated itself to the troubling legacy of Napoleon. That shouldn’t be so surprising. Napoleon was a product of the Revolution.

More surprising is the amusement park concept to pay tribute to Napoleon. Just up the road from the future Napoleonland, some 15 millions tourists annually visit Disneyland just southeast of Paris. Disneyland may be Europe’s most popular theme park, but it has never enjoyed the undiluted affection of the French. Twenty years ago when Mickey Mouse flung open the gates of EuroDisney — as it was then called — it was savaged and satirised by Parisian intellectuals, challenged in the courts by French labour unions, and generally resented in France as yet another symbol of American cultural imperialism.

And yet, paradoxically, the French were more sanguine about the inauguration of another amusement park called Asterix, celebrating a popular French historical hero. Asterix, the so-called plucky Gaul, is a comicbook hero known to millions of French children. Popular French movies based on the cartoon character have starred film legends such as Gerard Depardieu. Asterix is in fact based on a real figure from history, Vercingetorix, an ancient Gallic warrior who fought valiantly against the conquering Roman general Julius Ceasar. Vercingetorix, like Napoleon, met a humiliating end. Defeated in 52 BC by Caesar at Alesia (which today is a Paris Metro station), Vincingetorix was hauled back to Rome as a prisoner, put on public display as a war trophy, and later executed.

In truth, Vercingetorix wasn’t “French” at all — at least not in the modern sense of the word. He was a Celtic warlord resisting Roman domination. The French nation didn’t emerge until long after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and the migration of Germanic tribes, notably the Franks, into the region that today is modern France. The connection between Vercingetorix and French nationalism was a historical myth fabricated in the 19th century. In the 1860s Napoleon III, the nephew of the Napoleon Bonaparte, was looking for a heroic symbol to boost French national pride and thus legitimise his Second Empire regime. Vercingetorix, a long-forgotten Gallic warrior who had stood up to Rome, fit the bill perfectly. Thus Vercingetorix, dusted off and resurrected for nation-building purposes, entered France’s popular imagination as part of a Second Empire propaganda campaign. Napoleon III, like his uncle, met a humiliating end when defeated by the Prussians only a few years later. But the nationalist myth of Vercingetorix lived on, inspiring generations of French schoolchildren.

Today Vercingetorix has morphed into Asterix of comic book and theme park fame. Yet the Parc Asterix attracts only 2 million visitors a year, only a fraction of the 15 million who visit nearby Disneyland. Yves Jégo is undoubtedly betting that his Napoleonland will rival Disneyland more valiantly. He can’t count only French national pride to finance the scheme, however. He’s looking to deep-pocketed investors from places like Qatar to bankroll Napoleonland.

If Napoleonland is built, it will be France’s second amusement park inspired by a national military hero who ended in defeat. The timing will also be ironic. As construction begins on Napoleonland, the British will be memorialiszing the 200th anniversary of Waterloo.

From Matthewfraser-thismuchiknow.com