I was in Europe recently researching a future Ethan Gage novel and a French guide to the Normandy beaches asked me what water we were looking at.
“The English Channel,” I replied.
He shook his head. “No, that may be the name they use in England but it is actually La Manche, The Sleeve. History is different here.”
Indeed. In touring museums dedicated to both the Napoleonic era and D-Day, I was struck at how each nation edits the past to fit its own story. It’s not just what they say, but what they don’t.
While we Americans, with the help of Hollywood, are accustomed to thinking of ourselves on center stage, our World War II role tends to get better billing in France (liberation) than in England (the GIs were “over-paid, over-sexed, and over-here,” the Brits would say.) And the Soviet Union? Forgetaboudit. Yeah, they chewed up the German army but it was (fill in your own nation) that won the war, as the Beatles sang.
The same is true of Napoleon, a volcanic genius in France, ogre in Britain, and something in-between in American histories. It helps to poke about on both sides of the Channel to get a rounded look.
The Napoleon Wing of the Army Museum in Paris has splendid uniforms and weapons but is curiously dry in putting the campaigns in context or trying to relate what it was like to fight them. The British Army Museum in London is all-England, and Nelson’s flagship “Victory” in Portsmouth relates reams about life in the British navy and nary a word about the French or Spanish sailors Nelson fought.
My interests as a novelist don’t always match what countries choose to remember. England’s Walmer Castle, on the La Manche coast near Dover looking out toward France, is a charming place to visit but the tour doesn’t mention its role as a spy headquarters in the Napoleonic Wars.
In France’s Boulogne across the water, there is a huge column commemorating the “Army of England” Napoleon built there for an invasion of Britain that never happened, but intriguingly the statue of the general on top is facing east (toward his eventual victory at Austerlitz) and not west at the country he longed to conquer.
Napoleon has been alternately portrayed as hero and villain by legions of competing historians, and he drew such mixed reactions even in his own lifetime.
Some first-person accounts record him as warm, charismatic, and handsome, able to modify his personality to put almost any visitor at ease and to enlist almost any potential confederate. By those accounts he recruited, rewarded, and delegated.
Other contemporary accounts describe him as brusque, disdainful of women, slight and then plump, with a sallow complexion, receding hairline, and clumsy administration.
Sometimes his gray eyes are described as seductive, and others, as icy.
His legend has him sharing the miseries of his shoulders and standing in for frozen sentries, while his detractors note his assembly of a costly array of servants and ruinous spending. He was either generous to his siblings or cruel, loyal to subordinates or ruthless, a hopeless romantic or a cheating husband.
There’s evidence to support all these assessments, which make Napoleon’s complexity one of the things that fascinate. It was as if he combined all our species’ strengths and weaknesses in one being.
Which is why Napoleon remains such a useful foil for Ethan Gage in his adventures. He is a man always being discovered. And Ethan, the wayward American, finds himself on both sides of the Channel in his pursuit of truth.
