Joséphine and Napoleon: A Femdom-ish Romance
Explaining why Napoleon loved Joséphine. A critical femdom theory perspective on Ridley Scott's epic.
Ridley Scott’s treatment of Napoleon’s life is a grand cinematic epic of cannon fire, cavalry charges, royal coups, and sex under tables. It is entertaining, but it is uneven.
The acting by Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon has been scrutinized. Phoenix’s Napoleon shifted his temperament wildly from scene to scene and within scenes. For much of the movie, he appears passionless and cold in his treatment of his first wife, Empress Joséphine. At other points, he appears enslaved by love, a puppy dog seeking Joséphine’s touch. He goes from acting like a romantic schoolboy in one moment to posing as a lord and master in the next.
The striking shifts in Napoleon’s demeanor are not limited to his relationship with Joséphine. But I shall focus on his relationship with Joséphine, the woman who conquered his heart, for it may explain a good deal about the movie.
I, too, felt that Phoenix’s acting was uneven and made Napoleon hard to understand as a character. Was Napoleon really such a confounding man full of contradictory emotions and motivations?
The Napoleon on screen makes sense if the film is intended to show the Napoleon described by Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, and Harold T. Parker—he of the inferiority complex. The harshest criticism of the film is coming from Napoleon’s biggest fans who feel that the movie doesn’t do a good enough job showing his leadership or giving him due for the reforms he implemented as a dictator. They wanted a Great Man hagiography of a man who wasn’t always so great.
But for me, the look at Napoleon’s complex character and his imperfect romance with Joséphine makes Napoleon a more interesting character and does Joséphine justice.
Scott’s Napoleon is an accurate portrayal of the historical Napoleon, according to many scholars. It’s just not a portrayal that shows him to be the iron-willed man of courage and undying resolve chiseled into the marble dome of the U.S. Capitol.
Indeed, Napoleon at his best was a sensitive man who desired the hand of a strong woman. Even being unable to win and hold her affection, he still loved and was in awe of Joséphine. It was when Napoleon lashed out in anger or in an attempt to prove his masculinity that he became a worse man—the kind of man who would let the woman he loved die alone and would cause the death of 6 million people in misguided wars.
A Critical Femdom Perspective of Their Romance
He accepted her despite her notorious history as the widow of politician Alexandre de Beauharnais, the former president of the National Constituent Assembly and general who was executed during the Reign of Terror, even after she confessed her “indiscretions” to him. She had gotten pregnant in order to survive while in prison, she said, but she continued to have more “indiscretions” outside of prison.
None can say that Joséphine did not warn him. Implied in her confession to him before their marriage, she said, in so many words: I am a bad girl. I have my needs. Is that okay with you?
Napoleon was vexed and at times incensed by her affairs, but he could never bring himself to cast aside his feelings for her. Even when he works up his rage following the discovery of her affair while he was away fighting and chastises her, he calms down in the next scene and ponders, “I am not built like other men. I’m not subject to petty insecurity. You’re a beast,” to which Joséphine responds, “You want to be great. You are nothing without me.”
Napoleon, too, had his share of affairs with about two dozen women, a fact the movie doesn’t focus on. The effect of downplaying Napoleon’s own affairs is, on the one hand, to exaggerate his devotion to Joséphine, but it could backfire if it makes Napoleon seem too much the victim.
The sex between Napoleon and Joséphine was bland. In most scenes, Napoleon is taking her from behind—quickly and perfunctorily—while both are clothed. In contrast, Joséphine and her extramarital lovers are shown doing the act while naked and with much more passion. In the most inspired scene, Napoleon comes to Joséphine on all fours and pulls her under the table.
The portrayal of their sexual relations was disappointing, especially given that Scott had more material to work with. There were letters from the battlefield in which Napoleon said he would give her “a kiss on your breast, and then a little lower, then much much lower.”
But I call it a “femdom-ish” romance because Joséphine had the stronger character and the force of charisma. It’s quite literally femdom of the gentle variety. She controlled him with her charm and her force of presence, not with her whip. She had sway over his heart. He would write her every day, multiple times a day, and she would respond tersely a couple of times a week. She introduced herself to him after he was caught staring at her at a party. She dismissed his elegant military attire as a “costume” and tittered when he called it a “uniform.”
Perhaps the crowning line from the perspective of critical femdom theory is at the end, Joséphine dead and Napoleon dying in exile, when the ghost of the once and eternal capital-M Mistress says, “I let you loose and let you come to ruin. Next time, I will be emperor, and you will do as I say.”
I have seen this kind of woman. I know the attraction to her. She is the woman who knows her worth. She doesn’t need a proud and powerful man to give her value. She prefers the submissive man who knows that she is the one giving him great honor and privilege to be in his life.
There is something intoxicating about the woman who knows that she can control you sexually. “Once you see it, you will always want it,” Joséphine said. And he did.
Napoleon did vacillate between extremes, attempting to project exaggerated strength, but it never lasted for long. He ultimately divorced her for political reasons. Why should the former republican have felt he needed an heir of his own blood? Why need an heir at all? Josephine’s son Eugène de Beauharnais was the child who bravely asked for his father’s sword.
The fact that Napoleon would reestablish the monarchy and reestablish slavery in Haiti is enough to discard the complaints that Scott didn’t give Napoleon enough credit for his democratic reforms. Oh, the Chargers might have lost to the Raiders by a score of 63-21, but you must give them credit for scoring three touchdowns in the second half!
Grading the Film and Final Analysis
Ridley Scott is not a historian. He is a storyteller. Did he do a good job telling a story? I was unsure. After the first viewing, I might have rated it a C+ or a B-. It was entertaining, but I didn’t think it held together as a whole. But after reading more and thinking about it more, I would bump up my grade to a B or maybe even a B+. It is by no means perfect or even close to perfect, but took difficult source material and tried to fasten together a sprawling story about a contested figure.
To some degree, the attempt to tell a story could conflict with the History in some parts. History doesn’t always play out in a three-act structure. From a director’s point of view (and that of the viewer who pays for a ticket to be entertained), it is a legitimate exercise to sift through a great many facts and mold together those that make up the story.
Scott’s film did not introduce the debate over Napoleon. Historians have been debating him. As is often the case, the debate isn’t so much about specific facts as it is about the broader conclusion: Was Napoleon the ultimate Great Man, or was Napoleon a small, cucked man with an inferiority complex that led him to overcompensate with his swords and guns? That question is not actually a disagreement over the facts but rather a disagreement over interpretation. It’s a disagreement about one’s opinion of said facts.
There are, at any rate, enough facts for many historians to advance the interpretation of Napoleon as the conflicted figure whose name would be used to identify an inferiority complex.
In Napoleon: A Life, Andrew Roberts writes:
Napoleon’s love affair with Josephine has been presented all too often in plays, novels and movies as a Romeo and Juliet story: in fact, it was anything but. He had an overwhelming crush on her, but she didn’t love him, at least in the beginning, and was unfaithful to him from the very start of their marriage. When he learned of her infidelities two years later while on campaign in the middle of the Egyptian desert, he was devastated. He took a mistress in Cairo in part to protect himself from accusations of cuckoldry, which were far more dangerous for a French general of the era than those of adultery. Yet he forgave Josephine when he returned to France, and they started off on a decade of harmonious marital and sexual contentment, despite his taking a series of mistresses. Josephine remained faithful and even fell in love with him.
His letters show the power Joséphine held over his heart and soul—the combination of love, desire, and fear she inspired in him. In one (cited in Roberts’ book), he calls her the “torment, joy, hope and soul of my life, whom I love, whom I fear, who inspires in me tender feelings which summon up Nature and emotions as impetuous and volcanic as thunder.”
In a different world, maybe Napoleon would have met Joséphine in a time of peace, in a time when France was a stable democracy, or at least when Napoleon did not have to play empire-maker around the world. Instead of wondering whether the world would have been a better place if Joséphine had been empress, I wonder whether Napoleon and Joséphine would not have had happier lives and more fulfilling romances had neither of them been thrust into politics and forced to survive. Then Napoleon could have kissed Joséphine’s feet without shame and published his poetry to her for all the world to read.