"I am the instrument of providence (fortuna), she will use me as long as I accomplish her designs, then she will break me like a glass."
Napoleon
Vivat in aeternum - Coronation Music for Napoleon I by Nicolas Roze
In the coronation itself, which took place not in the traditional location of French royal coronations, the Cathedral in Reims, but in Notre Dame in Paris, he actually used two crowns. Initially he placed a laurel crown of the Roman emperors on his own head. Afterward he briefly placed the imperial Charlemagne crown on his head, then touched it to the head of his empress, Josephine.
The Crown of Napoleon was a coronation crown manufactured for Emperor Napoleon I of the French and used in his coronation on December 2, 1804. Napoleon called his new crown the Crown of Charlemagne, the name of the ancient royal coronation crown of France that had been destroyed in the French Revolution, a name which allowed him to compare himself to the famed mediaeval monarch Charlemagne, King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor.
At Malmaison, the country estate of Napoleon and Josephine outside Paris, decisions of state were made in a room decorated to resemble the inside of a military tent: an opulent military tent, made of rich striped fabric, but a military tent nonetheless, the place Napoleon felt most at home. That bizarre detail is not included in David Grubin's finely wrought, beautifully photographed ''Napoleon,'' but it suits the series's vision of the man who would be emperor. This Napoleon was first and always a soldier.
This sleek two-part series is most concerned with Napoleon's conquest of France, then much of Europe. It sets these maneuvers lucidly in the context of the French Revolution, whose reforms shaped Napoleon and whose changes he in turn reshaped. But the documentary spends little time on the personality that allowed him to dominate an era, which leaves a hole in the center of the portrait. The Napoleon complex, after all, wasn't named on a whim.
The series does portray him as a man with an early lust for power. Soon after Napoleon arrived in France as a schoolboy, a teacher described him as ''domineering, imperious and stubborn,'' speaking French with ''a horrible Corsican accent'' he never entirely lost. The Revolution had made it possible for a nobody like little Napoleon Bonaparte to rise through sheer military brilliance. In 1799 he took part in a coup and soon ruled France as first consul.
The great irony of Napoleon's complicated career is set out here with ease and clarity: he rightly proclaimed that his conquests carried Revolutionary principles to Europeans still mired in a feudal past, yet he gave himself dictatorial powers, eventually crowning himself emperor. The documentary's view is cautiously down the middle. He gets credit for many reforms, especially for establishing the civil code that remains the basis for French law. Yet the film doesn't shy away from the ruthlessness with which he squandered lives and rewrote history.
