Peter Black, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
peterblack@qctonline.com
I have a small laminated copy of Jacques-Louis David’s famous portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, purchased many years ago from the gift shop of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Why, of all possible souvenirs of works of art on offer, your scribe chose a portrait of Napoleon, escapes me. There just must have been something about it, or him (or was it in the bargain bin of historical portraits?).
In any event, that little Napoleon memento comes to mind as British director Ridley Scott’s cinematic opus about the French emperor hits theatres with a three-hour thump – a running time longer, as one critic noted, than Bonaparte’s coronation ceremony.
The latest surge of Boney-mania also brings to mind a certain Montreal muscleman whose passion – beyond bodybuilding and nutrition – was everything Napoleonic.
Ben Weider, with his brother Joe, built a successful global business publishing fitness and health magazines, selling nutritional products and staging body-building competitions. For example, the Mr. Olympia contest, going, um … strong since 1965, famously brought to world attention, Hollywood stardom and the California governorship seven-time champion Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Napoleon may have been a strongman, but he was no muscleman. Yet Weider had a lifelong fascination with the Little Corporal, amassing a collection of some 100 items of memorabilia, many of them owned by the emperor himself. One Napoleonic keepsake, a lock of the emperor’s hair, became key to Weider’s campaign to prove Bonaparte, 51 years old at the time, did not die of stomach cancer, as the generally accepted version states, but was poisoned by monarchist plotters fearing another comeback.
Weider wrote a 1982 best-seller titled The Murder of Napoleon, in which he makes the case, based on reams of personal accounts and forensic science, that Napoleon succumbed to arsenic poisoning. The most convincing proof was the analysis of hair shaved from his head the day after he died in May 1821.
Weider donated his collection to the Montreal Museum of Fine Art in 2008. A ceremony to accept the Napoleonic treasures, with a Bonaparte descendant in attendance, took place eight days after Weider died that year at age 85.
Weider’s interest in Napoleon ran deeper than simple fascination with an epic historical figure. As cited in one tribute, Weider “often said that one of the chief reasons he so admired Bonaparte was because he was ahead of his time in extending rights to Jews and other minorities; he emancipated Jews from the ghettos and lifted restrictions on their freedoms in the European countries he conquered, and even proposed a Jewish state in Palestine.”
When his plan for a Jewish state in the Middle East failed, following his brutal invasion of Egypt and Palestine in 1798, Napoleon declared France to be the homeland of the Jews.
He was somewhat less tolerant when it came to other types of human beings. His mission in 1801 to suppress a slave revolt in Hispaniola, now Haiti, ended in disaster, with only a fraction of his 35,000-man expeditionary force surviving death in battle or by disease.
As a result, Napoleon had to abandon his plan to reinforce the massive swath of territory in the American midwest he had acquired from Spain in exchange for Tuscany in Italy, creating a French territory to replace Canada – Voltaire’s “few acres of snow” lost in the Seven Years War.
Desperate for cash to fill his war chest to take on the British once again, Napoleon eagerly agreed to sell the Louisiana territory to the United States, for the equivalent of about $350 million US in today’s money.
The Americans had originally only wanted to buy New Orleans, but ended up getting some 828,000 square miles west of the Mississippi River, most of which had never seen a French visitor and was occupied only by Indigenous tribes.
Napoleon’s vision of a French-speaking empire in North America ended when the Americans took possession of Louisiana on Dec. 20, 1803, and promptly started making plans to extend slavery to the new possession, sowing the seeds of the Civil War.
Who knows what would have happened had Napoleon not met his Caribbean Waterloo on Hispaniola, and instead been able to muster a massive expeditionary force to claim this huge and sparsely populated territory – running all the way up to the border with British North America – for France?
It certainly would have given new meaning to the dreaded “Louisianization” of Quebec.
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