Give Ridley his dues, he sure stirred up some dust with this film. I have never seen so many great and really well made French videos popping up all over the place to speak on English takes on Napoleon.

I don’t blame any one in France being annoyed, irritated, amused or plain gobsmacked at Ridley’s cheek, chutzpah, his finger in the eye devil may care attitude towards historical accuracy – call it whatever you want. Would a French filmmaker wade in with a knife in the belly critique of Churchill…

Ridley takes the cake. Does he care? Not at all. The more noise the better. It’s not that I think Ridley is wrong. He’s a filmmaker, a very good one, and filmmakers, good or not, can do what they like, up to a point, I guess, with history.

I know as a filmmaker I probably would have left the top on the Pyramid. Maybe to be provocative I could have had Napoleon knock the top off the Eiffel Tower (oh that’s right, it wasn’t there then, damn!).

And Napoleon’s last big well-financed campaign, OMG, Russia, what a debacle. My only question is this: why didn’t his maréchaux take the army off him?