British Cinema and the Napoleonic Wars

It has long been recognised that the historical feature film often has as much to say about the time in which it was made as about the period in which it was set.

This idea will be explored through a discussion of British feature films about the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. A range of examples, illustrated by extracts, will demonstrate the strategies adopted by British film makers for representing this period in response to the ideological and cultural determinants of the present.

In 1934, for example, the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation produced The Iron Duke, which used the story of Wellington at the Congress of Vienna as an allegory of appeasement, drawing explicit parallels between the treatment of France in 1815 and the treatment of Germany in 1919. Its plea for fair and tolerant treatment of a defeated nation had clear contemporary overtones during the mid 1930s. During the Second World War, however, the narrative of British resistance to Napoleon is mobilised as propaganda in the context of the war against Hitler’s Germany. Films such as Lady Hamilton (1940) – a ‘Hollywood British’ film produced by Alexander Korda – and The Young Mr Pitt (1942) both make explicit statements against appeasement in drawing on the lessons of the past as propaganda for the present.