A ‘Napoleon’ for the Ages

“Napoleon,” a two-night documentary series on PBS, is as intoxicating as history on television gets. It turns out the most storied French leader ever--a genius general and cosmic empire builder before he was 30--wasn’t named after a puff pastry, after all.

Another superb work from David Grubin, “Napoleon” sets a standard for historical documentaries. Smart and accessible to the masses, it’s a rich, pulsating account of a seminal figure rising vibrantly to life through scholarly words, gorgeous pictures, stunning reenactments and splendid narration from historian David McCullough without being pretentious.

Abel Gance’s 1927 silent movie “Napoleon” is said to be the most admirable screen rendering of this man, as dominant on the skyline of European history as is Notre Dame in Paris. Uncredited with the full range of his deeds in subsequent muddled biographies with Marlon Brando and Armand Assante, Napoleon Bonaparte was more than 5 feet, 2 inches of hand-in-vest ruthless conqueror and dictator who ran France as a police state and viewed his destiny mystically. We’re reminded during these four hours that he was also a city and nation builder whose epic presence yielded positive achievements as well.

A Coriscan-born Francophobe turned Francophile, Napoleon rides the French Revolution to power in 1799 so vividly here that you can almost feel the cold blade of the guillotine on your neck. Later, he anoints himself emperor at a crossroads of history, placing upon his own head in 1804 the crown he said he found in the gutter.

History should be fun, and this documentary often is, recalling, for example, the cheating heart of Napoleon’s wife, Josephine, whose philandering deeply wounds him just as he gouges the nations and towns that fall to his armies. When he is miserably isolated in Egypt after the English destroy his fleet, at one point, she continues her elegant, sexually adventurous life in France, a contrast that Grubin notes persuasively.

This is equally a military history, from Napoleon’s great campaign across the Alps to his great 1805 victory at Austerlitz, where we’re told descriptively, “Hidden in the haze below the heights were two French divisions.”

Much later, his great army sinks in the same snowy Russian winter that would defeat Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the next century. In his future, also, are more stunning defeats, exile on Elba followed by escape, and his campaign against the allies at the head of an army marching toward a field of rye and clover. Its name: Waterloo.

It’s all quite seductive. The greatest compliment you can give “Napoleon” is that it induces you to pick up a book.

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* Part 1 of “Napoleon” can be seen tonight at 9 on KCET-TV and KVCR-TV, with the conclusion airing Nov. 15 at 9 p.m.