It is Napoleon’s fault

 that Brazilians drink caipirinha instead of champagne!

This was the tongue-in-cheek advertisement for the film Napoleon.  It, very well could have been the case, if Napoleon had not been defeated at Waterloo.  The flawed Ridley Scott film has everyone debating and researching Napoleon’s epic story to uncover the true Napoleon.  Since more than 60 000 books have been written on the Corsican, it is an impossible feat.  Each author has labored to drill down into the character to the point of reinventing him.  Napoleon’s cultural legacy is nearly as significant as the political impact he had on the society of his time, in Europe and beyond.

In 1807, Napoleon’s army invaded Portugal (Napoleon delegated the invasion to one of his generals).  With British help, the Portuguese Prince regent fled Lisbon and landed on Brazil shore which, literally, was Portugal’s gold mine.  In Rio de Janeiro, the prince may have tasted caipirinha for the first time.  Portugal was ruled by Napoleon’s satraps until 1808 when the French army was forced out by the Port drinking British troops.  If not defeated at Waterloo, the Imperial army would have come back to Portugal and probably, sailed to Rio with crates of champagne.

Coincidentally, the current bullying of small Guyana by its bigger neighbor Venezuela may also be Napoleon’s fault. Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela dictator, is threatening to grab half of his neighbor’s territory, the oil-rich Essequibo region.

Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula not only destabilized the Spanish colonial bureaucracy but his revolutionary ideas were welcomed by the South American elite.  These ideas justified the revolts which led on leaps and bounds, to wars of independence.  This speed led to a century of instability and territorial disputes.  Many are still not resolved as Maduro’s threats indicate. 

Bordering the Spanish colonies, but without defined borders, the Guiana region belonged to Holland (except for the Cayenne bit which had been colonized by France).  After Napoleon’s takeover of Holland in 1804, preemptively Britain grabbed the Guianas.  In 1815, they were divided into three parts with Britain keeping the largest one.  The Venezuelan claim over Essequibo started in 1840 when a British-mandated surveyor unilaterally enlarged the British colony.  The 2023 Venezuelan bluster reminds me of the 1982’ invasion of the British Falklands Islands by Argentine dictators desperate to evade domestic troubles.  Invading neighbours seems to be a time-honored dictators’ distraction.  Coincidentally, it is Napoleon III, Napoleon’s nephew who in 1856 coined the term Latin America.

Beside Napoleon, another film gathered plenty of historic interest, particularly in France. Its connection to Napoleon is more subtle.  The Killers of the Flower Moon is a three and a half hour long American epic directed by Martin Scorsese.  The film recounts the brutal murders of the Osage people in Oklahoma in the 1920s and the resulting birth of the FBI.  Greedy white men murdered a number of Indians to grab their valuable oil claims.

Actually, the Osage' s woes started much earlier, largely as a consequence of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase Treaty between France and the USA.  First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte sold the US government a territory roughly the size of a third of today’s continental USA.  Two centuries earlier, the first white men the Indians had met were French trappers who called them “Osage”, the phonetic writing of “eau sage” (calm water).  The Osage sided with France during the war against England; they lived side by side, intermarried and many became Catholic.  They remained loyal to the French cause until 1803.  Alas, the Louisiana Purchase allowed the US government to grab Indian lands to settle European immigrants; the Osage were forced out and had to fight other Indian tribes over access to land.  70 years after the Louisiana Purchase, the Osage had lost 90% of their population.

Unhappy with the way the US government was treating them, an Osage delegation went to France to seek the support of the French king (1827-30).  Feted at first as “noble savages”, they were soon abandoned to their fate and resorted to beg to survive.  They were able to return to the USA thanks to the financial help of the citizens of the city of Montauban in southern France.  The city bishop had been the bishop of Louisiana.  Now, Montauban is the sister-city of the Osage town of Pawhuska in Oklahoma.  

Coincidentally, after the Waterloo melt-down, defeated Napoleon had hoped to be banished to America, where as a matter of fact, there are more descendants of the Napoleon family than in France.  Instead, he was shipped to a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.  Ridley Scott’s film has sparked a renewed Napoleon interest in Europe.  Napoleon: Love or loathe him!