Vive l'Empereur!

After Waterloo, the British went to great lengths to paint Napoleon as a monstrous buffoon, a historical has-been. Two centuries on, the biographical films and books just keep coming, and now an all-star TV mini-series is taking France by storm. So has 'the upstart' triumphed after all?

Of course the Duke of Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, or rather, Napoleon Bonaparte contrived to lose it, seriously denting his reputation as a military genius, and condemning him to spend the final six years of his life on a large rock in the south Atlantic.

But Napoleon was a brilliant self-propagandist as well as an occasionally great general. He knew that his most important battle would be the battle for his place in history.

Was Napoleone di Buonaparte, a Corsican of Italian extraction who became emperor of the French and, briefly, the master of Europe, a wicked despot or a tragic hero? Was he an imposter who led hundreds of thousands to their deaths by charging down a historical cul-de-sac? Or was he the father of modern times? A genius? An insignificant nonentity? A monster and a butcher? Or a man of peace and a pan-European idealist?

A blockbuster, £25m mini-series, now showing on the France 2 public television channel – the most expensive production made for the small screen in France – goes, broadly speaking, for the "tragic hero" option. It will be interesting to see what we, the British, who have often demonised and ridiculed Napoleon, make of the series when it appears on British TV screens next year.

Napoléon, directed by a Hollywood-based Canadian, Yves Simoneau, is a sumptuous production – 150 actors, 1,500 extras, 4,500 costumes – that was made simultaneously in French and English. The cast list is stunning: John Malkovich is the treacherous foreign minister, Talleyrand; Gérard Depardieu (who is also the co-producer) is the police chief, Fouché; Isabella Rossellini is wonderful as Napoleon's scheming, vulnerable wife Joséphine. Kenneth Branagh has a small role as the Tsar. Anouk Aimée is the emperor's poisonous mother, Letizia.

Napoleon is played by Christian Clavier, an actor previously best known for his comic roles in movies such as Les Bronzés, Les Visiteurs and the Astérix films. This is rather like casting John Cleese as the Duke of Wellington. Clavier is sometimes convincing, sometimes not. The view of the French critics is that he is a good Napoleon (striking an imposing figure as the politician and general) but a poor Bonaparte (giving little insight into the man). His task is not simplified by a script that occasionally has lines such as: "Tonight, I must make passionate love to my wife. Tomorrow, I conquer Italy."

The battle scenes are also inconsistent. Some are convincingly gruesome. Others resemble those recreations by Napoleon fanatics that occur occasionally at Waterloo and other battle sites, in which the soldiers wear period uniforms and sunglasses, and snap each other with cameras.

The series of four, 90-minute episodes is part of an upsurge in Napoleonic interest in France. There is also a musical about Napoleon as a young man showing in Paris, produced by Robert Hossein, the man who was also behind a successful play about Charles de Gaulle three years ago. Antoine de Caunes, the French actor, best known in Britain as the presenter of Eurotrash, is directing a movie exploring the mysteries of Napoleon's final years under British custody on the island of Saint Helena. Was the ex-emperor poisoned or not?

Napoleon would have been delighted to know that he would be a media star in the 21st century. The emperor was one of the first historical figures to understand the importance of spin. He was a man without wealth, or even a nationality, who reinvented himself several times before he became emperor at the age of 35. He was obsessed with the way others saw him and how history would portray him.

Two centuries on, the French buy part of the myth but remain doubtful about the man. Paris is littered with avenues and streets that commemorate Napoleon's generals, armies, victories and treaties, but there is no grand avenue or square named after the emperor (only a narrow street on the Left Bank called the rue Bonaparte).

One dissident French historian, Roger Caratini, has recently pushed the dark view of Napoleon to an entertaining but, finally unconvincing, extreme. In Napoléon: une imposture (recently enlarged and republished by L'Archipel, €22.50), he insists that Napoleon was an illegitimate Italian (ie not even Corsican) carpetbagger who hood-winked the French for two decades.

Napoleon, according to Caratini, took the credit for the military ideas and exploits of others. He exploited the post-revolutionary confusion to stage a very modern coup d'état. Contrary to the received view, he did not rewrite French laws (the Code Civil) or invent the modern French state. He began as an unprincipled opportunist and ended as a paranoid megalomaniac.

The contrary view – Napoleon as hero and visionary – is taken by a bestselling, four-volume biography of Napoleon by the popular historian and novelist Max Gallo. Much of his book is written in the first person. Napoleon's enemies are Max Gallo's enemies.

The television series is based on Gallo's book but adds a little balance. To recoup the cost of the series, it was necessary to sell it abroad and the producers knew that a wholly laudatory portrait of Napoleon would not travel. So we see Napoleon fiddling the figures on the plebiscite that declared him emperor, making the result even more crushingly in his favour than it already was. "Impression is everything," he says. We are shown some of the shadows of the Empire: the suppression of opposing ideas; Napoleon's insensitivity to the human cost of war; the execution of an innocent, minor member of royalty to establish Napoleon's revolutionary credentials; the shooting of petty smugglers who broke the embargo on trade with Britain.

But there are also glaring omissions. The Battle of Trafalgar is dismissed in one sentence in which Napoleon says: "Trafalgar did not exist." Italian commentators were enraged by the portrayal of Napoleon's Italian campaign of 1796-7 as a glorious episode. There were no burning villages; no sign of the pillaging of money to enrich the French state and Napoleon himself; no mention of the systematic looting of the greatest treasures of Italian art (many of which the French were forced to return after 1815).

Which is the real Napoleon? The acknowledged expert among academic French historians is Jean Tulard. He regards the TV mini-series as too soft on the emperor, but Caratini's rubbishing of the Napoleonic legend as equally misleading.

Napoleon, according to Tulard, may not have been the greatest military strategist who ever lived, but he transformed late-18th-century warfare by abandoning the dilettante, aristocratic, almost sporting approach to battles that had gone before. He marched troops rapidly from one place to another; he attacked enemies from the rear (most unsporting, that one); he fought battles to destroy the strength of the enemy, not just to win the day. Increasingly, these turned from battles of attrition into battles of extermination.

To begin with, these battles were not undertaken for conquest, but for survival. The British, Austrians, Russians and Prussians were determined to end the French Revolutionary experiment and, beyond that, to end the domination of France, which was then the largest economic and political power in the world.

It is perfectly fair to say that battles such as Iena and Austerlitz were fought on the George W Bush principle of pre-emptive defence. (Later campaigns in Spain and Russia are harder to justify.)

Napoleon was a great opportunist but he also convinced himself that he was the only man capable of rescuing the legacy of the Revolution from the murderous chaos of the 1790s. He believed in egality and democracy, as principles to be fought for, even though he imposed himself as consul, and then emperor, and installed his feckless relations as monarchs in Italy, Spain, Germany and Holland. (Feckless they may have been, but they generally ruled better than the hopeless monarchies that came before and afterwards.)

In France, the administrative structure created by Napoleon survives to this day: the Code Civil, the départements, the Prefects, the lycées, the Légion d'honneur, the Banque de France, the grandes écoles for training an administrative élite, the examining magistrates.

Many of these ideas had already been discussed or started, but it was Naploeon who had the willpower (and simply the power) to impose them. Depending on your viewpoint, he laid the foundations for a strong, efficient, united France; or he created an over-centralised country that is top-heavy with bureaucracy. In summary, the more balanced, intelligent, French view of Napoleon is that he turned into a brutal dictator but that the French Revolution, and its Napoleonic aftermath, were, at least, the Beginning of Modern Times.

Were they? British historians argue that the Revolution and Napoleon – far from speeding the "modernisation" of France – delayed for many decades the political, economic and industrial developments that were already starting under the Ancien Régime. The real "beginning of Modern Times" occurred, not at the Bastille or Austerlitz, but in the factories of Lancashire and the West Midlands.

The French see this as a smugly British view of history. Napoleon may have been a brutal dictator by the end, but wherever he went – Italy, Germany, the Low Countries, less so in Spain – he imposed his Napoleonic code of law. By introducing basic property and legal rights, Napoleon hastened the end of feudalism all over Europe and laid the foundations for modern economics and politics.

There is also a suggestion – first made by Napoleon himself over a glass of wine, and possibly arsenic, in Saint Helena – that the emperor was the first "European"; that his intention, all along, was to create a Europe without borders and without "civil wars". To do that, he had to defeat Albion by imposing a single European market – "the continental system" – from which the incorrigible and un-European British would be excluded.

This theory may be attractive to French romantics, and British Eurosceptics, but makes little sense. There is little evidence that Napoleon had this idea in mind at the time. He was, at various points, hopeful that he could do a deal with "les Anglais", who had, after all, thrown off royal rule themselves and were, with the French, the most "modern" country in the Old World. The European dream was a justification, invented later, in the long, boring hours of imprisonment in Longwood House on Saint Helena.

It is perhaps truer to say that, by accidentally awakening national feelings and bourgeois politics, Napoleon helped to create the antagonistic, European nation states that dominated the next 150 years and generated two world wars.

Was he also a precursor of Hitler and Stalin? Hardly. He was more like a French Oliver Cromwell: a driven idealist-cum-opportunist, whose legacy outlasted the brief restoration of absolute monarchy; a man whose darker side his apologists prefer to forget.

In one respect, however, Napoleon was clearly a modern figure: rather chillingly modern. He grasped the importance of image-making and PR. As early as 1796, when he was an obscure 27-year-old general, he created two newspapers that glorified and exaggerated his exploits in Italy. ("Bonaparte flies like lightning and strikes like thunder. He is everywhere and sees everything. He knows that he is one of those men whose capacity is limited only by his own willpower... an immense genius." )

After seizing power in a coup in 1799, he employed teams of writers and historians to laud his military and political expertise. Even in exile in Saint Helena, he continued that battle. He dictated a sprawling memoir of his life to the Comte de Las Cases, which remains to this day the principal source for the view of Napoleon as a creative but misunderstood man of vision and peace.

The exiled, and later restored, French royalty, and the British government, employed pamphleteers and historians – sometimes the same historians previously paid by Napoleon – to reverse the imperial propaganda. L'Empereur was ferociously belittled as the upstart "Bonaparte": cowardly, superstitious, irreligious, sadistic, sexually depraved, incestuous, impotent, a man who cheated at chess, insane and, above all, small. (He was in fact around five feet seven inches tall, which was above average for the period.)

Precisely because he was a man without pedigree who achieved extraordinary things, the degenerate royalties that ran the Continent, and the arrogant aristocracy and squierarchy that ran Britain, were determined to deflate him. To them, meritocracy was the most terrifying of the ideas thrown up by the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. Napoleon must not only be beaten; he must be exorcised. No Napoleonic myth must be be allowed to survive and thrive.

Forty thousand books, 100 movies and, now, one TV mini-series later, it is clear who won that battle.