Word: napoles
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DIED. Abel Gance, 92, illustrious French film director who devised such techniques as multiple screens, double-printing and wide-angle lenses to create brilliant silent movies, including the 1927 masterpiece Napoléon; in Paris. A prolific film maker, Gance produced such classics as I Accuse and The Wheel. But his success ended with the advent of talkies. Shuttling between unemployment and obscure commercial movies, he complained: "I prostituted myself not to live but to avoid dying." Five decades later, one understanding producer, Francis Coppola, helped English Film Historian Kevin Brownlow present a reassembled copy of Napoleon, shown last January...
...Napoleonic Scholar Jean Tulard. "Even before Napoleon created his own golden legend, his opponents had created the black legend of Napoleon." Two socialist-minded French historians, ex-Naval Officer Louis de Villefosse and his wife Janine Bouissonouse, attack Napoleon ferociously in a recently published book, L'Opposition à Napoléon. In j'accusé tones, they condemn Napoleon for "reestablishing slavery in the [French] colonies and the black slave trade. We could go as far as to charge him with racism and fascism. No, decidedly, it is not respect for law that he taught Europe...
Since 1840, when the Code Napoléon was enacted as France's basic civil law, married Frenchwomen have enjoyed all the legal privileges one might expect from the Emperor's opinion of them. Novelist George Sand watched in despair in the 19th century while her husband squandered her immense dowry and made her ask permission to spend the money she earned from her books and plays. A present-day French woman told her lawyer that her husband had just sold her store, and now wanted a divorce. What could she do? "Cry, madame, cry," she was advised...
...Consent. White slavery, says Author Terrot, was no problem in Britain before the 19th century. The French started the trouble. In 1804 the Code Napoléon, a writ that ran through Western Europe, raised the age of consent to 21, and any man who had sexual relations with a minor could be brought to trial (penalty: two years' imprisonment). Suddenly the Continental whoremongers found it convenient to get their fresh recruits from foreign fields, notably England, where, as Author Terrot puts it, "any child of twelve was legally competent to consent to her own seduction." (Exception...
Underground Prince. On Paris streets, wispy old women still peddled literature advocating a return to Bourbon rule, but the royalist cause has been as good as dead for years. By tacit consent of the government itself, 36-year-old Prince Louis Napoleéon, the Bonapartist pretender, had been calmly ignoring the Law of Exile ever since World War II. A well-heeled young businessman, Prince Louis Napoléeon was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor for his leadership in the French underground during the war. Since then he has spent a good part of every year...