The Napoleonic Wars are exactly what you’d expect them to be: a series of conflicts fought while Napoleon Bonaparte reigned as the Emperor of the French. This period is recognized as lasting between 1803 and 1815, and given the battles fought as part of the conflict all occurred before photography existed, it falls on things like artwork and cinema to recreate and depict such a time in history.

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30 Adieu Bonaparte, 1985

A story during the French Occupation of Egypt (1797-1803), depicting the conflict between tradition and modernization in the context of fighting the French invaders.

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29 The Terror, 1963

Separated from from his regiment during the Napoleonic wars, Lt. Andre Duvalier briefly comes across a beautiful young woman, Helene. An old woman who seems to live in the forest alone and gives him shelter tells him he is imagining things but the young woman intrigues him and he eventually follows her to Baron Victor Frederick Von Leppe’s castle. There he learns that the girl he’s seen is identical to the Baron’s late wife, Ilsa, who has been dead for 20 years. The Baron admits to having killed her when he returned unexpectedly only to find her in the arms of another man. Duvalier is convinced that the girl is real however and sets out to uncover the truth.

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28 Lines of Wellington (Linhas de Wellington), 2012

On September 27, 1810, the French troops commanded by Marshal Massena, were defeated in the Serra do Buçaco by the Anglo-Portuguese army of general Wellington. Despite the victory, Portuguese and British are forced to retreat from the enemy, numerically superior, in order to attract them to Torres Vedras, where Wellington had built fortified lines hardly surmountable. Simultaneously, the Anglo-Portuguese command organizes the evacuation of the entire territory between the battlefield and the lines of Torres Vedras, a gigantic burned land operation, which prevents the French from collecting supplies. This is the setting for the adventures of a multitude of characters from all social backgrounds – soldiers and civilians, men, women and children, young and old – to the daily routine torn by war and dragged through hills and valleys, between ruined villages, charred forests and devastated crops.Highly persecuted by the French, already tormented by an unmerciful weather, the mass of fugitives continues to move forward clenching the teeth, just to save their skin, loaded with tenacious will to resist the invaders and retreat them from their country. Or even hoping to take advantage of the disarray to satisfy their basic instincts. All of them, whatever nature or motivations – the idealistic young lieutenant Pedro De Alencar, Clarissa Warren, the malicious little English girl, the shady dealer Penabranca, the vindictive Sergeant Francisco Xavier or the lusty prostitute Martírio, all gather by different paths to the lines of Torres, where the final battle will decide the fate of each one of them.

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27 Napoleon (Napoléon), 1954

Napoléon Bonaparte’s life, loves and exceptional destiny from 1769 to 1821, but as seen through the eyes of Talleyrand, the cynical and ironic politician who once was the Emperor of France’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.

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26 St. Ives, 1998

In 1813, Capitaine Jacques St. Ives, a Hussar in the Napoleonic wars, is captured and sent to a Scottish prison camp. He’s a swashbuckler, so the prison’s commander, Major Farquar Bolingbroke Chevening, asks for lessons in communicating with women. Both men have their eyes on the lovely Flora, who resides with her aunt, the iconoclastic and well-traveled Miss Susan Emily Gilcrist. By chance, living close to the camp is Jacques’s grandfather and brother, whom Jacques believes died years before. Jacques decides to escape, find his relatives, and win the hand of Flora; Major Chevening and an unforeseen enemy stand in his way. Can Miss Gilcrist contrive to make everything work out?

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25 Le souper, 1992

France, 1815. After his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon heads for exile. Royalists occupy Paris and attempt to restore the monarchy. However, the battle doesn’t seem to be over. On July 6, Talleyrand, a shrewd politician of flexible convictions, invites chief of police and zealous revolutionary Fouché to supper and tries to convince him to serve the king. Over the meal they insult each other, accuse each other, and, at first sight, look like mortal enemies. But they definitely have one thing in common: they are both power-hungry.

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24 Union of Salvation (Союз Спасения), 2019

A group of officers of the Russian Imperial Guard prepare a revolt in December 1825, when about 3,000 officers and soldiers refused to swear allegiance to the new tsar.

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23 The Emperor of Paris (L’Empereur de Paris), 2018

Under the reign of Napoleon, François Vidocq, the only man who escaped from the greatest penal colony of the country, is a legend of the low-Parisian world. Left for dead after his last spectacular escape, the ex-penal colony prisoner tries to make a new life under the guise of a single trader.

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22 War and Peace, 1956

Napoleon’s tumultuous relations with Russia, including his disastrous 1812 invasion, serve as the backdrop for the tangled personal lives of two aristocratic families.

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21 Pan Tadeusz, 1999

In the early 1810s, Poles, part of Russia’s client state of Lithuania, think independence will come if they join forces with Napoleon when he invades Russia. This unity of purpose, in one district, is undermined by two families, feuding since the head of one shot the head of the other twenty years before. There are hopes of a reconciliation through a marriage of Pan Tadeusz, a Soplica, whose father, the murderer, is in hiding somewhere, and Zosia, a teen-aged girl, a Horeszko who lives in the household of Pan’s uncle. Other cross-currents – of love, family, politics, village traditions, land reform, and what it means to be Polish – give the film texture. It’s an exile’s story.

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