352: This Week: Napoleon, Thirteen Days, The Patriot, The Last Duel

October 16th, 1793. France.

We’re starting this week at the start of Ridley Scott’s epic film from 2023 called Napoleon to see this week’s first event: The execution of Marie Antoinette.

As the movie fades up from the opening credits, we’re moving down a hallway following two soldiers in red uniforms. Between the two men is a woman with long, curly blonde hair. If you know anything about Marie Antoinette, then you know about her signature hair style so it’s pretty obvious this is her.

She’s ushering what looks like three children in front of her—it’s hard to see if it’s two or three children because she’s blocking the view.

As the soldiers pass them, two more soldiers appear from behind us and march along behind Marie. The soldiers who rushed ahead open the door as a couple more soldiers walk into view. She and children almost make it to the door when the movie cuts to black. More credits roll, this time for the lead actors in the movie, Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby.

A moment later, the movie returns us to Marie who is now holding the children close to her in front of what looks like a shelf filled with sheets, blankets, and bedding. Now that the camera angle has changed to seeing them from the front we can tell there are two children: A boy, and a girl.

After some more credits, we return to seeing Marie. Again we’re behind her, seeing her curly hair against the bright light of day. This time she’s riding in a cart, which is taking her out of a large building into what looks like a courtyard filled with a huge crowd waving French flags.

As her cart moves past people in the crowd, they start throwing items at her and yelling out, “Get to the guillotine!” Soldiers holding the crowd back to make a path for the cart seem to be having a bit of a hard time doing so as the crowd continues to yell, scream, and throw things at Marie Antoinette as she passes by.

A quick overhead shot gives us a view of the whole courtyard, and we can see a scaffold with a guillotine there. French tricolor flags wave as people fill the square outside a grand, official building adorned with banners.

Off the cart now, Marie silently walks among the crowd through a pathway made by soldiers holding back the crowd. Her hair is a stark contrast to the crowd and soldiers behind her. They’re continuing to throw things at her, and what looks like a tomato strikes her left breast, smearing red on her skin as others continue to throw what looks like lettuce or some other foods at her.

From behind, and with a leaf of some sort of vegetable stuck in her hair, Marie walks forward and up the steps toward the guillotine. Once there, a man binds her hands with rope and forces her to her knees. Another man moves her hair out of the way as he places her head under the blade. She doesn’t seem to be resisting…in fact, she seems to be helping as she sticks her head through the hole and in place.

A third man on the other side of the guillotine roughly pushes down the top semicircular piece that forces Marie’s head down in place under the blade. Those pieces are called the lunette, by the way.

Then, the blade drops. The crowd continues to yell and scream as the movie plays a song in the background. One of the soldiers manning the guillotine pulls out Marie Antoinette’s now detached head and holds it up for the crowd to see.

Switching to a camera angle from the crowd, we can see Joaquin Phoenix’s version of Napoleon watching this all take place. After a moment, he turns and leaves just as the movie cuts to black for the title to appear.

Fact-checking this week’s event from Napoleon

How much of that really happened?

Well, Marie Antoinette really was executed on October 16th, 1793, and…actually, let’s learn from someone way more knowledgeable about this than I am, because I had the chance to chat with acclaimed Napoleonic era historian Alexander Mikaberidze about the movie, and he did a fantastic job of separating fact from fiction in that opening sequence. So, here is a clip with Alexander:

[00:00:45] Dan LeFebvre: As the movie starts off, in 1789 in France, and it tells us that people are driven to revolution by misery, and then they’re brought back to misery by the revolution. Talks about food shortages and economic depression, driving anti royalists to send King Louis the 16th.

And. 11, 000 of his supporters to a violent end. And then after that, the French people set their sights on the last queen of France, Marie Antoinette. And we see in the movie, the beheading of Marie Antoinette before public audience, who just cheers at her death. Do you think the movie did a good job setting up the way things were at the beginning of the French revolution in 1789?

[00:01:24] Alexander Mikaberidze: I think that scene actually is among the the better ones in the movie. I think he does convey the. The drama, the tragedy of the French Revolution, um, I wish Scott simply had maybe stayed a little bit closer to actual events because that would have underscored really the dramatic side of it.

For example, that scene where Marie Antoinette at the beginning of the movie is huddling her kids and she has this wonderful, beautiful hair, right? In, in actual history, that hair was shorn. It was cut off. She was taken to the guillotine with this kind of shaved off head. And I think in the movie, she still has the beautiful hair.

If he had actually shown what happened, it would have underscored the profound fall that this woman experienced from being at the top of the world to being to, to being this ridiculed acute, mistreated, humiliated. And tragically the person but by October of 1793, when she’s executed.

And then of course the scene itself is set in what looks like a backyard of some Persian residents when of course in actuality all of this was state or the executions were taking place in a massive square, right? One of the key areas in Paris, which we still can visit Place de la Concorde.

Where, if your listeners are ever in Paris and to visit that place and see where the Egyptian obelisk stands back in 1793, that’s where the guillotine stood and that’s where the queen was executed. So I think the scale of it is also missing. But overall, I think the emotional side is conveyed in that particular scene.

I think Ridley Scott has a problem overall with the with the dealing with the history of both Napoleon and revolution in that he dumbs it down too much, simplifies it too much. And so we are then after this dramatic scene of a queen’s execution, we are then thrown shown a effectively caricature, a lampoon version of revolutionary debates or revolutionary discourse that was taking place there.

We see Roby Spear that is gonna combine image of Rob Spear and Danton. He looks absolutely nothing like Joe Rob Spear. And of course the debates that Wrigley, Cortana shows us, they, in many respect are torn out of the context. And so by the, if in effect the, I think the viewer doesn’t get a sense of the magnitude, the importance, the transformative nature of revolution.

Instead, what we see. It’s a bunch of radicals running around and behaving people.

[00:03:55] Dan LeFebvre: Yeah, I could see how that’s, that, that’s a challenge. ’cause that could be a movie in an all in and in of itself outside of Napoleon. And so trying to capture Napoleon as I was watching that, those. thE scene with Marie Antoinette’s beheading, we see Napoleon there, do we know if he was actually there?

I got the impression the movie’s trying to tie him into this historical event to show him because it is a movie called Napoleon.

[00:04:18] Alexander Mikaberidze: That’s right. And we do know, again, that’s one of the issues is that Napoleon is among the most documented, um, historical figures. So we can retrace him throughout his life.

Down to effectively now, so that, that degree can come to, so this whole little Ridley Scott’s famous where are you there? How do you know? If you look what, how historians actually work and what the job of historian is, what the profession, the field of history is about, that we’re not simply inventing stuff, right?

We’re following the evidence and the evidence tells us that Napoleon was not in Paris in October of 1793. And that he was in the south of France but having said that, I’m fine, see, this is the thing, is that I’m fine with movie film directors, artists, writers taking artistic liberty with those kind of things in order to emphasize the drama, as you pointed out, I think setting Napoleon there, Is it cool?

Is it is actually a nice way of opening the movie because we know that Napoleon was at a different event. He was present in the storming of the Royal Palace in August of 1792 which was a violent event, much more violent than this we’re talking about. A massacre of Swiss guards and the fall of monarchy.

So it’s much more dramatic and a bigger scale. And we know that Napoleon was very critical of how the king’s government essentially how the state responded to this. And so he was dismissive of this rabble that he looked upon. And I think that scene where Ridley Scott shows him President and he condescendingly, in some respects, looks at this rabble that Napoleon I think it works for me.

It just it didn’t happen.

If you want to learn more about the entire Napoleon movie, I’ve got a link in the show notes to my full chat with Alexander.

October 16th, 1962. Washington, D.C.

For our next historical event this week, we’re heading to the 2000 movie called Thirteen Days for the start of what we now know as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

At about 13 minutes into the movie, we’re in Washington D.C. as three men are walking down the hallways of the White House. The movie is in black and white as we see Special Assistant to the President Kenny O’Donnell on the left side of the frame. He’s portrayed by Kevin Costner in the movie. In the center is President John F. Kennedy, who is played by Bruce Greenwood, and on the right is his brother and the Attorney General of the United States, Bobby Kennedy. He’s played by Steven Culp in the movie.

The three men have stern looks on their faces as they turn the corner and enter a room filled with a bunch of other men—and I noticed one woman. Most of the men are in military uniforms or suits. The movie fades into color as the president walks into the room and greets many of them with a handshake and a “good morning.”

As he does, we can hear someone in the background telling him that the CIA has been notified and make mentions of people who are being called in, but haven’t arrived yet. After all the greetings are done, everyone sits down at a large, wooden conference table in the middle of the room.

Once everyone is seated, JFK tells the man in a suit still standing at the head of the table, “Let’s have it.”

The standing man starts his presentation. We can see there’s an easel with a black and white photograph on it next to him. He explains that a U-2 over Cuba on Sunday morning took a series of disturbing photographs. Our analysis, he says, indicates the Soviet Union has followed-up its conventional weapons in Cuba with MRBMs. That stands for medium-range ballistic missiles.

The movie shows footage of the missiles being towed into a clearing in the jungle.

The man’s voiceover continues, saying the missile system we’ve identified in the photographs indicate it’s the SS-4 Sandal Pronunciation Guide > Sandal. That missile is capable of delivering a 3-megaton nuclear weapon with a range of 1,000 miles, and so far we’ve identified 32 of the missiles being manned by about 3,400 men. We assume they’re mostly Soviets.

The movie shifts back to the meeting in the White House as the man giving the presentation points to the easel. Instead of the photograph from before, now we can see the graphic of a map of the area around Cuba and the United States. Three concentric rings are coming out of Cuba, implying the missile’s range will reach far into the United States. On the map, we can see a few cities shown. Cities like Miami, New Orleans, San Antonio, Dallas, Savannah, and Atlanta are inside the rings. So is Washington, D.C., and Cincinnati in Ohio. Just outside the rings are St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Oklahoma City.

He turns to the men at the conference table and says the cities in range, “…would have only 5 minutes of warning.”

In his military uniform, Bill Smitrovich’s version of General Maxwell Taylor repeats this to the other men around the table to impress the impact: In those 5 minutes of warning, they could kill 80 million Americans and destroy a significant percentage of our bomber bases, degrading our retaliatory options.

Fact-checking this week’s event from Thirteen Days

Before we fact-check this event, I just want to give you a heads up that covering the entire Thirteen Days movie is already on my to-do list, so expect an episode coming probably early next year about that.

For our purposes today, though, I’ll admit that it was odd for a movie called Thirteen Days not to tell us what day it is with on-screen text. But, it doesn’t, so we have to deduce what day it is in the movie based on the historical events.

And we know from history that it was October 14th, 1962, when the U-2 spy plane took photos over Cuba. We see that very briefly in the movie, just before the segment I described. Then, those photos were analyzed on the 15th and determined to be of importance enough that, on October 16th is when this meeting took place with JFK and other senior staff.

In the movie, it mentions the missiles are SS-4 Sandal MRBMs with a range of 1,000 miles and delivering 3-megaton nuclear warheads.

That’s mostly accurate, although the details of the SS-4 Sandal MRBMs is a little off. Those really were the missiles they photographed, although that’s the NATO name for them. The Soviet name for them was the R-12 Dvina, and they had the capabilities of carrying between 1 and 2.3 megaton nuclear warhead about 1,200 miles, or roughly 2,000 kilometers.

So, the movie was slightly off, but not enough to really matter in the grand scope of things because Cuba is just 90 miles, or 145 kilometers, off the coast of the United States.

That means many of the major cities shown on the map in the movie would’ve been in range of the nuclear warheads. For example, Miami is just 230 miles from Havana, Cuba. New Orleans is about 600 miles, or 965 kilometers, and Atlanta is approximately 730 miles, or 1,175 kilometers. Even Washington D.C. is on the outer range of the missiles at about 1,200 miles from Havana, Cuba.

So, the movie is correct to point out the severity of the situation. Although, the movie mentions it’d only take five minutes to reach their targets and…well, that depends on which target. Miami is just 230 miles, so naturally it wouldn’t have as much reaction time as Washington, D.C.

And if we look at the specs for the R-12 Dvina missile, it could travel about 3 to 4 miles per second, so it’d take about 3 or 4 minutes to reach Miami and about 10 or 15 minutes to reach Washington, D.C.

So, again, even though the movie is simplifying the numbers a bit, when it comes to a nuclear warhead coming your way…what’s the difference between 3 or 4 minutes and 10 or 15 minutes? For all intents and purposes, not much.

And that is why the Cuban Missile Crisis was such a big deal.

As I mentioned earlier, we’ll do a deep dive into this movie to learn more about the crisis as a whole, but that’s not out yet, so before we wrap up today, let’s get a quick overview of the rest of the timeline.

After JFK’s meeting on the 16th that we saw in today’s movie, a committee was formed called ExComm. The movie mentions this right after the segment I described. ExComm stands for the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, and they were formed after the 16th meeting.

On October 17th, JFK met with the ExComm members who had assembled to deal with the crisis. They proposed a range of options. What sort of diplomatic options do we have? What would happen if we attacked the missile sites?

They weighed all the options.

On October 18th, President Kennedy reached out to the Soviet Foreign Minister, a man named Andrei Gromyko. Kennedy didn’t say anything about the missiles because he didn’t want to let the Soviets know the Americans knew about them. Gromyko also didn’t mention them, and assured Kennedy the Soviet Union only has a presence in Cuba to help build up their defenses.

The next day, Kennedy met with ExComm again to further discuss options. The idea of an air strike on the missile sites started to gain in popularity with some of the military advisors. But then, on October 20th, Kennedy decided not to go ahead with the air strikes but instead to do a military blockade. Basically, he ordered U.S. Navy ships to go block off Cuba and not allow any Soviet shipments from arriving in Cuba.

That didn’t really stop the missiles already in Cuba, but it helped make sure there wouldn’t be any more.

On the 21st, Kennedy and his advisors continued to mull over ideas and Kennedy started to put together a speech to the nation. He decided he wanted to let the public know what was going on. After all, if missiles were launched there would only be minutes of warning so it’d be public really fast. Also, Kennedy hoped the public pressure would help pressure the Soviets into diplomatic talks when they realized the Americans knew about the missiles.

Then, on October 22nd, President Kennedy made an 18-minute address on live television. I’ll include a link in the show notes for where you can watch that on YouTube.

The next day, on the 23rd, the Navy ships made it to their locations for the blockade and that officially went into effect. And it didn’t take long for them to encounter Soviet ships, with the first ships hitting the blockade on October 24th. All of a sudden, there was this face-off in the waters off Cuba between the U.S. Navy and the Soviet Navy.

Since the public knew about the situation now, everyone in the world was watching to see if the Soviet ships would attack the U.S. ships in the blockade. Or, would the U.S. ships attack the Soviet ships?

Tensions mounted even further the next day, on the 25th, when one of the Soviet ships nearly crossed the quarantine line, pushing the boundaries of whether or not the U.S. would enforce it. But, they backed off just before hitting the line. Meanwhile, diplomatic communications started when the U.S. showed the Soviets their photographs that proved the existence of the missiles in Cuba.

While the public didn’t know it at the time, we know now that the next day, the 26th, the Premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, sent a letter privately to President Kennedy. In that letter, he basically said they’d get rid of the missiles in Cuba if the United States promised not to invade Cuba.

During the 12th day of the crisis, while Kennedy and his advisors considered Khrushchev’s letter, things reached their most intense point of the entire crisis when shots were fired.

Major Rudolf Anderson of the U.S. Air Force was flying his U-2 spy plane over Cuba when it was picked up on Soviet radar. Remember, at this point, the Soviets knew about the American’s taking photographs of the missiles a couple weeks earlier. So, now, they recognized this would be another spy plane taking more recon photos.

After an hour of the Soviets watching the radar blip travel around, Soviet Lt. General Stepan Grechko knew the U.S. would have even more detailed information about their missiles. He recommended to his superior officers that they shoot the U-2 plane down before it could return to base with the photographs.

When he didn’t hear back, Grechko made the decision himself. Major Anderson’s U-2 was shot down by two surface-to-air missiles at an altitude of 72,000 feet. At that height, it’s most likely he died immediately after his suit would’ve depressurized.

Meanwhile, back in Moscow, Premier Khrushchev sent another private letter to President Kennedy making another demand in exchange for the removal of the missiles in Cuba. He wanted the U.S. to remove their nuclear armed PGM-19 Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

For a bit of geographical context, that’s about 700 or so miles from the Soviet Union, or 1,100 kilometers. And the Jupiter missiles had a range of about 1,500 miles, or 2,400 kilometers, meaning the U.S. basically had the same sort of situation going on for the Soviets as they did in Cuba: Nuclear missiles within striking distance of a wide range of their territory.

Finally, the 13th day of the crisis saw an end to the escalated tensions when President Kennedy made a public announcement that the U.S. would not invade Cuba. Privately, he also agreed to remove the U.S. missiles from Turkey. In exchange for this agreement, the Soviet Union removed all their missiles from Cuba.

Of course, there’s a lot more to the true story, so be sure to follow Based on a True Story to get notified as soon as the deep dive into Thirteen Days comes out, but now you know a little more about the true story behind the Cuban Missile Crisis that started this week in history.

October 19th, 1781. Yorktown, Virginia

This Saturday marks the 243rd anniversary of Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown, so we’ll head over to the 2000 Mel Gibson movie called The Patriot to see how it’s shown there.

At about two hours and 43 minutes into the movie, there’s a cannon blast before the camera quickly shifts to show more of the battlefield. We can see a huge explosion on the left side while smoke from other explosions still lingers over parts of the center and right side of the frame. In the background, an American flag is flying against the blue sky dotted with white clouds. In the foreground, there’s a bunch of wooden wheels and pieces of what we can assume are other military equipment. We can also see a few soldiers running away from the artillery fire around them.

The voiceover we can hear at this point in the movie is Mel Gibson’s voice. He’s talking about how Cornwallis couldn’t retreat to the seas because it was blocked off by our long-lost friends who had finally arrived.

As he says this, the camera pans over from soldiers manning the cannons as they continue blasting away. Now we can see ships in the water. It looks like at least 33 ships scattered along the water in the distance. Many of the closer ships are firing on the encampment we can see in-between the Americans in the foreground and the ships in the distance.

The scene shifts to focus on Mel Gibson’s character, Benjamin Martin. Standing next to him is Tchéky Karyo’s character, Jean Villeneuve. The two are looking at the scene we just saw with the ships firing on the land fort.

Benjamin turns to Jean and says, “Vive la France.”

Jean nods his head then says, “Vive la liberté.”

Now the camera cuts to a French soldier on one of the ships ordering the men to fire. Huge blasts from the ship’s cannons continue to assault the fort on land. Cutting to the fort, we can see it’s occupied by the British. Inside, the British commander, Tom Wilkinson’s version of General Cornwallis looks out of a window. We can see the artillery blasts of smoke and fire still dotting the landscape as they hit their targets.

Cornwallis laments to the officer next to him, “How could it come to this? An army of rabble. Peasants. Everything will change. Everything has changed.”

Then, we see a soldier with a white flag emerging from the top of the building indicating the British surrender. From the hill across the way and underneath an American flag, we can see the American soldiers start cheering.

Fact-checking this week’s event from The Patriot

Going into the fact-checking of that event, the movie doesn’t really do a good job of showing how long the battle lasted. In the true story, the Siege of Yorktown lasted for three weeks from September 28th until Cornwallis’ surrender on October 19th, 1781.

It’s significance in history is due to it being the last major land battle in the American Revolutionary War. When the Continental Army defeated Cornwallis at Yorktown, the British government was ready to negotiate and end of the war.

Speaking of Cornwallis, he’s the only real historical figure from the segment of the movie we talked about today.

Mel Gibson’s character, Benjamin Martin, is a fictional composite character who is based on a number of people, primarily a man named Francis Marion.

Tchéky Karyo’s character, Jean Villeneuve, is also a fictional composite character based on many of the French soldiers who helped the Americans against the British in the Revolutionary War. For example, Marquis de La Fayette was a very real person who volunteered to join the Continental Army and was there alongside General George Washington at the Battle of Yorktown.

Another man who led the French Army at Yorktown was Comte de Rochambeau, whose first name is Jean-Baptiste, so perhaps that was a bit of influence on the character in the movie.

There were about 8,000 American soldiers—about 5,000 regulars and 3,000 or so militia—along with about 10,000 French soldiers and 29 ships. So, the movie got that wrong with 33 ships…or maybe I was miscounting what I saw on screen. If you count something different, let me know!

What we do know from history, though, is that the movie was wrong to suggest Yorktown was the first time the French arrived to help the Americans. After all, a year earlier in 1780 there were over 5,000 French soldiers helped in the Americans’ fight against the British around New York City.

For Yorktown, though, it was the French Navy officer Comte de Grasse who created a blockade. The British sent a fleet to relieve Cornwallis, but De Grasse defeated them in September of 1781. Moreover, De Grasse brought with him some heavy artillery guns that would help with the siege.

American and French troops arrived, completely surrounding Cornwallis by the end of September. After weeks of bombardment, on October 14th, General Washington ordered an offensive against some of the British defensive outposts.

As a fun little fact, the man who led the American troops in this offensive was Lt. Colonel Alexander Hamilton. Yes, that Hamilton.

With the outposts captured, the rest of the British defensives started to fall quickly. Cornwallis requested terms of surrender on October 17th and, after a couple days of negotiation, the official surrender took place on October 19th.

The movie briefly mentions in dialogue that Cornwallis wasn’t there at the surrender, and that is true. He didn’t participate. But, over 7,000 British soldiers were captured in a blow that marked the beginning of the end for the American Revolutionary War.

If you want to watch the Siege of Yorktown as it’s depicted in the 2000 movie The Patriot, that happens about two hours and 43 minutes into the movie.

And we covered the historical accuracy of the entire movie way back on episode #60 of Based on a True Story, so you’ll find a link to that episode in the show notes for this one.

This week’s movie release: The Last Duel

Earlier we learned about the execution of Marie Antoinette from Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, so I thought it’d be fitting to learn a bit about the movie about French history that he directed just before Napoleon. It was three years ago on Tuesday that Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel was released.

It’s based on a 2004 book by Eric Jager called The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France.

The storyline of the movie revolves around Jean de Carrouges, who is played by Matt Damon, his wife, Marguerite, who is played by Jodie Comer, and Adam Driver’s character, Jacques le Gris.

As the name implies, it’s about the final duel, but before we dig into the true story, in case you haven’t seen the movie then I wanted to give you a heads up that the cause for the duel has to do with Marguerite being raped. So, if you want to stop this episode here, that’s perfectly understandable.

Okay, with that content warning in place, let’s go back to the movie because the movie tells its story through three chapters. It has title cards to separate the chapters, and the first says it’s telling “the truth” according to Jean de Carrouges. The second chapter is “the truth” according to Jacques le Gris, and finally the third chapter in the movie is “the truth” according to Marguerite.

Interestingly, the words “the truth” take a couple seconds longer to fade away when it’s Marguerite’s turn, suggesting that her version of the story is the actual true story.

So, according to the movie, Jean de Carrouges is a French squire in the 14th century. The date the movie gives for the duel itself is December 29th, 1386. But, it backs up to start at the Battle of Limoges, which more on-screen text tells us is on September 19th, 1370.

At that time, both Jean de Carrouges and Jacques le Gris are squires when Jean who saves Jacques’ life on the battlefield. They seem to be good friends.

But then, a few years later, Jean’s family is going through financial difficulties. They can’t afford to pay their taxes owed to Count Pierre d’Alençon. He’s played by Ben Affleck in the movie. So, in an attempt to regain a financial foothold and grow his family’s reputation, Jean married Marguerite in exchange for a rather large dowry that includes some parcels of land—in particular the movie mentions Aunou-le-Faucon—which Marguerite’s father, Robert, regrettably agrees to give Jean as part of the dowry.

But then, troubles start to happen when Robert, too, is unable to pay his taxes to Count d’Alençon. So, he sells Aunou-le-Faucon to Pierre who, in turn, gives it away to his now-good friend Jacques le Gris. When Jean learns of this, he seeks an appeal on the decision because he believes the land belonged to him. But, as his liege lord, Pierre can basically do whatever he wants because Count Pierre d’Alençon is the highest legal authority in the region.

So, according to the movie, all Jean’s request for an appeal over the land does nothing but turn Pierre into an enemy.

Further complicating things is when Jean de Carrouges’ father passes away. He was the captain of the garrison at Bellême, and Jean naturally assumed once his father passed that he would take the captaincy. But, of course, it’s Pierre as the legal authority in the region who is in charge of deciding who actually gets the post. Seemingly out of spite over Jean’s land appeal, Pierre hands the captaincy over to Jacques.

Also of importance to the story is Jean’s rise to being appointed a knight during a battle in Scotland in 1385. He takes offense to Jacques not calling him “Sir Jean” since he is, after all, a knight.

Now, something I haven’t really mentioned yet about the movie is a subplot going on where Jacques and Pierre seem to have drunken orgies at Pierre’s estate. We only see a couple of them depicted in the movie, but the way they’re depicted you get the sense it’s a normal thing. At least, that’s the impression I got.

And I also got the impression that not all the women were willing participants.

So, one day while Jean is off at a battle, and everyone else is away from their estate, Jacques pays a visit to Marguerite. He seems to know when she’ll be home alone and tricks his way into the house, then violently rapes her and leaves before anyone else returns home.

Marguerite isn’t able to keep quiet about being raped, so when Jean returns home, she tells her husband. He knows he can’t take the legal path because that means going to Pierre. So, instead, he tells everyone to spread the word of the story so that it’ll reach the ears of King Charles VI.

And, according to the movie, that part of his plan works. So, Jean’s petition to the king is to allow him to partake in a duel, a custom the king says was outlawed years ago. But, it hasn’t really been outlawed, it’s just a custom that hasn’t been done in King Charles VI’s lifetime.

The way the movie explains it, the reason for a duel to the death is because that’s how God will judge who is right and who is wrong. If you win, you’re right. If you lose and you die, then obviously God decided that you were in the wrong. So, in a nutshell, it’s Jean’s way of bypassing the laws of man that would have him take a legal path through Pierre, and appealing to God.

There’s a scene in the movie in 1386 where Jacques and Jean are at the Palace of Justice in Paris where Jean accuses Jacques of the rape.

In that scene we learn of another way of thinking that the movie presents.

So, at this point according to the movie in 1386, Jean and Marguerite have been married for five years. And in that time, she hasn’t conceived a child. But now, at the time of the trial, she’s pregnant. And as one of the men in the court explains, the only way to get pregnant is for a woman to experience pleasure at the end of sex. Since you can’t experience pleasure during rape, obviously you can’t get pregnant from a rape. As he says in the movie, it’s just science.

And since Marguerite is now pregnant, it adds doubt to her being raped. After all, Jacques’ version of the story in the movie that he tells everyone is that he had a consensual affair with her. That’s something he confessed and already did his penance for, so it should be okay in the eyes of the law since, apparently, that makes it okay in the eyes of God. As if all you have to do is just apologize for breaking God’s laws, and it’s magically fixes it all.

King Charles VI decides to allow the duel to continue, saying that will allow God to make the final decision.

If Jean wins the duel by killing Jacques, then Marguerite’s claim of rape is true and they’ll be able to go free.

If Jacques wins the duel by killing Jean, then Marguerite’s claim of rape is false and she’ll be lashed to a wooden post and burned alive as punishment—something that would leave their child an orphan.

And that is how the movie explains the setup behind the duel of December 29th, 1386.

As you might expect, the duel itself is a violent affair. It starts off looking more like a joust as the two men start on horseback with lances. Then, after a few rounds, they both get unhorsed and the fight continues in a brutal hand-to-hand combat with swords and, in Jean’s case, an axe. It seems to go either way for a while until, in the end, Jean gets the better of Jacques. He tries to get Jacques to confess to raping Marguerite, but to the end Jacques claims there was no rape.

Jean kills Jacques to the cheers of everyone in attendance. That includes King Charles VI who, at the end, offers his blessings and officially acknowledge the result of the duel as proving Jean and Marguerite as being in the right. So, they’re able to go free.

At the very end of the movie, there’s on-screen text saying that Sir Jean de Carrouges fought and died in the Crusades a few years later, and Marguerite never remarried and lived out another 30 years in prosperity and happiness as lady of the estate at Carrouges.

The true story behind The Last Duel

Shifting to our fact-checking of the movie, there’s one massive caveat that I want to add to this: It seems that most of the research done into this story is done by Eric Jager. He’s the guy who wrote the book the movie is based on, so that’d make sense that he did a ton of research into it. I just wanted to point that out because I couldn’t find a lot of other sources of the original story, so it’s not like the Napoleon movie where there are countless people over the centuries who have written about the real Napoleon and literally thousands of sources that we can use to compare the movie with history.

So, with that said, most of this is also based on Eric Jager’s work, and I’d highly recommend you pick up a copy of his book to learn more. I’ve got it linked in the show notes.

With that said, the main characters in the movie that we talked about were all real people.

It is true that the real Sir Jean de Carrouges was a French knight who was a vassal of Count Pierre d’Alençon. So, as you might have guessed, the Count was also a real person. So, too, were Jacques le Gris and, of course, Marguerite de Thibouville.

Those were all real people.

And the basic concept of the “last duel” is also true with one major caveat: It was not the last duel.

I mean, if you’re a long-time listener of Based on a True Story, you might remember back on episode No. 177, we covered Ridley Scott’s directorial debut film called The Duellists which tells the true story of a duel between two Frenchmen in 1801. So, the title of Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel is misleading there.

The duel depicted in the movie between Carrouges and Le Gris in 1386 really did happen. And it really was to settle the accusation of rape by Le Gris against Marguerite. And it is true that it’s often referred to as “the last duel” but that’s mostly because it’s the most popular of the final officially sanctioned judicial duels in France. So, it was not the “last duel” as the title would suggest.

But, I guess “One of the Last Judicial Duels” isn’t quite as catchy of a movie title.

With that said, the movie also changes a lot of the details to tell its story.

The first thing I’d like to point out is something the movie seems to omit entirely near the beginning of the movie. Remember the opening sequence where we see Jean and Jacques fighting side-by-side at the Battle of Limoges in September of 1370? That was a real battle, as the French were taking back the town of Limoges after the English had captured it in August of the same year. But, that’s a story for another day.

For the purposes of our story today, though, the movie omits entirely that right after that battle, Jean de Carrouges got married to someone other than Marguerite. Jean’s first wife was a woman named Jeanne de Tilly. They were married in 1371, so the movie confuses that timeline by suggesting Jean returned home from battle and married Marguerite.

This part of the true story adds even more intrigue, though, because Jean actually had a son with his first wife. The godfather of that son? You guessed it: Jacques le Gris.

With that said, though, the movie is correct not to show them in the 1380s because even though I couldn’t find an exact date for when it happened, both Jeanne de Tilly and her son died in the late 1370s.

It’s still relevant, though, because the death of his wife and son was a huge driver for Jean to remarry. And it is true that he married Marguerite to try and restore his lineage. Although, in the movie, there’s no hiding that part of Jean’s driver to marry Marguerite is the land that comes with her dowry. In particular, Matt Damon’s version of Jean de Carrouges is enraged when he finds out at the wedding ceremony that Marguerite’s father, Robert, sold the estate at Aunou-le-Faucon to Count Pierre d’Alençon.

That’s not really what happened.

In the true story, the estate at Aunou-le-Faucon was sold by Robert de Thibouville to Pierre in 1377 for roughly about $5 to $6 million in today’s U.S. dollars. Of course, that’s a rough estimate since it’s very hard to convert the 8,000 French livres it was reported to be sold for in 1377 to today’s currency, but that’s just to give you a ballpark.

And as I mentioned earlier, something else that’s hard to pin down specifics on is the exact date of Jean de Carrouges’ first wife, Jean de Tilly, but the only date I could find was 1378. So, that would mean Pierre already owned Aunou-le-Faucon for years before Jean’s marriage to Marguerite in 1380.

That’s different than what the movie shows.

Although, to be fair, the movie is correct to show Jean’s lawsuit to try and gain control of Aunou-le-Faucon. While I couldn’t find any evidence to suggest he made this known beforehand, it would seem part of his plan in marrying Marguerite was to try and wrestle away Aunou-le-Faucon from Pierre, because immediately after marrying her he did start a lawsuit to try and recover the land.

The movie bounces around a lot with the timeline, but that lawsuit lasted a few months and forced Pierre to visit King Charles VI in person to settle. Something else the movie doesn’t mention that I’m sure it helped, is that Count Pierre d’Alençon was the cousin of King Charles VI. So, the king sided with Pierre and Jean lost any claim on Aunou-le-Faucon. As you might imagine, that whole process didn’t make Pierre happy.

So, that’s where the movie’s suggestion of Pierre not liking Jean comes into play as it pushed Jean further out of favor.

And that brings us to the rape allegations. Of course, the movie dramatizes the event itself and because the movie shows things in three chapters, we have to endure watching the sexual assault multiple times. There’s really no way for us to verify whose version of the story is accurate.

According to an article written by Eric Jager, he quoted Marguerite’s testimony of what happened:

“I fought him so desperately,” she claimed, “that he shouted to Louvel to come back and help him. They pinned me down and stuffed a hood over my mouth to silence me. I thought I was going to suffocate, and soon I couldn’t fight them anymore. Le Gris raped me.”

You’ll notice the mention of Louvel. That’s Adam Louvel. He’s played by Adam Nagaitis in the movie.

Remember the guy in the movie who convinces Marguerite to open the door before Le Gris bursts in, too? That’s the guy.

So, apparently, none of the versions we see in the movie are true because it’d seem he was in the room helping Jacques le Gris.

After the assault, there’s a line in the movie where Jodie Comer’s version of Marguerite tells her husband, “Jean, I intend to speak the truth. I will not be silent. I hav eno legal standing without your support.”

To which Matt Damon’s version of Jean de Carrouges replies, “Then you shall
have it.”

It is true that Marguerite couldn’t directly accuse Le Gris of the assault. Women in 14th century France simply couldn’t do things like that. And while my speculation is that Carrouges probably didn’t offer his support as quickly as we see in the movie, in the end it is true that the accusation of rape by Marguerite became the basis of the duel between Le Gris and Carrouges.

Giving us another peek into how little we know about the true story today, here’s another quote from Eric Jager’s article about some of the research he uncovered about the court case after Marguerite’s accusations against Le Gris:

“Le Gris countered with a detailed alibi for not just the day in question but the entire week, calling numerous witnesses to establish his whereabouts in or near another town some twenty-five miles away. Le Gris’ attorney, the highly respected Jean Le Coq, kept notes in Latin that still survive, allowing us a glimpse into attorney-client discussions. Le Coq seems to have had some doubts about his client’s truthfulness, while admitting that this was the thorniest of ‘he said, she said’ cases. Despite the lady’s many oaths, and those of the squire, he confided to his journal, ‘No one really knew the truth of the matter.'”

The squire he’s referring to is Jacques le Gris since Carrouges was a knight at the time. I’ll include a link to Jager’s article alongside Jager’s book in the show notes.

But, what we can conclude from this is that even back then: No one knew the true story.

What we do know is that the duel did happen, and King Charles VI really was in attendance at the duel.

That brings up something else that we don’t really see in the movie, because King Charles VI had something very personal going on at the time of the duel, too. The movie is correct to show Marguerite having a son, but what the movie doesn’t tell us is that his wife, Queen Isabeau, also had a son who, sadly, also passed away on December 28th, the day before the duel.

This is all outside the storyline of Carrouges and Le Gris, so I understand why they didn’t include it in the movie, but it’s helpful to the historical context because Charles reacted to his son’s death by throwing a bunch of celebrations that culminated with the duel. So, that’s why, just like we see in the movie, a bunch of other nobles were in attendance at the duel along with thousands of ordinary people.

It was a big deal that led to Carrouges’ name being famous at the time, even if no one really knew the true story behind what led to the duel. But, since the duel was a public matter, we do know more about that.

The movie is correct to show it looking a lot more like a joust.

The reason for that is because of something else the movie mentions: Judicial duels weren’t a normal thing anymore. So, when they needed a place for the duel to take place in Paris, it ended up taking place in a jousting arena at the Abbey of Saint-Martin-des-Champs. Not all of the Abbey has survived since the time of the duel, but there are some structures still surviving so I’ll include a link in the show notes if you want to see what it looks like.

But, that’s why it looks like a jousting arena in the movie. Because it was.

As for the duel itself, the movie is correct to show Marguerite’s fate was tied to the duel as well. Just like the movie says, she really did face being burned at the stake if her husband lost.

While the fighting in the movie’s version of the duel is obviously dramatized, there are elements from the movie that seem to be pulled directly from sources from medieval historians who were at the duel.

For example, in the true story, the duel really did start on horseback with lances like we see in the movie. The movie was also correct to show that changing when, after going at each other a few times, Le Gris killed Carrouges’ horse. As he fell, Carrouges retaliated by killing Le Gris’ horse, forcing both men to the ground.

Le Gris was just a stronger guy, so as they fought with swords, he started to gain the upper hand on Carrouges. In the movie, we see Carrouges turning the battle to his advantage by hitting Le Gris in the back of the knee with his axe, and that’s pretty close to what really happened—although, I think it was actually Le Gris’ right thigh he hit, but that’s nitpicking.

That forced Le Gris back enough to where Carrouges pushed him to the ground. Since they were wearing heavy armor, once Le Gris was on the ground, he couldn’t get back up before Carrouges was on him. But, because of the heavy armor, Carrouges couldn’t pierce it even at close range with his sword, so he instead took his dagger and used the handle to bash in the faceplate on Le Gris’ helmet.

At about this point in the movie is when we see Jean demanding a confession out of Jacques who, in turn, refuses to admit any guilt. And according to the historical sources, that’s pretty close to what really happened!

With Carrouges on him demanding Le Gris admit guilt, Jacques yelled out, “In the name of God and on the peril and damnation of my soul, I am innocent!”

The movie’s version shows Jean stabbing Jacques in the mouth after this.

In the true story, it’s said he stabbed him in the neck. But, again, that might be nitpicking because the end result was the same.

Something else we don’t see happen in the movie, though, is what happened after he defeated Le Gris. The movie’s version has King Charles offering his blessings and both Jean and Marguerite are allowed to go free.

While that did happen, the movie omits that King Charles gave Jean de Carrouges a thousand francs as well as an ongoing royal income of 200 francs a year.

He used that money to try and sue Count Pierre d’Alençon for the estate and lands at
Aunou-le-Faucon. Again, he was unsuccessful.

The movie is correct to mention Carrouges dying in the Crusades a few years later. We don’t know exactly how he died in battle, but it was likely in September of 1396 at the Battle of Nicopolis. Upon his death, his then-10-year-old son received all his estates which is how his mother, Marguerite, was able to live out the rest of her life as we see mentioned in the text at the end of the movie.

The movie mentions her spending 30 years in prosperity and happiness, but it doesn’t really mention if that’s 30 years after the duel or 30 years after her husband’s death. And in truth, we don’t know a lot of specifics about her death. But, as best as I can tell from my research, she likely died in the year 1419. That’s 23 years after her husband’s death and 33 years after the duel.