Two centuries before Saint George Floyd, there was the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, another black martyr to white supremacy. Such, at least, is the premise of Chevalier, a movie directed by Stephen Williams, released in early 2023 in the United States to a credulous press. Chevalier purports to tell the story of Joseph Bologne, an eighteenth-century swordsman, violinist, and composer, who played a modest role in the court of King Louis XVI. Bologne was the son of a French plantation owner and his Caribbean slave, and therein lies his present interest for music history.

In the George Floyd era, it was inevitable that the half-black Bologne would be exhumed from obscurity and accorded a status to rival the geniuses of Western classical music. Bologne is now routinely referred to as the Black Mozart (they were rough contemporaries). But even that hyperbole does not go far enough. We also hear that Mozart is the White Chevalier, a comparison of such preposterous gall that the mind cannot begin to take it in.

The claims made on behalf of Bologne’s music violate aesthetic truth. The movie Chevalier, however, shreds history itself in order to show that European civilization is unremittingly racist.

[The didactic must triumph over the factual record in these films. The French have the same complaint about butchered history with “Napoleon,” although not along political lines per se. Mac Donald’s dissection of the film’s slander of Mozart is the most revealing of this film’s malice. — Ed]