While executive producer Bernard Sofronski estimated that the mini-series could have been nearly half as expensive to produce if it had been shot elsewhere, such as Hungary, it was decided to film entirely on location in and around Paris, Morocco and Portsmouth, England to "do it right" and "offer something to the public that they don't see every day", adding that shooting in Hungary would have meant they'd spend all their time "trying to make [the locations] look like Paris".
Jacqueline Bisset is five years older than Armand Assante, which is close to Napoleon and Josephine's real life age gap of six years.
Armand Assante had previously played Napoleon on stage in a 1982 production titled "The Pope and Napoleon".