Like so many problematic figures of history and fiction, Napoleon (like Marie at the beginning of the film) comes to an ignoble end. Instead of dying a hero or with honor on the battlefield, he’s kept alive, still believing he may pull another escape and resurgence until he learns he’s being sent to the island of Saint Helena, which is even further and more remote than Elba had been.
Once there, Napoleon is almost literally a haunted man, hearing the voice (or perhaps more) of the deceased Joséphine as he goes about his final days. In a final scene reminiscent of the death of Don Corleone in “The Godfather,” he watches two young girls play fight with sticks before making one last attempt at immortality through legend. Claiming that he was the one who burned down Moscow, the girls reveal that they know the actual truth, laughing at Napoleon’s attempt at revisionism. With that, Napoleon’s defeat is complete, and the man literally sinks out of frame, diminished.
Of course, fading into obscurity is not what’s happened to Napoleon in reality; after all, this movie likely wouldn’t exist if that were true. Yet Scott’s film is both an acknowledgment of history and a knowingly revisionist look at the man, contextualizing Napoleon as someone once great whose impact is both far-reaching and paradoxically nil. As Scott observes in the movie’s official press kit, “History’s very interesting, because we don’t learn from all of our mistakes.” The history of humanity, when looked at with as wide a perspective as possible, does seem like a revolving wheel of the same problems, the same issues, the same brief triumphs, and the same devastating mistakes that endlessly follow each other for eternity.
In the end, the only thing one can both take with them and leave behind is affection. For Napoleon, as a title card states, he spent his last breath saying “France … Army … Joséphine.” For Scott, he ends his film with a seeming dedication to his dog, Lulu: a wry joke or a genuine sentiment? Maybe it’s just Scott hammering home his film’s theme again, mashing up the tragic with the comedic, like history. Like life.