What really happened to Napoleon?
Ridley Scott’s latest epic, Napoleon, has arrived in cinemas in the UK and the US – but is drawing criticism for its historical inaccuracies.
Historian Dan Snow recently pointed out the film’s errors in a TikTok video, correcting scenes shown in the trailer.
The video didn’t go down too well with Scott, who responded in an interview with the New Yorker. “Get a life,” the director told Snow via the publication. “I tend to be visual above all things, before the written word.”
What does Napoleon get wrong?
While Scott’s explosive biopic of the French Emperor knows how to entertain, it sometimes does so at the expense of getting things fully accurate. In the movie, we see Napoleon shooting off the top of a pyramid in Egypt – a memorable scene, but not something that happened in real life.
“When we were talking about it, and Scott said that was going to happen, some of us sort of looked at each other and said, ‘You know what, hang on a minute’,” Napoleon historian and advisor on the film Michael Broers told TIME. “But he turned to me and said, ‘When I told you we were going to shoot off the top of the pyramid, you laughed, didn’t you?’ And I said, ‘Well, yes.’ He said, ‘It’s staying in then.’”
The film also shows the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon meeting during the Battle of Waterloo. In reality, the pair never came face-to-face, even in battle, remaining some distance apart from each other as things went down.
Aspects of Napoleon’s relationship with Joséphine are presented inaccurately, too. Despite how it plays out in the movie, their divorce happened after the Emperor met with Tsar Alexander, while his mother didn’t convince him to cheat on his wife – he’d already done that long before.
How did Napoleon die?
After losing the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon was exiled to St Helena, a British territory in the South Atlantic Ocean. He spent the last six years of his life on the island and, as is explained in the movie, died there in 1821 at the age of 51.
The former emperor’s cause of death is highly contested, though. Some historians believe he died of stomach cancer, while others cite his demise as being down to a stomach ulcer. Others, meanwhile, claim that his stomach wasn’t the problem at all – but that either the British or French played a part in his departure from this earth.
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Rhian Daly
NME
