Tiny Island, tiny dictator: Elba has something to teach us about tyrants and how they finish.

ELBA is a pinprick of an island off the coast of Tuscany, and very beautiful it is. The journey by ferry from Piombino on the mainland to the island's little capital of Portoferraio takes an hour. In the season, huge numbers of tourists, including bus travelers, backpackers, campers, and bicyclists, flood over the beaches or clog the roads and trails twisting up to picturesque villages in the hills, where the yellow gorse spreads far and wide.

And yet today's escapist retreat was once an epicenter for the high politics of continental Europe. Between May 1814 and March 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte was in exile here. The first dictator of the modern age, he had shattered the settled order of nations and was responsible for death on a scale not previously experienced in Europe (at least by hand of man). An Allied coalition of the British, the Russians, the Austrians, and the Prussians contained him in a policy that the British prime minister of the day, Lord Liverpool, described as "hitting one's enemy as hard as one can, and in the most vulnerable place." Cornered at last in his Fontainebleau palace, Napoleon tried to commit suicide by swallowing a mixture of opium, belladonna, and hellebore, but the poison only made him retch. Col. Sir Neil Campbell, the Allied commissioner detailed to arrest Napoleon, found "a short active-looking man ... pacing the length of his apartment like some wild animal in his cell ... unshaven, uncombed." Calls for him to be shot out of hand were rejected as illegal and uncivilized.

Campbell escorted Napoleon through France down to Marseilles, where they boarded a British warship, the Undaunted. Contrary winds slowed the voyage. Local officials and a huge and enthusiastic crowd greeted Napoleon at the Portoferraio harbor. The Allies had granted him the title of Emperor of Elba, which was to be a sovereign state under his jurisdiction. Accompanying him were his loyal generals Bertrand and Drouot, a few displaced aristocrats, and the Italian accountant who audited the subsidies that the Allies generously paid in gold coins. For the sake of security, he was also allowed a regiment of Chasseurs, or light horsemen, and very unruly and drunken they proved too.

Bonaparte set about tidying up Elba with the formidable energy and single-mindedness of purpose previously directed at reorganizing the whole of Europe. There were to be roads, courts of law, a theater. In the old citadel of Portoferraio he transformed a building into the Palazzina dei Mulini, a miniature palace in the Empire style he had popularized, complete with a salon whose frescoes reminded him happily of the 1798 campaign in Egypt, when he had first erupted into the world. A few miles away in the countryside, at San Martino, he purchased a farmhouse, and remodeled it into what today would be called a bijou, or jewel, residence.

That August, Letizia, his forbidding mother, always known as Madame MSre, moved in with him. He implored his wife, Marie Louise--daughter of the Habsburg emperor--to arrive with their small son, but in fact he never saw them again. Frustrated in his ambitions, cramped, he began to brood and to plot. Visiting British radicals, including Lord John Russell, a future prime minister, flattered his ego. Nothing prevented him from outwitting the Allied coalition. "Fulfill your destiny," Madame Mere told him, "you were not made to die on this island." Duly escaping to France for a period that entered history as the Hundred Days, Napoleon mobilized for the Battle of Waterloo, the final great test of strength, and he very nearly won it. The victorious Allies then exiled him once again, this time to Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he was to die.

How and when to end their career is the occupational hazard of dictators. All must live in continual fear of enemies, real or supposed. Lenin, Stalin, Tito, Mao, Nasser, Arafat, were all brutal and cunning enough to stay in power till the day of their death. Some dictators have been forcibly overthrown, but exile is now a less likely option for them, given the fear that they will follow Napoleon's example and bid for power once more. Hitler committed suicide, Mussolini was lynched, Ceausescu faced a questionable trial and then the firing squad.

If Saddam Hussein has any sense of history, he will be pondering all these precedents. When he had the chance, he failed to take his own life. Captured, he too seemed like some wild animal in his cell, as unshaven and uncombed as Napoleon in similar circumstances. The current insurgency in Iraq is his equivalent of Waterloo, a last desperate gamble on a military test of strength. Otherwise a tribunal and the dispensation of justice loom imminently over him.

In the current perspective, Saddam can hardly expect to have some sort of assured Napoleonic place in history as a glorious conqueror. Napoleon's tomb in the Invalides at Paris is a monument that strives to embody some fantasy of French glory. After almost two centuries now, the crimes and chaos of his rule have been irradiated into sentimental hero-worship. Elba contributes to the legend. The month of May, otherwise the Maggio Napoleonico, is given up to celebratory concerts and lectures and exhibitions. High in the forest above the village of Marciana is the Sanctuary of the Madonna, a monastery where he liked to stay, and in his honor they are playing music of his period in the church there. Water is bottled from a spring called Fonte di Napoleone, and the shops are selling Sospiri di Napoleone, a candy. On display at the Palazzina dei Mulini is one of the bicornes or cocked hats that were so integral a part of his invincible image. Out at San Martino, visitors spill from their buses and cars, pose for snapshots in front of gates with his heraldic eagles or against a facade embossed with many a capital N. And there on stalls are rows and rows of small busts and effigies of him in characteristic poses.

Dictator kitsch looks like a way to soften ugly reality. Stalin was born at Gori, a rather desolate town not far from Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. The modest family house has been preserved, and more than that, enclosed within a kind of mausoleum with a dome and a portico of marble pillars. Statues of Stalin may have been taken down elsewhere, but not here. Berchtesgaden was Hitler's Eagle's Nest, and a luxury hotel has just opened on the site of what was once his garden. "Have a holiday like Hitler," in the words of an article recommending the hotel. One of Hitler's felt hats, his walking stick, or maybe a collection of the drawings he commissioned from Albert Speer would pull the crowds in, just as Elba's palazzinas do. All it takes now is a little leisure and money to visit Auschwitz and Dachau and Vorkuta and the camps of the Arctic Circle.

Similarly, busloads of people are likely one day to be lumbering into Baghdad to gawp at some museum of Baathist relics, displaying designs of Saddam's palaces and specimens of the millions of ochre-colored bricks with his name stamped on them that have spoiled archeological sites like Nineveh and Ur. There may be plastic models for sale of the statue American soldiers helped to pull down, or mass-produced little versions of the monumental bronze casts of Saddam's arms wielding a scimitar. Let's hope so-it's really rather a subtle popular revenge to treat former dictators as objects of tourism and cheap commerce.