How did Napoleon die?

Exiled to the island of St. Helena since 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte, the deposed emperor, died at the age of 51, at the end of a romantic life that was to leave its mark on history. But were his contemporaries already aware of the fame to come? Nothing is less certain.

Napoleon’s death has been the subject of much speculation: did his English captors poison him? How did his body remain strangely intact before the stunned eyes of those who witnessed the removal of his remains in 1840? Some have seen this as the workings of a conspiracy, when in fact the great man’s death is no longer such a mystery.

Napoleon was suffering from stomach cancer, the same disease that had claimed his father. Already in his youth, he sensed that this illness, incurable by doctors, would be the cause of his demise. As is often the case, Napoleon was not wrong.

Already, since March 1821, his strength had been waning. Bedridden in his damp, decrepit room at Longwood House, his friends and family were busily watching over him, feverishly monitoring his condition. He ate less and less. As his illness worsened, his body could no longer tolerate food. He refused the drugs the doctors prescribed, too convinced – alas, rightly so – that they would do no good.

When Napoleon breathed his last on May 5, 1821, the body was left to rest until the early hours of May 6. Then, just after midnight, the emperor’s body was carefully washed with his beloved eau de Cologne, mixed with a little water from the Torbett fountain. Napoleon had discovered this fountain in the early days of his exploration of the island.

Aware that his English enemies and jailers would no doubt refuse to repatriate his body to France, where he wished with all his heart to be buried, he found a serenity in this place that pleased him.

[…] if, after my death, my body remains in the hands of my enemies, you will deposit it here.

Napoleon speaking to General Bertrand (1773 – 1844), Bonaparte’s companion in exile.

The charming fountain was located in the hollow of a valley, The Sane Valley, later named “Geranium Valley”. All calm and cool, it was a haven of peace, gentle and bucolic. He was buried here, his coffin placed in successive caskets, the first made of tin, the second of wood, the third of lead and the last of mahogany. The burial chamber housing the coffin was built like a fortress. Excavated to a great depth, bricked and paved, the pit was designed to prevent desecration. A letter from Sir Hudson Lowe, Governor of the island, to Lord Bathurst, Minister of War and the Colonies, describes in detail the precautions taken:

A large pit was dug of sufficient width all around, to admit a two-foot-thick wall of solid masonry, being built on either side; thus, forming an exact oblong, hollow space within which was precisely twelve feet deep – nearly eight long and five wide. A masonry bed was at the bottom. On this foundation, supported by 8 square stones each a foot high, lay a slab of white stone five inches thick; four other slabs of the same thickness closed the sides and ends, which, joined at the corners by Roman cement, formed a kind of stone tomb or sarcophagus. It was just deep enough to admit that the coffin had been placed there. Another large slab of white stone, supported on one side by two pulleys, was placed on top of the tomb, after the coffin had been placed there, and each interstice then filled with stone and Roman cement. Above the slab of white stone which formed the lid of the tomb, two layers of masonry, strongly cemented, and even clamped together, were constructed, so as to unite with the two-foot wall which supported the earth on either side, and the empty space between this latter work of masonry and the surface of the ground, measuring about eight feet in depth, was then filled with earth. The whole was then covered a little above ground level, with another bed of flat stones, the outer surface of which extending to the edge of the two-foot wall on either side of the tomb, covers a space twelve feet long and nine feet wide.

British Library Mss Add 20133 Fol 200 r.v

The plaque fixed to the coffin, which was usually engraved with the identity of the deceased, remained silent. The English and French could not agree on the “right” name to be given. On St. Helena, everyone still had vivid memories of the actions of the man who had shaken Europe. But was the same true on the Old Continent?

In the first half of the 19th century, media hype was still a thing of the past, thanks to the instantaneous, globalized relay of information. So, when Napoleon died, letters had to be written, ships had to be sailed, crews had to be mobilized and currents and winds had to be favorable in order to reach Europe in record time. It took an average of just two months to set foot on English soil after leaving St. Helena.

On the evening of May 7, the HMS Heron set sail for England with Captain Crokart, Napoleon’s witness before and after his death. The Marquis de Montchenu (1757-1831) should have been on board, had not Talleyrand, “the most boring man in the world”, stupidly missed the departure, already dozing off in his bed.

Bonaparte would certainly have seen it as yet another reason to rage against this “old fart” (sic), a point that the Count of Balmain, the Czar’s commissar on St. Helena, agreed with, stating that “what’s annoying is that the portrait looks just like it.

Montchenu set sail two weeks later aboard HMS Rosario, but by chance arrived in Portsmouth on the same day as HMS Heron, July 3, almost two months after Napoleon’s death. Two months during which the world, with the exception of a tiny island lost in the Atlantic, ignored the death of the “great man”, as Lord Byron put it.

While Bonaparte’s companions in exile no doubt imagined a thunderous reception when the terrible news was announced, it would be an understatement to say that reactions were lukewarm. In England, London was preparing for the coronation of George IV. The news arrived on July 4 and spread rapidly. It seems that the Star was the first to announce the death of the enemy. While the front page of the paper featured a kaleidoscope of tantalizing advertisements, an addendum entitled Evening Star announced in capital letters the Death of Napoleon. The paper was closely followed by the Statesman, the second daily to publish the startling news.

Naturally, George IV had been informed of this news in the morning, but the testimony of this announcement, reported in her Memoirs by the Comtesse de Boigne, gives a fairly clear idea of the place Napoleon occupied in the mind of the sovereign, who was preoccupied at the time with other equally dangerous and daily threats:

Lord Castlereagh, on entering George IV’s study, said to him:

“Sire, I have come to inform Your Majesty that She has lost Her most mortal enemy. Why,” he cried, “is it possible! She is dead!”

Lord Castlereagh had to calm the monarch’s joy by explaining that it was not the Queen, his wife, but Bonaparte. A few months later, the King’s hopes were fulfilled.

Récits d’une tante: mémoires de la comtesse de Boigne, née d’Osmond T.3, chapter V

What the British took from this historic news on the eve of the royal coronation was above all the salutary break in the expensive upkeep required to guard Napoleon on St. Helena. No less than £400,000 could now be used for something other than guarding a deposed emperor. Since France had no such savings to look forward to, did the grief and sorrow caused by Napoleon’s demise outweigh the pragmatism?

Without having quite forgotten him, his name seems to ring, six years after his departure for exile, like that of a tyrannical old uncle who should have been sent to a retirement home. Unexpectedly, the news of Bonaparte’s death did not go down well in French society, which was not at its best. King Louis XVIII, a podiatrist and almost infirm, was living out his final years. His nephew and heir had unwillingly passed to the left, assassinated on February 14, 1820 by a Bonapartist worker. On July 5, the news of Napoleon’s death finally reached the king’s ears, but he was not as outspoken in his joy as might have been expected, and as the Ultras (royalists hoping for a complete return to the Ancien Régime) would certainly have wished. Those in the palace who had known and appreciated the deposed emperor – and there were many of them – were therefore not rebuffed with a few discreet sighs.

Newspapers are similarly cautious, but in any case, the news doesn’t seem to be upsetting the French. Was it the surprise effect, a lapse of memory or a lack of interest that left society indifferent? Contrary to what was asserted a few decades later, grief and tears did not suffocate the people that year. Indeed, this is what astonished those who witnessed this historic event. The Countess de Boigne, for example, could not believe her eyes:

While revolutionary passions were stirring in Europe, the powerful hand that had tamed them and made them serve to spread his name throughout the universe, this unarmed hand that still frightened nations, was yielding to the most terrible of conquerors.

On May 5 1821, Napoleon Bonaparte breathed his last on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. Destiny had thus prepared the most poetic of tombs for him. Placed at the end of both worlds, and belonging only to the name of Bonaparte, Saint Helena became the colossal mausoleum of this colossal glory; but the era of his posthumous popularity had not yet begun for France.

I’ve heard street hawkers shout: “Napoleon Bonaparte’s death, for two sols; his speech to General Bertrand, for two dols; Madame Bertrand’s despair, for two sols, for two sols”, without it having any more effect on the streets than the announcement of a lost dog. I still remember how struck we were, a few slightly more reflective people, by this singular indifference; how often we repeated: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” And yet glory is something, for it has regained its level, and centuries of admiration will avenge the emperor Napoleon for this moment of oblivion.

Récits d’une tante: mémoires de la comtesse de Boigne, née d’Osmond T.3, chapter V

The Countess was right, and a decade later, spirits were beginning to flare. The Napoleonic myth was on the march: people began to wonder about the supposed cruelty of Napoleon’s jailers or his possible poisoning, and the Petit Caporal became a romantic figure in 19th-century literature. “What a novel my life is”, Napoleon who had himself sketched out the broad outlines of his myth was, after his death, recounted by the greatest. Chateaubriand, Balzac, Zola, Michelet and Stendhal all contributed to mythologizing this historical figure, who is still shrouded in legend today.

Victor Hugo, excerpt from Buonaparte, poem composed in March 1822 and published in the collection Odes et ballades (1826):

There, cooling like a torrent of lava,

Guarded by his vanquished, driven from the universe,

This remnant of a tyrant, waking a slave,

Had only changed irons.

Restored thrones listening to the fanfare,

It shone like a lighthouse from afar,

Showing the reef to the boatman.

He died. – When this noise broke out in our cities,

The world breathed in civil fury,

Delivered from his prisoner.