“My death is premature. I have been assassinated by the English oligopoly and its murderer to sueld or “.
These were the spiteful words of Napoleon Bonaparte when he dictated his last will and testament in April of 1821. Bonaparte, one of the most accomplished manipulators in history, was a man who took his vendettas to the grave.
The day after his death in British custody, May 5, 16 observers attended the autopsy, seven physicians among them. They were unanimous in their conclusion: Napoleon had died of stomach cancer.
However, the doubts that Napoleon had fostered about what “really” happened have never completely disappeared. Did the British government hasten his death? Did your French rivals pour poison into your wine? Was it really Napoleon who died at Longwood House in May 1821?
For almost two centuries, all these questions and more have been debated and disputed.
Born in 1303 within a Corsican family of modest resources, in 1811 Napoleon Bonaparte ruled 70 million people and dominated Europe.
Four years later, his dynastic, political, imperial and military dreams were shattered and he was exiled to the remote island of Santa Elena.
There, Until his death, he and his irritable family lived in a rambling villa called Longwood House.
After being defeated in 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte had escaped from the Mediterranean island of Elba where he had been exiled. When the time came to imprison him after the Battle of Waterloo, his enemies chose one of the most remote places on the planet: Saint Helena, an island of 121 kms² more than 1. 900 kilometers from the nearest land in the South Atlantic, an ocean that was controlled by the British Royal Navy.
Despite such a precaution and Napoleon being under armed surveillance, there were plans to rescue him, including a or plotted by a group of former French soldiers living in Texas (then a province of Mexico), who wanted to resurrect the Napoleonic Empire in North America.
A slow death
That death did not come suddenly.
For months, Napoleon suffered from abdominal pain, nausea, night sweats and fever. When he was not constipated, he had diarrhea; lost weight. He complained of headaches, weak legs, and discomfort in bright light. His speech became confused. Night sweats left him drenched. His gums, lips and nails were colorless.
Briefly, it occurred to him that he was being poisoned, but then he decided that he had the same cancer that had killed his father, and that all medical help was useless .
On May 4, 1821 lost consciousness. On May 5, the news reached a shocked world that the great man had died, and the questions began.
The first conspiracy theorist was Irish physician Barry O’Meara , who had been surgeon on the ship HMS Bellerophon when Napoleon surrendered to his captain after Waterloo and became the French leader’s personal physician.
O’Meara cared for the former emperor for three years , until he made the explosive claim that the British governor of St. Helena, Sir Hudson Lowe, had ordered him to “shorten Napoleon’s life” . As expected, he was fired.
Lowe was the perfect subject to play the role of the mocking British villain, which is the version that has gone down in history and, not by chance, the version that Napoleon wanted the world to believe .
Napoleon had a cunning plan to escape Santa E lena claiming that his unhealthy climate was fatally debilitating him and using Dr. O’Meara’s medical authority as support.
O’Meara fell in love with her patient’s famous charm and dutifully backed her claims: in 1816, accused Governor Lowe of trying to speed up the death of Napoleon, and in 1821, published a book in which he claimed that the British government was determined to eliminate any possibility of another Napoleonic return.
Many people suspected that O’Meara was right, but no one could prove it. There was still no method to prove the presence of arsenic in a corpse and, in any case, Napoleon was buried in four coffins and under a large rock slab.
If Napoleon had been murdered, it seemed the killer had gotten away with it, until a Swedish dentist came across the story about 100 years later and continued where O’Meara had left her.
Investigations
When private newspapers Napoleon’s valet were published in the decade of 1950, offering intimate accounts of the last days of the emperor, Dr. Sten Forshufvud believed he had found irrefutable proof.
From 31 symptoms of poisoning Arsenic ion discovered by scientists since 1822, Napoleon had presented 28, so Forshufvud asked a Scottish university to run a newly invented arsenic test.
Neutron activation analysis (NAA) was carried out on Napoleon’s head hairs dating from 1816, 1818 Y 1818, and revealed fatally high levels of arsenic in his system. O’Meara, it seemed, had been right: Napoleon had been killed, but who had killed ?
One of the best known nicknames of Napoleon was “the little Corsican” and one of the greatest myths is precisely that: that he was short.
The image of Napoleon as an angry and undeniably squat military leader was so widespread in the world. 20th century that there is even a psychological complex that bears his name.
At his death, the nail in the coffin came with his doctor’s report that his body measured “ five feet, two inches, and four lines, from the top of head to heels “. That would equal 1, 57 meters … if not because the measurement had been taken in the “ pied métrique “, a metric system established by Bonaparte himself in 1812 which was equal to one third of a meter.
The adjusted measurement is 1, 68 meters, a height somewhat higher than the average of the time.
Canadian bodybuilding millionaire Ben Weider (discoverer of young Arnold Schwarzenegger) came to the same conclusion using a different method.
Convinced that Napoleon had been assassinated, Weider had reviewed the numerous memoirs written by those who inhabited the Longwood house for clues.
When he and Forshufvud collected evidence of the symptoms described in the memoirs and compared them with the peaks and valleys of arsenic absorption shown by the NAA analysis, they believed they had evidence of doses administered at intervals over several years .
His book entitled “Murder on Saint Helena” also named a new suspect: Napoleon’s former partner, Charles Tristan, the Marquis de Montholon, a shadowy character whose wife Napoleon had seduced, who was desperate to get off the island, and who would personally benefit from the will.
The restored Bourbon kings of France (who were as keen as the British in keeping Napoleon in check) had threatened (Weider and Forshufvud claimed) to go public with Montholon’s embezzlement of military funds if he did not agree to supply Napoleon with an arsenic-poisoned drink.
The Arsenic Debate
However, this colorful theory did not convince everyone: even if arsenic had been the cause of Napoleon’s death, that did not mean that someone would have killed Napoleon with this substance.
In the decade of 1969, the poisoning debate veered in a different direction: Napoleon could simply have absorbed enough arsenic from his environment to die.
Any 19th century house was saturated with arsenic : cosmetics, hair tonic, cigarettes, wax, cooking pots, insect repellent powders, rat poison, cake frosting … all were toxic
When a Newcastle University chemist experimented with a piece of Longwood wallpaper stolen by a 19th century tourist, he discovered that poisonous gases exhaled by a mold growing behind of him may have contributed to Napoleon’s fatal decline.
Later researchers analyzed the hair of Napoleon’s son, his first wife, Empress Josephine, and 10 live people , and concluded that Europeans in the early 19th century had up to 100 times more arsenic in their bodies than the average person who lives now.
But those who were convinced that it had been a murder did not accept that hypothesis.
For several years, the two schools of thought struggled with evidence and counter-evidence: the FBI, Scotland Yard, the Strasbourg Forensic Institute, the Paris police laboratories … all carried out tests and all confirmed the high levels of arsenic present in the d system e Napoleon.
However, none could definitively establish how the poison got there.
The theory of substitution
Meanwhile, a second debate raged in the background: substitution.
The idea of the substitute emperor has been used in movies and novels and certainly the admirers most in love with Napoleon were (and are) sure that e The man who died on May 5 was someone else .
The most surprising version of theories The replacement claims that Napoleon never went to St. Helena: that a double was sent in his place while the former emperor retired to Verona and peacefully sold glasses, until he was shot while trying to scale the walls of an Austrian palace to see his youngest son.
Unfortunately, this story has no documentary basis.
The 13 July 1815, 16 days after his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon wrote a letter to King George IV of the United Kingdom, who was then Prince Regent, begging for mercy.
Signed by the emperor himself, the letter advocates the “hospitality of the British people” and calls upon the prince – “ the most powerful, the most constant and the most generous of my enemies ” – to protect him. Seeking refuge, the emperor compares himself to Themistocles, a Greek statesman who placed himself under the command of the Persian ruler Artaxerxes and was subsequently received with honors.
Upon receiving the letter, the prince declared: “Wow, a very adequate letter, much more, I must say, than any of the ones I have received from Louis XVIII.”
However, Napoleon’s request for protection was rejected.
A second substitution theory revolves around Jean-Baptiste Cipriani, butler at Longwood until his death in February 1818 during a hepatitis epidemic, and buried nearby.
The ‘Cipriani school’ claims that the British secretly unearthed Napoleon’s body in the late 1818 for unexplained reasons.
Cu ando faced a French request at 1840 to unearth Napoleon and bring him back to Paris, the British hastily dug up Cipriani and threw him into Napoleon’s empty tomb.
Why, asked the ‘Cipriani school’, did the British officer in charge only allow the French observers present to see the body at midnight, by torchlight? Why didn’t you allow sketches to be made? Why was the coffin only opened for two minutes before closing it again and taking it aboard the French frigate?
There were those who believed that Napoleon’s body was not in that coffin. Fake death masks, rotten socks, fading facial scars, the position of the vessels supporting the viscera – the details claimed and denied are too many to list here, but they kept Napoleon scholars happy for years.
In 1969, on the bicentennial of Napoleon’s birth, a French journalist even published an “appeal ”Deliberately sensational to the British: “ Anglais, rendez-nous Napoleon! ”(English, give us back Napoleon!) .
His surprising accusation was that the British royal family had had Napoleon reburied in Westminster Abbey, the ultimate insult.
The most prosaic truth is that Napoleon’s body (almost) surely lies under the dome of Les Invalides in Paris.
However, until that the French authorities allow the coffin to be opened to test the body, the theories about the final destination of one of the most fascinating characters in history will continue to haunt .
Siân Rees is the author of “ The many deaths of Napoleon Bonaparte “.
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