Exile to Saint Helena
After Waterloo and his second abdication, Napoleon surrendered to the British aboard HMS Bellerophon at Rochefort on 15 July 1815, hoping to be granted asylum in Britain or the United States. The British government, determined to remove all possibility of a third return, selected the remote island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic — 1,900 kilometres from the African coast — as his permanent place of captivity. Napoleon arrived on 17 October 1815 and was installed at Longwood House, a damp and isolated property chosen by the restrictive governor Sir Hudson Lowe. Napoleon spent the remaining six years dictating his memoirs to trusted companions — the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène — constructing the Napoleonic legend with meticulous care. He reframed his wars as the defence of the French Revolution's principles against reactionary monarchies, portrayed himself as the defender of European peoples against dynastic oppression, and dismissed his defeats as the products of treachery rather than failure. This retrospective mythology — sympathetic, romantic, and highly selective — proved extraordinarily influential in France and across Europe, fuelling Bonapartism as a political movement and shaping how Napoleon was remembered through the nineteenth century. He died on 5 May 1821, most likely from stomach cancer, and his remains were returned to the Invalides in Paris in 1840.
- Year: 1815 CE
- Category: Political
