Exile to Saint Helena
Napoleon spent the last five and a half years of his life on a volcanic island in the South Atlantic 1,900 kilometres from anywhere. He surrendered to the captain of HMS Bellerophon in July 1815 with a letter to the Prince Regent comparing himself to Themistocles seeking the hearth of his enemy, and was informed at Plymouth that he would not be landing. The choice of Saint Helena was deliberate: sixteen kilometres across, garrisoned, with two anchorages and a permanent naval patrol, and no possibility of a second Elba. He was housed at Longwood, a converted farmhouse on a damp plateau, with a suite of about fifty and a governor, Hudson Lowe, whose relations with him were poisonous from the first month — over the title he was addressed by, over the expenses, over the sentries and over everything else. He dictated his memoirs to Las Cases and others for hours a day, and the account they produced is the foundation of the Napoleonic legend: the emperor as the heir of the Revolution, the champion of European union, and the victim of British spite. It sold enormously and shaped nineteenth-century politics in France for fifty years. He gardened, complained, played chess badly and grew heavy. He died on 5 May 1821, probably of stomach cancer, which had killed his father; the arsenic theories rest on hair samples and on wallpaper. His body was brought back to Paris in 1840 and buried at the Invalides. The exile is also where the second career begins. A defeated emperor on a rock in the Atlantic, dictating his own version, was politically far more useful to the Bonapartists than a living claimant would have been, and his nephew was elected president of France in 1848 largely on the strength of it.
- Year: 1815 CE
- Category: Political
