The Former Emperor of the French Who Spent His Last Five and a Half Years on a Volcanic South Atlantic Island and Was Possibly Poisoned With Arsenic

Napoleon Bonaparte had abdicated after Waterloo on 22 June 1815 and surrendered to the British naval frigate HMS Bellerophon at Rochefort on 15 July 1815. The British government — under the foreign secretary Castlereagh and the prime minister Lord Liverpool — concluded that he could not be safely held in Europe. The 1814 Elba arrangement had failed within eleven months. Permanent exile required geographic distance.

The chosen location was Saint Helena — a 122-square-kilometre volcanic island in the South Atlantic, approximately 2,000 km from the African coast and 4,000 km from the South American coast, owned by the British East India Company as a midway supply station for the Cape of Good Hope route. The island had a population of approximately 4,000 in 1815, no airfield (aviation was a century away), no telegraph cable (the first transatlantic cable was 51 years away), and a single anchorage at Jamestown that was monitored by the Royal Navy detachment permanently stationed there.

Napoleon was transferred to the larger ship of the line HMS Northumberland at Plymouth and arrived at Jamestown on 15 October 1815, ten weeks after the surrender. He was 46.

Longwood

The British accommodation arrangements were deliberately uncomfortable. The available residence at Longwood House — a former East India Company farmhouse on the inland plateau approximately 6 km from Jamestown — was damp, badly drained, and built in a windswept depression that retained the South Atlantic humidity. The British government had specifically chosen Longwood over the more alternatives (the Plantation House governor’s residence; the more comfortable Briars cottage where Napoleon spent his first six weeks) on the grounds that the more uncomfortable accommodation was politically appropriate to his current status.

Napoleon was accompanied by a retinue: the Grand Marshal Henri-Gratien Bertrand and his wife, the Comte de Charles de Montholon and his wife Albine, the Comte de Las Cases and his son, the General Gourgaud, the secretary Marchand, the valet Saint-Denis, the chef Pierron, plus various junior household staff. The total French establishment at Longwood was approximately 25 people.

The British governor from April 1816 was Sir Hudson Lowe — a 47-year-old Irish-born officer with bureaucratic punctiliousness and no diplomatic experience. Napoleon and Lowe met six times between April 1816 and August 1816 and then refused to meet again for the remaining four and a half years of Napoleon’s life. Communication between them was conducted by written notes through Bertrand. Lowe’s restrictions on Napoleon’s movements (no riding outside a defined 12-mile zone, no correspondence not first read by the governor, no visitors not first approved), regular surprise inspections of Longwood House, and budget restrictions on the French establishment’s allowances produced constant disputes through the entire exile.

What Napoleon did at Longwood

He dictated his memoirs. The senior memoirist was the Comte de Las Cases, whose 1823 Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène — a eight-volume compendium of Napoleon’s recollections, opinions, and political reflections — became one of the founding documents of the 19th-century Bonapartist legend. Montholon, Gourgaud, and the secretary Marchand also produced separate memoir materials. Napoleon was an active editor of his own posthumous reputation through the entire five-year period; the framing of his historical role — the gloire, the revolutionary continuity, the European reformer — was largely Napoleon’s own construction.

He gardened. He played chess. He read widely (his Longwood library had approximately 1,500 volumes shipped from Paris). He saw few visitors. His health deteriorated progressively from approximately 1817 onward — weight gain, chronic stomach pain, alternating constipation and vomiting, intermittent fevers. By 1820 he was physically diminished. By spring 1821 he was confined to bed.

5 May 1821

He died at approximately 5:49 p.m. on 5 May 1821, with witnesses present including Bertrand, Montholon, Marchand, and the Corsican-French physician François Antommarchi who had been sent to Saint Helena in 1819 by Napoleon’s mother. He was 51.

The autopsy on 6 May 1821 — conducted by Antommarchi in the presence of British witnesses including the Longwood British medical officer Thomas Reade — identified a perforated stomach ulcer associated with what Antommarchi described as a tumour mass at the pylorus. The 19th-century medical conclusion was stomach cancer. The diagnosis was consistent with Napoleon’s family history: his father Carlo Buonaparte had died of probable stomach cancer in 1785.

Napoleon was buried at Sane Valley on Saint Helena on 9 May 1821 in a location he had himself selected. The body was repatriated to France in 1840 under King Louis-Philippe and reburied in the Dôme des Invalides in Paris on 15 December 1840 with state ceremony.

1961

In 1961 the Swedish toxicologist Sten Forshufvud published Vem mördade Napoleon? (“Who Killed Napoleon?”), arguing on the basis of neutron-activation analysis of preserved samples of Napoleon’s hair that Napoleon had died of arsenic poisoning, not stomach cancer. The hair samples — saved by Marchand in 1821 as mourning relics and preserved in French museum collections — showed arsenic concentrations of approximately 38 parts per million, against the normal background of approximately 0.5 ppm. The concentration was approximately 100 times the expected baseline.

The Forshufvud thesis became the canonical alternative explanation of Napoleon’s death. The proposed perpetrator was Charles de Montholon, the Longwood courtier who had reasons (debts, gambling losses, difficulties with his wife Albine, who was rumoured to be Napoleon’s lover) and means (access to Napoleon’s daily food and wine). The Forshufvud reconstruction has the Montholon administering arsenic in the Longwood Cape wine over months.

The competing modern explanation is that the arsenic was environmental rather than deliberate. The Longwood House wallpaper was a green pattern called Scheele’s Green — a 19th-century paint pigment based on copper arsenite. The Longwood damp would have produced arsenic vapour from the wallpaper through mould action. The poisoning would have been slow accidental household poisoning rather than deliberate assassination. The Scheele’s Green hypothesis was advanced by David Jones in 1982 and modified by Robert Kintz in 1994.

The argument has not been settled. Modern pathological analysis of Napoleon’s preserved tissue (the Antommarchi autopsy samples held at the Musée de l’Armée) was undertaken in 2008 by a team led by Robert Genta and concluded that the pathological evidence is most consistent with the 1821 stomach cancer diagnosis. The Genta analysis does not exclude the possibility that arsenic was a contributing factor through a poisoning that was separate from the fatal cancer.