Napoleon on Saint Helena (1815–1821): Exile and Death

Napoleon’s exile on Saint Helena lasted from October 1815 until his death on 5 May 1821. After his defeat at Waterloo the British government sent the former emperor to one of the most isolated islands on Earth, in the South Atlantic, where he lived under guard at Longwood House with a small group of loyal companions. There he dictated the memoirs that shaped his legend, and there he died at the age of 51.

Background: from Waterloo to the Bellerophon

After the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815 Napoleon returned to Paris and abdicated for the second time on 22 June. He made his way to Rochefort on the Atlantic coast, hoping to sail to the United States, but the port was blockaded by the Royal Navy. On 15 July he surrendered to Captain Frederick Maitland of HMS Bellerophon, asking to live in England as a private citizen.

The British government, in agreement with its allies, refused. The escape from Elba had shown the danger of leaving him near Europe. Ministers chose Saint Helena, an island owned by the East India Company and used as a supply stop on the route to India. In early August Napoleon was transferred to HMS Northumberland under Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn, and he sailed into exile with a small entourage.

Saint Helena is a volcanic island of roughly 120 square kilometres, about 1,900 kilometres from the coast of Africa and much further from South America. In 1815 it had a few thousand inhabitants, including soldiers, company officials, settlers, enslaved people and Chinese labourers. The British stationed a garrison of around 2,000 soldiers and a naval squadron to guard one prisoner, and they also occupied the distant islands of Ascension and Tristan da Cunha to prevent any rescue attempt.

The Northumberland reached Jamestown, the island’s only town, on 15 October 1815, and Napoleon came ashore two days later. While his permanent residence was prepared, he spent about seven weeks at The Briars, the home of the Balcombe family. He became friendly with the family’s lively teenage daughter, Betsy, who later published her memories of him.

Life at Longwood House

On 10 December 1815 Napoleon moved to Longwood House, a former farmhouse on a high, windswept plateau several kilometres from Jamestown. The house had been enlarged for him, but it was damp, often shrouded in mist and plagued by rats. A larger new house was built nearby, but it was finished only shortly before his death and he never lived in it.

His household numbered several dozen people. The most important companions were General Henri Bertrand, the Grand Marshal of the Palace, and his wife Fanny; General Charles de Montholon and his wife Albine; General Gaspard Gourgaud; and Count Emmanuel de Las Cases, a former émigré who acted as secretary. His valet Louis-Joseph Marchand and another servant, Louis-Étienne Saint-Denis, known as Ali, served him to the end.

Napoleon kept up imperial etiquette, with formal dinners and court dress. He read widely, played cards and chess, rode within the permitted limits and, in his last years, took up gardening at Longwood. Quarrels and jealousies among his companions were frequent in the cramped house.

The conflict with Hudson Lowe

In April 1816 a new governor arrived: Sir Hudson Lowe, a conscientious but rigid officer charged with preventing escape at all costs. He enforced strict rules: Napoleon could ride freely only within a set boundary around Longwood, a British orderly officer had to confirm his presence each day, and his letters were inspected. The British government refused to recognise him as emperor and referred to him as General Bonaparte.

Napoleon met Lowe only a handful of times, all in 1816, and the meetings ended in bitter exchanges. Disputes over money, supplies and restrictions followed; at one point Napoleon had silver plate broken up and sold in protest at cuts to his household budget. Over time his circle shrank. Las Cases was arrested and expelled in late 1816 after trying to smuggle letters, Gourgaud left in 1818, and the Irish naval surgeon Barry O’Meara, who had become close to Napoleon, was dismissed the same year.

For much of the 19th century Lowe was portrayed as a petty tyrant, largely through the books of Napoleon’s companions. Many modern historians take a more balanced view, seeing him as an anxious official caught between strict orders from London and a prisoner who resisted every restriction. Both men, in different ways, made the situation worse.

Shaping the legend

On Saint Helena Napoleon devoted much of his time to his own history. He dictated accounts of his campaigns and long conversations to his companions, presenting himself as a defender of the French Revolution’s achievements, a liberal who had wanted a free and united Europe, and a victim of the old monarchies.

These records became influential books. Las Cases’ Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, published in 1823, was one of the best-selling works of the 19th century in France. O’Meara’s Napoleon in Exile (1822) attacked Lowe, and memoirs by Gourgaud, Montholon and Bertrand followed. Together they did much to create the Napoleonic legend that later helped his nephew, Louis-Napoléon, come to power.

Illness and death

Napoleon’s health declined from 1817 onwards, and from late 1820 he grew seriously ill, suffering stomach pains, vomiting and weight loss. A Corsican doctor, Francesco Antommarchi, had arrived in 1819 together with two Catholic priests sent by Napoleon’s family, but medical care at the time could do little. Napoleon distrusted Antommarchi, and in his final weeks British army doctors were also consulted. In April 1821 Napoleon drew up his will, in which he expressed the wish that his remains should rest on the banks of the Seine among the French people he had loved.

He died at Longwood at about 5.49 pm on 5 May 1821. Witnesses recorded that his last words, spoken in delirium, included references to France, the army and Joséphine. An autopsy the next day, attended by British doctors, found a large ulcerated lesion in the stomach. On 9 May he was buried with military honours in a quiet valley near a spring he had liked, today often called the Geranium Valley. Because the French and British could not agree on an inscription, the tombstone was left without a name.

Myths and facts

• Was Napoleon poisoned? In 1961 the Swedish dentist Sten Forshufvud argued that Napoleon had been poisoned with arsenic, perhaps by Montholon. Later analyses showed high arsenic in his hair, but also in samples from earlier in his life and from his family, suggesting environmental exposure common at the time. Most specialists today accept stomach cancer as the cause of death.
• The wallpaper theory. Another theory suggested that arsenic-based green pigment in Longwood’s wallpaper released toxic vapours. It is possible he absorbed some arsenic this way, but it is not considered the cause of his death.
• Napoleon was very short. This myth has nothing to do with Saint Helena but is often repeated. Measured at death at five feet two inches in French units, he was about 1.68–1.70 metres tall, roughly average for his time.

The return of the ashes

In 1840 King Louis-Philippe, seeking to win popularity by associating his monarchy with Napoleon’s glory, obtained British agreement to bring the body back to France. The king’s son, the Prince de Joinville, sailed to Saint Helena aboard the frigate Belle Poule. The coffin was exhumed on 15 October 1840 and witnesses reported that the body was remarkably well preserved.

On 15 December 1840, in bitter cold, a vast funeral procession carried the coffin through Paris, under the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Élysées to Les Invalides. The remains were later placed in a monumental sarcophagus of red quartzite beneath the dome of the Invalides, completed in 1861.

Legacy

Saint Helena turned Napoleon from a defeated conqueror into a romantic martyr for many admirers in France and beyond. Poets and writers across Europe embraced the image of the lonely eagle on his rock. The French state acquired Longwood House and the empty tomb site in 1858, under Napoleon III, and they remain French-owned properties on a British island, as does The Briars pavilion, donated in 1959.

The exile also remains part of a long-running debate about Napoleon himself: whether he was a reformer who spread modern law and administration, as he claimed on Saint Helena, or an ambitious conqueror whose wars cost millions of lives.

Timeline

• 1815, 22 June: Napoleon abdicates after Waterloo.
• 1815, 15 July: He surrenders aboard HMS Bellerophon.
• 1815, 15–17 October: HMS Northumberland reaches Saint Helena and Napoleon lands.
• 1815, 10 December: Napoleon moves into Longwood House.
• 1816, April: Sir Hudson Lowe arrives as governor.
• 1816, November–December: Las Cases is arrested and expelled from the island.
• 1821, 5 May: Napoleon dies at Longwood.
• 1821, 9 May: He is buried in the Geranium Valley.
• 1840, 15 October: His remains are exhumed for return to France.
• 1840, 15 December: State funeral in Paris and burial at Les Invalides.

Why it matters

Napoleon’s years on Saint Helena ended the life of the most famous man of his age and, through the memoirs written there, created the legend that would shape French politics for decades. The exile also showed how far the victorious powers of 1815 were prepared to go to secure the peace built at the Congress of Vienna.