Napoleon Bonaparte, Death and Facts – 2024
The stories that Napoleon Bonaparte was either assassinated or carried off the island have never entirely vanished since he died in British captivity on the island of St Helena in 1821.
Siân Rees investigates these hypotheses in-depth and looks into Napoleon’s numerous deaths.
Seven doctors were among the sixteen observers who attended the autopsy on May 5, 1821, the day after he passed away while in British custody.
They all came to the same conclusion: Napoleon’s cause of death was stomach cancer.
When Napoleon Bonaparte penned his final will in April 1821, he said these resentful words.
“My death is premature. I have been assassinated by the English oligopoly and their hired murderer.”
Napoleon, one of the greatest con artists in history, carried his resentment with him to death.
However, the questions Napoleon raised about what “really” transpired have never fully vanished: was his death accelerated by the British government? Were rival Frenchmen putting poison in his wine?
Was Napoleon the one who passed away in May 1821 at Longwood House?
All these questions and many more have been debated, argued, and repeated for almost 200 years.
Napoleon Bonaparte, who was born in 1769 into a poor Corsican family, governed over 70 million people and conquered Europe by 1811.
His hopes for dynastic, political, imperial, and military glory were dashed four years later, and he was banished to the isolated island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, where he was placed under British protection.
There, he resided in the sprawling home known as Longwood House with his anxious, cooped-up household until his death.
Slow and Painful Death of Napoleon Bonaparte
That was hardly an abrupt death. Napoleon experienced fever, nocturnal sweats, nausea, and abdominal agony for months.
He experienced severe diarrhea when not constipated, which caused him to lose weight. He complained of light-induced headaches, weak legs, and pain.
He started to speak and mumbled. He was soaked with the sweats of the night.
His nails, lips, and gums were all the same color. For a brief while, he thought he might have been poisoned, but eventually concluded all medical assistance was pointless because he had an identical malignancy that had killed his father.
On May 4, 1821, he passed out. After the world was shocked to learn that the great man had passed away on May 5, doubts started to surface.
Intimate details of Napoleon’s last days were revealed in the 1950s through the publication of Napoleon’s valet de chambre’s private documents, which led Dr. Sten Forshufvud to assume he had found a smoking gun.
Conspiracies Regarding Napoleon Bonaparte’s Demise
Forshufvud urged a Scottish university to administer a newly developed arsenic-detection test since Napoleon displayed 28 of the 31 signs of arsenic poisoning that scientists had found since 1821.
Napoleon was a remarkable hairdresser, and when hairs from his head dating to 1816, 1817, and 1818 were subjected to neutron activation analysis (NAA), it was discovered that his system contained dangerously high quantities of arsenic.
It seems that O’Meara had been correct: Napoleon had been killed, but by whom?
Though this colorful idea did not win over everyone, it did not imply that someone had used arsenic to kill Napoleon, even if it was the cause of his death.
The poisoning controversy took a different turn in the 1980s when it was proposed that Napoleon might have died from exposure to enough arsenic in his surroundings.
A 19th-century home was contaminated with arsenic; poisonous items included cake icing, hair tonic, cigarettes, sealing wax, cooking pots, and insect-repellent powders.
Napoleon’s demise may have been influenced by toxic fumes emanating from a mold that was growing beneath a piece of Longwood wallpaper that a 19th-century tourist had taken.
This was uncovered by a chemist from Newcastle University who was doing experiments on the wallpaper scrap and verified that Napoleon’s system had included high quantities of arsenic, but still no one knew the source.
