How Napoleon’s death in exile became a controversial mystery

When I noticed that Aug. 15 is Napoleon’s 253rd birthday, I recalled a dinner I had several years ago with an elderly surgeon. He had amassed a remarkable collection of medical historical artifacts, and after we had our entrées, he confessed that his most treasured souvenir was a severed piece of Napoleon Bonaparte’s body – good manners prevent me from specifying which body part. Suffice to say, I was sufficiently nauseated not to desire dessert.

The surgeon whispered of his plans to analyze the anatomical specimen to try to figure out the cause of Napoleon’s death in 1821, which has long been one of the most contentious mysteries in French historical circles.

I thought my Napoleonic encounters had come to an end until I found myself in Paris recently. In my spare time, I made a visit to the Tomb of Napoleon, at the Dôme des Invalides and under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. While looking at the polished, red quartzite sarcophagus containing the old fellow’s remains, the question began to bother me — what did he die of, after so many years of exile?

Napoleon was only 51 when he died on the island of St. Helena, where he was out of power and exiled from his beloved France. By May 5, 1821, he had been getting sicker for several months, suffering from recurrent abdominal pain, progressive weakness and unabating constipation. His last weeks were plagued by vomiting, incessant hiccups and blood clots, or thrombophlebitis, in various parts of his body.

The physicians who conducted Napoleon’s autopsy, on May 6, 1821, concluded that his death was from stomach cancer, exacerbated by bleeding gastric ulcers, after a huge dose of calomel – a compound containing mercury that was used as a medicine – was administered to him on the day before he died. Ever since, armchair pathologists have been wondering if this was, indeed, the case. Many medicos have offered up a slew of diagnoses that have literally filled books and journals over the past century.

Napoleon I, emperor of France, in exile. Image via Ann Ronan Pictures/ Print Collector/ Getty Images

Most infamously, in 1961, a Swedish dentist named Sten Forshufvud, working with Drs. Hamilton Smith of Glasgow and Anders Wassen of Sweden, made international headlines with an article they published in Nature magazine. Applying the latest technology to analyze a lock of the emperor’s hair, “probably taken immediately after his death,” they announced that Napoleon may have died from arsenic poisoning.

Forshufvud and his colleagues initially reported that It was impossible to tell from the sample results alone “whether the arsenic was evenly distributed (as expected in continuous exposure) or located in one point (as would be the case in a single large exposure).” A second paper by the same team analyzed a different hair sample supposedly pulled from Napoleon’s head. Again, they found high levels of arsenic and suggested he was exposed intermittently to the poison for, perhaps, four months before his death and that the arsenic could “not have been added afterwards, by spraying, dusting or dipping, as suggested by some critics.” Subsequent hair samples showed similar findings, even though the provenance of all these samples is not exactly definitive and could easily have come from other heads.

Decades later, the chemists J. Thomas Hindmarch and John Savory wrote a rebuttal to the claims of arsenic poisoning. It is important to note, they reminded their readers, that in the bad old days of medicine—when bleeding and cupping were still major treatment modalities— arsenic was a common, if ill-advised medication, often bottled in the form of a tonic known as Fowler’s solution. It was also widely used in rodenticides, insecticides, clothing dyes and “even candy wrappers.” Moreover, French aristocrats, including Napoleon, wore arsenic-based face and hair powder. There also may have been arsenic in the water supply, the wallpaper covering Napoleon’s bed chamber, in the coal smoke heating his chambers, and post-mortem exposure because of the arsenic soil content covering his coffin, when he was still buried on St. Helena before being brought back to Paris. And to make matters more confusing, there was also the 19th-century practice of preserving locks of hair in arsenical solutions and hair powders.

Nonetheless, journalists and history buffs alike have embraced a variety of conspiracy theories involving arsenic poisoning. Some claim that the alleged murderer (perhaps by accident) was Charles Tristan, marquis de Montholon, who was Napoleon’s boon companion when they were both on the island of St. Helena. A motive was even elaborated in that Napoleon left Montholon 2 million francs in his will.

This is a great story, but probably just that — a story — and at the expense of the marquis’s historical reputation. Alas, as Napoleon supposedly once said, history is a fable that people have agreed upon. (That line, by the way, has been attributed in different forms to a number of French figures.) Given how ubiquitous arsenic was during this era, Napoleon’s family’s medical history of gastric carcinomas, and the advanced state of his stomach cancer and bleeding stress ulcers, exacerbated by all his doctors’ prescriptions, the initial autopsy results still seem most likely.

Napoleon was the author of several revolutionary accomplishments and a near-godlike reputation while in power, yet history also agrees he was a tyrannical despot and warmonger. In the end, debating the cause of his death may be the ultimate fool’s errand. His giant and impressive tomb reminds us all too well that it is high time to let the man alone.