After his defeat, why was Napoleon exiled, rather than killed? I realized that he still had a segment of the public that approved of him, but surely they would disagree with his exile just as much as being put to death…
Thanks.
Bonus question: Why did he want to establish control of Egypt? My social studies teacher glossed over the subject as just being among his few little gaffes, but I can’t find any real reason for Napoleon’s doing so.
Napoleon recognized that the isthmus of Suez was an ideal place to create a canal from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. If France controlled Egypt, then built that canal, it could control the most efficient route for trade from Asia, east Africa and the Pacific Islands to Europe.
Or, in the words of Kander & Ebb: Money, money, money, money, money, money, money…
Why didn’t they just shoot him in the head? I don’t know honestly. The article I listed about arsenic poisoning says
“If they had killed him suddenly after Waterloo, they would have had a new French revolution on their hands, because the emperor was very popular. They had to make it look like his health was deteriorating gradually,”
Even nations that had reason to hate Napoleon recognized him as a monarch, and executing a defeated monarch would set a dangerous precedent. If you were George IV of England (who was Regent of England at the time of Napoleon’s defeat), would YOU like the idea of being tried and executed if England were ever defeated in a war?
Better to defang Napoleon and send him someplace where he could never cause mischief again.
I suspect citrus may have been thinking of Napoleon’s return to power after escaping from exile in Elba. Napoleon was exiled twice, first to the island of Elba off the Italian peninsula in 1814, then, after his escape, return to power for the “Hundred Days,” and final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, to St. Helena in the distant South Atlantic.
Foreign leaders generally weren’t killed after losing wars–at least prior to World War II. It would set a bad precedent in case the home country lost a future war, it would encourage revolutionaries by legitimizing regicide, and it would make future leaders much less likely to surrender or make peace even when their cause was hopeless.
France was at war with Britain in 1798, but lacked the fleet to threaten an invasion of that country. Instead, they tried to weaken Britain indirectly, by harassing the overseas colonies and foreign trade which formed the basis of British prosperity.
The most lucrative of such colonies were in India, and Egypt was the gateway to India. France and Britain had fought a long series of wars for control of India earlier in the Eighteenth Century, France had lost, and the defeat still rankled. Most British trade with India took place via the Mediterranean, by land over the narrow neck of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, and then by sea again via the Red Sea and Arabian Sea. By seizing the vital neck of land in Egypt, France could make British trade with and supply of India much more difficult, and possibly win control of India or at least force the British into a favorable peace settlement.
It didn’t work, of course. The British destroyed Napoleon’s fleet in the Mediterranean, and instead of India being cut off from Britain, Napoleon’s army was cut off from France. He bailed out by abandoning his army and returning to France to seize dictatorial power.
Sorry to have been unclear, but you three all assumed correctly. I believe I’ll need a tie-breaker-- anyone happen to know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Show all work, use Euclidean figures if possible, please keep all figures to the third dimension, you know the drill.
Freddy the Pig: Thank you for your especially thorough explanation. I’m familiar with the Continental System, but did not realize how important the connections with India were. Now that I consider it, India would have to be quite an asset for the British to invest so much in colonizing it.
In addition to the factors already mentioned by astorian and Freddy the Pig, it worked to his advantage that one of the parties to the treaty of Fontainebleau, the agreement by which he was allowed to go into exile on Elba, was his father-in-law, the emperor of Austria. It wasn’t that Francis I had any affection for his son-in-law, but he was concerned to defend the interests of his daughter, the Empress Marie Louise, and it was easier to do so if Napoleon was allowed to remain nominally as an emperor, with Elba as his sovereign principality. That way she remained an empress, albeit one estranged from her emperor.
I thought that this had been pretty much proven to be true. By modern scientific testing on various preserved locks of Naopleon’s hair, which clearly showed fatal levels of arsenic.
Yes because arsenic was a recreational drug back in napoleons day. Maybe in 200 years alcohol will be considered strictly a poison (which is it if you take too much) but in low doses it gets you high. Same with Opium. maybe in 200 years it’ll lose its cultural value as a drug and be considered strictly a poison.
"Arsenic was also used by some as a mind-altering drug, much as marijuana or cocaine is used today. In small doses it gave the user a feeling of well-being, strength, and sexual staying power.
But arsenic was very much a drug of dependence. The user was forced to continue to ingest the substance in larger and larger quantities, both to obtain the effect, and also to stave off withdrawal symptoms. Dosages soon reached levels that would be immediately fatal to a non-user, yet to cease would bring on the terrible symptoms of acute arsenical poisoning. Inevitably, doses reached levels intolerable even to the experienced user’s body, and physical deterioration and death ensued.
Thus we have here an explanation for Napoléon’s long term ingestion of arsenic that is much more plausible than a poisoner continuing to dose him secretly for as long as 4.5 years."
The fact that he has arsenic in his system doesn’t prove he was murdered by the British anymore than (if thereoretically) someone who is exhumed in 2400 with a fatty liver is proven to have been killed by alcohol poisoning. That arsenic could’ve been due to napoleon being a junkie, or just bad luck with St. helena having a high amount of arsenic on it.
On the murder hypothesis, it’s worth pointing out that it’s main advocate, Ben Weider, has shifted his scenario over the years. Back in The Murder of Napoleon (with David Hapgood, 1982) his claim was that it was Montholon acting alone on St. Helena as the poisoner, solely on behalf of Charles X. If he now wants to implicate the British authorities on the island as well, his plot appears to be getting wider - in the usual manner of such theorising.
Concerning the arsenic in Napolean’s hair. At the somewhat amusing website Grand Illusions is an entertaining article that I read a few years ago titled The Stange Story of Napoleans Wallpaper. In 1980 , one David Jones, a University of Newcastle chemist was discussing “vapour chemistry” on a radio program. A 19th century rash of arsenic poisonings had most people baffled until an Italian Biochemist, a guy named Gosio worked out what was happening. The resulting “disease” was named after him.
It seems a particular pigment, Scheele’s Green, popular in fabrics and wallpapers since the 1700’s was a copper arsenite. Poisons in colors have been everywhere. Many colors I loved to paint with when younger have been shown to be extremely deadly and have even been banned. What Gosio did, was show that wallpaper with Scheele’s Green, when damp and moldy - aren’t we all afraid of the dangers of mold in the house now? - could vaporize the arsenic in the wallpaper, giving out lovely arsenic fumes.
In the radio program, Jones was asking if anyone knew what color Napolean’s wallpaper was. Long story short, a gal with a scrapbook handed down from someone who apparently visited St. Helena in 1823, had an actual sample of said wallpaper, reasonably well-documented. Tests confirmed arsenic in the sample, and certainly gives plausibility to the idea that Napolean was partially posioned in his own bed by his hideous wallpaper.
True, nothing is conclusive, but it’s a real good story. How many stories from Victorian times talk about sickly people confined to their dark, damp rooms, never able to get well. Not just arsenic, but countless other toxins people once lived with could certainly keep a fellow down. But the doctors were more afraid of fresh air.
The article in reference also includes a bunch of really good pictures of St Helena and the house where Napolean lived.
The “one” and the “a” seem somehow disrespectful: that’ll be David E.H. Jones, famous for his long-running Daedalus columns in New Scientist and Nature, which proposed most of the truly great scientific ideas to have been invented since the 1960s.
I’m sure DREADCO are already industrialising wallpaper as the modern spy’s assassination weapon of choice.