Was Napoleon assassinated? | Suceava News Online

On this day in 1821, at 5:49 p.m., Napoleon Bonaparte, once emperor of half of Europe and ruler of over 70 million people, dies on the remote island of Saint Helena, a few months before his 52nd birthday, following what was thought to be stomach cancer.

The last word he uttered in his dying voice was “Joséphine,” a wistful thought directed at his first wife, who had died seven years before.

Napoleon spent the last five and a half years of his life on St. Helena, an island with a population of only 2,000 people, instead being guarded by 1,400 British soldiers, lest he escape.

Bored to the point of exasperation, and fierce both to the enemies who had defeated him and to the supporters who had betrayed him, he had kept a small court, consisting of only a few officers with their wives, who had followed him into exile.

He had spent the last 18 months weakened and in increasing pain, with increased nausea, headaches, poor vision, insomnia, deafness and bleeding gums. Although he bravely faced his death, on the evening of May 3, 1821, he fell into a state of unconsciousness, apparently paralyzed, after taking a huge dose of calomel, a laxative that the doctors hoped might help him. He would die two days later.

Napoleon was buried on the island where he died, in a grave dug over three and a half meters deep, lined with stone.

He remained here for 19 years, until his body was repatriated to Paris, where he was buried in the Dome of the Invalides.

Towards the end of the 20th century, scientific analysis of Napoleon’s hair revealed the presence of residual traces of arsenic, leading some historians to conclude that he had not died of cancer but had been murdered, probably by one of his courtiers. Count Charles Tristan de Montholon, who had poisoned his wine.

Montholon’s alleged motive would have been revenge on Napoleon for the affair with his wife.

Equally reasonable is the assumption that the restored British and French monarchies would have persuaded Montholon to administer the fatal dose, fearing that Napoleon might once again escape and overthrow the autocratic regimes of Europe.

Also on May 5:

1818: Karl Marx is born in Trier, Prussia.

1835: Continental Europe’s first passenger railway opens at Allée Verte in France, 11 years after the first British railway.

1850: The Risorgimento movement begins, with the invasion of Sicily by Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Red Shirts.

Geo Alupoae, theater critic.