From the iron cot in which he died to the flagstones that covered his grave, a Paris exhibition recreates the emperor Bonaparte’s exile to remote St Helena
The bed on which Napoleon Bonaparte died is a plain iron cot with handsome enough drapes but a mattress not much thicker than a blanket – a piece of furniture designed to be folded up and slung into an army baggage train.
Part of a spectacular new exhibition at Musée de l’Armée, Les Invalides, in Paris, the bed is a powerful symbol that the former emperor, one-time ruler of half of Europe and terror of the rest, was a soldier to the end, the “little corporal” beloved of his troops.
Everything Napoleon did was affected. He was writing his own legend, the story of his suffering and deathMichel Dancoisne-Martineau, museum director of Longwood House on the remote island of St Helena where the exiled Napoleon lived out his last years, points out that by the bed are two more everyday objects: a solid silver gold-mounted wash basin and a ewer, a truly imperial slice of kit.
When Napoleon melted down some of his domestic silver, and ensured the word got out as to what his shabby treatment by the British had reduced him, there was no question of his beautiful jug and basin going into the furnace. “It was all for the effect, everything he did was constructed,” says Dancoisne-Martineau. “He was writing his own legend, his own afterlife, the story of his suffering and death.”
The possessions were shipped thousands of miles from St Helena and gathered from public and private collections across Europe (one suit of coat, waistcoat, breeches and cockaded hat has been reassembled from four sources). They include a pair of crimson leather slippers, touchingly scuffed and creased, the cream lining slightly stained.
When Napoleon’s valet first put them on his master’s small feet, he would never have imagined that they would be worn in exile.
“It was not a foregone conclusion that Napoleon would abdicate, or that he would die in exile,” says Dancoisne-Martineau. “For his first three years on the island, he was expecting to return. For his last two years, he abandoned all hope that that would happen. He no longer received people; he no longer went out.”
Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815 and fled to Paris, where he hoped to rebuild political and popular support as emperor. Instead, he abdicated four days later in favour of his three-year-old son. After the provisional government formally deposed him, too, his father sailed from France for the last time and surrendered to the British on 10 July. After his escape from Elba a year earlier, the English were taking no chances: he was never permitted to set foot on British soil again.
The first object in the exhibition at Les Invalides is a painting on loan from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, south London, showing Plymouth harbour with an armada of small boats full of tourists being rowed out to gaze in wonder at the diminutive figure of Boney, taking exercise by pacing the deck of HMS Bellerophon.
The public fascination must have unnerved the authorities, who decided to send him to the most remote spot they could find, the tiny island of St Helena in the south Atlantic, more than 7,000km (4,300 miles) from Paris and London.
By coincidence, this exhibition – planned to coincide with the completion of much-needed conservation work in Europe on some of the furniture from the house – opens just as St Helena’s isolation, almost as great as in Napoleon’s day, is about to end with the opening of a new airport that is expected to bring a tourism bonanza.
Napoleon died on his rock in 1821. The huge new house the British were shamed into building to replace the damp, verminous Longwood House was still unoccupied. He was buried in a green valley that he chose, under weeping willow trees and three flagstones borrowed from Longwood’s kitchen floor.
A poster from 1840 shows Napoleon with a halo, rising from his tomb, an unmistakably Christ-like figure. It marked the year King Louis-Philippe won permission from the British to resurrect France’s lost leader, sending his son to bring Bonaparte back to France for reburial under the gigantic golden dome of Les Invalides.
Many possessions that came back to France after Napoleon’s death or with his coffin are also on show , including the bath where he spent hours reading, eating and working on his memoirs. The original St Helena grave, complete with flagstones and willows, has been recreated in a courtyard.
Other objects were scattered at public auction, and Dancoisne-Martineau spent years going through the wills of island people, trying to trace and recover pieces. Some of his discoveries are in the exhibition. One speaks vividly of how the island got on with life after its strange encounter with one of the giants of history: the small, square altar stone, on which the the last mass by the bed of the dying emperor would have been celebrated, was found in an island farmhouse. It had been used as a smooth surface for grinding down rat poison.
Napoleon in Saint Helena: The Conquest of Memory, is at Musée de l’Armée, Les Invalides, Paris, until 24 July.
Maev Kennedy visited the exhibition as a guest of St Helena Tourism and Eurostar
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