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Defeat, exile in Elba, return and Waterloo - Napoleon Bonaparte Biography
In 1814 Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria formed an alliance against Napoleon. Although the defence of France included many battles which the French won, the pressure became overwhelming. Paris was occupied on 31 March 1814. The marshals asked Napoleon to abdicate, and he did so on 6 April in favour of his son. The Allies, however, demanded unconditional surrender and Napoleon abdicated again, unconditionally, on 11 April. In the Treaty of Fontainebleau the victors exiled the Corsican to Elba, a small island in the Mediterranean 20 km off the coast of Italy. They let him keep the title of "Emperor" but restricted his empire to that tiny island.
Napoleon Bonaparte tried to poison himself and failed; on the voyage to Elba he was almost assassinated. In France, the royalists had taken over and restored King Louis XVIII to power. On Elba, Napoleon became concerned about his wife and, more especially, his son, in the hands of the Austrians. The French government refused to pay his allowance and he heard rumours that he was about to be banished to a remote island in the Atlantic. Napoleon escaped from Elba on 26 February 1815 and returned to the mainland on 1 March 1815. The French armies sent to stop him received him instead as leader. He arrived in Paris on 20 March with a regular army of 140,000 and a volunteer force of around 200,000 and governed for a Hundred Days.
Napoleon's final defeat came at the hands of the Duke of Wellington and Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher at the Battle of Waterloo in present-day Belgium on 18 June 1815.
Off the port of Rochefort, Napoleon made his formal surrender while on board HMS Bellerophon on 15 July 1815.
Exile in Saint Helena and death - Napoleon Bonaparte Biography
Napoleon on the Bellerophon at Plymouth, before his exile to Saint Helena.Napoleon was imprisoned and then exiled by the British to the island of Saint Helena (2,800 km off the Bight of Guinea) from 15 October 1815. There, with a small cadre of followers, he dictated his memoirs and criticized his captors. In the last half of April 1821, he wrote out his own will and several codicils (a total of 40-odd pages). When he died, on 5 May 1821, his last words were: "France, the Army, Joséphine."
In 1955 the diaries of Louis Marchand, Napoleon's valet, appeared in print. He describes Napoleon in the months leading up to his death, and led many, most notably Sten Forshufvud and Ben Weider, to conclude that he had been killed by arsenic poisoning. Arsenic was at the time sometimes used as a poison undetectable when administered over a long period of time. In 2001 Pascal Kintz, of the Strasbourg Forensic Institute in France, added credence to this claim with a study of arsenic levels found in a lock of Napoleon's hair preserved after his death: they were seven to thirty-eight times higher than normal.
Cutting up hairs into short segments and analysing each segment individually provides a histogram of arsenic concentration in the body. This analysis on hair from Napoleon suggests that large but non-lethal doses were absorbed at random intervals. The arsenic severely weakened Napoleon and remained in his system. There, it could have reacted with calomel- and mercury-based compounds -- common medicines at the time -- and thus been the immediate cause of his death.
More recent analysis on behalf of the magazine Science et Vie showed that similar concentrations of arsenic can be found in Napoleon Bonaparte's hair in samples taken from 1805, 1814 and 1821. The lead investigator, Ivan Ricordel (head of toxicology for the Paris Police), stated that if arsenic had been the cause, Napoleon would have died years earlier. Arsenic was also used in some wallpaper, as a green pigment, and even in some patent medicines, and the group suggested that the most likely source in this case was a hair tonic. Prior to the discovery of antibiotics, arsenic was also a widely used, but ineffective, treatment for syphilis. (This has led to speculation that Napoleon might have suffered from syphilis.) Controversy remains as the Science et Vie analysis has not addressed all points of the arsenic poisoning theory.
Marriages and children - Napoleon Bonaparte Biography
Napoleon was twice married:
First on March 9, 1796 to Joséphine de Beauharnais. He later crowned her as Empress Joséphine. She had no heirs for him, leading to a divorce.
Second on March 11, 1810 (by proxy) to Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria, who became his second empress. They had one child.
Napoleon Francis Joseph Charles Bonaparte (March 20, 1811- July 22, 1832), King of Rome. He is known as Napoleon II of France although he never ruled.
Napoleon also had at least two illegitimate children who both had descendants:
Charles, Count Léon, (1806 - 1881), son by Louise Catherine Eléonore Denuelle de la Plaigne (1787 - 1868).
Alexandre Joseph Colonna, Count Walewski, (May 4, 1810 - October 27, 1868), son of Maria, Countess Walewski (1789 - 1817).
Other information points to Napoleons's having had further illegitimate children:
Émilie Louise Marie Françoise Joséphine Pellapra, daughter by Françoise-Marie LeRoy.
Karl Eugin von Mühlfeld, son by Victoria Kraus.
Hélène Napoleone Bonaparte, daughter by Countess Montholon.
Barthélemy St Hilaire (August 19, 1805 - November 24, 1895) whose mother remains unknown.
Burial - Napoleon Bonaparte Biography
Napoleon had asked in his will to be buried on the banks of the Seine, but when he died in 1821 he was buried on Saint Helena. This final wish was not executed until 1840, when his remains were taken to France in the frigate Belle-Poule and entombed in Les Invalides, Paris.
Legacy - Napoleon Bonaparte Biography
Napoleon is credited with introducing the concept of the modern professional conscript army to Europe, an innovation which other states were forced to follow.
In France, Napoleon Bonaparte is also seen as having preserved the Revolution by creating and perpetuating its myth. It is widely believed that, had he not taken power and radically changed French society as well as the map of Europe, a restoration of the French monarchy would have evolved into a parliamentary constitutional monarchy, much in the way that the British monarchy has. Furthermore, the Napoleonic Wars also exported the Revolution to the rest of Europe, and it is believed that the movements of national unification and the rise of the nation state, notably in Italy and Germany, were rooted in and precipitated — if not caused — by the Napoleonic rule of those areas.
The Code Napoleon was adopted through much of Europe and remained after Napoleon's defeat. Professor Dieter Langewiesche of the University of Tuebingen describes the code as a "revolutionary project" which spurred the development of bourgeois society in Germany by expanding the right to own property and breaking the back of feudalism. Langewiesche also credits Napoleon Bonaparte with reorganizing what had been the Holy Roman Empire made up of more than 1,000 entities into a more streamlined network of 40 states providing the basis for the German Confederation and the future unification of Germany under the Second Reich in 1871.
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