You are in:
- Contents » Heroes and Villains
Who Killed Napoleon?
He was a boy from Corsica who made it very, very big. He made an attempt to conquer Europe, killing more than two million people in his military campaigns, including many of his own troops. His name is Napoleon Bonaparte.
He was eventually dispatched, courtesy of the Royal Navy, to the British-controlled island of St Helena in the South Atlantic where he was certified dead in 1821 at the age of 51.
There is a popular idea in France which has endured over generations that he was poisoned by a British guardian warder.
Who killed Napoleon ? He killed himself. But not by volition or a diabolical British plot.
A new study by Italian researchers has revealed that the former emperor of France gradually accumulated arsenic (pioson) throughout his life.
At Pavia in northern Italy, scientists have subjected samples of hair from Napoleon, from eight stages in his life. (Some locks of hair were cut by his wife Joséphine at the Chateau de Malmaison, which is eight miles west of central Paris).
The Italian team found arsenic levels: "A hundred times the average in hair found today".
At near the time of his death he was so deranged that he wrote in his journal that he was likely to be killed by his wallpaper.


