Napoleon Part 6: Showdown at Waterloo

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Plymouth, England, July the 29th, 1815.

The port has never witnessed anything like it.

Out in the sound, hundreds of small vessels swirl around, causing mayhem.

Yachts, rowing boats, pleasure craft all vie for position, jostling each other in a feeding frenzy.

The object of their fascination is a Royal Naval warship which sits out at anchor, HMS Bellerophon, or rather, its passenger.

He is a distinguished fellow, ex-Emperor of France, be noire of the British establishment, and he's currently being detained at His Majesty's pleasure.

Local fishermen hiring out skiffs have made a killing, in some cases literally.

As day trippers scrap for a glimpse of the Corsican ogre, boats have capsized, capsized, some have drowned.

Another 10,000 watch this madness from the shore.

It was two weeks ago in France, at Rochefort, that Napoleon Bonaparte stepped aboard, turning himself in after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.

HMS Bellerophon, or Billy Ruffian as the crew call her, had proceeded to cross the English Channel.

It had put in at the fishing village of Brixham, the identity of its prisoner a closely guarded secret.

Unfortunately for the Admiralty, loose-lipped Matlows, keen to impress the local girls, had bragged about their star guest.

Thus, the ship was moved on to Plymouth, to the supposed greater security of the naval base.

But it's too late.

Word is out.

Those same sailors now hang blackboards over the side.

Messages Messages are chalked on them to keep the crowds informed as to Napoleon's movements.

Talking to officers, eating dinner, or, more often than not, asleep in his cabin.

Occasionally a bemused Napoleon will shuffle out on deck, bestowing the odd wave upon those bobbing below.

It's a far cry from what happened in another English port, Hartlepool, up in the northeast.

There, when a foreign ship was wrecked, a pet monkey had washed up on the beach.

Thinking it was a Frenchman, the locals had hanged it, or so it said.

It will be a few more days before Napoleon's fate is determined.

Till then, he must grin and bear it.

From Neuser,

this is the final part of the Napoleon story.

and this

is real dictators.

So let's go back

just over a year.

It's March 1814.

After twenty two years of war, France has been defeated.

As Emperor, Napoleon had reinvigorated the French state and brought most of Europe under his dominance.

But he'd overreached, stretching his resources from Madrid to Moscow.

The push into Russia in 1812 was the step too far.

It led to a crushing defeat.

Eighteen months on, the Allies have reached Paris.

The Bourbon monarchy has been restored.

For a man who left a trail of such destruction, three million military dead, maybe two million civilians, Napoleon has been let off lightly.

The Allied leaders have treated him as a deposed monarch rather than a beaten warmonger.

Napoleon's punishment is a cushy exile on the island of Elba, off Tuscany.

He will be its new ruler.

Napoleon arrives in Porto Ferayo on the evening of May the 3rd, 1814.

He is still a head of state, albeit of 12,000 people on a tiny island, not 70 million.

Still, joked the British press, at least he'll get some Elba room.

Professor Andrew Roberts.

Napoleon was not imprisoned on Elba.

He was allowed to go there and rule Elba.

He had about 600 troops with him, and he wasn't being watched constantly.

France was going to return to the group of nations.

So it was actually essential for the peace of Europe for Napoleon to stay on Elba.

The new Emperor of Elba takes things seriously.

He may call this his little cabbage patch, but he will run the island with the same sense of purpose as any previous dominion.

He throws himself into his work, he plants trees, builds roads.

He pays special attention to the island's economy, its agriculture, its fisheries, its iron mines.

At night, Napoleon retreats to his hillside residence, which he readies for the arrival of his Austrian wife, the Empress Marie-Louise, and their son.

But unbeknown to Napoleon, Mrs.

Bonaparte will not be coming.

In Vienna, she has embarked on a passionate affair with the equerry assigned to squire her, a flash eyepatch sporting cavalry officer.

But Napoleon is not short of company.

Friends are with him.

His sister Pauline arrives.

So does his mother.

Napoleon even has a visit from Countess Maria Valewska and their love child.

Overnight time, he plays cards, cheating mercilessly.

He hates to lose.

Napoleon seems in good spirits.

In transit, His British captors gave him the VIP treatment.

He was a hit with the naval ratings.

They were unaccustomed to a pat on the cheek or a ruffle of their hair from a man of such exalted rank.

His observer on Elba, Colonel Seneal Campbell, is no less genial.

Napoleon is addressed as Excellency.

There seems little acceptance of Elba as a state of permanence.

This is all just an interlude, a holiday.

In secret, Napoleon keeps the lines of communication open.

And the news coming out of France is that fat old gout-ridden Louis XVIII

is making a king-sized hash of things.

Louis has paid scant regard to the societal changes that have occurred since the revolution.

He's acting just like the despots of old, restoring noble privileges, sucking up to the church.

disparaging those who served under Napoleon.

He's even banned the tricole flag.

Out in the countryside, the king's troops watch for signs of resurgent republicanism.

There are grumblings of discontent, a growing, misty-eyed fondness for the old days.

On August the 15th, Napoleon's birthday, army units defy orders and fire cannons in salute.

For his part, Napoleon is still a man driven by destiny.

There's a visible reminder of it across the water.

He can see it from the slopes of Monte Capane, which he rides up every day.

Corsica.

The Napoleonic Wars have caused a shift in the international order.

It took six coalitions to bring Napoleon down.

Ultimately, it only worked when the Allied powers had acted in concert.

An international body has been set up to maintain this new order.

The Vienna Congress will remain in permanent session, ready to act at the first sign of disharmony.

Professor David Bell.

They're actually trying to set up, you know, sort of a formal security arrangement for Europe in the future.

The Allies set up what they call the Concert of Europe, which is this notion that the leading powers will collaborate actively and consciously to repress revolutionary activity and to maintain the peace so that nothing like the Napoleonic Wars can ever happen again.

Dr.

Michael Rowe.

I guess as peace settlements go, the Congress of Vienna is rated quite highly.

You know, not least because the next peace conference after the First World War is sort of an unmitigated disaster.

France as the defeated party is brought back into the negotiating process at a fairly early stage.

So no one gets, you know, utterly humiliated and crushed.

The Napoleonic era has had a profound effect beyond Europe.

During the Peninsular War, the British had evacuated the Portuguese royals to Brazil.

Rio de Janeiro is now the seat of the Portuguese Empire, a dynamic shift.

Elsewhere in South America with the collapse of Spanish authority, Republican movements have gained traction.

In 1804, in the audience for Napoleon's coronation, had sat a young man aged 21 from the Spanish colony of Venezuela, Simón Bolívar.

While Joseph Bonaparte was struggling to govern Spain, Venezuela, under Bolivar, declared independence.

Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, named after him, all follow.

The great liberator even implements a version of the Napoleonic Code.

From Mexico to Chile, The genie of independence has been released.

Britain has attempted to exploit the Latin American turmoil, prompting military raids on the River Plate colony of Buenos Aires in Montevideo.

Elsewhere, at the tip of southern Africa, the strategically vital Cape colony, once Dutch, briefly a French vassal, has been reoccupied by Britain.

In South Africa, that of course will then lead to a very troubled future.

The expulsion of the Boers from the Cape and their movement north at the expense of black African peoples will then set up a whole kind of scene for apartheid South Africa, I guess, in the long term.

The global kind of aftershocks are, you know, immense and enduring.

There have been Anglo-French clashes elsewhere, in Asia, the Pacific, and with ramifications too for North America and the Caribbean.

In 1791, a slave revolt had broken out in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, present-day Haiti, led by the charismatic black leader, Toussaine Louvature.

He had secured a de facto independence.

Haiti, the world's leading supplier of sugar and coffee, was a huge cash car for France, accounting for 40% of its overseas trade.

Napoleon had regained it by force, dragging Louvature back to France where he would die in jail.

Against the growing trend of abolitionism, Napoleon, to his eternal shame, also reintroduced slavery.

Haiti was ultimately lost for good.

The diminishing returns in the Caribbean have caused a rethink of French policy in the Americas.

Beyond the port of New Orleans lies a large French possession named after the Bourbon kings, the Louisiana Territory.

A vast tract of the interior, 875,000 square miles, it stretches from the Mississippi Delta up to the Dakotas, taking in much of the Great Plains and Midwest.

With Canada lost and the United States independent, holding on to this real estate, this Indian land, seems pointless.

Plus, the wars in Europe are expensive and the French need the cash.

In 1803, In a quickie sale, Napoleon offloads the territory to Thomas Jefferson's government for a mates rate of $15 million,

less than 4 cents an acre.

At a stroke, the Louisiana Purchase more than doubles the geographical size of the United States, advancing it beyond the Appalachians and into the West.

As it happens, As Napoleon is being packed off to Elba, the United States and Britain are at war again.

Among other factors, the newly expansionist US had attempted to invade Canada.

The War of 1812, which actually goes on for three years, will end in a relative stalemate, though not without British troops raiding Washington, D.C.

and torching the White House.

Make no mistake, put all the elements together and this is a World War.

Before the term is redeployed to refer to World War I,

the Napoleonic conflict will be known simply as the Great War.

Bernard Cornwell.

It is a world war, and I always like to point out that it was a war in which both Moscow and Washington were burned to the ground.

I mean, it's an extraordinary coincidence that the two great powers of the Cold War both suffered huge defeats in that war and saw their capitals burned.

On Elba, in June 1814,

Napoleon receives some devastating news.

Josephine has died.

It happened at Malmaison.

After attending a ball, she'd taken a walk in the chilly night air with Tsar Alexander of all people.

A chest cold had turned to pneumonia.

She was just fifty.

Napoleon takes to his room.

He doesn't come out for two days.

When he does, it's with a renewed sense of purpose.

To his mind, Louis XVIII is behaving in violation of the agreement France cut with the Allies.

Napoleon owes it to his people to set things right.

No more Mr.

Nice Guy.

And Elba, it turns out, is not so safe.

Despite the idyllic surroundings, there are rumors of assassination plots.

He escaped Corsica by ship in 1793.

He did the same from Egypt in 1799.

He is about to conduct the mother of all prison breaks.

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Governance of Elba has come with a perk.

A navy.

It amounts to a solitary warship, a two-masted brig named Lanconstan.

It's no match for the British frigate, HMS Partridge, which patrols the island.

But it's it's a seaworthy vessel nonetheless.

And Napoleon understands a thing or two about the human condition.

He knows that his liaison, Colonel Campbell, has a mistress in Florence.

The partridge ferries him over to the mainland when his needs arise.

In secret, Napoleon provisions his brig and waits till Campbell gets his next urge.

He has his men ready to paint the sides in the black and white stripes of a royal naval warship.

Elbor is a wonderful exile.

I mean it's a splendid little place, but he sees that France is decaying under Louis XVIII.

He knows there's an immense amount of dissatisfaction with the new government.

Economically, France is doing badly and he sees his chance.

He's a great opportunist.

On the night of February 26th, 1815, Napoleon climbs on board Lanconstan and slips away.

When he is rowed ashore near Cannes three days later, the locals can hardly believe it.

Whatever one's opinion of Napoleon, life was never dull.

It was said that when the Bourbons were returned to power in 1814, they remembered nothing and had forgotten nothing, by which I mean they tried to go back to the pre-revolutionary days.

And this was something that a people who had spent a quarter of a century with equality before the law and meritocracy and so on were simply not going to allow.

And when Napoleon, therefore, suddenly arrives in the south of France in March 1815, peasants welcomed him in the fields and the streets.

It was a quite extraordinary national revival.

The semaphore telegraphs to Paris go into panicked overdrive.

Napoleon is back.

What's more, he's moving north.

It's a big risk.

There will be Bourbon troops after him.

With less than a thousand men, the little corporal must stick to the back roads.

The plan is to seize the government arsenal at Grenoble in the Alps.

But as Napoleon's army marches, it assumes a gravity of its own.

National Guard and local militia are drawn to it.

With great dramatic flourish, Napoleon declares that he has come back to France to prevent a return to feudalism.

The eagle, bearing the national colours, will fly from belfry to belfry, all the way to the towers of Notre Dame.

In Paris, Louis XVIII summons his generals.

Marshal Ney, a fiery red-haired commander, a former Napoleon favourite, is dispatched.

Ney promises to bring his old boss back in an iron cage.

But Ney is swimming against the tide.

On March the 7th at La Fray, when Bourbon troops block his path, path, Napoleon marches up to them.

He opens his coat, gesturing to his heart.

Soldiers, if there is one among you who wants to kill his general, his Emperor, here I am.

Cries of long live the Emperor ring out.

Soon Marshal Nay too will be switching sides.

Two weeks later, the People's Army is at the gates of Paris.

The flight of the eagle is complete.

With a showman's timing, Napoleon enters on March the 20th, his son's birthday.

King Louis had promised to defend the capital, but he has already bolted.

Napoleon heads straight to the Tuileries Palace and picks up exactly where he left off, summoning his old ministers.

The Bourbons left as quickly as they could that same day, and it's said that Napoleon sat down and ate the dinner that had been cooked for Louis XVIII.

He sends out letters to the crowned heads of Europe.

He will respect the territorial borders imposed upon France.

He seeks no quarrel.

He comes in peace.

The Duke of Wellington is in Vienna when news breaks of Napoleon's escape.

He leaves immediately, heading for Brussels.

Congress, the Viennese one of the United States, brands Napoleon an outlaw.

It decrees Napoleon is an enemy and disturber of the tranquility of the world.

The Allies formally declare war on France, pledging not to cease till Napoleon has been overthrown for good.

Wellington, meanwhile, assembles an army.

The Prussians will march to join him in the southern Netherlands, present-day Belgium.

War meant a lot different to them than it has to us.

It meant promotion for most of the officers.

Certainly, for that part of the officers who had never fought against French forces.

Suddenly, there's this big opportunity again: dead men's shoes.

So there's this rather extraordinary excitement that runs through the British Army and is witnessed in many, many letters and memoirs.

That hey-ho, here we go again.

The Russians and Austrians are also mobilizing.

Together, the Allies can muster 800,000, maybe even a million men.

And so enormous armies all started to converge on France.

Napoleon, who had a much smaller force, about 150,000, about one quarter of the size of the Allied army, seemed like he was doomed.

The only way that Napoleon could win this war was if he could knock the Anglo-Allied army out and force them to retreat back to Britain and then take each of the enemy armies in turn.

As the old mantra goes, attack is the best form of defense.

Napoleon will intercept the British and the Prussians, prevent them from linking.

Napoleon was hoping that if he could win a really convincing victory, and if he could also demonstrate that he really had the people of France behind him, that at that point the allies might be willing to say, all right, the hell with it, we'll make peace.

You can stay there, just just stay within your limits here i think that was his hope wellington's army is not a homogenous entity either less than a third are british half the army speaks german as its first language for napoleon it's a case of maximizing any advantage speed is of the essence he makes a proclamation to his men soldiers We have forced marches to make, battles to fight, dangers to face.

But, with perseverance, victory will be ours.

The rights, the honor, and the welfare of our country will be reclaimed.

In Brussels, on the night of June the 15th, the Duchess of Richmond hosts a grand ball.

Beneath the chandeliers, young officers in dress uniforms whisk young ladies around the dance floor.

The British have brought their weather with them.

Through June, there are storms.

Rain drums hard on the windows.

Attending a ball when military action is afoot may seem a strange course of action.

But Wellington has got his top brass under one roof and in a good mood.

Quietly, behind a facade of confident calm, he can hold a council of war.

The rush to get here via the channel ports has caused mayhem.

General Picton has had his luggage go missing.

He attends the ball, as indeed he willed the battle, in a top hat and old overcoat.

Late that night there is an interruption.

Wellington plays it down, but a Prussian dispatch rider brings alarming news.

There is this fantastic ball, and everyone who's anyone is there.

And suddenly in the middle of this, news comes that Napoleon himself has crossed the frontier at Charlois and is now marching on Brussels and is actually not that far away.

And some of them have no time to change and die still wearing their silk stockings and dancing shoes.

But it is this extraordinary contrast between the luxury and the grandeur of this ball and what is going to happen two days later.

Wellington growls.

Napoleon has humbugged me by God.

He rushes orders to defend of the southerly approaches to Brussels.

A Dutch division will hold the crossroads at Catrel Bra.

The grizzled Prussian warrior General Blucher will defend nearby Ligny.

He will find himself facing Napoleon directly.

In what will prove to be his last ever victory, the little corporal gives the Prussians a beating, though does not pursue them.

They withdraw north.

When the 72-year-old Blucher is trapped under his wounded horse, French cavalry in a moment of gallantry set him free and send him on his way.

Blucher, by the way, is not quite the full shilling.

He had a mental breakdown a couple of years before, and there was always worry that it might return.

It didn't, in fact, return, but he did suffer under the delusion that he had been raped by a French soldier who had delivered an elephant into his womb.

Following a skirmish led by Marshal Ney at Catrobras, Wellington pulls back too.

He will make battle on his own terms.

There is a long, low hill, Mont Saint-Jean, that crosses the Brussels Road.

Before it are cornfields.

To either side are buildings that can be used as strong points.

Farmhouse, a country manor.

Wellington had marked it a year before when he was riding around Belgium as a possible place where an army advancing on Brussels could be stopped.

The one thing that Wellington had was a terrific eye for country.

He always put that down to his fox hunting.

He says that as you're hunting foxes, you learn to read the countryside.

And he sees this ridge as a possible place to fight a battle.

Well, he probably noted down a dozen other places, but somehow this one stuck.

Mont Saint-Jean is the name the French will adopt for the battle.

The British will call it after the nearest village.

an unassuming hamlet, Waterloo.

Napoleon and Wellington have never fought each other, but they've studied each other well.

Yeah, I mean, that's what makes Waterloo so dramatic.

It was the Tsar of Russia who called Wellington the conqueror of the world's conqueror.

And all Europe knew that.

I mean, there's no doubt that by 1815, probably if you'd taken a public opinion poll across the whole of the world, Napoleon was the greatest soldier of the time, but the second greatest soldier of the time was the Duke of Wellington.

And I mean, this is the Wimbledon final between the two favourites, top two seats.

I mean, it's an extraordinary clash, and that gave it a drama all of its own.

That night, the 17th, as the troops assemble, fires burn brightly in both camps.

The overall field of battle is small, just two and a half square miles.

And the morrow, it will be a killing field.

Sunday, June the 18th, 1815.

The rain is relentless till the early hours.

First light reveals a mudbath.

For Napoleon, sodden terrain is ill-suited to quick maneuvering, a disaster for horses and gun carriages.

Cannonballs too are ineffective when they cannot bounce and ricochet.

His right wing, under Marshal Grouchy, has been drawn away east,

but he still has around 73,000 men here, 5,000 more than Wellington.

As the sun rises, it starts to warm up, if they can just let that ground dry out.

Wellington has concealed his army behind Mont Saint-Jean-Ridge.

He never likes to reveal his hand.

He watches from the top alongside his staff officers.

One of them passes him a telescope.

See there, on a white horse, Napoleon,

riding up and down, exhorting his men.

A marksman could easily pick him off.

But Wellington will hear none of it.

Such a sneaky move would be thoroughly ungentlemanly.

There he was at last, the ogre they'd been fighting for so long.

But they had immense respect for him.

I mean, they knew his record, and they knew he was damn difficult to beat.

It's only after 11 o'clock that Napoleon, happy with the conditions, orders his opening artillery salvo.

The delay will prove fatal.

It's given the Prussians additional hours to join the fray.

They're only about eight miles away.

And so, led by his brother Jerome, Napoleon's 2nd Infantry Corps begin their advance.

Of all the battles of the era, Waterloo has been dissected more than any other.

The thrust and counter-thrust, the taking and retaking of the farmhouses, famous images like the charge of the Scots Greys.

Many brave men on both sides will die.

General Picton, on horseback in his top hat and scruffy overcoat, is shot through the head.

At the battle's climax, A ferocious French cavalry charge is repelled by Wellington's red coats, forming themselves into defensive squares, guns and bayonets bristling outwards.

Waterloo is the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life, as Wellington will describe it.

The balance is tipped late afternoon when the black-clad Prussians start arriving through the woods to the east.

By 7 p.m., Their full complement will be doing battle.

Another 50,000 men.

The Allies now have a numerical advantage of nearly two to one.

With a last roll of the dice, Napoleon sends in his old guard the veterans that had been with him from Lodig to Leipzig.

Despite a heroic advance, they're overwhelmed.

For the first time in their illustrious history, they retreat.

Pinned down, they're approached under a white flag by a British officer.

They are brave men, he tells them.

There is no shame in laying down their arms.

He is met by a one-word insult delivered by Major Pierre Cambron.

Merde.

The equivalent of telling the British to go forth and multiply.

The artillery duly pulverizes them.

From opening barrage to last gunshot, the battle lasts nearly 12 hours.

By about 8 o'clock, 8.30 that night, really you couldn't have said who was going to win this.

And it's then that Napoleon throws in his final great attack.

And it's not until that is defeated that suddenly the French army collapse.

Despite it being midsummer, a darkness descends, the black smoke of battle blotting out the sun.

50,000 men lie dead or wounded.

Wellington has still never lost a battle, but that stat is not uppermost in his mind.

As he walks the field, amid the bodies and the guts and the limbs, he meditates on the awfulness.

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

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By the time Wellington and Blucher shake hands at a nearby inn, Napoleon has already left.

He had whispered to a general, Come, sir, the affair is over.

We've lost the day.

Let us be off.

Although the Duke of Wellington was absolutely right in saying that the Battle of Waterloo was a close-run thing, Napoleon, even if he had won Waterloo, he would still have had to face these half a million men that were bearing down on him in the Russian and the Austrian armies.

So, Waterloo is an important and decisive battle in European history.

But even if it had gone gone the other way, it would not necessarily have meant that Napoleon could have stayed on the throne.

With the roads clogged, Napoleon abandons his carriage to travel by horseback.

Four days later, he's in Paris.

News of the earlier victory at Ligny had spread quickly.

There's been an eerie silence ever since, but word is seeping out.

Men are drifting back.

Brothers Joseph and Lucien rush to his side.

There is no choice.

To spare France, Napoleon must abdicate.

On June the 22nd, 1815, Napoleon does so for a second time, appointing, as before, his son as heir.

He is sacrificing himself, he declares, for his love of the nation.

On July the 8th, Louis XVIII is restored to the throne.

Napoleon's second coming is over.

It lasted just three and a half months.

With mathematical license, this period will be known as the Hundred Days.

On the run through western France, Napoleon heads for the port of Rochefort.

He must hurry.

Bourbon and Prussian cavalry patrols are out.

At the port, two frigates are waiting for him.

He might just be able to sneak away to the United States, where he can live as a private citizen, citizen, perhaps even get there in disguise.

But it would smack of desertion, an ignoble end.

Plus, there's a new problem.

The 74-gun warship, HMS Bellerophon, veteran of the Nile and Trafalgar, is now blocking the harbour.

Behind him, on land, the Prussians are closing in.

They are not inclined to clemency.

It's the devil or the deep blue sea.

Napoleon sends riders to approach the Royal Navy squadron.

On July the 15th, Captain Frederick Maitland, the Bellerophon skipper, agrees to take Napoleon on board.

After being rowed out, the ex-Emperor of France steps up the gangway.

He declares formally, I come on board your ship, to place myself under the laws of England.

Play it by the book, and he could live quietly in exile, perhaps in a house in the English countryside, just like Louis XVIII did.

Or so he hopes.

With Napoleon's departure imminent, he's leaving behind a country that has been invaded twice in just over a year.

After the Waterloo campaign, that's when you get this long-term occupation.

It's a bit like the occupation of Germany after World War II.

You get the division of France into zones of occupation and each power has has its zone.

So, you've got an Austrian zone, you've got a Prussian zone, you've got a British zone, you've got a Russian zone, and then you've got an overall commander-in-chief who's the Duke of Wellington.

Yeah, I mean, the French aren't very keen on this, there's sort of, you know, sullen resentment.

I think some of the occupiers have better reputations than the others.

The Prussians have a fairly sort of bad reputation.

They've suffered a lot under French occupation after 1807.

So, you know, it's payback time as far as they're concerned.

It was the Prussians who'd been keenest to string Napoleon up.

And Wellington was absolutely against that.

There were huge arguments between the Brits and the Prussians in Paris in 1815.

And Wellington wrote that if you want to execute Napoleon, fine, but I will not be the executioner.

Meanwhile, war-weary Paris gets on with life in the face of its new occupiers.

and their unfamiliar habits.

Russian soldiers like to be served their food plain plain and simple, and right away.

A new type of restaurant springs up, dishing out the 19th-century equivalent of fast food.

It's named after the Russian word for quickly, oft yelled at harried waiters, bistro.

It will take an unusual nine days for Napoleon to reach England.

There are squalls in the Bay of Biscay.

On the 23rd, as he rounds the Breton island at Uchant,

he stares landward wistfully.

It's the last time you will ever see France.

In English waters, after the surreal freak show in Plymouth, the Bellerophon prepares to weigh anchor.

There was talk in Plymouth of a magistrate issuing a writ of habeas corpus in order to bring him onto British soil.

But they were actually afraid that there might even be some sort of legal procedure to free Napoleon because he did have a lot of friends, a lot of supporters.

Any notion that Napoleon had about a comfortable retirement is mere fancy.

He will be dispatched, he is told, to St.

Helena in the South Atlantic, a craggy volcanic island 10 miles by six, one of the most remote spots on Earth.

Napoleon protests, but it's to no avail.

He'd have settled for anything that gave him a chance to come back.

And that was very much the view of the Allies, that you can't believe a word he says.

He promises to live in peace.

And the next thing you know, you've got 150,000 Frenchmen up your backside.

Just don't trust him.

Dr.

Michael Rappon, I have to say, if I'd been Napoleon and was told, right, you're going to be on Elba, a Tuscan island in the Mediterranean with your own little guard, you know, with your library, I think I would have done that.

But then to come back to Europe because you can't help yourself, to reignite the war in Europe, when remember delegates are already at Vienna talking about peace and how to reorder Europe to make sure the peace lasts, to reignite it, to then unleash carnage in the Low Countries.

Yeah, send him to St.

Selena.

Napoleon spends the next three days sulking in his cabin.

He will be transferred to the even bigger HMS Northumberland for the long journey south.

On it, he will meet the small entourage permitted to go with him.

It will include General Bertrand, his aide-de-camp Charles de Montalon, and their wives, his chamberlain, Emmanuel Comte de Las Caz,

and his Mameluk manservant, Ali.

In actual fact, Ali is a Frenchman, real name Louis Etienne.

In accordance with Napoleon's imperial delusion, he's required to dress up as an Egyptian warrior.

Napoleon's personal physician refuses to take the trip.

Into the breach steps de Bellerophon's Irish surgeon, Barry O'Meara.

On the ten-week voyage, Napoleon enters into the usual familiar badinage with the crew.

They play cards, they play chess, he brushes up on his English.

When they pass the equator, Napoleon joins in with the humorous crossing the line ceremony.

But when he arrives at St.

Helena on October the 15th, It's a shock to the system.

When one arrives at St.

Helena by ship, one sees these very forbidding 600 feet rocks, and Napoleon, when he saw them, said, I'd have done better to have stayed in Egypt.

Napoleon's assigned orderly, Captain Thomas Poppleton, is another respectful host.

While Longwood House, Napoleon's designated residence, is being prepared, Poppleton arranges for him to lodge with the family of William Balcombe, an official with the East India Company.

There Napoleon strikes up an innocent friendship with the Balcombe's thirteen-year-old daughter Betsy.

With his broken English and her schoolgirl French, they tease each other.

She finds the Corsican ogre quite the teddy bear.

He delights in the distraction of games like Blind Man's Buff.

Miss Betsy is his Bambina, as he calls her.

My little monkey.

Things are to change, however, and for the worse.

In December 1815 comes the move to Longwood House.

Remote, at a high elevation in the island's interior, the small wooden building has been chosen to diminish Napoleon's chances of escape.

St.

Helena is tropical, but its climate is mild, blasted by trade winds and cold ocean currents.

At Longwood, up in the clouds, It's permanently damp.

And it's a perfectly nice house, but it's very small.

It's like having to move from Buckingham Palace to a council house.

It was also infested by rats, and he's always surrounded by red coats.

It must have been incredibly humiliating and dispiriting, but tough.

It's better than being stood against a wall and shot.

The house actually spends about 300 of the 365 days of the year in the cloud.

They had to heat up the claying cards because otherwise they all stuck together in the damp.

And it was made worse by the fact that the british jailer sir hudson lowe was a small-minded petty fogging rather pedantic individual

sir hudson low the island's new governor will have no truck with all the civility prisoner bonaparte is a man never to be let out of sight the island garrison grows to 2 000

Two warships circle permanently.

As Lowe would have it, he is simply doing his job.

Napoleon tricked them once before, and there are constant rumors, even here, of plots to free him.

Well, there was even a scheme to make Napoleon the Emperor of South America, and a ship was actually sent to rescue him from St.

Helena, but got there just after he died, I think.

The idea was to somehow liberate him from Longwood, take him to South America, and then unite all the ex-Spanish colonies and Portuguese colonies into one massive new empire ruled by Napoleon.

And it's like something out of a novel.

Sir Hudson rations Napoleon's butter and firewood.

When Napoleon takes up gardening, Lowe won't let him grow vegetables.

Green is the Republican color.

He might be communicating in code.

Napoleon is just left to do what he's done best these last few months.

Reminisce to anyone who listen about old exaggerated glories.

He still finds time to have an affair with Mrs.

Albine de Montalon, wife of his aide-de-camp.

In 1816, on St.

Helena, she gives birth to a daughter, Helena Napoleone Bonaparte.

Resigned to his fate, Napoleon decides that if he's going to leave a legacy, he'd best craft the narrative himself.

His rambling monologues are soon channeled into official memoirs, which will be published posthumously as the memorial of St.

Helena.

So it was a sad end, but in a sense, he needed his time on St.

Helena in order to create the myth of Napoleon.

It gave him six years in order to write his memoirs, which turned out to be the biggest bestseller of the 19th century.

He was able to present the whole story very much in his terms, of course, and he was able to create this myth of the ill-treated figure.

In 1817, Napoleon's health begins to deteriorate.

The unsympathetic Lowe pays little heed to Sergein O'Meara's concerns and dismisses him from service.

The decline is slow at first, but by the end, Napoleon is constantly coughing up blood, doubled over in pain, suffering, it will turn out, from the same stomach cancer that killed his father.

The bearded, gaunt figure shuffling around Longwood is barely recognizable from the pudgy thirty-something who had crowned himself emperor.

Throughout his military adventures, Napoleon always slept on his trusty iron campaign bed.

It has travelled with him all the way to the South Atlantic,

though this is one battle even he cannot win.

To get better air, he's dragged it into the sitting-room.

It is there, on the evening of Saturday, May the 5th, 1821, that he breathes his last.

He was 51.

His final words are,

France, the Army,

Josephine.

I think he himself obviously would have preferred to have died heroically, but it's a key part of the legend.

You know, Napoleon, you know, loved to pose as a mythic character, and he embodied many mythic characters over the course of his career.

He's Hercules, he's Icarus sailing too close to the sun, he's Prometheus, and in some ways, also, he even posed a little bit as Christ, sacrificing himself for his country.

So I think, you know, St.

Helena served to solidify the myth in that sense, the mythic status of Napoleon.

Dr.

Patrice Genife.

He dies like a mythological hero because it's the end of Prometheus, chained to a rock with his liver devoured, in reality by cancer, and symbolically by a vulture.

so it's a mythological end on this rock lost at the end of the world this man who at one point held the world in his hand

napoleon is buried with full military honours on saint helena but later in 1840 french king louis philippe hoping to boost his sagging popularity agrees to have his remains repatriated.

On December the 15th of that year for the state funeral he never had, Napoleon's casket is borne on an enormous gilded carriage through the center of Paris.

A million people throng the streets.

Veterans sob openly.

Even beyond the grave, Napoleon stirs feelings.

The monarchy's days are numbered.

There had been a second revolution in 1830.

A third will follow in 1848.

A second republic will emerge under an elected president, Charles-Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon's nephew.

He will tear a leaf out of his uncle's book and declare himself emperor.

Napoleon's own son, Napoleon II, died aged 21 of tuberculosis.

Charles-Louis will rule from 1852 as Napoleon III.

There are, globally, two Napoleons.

The Napoleon of the left, he embodies the revolution.

He is on the side of the people.

And then a right-wing Napoleon, the man of order.

Today in France, every episode in history, every character in history, is the subject of permanent memory battles.

Napoleon is no exception.

People rarely celebrate his battles these days.

The warrior has disappeared.

But on the other hand, a whole part of public opinion continues to see in Napoleon the man who put an end to 10 years of revolution, 10 years of civil war, and then the man who rebuilt the state and gave solid structures to society, since a large part of our institutions today are the direct heritage of Napoleon.

Therefore, it is more the statesman who remains celebrated than the conqueror and the warrior.

One could say that the character who continues to be admired is Bonaparte and not Napoleon.

Napoleon Bonaparte's remains are interred in a red quartzite sarcophagus in Paris's Hotel des Invalides.

They sit there still.

To die is nothing, he once said, but to live defeated and without glory is to die every day.

Real dictators will return in the coming weeks with the story of Vladimir Lenin.

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