The rivalry between Britain and France sometimes touches legendary peaks. The British can find the ”Frogs” unbearably smug or lazy, while the French like to stereotype ”les Rosbifs” as irredeemably cold or treacherous.
British ale drinkers find French lager a tasteless joke, while French foodies lampoon the Brits for ”putting jam on everything,” a reference to mint sauce, the traditional accompaniment for roast lamb.
But one thing, at least, can finally be settled. And let the world be witness. The British did not kill Napoleon.
For decades, the ugly rumour gripped French historical circles that the British — true to their perfidious nature ? slowly poisoned l’Empereur while he was in exile in Saint Helena, where he died on May 5 1821 at the age of 51.
Convincing proof of these suspicions appeared to emerge in June 2001, when a team led by Strasbourg autopsy specialist Pascal Kintz did a chemical analysis of a lock of hair cut from Bonaparte after his death.
They found the hairs contained levels of arsenic which were between seven and 38 times normal levels: ”an incontrovertible sign of poisoning,” Kintz said darkly.
Heads nodded around France. The architect of national glory, whose renown is reflected to this day in innumerable statues, monuments and street names, could only have been brought low by an act of typically British baseness.
Now, however, science has stepped in to redress the balance. The magazine Science et Vie has carried out a fresh inquiry, on 19 hairs taken from Napoleon in 1805, 1814 — before he went into exile — and in 1821.
All the samples contain massive doses of arsenic, ranging from 15 to 100 parts per million (ppm), it reported on Monday. On average, human hair contains only 0,8 ppm of arsenic, and the maximum limit considered safe is three ppm.
”There was no poisoning,” Science et Vie declares bluntly. Ivan Ricordel, head of the toxicology laboratory at Paris police headquarters, who led the team that carried out the latest tests, is adamant.
”If arsenic caused Napoleon’s death, he would have died three times over,” he says. The conclusion is drawn after an exhaustive 18-month battery of 1 000 tests on the 19 samples, chief of which was synchrotron radiation, which uses a laser beam in the X-ray part of the energy spectrum to detect traces of individual chemicals.
Because of the way hair grows and the way it absorbs arsenic, the poison is spread across the strand, which make it impossible to say exactly when the chemical was absorbed. So where did the arsenic come from?
Science et Vie sees several possibilities. It could have come from arsenic in the wallpaper at Napoleon’s house in Longwood on St Helena, or in wood used to heat its rooms. Another potential source was handling gun cartridges, which contained arsenic at the time.
However, ”the most plausible source,” it says, is the most banal: hair restorer, a product that in the early 19th century typically contained lots of arsenic.
Napoleon was captured by Britain after his defeat in Waterloo in 1815, and then transferred to St Helena, a tiny South Atlantic island a thousand kilometres from the African coast.
The history books, based on an autopsy carried out by British doctors, say he died of complications from a perforated gastric ulcer that may have been cancerous.
In 1840, his remains were taken back to Paris, where he was entombed in pomp in a vast marble catafalque beneath the gilt dome of the Invalides military hospital.
The new study not only makes Britain blameless in Napoleon’s demise, it also lifts the shadow from Count Charles de Montholon, who accompanied the emperor into exile. Amateur historians have portrayed de Montholon as the evil hand behind the poisoning, acting either at London’s behest or out of jealousy.
However, conspiracy theorists are unlikely to be silenced, not least because Napoleon is undergoing a huge revival in books, film and on the stage.
A small but vocal group, led by lawyer Bruno Roy-Henry, believe the British did the ultimate in treachery — for a laugh, they swapped bodies, gulling the poor French into burying a Bonaparte lookalike.
Roy-Henry is campaigning for the corpse in the Invalides to be exhumed and submitted to a DNA test but this was tersely rejected in August by the ministry of defence, which is in charge of the imperial remains. – Sapa-AFP