How Did Napoleon Die?

Napoleon Bonaparte died on 5 May 1821, on the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena — a lonely, drawn-out end for a man who had ruled most of continental Europe barely a decade earlier. His death came nearly six years after his final military defeat, in conditions of exile and declining health far removed from the battlefields that had defined his career.

From Waterloo to a second exile

Napoleon's final bid for power, the Hundred Days, ended in defeat at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. He abdicated for the second and final time days later and surrendered himself to the British, hoping — unsuccessfully — for asylum in England. Instead, the British government exiled him to Saint Helena, a small, isolated volcanic island roughly 1,900 kilometers off the coast of Africa, chosen specifically for its remoteness and difficulty of escape. He arrived in October 1815 and would never leave.

Six years of declining health

Confined to the island under close British guard, Napoleon spent his final years dictating memoirs, gardening, and increasingly clashing with the island's governor, Hudson Lowe, over the restrictions of his captivity. His health deteriorated steadily through 1820 and into 1821, with severe stomach pain and weight loss. He died on 5 May 1821 at the age of 51.

What actually killed him

The autopsy conducted at the time recorded stomach cancer as the cause of death, and this remains the conclusion most historians and medical researchers accept today — Napoleon's father had died of the same disease, and the autopsy findings are broadly consistent with it. A competing theory, that he was slowly poisoned with arsenic, gained popular attention in the twentieth century after arsenic traces were found in preserved samples of his hair; most historians consider this unproven and likely explained by arsenic's common presence in period wallpaper dyes and medicines rather than deliberate poisoning.

A final return to France

Napoleon was buried on Saint Helena, but in 1840 his remains were exhumed and returned to Paris in an event known as the retour des cendres, where they were interred in a grand tomb at Les Invalides — the resting place that had eluded him for nearly two decades.

The letters corpus behind this map runs from 1793 to 1815 and does not extend into Napoleon's exile — there is no correspondence from Saint Helena to plot. The closest genuine match in the tag taxonomy is the Hundred Days and the Waterloo campaign, the final chapter of his political and military life that the map does cover, immediately preceding the exile described above.