Confined to the volcanic outcrop of St. Helena since 1815, Napoleon spent his final years dictating memoirs and quarreling with his British jailers. He died at age 51, likely from stomach cancer, though rumors of arsenic poisoning persisted for generations. His body was returned to France in 1840 to a hero's burial at Les Invalides.
By the time Napoleon Bonaparte died at Longwood House on May 5, 1821, he had been reduced from master of Europe to a bored, ailing exile guarded by British soldiers on a speck of volcanic rock in the South Atlantic, 1,200 miles from the nearest continent. He spent his last years re-fighting his campaigns for visitors, dictating a self-serving memoir, and feuding bitterly with the island's governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, over matters as petty as his title.
His final words, according to attendants, trailed into delirium about army and France. An autopsy revealed a perforated stomach ulcer, consistent with the cancer that had killed his father, though the arsenic found in later hair-sample tests fueled decades of poisoning theories, most now attributed to contaminated wallpaper pigment or medicinal use rather than murder.
France did not forget him. In 1840, King Louis Philippe arranged for Napoleon's remains to be shipped home in a ceremony of almost absurd grandeur, the coffin carried up the Champs-Élysées through freezing crowds to a tomb beneath the golden dome of Les Invalides, where he remains one of history's most argued-over figures.
Key people: Napoleon Bonaparte, Hudson Lowe