Napoleon Bonaparte dies in exile on Saint Helena
On this day · 5 May 1821
On May 5, 1821, the emperor who had redrawn Europe died of stomach cancer in a damp house on one of the loneliest islands on Earth.
On May 5, 1821, Napoleon Bonaparte died at Longwood House on Saint Helena, a wind-scoured speck in the South Atlantic where the British had stashed him after Waterloo. He was 51.
For months he had been wasting away, plagued by stomach pain, nausea, and vomiting. An autopsy the next day, performed by his own physician alongside British doctors, pointed to advanced gastric cancer with internal bleeding, the same disease that had killed his father. Later poisoning theories, including arsenic, have not held up against the medical record.
The man who once commanded armies across a continent spent his final years arguing with his jailers over the size of his household.
He was buried on the island under a plain, unnamed slab. Nearly two decades on, in 1840, France brought his remains home in the grand “Retour des Cendres,” and he was entombed beneath the dome of Les Invalides in Paris, where crowds still file past today.
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