Napoleon Bonaparte

November 5, 2001
Napoleon, Europe's 19th-century bête noir, spent his final years as Britain's prisoner, in the custody of Sir Hudson Lowe on the isolated south Atlantic island of St. Helena. This esoteric addition to the vast assortment of Napoleonic literature concerns the adversarial relationship between the former emperor and his keeper and the controversy Napoleon's exile spawned in Britain. Giles, former literary editor of London's Sunday Times
and author of The Locust Years: The Story of the Fourth French Republic, proposes that the historical view of Lowe as a "pettifogging, tactless, suspicious, tyrannical officer" was the result of a "ceaseless campaign of vilification mounted against him by Bonaparte." Readers will find Giles's descriptions of Napoleon in exile—no longer battling Wellington over countries, but battling Lowe over the protocols of dinner invitations and his right to be called emperor—are poignant and pathetic. Much of the book is devoted to the discord within English society generated by his captivity. Giles explores the opinions of Lord and Lady Holland, prominent Whigs who steadfastly argued Bonaparte's case against Lowe, as well as those of Byron and Wordsworth, and artists and historians. The controversy did not end with Napoleon's death. He was interred on St. Helena despite his wish to be returned to France upon his death; 19 years later, the French government, hoping to appease a restless French citizenry nostalgic for past "Imperial glory," requested that the English allow Bonaparte's remains to be removed there. Ironically, the English complied with the request in order to help cement ties between the two nations. Giles is a straightforward writer and a diligent researcher, but this narrow slice of history will draw only the most devoted students of Napoleon and his era. Illus. not seen by PW.