Buried Napoleons and Other Nonsense

Today is the Ides of April and my thoughts keep spinning around the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of Lincoln, and (unfortunately) Napoleon.  I say “unfortunately” because every time I write about the little emperor, angry readers send email reminding me that I have written way, way too frequently about the diminutive Corsican whom the British monarchy referred to as the “Beast”.

I apologize in advance.  While many of the posts in this blog tell an orderly story, with a solid beginning, lots of details, and a solid conclusion…. too many others bounce along, jumping from topic to topic to topic, reminiscent of a ping-pong ball going down a long flight of stairs.  This is one of the latter.

Napoleon, of course, wrote his last will and testament on April 15, 1821, just three weeks before he died of stomach cancer,… or gallstones,… or pneumonia.  Or, maybe, he was assassinated by the British oligarchy, as Napoleon declared in his will.  Famously, the second line of his will states: “It is my wish that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people, whom I have loved so well.”

The phrase “my ashes” has caused no end of confusion with historians for years.  Napoleon was not cremated nor did he wish to be, the word ashes refers to a French idiom, referring to the whole remains of deceased person, much like the phrase “dust to dust” in English.  The confusion also led to endless speculation that Napoleon was secretly smuggled off St. Helena to plan his triumphant return to Europe.  (Publicly, I can neither confirm nor deny that Napoleon is currently shacked up in a messy love triangle with Elvis and Amelia Earhart at Camp David.)

When the Emperor died in 1821, an autopsy was performed, discovering a stomach tumor that was attributed to gallstones.  His viscera were removed and placed in a large soup tureen until jars could be located.  The body, along with those jars, was placed in a tin coffin that was soldered shut, which in turn was placed in a mahogany coffin that was closed and fastened with screws.  This coffin was then placed inside a lead coffin with the seams soldered shut, then finally placed inside a larger mahogany enclosure, which was buried in a stone-lined crypt and covered with cement.  Evidently, the British were just a little afraid that the Beast might decide to wake up and raise another army.

Almost two decades later, King Louis Philippe of France decided that the emperor’s remains had to be brought back to Paris.  In the presence of both English and French officials who had been present at the 1821 funeral, the coffin was dug up, the outer wooden coffin demolished and the three inner coffins opened.  Napoleon was still recognizable to those present.  Then, the three coffins were resealed, with both the tin and lead coffins having their seams soldered shut again.  The body was then shipped to Paris and placed in the sarcophagus at Les Invalides where it still remains.  Despite the persistent rumors, there is no reason to believe that the coffins have been opened since 1840.

Which brings us back to Napoleon’s will.  The emperor had not only been generous, he was a little overly generous, leaving more bequests than his estate could handle.  Worse, he left sums of money to people that the authorities—including King Louis Philippe—didn’t really like.  All of this meant lawsuits and court cases that lasted until 1860.  A significant part of the problem was that Napoleon’s principle heir, his son Napoleon II, died in 1832 at the age of 22, long before the estate was finalized.

Young Napoleon II died of pneumonia in Vienna.  As his mother was a Hapsburg, the family followed the royal tradition and carefully removed his heart and viscera.  Following the long-established Hapsburg tradition, his heart was stored in Urn 42 in the Herzgruff (Heart Crypt) and his other assorted viscera are stored in Urn 76 a couple of blocks away at the Kaisergruft (Ducal Crypt).  The rest of him was buried.  Over a century later, Adolf Hitler moved the body to Paris and buried him underground in his father’s tomb, but left the squishy parts in their jars in Vienna.

While it has been fairly common knowledge that removing the internal organs will aid in the preservation of a body—that’s why the ancient Egyptians stored the organs of the deceased in canopic jars—this doesn’t seem to be the reason for why the monarchs of Austria believed in home canning.  Why did the Hapsburgs decide to pickle intestines?  Well, compared to what the other branch of the Hapsburg family does with their deceased, it’s almost normal.  When thinking about any part of the Hapsburg dynasty, it’s useful to remember that the family is so inbred that if common sense were leather, the collected brains of the whole family couldn’t shoe a flea.

Which brings us to Napoleon III, the first president of the French Republic who later seized the throne and became the second Emperor of France.  Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was kind of a jack of all trades.  He was once a London constable, wrote a manual for artillery, was a friend of Charles Dickens, and after his abdication, spent his years in exile in England trying to develop an energy efficient stove.  Like his famous uncle, he developed gallstones and died from complications after the second surgery to correct the problem.

Napoleon III’s son, wasn’t officially Napoleon IV—though I’m going to call him that—he was Napoléon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte, The Prince Imperial or just plain Lou-Lou to his friends.  He did what every Napoleon before him had done:  he went to a military school and joined the army.  In Lou-Lou’s case, it was the Royal Military Academy and the Royal Artillery.  Unlikely as it seems, Napoleon IV was a Lieutenant in the British Army.  Equally weird, Queen Victoria was planning on marrying her youngest daughter, Beatrice to the young man as soon as his military unit returned from fighting the Zulus in Africa.  

Note:  The Queen had a plan to homestead all of Europe by marrying eight of her nine children off to the heads of European countries.  The idea was that if the head of every European nation were a member of the same family, this would prevent war, right?  During the First World War, the Russian Czar, the German Kaiser, and the King of England were all first cousins, and despite sharing a royal grandmother, they still took the world to war.  

Unfortunately, from the picture at right, you can see that Lou-Lou did not live long enough to fulfill his destiny and reestablish French Monarchy.  After dying in a skirmish with the Zulu, his body was returned to his mother, who buried both her son and her husband in the Imperial Crypt at St Michael's Abbey, Farnborough, Hampshire, England.  I cannot find evidence of any other monument in England honoring a Napoleon.

One last thing about Napoleon IV.  All of the history books say he was killed by an assegai spear.  If you actually read the official report, he had eighteen separate stab wounds, including the fatal one that punctured his left eye and pierced his brain.  These wounds, however, weren’t from an assegai spear.

The original assegai spear is slightly more than six and a half feet long, with a metal double edge tip.  Shaka Zulu, the legendary Zulu leader, modified the weapon, shortening the wooden handle to just two feet while lengthening the sharp blade to a full foot, this giving the warrior a weapon that could be thrown, or used in close combat as a combination sword and ax.  This weapon, called the iklwa or ixwa, was the weapon that killed Napoleon IV.

The strangely named weapon is pronounced as E-KWA, which according to the Zulu, is the sound the weapon makes when you pull it out of your victim.