The choice of site was a political decision. Governor Hudson Lowe and the Admiralty wanted Napoleon far from the sea, far from ships and far from Jamestown: Longwood stands at five hundred metres, on a bare plateau exposed to the trade winds, where damp rots wood and paper within months. The house itself was a farm building belonging to the lieutenant-governor, hastily enlarged.
He moved in on 10 December 1815 with a suite of some twenty people. Life organised itself around dictation: Las Cases, Montholon, Gourgaud and Bertrand took down the recollections that became the Memorial of Saint Helena, published in 1823 and one of the great publishing successes of the nineteenth century. It is in these low rooms that the Napoleonic legend was manufactured.
He died there on 5 May 1821, in the small drawing room turned into a bedroom. The house was then left to farm use; it served as barn and stable for thirty-seven years. In 1858 Napoleon III bought Longwood and the Valley of the Tomb from the British government: the two properties have been French territory ever since, administered by a consul.
The latest restoration campaign, launched in 2008 after an international subscription and completed in 2021 for the bicentenary of his death, redid the roof timbers, wallpapers and furniture from period inventories. Today one visits rooms furnished as in 1821 — one of the rare Napoleonic houses preserved in its terminal state rather than its splendour.
