The British island of Saint Helena, lost in the South Atlantic, hosted Napoleon from October 15, 1815 until his death on May 5, 1821. Longwood House became his forced residence.

Historical context

The choice was deliberate: after Elba, London wanted a prison that geography alone would guard. Saint Helena is a volcano of one hundred and twenty square kilometres, nineteen hundred kilometres from the African coast, held by a garrison of two thousand men with two ships permanently on station. He landed there on 15 October 1815.

After two months at the Briars he moved in December to Longwood, a former farm on the plateau swept by the trade winds, so damp that papers went mouldy and hangings rotted. Around him a court of a few faithful: Bertrand, Montholon, Gourgaud, Las Cases and the valet Marchand.

Governor Hudson Lowe, who arrived in April 1816, applied the regulations to the letter: expenses cut, rides restricted, visits controlled, the imperial title refused. Clashes were constant. With no action left, Napoleon dictated — the campaigns of Italy and Egypt, memories, judgements on men; in 1816 Las Cases carried away the manuscript that became the Memorial.

He died on 5 May 1821 and lay in the Geranium valley beneath a slab left blank, for want of agreement on the name to engrave. The body left again in 1840 for the Invalides. Longwood and the valley, bought by France in 1858, have since formed a French domain administered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.