An illustrated 1852 edition of Las Cases's Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, the founding text of the Napoleonic legend — An illustrated 1852 edition of the *Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène* — the legend in mass-market form, three decades on. Public domain.

The Legend Industry

He lost the war and won the story. The memoirs, the bestsellers, the exhumation, and the tomb — how Napoleon was rebuilt, in print and in stone, after 1815.

The founding text

The Napoleonic legend has a publication date: 1823, when Emmanuel de Las Cases’s Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène appeared in eight volumes. Las Cases had begun his journal on 20 June 1815, two days after Waterloo; aboard the Bellerophon he and Napoleon agreed to “write our Memoirs”; for eighteen months on St. Helena he transcribed the Emperor’s table-talk nightly, his son Emmanuel making the fair copy.

The Mémorial’s Napoleon is a very particular construction: the heir of the Revolution, the liberal martyr, the man who “would have” freed the peoples of Europe if the kings had let him — the conqueror recast as a victim of the old order. It was, between 1826 and 1840, one of the bestselling books in France. Generations of Frenchmen learned Napoleon from Las Cases before they learned him from any historian.

The discount: Las Cases was a partisan writing from memory, expelled from St. Helena in December 1816 after being caught smuggling letters; the British held his manuscript until after Napoleon’s death. Everything in the Mémorial is Napoleon as Las Cases heard him, or as Las Cases wished him heard. This site treats it as a reported source — invaluable, and never to be taken straight.

The memoir wars

Las Cases was only the first manufacturer. St. Helena produced a small industry of competing memories:

Barry O’Meara, the British surgeon: Napoleon in Exile (1822) — the sympathetic English witness, published while the body was barely cold.
General de Montholon: Histoire de la captivité de Sainte-Hélène (1846–47) — the head of household’s version, self-serving and detailed.
General Gourgaud: his journal, not published until 1899 — prickly, score-settling, the least romantic of the inner circle.
General Bertrand: the Cahiers de Sainte-Hélène, not published until 1949–59 — the Grand Marshal’s day-by-day record, the driest and in some ways the most reliable.
Louis Marchand, the valet: memoirs published 1950 — the servant’s-eye view, and the book that launched the arsenic-poisoning theory (see The Death Controversy).

Each memoirist was selling something: vindication, a pension, a score settled, a legend burnished. The contradictions between them are the real historical record of Longwood — and a standing warning about everything “Napoleon said” at St. Helena.

The body comes home

In 1840, King Louis-Philippe’s government — hoping to borrow some glory — sent the Prince de Joinville with the frigate La Belle Poule to bring the Emperor’s remains home: the retour des cendres. The exhumation on St. Helena produced the famous scene: the coffin opened, the body reportedly perfectly preserved in its uniform — a detail the poisoning theorists would later seize on. Paris gave him a state funeral of operatic scale; Victor Hugo wrote, Béranger’s songs were sung in every café, and the July Monarchy discovered it had resurrected a ghost it couldn’t control.

The remains waited twenty years for their monument: the great tomb under the dome of Les Invalides, completed in 1861 — red porphyry sarcophagus on green granite, in a circular crypt, visited by millions. The photograph on this site’s Biography page shows it as it is today.

The legend as politics

The legend refused to stay literary. Under the Second Empire (1848–1870), Napoleon III — the Emperor’s nephew — made the uncle’s myth the regime’s operating system: the Napoleonic legend as a governing ideology, complete with its own historians, painters, and public works. Earlier, the legend had been the romance of the liberal opposition under the Restoration; later it would be the reference point for everyone from French nationalists to military theorists.

Historians call this whole phenomenon the Napoleonic legend (la légende napoléonienne): not a lie, exactly, but a selection — the Code and Austerlitz kept, the Spanish ulcer and the 1812 dead filed away. The industry that built it — memoirs, songs, prints, exhumations, tombs — is one of the most successful reputation campaigns in history. Its founder was its subject: nobody dictated his own legend as industriously as Napoleon did at Longwood.

Reading against the legend

This site’s rule, stated in Methodology: the legend is evidence of what people wanted to believe, not of what happened. Every quotation from the St. Helena years carries its channel of transmission — Las Cases, Montholon, Gourgaud, Bertrand, O’Meara, Marchand — so the reader can apply the discount each witness has earned.

Source notes

Documented: the Mémorial’s composition timeline (journal from 20 June 1815; expulsion December 1816; manuscript confiscated and returned; publication 1823, 8 volumes); the bestseller status 1826–1840; the publication dates of the rival memoirs (O’Meara 1822; Montholon 1846–47; Gourgaud 1899; Bertrand 1949–59; Marchand 1950); the 1840 retour des cendres (Joinville, La Belle Poule); the Invalides tomb (completed 1861).
Reported: the memoirists’ motives and the characterizations of their accounts follow the standard historiography; the “perfectly preserved” exhumation detail is the witnesses’ claim, cited as such.
Interpretive: “the Napoleonic legend” as a historiographical concept is the historians’ term, used here in that sense.
Image: an illustrated 1852 edition of the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (Paris: G. Barba) — the legend in mass-market form, three decades on. Public domain. Provenance: the image credits on this page.