Hair Analysis Deflates Napoleon Poisoning Theories

For decades, scholars and scientists have argued that the exiled dictator, who died in 1821 on the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, was the victim of arsenic, whether by accident or design.

The murder theory held that his British captors poisoned him; the accident theory said that colored wallpaper in his bedroom contained an arsenic-based dye that mold transformed into poisonous fumes.

The evidence behind both theories was that scientists had found arsenic in hairs from Napoleon’s head, which diminished the idea that he had died of stomach cancer. Arsenic is highly toxic, and its poisoning symptoms include violent stomach pains.

“There is nothing improbable about the hypothesis of arsenic poisoning,” wrote Frank McLynn in “Napoleon: A Biography” (Arcade, 2002). “Science gives it rather more than warranted assertibility.”

But now, a team of scientists at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Milan-Bicocca and Pavia has uncovered strong evidence to the contrary. They conducted a detailed analysis of hairs taken from Napoleon’s head at four times in his life — as a boy in Corsica, during his exile on the island of Elba, the day he died on St. Helena, at age 51, and the day afterward — and discovered that the arsenic levels underwent no significant rises.

Casting a wide net, the scientists also studied hairs from his son, Napoleon II, and his wife, Empress Josephine. Here, too, they found that the arsenic levels were similar and uniformly high.

The big surprise was that the old levels were roughly 100 times the readings that the scientists obtained for comparison from the hairs of living people.

“The concentrations of arsenic in the hair taken from Napoleon after his death were much higher,” the scientists wrote. But the levels were “quite comparable with that found not only in the hair of the emperor in other periods of his life, but also in those of his son and first wife.”

The results, they added, “undoubtedly reveal a chronic exposure that we believe can be simply attributed to environmental factors, unfortunately no longer easily identifiable, or habits involving food and therapeutics.”

A team of 10 scientists reported their results in a recent issue of the Italian journal Il Nuovo Saggiatore (The New Experimenter). The hair samples of Napoleon and his family came from the Glauco-Lombardi Museum in Parma, Italy, the Malmaison Museum in Paris and the Napoleonic Museum in Rome.