Napoleon 'was poisoned'

2005-06-03 07:57

Anabelle Nicoud

Paris - Unearthing a long-running debate, a French toxicologist said on Thursday that new scientific evidence supports the theory that French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was poisoned with arsenic.

Pascal Kintz, working on a request from the head of the International Napoleonic Society, said he had found traces of the poison in two strands of the French emperor's hair, supporting similar conclusions from past tests on samples of Napoleon's hair.

Napoleon's ultimate fate has fuelled controversy over the years, with some arguing he died not of stomach cancer - as the official version tells - but from poisoning.

"I'm simply saying that the arsenic found in his hair is mineral - thus, there was poisoning," said Kintz, president of the International Association of Forensic Toxicologists, at a Paris news conference.

Further tests

Kintz, who has conducted other such studies in the past, said he was happy to "put science to the service of history." He led the study on a request by Canadian Ben Weider, author of six books on the emperor and president of the Napoleon society.

Napoleon, born in Corsica, died at age 52 on May 5 1821, on the island of St Helena, where he had been banished after his defeat at Waterloo.

Weider has repeatedly claimed Napoleon died of arsenic, arguing that the British and French wanted to ensure that he would not make a second comeback, as he had done after his exile on the island of Elba.

In past studies, Kintz and colleagues said they had examined and dismissed the possibility that the traces of poison could have come from other sources - as detractors of the murder theory claim - such as seafood.

Conspiracy theories took on new seriousness a decade ago after the FBI and Britain's Scotland Yard first discovered that clippings of Napoleon's hair were tinged with poison.

The strands studied by Kintz had been purchased at a Paris auction 30 years ago. In past tests, Napoleon's hair clippings were gathered in a number of places as a way to ensure accuracy.

Weider hopes to gain access to Napoleon's body, buried in the gilded Invalides monument in Paris.

- AP