Twice in two days this month, Napoleon Bonaparte made news in the New York Times. I’m not sure how much he would have appreciated either article. Napoleon Bonaparte as Cultural Icon In a clash of new and old, current icons Beyoncé and Jay-Z filmed their latest music video in the Louvre Museum. They and their …
If you read my last blog post, you know I visited Havana’s Museo Napoleónico. Thanks to the Cuban sugar magnate, Julio Lobo, the museum houses the Western Hemisphere’s largest exhibition of Napoleon Bonaparte’s artifacts. My favorite piece is Napoleon’s pocket watch from his exile on St Helena. But how did it end up in Cuba? Like so …
Who knew one of the world’s great Napoleonic museums is in Cuba? Surprisingly, Havana’s Museo Napoleónico contains the Western Hemisphere’s largest collection of artifacts associated with Napoleon Bonaparte. Thanks to the Napoleonic Historical Society, I got to visit it. The collection belonged to Julio Lobo (1898 – 1983), Cuba’s richest sugar cane magnate. Lobo, who …
May 21st is St Helena Day, when the local population celebrates the remote island’s discovery in 1502. For the 4,500 residents, it’s a big holiday with speeches, parades and picnics. I haven’t found any historical record of Napoleon Bonaparte joining in the festivities during his exile there. In all likelihood, he preferred that the place …
Finding Napoleon (and Shakespeare) on St Helena Day Read More »
Last November I posted about Ernest Meissonier’s paintings of Napoleon Bonaparte. This month I came across another of Meissonier’s paintings (shown above) in the Walters Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. It depicts a sad but stoic Napoleon at the end of his reign. Meissonier painted his images of Napoleon Bonaparte fifty years after the emperor’s defeat. …
For your amusement, a comic strip “honoring” Napoleon Bonaparte on the anniversary of man’s July 20, 1969 landing on the moon: Napoleon Bonaparte: it’s hard to keep a determined man in check. 🙂 Thank you, XKCD.com.
My last post covered a few of the ways Napoleon Bonaparte filled his days during his five-and-a-half-year exile on St Helena Island. However, his most important pastime—the one he did every day—was reading. Throughout his life, Napoleon was a voracious reader and book collector. As an impoverished young man, he lived a monkish life, often …
How did Napoleon Bonaparte spend the 2,029 days of his exile on St Helena? After all, the Great Man (or Monster, depending on your point of view) jam-packed his previous forty-six years. At sixteen, he rushed through Paris’ École Militaire to graduate after one year instead of the normal two. In 1798, on his way …
On October 15, 1815, four months after his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte arrived on St Helena Island for his second and last exile. As you can see in the photo above, the island rises out of the south Atlantic Ocean like a forbidding rock in a vacant sea. It’s the very definition of remote: …
During my travels to do research on Napoleon Bonaparte, I’ve taken hundreds of photographs of Napoleonic sites, art, memorabilia, and related objects. I’ve learned a lot about about military campaigns, geopolitics, and daily life in his times. I’ve become fascinated (and distracted by) the countless characters who surrounded Napoleon, from his birth in Corsica through …
