The Memorial of Saint Helena

• 1. Introduction

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  The Memorial of Saint Helena opens with a scene aboard the Bellerophon in early August 1815. Napoleon Bonaparte, freshly defeated at Waterloo, is waiting for the ship that will carry him to a remote island in the South Atlantic. His companion, Emmanuel de Las Cases, senses the Emperor's despair and offers him a proposition. "Sire," Las Cases says, "we will live on the past: there is enough in it to satisfy us. Do we not enjoy the life of Caesar and that of Alexander? We shall possess still more, you will re-peruse yourself, Sire!" Napoleon's reply is brief: "Be it so! We will write our Memoirs."

  That exchange on a British warship gave birth to one of the most consequential books of the nineteenth century. Las Cases went on to transcribe his near-daily conversations with Napoleon across months of exile on Saint Helena. The resulting work, first published in 1823 after Napoleon's death, became a bestseller in France, spread across Europe in multiple languages, and quietly shaped the ideology of Bonapartism for generations. What drove Las Cases to begin the project, how it was nearly lost to British authorities, and why Charles de Gaulle was still drawing on it more than a century later are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Journal Begins in Exile

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  Las Cases started his journal on the 20th of June 1815, just two days after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. The timing is striking: while the outcome of the war was barely settled, Las Cases was already reaching for his pen. He maintained the journal throughout the voyage and on Saint Helena itself, recording the Emperor's reflections on his life, his career, his political philosophy, and the conditions of his confinement.

  The working method was methodical. Las Cases would sit with Napoleon and take notes of their conversations, then write them up. His son Emmanuel handled the task of producing a clean fair copy. At intervals, Las Cases gave Napoleon excerpts to read, a deliberate step that secured what the author later described as the Emperor's imprimatur. Napoleon was not a passive subject; he was, in effect, a collaborator who reviewed what was being written about him.

  That collaborative arrangement also carried a risk. Las Cases was attempting to smuggle personal letters out of Saint Helena when the island's governor, Hudson Lowe, ordered his arrest on the 25th of November 1816. A month later Las Cases was expelled from the island entirely. British authorities seized the manuscript and dispatched it to England, placing it in the care of Henry Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. Las Cases would not recover the manuscript for five years, and only then because Napoleon was already dead.

• 3. Publication and Its Reach

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  When the Memorial finally appeared in 1823, it moved quickly. Within less than a year it was already being reprinted, and translations into English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish followed in short order. In France, between 1826 and 1840, it ranked among the bestselling books in the country.

  The work entered popular imagination as something close to Napoleon's own personal and political testament. Readers treated it not as a journalist's notes but as the former Emperor's direct voice. That perception shaped how the book functioned culturally. Rather than reading as a memoir written by Las Cases, it read as Napoleon speaking from exile. The distinction mattered enormously for what the text then became: a founding document in the development of what historians call the Napoleon cult, and a cornerstone of Bonapartist ideology.

  By 1935, the Memorial had acquired enough standing as a literary and historical monument that it was included in La Pléiade, the prestigious French classics series published by the Éditions Gallimard. That edition, prepared in two volumes by Gérard Walter, a historian of the French Revolution, placed the work alongside the enduring texts of French letters. A boxed set in the same La Pléiade collection was planned to mark the bicentenary of Napoleon's death in 2021.

• 4. The Manuscript's Hidden Life

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  After Henry Bathurst took possession of the seized manuscript in 1816, it passed into the keeping of his family. It remained there, largely outside public view, until 1965, when the family deposited it in the British Library. That deposit effectively preserved the original version of the Memorial for scholars, separate from the published editions that had circulated across Europe for over a century.

  The existence of that original manuscript eventually prompted a new scholarly edition. In 2017, the Editions Perrin published a fresh version in France, drawing on the British Library copy. The text was prepared, presented, and annotated by Thierry Lentz, Peter Hicks, Francois Houdecek, and Chantal Prevost, all working from the Fondation Napoleon. Their edition offered readers access to the Memorial as Las Cases actually recorded it, rather than in the form shaped by later editorial hands and the passage of time.

  The gap between the original manuscript and the long-circulating published text is a reminder of how much the Memorial's history was shaped by forces outside Las Cases' control: British seizure, enforced delays, the death of Napoleon, and then the slow passage of the document through one aristocratic English family for more than a century.

• 5. Influence Beyond Napoleon

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  Charles de Gaulle, who led Free France during World War Two and served as President of France from 1958 to 1969, drew on the Memorial as inspiration for his own memoirs. The connection is worth pausing on. De Gaulle was not simply admiring a historical curiosity; he was taking formal and intellectual cues from a text that itself had been composed under conditions of political displacement and defeat.

  The Memorial's influence on de Gaulle illustrates how the book operated across generations: not as a historical record in the conventional sense, but as a model for how a leader in extremity could shape his own legacy through controlled narration. Las Cases had understood, aboard the Bellerophon, that exile offered Napoleon a final opportunity. The conversations they recorded together transformed captivity into a kind of literary campaign. De Gaulle, writing his own account of France's wartime ordeal, apparently recognized that same strategic possibility in the form Las Cases had developed.

  The Memorial also reached cinema. In 1911, a French silent film titled Le Memorial de Sainte-Helene, also known as La Captivite de Napoleon, adapted the material in a running time of twenty minutes and twenty seconds. The film was directed by Michel Carre.