A French Emperor who dreamed of retiring in New Jersey. A military dictator who
wrote steamy romances. A corporal who saw the world past death. These are
the weird things you don’t know about Napoleon. Keep watching to find out!
Most people seem to know just two things about Napoleon: he was short,
and he was French. But actually, he wasn't French, he was Corsican.
A small island southeast of France, Corsica was ruled by Genoa for nearly five centuries
before a rebellion finally gained them their independence in 1755. But, it didn't last long.
In 1769, France conquered the island and four months later, Napoleon was born. His parents were
fervent revolutionaries, so he grew up hating the French. In fact, his letters of the time
are full of references to French "monsters" and vivid passages about killing Frenchmen.
Eventually, though, the ideals of the French Revolution and a falling
out with Corsican resistance leader Pasquale Paoli ultimately resulted
in Napoleon switching allegiances — and changing the course of history.
Oh, and if you learned all your history from "Bill & Ted," it should be said that at 5'6" tall,
Napoleon was actually average height for his time.
"Ted! It's Napoleon!"
"Who?" "The short, dead due from our history review!"
Everyone needs to blow off some steam, even military dictators.
But Napoleon's outlet might come as a surprise: he occasionally wrote steamy romance stories.
"Clisson and Eugenie” is the 17-page story of a dashing French military officer and the
woman he falls for while on a spa break. They have lots of romantic encounters and
ultimately marry, but the handsome officer is called back into action.
After his wife cheats on him with a comrade, the grief stricken Clisson
volunteers to lead a doomed charge into battle, where he ultimately dies.
The original story was written in 1795, and is a fictionalized account of Napoleon's relationship
with Bernadine Eugenie Desiree Clary, who later became Queen of Sweden and Norway.
In the real world it was Napoleon who broke their engagement after becoming involved with the
future Empress Josephine, but hey, when you're the writer you can change the story however you want.
The original manuscript was broken up and individual pages sold around the globe as
souvenirs after Napoleon's death; the full story wasn't completely pieced back together until 2009.
As you might expect from a guy who tried to conquer the whole of Europe in barely a decade,
Napoleon was famously impatient. That can be bad enough when you live in an
age of instant communication, but for someone living in 18th-century
France it was suffocating. When Napoleon joined the French revolutionary army,
sending a cat gif from France to Italy involved days of hard riding.
But Napoleon was also a guy who liked to get things done,
so he set about pioneering a new high speed communications system…
“Napoleon don’t be jealous that I’ve been chatting online with babes all day.”
Well, not that kind of communication. Napoleon instead pioneered a semaphore
system invented by Claude Chappe which involved sticking a pair of mechanical
arms atop a tower or mountain and moving them into various positions
to signal different things – chatting with people online wasn’t available yet.
Another guy on the next tower would replicate those movements to signal further towers,
and so on. A basic network was installed by the revolutionary
government, but it was Napoleon who expanded it into an international system.
Under his watch, this system developed until you could send
a message from Amsterdam to Venice in mere hours.
Napoleon's 1812 foray into Russia is the stuff of legends. Of the 600,000
or so men who attacked Moscow, fewer than 100,000
made it back alive. It was a humiliating setback for a man praised as a military genius.
But what you might not know thanks to that oversized reputation is
that Napoleon suffered many other terrible defeats as well, and not just at Waterloo.
Take the Leclerc expedition. In 1802, Napoleon sent out a vast
French army to retake the rebellious colony of Haiti and reimpose slavery.
Tens of thousands of French soldiers sailed off to the Caribbean,
only to be stomped by Toussaint L'Ouverture's ill-equipped amateur slave armies. And in 1807,
Napoleon launched the similarly doomed Peninsular War against Spain,
which saw over 110,000 French troops fail to take down a ragtag bunch of Spanish peasants.
His forces also suffered humiliating naval defeats too, particularly
at the decisive battle of Trafalgar in 1805, where Admiral Horatio Nelson
completely obliterated the French navy without losing a single British ship.
The Louisiana Purchase is famous because at that time Thomas Jefferson bought Louisiana
off the French for the presidential equivalent of spare change. That
wasn't Napoleon's original plan, though. No, originally he wanted to invade North America!
In 1802, Napoleon was still dealing with the Haitian rebellion under Toussaint L'Ouverture.
But he still wanted Haiti's sugar money back. One of his ideas to accomplish that
was to work with L'Ouverture, in hopes that they could combine forces to invade America.
Ultimately, though, Napoleon decided to invade both Haiti and America!
But after L'Ouverture defeated the French forces sent to invade Haiti,
Napoleon had to divert the army that was heading to Louisiana.
Instead, he sent them to Haiti as reinforcements. When they were smacked to smithereens,
Napoleon just gave up on the whole Louisiana thing, and sold it to Jefferson.
After his ultimate defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon was sent to the tiny
South Atlantic island of St. Helena. A tiny lump of land over 1,200 miles away from the nearest
country, St. Helena is so remote that it didn't even get its first airport until 2016. So in the
early 19th century, it was almost literally the farthest you could get from civilization.
But there's an alternative history where he spent his retirement somewhere even more godforsaken
than this lump of blasted rock. According to NPR, Napoleon could have retired to New Jersey.
After losing Waterloo, Napoleon had a narrow window of time in which he was a free man,
and he used that time to plan his escape.
Letters exchanged between Napoleon and his remaining allies show he
was seriously considering upping sticks and hoofing it to the Land of the Free,
where he planned to settle into a life of science, horse rearing, and a whole lotta hunting.
Although we don't know exactly where in America he would've gone,
he did have a brother in New Jersey, which made it a natural destination.
Yes, strange as it sounds, Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the most famous and powerful dictators
in the history of the world, had a brother who lived in New Jersey of all places. New Jersey,
the home of "Jersey Shore," "The Sopranos," and Jon Stewart.
"All right, it's kinda weird, right? But how's this story really Jersey?"
The kicker is that Napoleon's older brother Joseph wasn't just any random Bonaparte.
Joseph had literally been the king of Spain and Naples before everything went
pear shaped on the continent and they had to flee for their lives.
After the debacle of Waterloo, France made a law to ban all relatives and descendants of
Napoleon. The Bonapartes scattered, and Joseph naturally chose New Jersey as his new home.
There, he built a massive house, amassed the biggest library in America,
and spent the next two decades palling around with guys like John Quincy Adams.
Joseph wasn't the only Bonaparte to visit America. Years earlier, Napoleon's younger brother, Jerome,
also washed up there and got a woman pregnant. She stayed in America and raised a line of Bonapartes.
One of her grandchildren, Charles Bonaparte, even became secretary of the U.S. Navy and
later Attorney General. The line didn't peter out until 1945, when, according to the New York Times,
the last of the American Bonapartes died in Central Park after tripping over a dog leash.
New Jersey isn't even the strangest place that almost became Napoleon's final destination.
According to some rumors, there was a possibility he might have ended up ruling South America.
How? Well, Sir Thomas Cochrane was a captain in the British navy who was renowned for coming up
with borderline insane schemes that somehow worked. During the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon
himself christened Cochrane the quote, "Sea Wolf'' for his habit of capturing French vessels.
After he quit Britain following a financial scandal, Cochrane sailed to Chile,
where the country's revolutionary leaders gave him command of their
navy and watched as he used it to almost single-handedly liberate Peru.
But there was another side to Cochrane that was less "crazy
cool guy" and more just well… "crazy." While serving in revolutionary Chile,
Cochrane came up with a plan as counterintuitive as it was nuts.
Deciding that newly liberated South America needed an emperor,
he proposed rescuing Napoleon from exile on St. Helena and just giving him the continent.
On the surface it doesn't make sense. Cochrane, remember,
had previously fought against Napoleon. He must've also been aware that a whole lotta
South America already had a popular ruler named Simon Bolivar. Whatever the case,
it never happened, as Napoleon died in exile before any rescue attempt might be made.
On the sliding scale of strangeness, Cochrane's apocryphal South American
mission might be weirder than New Jersey, but it doesn't come close to
the time a guy wanted to smuggle Napoleon to freedom inside a homemade submarine.
During his six years on St. Helena, Napoleon was probably the most closely guarded prisoner
in history. Not only was St. Helena 1,200 miles from land, it was surrounded by sheer
cliffs with only two viable landing spots — which the British had garrisoned with nearly
3,000 men. Plus, the Royal Navy had a squadron of 11 ships constantly on patrol. In other words,
nobody was getting in or out. Except maybe smuggler Tom Johnson.
According to the Smithsonian, Johnson had worked with American submarine pioneer Robert Fulton,
and had been paid by the British government to devise a submarine during the War of 1812.
Details are sketchy, but according to some reports, in 1820 he got involved
with a group of French officers looking to rescue Napoleon using that submarine.
Johnson’s plans were to surface by St. Helena at night and, with the help of a
mechanical harness, lower Napoleon down before hightailing it back to Europe.
No one knows how far the scheme got, but it wouldn't have worked anyway.
Napoleon had rejected leaving St. Helena at anything less than the
head of a conquering French fleet, saying it was beneath his dignity.
Officially, Napoleon's reputation isn't that great. Even the French barely teach Napoleon
at school. But there's one country in Europe where pretty much everyone agrees he's a hero: Slovenia.
Why? Because freedom, that's why. In 1809, when Napoleon negotiated
terms with the defeated Austrians, he turned their province of Slovenia
into the center of a new autonomous region, making Ljubljana the capital.
Under the Austrians, Slovenian language had been suppressed. But Napoleon set up
a local government instead, and allowed the government to be conducted in the
Slovenian language. He also guaranteed safety from reconquest by Austria.
Of course, that only lasted a couple years until Napoleon himself was defeated. Slovenia was
reconquered in 1813, but by then the cat was out of the bag,
and a massive revival of Slovenian folk culture had taken place. Slovenes still
credit that revival with leading to their eventual nationhood in 1991.
Before we go, we just have to spend a few minutes talking about Napoleon's private
parts. You're probably thinking, "No, you really don't." But the craziest story of
all is that Napoleon's most prized body part is actually still around,
reportedly in a private collection in — you guessed it — New Jersey.
"Just rip my balls off, why don't you!"
According to The Washington Post, the doctor who conducted Napoleon's autopsy in 1821
decided to take home the grossest souvenir imaginable . When no one was watching,
he sliced off the Emperor's … and smuggled it back to Europe.
From here, the journey becomes so fantastical it seems like fiction. The Washington Post
claims that the severed you-know-what was passed from one creepy collector to another:
first an Italian priest, then a London bookseller, who sold it to a Philadelphia bookseller,
who exhibited it at the New York Museum of French Arts in 1927. Time magazine sent
a reporter, who likened it to a quote, "maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace."
This just goes to show that no matter how mighty a person is in life,
death is the great equalizer. Think about that the next time you tie your shoes.