June 24, 2005, 8:05 a.m.
Tiny Island, Tiny Dictator
Elba has something to teach us about tyrants and how they finish.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the July 4th, 2005, issue of National Review.

Elba is a pinprick of an island off the coast of Tuscany, and very beautiful it is. The journey by ferry from Piombino on the mainland to the island’s little capital of Portoferraio takes an hour. In the season, huge numbers of tourists, including bus travelers, backpackers, campers, and bicyclists, flood over the beaches or clog the roads and trails twisting up to picturesque villages in the hills, where the yellow gorse spreads far and wide.

And yet today’s escapist retreat was once an epicenter for the high politics of continental Europe. Between May 1814 and March 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte was in exile here. The first dictator of the modern age, he had shattered the settled order of nations and was responsible for death on a scale not previously experienced in Europe (at least by hand of man). An Allied coalition of the British, the Russians, the Austrians, and the Prussians contained him in a policy that the British prime minister of the day, Lord Liverpool, described as “hitting one’s enemy as hard as one can, and in the most vulnerable place.” Cornered at last in his Fontainebleau palace, Napoleon tried to commit suicide by swallowing a mixture of opium, belladonna, and hellebore, but the poison only made him retch. Col. Sir Neil Campbell, the Allied commissioner detailed to arrest Napoleon, found “a short active-looking man . . . pacing the length of his apartment like some wild animal in his cell . . . unshaven, uncombed.” Calls for him to be shot out of hand were rejected as illegal and uncivilized.

Campbell escorted Napoleon through France down to Marseilles, where they boarded a British warship, the Undaunted. Contrary winds slowed the voyage. Local officials and a huge and enthusiastic crowd greeted Napoleon at the Portoferraio harbor. The Allies had granted him the title of Emperor of Elba, which was to be a sovereign state under his jurisdiction. Accompanying him were his loyal generals Bertrand and Drouot, a few displaced aristocrats, and the Italian accountant who audited the subsidies that the Allies generously paid in gold coins. For the sake of security, he was also allowed a regiment of Chasseurs, or light horsemen, and very unruly and drunken they proved too.

Bonaparte set about tidying up Elba with the formidable energy and single-mindedness of purpose previously directed at reorganizing the whole of Europe. There were to be roads, courts of law, a theater. In the old citadel of Portoferraio he transformed a building into the Palazzina dei Mulini, a miniature palace in the Empire style he had popularized, complete with a salon whose frescoes reminded him happily of the 1798 campaign in Egypt, when he had first erupted into the world. A few miles away in the countryside, at San Martino, he purchased a farmhouse, and remodeled it into what today would be called a bijou, or jewel, residence.

That August, Letizia, his forbidding mother, always known as Madame Mère, moved in with him. He implored his wife, Marie Louise — daughter of the Habsburg emperor — to arrive with their small son, but in fact he never saw them again. Frustrated in his ambitions, cramped, he began to brood and to plot. Visiting British radicals, including Lord John Russell, a future prime minister, flattered his ego. Nothing prevented him from outwitting the Allied coalition. “Fulfill your destiny,” Madame Mère told him, “you were not made to die on this island.” Duly escaping to France for a period that entered history as the Hundred Days, Napoleon mobilized for the Battle of Waterloo, the final great test of strength, and he very nearly won it. The victorious Allies then exiled him once again, this time to Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he was to die. . . .

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