How the Observer reported Napoléon's exile to St Helena 200 years ago

When Napoléon Bonaparte was banished in 1815, the Observer published a guide to the remote island - and the luxurious fixtures and fittings ordered for the exiled ruler

On 15 October 1815, exiled from mainland Europe following a failed comeback, former emperor of France Napoléon Bonaparte reached St Helena, a remote British outpost in the south Atlantic.

Two weeks later the Observer, then only running to four sides, published a lengthy sketch on the political history of the island prominently on the front page. It dated the earliest settlement there to a ‘Portuguese nobleman who had disgraced himself in India so early as the year 1513’.

The newspaper declared St Helena the ideal location for Napoléon’s exile:

It is not our purpose here to record his political offences. But if nature in her wrath shall have furnished this rugged but interesting abode for a head that could never rest before; if some volcanic explosion of her physical elements has given birth (as is generally supposed) to an island destined to receive this production of a moral volcano in the French Revolution, as great as history has ever recorded, may he only remain as quiet from the repetition of ill as those elements have left this spot!

The theme continued on the inside pages. Readers were furnished with a descriptive, rather than political, sketch of the geography of the island that reads like a travelogue:

If the Island of Capreæ acquired celebrity by the residence of Tiberius, so the Islands of Elba and St. Helena will assume a local importance - one from being the first, the other the last scene of Napoleon’s fall from the pinnacle of power to the solitude of captivity!

Accompanying this article was an illustration of St Helena, based on an etching by George Hutchins Bellasis which is now in the royal collection.

Elsewhere, the paper went into great detail about the supplies that had been ordered for Napoléon’s arrival:

By command of the Prince Regent, Lord Bathurst issued orders last month to one of the most tasteful and ingenious artists of the metropolis, to provide every thing which could contribute to the domestic gratification and comfort of Napoleon Buonaparte in his new residence at St Helena. This order comprises every species of furniture, linen, glassware, clothes, music, and musical instruments, which Buonaparte and the whole of his suite can possibly want for a period of more than three years.

The directions for it were given in the most ample and unrestricted sense - no price in the first instance fixed, no particular quality of articles specified: the whole were to be made up in a style of pure and simple elegance, with this only reservation - that in no instance should any ornament or initial creep into the decorations which would be likely to recall to the mind of Buonaparte the former emblematic appendages of his imperial rank.

Napoléon died on St Helena in May 1821.