The failed flight of Napoleon to the United States

The failed flight of Napoleon to the United States

"Nice day to make a barbecue"

In the history manuals the facts are usually presented condensed, for reasons of space, leaving out those that the historian or the editor consider more anecdotal or irrelevant. In the case of Napoleon, the most usual thing is to pass from the defeat in Waterloo and its subsequent second and final abdication, to exile on the island of Santa Helena.

However, through the medium of these two events there is a lapse of two weeks that is not so famous: that of the flight of Napoleon Bonaparte to the United States of America. The attempt would be made from the port of Rochefort, where he arrives on July 3, 1815, eleven days after his abdication. The choice of the United States was perhaps the only logic left to him, since elsewhere in Europe he would have been persecuted. Although there are some who think that the plans happened rather to go ultimately to Mexico or South America, where he could make use of his military skills helping the independence of the Spanish colonies.

Besides, the United States offered him not only freedom but also a nation based on the principles that had inspired the French Revolution, and that was an opponent of its greatest enemy, the United Kingdom. According to Munro Price in his new book Napoleon: The End of Glory, he had even spent his last days in Paris reading avidly Humboldt's work Journey to the Equatorial Regions of the New Continent (1804) and his descriptions of Mexico, Venezuela and Peru. And his relatives had heard him say that he intended to travel to these places with scientific intentions.

But the British government had already established a naval blockade on the French ports, and when Napoleon arrives in Rochefort he finds HMS Bellerophon waiting for him there, blocking the exit from the port. Not wishing to flee in secret, he preferred to wait for the passport that the provisional government had promised to obtain from the English. On July 9, he went to HMS Bellerophon, asking if the passports had been sent there, but without luck.

So there was only one way out, the escape. A plan was prepared that consisted of boarding a freighter and then going to an anchored merchant ship in front of La Rochelle that would take him to America. His brother Jose, the ex-king of Spain, who had a certain resemblance to him, would serve as bait to mislead his pursuers.

But at midnight on July 13, when everything was ready, Napoleon changed his mind. No one knows why he did it, and it will surely remain a mystery. Perhaps he feared that the plan would fail, or leave behind an uncertain destiny to those who had helped him. Or maybe he just tired of running away. The fact is that at 10 o'clock on the morning of July 15, he was handed over to Captain Maitland aboard HMS Bellerophon, in the hope that he would be granted a retreat in England. No luck, three months later he would be banished on the island of Santa Helena.

His brother Jose could, ten days later, embark for America in a nearby port, and lived in New Jersey without difficulties for fifteen years.