ABSTRACT
First published in The Examiner, XIV, 8 July 1821, pp. 417–21. Napoleon died of a stomach cancer on 5 May 1821, after a period of over five years exiled and under constant guard accompanied only by a small entourage on the small windswept South Atlantic island of St Helena, owned at the time by the East India Company. News of this event profoundly moved Hunt, who had long remained a fascinated observer of Napoleon’s meteoric career. He ran an illustration of Napoleon on this issue’s front page and framed its margins with a black border (see frontispiece to Vol.1). Thus deeply affected, Hunt produced what became his longest and most haunting Examiner article. After a relatively long silence on Napoleon, he now returns to a theme that had dominated the pages of The Examiner for years. As this article makes clear, Hunt’s attitudes toward Napoleon were always divided. Although he had frequently condemned Napoleon as the great disturber of the world in his earlier commentary, he was always fascinated with the spectre of a once majestic ruler sunk to defeat and intolerable despair (see ‘The Joy of the Public – Bonaparte’, The Examiner, VII, 25 April 1814, pp. 257–9 and Vol. 1, pp. 323–8). Moreover, in the present time of political retrogression throughout Europe, he tended to see Napoleon as a victim of old tyranny, intriguingly drawing a link between him and the much abused Queen Caroline by featuring a similar black border on the Examiner page commemorating her death on 7 August (pp. 513–16). Against the restored despots of Europe, Hunt now commends Napoleon as a much-needed scourge to the monkeys of Legitimacy. He appears as an ‘extraordinary mortal’, an ‘Illustrious Captive’ (below, p.336), whose towering embodiment of the spirit of liberty is urgently needed in the present age of iron-fisted reaction. Hunt’s stirring commentary was obviously influenced by Hazlitt, one of Napoleon’s great defenders, whose impassioned writings on Napoleon Hunt quotes at the end of this article.
