Lecture: Assassination of Napoleon, by Dr. Ben Weider
The case is very clear. Napoleon was murdered by the Comte de Montholon, using chronic arsenical intoxication followed by acute cyanide poisoning. As an agent of the Bourbons, he succeeded with his mission.
Montholon had the opportunity, competence and credible motive to achieve secretly the removal of any likelihood that Napoleon might return to claim the throne from Louis XVIII.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I ask you – were the eight eyewitnesses hallucinating when they recorded independently of each other more than 30 symptoms of arsenical intoxication?
Not to recognize the symptoms they described is to ignore history and suggests a terrible blind spot.
Was the Harwell Nuclear Research Laboratory, one of the most respected laboratories of its kind in the world, which actually helped produce the atomic bomb for England, wrong in their analysis of Napoleon’s hair which showed high dosages of arsenic up to 51.2 ppm? Impossible.
{default}All historians agree that Napoleon died fat, and was not in the wasted condition that cancer would produce, especially after five years without treatment. Getting fat is another symptom of arsenical intoxication. Why? Because chronic arsenic poisoning causes obesity.
The epilogue to this is that after 19 years, when Napoleon’s body was exhumed to be returned to France, it was in an excellent state of preservation. Why? Because it is consistent with arsenic poisoning, because although arsenic could kill, it also preserves tissues.
Professor Guériot , Président of "l’Académie de Médecine de Paris (1996) said that "the state of preservation of Napoleon’s body is a sign of arsenic".
Finally, I’d like to read the last sentence of a two-column book review published by Newsweek magazine in its book section when my first book, entitled "The Murder of Napoleon" was published:
THE EFFECT IS HISTORY AT ITS MOST ELECTRIFYING. IT WILL SURELY DRAW THE WRATH OF NAPOLEONIC SCHOLARS. I CANNOT BE SURE THAT FORSHUFVUD AND WEIDER ARE RIGHT, BUT TO PROVE THEM WRONG, THEIR OPPONENTS WILL HAVE TO PRODUCE AN IMPRESSIVE HAT AND HOPE THERE IS A RABBIT IN IT."
St. Helena by J. Clark and J. Hamble, c. 1806
Our research now removes the unfortunate distortion of history and we have now established the truth, which is that Napoleon died from poisoning rather that cancer of the stomach.
I would like to bring to your attention that my new book, entitled "The Assassination at St. Helena Revisited," with all the details of the poisoning of Napoleon, has been published by John Wiley and Sons of New York, and is available in bookstores.
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